It's not the food that trips up the military brass in Iraq when they're invited to eat with tribal chiefs or government officials.

It's the customs surrounding the food.

During a video teleconference last week with relatives of soldiers serving in Iraq, Gen. Robert L. Caslen, commanding general Contingency Operating Base Speicher near Tikrit, told several stories about his on-the-job cultural training in Iraqi foodways.

Like the time he drank nearly a half-dozen tiny but titanically strong cups of coffee before his cultural adviser whispered urgently, "Don't hand it back. Waggle it." Handing the cup back is a way of saying, "I want more!" Waggling it says, "Thank you, I'm done."

Then there was the occasion when he was offered goat's milk to drink — a sour, lumpy beverage much prized in Iraq but a leap for the average American. "It was ... well ... it was bad. They thought it was great. I put it to my lips and took a sip," he said, the very picture of a man who has fallen on his sword for the cause.

As to Iraqi-style tea: "I always hope they don't stir it, because the sugar at the bottom is enough to sweeten a 32-ounce bottle of Pepsi," said Caslen with a laugh.

Caslen and all the Americans who have dined Iraqi-style during the conflict there have had to learn new table manners: eating without utensils from common platters, making use of the right hand only, rolling the food between the fingers to form a convenient little nugget and popping it in the mouth.

"He's getting quite good at it," said Sameh "Sam" Youseff, an interpreter and cultural adviser employed as a civilian contractor by the military.

Youseff's job at the briefing was to introduce the 20 or so military wives in the room to common foods of Iraq — which turned out to be common foods of all the Middle East (samples provided at the event were from Pyramids, an Egyptian restaurant). In Iraq, Youseff showed off a typical feast: lamb and chicken kebabs, ground meats and spices rolled into croquettes on a platter of rice, flatbreads with hummous (garbanzo-sesame spread), grape leaf dolmas, tzaziki (yogurt and vegetable salad) and a condiment made with kidney beans and tomato paste.

Flatbreads are very common, used for scooping up and wrapping foods. But, as in Hawai'i, rice is the real center of the plate. Iraqis don't feel they've eaten if they haven't had a platter of fluffy long-grain rice cooked in oil -spiced and garnished with nuts and fruit on special occasions.

With the average family numbering 9 to 11 children, Youseff said, "You have to have a lot of rice."

It has been said that Iraq has no cuisine of its own, but in fact its food customs have roots as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. And although Iraqi dishes bear a great deal of similarity to common foods throughout the Middle East and even Greece and Turkey, the differences are in the spicing and the choice of vegetables and herbs. There is also a strong subculture of Iraqi Jewish food, and some dishes common to all have Jewish roots, such as a form of cholent, a slow-cooked vegetable stew, which is served in non-Jewish homes as well. Because neither Muslims nor Jews eat pork, it is not served.

Although the names of some dishes may seem familiar to us, they may not mean exactly the same thing to Iraqis as Americans. For example, dolma or dolmades in America are grape leaves stuffed with rice and meat. But in Iraq, dolma is a broad term for any vegetable-wrapped dish or any stuffed vegetable: stuffed cabbage leaves, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini or eggplant all are dolma.

And pita isn't the sandwich-size pocket bread that we think of but a thickish bread the size of a large tortilla. It's baked by skilled craftsmen who shape the dough by hand, slap it onto the walls of a wood-burning masonry oven and, just before the puffed, bubbled and browned bread drops off the wall, grab it with hooks and hurl it steaming onto the shop counter where it's snatched up by market shoppers.

Like us, Iraqis enjoy sweets (Youseff said we've taught them "a terrible thing" — drinking soda, except that they drink it warm because of the lack of ice and refrigeration). They make baklava, spiced cookies and other desserts. And they love very sweet tea and dried fruits, particularly dates.

"When they give you dates, you know they like you," said Sgt. Maj. James Wafe. Wafe served tours in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, and said you can tell how well off your host is by the quality of the tea offered: mint tea, or tea served with milk or cream, indicates wealth, he said.