People who are a cut above eat asparagus with their fingers

HOW you eat asparagus reveals your social class, according to the head researcher for

Annie Sulzberger has revealed that while working on an episode of the Netflix series , she was informed by an etiquette adviser on set that “posh people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks”.

The 40-year-old researcher told

magazine: “In one scene, Dominic West was eating asparagus at Highgrove.

“Our amazing etiquette adviser, David Rankin Hunt, stopped him and said ‘Posh people don’t eat asparagus with knives and forks – they use their fingers’.

“So we reshot it with Dom picking up the asparagus with his fingers.”

The adviser, Major David RankinHunt, is a British member of the Royal household at St James’s Palace in London.

Ms Sulzberger added: “It’s important to have so many voices who can chime in with their experience because I don’t think I would have been able to look up the way in which two posh people would have eaten asparagus back in 1992.”

The news comes as the actor who played the late Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Jonathan Pryce, said that the delicious

‘Asparagus is always eaten with the left hand and never with a knife and fork’

cream teas on set played havoc with the cast’s waistlines.

Sir Jonathan revealed that he went on a gruelling fast before filming

He was limited to just a black coffee, a midday vegetable broth and a glass of fruit juice in the evening as he tried to slim down for his role in the hit show.

Sir Jonathan, 76, said the reward at the end of the fortnight was an apple – which was the “best he’d ever had”.

Speaking on the podcast, he said: “I dieted heavily before we started. I went to a clinic in Germany, which seems to be very appropriate, and fasted for two weeks.

“He’s a lot skinnier than I am and wardrobe are, very frankly, disconcerted, because they’d made all these beautiful hand-made suits for the size I was before I went to the clinic.

“And then I came back from the clinic and they had to take them all in meticulously and then as the shooting went on and the cream teas were set, they had to let them all out again.”

the guide to etiquette and table manners, advises that in general one should avoid using one’s fingers “though it’s fine to pick up asparagus (without a sauce)”.

It goes on to state: “Asparagus is always eaten with the left hand and never with a knife and fork,” adding that stalks should be eaten down “to about an inch and a half from the end.”