Table Manners and the custom of washing the hands before and after having a meal

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Published 2019

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Although it is more customary nowadays among city-dwellers to use forks and spoons when having food, eating from communal dishes with the hand (actually with three fingers of the right hand) is still practiced in rural and Bedouin regions. For the novice it is not an easy task at all. Here is a description of the clumsy first attempts of an Englishman to eat rice and stew with a group of marsh-dwellers, in southern Iraq:

Eating the Arab manner requires to be learnt, and at the beginning I found it humiliatingly impossible … the fingers enclose the rice, and when the hand reaches the mouth the thumb pushes the rice up into it – if, that is to say, there is any rice left to push. The first evening, I found, there rarely was. The mere fact of being cross-legged made the rice a disconcertingly long way off, and no matter how large a handful I set out with, so to speak, it had dwindled to a few grains by the time the hand reached the mouth. (Maxwell)

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