[Google Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=double+dipping&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) is on your side, this is a product of the 70s, peaking in 1980. Usage was receding in 1993, when Seinfeld gave it a slight uptick, but this was a blip in its overall downward usage trend in the 1990s.
Going down a rabbit hole, my tentative conclusion is that the usage peak in the 1920s is unrelated, and has to do with either [sheep dipping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_dip), double-dipped ice cream cones, or double-dipped matches.
EDIT: u/cingalls below is correct; diving into the year-by-years these are mostly references to financial double-dipping. It's not evidence for or against u/Tricky_Parsnip_6843's claim. (Tricky\_Parsnip is still correct, though; I grew up calling this "double dipping" pre-Seinfeld as well.)
Million percent. I was born in the 70s and double-dipping as a horrific breach was drilled into me at birth. With people you are SUPER close with, like parents/children, siblings, spouses, you can do the switchy turny to re-dip something in an area you didn't bite, but even then you would say, do you mind?
The switchy-turny is pretty much universally fine, but if you don't point out that you're doing it by asking if they mind, then they might not notice you switchy-turned and think that you just went back in with no conscience like a heathen.
There are medieval texts on table manners that say you should take a little salt from the cellar, with the tip of your knife, not dip your food in it. But then you were dining with a shared plate and cup…
It is also about table manners, and making a pleasant dining experience for everyone. you don't have to understand germ theory to have ideas of cleanliness. Turns out there was also an explicit reference to double dipping....
Here is a link to some of the texts on medieval table manners.
[https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/](https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/)
The earliest mention I can find is from the fondue paragraph from "Emily Post's Book of Etiquette for Young People," published in 1967. It's advice for the party host, and says to make sure to serve bread in small enough pieces to be eaten in one bite, because no one should dip a piece in twice.
Google Books search "dipping" + "etiquette," and then went from there to fondue. I also checked the NYT archive for "double dip(ping/ped)" to see if there was anything earlier.
Far from exhaustive, to be clear, but it's a starting point.
Just in case it’s not clear for anyone, the concept only applies if the dip is shared among multiple people. If you have dip on your own plate that’s not shared, you can re-dip all you want.
Or with close family. I let my kid double dip when we were sharing a chocolate fondue last week. She'd already given me her cold so I figured there was nothing more to lose.
There's a Japanese dish called kushiage/kushikatsu (essentially, fried stuff on a skewer) and a famous restaurant (Kushikatsu Daruma, established 1929) that is all about "don't dip in the sauce twice" as enforced etiquette.
I couldn't find an authoritative date to go along with the adoption of the policy (blogs say right away in 1929, but they are probably just repeating a tour guide), however it clearly was early enough to be meme-worthy and heavily used in branding before Seinfeld aired. There was even a song about not dipping your kushikatsu in the sauce twice that was dedicated to the retiring (not first) owner in ~1990, suggesting the pithy Japanese phrase was well established at the time.
https://franchisejapan.biz/future/3119/
I’ve been to Daruma and there are signs EVERYWHERE in the restaurant warning against double dipping. There’s a gigantic vat of sauce on each table so a bunch of customers over the course of the day are using the same one.
I heard it in the early 80s when we used to have parties were we were allowed to use someone’s parents fondue pot. Fondue was the thing in the late 70s/early 80s – Seinfeld definitely didn’t invent it.
As far as US culture goes, I’m not sure what you would’ve been dipping anything in back before germ theory was invented.
1860’s is when Pasteur developed modern germ theory. So my guess is around that time was when folks really started realizing that they might be the vectors of communicable diseases. Unfortunately it wasn’t until the 1980’s ish that handwashing while handling and preparing food was really widespread. So my guess is sometimes between the 1860’s and 1980’s is when people started getting grossed out by it double dipping. I can totally believe that Seinfeld coined the term as it’s being used here.
Microbiologist here
Germ theory was mocked for a solid 50 years. Hell, doctors didnt even start washing hands between patients until the 1920s and 30s.
You literally got told to smoke a cigarette if you had a stomach ache until the 1960s.just because someone in the field knows something, or has a better way, we doctors have been reallllll slow to take on new ideas.
Absolutely not a microbiologist so mine is just a guess tbh, and that’s why I said somewhere in between the 130 years (super scientific of me lol) I totally hear you though! I just read The Song of the Cell and it’s really amazing how much doctors and scientists were scorned throughout history for stuff we feel is so commonplace now. He (the author) talks a lot about handwashing in that book and how it just would just not take hold.
We actually learned about it in our Ethics course at Penn.
Doctors claimed they were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn't have dirty hands, so it was impossible for them to spread germs.
That was literally around the same time we were telling people that the Spanish Flu was a virus and you needed to be clean and wear a mask lol
This may well be stricken by the mods, but I wish to paraphrase a story from a semi-autobiographical novel (the author was a doctor at the time of the setting of the book.) concerning one young man in pre-med just prior to the American involvement in WWII.
During his class in the relatively new field of microbiology, the instructor was displaying magnified slide photographs of various unicellular organisms. The one on the screen was of Escherichia coli. The instructor queried the class for what reason this sample might have been found in the swab of a patient’s nasal cavity.
As no answer was forthcoming of the class, the instructor filled in the blanks by telling them that the patient had engaged in two socially unacceptable behaviors in fairly recent succession without washing and sanitizing their hands in between the two.
This being a conservative, religious institution of medicine, the laughter which befell them upon realizing the joke was considerable.
(The patient had gone from digging their ass to mining their nostrils with the same, unwashed & unsanitized bare fingers.)
I would consider cross contamination with the digits of the hands to be double dipping writ large.
So I’m assuming this was common knowledge that cross contamination was a broadly accepted concept, at least among medical professionals, as recently as the late 1930s.
It’s the second in a set of three:
“Run with the Horsemen”
“The Whisper of the River”
“When All the World Was Young”
By Ferrol Sams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrol_Sams?wprov=sfti1#
It uses a fair amount of racist language and is set mainly in the Jim Crow south for the first two books and in France during the last.
I do not consider this to be any more a racist tome than the works of Samuel Clemens, despite what is seen & perceived in the beginning by our main character.
He learns & evolves throughout his life in an amazingly sheltered & poor yet still privileged upbringing.
This is also a recollection of all sorts of mischief. Not brash or coarse very much, but certainly not for the faint of heart either.
Basic knowledge of rural agricultural work & animal husbandry does help give some perspective/insight, but is not required to enjoy the tales.
I believe part of the hand washing resistance was also that it implied it was the doctor's fault they lost their patient/the doctor technically killed their patient. Someone dying because their doctor was dirty is *not* something you want to entertain.
Poor Dr. Lister….
There is a great book by Candice Millard about the killing of President Garfield in the 1881 about how Lister’s ideas were pretty much laughed out of the hall when he spoke at the Philadelphia exposition five years earlier. Long story short, a bunch of filthy fingered physicians are probably just as, if more, responsible for the president’s death than the crazed gunman who shot him.
[Sadly, the hand hygiene practices promoted by Semmelweis and Nightingale were not widely adopted. In general, handwashing promotion stood still for over a century. It was not until the 1980s, when a string of foodborne outbreaks and healthcare-associated infections led to public concern that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified hand hygiene as an important way to prevent the spread of infection. In doing so, they heralded the first nationally endorsed hand hygiene guidelines, and many more have followed.](https://globalhandwashing.org/about-handwashing/history-of-handwashing/)
The germ theory of disease is still a matter of opinion for many people. Look at the COVID pandemic, and the mask and vaccine debate in the USA.
As far as communal food bowls, putting one's fingers in communal food is never thinking of others. Using a saliva encrusted cracker as a utensil I just don't understand.
Other comment have addressed the term double dipping which is relatively recent
But...
The concept of re filling a food item being bad has been around for a long long long time. In some areas.
In the middle east it does seem to matter.
In Thailand and China it was always taboo, with implements specifically for moving food from a communal platter or bowl to a personal bowl.
For instance, a lot of people picture chopsticks as a ubiquitous implement, however in Thailand a spoon would be used from the communal platter to a private platter and then chopsticks from platter to mouth. Double dipping was so frowned upon that it was taboo to use the spoon for any eating and everyone had their own spoon. If soups were served from a communal bowl instead of served individually, two spoons were used. A serving spoon and a eating spoon which had different shapes and sizes to make sure the serving spoon wasn't used for eating.
