Years ago, when I was visiting my then-girlfriend, later wife, and later late wife in her Pittsburgh apartment with her roommate, one of them would make dinner. (This was before I became a major cook.) As a result, it seemed fair that I would do the dishes. One evening I was criticized for not washing the backs of the dishes. But I didn’t realize they were that dirty until they pointed out that they became so because they stacked the plates before moving them from the table to the kitchen. My reaction to this was, I thought, quite logical: why stack the plates, when you then have to wash the backs? Why not carry them individually to the sink so there’s less area to clean?
Apparently this response was not only wrong but verged on the insane, although their reaction seemed more loony: because we stack the plates!
And I get it if we’re in a restaurant and need to make the plates, cups, glasses, and silevrware and so on into as small an area as possible, perhaps onto a tray, to take to that poor, likely underpaid dishwasher in the back. Who cares if the (probably immigrant) worker has to work to unstick the glasses from the gravy or the alfredo sauce before the washing process begins?
I do, of course, but I guess society outvoted me.
This reminds me of the time my late wife moved into the apartment I had rented for us in California. She was putting silverware in a particular drawer, and I asked why that drawer? The answer was: that’s where they go.
According to whom? Who made that law? Is it in the Bible, the Constitution, or one of the Amendments? Again, I failed to understand the logic.
I never quite got over the plate stacking, as you can probably figure out since I’m doing a blog post about this 40 years later. I pay close attention to the backs of the plates now, but still have to wonder, since that the table is mere feet from the sink, why do we have to stack them?
MUSOFYR 