Etiquette for Twirling Pasta

Tools for Twirling Spaghetti —In her “Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior,” the impeccable Miss Manners insists that the fork is the only tool acceptable for the eating of spaghetti. Using a spoon, she says, is outrageous. “The definition of civilized,” she adds, “is a society that does not consider it correct to eat spaghetti with a spoon.”
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A Real Cro-Magnon When It Comes to Fork and Knife

No matter how civilized we think we are, most of us have little chinks in our armor through which our cave person past is revealed.
We occasionally flare up in anger, as our ancestors must have, reacting to the dangers and mysteries of primitive life. Sometimes our manners fail, in small things like eating at table, and we are prehistoric slobs once more.

I think of myself as civilized in every respect: I read, I like music, I drive, I vote, I pay taxes, I don’t jaywalk, I subscribe to the paper, I wear shoes, I drink wine and I use a fork. It is my virtuosity with the fork, however, in which I may be the least polished. I know which fork to use, when there are no more than two, but I find the fork, in some encounters with edibles, less efficient than nature’s own tools--the fingers and the teeth.

The fork is, at best, an inadequate instrument for grasping certain morsels, such as chicken legs. One must hold the piece down with the fork, then attempt to slice meat from it with a knife--an awkward exercise at best. There is always the danger, too, that the leg will shoot from the plate and land in some other guest’s plate, or worse, her lap.

My particular bete noire is spaghetti and other forms of stringy pasta. I am quite incapable of wrapping these strands around a fork to form a ball without long loops hanging from the fork to the plate. When I find myself in that predicament, my only recourse is to bite off the strings and let them fall back in the plate.

From the look of horror or disgust this brings to my wife’s face, I assume that it is bad manners. She will say, “Like this,” wrapping a ball of spaghetti around her fork and popping it, without strings, into her mouth.

I simply do not have that skill. I have found no useful instructions in books on etiquette. In her “Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior,” the impeccable Miss Manners insists that the fork is the only tool acceptable for the eating of spaghetti. Using a spoon, she says, is outrageous. “The definition of civilized,” she adds, “is a society that does not consider it correct to eat spaghetti with a spoon.”

She concedes: “Actually, there simply is no easy, foolproof way to eat spaghetti. . . . The fork is planted on the plate, and the spaghetti is then twirled around the tines of the fork. . . . The twirled forkful is then presented to the mouth. If this were an ideal world, all the spaghetti strands would begin and end in the same place, so that the mouth could receive the entire forkful at once. However, we have all learned that compromises must often be made, and the fact is that one will often find a few long strands hanging down outside the mouth. As you may not spit these parts back into the plate, what are you to do with them? Well, for heaven’s sake. Why do you think God taught you to inhale?”

I am shocked. Evidently Miss Manners is suggesting that we suck up those hanging strands into our open maws. Now that is truly outrageous. Can you imagine the rude sucking sound that would accompany such a practice? As I say, my solution has always been simply to bite off the hanging strands. They fall back noiselessly into the plate to await another assault. It is not elegant, I grant, but it certainly is a lot more graceful than sucking up the loose spaghetti.

One does not need a perfect bite to accomplish this feat, I might add. One simply pushes the spaghetti up against one’s upper incisors with one’s tongue, and, voila!, the elusive pasta plops to the plate. What inspires this essay is the present my French daughter-in-law gave me for my recent birthday. She is a rather cheeky young woman, and I usually suspect her of insidious motives.

However, she seemed to have nothing but good intentions this time. Her present consisted of four parts. A box of 18-inch spaghetti, a bottle of spaghetti sauce, a bib of the kind Italian men wear at table and a 6 1/2-inch fork with a wooden handle ending in a crank by which one can turn the fork, thus winding the spaghetti around its tines.

She didn’t have to explain. It was her way of improving, rather late in my life, my table manners. It might work, but I see two problems. How does one transport the fork to the dining table to which one has been invited? And how does one get home with the dirty fork afterward?

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia