Some pretty interesting gadgets have been invented to help eat spaghetti and other long noodles. This shown above, is one of the least practical Etiquipedia has seen. |
Practice makes better, so keep practicing when you can |
Some spaghetti etiquette tips:
• If you want to twirl, you may use a spoon to help you.Leave the bowl of the spoon on the plate, not up in the air,
and only try to twirl two or three “strings” at a time onto the
fork with the help of the spoon. If you put too many strings
on the fork, the result will be too much pasta once it is all
twirled.
• Try not to have any “strings” hanging down from the fork
that you will need to slurp up into your mouth, or bite off, to
fall back into your plate.
• Bring the pasta to your mouth, not your mouth to the pasta
or plate.
• If you need to, you can cut your pasta with the side of
your fork, but never use a knife.
• Make sure you have a napkin on your lap to catch anything
that may fall to your lap. Use your napkin to wipe you
mouth in between bites too, if you think there is a chance
you have sauce on your face.
• Practice makes better, so keep practicing when you can.
From Maura Graber and The RVP Institute of Etiquette
Pasta and the Arabs
In the Jerusalem Talmud, written in Aramaic in the 5th century AD is the first certain record of noodles cooked by boiling. The word used for the noodles was itriyah. In Arabic references this word stands for not homemade noodles, which would have been fresh, but the dried noodles purchased from a vendor. While fresh noodles must be eaten immediately, dried noodles are extremely portable. Pasta was more than likely introduced to Sicilians during the Arab conquests and carried in as a dry staple. The Arab geographer, Al Idrisi wrote that a flour-based product in the shape of strings was produced in Palermo, then an Arab colony.Marco Polo and Pasta
As the Chinese are known to have been eating a "noodle-like food" as early as 3000 BC. Marco Polo describes a starchy product made from breadfruit - hardly what we now know as durum wheat. The myth that Marco Polo brought pasta with him upon his return from China was debunked long ago. Polo returned to Italy in 1295 after twenty-odd years of travel, but much earlier in 1279, a Genoese soldier listed in the inventory of his estate a basket of dried pasta ('una bariscella plena de macaronis').A 1933 table-fork designed specifically for any "string-like" food. |
New World Tomato Meets Old World Pasta
In the 16th century, the Spanish brought their food discoveries back to the old world. Among the rich assortment of foodstuffs that were to become permanent fixtures in the old world was the tomato. The tomatoes may have been a pale variety as they were given the name 'golden apple' (pomo d'oro) by a Sienese botanist, Pietro Andrea Mattioli. The tomato was born to meet pasta as any Italian might have guessed, and tomato sauce altered the history of pasta forever. The first recipe for tomatoes with pasta wasn't written until 1839, however, when Ippolito Cavalcanti, Duke of Buonvicino, offered a recipe for 'vermicelli co le pommodoro.' A mere thirty years later, La Cuciniera Genovese offered recipes for purées, soups, distinctly different sauces for meats, chicken, veal and pasta. Tomatoes had arrived.
Old Italian artwork in background on magazine cover, shows how pasta was once eaten properly~ |
What he described, after having learned it, is the dinner-table ritual --as automatic and unquestioned by every participant in it, as impossible to gainsay, as the artificial rules and preferences which every cannibal society has upheld. Practical reasons can be found for it, most of them having to do with neatness, cleanliness, and noiselessness. Because these three general principles are so warmly encouraged in our culture, having been arrived at, as ideals to be striven for, after centuries of struggle and constraint, we simply never doubt that everyone who is right-minded will find a spaghetti eating companion disgusting and impossible to eat with where even one of them is lacking. Yet we know from paintings and early photographs of spaghetti eaters in 19th century Naples (where the modern version of spaghetti comes from) that their way of eating pasta was with their hands-- not that the dish was likely to appear at a formal dinner. You had to raise the strings in your right hand, throwback your head, then lower the strings, dexterously with dispatch, and without slurping (there are invariably 'polite' and 'rude' ways of eating), into your open mouth. The spaghetti in the picture does not seem to have sauce on it.
Today, spaghetti-eating manners demand forks, and fist fulls of wet pasta are simply not acceptable on any 'civilized' occasion. The son's ignorance cast a dark reflection upon his father: he had not been doing his duty, had not given his child a proper 'upbringing.' Even if the boy had not seen spaghetti before, he subsequently admitted that what he ought to have done was to look about him, watch how other people were eating this awkward food, and imitate them. In any case, the options were clearer after this demonstration of an ineptitude: either the boy learns his table manners, or he would not be asked to 'a big dinner meeting' again by anyone who had heard of his unfinished education.” Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner
A most modern noodle fork. |
Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia
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