You have just finished your tasty pasta cooked al dente, and there it lies on your plate: a whole layer of delicious sauce. How could you leave it there, wasted, to be thrown away? Impossible! is the answer many Italians would give to such a question: this is why we love the scarpetta and cannot quite avoid doing it, even when, as Galateo says, we shouldn’t.
This word can hardly be translated in other languages except if using a whole definition of the action itself: in Italy, the idiomatic expression fare la scarpetta is understood everywhere, but the origins of it are still unknown. Some would say that the word scarpetta recalls a type of pasta used in the 19th century in Tuscany, others say that it is linked to the idea of a little shoe, literally, a scarpetta, taking everything under its sole and cleaning the plate; others still say that it is linked to the Southern Italian word “scarsetta,” meaning poverty.
