Last night’s Jeans

One Teaspoon Awesome Baggies available at Jean Machine // Velvet neon shirt // GEOX mules // Ray-Ban Wayfarers // Nella Bella bag 

Last night’s jeans is really just a convenient segue to last night’s pasta-less-sauce-full bowl at Terroni Rosedale. Which, if you’d like to escape the usual see-and-be-seen of downtown Toronto, that restaurant is not the place. I mean, everyone and their mother was there last night. Even me, I was there with my mom (and my sis, dad, aunt, uncle, boyfriend and my carb-loading self-degradation).

Speaking of carbs, I ate so much past last night. The best part though? Scarpetta.

Scarpetta: (verb) Fare la scarpetta, roughly translated as “to do the little shoe,” is the very charming act of using a small piece of bread to mop up the wonderful sauce on your plate that you cannot possibly leave behind.

Google’s definition is bang on. You can read more on the origins of “scarpetta” at Under The Tuscan Gun, where the author goes into detail about Medieval eating habits and more importantly, it was the poor people who did scarpetta (so as not to waste food) and therefore it is often frowned upon as bad table etiquette. I mean if you can’t bring a fresh piece of bread to your plate why bother living at all?

NB: Ripped jeans were once a sign of bad etiquette, too. Nowadays, they mean you’re cooler than cool.

So there I was last night, faced with a bowl of succulent tomato sauce and a basket of Sud Forno bread. It was risky. At home, there would be no question. I cut the bread after we eat the pasta just for the purpose of scarpetta. I even make extra sauce for this peasant ritual. Which had me thinking to myself, as I unconsciously grabbed a slice of bread from the basket, tearing off a piece and bringing it to my plate. Pause. “Who gives a shit about scarpetta as a mark of bad etiquette?” I asked myself, rhetorically, as I began to gather a nice pile of sauce into one corner of the bowl. “I mean, all someone has to do is try this once, just once, and they’ll know it’s the best thing on earth.”

I eat the first scoop. Heavenly.

My dad reaches over from across the table (which, is certainly bad etiquette and I reprimanded him for it) dunking a piece of his bread into my plate. You see – scarpetta is fuelled by crowd-mentality. Everyone is thinking about doing it but nobody wants to be the first. Do me a favour, next time you’re at a dinner table and you’ve got a pasta-less-sauce-full bowl in front on you, grab a piece of bread and start the scarpetta. You’ll be silently thanked by everyone seated around you.

But don’t you dare put your elbows on the table. Ain’t nobody gonna thank you for that.

Justine Iaboni