How to eat spaghetti like an Italian

I guess you've seen them before - Italians at the table, eating spaghetti and making it look so easy, while you're trying to get the spaghetti into your mouth without splashing the tomato sauce onto your clothes or the table-cloth or worse - the person sitting beside you.... Everything while inside you feel like a 3 year old that still doesn't manage the art of "self-feeding".

In situations like these many Norwegians start cutting the spaghetti into smaller pieces, making it even more difficult to eat without making a total mess out of the meal.  So they end up trying to avoid eating spaghetti "in public". But the good news is that it doesn't have to be like this. It's much easier eating spaghetti without loosing your dignity than you might think. And I'll tell you how to do it....

Rule No 1. to eat like an Italian is to use the fork and nothing else; never ever use a knife.

And when you're sitting at the table with a fork as your only tool and you're so nervous that you feel the sweat trickling down your spine you just have to put on a brave face.... Put the fork down into the spaghetti in an "upright" position, preferably not in the middle of the plate, but a bit to the side so that you don't get hold of a whole lot of spaghetti. 3-4 strings of spaghetti is enough.

Then you rotate the fork clockwise until you have a neat little roll of spaghetti around it and with an elegant gesture put everything into your mouth without the tomato sauce splashing around. (Just remember to hold the fork in an upright position while rotating it.)

Now that you know how to eat spaghetti like a pro you just have to rehearse (the first time you can try it when you're all alone) and then you can impress all your friends and family - and maybe also an Italian or two - when you're on holiday in Italy.... And you don't have to tell people that you've ruined 4 t-shirts and 3 table-clothes while rehearsing to become an Italian!!

Buon appetito!!