Sunday 15 April 2001
Revealed: how to eat pasta making no mess
By Jenny Jarvie
A UNIVERSITY professor has discovered the secret of eating spaghetti without splattering sauce over tablecloths and fellow diners, after conducting laboratory experiments during his lunchbreaks.
Success depends on the position of the spoon: in addition to helping to collect the pasta, it should be used to shield the sauce from the eater and companions.
Colin Humphreys, a professor of Material Science at the University of Cambridge, made the discovery after he and his colleagues carried out experiments in his departmental tearoom and laboratories to calculate the "kinetic energy, centrifugal force and co-efficient of friction" for different kinds of pasta.
The scientist and his team, which specialises in semiconductors and electron microscopy, were commissioned by Tesco, the supermarket chain, to research the tidiest and most efficient way of eating pasta.
They studied pasta sauce patterns on white tablecloths to establish average distribution of escaped sauce and immediately reached their first conclusion: a pasta sauce's viscosity influences the distribution of splatter. Thick Italian cheese sauces and cream-based sauces have higher levels of viscosity than lighter tomato-based sauces, which means they stick firmly to the pasta and are less likely to spray the surroundings.
Then came eating techniques. According to Prof Humphreys, the most common mistake English people make when eating pasta is holding a spoon vertically: this fails to use the spoon's dishlike qualities to shield both eater and fellow diners when the last inch or so of pasta is rotating.
The team found that the safest method of eating spaghetti is to hold the fork vertically, rather than horizontally, select a few strands and rotate them against the concave part of a spoon which is held parallel to the plate. The fork can then be lifted out and the spaghetti eaten off the spoon.
The laboratory experiments proved that the risk of sauce splatter is highest as the last 4.3ins of spaghetti are rolled on to the fork: a final flick of the wrist can accelerate the speed of the spaghetti tip to more than nine feet per second, producing enough centrifugal force to make the the sauce fly four feet.
Prof Humphreys said: "If you eat pasta carefully there is no reason to splatter it all over the place. The best technique is to have a spoon underneath the fork."
Prof Humphreys, whose other projects include developing light bulbs that can last for 60 years and creating text so small that the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica can be stored on a pinhead, said: "We specialise in research which will bring a positive advantage to mankind. Finding ways to control pasta sauce may not be the obvious subject to study, but it could undoubtedly benefit millions."
Whether Italian chefs will be convinced by the scientists' research is unclear. Antonio Carluccio, the Italian chef and cookery writer, said: "In Italy it is an absolute faux pas to eat pasta with a spoon.
"In Italy there is not much danger of splattering sauce all over the place because we don't eat pasta with a lot of sauce. It should be just enough to coat the pasta. The English always put too much sauce on the top because they think of pasta as a full meal. Pasta is always just part of a meal in Italy."
Mr Carluccio's preferred method is to create a little space on the side of the plate, lift a few strings of pasta from the mass of the spaghetti and then pin the strings down on the designated space to twirl them on to the fork.
Prof Humphreys conceded that he had not considered observing Italians eat pasta and confirmed that he would be delighted to conduct the next phase of his research in Italy.
-- Anonymous, April 15, 2001