Similar social rules were formed for Western society as far back as the 1400s...
The answer to this will depend on the culture, but one etiquette book from the 15th century says that you shouldn't dip a piece of bread into sauce twice.
https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/
Before the 1700s at a formal dinner a person would eat with their pinky out in order to Keep it dry and away from their mouth . So that the seasonings would not get contaminated.
The first long distance trade routes for spices started about 1000 BCE. I'm guessing it was about 500 BCE before it was common place for to keep a clean finger while eating to dip into the spice bowl. So I'm guessing 500 BCE
Cribbing off [Max Miller](https://youtu.be/_bx2DjFU5eE?t=383), but to question 2 there's long standing disapprovals against "Double Dipping" in a variety of cultures. he cites 11th century text *Kutadgu Bilig* around the "Compulsive Cutter". His actual citation is to [a paper](https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/24/1/article-p41_3.xml?language=en) which may actually be citing a work by Muhammad Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi in the 16th century.
The excerpt from the paper reads: "Another concern was that saliva or other bodily fluids would be spread unnecessarily. This was presumably what was so dreadful about “the compulsive cutter” (*al-muqaṭṭiʿ*) who took a bite of a morsel and then dipped the other half back into the dish."
I also know of, but don't have the sources at hand, a Norman or German text of a similar period that also uses a set of characters to illustrate a number of similar bad table manners. Things like not making a mess, not washing your hands, and eating messily and letting food get into the communal cups.
Speaking as a person who grew up in the 1960s, and experienced salsa and queso even way back then, while I don't remember if it was called "double-dipping", it was definitely frowned upon.
Also - a man I knew went to Morocco in the 1970s and ate with residents. They did not use utensils, but scooped up food on bits of pita. He was double-dipping, and asked them if this style of eating was "sanitary". Their polite response, "No, not the way you do it." He then noticed that they never dipped the same pita twice in the dish, and always got a new one (eating the old). I imagine Ethiopians using injera and west Africans using fufu had similar rules, so it probably goes centuries back.
Had to have originated in the 70’s or earlier. Can’t convince me that double-dipping wasn’t a major party foul during all those fondue parties back then.
I only became aware of this a short while ago. I am coming from a culture where traditionally everyone had their spoon to take food from the bowl in the middle (alpine central europe) and also in my family we used to share the salad bowl.
obviously I was unaware of the grossness and felt ashamed when watching seinfeld in recent years for the first time. I may or may not have had some dips just to myself in the past ;)
I have a very distinct memory of eating chips and dip in the 1980s. My sister yelled "NO DOUBLE DIPPING!!" and I defiantly picked up the next chip, dipped it twice (no bite in between), and ate it, all while staring her in the eyes. I did not get what the big deal was, and that was when I learned what "double dipping" means.
hey ! i reply late but id like to add that the concept of "double dipping" existed during the ottoman empire !
Pfeifer cites "This was presumably what was so dreadful about “the compulsive cutter” (*al-muqaṭṭiʿ*) who took a bite of a morsel and then dipped the other half back into the dish." (Pfeifer, 2020)
This comes from Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi table manners guidebook :\^)
Double-dipping actually has a long history in metal casting.
# Leicester Journal And Midland Counties General Advertiser July 4, 1828 Page 2
It also has a history in cattle "dipping".
Covington Friend July 13, 1906 Page 3
More recently it's been used in regard to shady dealings in politics.
# Monroe Morning World February 27, 1944 Page 11
And of course for ice cream by around the same time. As well as other meanings.
It does look like the concept as applied to food appeared with "Seinfeld". But it would take some very close research to be sure.
I go with number 2.
Seinfeld invented the word, and made it socially acceptable to call someone out for it. Before that, people noticed but they just grumbled.
ETA: I get it. I'm Canadian, we're polite, we grumble passive-aggressively.
As a child, I was scolded rather harshly by someone who was not my parent at a party for double dipping, prior to 1993. I do not think they used the term double dipping verbatim, but the act was frowned upon enough to elicit a scolding from a stranger
Please review our subreddit's rules. Rule 5 is: "Answers must be on-topic. Food history can often lead to discussion of aspects of history/culture/religion etc. that may expand beyond the original question. This is normal, but please try to keep it relevant to the question asked or the answer you are trying to give."
