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 

Spaghetti Etiquette: Spoon? No Spoon?

Peasant style or not, Amy Vanderbilt gave the following logistical advice in 1952 in her “Complete Book of Etiquette:” “The spoon is placed in the left hand, assuming the subject is a right-handed person, more or less upright in the plate of spaghetti. The right hand uses the fork with the tip of the prongs against the spoon to wind the spaghetti into a manageable mouthful. It should not drip off the fork. The forkful of spaghetti is then conveyed to the mouth while the spoon remains in the hand and on the plate.”

ABIGAIL VAN BUREN:
Dear Abby...

DEAR ABBY: Shame on you for suggesting that spaghetti be eaten by twisting the forked-up spaghetti into the hollow of a large spoon. That's like condoning drinking coffee out of a saucer after fanning it with your hat! A SPAGHETTI AFICIONADO

DEAR ABBY: Where did you A get the idea that one uses a fork “and a spoon” for spaghetti? According to Emily Post it is not considered etiquette either here or in Italy. Please correct yourself in your column before millions of Dear Abby fans start eating their spaghetti like Italian peasants. VELIA

DEAR VELIA: All right, so I was taught to eat spaghetti like an Italian peasant, But it's easier to eat that way and, in my book, common sense and convenience transcend “etiquette”, so let us not have any Emily Postmortems.

DEAR READERS: I finally became so exercised over the spaghetti-eating controversy that I sent the following cable to a well- bred Italian friend in Florence, Italy: “In Italy, is it considered proper etiquette to eat spaghetti with a fork and large spoon?” -ABBITTA VAN BURENIO

By return cable, this reply was received: “Only the middle-class southern Italian eats spaghetti with a fork and large spoon. Aforementioned technique strictly excluded by good society throughout the whole of Italy.” -GIORGIO GIANESE

DEAR ABBY: I followed through on your memo, telephoned a number of the leading Italian restaurants in the Los Angeles area, and asked, “How do your customers eat spaghetti?” The replies:

“With a fork and large spoon.” - Patrone's
“With a fork and large spoon.” -La Scalla
“With a fork and large spoon.” -Villa Nova
“With a fork and large spoon.” -Gizzarri's
“With a fork and large spoon.” -Frascatis
      -Your secretary, Marion

      From “Dear Abby,” in The Desert Sun, 1963

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

Spaghetti’s Western Etiquette

 

Old Italian artwork in background on magazine cover, shows how pasta was once properly eaten.

“A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged 15, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as ‘a big dinner meeting.’ When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. ‘I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,’ he admitted. ‘My dad took some grief about it.’ The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. ‘When we have spaghetti,’ he announced later, ‘you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.’ 

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.” —Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

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

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.”
— Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

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

Don’t Argue with Miss Manners

It’s not true that “high tea” is a fancy little British business, featuring witty people eating cucumber sandwiches and tiny cakes. No, no. no! That is just called tea. The “high” doesn’t make it fancier. Quite the opposite. High tea features potted meat and soft-cooked eggs, and is what you have when you don't want to bother with a real dinner. 

Your etiquette blunders are upsetting Miss Manners!

Why don’t people pay strict attention to Miss Manners instead of trying to argue with her? There is a body of etiquette beliefs, firmly held in this society that is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you only knew how weary Miss Manners gets of repeating the same things, in a never-ending crusade to separate gentle people from this misinformation, you would use your energy to fetch her a cool drink, instead. 

Here, for positively (or possibly) the last time, is a list of common errors. It's not true: 

That spaghetti properly is eaten by twirling the strands on a fork held in the one hand, into the bowl of a large spoon held in the other hand; that this method, if not correct here, is at least dashingly continental. No, no, no! Here and in Italy, this is peasant or family manners (like eating chicken from the fingers) and not proper table manners under remotely formal circumstance.

That a bride in a white dress is either a virgin, or a brazen hussy, trying to pass herself off as one, when everyone in town knows better. No. no, no. The white wedding dress symbolize a first marriage, not a first consummation later in the day’s schedule, after all the guests have gone home. 

That dessert is correctly eaten with a teaspoon. No, no, no. Teaspoons are for stirring tea, and a dessert spoon is a larger oval spoon. Miss Manners blames the manufacturer of silverware, with their “basic place settings” of dinner fork, knife and teaspoon, for this one. Fork, knife and dessert spoon would be much more basic, as the large oval spoon can also pass itself off as a soup spoon. 

That “high tea” is a fancy little British business, featuring witty people eating cucumber sandwiches and tiny cakes. No, no. no. That is just called tea. The “high” doesn’t make it fancier. Quite the opposite. High tea features potted meat and soft-cooked eggs, and is what you have when you don't want to bother with a real dinner. 

That Miss Manners is willing to debate these matters further. — Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, 1984

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

Etiquette for Spaghetti

Life brings enough embarrassment without willingly putting yourself on the spot, or the spot on you. Of course, if you love pasta but hate eating it in public, you can stick to the smaller, defined shapes that are easier to handle. No wonder corkscrew pasta, the updated version of hot sellers like macaroni and shells, has become popular. But every once in a while a plate of spaghetti beckons. There’s no reason to be intimidated by it.

