Etiquette and Appreciation of Soup

What Have We Here? — A Gilded Age place setting with a French écuelle. An écuelle is a 2 handled bowl, generally with a cover to keep soup hot. The écuelle is perfect for a broth or light soup. A small round (bouillon) soup spoon sits to the right. – From the book, “Yesteryear… More of What Have We Here?: The Etiquette and Essentials of Past Times to the Mid-20th Century”

NEW YORK Every eater has a special set of gastronomic obsessions. One of my most persistent has to do with hot soup, by which I really mean hot ' soup. Anything less than a curtain of steam that obscures an eating partner across the table is to me soup that borders on the tepid, a soup that must be hurried through before it is actually cold and therefore inedible. 

Today one is generally served soup that ranges from barely tepid to very warm. Or which, at best, is Just a few degrees above body temperature, so that it feels hot to the lips but dies a chilly death by the time it reaches the back of the tongue. Nor do a few wan wisps of rising steam prove that soup is really hot. but merely that the liquid is somewhat warmer than the room in which it is being served. 

A combination of reasons Is behind this creeping tepidism that is understandable, if not excusable. For one thing, hardly anyone under 45 really knows what hot means when related to soup. At least two generations separate today's eaters from forbears who emigrated from Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and China, where even today Microwave, like it not, hot soup is taken seriously. 

Ever frugal, wise old housewives served soup so hot that the preheated tureens added to the warmth of the room and one could thaw winter chilled hands by sliding them over the outside of the bowl. Finally, when eaten, these soups served as personalized central heating systems. Hot soup has also met Its demise partly at the hands of etiquette snobs who decry blowing on broth or slurping It from a spoon. Many restaurants deliberately serve tepid soup for economic reasons. If they are relatively inexpensive eating places that rely on turnover, they cannot afford to have chairs occupied an extra 10 minutes per seating by customers waiting for soup (or coffee, tea or cocoa) to cool. 

To work one's way through a bowlful of incendiary soup is to pass through several stages of enjoyment, almost Oriental In their subtle refinements. Start with a bowl of soup that is topped by a mushroom cloud of steam, a soup that is still atremble with its own inner heat, and you begin by inhaling a heady essence, as the scent pervades your nostrils long before its substance can touch your tongue. Soon you pick up a small amount on the tip of the spoon and between whispering sips and lightly exhaled, cooling puffs, you begin carefully to get a sense of what the liquid portion of the soup holds in store. 

These early sips must exclude solids, still too hot to handle in the throat. In a few minutes the soup is merely hot and larger mouthfuls can be handled, revealing liquid and solids in full-bodied splendor. After that, and eating ever more quickly, the warm soup is a luxurious comfort, full of taste but allowing freedom from caution. Now you can really consider the tastes behind tastes, the textures of solids, the herbs and pot vegetables that perfume the brew. As always when eating soup, intermittent bites of bread renew the palate to the subtleties of the liquid. – By Mimi Sheraton, New York Times News Service, 1979

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

Etiquette for Feeding Romance

Comes now the silly season, or the romantic season, or the wonderful season, or the lyrical season, depending on where you stand in these matters. And it might be well, at this point, to look at some groceries with an eye to their R.Q., or Romantic Quotient.

... And Another Thing

Now springtime is approaching like a runaway choo-choo, and we'd all better get ready. Comes now the silly season, or the romantic season, or the wonderful season, or the lyrical season, depending on where you stand in these matters. And it might be well, at this point, to look at some groceries with an eye to their R.Q., or Romantic Quotient.

This is no new endeavor. Since people and food were invented, which was at about the same time, people have been interested in the romantic or - hopefully – aphrodisiac properties of what they eat.

But I bring sad tidings. If you have been depending heavily on Arabian skunk or Roman goose tongue or the brains of love- making sparrows - as did the ancients - you might as well forget it. They do no good. Nor, apparently, do the more personal parts of the poisonous puffer fish, no matter what the modern Japanese think. Nor does anything else.

And, to quote Mimi Sheraton. who has made quite a study of these things, and I wish all research projects were as interesting, “I have yet to find the food one bite of which will cause me to drop my fork and make straight for the bedroom.”

Still, it might not be without value (this is a phrase we scholarly writers like to use be cause it sounds more scholarly than “it might be valuable”) to consider what foods or dishes are definitely UN-aphrodisiac in their effect. On whoever is watching you eat, that is. And while I am no expert in matters of the heart, I once wrote an Etiquette Book in which I touched briefly on the less attractive aspects of ingesting food.

So let's plunge in.

Anything you must spit out some of, such as grapes or olives with pits in them, isn't particularly romantic fodder. You can, however, swallow the grape seeds, and I don't think they’ll hurt you any, even if your mother did tell you they'd give you appendicitis. At least, when you attack a piece of grappa cheese, the rind of which is solid grape seeds, you're supposed to eat them, else you display a certain lack of savoir faire. Next time, don't order it. 

Corn, of course, presents a nearly insoluble problem. When a girl eats it on the cob, her lipstick tends to meld with the butter, on the cob and around her mouth. (On the other hand, if one slices the corn off, one may arouse the suspicion that one’s choppers are not one’s own.)

A lady I know insists on drinking all her drinks except hot coffee through a straw, because she can shape her mouth so prettily around it.

Then there is the sound of spaghetti. This is a welcome sound to the chef who prepared it, for it is the sound of appreciation. But it is not a romantic sound.

Consider, too, the too-fat hamburger, dribbling bits of letutce and mayonnaise down the chin, to leave it smelling like a blue plate salad.

Consider, too, the potency of peanut butter, the scent of which carries three times farther and lasts six times longer than any- thing by Lanvin or Chanel. These are all gustatory truths which must be faced and grappled with.

And yet, to be honest, we must admit that whether or not spaghetti or corn on the cob or even peanut butter is romantic depends to a huge extent on who is eating them. Which is only one of the many lyrical facts about Springtime. – By Peg Bracken, 1965

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