Food Gaffes

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I read a book called Making friends (The Girls of Canby Hall, No. 18) about three very different girls who end up as roommates at a boarding school.

As I’ve Googled (goodness knows my memory is shot), the girls are from Boston, Chicago, and… Texas. I don’t know why they didn’t say what city the third girl was from. Anyway, they all have very lame names and the characters are quite the exercise in regional and socioeconomic class stereotypes — it was the 80s after all:

• Jane Barrett from Boston: prim & proper, quite the blueblood WASP blonde
• Andy Cord from Chicago: fun-loving black girl from a boisterous middle-class family
• Toby Houston from… Texas (I believe she was not actually from Houston): naive but sweet redheaded farmer’s daughter who had never been to the big city

As I sliced some brie tonight (yes, I “cut the cheese”), I was thinking of the time I was at a friend’s house for a dinner party and I was jokingly taken to task for a breach in etiquette in cutting cheese. Do you know the proper rules for cutting cheese?

Yeah, I know. I guess it makes sense, but how are you to know without someone explicitly telling you?

Anyway, I swear this has something to do with the Girls of Canby Hall.

At some point in the story, the three girls go to Posh Spice a.k.a. Jane Barrett’s home for a weekend. Baby Spice a.k.a. Toby has trouble with the artichoke, which she’s never seen before, whereas Sporty Spice (or maybe Scary Spice since people from cities will cut you ;p) a.k.a. Andy, despite the fact that she’s never seen it before either, manages to successfully mimic the Barrett family. Or wait, maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, one of them chews and chews on the entire leaf for a while until someone shows some mercy. I think the Jane character then painstakingly shows how to properly eat an artichoke.

It was a humiliating experience for whichever character it was.

Meanwhile, I was this 10 or 11 year old, full of pre-teen anxieties, as well as being a relatively new immigrant to the U.S. I had no real idea of what “Americans” ate in their homes, other than what I saw on Growing Pains or Family Ties or what I observed at lunchtime in school. I had friends of various backgrounds, but I was rarely allowed to go over other people’s houses, so it was largely a mystery what the theoretical “average American family” ate on a daily basis. So you can imagine my interest at this odd foodstuff that even other born-and-bred Americans had trouble with.

I had all these fears about food because I simply didn’t have contact with various foods. Man, when I had real Indian curry, you should have seen how weirded out I was that it wasn’t like Korean curry. I was like, “Where is the real curry?” Stupid, eh? Heh.

In high school, I made the dumb mistake of putting both lemon and cream in my tea. Curdle-rama. My friend called me an idiot. 😀

Back to Canby Hall… So I went off to college at some point, and I wanted to try artichokes, filled with fear and trepidation and excitement at the prospect of eating this Very Exotic Food ™. My then-bf and I went out and bought some, cooked them up, and ate them. They were tasty. But somehow, the book had made it seem like it was just impossible to figure out how to eat properly. But all you needed to do was see someone eat one leaf and it was easy as pie.

Once I learned the hows and whys of cutting cheese, it was not difficult to remember, but it was embarrassing when I was told I was being greedy by cutting the tip of the brie. I only meant to cut the smallest part so I didn’t look greedy. Oh well.

Seppo and I always sweat bullets at some of the fancier restaurants for fear that we’ll use the wrong utensils. I know the general rules, but there always seems to be some exception. Alas.

So, you guys have any embarrassing food-related gaffes?