Learning to Swirl and Twirl Stringy Spaghetti Strands

It's only partially true that Americans eschewed pasta for so long because they considered it fattening. Many Americans never acquired the spaghetti habit because they couldn’t find a neat way of eating it. They tired of having the sauce end up on their clothes, flung there by errant noodle strings dangling between fork and mouth. Life brings enough embarrassment without willingly putting yourself on the spot, or the spot on you. Of course, if you love pasta but hate eating it in public, you can stick to the smaller, defined shapes that are easier to handle. No wonder corkscrew pasta, the updated version of hot sellers like macaroni and shells, has become popular. But every once in a while a plate of spaghetti beckons. There’s no reason to be intimidated by it. Simply twirl the strands around your fork, resting the tips of the tines on the plate or a large soup spoon for support. This is ever so much more Italian than attempting to cut it into manageable pieces. 

Amy Vanderbilt gave the following logistical advice in 1952 in her “Complete Book of Etiquette:” “The spoon is placed in the left hand, assuming the subject is a right-handed person, more or less upright in the plate of spaghetti. The right hand uses the fork with the tip of the prongs against the spoon to wind the spaghetti into a manageable mouthful. It should not drip off the fork. The forkful of spaghetti is then conveyed to the mouth while the spoon remains in the hand and on the plate.” Vanderbilt states further, “As with any sauced dish, it should be eaten without stirring the spaghetti, grated cheese and meatballs (or other garnish) all together, infant style. Remaining sauce on each dish may be eaten with a spoon or sopped up with small bits of bread, which are then eaten with a fork.” And it goes without saying that once you get a portion of the noodles into your mouth that you bite off any trailers. It is not permissible to suck up the ends with a loud slurp. Should you be wondering how all this looks, you may want to practice in front of a mirror. When you can eat spaghetti and sauce without spotting yourself, you’ve passed the pasta-eating test. – By Marilyn Myers, Gannett News Service, 1988

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

Spaghetti Etiquette

Left– Old Italian artwork in background on a 1992 magazine cover, shows how pasta was once eaten properly — Today, spaghetti-eating etiquette demand forks. Fists full of wet pasta are simply not acceptable on any 'civilized' occasion.

“A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged 15, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as 'a big dinner meeting.' When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. 'I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,' he admitted. 'My dad took some grief about it.' The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. 'When we have spaghetti,' he announced later, 'you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.'

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

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

Pasta, Spaghetti and Noodle Etiquette

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.

Over time, many inventors have tried to invent forks, spoons and other utensils for the eating of pasta, hoping it would make eating pastas easier and cleaner, but few have actually worked. In the end, any way you twirl it, long pasta or noodles can still be very messy.

This 1939 creation resembles a child's "pusher" utensil, but is designed with spaghetti and other difficult foods to eat in a "highly genteel manner" ~ "Accordingly, in use and practice, the implement may be held in one hand with the scraper face 3 flatwise upon a plate, dish or the like C as shown in Figure 3. A fork D may be held in the other hand, and the gathering of the particular foodstuff upon the fork D for conveyance to the mouth may be facilitated in a simple, convenient, and highly genteel manner, as illustrated in Figure 3, thereby conducing to the ease and satisfaction of the diner and obviating the frequency occurring embarrassment of 'chasing food around the plate.'"

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 

A 1953 "spaghetti twirler fork" ~ On Eating Spaghetti : "The aficionado knows that the only graceful and satisfying way to eat real Italian spaghetti (which comes in full length or perhaps half-length rounds) is to eat it with a large soup spoon and a fork. The spoon is placed in the left-hand more or less upright in the plate (or often platter) of spaghetti. The right-hand uses a fork with the tip of the prongs against the spoon to wind the spaghetti in to a manageable mouthful. It should not drop off the fork. The fork full of spaghetti is then conveyed in the mouth while the spoon remains in the hand and on the platter. As with any sauce dish, it should be eaten without stirring the spaghetti, grated cheese, and meatballs (or other garnish) altogether, infant style.  The timid way to eat spaghetti is to cut it into small bits with knife and fork and eat it with a fork alone. Thick macaroni can't be eaten rolled on a fork so readily and is better cut with a fork as one goes along. Remaining sauce of each dish maybe eaten with a spoon or sopped up with small bits of bread, which are then eaten with a fork." Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book 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. 

Vintage and modern table tools for eating long spaghetti~ A simple noodle shaped the history of manners as well as the history of food ~ Until the creation of tomato sauces, pasta was eaten dry, and with one's fingers. The liquid sauce suddenly demanded one's use of a fork.  The manners of the common man were changed forever. 

Old Italian artwork in background on magazine cover, shows how pasta was once eaten properly~

“A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged 15, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as 'a big dinner meeting.' When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. 'I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,' he admitted. 'My dad took some grief about it.' The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. 'When we have spaghetti,' he announced later, 'you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.'

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

In Japan, when you move into a new home, it's customary to present your neighbors with buckwheat noodles known as “hikkoshi soba.”  In addition to being the name of the noodle, soba is a homonym for the word ‘near’ and “hikkoshi soba” is a play on words meaning “We've moved near you.”

A most modern noodle fork.

Contributor Maura Graber has been teaching etiquette to children, teens and adults, and training new etiquette instructors, since 1990, as founder and director of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette.  She is also a writer, has been featured in countless newspapers, magazines and television shows and was an on-air contributor to PBS in Southern California for 15 years. 

      

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