eating with italians

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dining etiqette in italian homes

If you're invited to an Italian home for dinner, you'll sometimes find that they serve it to you on disposable plastic plates. This happens to me in at least half the homes I visit, at least half the time. It's not that they don't think you're worth getting the best china out for. It may just be that there's too many guests at the table, creating a lot of washing up, or that they consider you 'one of the family' and, thus relaxed, there's no need to try to impress you. Perhaps then it's really just a sign of friendship, so don't worry about it.

                                              

Something else they do though, and this is harder to explain - When you finish your first course, they'll take your plate away, as normal, however, you're supposed to hang on to your fork to use with the next course. Thus, if the first course was pasta in tomato ragu sauce, then you'll have to eat your next course, say, roast beef or fish, with a dirty fork that now has cold red tomato sauce congealed on it. Okay, so nobody else has used the fork but you, but all the same, Romebuddy finds this pretty icky. We have devised a trick to get round this though - After the first course, simply 'accidentally on purpose' drop your fork on the floor, and exclaim loudly "Oh dear, I've dropped my fork". (or in Italian - "Aiuto! - mia forchetta!") Your host will then bring you a clean one.
(This usually only happens in private households - Restaurants in Rome are thankfully quite hip to the American and British quirk of requiring clean cutlery with each course)
Something else odd about Italian meals - Unlike multi-course British or American dinners, where each course is progressively grander and tastier than the one before it, Italian meals start out good and get progressively worse. In Britain or the US, we usually start with a salad, then a main course, and finally a magnificent pudding. In Italy however, the order is slightly reversed - It starts well with a hot tasty pasta, but the second course, (don't forget to drop your fork) although probably featuring some delightfully cooked cuts of fine meat will nevertheless exhibit a paucity of vegetables to go with it, (potato usually being the most obvious absentee), There won't be any gravy either. For the third course, what do they bring you to revive your tastebuds with?
A salad.
From Romebuddy's point of view, salad is the party-pooper of all dishes. It's cold, wet, and full of unpleasant textures. Salad's nice on a hot day, as a starter, or if your appetite's small. It's nice with cold potatoes and frankfurters thrown in with lots of mayo, thousand island or catalina dressing. But as the climax of a meal? I don't think so… Italian salad is usually only lightly dressed in olive oil and vinegar and tends to be comprised of bitter, rough-hewn shreds of lettuce and other odd-looking srubbishs of greenery of the kind that we in the free-west reserve exclusively for our pet rabbits.
One theory we've heard from Italians about saving the salad till last is that it 'cleans the palate and leaves you feeling refreshed'. Hey, if I wanna feel refreshed after a meal, I'll use a toothbrush and a squirt of Colgate. Unless I've got a romantic engagement of some description planned for after the meal, I actually prefer to retain the taste of a good meal in my mouth. The lingering flavour of a good main course should not be washed away but if anything, enhanced by a fine pudding with custard or icecream to round things off before the coffee.
Forget puddings though - The Italian meal concludes with fruit - Usually a bunch of grapes, apples and oranges swimming in half a bowl of water.
Curiously, in contradiction to Italy's usual low-tech, 'hands-on' way of doing things, Italians don't seem to like to use their mouths to handle fruit. Instead of just biting into an apple and enjoying that succulent moment when the teeth burst through the shining skin, they will peel all the skin off an apple with a knife. (Hey, the skin's the best bit!) Their approach to an orange is even more over the top. Here again, us Yanks and Brits like to notch lightly into the pith with our two front teeth and then rip the rest of the skin off with our thumbs, competing to see who can get it all off in one piece. Italians however will take a sharp knife and spend about five minutes scoring the skin into five or six equal segments of geometric purity before carefully using the blade to gradually draw back the skin and reverently expose the fruit below. That's quite a build up to a ten-cent orange. I've usually finished my orange before they've got skin-segment number two off.
The other icky thing about Italian meals is that they don't always clear off the plates after the main course. Although the deeper pasta bowls for the starter are cleared away and replaced by flat plates, you're often expected to eat your second course, third course salad and last course fruit all off the same plate, so at the end of your meal your plate will look like the bottom of a garbage pail with bits of your left-overs - meat, gristle, fat, basting juice, olive oil, vinegar and a pile of fruit-peelings on top. This perhaps harks back to the mediaeval 'platter' of wood. Actually most Italian's plates are left drier than mine as they often practice the habit of cleaning up their plates with a wedge of bread after each course, something which as a child I was taught was strictly NOC. They don't leave the knife and fork tidily together on the empty plate either. Strange.

So, the bottom line to Italian dining etiquette? Relax, there doesn't seem to be any. Make your plate as untidy as you like. Only one caveat - As a child I was always taught that it was improper to accept, (and certainly wrong to ask for) second helpings. In Italy, it's the opposite - Keep cramming down the food and don't turn anything down, and you won't offend them.