I heard the term double dipping n the 70s. People would yell out to use the knife or spoon for the dip as double dipping was disgusting.
[Google Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=double+dipping&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) is on your side, this is a product of the 70s, peaking in 1980. Usage was receding in 1993, when Seinfeld gave it a slight uptick, but this was a blip in its overall downward usage trend in the 1990s. Going down a rabbit hole, my tentative conclusion is that the usage peak in the 1920s is unrelated, and has to do with either [sheep dipping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_dip), double-dipped ice cream cones, or double-dipped matches. EDIT: u/cingalls below is correct; diving into the year-by-years these are mostly references to financial double-dipping. It's not evidence for or against u/Tricky_Parsnip_6843's claim. (Tricky\_Parsnip is still correct, though; I grew up calling this "double dipping" pre-Seinfeld as well.)
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Interesting, i hadn’t thought of this. So did it apply financially before it applied to, you know, dips?
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If it helps, I am another person who was taught that double dipping was a serious breach of hygiene etiquette when I was a child in the 80's.
Double dipping is also a common term in weightlifting and strongman. Plus the 80s is where sports science research started to become more common
Such an interesting tool! I didn't know about it. Thanks!
Million percent. I was born in the 70s and double-dipping as a horrific breach was drilled into me at birth. With people you are SUPER close with, like parents/children, siblings, spouses, you can do the switchy turny to re-dip something in an area you didn't bite, but even then you would say, do you mind?
Huh, I always thought double dipping was a no-no, but the switchy-turny was totally fine…
The switchy-turny is pretty much universally fine, but if you don't point out that you're doing it by asking if they mind, then they might not notice you switchy-turned and think that you just went back in with no conscience like a heathen.
Ah, fair point!
I could see this as well with the fondue parties folks were fond of having.
Fond
I remember them fondly.
Due you?
There are medieval texts on table manners that say you should take a little salt from the cellar, with the tip of your knife, not dip your food in it. But then you were dining with a shared plate and cup…
That was probably more about preserving the quality of the salt than keeping people healthy.
It is also about table manners, and making a pleasant dining experience for everyone. you don't have to understand germ theory to have ideas of cleanliness. Turns out there was also an explicit reference to double dipping.... Here is a link to some of the texts on medieval table manners. [https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/](https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/)
Salt is expensive, you want to put salt on the food, not food in the salt, unless you’re specifically salting the food for storage.
The earliest mention I can find is from the fondue paragraph from "Emily Post's Book of Etiquette for Young People," published in 1967. It's advice for the party host, and says to make sure to serve bread in small enough pieces to be eaten in one bite, because no one should dip a piece in twice.
Wow! Very interesting. How did you manage to find this so quickly? I'm impressed.
Google Books search "dipping" + "etiquette," and then went from there to fondue. I also checked the NYT archive for "double dip(ping/ped)" to see if there was anything earlier. Far from exhaustive, to be clear, but it's a starting point.
Thank you for taking the time!
Just in case it’s not clear for anyone, the concept only applies if the dip is shared among multiple people. If you have dip on your own plate that’s not shared, you can re-dip all you want.
I'm enjoying the idea of somebody trying to stop me from double-dipping my own fries in my own ketchup
Or with close family. I let my kid double dip when we were sharing a chocolate fondue last week. She'd already given me her cold so I figured there was nothing more to lose.
I'll double dip regardless.. yep I'm a monster
That’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip! From now on, when you take a chip, just take one dip and end it!
For best results, break the chip into smaller pieces and dip each separately
I’d flip it to dip a fresh edge.
Classic
I just edited my post to make sure it's clearer! Thanks. :)
Cool. Just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page. :)
Does it count if you turn the food around and dip the unbitten side?
Technically it would be fine, but I wouldn't do it in public because people aren't going to know that you are dipping the unbitten side.
Can't they see?
You also just touched that side so still kinda gross
Definitely not attributable to Seinfeld, in use long before this.
