Your family must be starving you, LOL, at our holiday feasts I'm ready to explode by the time we're only halfway through the plates of food. Anyway, I am a only with the lights off food swiper if that's the case, or I ask to take home the recipe.

I think its a compliment to the chef to mop up the last bits. Consider me a mopper.

I have never heard that it's bad form to mop up your plate with bread. I do it all the time! Why waste leftover deliciousness? I would love to hear from someone explaining why they find this offensive.

I thought that was the whole point of having the bread around anyways. I mean, they rarely used utensils long ago, and the bread itself became the spoon, so it goes to reason that getting every last morel using the bread would be completely commonplace.

I do it with abandon!

I take it as a compliment when I'm the cook. NOTHING is more gratifying to a cook than silent children mopping their plates. Of course, children will then lick them. I won't go that far, and wouldn't be too pleased if my adult dining companions did, either.

I think I only do it with thick soups, like split pea or corn chowder or chili. I'm not much of a sauce person, though, so that makes sense I guess!

I am proud to say that I am a MOPPER! Coming from a family of Italians, it was status quo to mop up the pasta sauce with a big hunk of bread at the end of any meal. To not do so was a sin and considered blasphemous.

I still do it to this day. :)

Mop away all ye moppers!

I've never heard it was rude or bad etiquette to use bread to mop your plate. Heck, even if it is, so what? I have no plans to stop :)

Growing up, whenever my dad had mashed potatoes it would fascinate me to watch him scoop his mashed potatoes up with a hunk of bread or roll (guess he was really digging carbs on carbs!) so much so that I started doing it!

So, we're supposed to deny ourselves the pleasure of the last bit of sauce and let it go to waste because some dork decided it was bad form? If the food is delicious, eat it.

@cmcinnyc, in a casual setting like having some good friends over for dinner, I would find it hilarious to see someone lick their plate and I would be 100% okay with it. But then again, I'm barely an adult so I'm probably a little immature still.

I always mop when I like what I'm eating. I have never thought twice about--I hope I haven't offended anyone along the way!

Along the same lines, how do people feel about dipping bread into soups/stews? Is that rude too? Because if it is, I can think of a few formal occasions where I was out of line. Oops!

Count me in the mopping crowd. There is a specific tapas place we go to on rare occasion, and every time we go we order the same dish (garlic shrimp) and we always ask for bread with it, because the sauce is the best part of the whole thing. Then it's me and my husband mopping out the same dish. It may be gauche, but it sure is enjoyable.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that when I was growing up, my dad couldn't/wouldn't eat a meal without a piece of bread in his hand to help scoop the rest of the food into his mouth. It was like reaching adulthood when we children started learning to eat our food with bread, like him.

What are you supposed to do with red bean & rice juice? THROW IT OUT?! No, you sop it up with cornbread. Biscuits or garlic bread get dipped in soup. Or gravy. Buttered Italian bread for red sauces. Pizza crust gets swiped through any topping drips on the plate. The end.

Not mopping up with a slab of bread is like not dunking your cookies in milk! Please pass the bread this way!

One of my favourite meals is bacon, eggs and toast. Especially with a nice runny yolk that I mop up after with buttery toast. Actually I don't even wait until the end. I break the yolk and dip my toast as I eat the egg.

Huh. I never thought it would be impolite to use bread to mop up sauces. Sure, it's rude to lick plates (although I will do it if I'm at home and make something particularly tasty), but I figured bread was polite *because* it takes the place of a swiping tongue or finger.

If something is delicious I am ready to lick the plate (I don't unless I'm home alone). Bread is the way to go. Of course, good bread enhances the experience.

I do this all the time, ESPECIALLY when I eat out somewhere that has fabulous sauces (like tapas). I'll even ask for more bread and ask my water/waitress to leave the plate until the sauce is gone!

Then again, I identified with the bit on the Simpsons where Homer asked Marge to get glass plates so he could still watch TV while licking off his plate. I'm not the most mature. :) lol

@jcudesigns ditto here!! You're insulting the cook if you don't get every last bit!

Well what do you think the French do with the remaining bits of baguette in the bread basket?

I have to point out though, that this is why dumplings are such a wonderful meal accompaniment; no need to hide in the dark if you are eating goulash and dumplings!

In India, it's actually rude to leave anything on the plate. It's seen as wasting food. So I do it no matter where I am!

Ahhh...I'm in fine company here. If being a mopper makes me a mannerless heathen, so be it. Plate-moppers of the world, unite!

This is what bread is for...

I am an Italian and I have the art of mopping down pat. No wasting of good sauce. How can you pass on the scampi or fra diavlo?? Hell, I dunk bread into my soup. And while we are at it, there is nothing better then going to an authentic Ethiopian joint and you get all the injera you want to eat with. No utensils. Now that is awesome.

Really? This is a thing? I don't get it...

