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Table Manners
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Pointing the Finger at Finger FoodsCaesar salads, sushi … where do you draw the line? |
Dear Helena,
Recently I took my girlfriend out for dinner at a fancy restaurant. The pieces of lettuce in my Caesar salad were too big to fit neatly in my mouth. So I ate them with my fingers. My girlfriend called me a cave man. She said I should use my knife and fork to fold each leaf up until it’s small enough to fit in my mouth. Is there any rule of thumb about when to use your fingers? —Cave Man
Dear Cave Man,
Many say that food tastes better when eaten outdoors. In my view, it also tastes better when eaten with the fingers. My friend Bob Blumer, a.k.a. the Surreal Gourmet, a TV chef and professional bon vivant, agrees. He eats salad sans cutlery, even in upscale restaurants. “It seems more pleasing that way. You appreciate the texture and temperature of the food,” says Blumer. And at dinner parties, eating with your fingers introduces an element of sensuality. If you want to encourage flirtation, Blumer recommends serving Dungeness crabs on a plastic tablecloth—no cutlery, no plates.
Here are some tips if the protocol is not so obvious:
- Shun the shellfish fork. Jon Rowley, an oyster expert in charge of marketing for Taylor Shellfish Farms, the largest grower on the West Coast, says you should pick up the shell with your fingers. “Just the feel of the oyster shell stimulates your taste buds.” And bringing the whole shell to your mouth allows you to drain every drop of the oyster’s liquor. Use your fork only if you have trouble coaxing the oyster from its home.
- Observe tradition. Some foods are designed to be eaten out of hand. These include obvious examples like burritos, pizza, sandwiches, and candy bars. Indian food traditionally is eaten by picking it up with pieces of bread, and sushi is designed to be eaten with the fingers. According to Mineko Moreno, coauthor of Sushi for Dummies, you may even use your fingers to help yourself from a communal platter. “But only touch the piece you want,” she cautions.
- Take the path of least resistance. Use your fingers when it’s much easier—as when eating corn on the cob, lobster in the shell, and whole artichokes (but remove the choke with a knife and fork). Note that the effort saved must be significant. You can’t eat a roast potato out of your hand, since it’s easily tackled with a knife and fork. But you may manually remove a mint-leaf garnish, rather than bat it out of the way with your dessert spoon. And if bacon is so crisp that a knife and fork would shatter it, pick it up with your fingers.
Table Manners appears every Wednesday. Have a Table Manners question? Email Helena.
Use knife and fork to cut up salad.
A Spanish friend once told me that it is considered very impolite to eat asparagus with utensils (in Spain). It should only be eaten with the fingers, even in the fanciest of restaurants. I believe it has something to do with the reaction of the asparagus with the metal.
Even if people eat a salad with their hands, they should avoid "picking" at food with their fingers. One time a friend was over for dinner and picked a bit of the salad out of the serving bowl. I found this incredibly rude.
According to Joy of Cooking, the Caesar was originally intended to be eaten in spears with one's fingers. I suppose it depends on the company.
I agree with eating Caesar salad with fingers if using whole leaves of Romaine; however, I would think it odd if someone was eating shredded lettuce with their fingers. Perhaps it's just enculturation, but still ...
There's a local restaurant near me that serves an entree-sized ceasar salad (with whole romaine leaves intact) with a filet of salmon. There's no way they intend it to be eaten by hand. The dressing is artfully poured, but very thick in some areas and nonexistent in others. You have to cut up the salad just to distribute the dressing! And I'd love to see some one try to eat a flaky falling-apart filet of fish with their hands. No, the answer to the original question is to cut the thing up with a knife and a fork. Would this guy argue similarly when confronted with a whole steak?
I draw the line at spaghetti
I was at a facy(ish) pizza restaurant here in montreal and my boyfriend was scandalized when I picked up a slice of my gourmet thin-crust pizza to eat it by hand.
This'll show him!
I agree with the article; if you can pick it up and eat something without making a mess, do it. Stuffing your mouth with a lightly dressed whole romaine leaf is pretty darn satisfying, especially if you can get an anchovy to stay in the middle of it.
I'm all for eating with your hands, but I was a little surprised by this article's easy going nature and people's agreement with it (and with me), especially after the fussiness in etiquette in adhering to proper bread eating techniques in an earlier Table Manners column! Maybe it's just either a reflection of the irrationality of manners or of something askew in my brain, but it seems much less messy and offensive to me to nibble from a slice of pre-buttered bread than it does to be picking up dressed salad leaves with your fingers and putting them in your mouth.
The hardest thing to eat with a fork, I think, is salad. Especially spinach salad. You scoop it up, it slides off. It's too thin to spear. My mom once said that you can eat anything with your fingers as long as you don't make a mess. My brother promptly responded by eating his mashed potatoes with his hands. Classy.
i figure - do what you want as long as you dont make a mess - and everyone who has a problem with other people eating with their hands should probably lighten up. i mean is it really gonna kill you if someone on the next table is using their hands? - probably not. life's short - we should experience things/food how we want to......
I don't know, this is the fist time I've read about eating salad with your fingers and I haven't noticed others doing it when I go out to eat. I would be taken aback at it if I were to see it, and it would never occur to me to do it myself. But hey, it's been an enlightening read and never say never!
There are plenty of other things that are appropriately eaten by hand - fried chicken, barbecued ribs (with a stack of paper towels!), olives, asparagus, and crudités, among others. Personally I use a knife and fork with pizza (at least for the floppy end of the slice), but I don't consider it rude not to.
On the other hand (pun intended), most cooked foods would just be a mess to eat with your fingers and really shouldn't be, at least in public. In the privacy of your own home you can eat with your toes as far as I care! (And now we'll get a YouTube video of someone doing just that...)
I think this is a "when in Rome" sort of issue. If everyone else is eating with a knife and fork, do the same.
I get what people are saying about the big romaine leaves and I can see how you might pick them up by hand successfully if the dressing was light, but I still think it sounds strange to eat salad by hand. Why wouldn't you just cut the leaves a bit, like any other food that doesn't come bite-sized? I can see the point of the "sensual experience" with oysters, but not salad.
Place your order, then go and wash your hands.
When eating with your hands (asparagus spears, chicken drumsticks, oysters, pizza etc) use *only* your right hand and leave the other in your lap.
Personally, I prefer to use chopsticks when eating a salad, but tend only to do this at home...
Left hand in your lap? That's a Middle Eastern thing. They traditionally used the left hand for certain unsanitary activities (no tradition of TP), thus making it taboo where food (and many other things) are concerned.
I don't see how this has any relevance to Western etiquette. It's very awkward to eat a drumstick or barbecued rib with one hand, and one thing etiquette strives for is to avoid awkwardness.
Keeping one hand clean can be useful when cooking, for sure. But as a left-handed person residing in the US, I have a bit of a problem supporting the expectation that I should use my right hand only.
Anyway, when in doubt, let the utensils serve their intended purpose.
I shudder to think of the training mess that would result from someone trying to relearn how to do the things that make a hand unclean. Good lord people, this isn't Oman, wash your hands.
Foureyes, where is 'this' then?
Ohmaha or Oman or Oahu, never doubt your readership is in more places than you are.
And heck, if there's no dressing, or if it's a light oil and vinegar spritz, take off your shoes and eat with your feet. Who cares what surrounding diners think?
I'll go ahead and horrify everyone by my salad behavior. No matter how nice the restaurant, I always do this--discreetly as possible. I hate white iceberg lettuce and any kind of lettuce stems. I'll pick them out and tear them off and put them in a "trash plate" that I must have. It's usually the bread plate, but I always get the dressing "on the side" for this reason. Then I eat the salad with a fork.
The reason for my horrific pickiness and bad behavior? I find the stems and white lettuce to be EXTREMELY bitter, and if I don't remove them, I can't eat salad at all.
I would never think to eat my salad with my fingers. I cut it in smaller bites, and if I have to, use a cracker or piece of bread to push it onto the fork. Now the only exception is if there are croutons. I don't like them and usually ask them to keep them off, but if I forget I will pick them out with my fingers. Anything else that I don't like, I pick out with my fork. I'm not saying eating a salad with your fingers is wrong, but it just never occurred to me!
I may look like a 100 % sushi dummie, but I believed sushi should be eaten with chopsticks. My Japanese fellow-students did so. Here, in North America, many restaurants provide the chopsticks for sushi, and take-out sushi boxes contain the chopsticks.
There is a distinction between formal, informal and casual dining situations. If you are having a business luncheon or dinner, I persoanlly would avoid eating anything with my fingers, except for those few foods which must be eaten with fingers (and which you can avoid ordering, especially if you're trying to either get a job or sell a product). At informal social gatherings, eating caesar salad with your fingers is okay, but not at a restaurant. At casual affairs, it's pretty much "gloves off". There are sometimes when there isn't even any cutlery provided. Fried chicken picnics, crab bakes and such are a great time to roll up your sleeves and dig right in.