Question about dinner table etiquette.

If the meat is falling away too easily, I’d argue they’re overcooked. Many competitions have some version of that in the professional judging - tender enough to bite through without having to work at it, but not so cooked that it literally falls off the bone.

But I also won’t put knives out. The corn is pre-buttered, even. :slight_smile:

My husband is an obnoxious clanker at the end of a meal. Drives me nuts! He stabs at little bits of salad remnants so ferociously with a death grip on his fork it’s a wonder he doesn’t crack the bowl! I’d never grab his hand though, even at home. But I have given him the ‘seriously?’ stare from across the room and we’ve talked about it before so he knows that means ‘calm the f down!’ It’s not him I blame though. It’s just an unconscious habit his parents never corrected. People are raised differently and table manners were a huge deal in my family, not his.

Film yourself eating for a day or two. Then watch it back to see if you are shoveling, eating too fast, clanking too aggressively, slurping, chewing with your mouth open (my personal pet peeve), eating with your elbows on the table, smacking, or lowering your face to the food instead of raising your food to your face. These are the kind of annoying things that become habits people may be totally unaware that they do.

It’s perfectly acceptable. You have rude, busybody friends. I bet they eat asparagus with a fork! :eek:

My old copy of Emily Post goes so far as to say, if you want to catch the last bit of a sauce, to discreetly put a little piece of your bread/roll on the plate, spear it with your fork, and use it to mop up the sauce. Though I wouldn’t do that if I were eating with the president.

Edit: Since we’re talking manners, can we please make people stop buttering an entire roll at once? PLEASE???

Uh, sorry. I’m going to go count my sterling silver iced tea spoons and grape shears until I calm down.

It really sounds like the OP may be doing more loud scraping than she realizes. That’s no excuse for the “friend” to go grabbing arms or anything, though. I’ll say it’s a far easier habit and a less persistent one than open-mouth chewing, so if the OP needs to work on just this one thing to avoid annoying table habits, it’s a very small thing, indeed.

This made me laugh. Everyone should do this to find out if they look like a drunk monkey trying to use a fork.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t making any loud noises, but even if I was, the music was loud enough that no one would be able to hear me.

This has been reassuring, everyone. Thanks!

Well ok, well if you were scraping the plate like you were trying to get some plate to eat… perhaps it was annoying to see … people ‘hear’ what they see, so it can reduce their enjoyment of the music.

As to whether they are good friends … would they let you go through life and eat like this in front of your ideal perfect, one in 10 billion partner, or should they tell you now how annoyed they are ?

Some cultures believe (according to what I’ve been told in “some cultures believe x” conversations) that you should leave a little bit of food on your plate to show that the portion size was large enough.

Maybe your friends are thinking that you’re showing that you are still hungry and accusing the cook of being too stingy with the portions?

Still rude to make a big deal of it, though.

False dichotomy. You can discreetly tell someone about something instead deliberately embarrassing them in public.

I’m not offering actual advice here, but I wonder what would happen if you told the other friend to watch her for grabbing people and embarrassing them in front of everyone.

Because that’s apparently what she needs to know. Even if you are the loudest eater in the world, she is embarrassing you and herself a lot more than you are embarrassing yourself.

Yep, me too.

I will discretely use bread to get the last bits. After a particularly exquisite meal at Loterie Farm in St Martin, the waiter chuckled and said that my plate did not need to go through the dishwasher. I complimented the meal. Minutes later the chef was at table side, thanking me for my nice words.

That one surprised me when I first encountered it, but it makes sense.

To start, it was terribly rude of your friend to grab your arm like a little kid. No excuse for handling the situation that way. However…

I somehow doubt you have been less humiliated if the bride had pulled you aside ahead of time and said “Look, my family will all be horrified by your plate scraping routine and I’d really prefer not to have to field questions and comments about my friends and their manners, so could you pretty please with a cherry on top not do that at the wedding?”

Well, if someone tends to do something that you find super-gauche, and you’re inviting that person to a huge fancy social event where said super-gauche behavior seems likely to happen, it’s not unreasonable to be concerned about being embarrassed. Especially when there will be other guests who will also find the behavior super-gauche, and even more especially when said guests are people who feel free to weigh in on pretty much every aspect of your life.

As for the overall etiquette of the situation, I’m all for getting every last little bit of something that’s exceptional. I’m rather more :dubious: about getting every last little bit of something pretty ordinary–I assume that you must just be starved to death if that extra half-mouthful of food is going to make an actual difference. If it’s not going to make a difference, and it’s not an amazing sensory experience, what’s the point?

But rules aside, you failed at the much more basic premise of etiquette–to make the people around you comfortable. You were going to do something you KNOW makes your hostess tense and unhappy and uncomfortable. Not cool. Not cool at all.

Hmm…that could backfire for him. It’s one thing if I joke about it, but don’t point out how I did with my meal.

You are making a disagreeable noise scraping your fork across the place. Even if you think you aren’t, you are. And for some it will be nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying.

Still though, rude to grab your arm like that. If someone did that to me, I’d ask them if they’d like to experience said fork sticking out of the back of their hand.

If you completely clean your plate, there’s nothing left for the dog when you put the plate on the floor.

Seriously, though, if I were ever invited to an affair fancy enough to invoke Miss Manners, I’d be too afraid of effing up, that I probably wouldn’t eat anything. I could grab a burger later.

“Should fried chicken be eaten with the fingers?”

“No, the fingers should be eaten separately.”

My upbringing included, “Some poor guy poured his heart and soul into being the best farmer he could be because that was his lot in life and he broke his back to grow that rice so some poor kid could strain his arms loading it onto a truck and some poor woman could kill herself trying to market it and some poor–”

“Okay, okay, Mom! I get it: I’ll make sure I don’t leave a single grain on my plate.”

Realizing I was trapped in that paradigm helped me start losing unnecessary weight.

I still leave nothing on my plate – but I either request a ‘doggy bag’ (at restaurants) or pack leftovers (at home) for future meals. The refrigerator is my friend again.

–G!

They both regularly pick up their plates and lick them. :smack:

They are 9 and 10. I have managed to impinge enough on their consciousness that they usually check to see if I am watching. Usually.

We lovingly refer to them as our house trolls. :stuck_out_tongue:

No, he was cool. He was British and we’d been joking around all night.:smiley:

Etiquette does create rules to allow people to behave in a way that creates social comfort, but you are under no obligation to succumb to every eccentric whim of those around you. In fact, the hostess bears more responsibility for making her guests feel welcome than the other way around. And under no circumstances does anyone have the right to physically restrain you if you are not threatening to harm someone.

I agree.
When the guest drinks out of the finger bowl, the gracious host follows suit. No one gets yanked or slapped around!