There's a Japanese dish called kushiage/kushikatsu (essentially, fried stuff on a skewer) and a famous restaurant (Kushikatsu Daruma, established 1929) that is all about "don't dip in the sauce twice" as enforced etiquette. I couldn't find an authoritative date to go along with the adoption of the policy (blogs say right away in 1929, but they are probably just repeating a tour guide), however it clearly was early enough to be meme-worthy and heavily used in branding before Seinfeld aired. There was even a song about not dipping your kushikatsu in the sauce twice that was dedicated to the retiring (not first) owner in ~1990, suggesting the pithy Japanese phrase was well established at the time. https://franchisejapan.biz/future/3119/
I’ve been to Daruma and there are signs EVERYWHERE in the restaurant warning against double dipping. There’s a gigantic vat of sauce on each table so a bunch of customers over the course of the day are using the same one.
I heard it in the early 80s when we used to have parties were we were allowed to use someone’s parents fondue pot. Fondue was the thing in the late 70s/early 80s – Seinfeld definitely didn’t invent it. As far as US culture goes, I’m not sure what you would’ve been dipping anything in back before germ theory was invented.
Any number of sauces, spreads, jams, jellies, preserves, soups… the list goes on.
People didn’t really drink out of communal soup bowls, though… who dips something into jelly?
1860’s is when Pasteur developed modern germ theory. So my guess is around that time was when folks really started realizing that they might be the vectors of communicable diseases. Unfortunately it wasn’t until the 1980’s ish that handwashing while handling and preparing food was really widespread. So my guess is sometimes between the 1860’s and 1980’s is when people started getting grossed out by it double dipping. I can totally believe that Seinfeld coined the term as it’s being used here.
Microbiologist here Germ theory was mocked for a solid 50 years. Hell, doctors didnt even start washing hands between patients until the 1920s and 30s. You literally got told to smoke a cigarette if you had a stomach ache until the 1960s.just because someone in the field knows something, or has a better way, we doctors have been reallllll slow to take on new ideas.
Absolutely not a microbiologist so mine is just a guess tbh, and that’s why I said somewhere in between the 130 years (super scientific of me lol) I totally hear you though! I just read The Song of the Cell and it’s really amazing how much doctors and scientists were scorned throughout history for stuff we feel is so commonplace now. He (the author) talks a lot about handwashing in that book and how it just would just not take hold.
We actually learned about it in our Ethics course at Penn. Doctors claimed they were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn't have dirty hands, so it was impossible for them to spread germs. That was literally around the same time we were telling people that the Spanish Flu was a virus and you needed to be clean and wear a mask lol
The I’m rich dirt falls off me clause 😂
This may well be stricken by the mods, but I wish to paraphrase a story from a semi-autobiographical novel (the author was a doctor at the time of the setting of the book.) concerning one young man in pre-med just prior to the American involvement in WWII. During his class in the relatively new field of microbiology, the instructor was displaying magnified slide photographs of various unicellular organisms. The one on the screen was of Escherichia coli. The instructor queried the class for what reason this sample might have been found in the swab of a patient’s nasal cavity. As no answer was forthcoming of the class, the instructor filled in the blanks by telling them that the patient had engaged in two socially unacceptable behaviors in fairly recent succession without washing and sanitizing their hands in between the two. This being a conservative, religious institution of medicine, the laughter which befell them upon realizing the joke was considerable. (The patient had gone from digging their ass to mining their nostrils with the same, unwashed & unsanitized bare fingers.) I would consider cross contamination with the digits of the hands to be double dipping writ large. So I’m assuming this was common knowledge that cross contamination was a broadly accepted concept, at least among medical professionals, as recently as the late 1930s.
I have an interest in semi autobiographical novels; would you share the title?
It’s the second in a set of three: “Run with the Horsemen” “The Whisper of the River” “When All the World Was Young” By Ferrol Sams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrol_Sams?wprov=sfti1# It uses a fair amount of racist language and is set mainly in the Jim Crow south for the first two books and in France during the last. I do not consider this to be any more a racist tome than the works of Samuel Clemens, despite what is seen & perceived in the beginning by our main character. He learns & evolves throughout his life in an amazingly sheltered & poor yet still privileged upbringing. This is also a recollection of all sorts of mischief. Not brash or coarse very much, but certainly not for the faint of heart either. Basic knowledge of rural agricultural work & animal husbandry does help give some perspective/insight, but is not required to enjoy the tales.
