Etiquette for Tricky Dining

Tips for eating artichokes, spaghetti and other tricky fare 

Crayfish, pizza, spaghetti and artichokes are just a few of the foods lurking out there waiting for your fork to take a wrong turn. Southern Ohio College’s “At Ease” etiquette hot line offers these tips to avoid a collision between the food and your lap:

• Artichokes are eaten leaf by leaf. Remove the leaves by grasping the tip with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. Dip its base in sauce, and gently scrape off the meat by pulling the leaf between your clenched teeth. Deposit the leaf on your plate.
• Bread and rolls are broken into bite-sized pieces using your hands, not your knife. Butter one bite-sized portion at a time, making sure you butter it over the bread plate, not over the dinner plate.
• Clams, mussels and oysters are retrieved from their shells with a sharp seafood fork. Eat them whole. Deposit empty shells on a discards plate or your bread-and-butter dish.
• Cracker wrappers should be placed on your bread plate or next to your dinner plate, not in the ashtray.
• Crayfish are eaten by twisting off the head and peeling the shell off the tail. Eat the meat with your fingers.
• Edible baskets such as the tortilla baskets that taco salads are served in should be broken off, one bite-sized piece at a time, and eaten.
• Escargots in the shell: grasp the shell firmly with the snail clamp (or your fingers, if they are all that are available). Then, with the fork in your other hand, twist the meat out. Dip it in the sauce and eat whole. Soak up the liquid in the shell with a piece of bread impaled on a seafood fork.
• Fish served whole is tackled by first slicing off the head and tail and putting them aside on the plate. Next, make a shallow incision end to end, slicing just under the skin. Open the fish up flat, then cut underneath the back-bone with the tip of your knife and lift out the skeleton whole, with the aid of your fork. Set it on the plate’s edge.
• Fruits such as grapes, tangerines and navel oranges can be eaten with your fingers. (When eating grapes, pull off a small bunch or branch, then eat one at a time.) Berries, persimmons, melons, papayas, grapefruits and pineapples are eaten with a spoon. Most other fruits are eaten with a knife and fork.
• A lemon should be pierced several times with a fork, then squeezed with one hand with the other hand cupped around it as a shield.
• Pie a la mode should be eaten with both a fork and a spoon.

Pizza, fried chicken, ribs, corn on cob are simple, but can be tricky. 

• Pizza: Roll it into your hand, cup it and take a bite. 
• Corn: butter and salt a few rows at a time, eat, and then resalt and butter. Use corn holders. 
• Ribs: bones should be picked up only in the privacy of your home.
• Shrimp with tails intact may be held by their tails or eaten with a fork, as dictated by the formality of the occasion. If the shrimp cocktail contains shelled jumbo-sized shrimp, pierce them near their tails with the accompanying small fork and eat the flesh one bite at a time.
• Small game birds such as squab and quail are eaten with a knife and fork, but you can pick up the legs (like fried chicken) to finish them off.
• Tea bags should be lifted out of the water with a spoon and placed on the saucer.
• Soup should be eaten by skimming the spoon over the top of it, away from you. “Little ships go out to sea, only to come home to me,” is a saying taught to children. 
• Spaghetti and other varieties of long, slippery pasta are eaten by twirling a few strands around your fork, using the spoon as a support to keep the ends from slipping.
• Lobster legs and claws are twisted off the body. Crack the large claws using a lobster cracker or the edge of a heavy knife. Then pick out the meat with a small, sharp seafood fork. Dip the meat in butter, and eat. Lift the tail meat out with your fork. Cut off a small piece and dip it in butter before eating.
• Pick up white wine glasses by the stem to prevent your body temperature from warming the chilled wine. Since red wine usually is served at a warm temperature, red wine glasses can be picked up by either the stem or the bowl. –San Bernardino Sun, 1986

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia