I am yet to meet a meal that absolutely demanded a trip to the cutlery drawer. It's amazing what you can do to a risotto by scooping with the middle and index finger, and the only thing that stops me lifting up a bowl of soup to my lips is the appalled stares of others. When I'm alone, the spoon can go hang. That's the reality. I suspect I am meant to confess to my hands-on relationship with my dinner; instead I want to boast about it.
I accept that, in this, I am a terrible father. I spend enormous amounts of credit from the parental authority bank, lecturing my boys on the uses of cutlery while, at the same time, watching my own hands slip unbidden across the table towards the remains of the roast chicken, determined to rip off the parson's nose. If I was a fraud I might tell you that my suspicion of cutlery is born of an acute palate and a disdain for the way the metallic taste interferes with the flavour of what I'm eating. Even I accept this is bollocks. Try licking a clean knife from the cutlery drawer. What does it taste of? It tastes of cold.
In truth I suspect it's all down to a killer combination of greed and self-obsession. When I eat with my hands I am closer to my food. I am inside my dinner. I am playing out some ancient need to hunt and gather, albeit on a very small scale – roughly 12 inches across. See that man in the picture at the top of this column? If the words "missing link" and "Cro-Magnon" have ever skittered across your mind, it will all begin to make a fetid kind of sense.
Spare ribs, with which I have had a long and intense relationship, are a no-brainer where hands are concerned; if ever I see someone using a knife and fork on a spare rib I instinctively know that, were we ever to talk – about anything at all – it would end with me wanting to punch them. Our whole approach to the world, to life, to the really important things like lunch, will be so completely different that it couldn't be otherwise. Obviously it's the same with chicken. And lamb chops. And sausages. And asparagus. And crab, and wild mushrooms sautéed in butter to a bronzed crispness, and the best kinds of salad, and mussels and clams and paella. Ooh! The crispy bits at the bottom.
One of the most delightful discoveries, on a trip to Tokyo, was that sushi was actually meant to be eaten with the hands rather than chopsticks, a complex manoeuvre involving rolling it on to its back with the index finger then placing it, fish-side down on the tongue, with middle finger and thumb. Sushi suddenly made sense. Hell, it looks like finger food. And if it looks like finger food…
Do I think eating with one's hands is sexy? Nah. That's a fallback for lousy novelists, who have, driven by imagination deficit, mistaken food as a metaphor for sensuality when really it's just dinner. I can't imagine anyone finding thumbs that smell of gravy a turn-on (though if you do, you know where to find me). That said, I have always thought the sexiest thing in the world is unbridled enthusiasm, and the hands-on approach bawls that noisily. This, at least, is what I tell myself as I brush the eating irons to one side and prepare to get up to my armpits in what I'm eating.
Now then, where's that tub of ice-cream?