I mean, I have some pretty fussy, fidgety Southern grandmothers and great aunts -- real sticklers for protocol at the table -- and nobody makes a nasty face at you for sopping up the gravy with a piece of dinner roll. It's your private plate, not the communal trough.

And like ranyart said, I thought the whole point was that you were using a roll and not resorting to your finger or to licking the plate.

Well, if the meal was so delicious and the host or establishment neglected to provide me with a French sauce spoon then I'm mopping away. I have lamented, many a time, in various situations on the scarcity of sauce spoons. They're just asking me to lick my plate.

I've been known to lick my plate when something's good. And I'm 30.

Miss Manners addressed this topic in one of her books. It is NOT polite to mop up sauces with bread and your fingers. It IS quite permissible to tear off and drop "bites" of your bread onto your plate and use your fork to swish around and get the last of the sauce or juices.

I totally sop up the gravy and juices on the plate. It's a downright Southern thing to do in my opinion. That's the whole reason why you get bread with your bbq, chili, or beans...

I picked up this habit when I spent several years in France. I'm o.k. with practicing French table manners over American ones any day.

I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CALL ME BIG MOPPA! Put your bread in that gravy, if you's a true lady.

MOP IN THE NAME OF LOVE! Before you waste that food.

It's my dinner and I'll mop if I want to. You would mop too if runny yolk happened to you.

Big Friday night ;)

I'm amused at how this post has made such an issue about a non-issue... No one, not even in the author's experience, has had a problem with a 'mopper' and yet here we have all the moppers up in arms defending themselves.. against what/who?? no one or nothing.. just some imagined non-existent anti-mopping entity.

Miss Manners can go pound sand. That's what bread is for!

I mop. At home. Dining out. It's food, people. And it's a delicious and lovely nonverbal compliment to the cook/chef. Let's not turn a well-meaning, seemingly ubiquitous American gesture into a "crime." Or liken it to wiping one's ass at the dinner table! ...I imagine quickly retrieving that dropped meatball or French fry from the kitchen floor might be considered "heresy" to the anti-moppers, too. (Yes, I've done it! :-) ...Having worked in "high" and "low" restaurant kitchens for a number of years, you'd be surprised--make that shell-shocked!--at what sometimes happens with your food before it arrives beautifully plated at your table. For example, it occurs with regularity that the cook will utilize his naked index finger (as a thermometer) to take the temperature of your mashed potatoes or vegetable puree, then cover it with quick flourish of a spoon. Or the naked finger (again!) used as a "tasting spoon" (over and over) to taste/test your sauce--in the name of "quality assurance," of course. And these "finger crimes" are fairly standard and widespread as I've witnessed them. ..."And some of you are up in arms about the etiquette of dabbing bread in sauce?" Clearly, your worries and judgments are misplaced.

In Italy, it's actually supposed to be rude to mop your plate (fare la scarpette), because it's supposed to mean that you didn't get enough to eat if you're still hungry enough to clean your plate.

I'm a mopper, but I know that my Italian prof told us to be careful about that when we were in Italy a few years ago.

* fare la scarpetta... oops

y/y. the more sauce to be absorbed the better.

I don't usually mop at home as I don't often have bread with me meal. I mop in restaurants, though. In a casual place I'll mop holding the bread with my fingers. In a nicer restaurant I will go French and tear a piece of bread off, place it on my plate, pierce it with my fork, and then mop.

Mopper.

I agree with some of the above: why deny yourself the pleasure of that last bit and why waste it, as well?

Do not tell me how to eat, or else. Someone once commented on my mopping in Rome, of all places & I very nearly stabbed him to death. If the food is lovely enough to warrant sopping, by all means sop away. And everyone can go to hell.

I don't like it when bread isn't part of the meal, sorry. If I've cooked rice or pasta with sauce and then a family member grabs some bread to mop up what's left on the plate. that reads to me like someone who didn't like the pasta or rice.

If I'm serving the meal with bread than obviously the point is to mop up and use the bread to eat.

I think the need to get every last bit of sauce from plate to mouth is a bit gluttonous, but that's just my personal opinion. I wouldn't stop someone else from doing it.

Mop it up. Three reasons:

1. It's tasty. Get every last bit of it.
2. There's people starving in the world and would kill for the little bit of sauce left on your plate.
3. It's economical... no need to pre-rinse your dishes before they go into the dishwasher.

Life is short! Live it up!

Mopper - 100 percent of the time if the sauce/gravy is good-there is no way I'm leaving it.

LA SCARPETTA.

I know I'm a year late on this lol, but I think this is bad manners. I shouldn't notice anything about your eating; smacking, fork scraping on teeth, scraping your plate, elbows on table, hovering over your plate, or mopping every last bite with your bread. It looks like you just got out of jail or off the streets and you think someone will steel your food or it's going to be the last thing you eat.