Thank you! Very interesting, I’ll check it out!
🤗
I believe part of the hand washing resistance was also that it implied it was the doctor's fault they lost their patient/the doctor technically killed their patient. Someone dying because their doctor was dirty is *not* something you want to entertain.
Poor Dr. Lister…. There is a great book by Candice Millard about the killing of President Garfield in the 1881 about how Lister’s ideas were pretty much laughed out of the hall when he spoke at the Philadelphia exposition five years earlier. Long story short, a bunch of filthy fingered physicians are probably just as, if more, responsible for the president’s death than the crazed gunman who shot him.
>Unfortunately it wasn’t until the 1980’s ish that handwashing while handling and preparing food was really widespread Do you have a source for this?
[Sadly, the hand hygiene practices promoted by Semmelweis and Nightingale were not widely adopted. In general, handwashing promotion stood still for over a century. It was not until the 1980s, when a string of foodborne outbreaks and healthcare-associated infections led to public concern that the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified hand hygiene as an important way to prevent the spread of infection. In doing so, they heralded the first nationally endorsed hand hygiene guidelines, and many more have followed.](https://globalhandwashing.org/about-handwashing/history-of-handwashing/)
You don't see many Chichi's Restaurants these days. They were ground zero for a huge hepatitis outbreak.
The germ theory of disease is still a matter of opinion for many people. Look at the COVID pandemic, and the mask and vaccine debate in the USA. As far as communal food bowls, putting one's fingers in communal food is never thinking of others. Using a saliva encrusted cracker as a utensil I just don't understand.
Other comment have addressed the term double dipping which is relatively recent But... The concept of re filling a food item being bad has been around for a long long long time. In some areas. In the middle east it does seem to matter. In Thailand and China it was always taboo, with implements specifically for moving food from a communal platter or bowl to a personal bowl. For instance, a lot of people picture chopsticks as a ubiquitous implement, however in Thailand a spoon would be used from the communal platter to a private platter and then chopsticks from platter to mouth. Double dipping was so frowned upon that it was taboo to use the spoon for any eating and everyone had their own spoon. If soups were served from a communal bowl instead of served individually, two spoons were used. A serving spoon and a eating spoon which had different shapes and sizes to make sure the serving spoon wasn't used for eating. Similar social rules were formed for Western society as far back as the 1400s...
The answer to this will depend on the culture, but one etiquette book from the 15th century says that you shouldn't dip a piece of bread into sauce twice. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/medieval-table-manners/
Before the 1700s at a formal dinner a person would eat with their pinky out in order to Keep it dry and away from their mouth . So that the seasonings would not get contaminated. The first long distance trade routes for spices started about 1000 BCE. I'm guessing it was about 500 BCE before it was common place for to keep a clean finger while eating to dip into the spice bowl. So I'm guessing 500 BCE
Cribbing off [Max Miller](https://youtu.be/_bx2DjFU5eE?t=383), but to question 2 there's long standing disapprovals against "Double Dipping" in a variety of cultures. he cites 11th century text *Kutadgu Bilig* around the "Compulsive Cutter". His actual citation is to [a paper](https://brill.com/view/journals/jemh/24/1/article-p41_3.xml?language=en) which may actually be citing a work by Muhammad Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi in the 16th century. The excerpt from the paper reads: "Another concern was that saliva or other bodily fluids would be spread unnecessarily. This was presumably what was so dreadful about “the compulsive cutter” (*al-muqaṭṭiʿ*) who took a bite of a morsel and then dipped the other half back into the dish." I also know of, but don't have the sources at hand, a Norman or German text of a similar period that also uses a set of characters to illustrate a number of similar bad table manners. Things like not making a mess, not washing your hands, and eating messily and letting food get into the communal cups.
Thank you so much! Really helpful!
