Magazine|Letter of Recommendation: Dunking
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By Chantal Braganza
A few years ago, at Easter dinner with my in-laws, I noticed my husband’s grandmother dipping pieces of yellow cake into her glass of soda. She’s a woman of nearly 90 with a preternatural grip for hugs and pinching cheeks but, in this, she was gentle: letting each bite soak into her orange Crush, allowing it to achieve full saturation before popping it in her mouth.
“Ew, Nonna!” someone chuckled in protest. But it was her table and home, and she’d apparently been doing this for years, so no one said much more about it.
Some seasons later, maybe a Thanksgiving, my other nonna-in-law did something similar with her dinner roll, tearing it into strips and letting the red wine from her glass climb up into the bread before eating it. This time, I resolved that I would ask why. But first — wanting my question to come across as the genuine curiosity it was, rather than an accusation of bad table manners — I decided to try it myself.
Those first few dips completely changed the way I eat at family meals. Part of what won me over was the pleasure of the thing itself: Wine-soaked bread is sharp, puckery and delicious, a double hit of fermented tang. But more important, I soon came to realize, was the role it can play in pacing out a marathon meal. Eating with my husband’s Italian family means incredible food, but far too much of it: antipasto; a soup course; a lasagna or pasta course; two kinds of meat (and if it’s Easter or Christmas, seafood and a turkey); hot vegetables; cold salad; then dessert. Rather than yielding to temptation for a second helping of anything, it’s far wiser to melt a bite of Chianti on your tongue instead.
The nonnas don’t have a word for this practice, but some Catholics do: intinction. Vatican documents specify everything about intinction from the size of the host (not too thin; not too small) to who dips (the priest, never the recipient) to how it’s received (by tongue only). But both nonnas have since taught me that you’re meant to dip bread into red wine; cake or cookies into white. These aren’t personal quirks but instead Italianish table mannerisms: To mask the taste of bad wine, meals often began with a bit of crisped bread dropped into the cup, hence the term “to toast.”
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