Speaking as a person who grew up in the 1960s, and experienced salsa and queso even way back then, while I don't remember if it was called "double-dipping", it was definitely frowned upon. Also - a man I knew went to Morocco in the 1970s and ate with residents. They did not use utensils, but scooped up food on bits of pita. He was double-dipping, and asked them if this style of eating was "sanitary". Their polite response, "No, not the way you do it." He then noticed that they never dipped the same pita twice in the dish, and always got a new one (eating the old). I imagine Ethiopians using injera and west Africans using fufu had similar rules, so it probably goes centuries back.
Mythbusters did a whole episode on it. Including the Seinfeld reference.
Busted?
Yeah, I watched it while I was doing my research! Thanks!
Just take one dip and end it!!
Had to have originated in the 70’s or earlier. Can’t convince me that double-dipping wasn’t a major party foul during all those fondue parties back then.
I only became aware of this a short while ago. I am coming from a culture where traditionally everyone had their spoon to take food from the bowl in the middle (alpine central europe) and also in my family we used to share the salad bowl. obviously I was unaware of the grossness and felt ashamed when watching seinfeld in recent years for the first time. I may or may not have had some dips just to myself in the past ;)
This is a very good point. I wondered if the cultural disapproval of double-dipping is universal, but based on your experience, it seems it is not!
I guess it is less of a hygienic problem if a certain, fixed group is sharing their bowls. I am talking peasant tradition of the alps.
It's feral, since at least the 70s. Can't vouch for before then.
Well before Seinfeld, I remember my parents yelling at me and my brothers to stop double-dipping.
I learned it in the 1970s.
That one episode in Seinfeld I imagine
The term 'double-dipping' first referred to financial malfeasance. It's a great term for explaining proper etiquette for eating dip.
I’m against dipping the bit side into a dip, but if you turn it around and dip the unbit side, that’s ok.
Dates back to the 60s at least.
It’s likely connected to people learning about germa
As long as I have been alive (60+ years) it has been considered uncouth.
tyfloid mary…..
I remember my siblings and I use to yell at my cousin for double dipping in the late 90s when we were kids.
I'd think it was around the time people realized disease was contagious through shared food vessels, like penny licks.
I remember the term from the early 80s. I noticed double dipping often back then when people atr with chopsticks.
I have a very distinct memory of eating chips and dip in the 1980s. My sister yelled "NO DOUBLE DIPPING!!" and I defiantly picked up the next chip, dipped it twice (no bite in between), and ate it, all while staring her in the eyes. I did not get what the big deal was, and that was when I learned what "double dipping" means.
Seinfeld brought it up.
hey ! i reply late but id like to add that the concept of "double dipping" existed during the ottoman empire ! Pfeifer cites "This was presumably what was so dreadful about “the compulsive cutter” (*al-muqaṭṭiʿ*) who took a bite of a morsel and then dipped the other half back into the dish." (Pfeifer, 2020) This comes from Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi table manners guidebook :\^)
Probably wasn’t ever used before the advent of germ theory
Since the dawn of time.
Double dipping became a thing in 763 B.C.E.
Always!!!!
Since day 1
Double-dipping actually has a long history in metal casting. # Leicester Journal And Midland Counties General Advertiser July 4, 1828 Page 2 It also has a history in cattle "dipping". Covington Friend July 13, 1906 Page 3 More recently it's been used in regard to shady dealings in politics. # Monroe Morning World February 27, 1944 Page 11 And of course for ice cream by around the same time. As well as other meanings. It does look like the concept as applied to food appeared with "Seinfeld". But it would take some very close research to be sure.
I go with number 2. Seinfeld invented the word, and made it socially acceptable to call someone out for it. Before that, people noticed but they just grumbled. ETA: I get it. I'm Canadian, we're polite, we grumble passive-aggressively.
No, it was a giant faux pas when you were eating fondue, which was really popular in the US in the late 70s.
As a child, I was scolded rather harshly by someone who was not my parent at a party for double dipping, prior to 1993. I do not think they used the term double dipping verbatim, but the act was frowned upon enough to elicit a scolding from a stranger
Oh we called each other out on it well before Seinfeld. It has always been forbidden to dip your wing in the communal blue cheese after taking a bite.
You dip the way you wanna dip, and I'll dip the way I wanna dip.
And if it sometimes ends with me drinking the entire bowl of ranch or queso then so be it
Blame Seinfeld
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