To foreigners the word has long been synonymous with Englishness, never mind the statistics. To them the ‘English gentleman’ is a notion of character more than of class, though he is often associated with the public schools that in Victorian England became factories for producing this type. He is a creature at once a little laughable and thoroughly wholesome, dignified, reserved, perhaps a bit sporty, certainly masculine but also somewhat repressed, brave rather than courageous, closely concerned with ‘the not doing of the things which are not done’ – in short, a myth that has not been deflated.11
Among the English, the term gentleman remains double-edged. It conveys images of both honour and humour, notes of respect but also jocularity. We may well associate it with the anti-democratic spirit of a leisured elite, the deliberate uselessness of the dandy, though also with sobriety and even a smooth sort of modesty. Many people find it hard to use the word gentleman with any degree of seriousness; others employ it apologetically; and then there are others who cannot utter it without a tingling of the blood. In the 1950s Evelyn Waugh could observe, in a letter to his fellow novelist Nancy Mitford, that ‘the basic principle of English social life is that everyone … thinks he is a gentleman. There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels.’12 The first of these statements no longer holds true. In fact, it wasn’t true when Waugh made it. The English gentleman was really a Victorian obsession, an ideal inherited from the age of Elizabeth, moulded in the eighteenth century by the essayists Richard Steele and Joseph Addison and the novelist Samuel Richardson, and given a special significance as the middle classes consolidated their status in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century he gradually slipped from view, his disappearance an effect of the inflation of the middle class.13
7
Table manners
or, how to eat a cobra’s heart
Visiting Italy in 1608, almost sixty years after Hoby’s tour of the country, the traveller Thomas Coryat saw forks being used – by individuals, rather than as a shared implement for hoicking food from a common dish. To be precise: ‘The Italian and also most strangers that are commorant [i.e. resident] in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat … because the Italian cannot by any means endure to have his dish touched with fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not alike clean.’1 This was novel. Erasmus had counselled that meat should be picked up with three fingers, not with the whole hand. But Coryat had stumbled on a neat alternative. Forks of this kind had been adopted in Venice and then in Italy more generally in the previous century. Tickled by the existence of an accessory that seemed almost scandalously luxurious, Coryat decided to bring one home. He was mocked for using it. Yet forks caught on, becoming popular initially because they made it possible to eat berries without staining one’s fingers. There were other benefits: using a fork made eating seem less lascivious, and later, as knives and forks were used together, it became easy to indicate when one had finished eating.
Thomas Coryat could hardly have imagined how many kinds of fork there would eventually be, with distinct forms of this little implement for dealing with pickles, oysters, chips, cheese and pastry. Nor could he have foreseen the differences of fork etiquette, principally today the disparity between the European and American styles, the latter involving the repeated ‘zig-zag’ switching of the fork from the left hand to the right. The first table fork reached America in 1633. It was a gift sent from England to John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The sender left the item’s ‘useful application … to your discretion’; there is no evidence that any such useful application was achieved.2
The arrival of the fork is a significant moment in the development of table manners, for the adoption of eating utensils changed the nature of communal eating. Having one’s own implements inevitably made the process of eating a more delicate one, an act of revulsion disguised as a rational act of hygiene. It influenced not only what went into one’s mouth, but also, more surprisingly, what came out of it. A greater physical sensitivity and delicacy at table were matched by greater delicacy and sensitivity in speech, a sense of ‘verbal hygiene’ and correct expression. This was heightened as awareness grew that there were other places, far from England, where savagery was the norm. The English delighted in contrasting themselves with the barbarous peoples of the New World (and, closer to home, the reputedly barbarous Irish).
Nightclothes and bathing clothes became common at around the same time as this, and Norbert Elias suggests that, as it grew less usual to see other people naked, so artistic depictions of nudity felt like images from the dreamworld, fulfilments of wishfulness. Similarly, ‘naked’ eating – using the hands rather than utensils – would come to seem, for all its connections with barbarity, something fun, a sensuous experience akin to, say, walking barefoot through lush grass. In both cases, nudity is liberating because it is recognized as temporary, a departure from the formal norm.
We cannot survive without food, and the sharing of food is an essential feature of civilization – a prerequisite for it. Table manners express our awareness of the importance of sharing food; they are rituals shaped by the need to eat in a way that is hygienic, efficient, reverential and predictable, and they reinforce social connections by allowing us, at table, to perform rather like musicians – a duo or quartet or orchestra, as the case may be. Someone whose table manners differ from our own is someone we may find a little unnerving: ‘If he eats a tomato like that, what else is he capable of…?’
Families have taken meals together for tens of thousands of years. Anyone who has much experience of eating with others will know all about the power games and bickering it can entail, but the communal taking of meals is a symbolic act, suggesting unity. It may be festive or spiritual (for some, an anticipation of the great banquet that is the afterlife), or it may simply be companionable and economical. Eating alone, which is stigmatized in many cultures, can feel pleasantly free, but it also affords an opportunity for eating badly – eating too fast or without regard for hygiene or nutritional value. Part of a child’s socialization is learning to eat with others, in an acceptably adult fashion, and later the child learns about conversational turn-taking at table.
Yet eating and drinking are today a less critical part of social life than they have been traditionally. In the age of the microwave oven, we often do eat alone and rapidly, and as we fill ourselves with convenience foods, mealtime seems less important. We love our consumer durables, and the kitchen is full of labour-saving devices that reflect a desire to get food ready fast. The TV dinner, the snatched sandwich, the salad in a bag, the nutritionally turbocharged ‘meal replacement’, the cheeky takeaway, the guilty fast food pit-stop – all provide evidence of haste, multitasking and antisocial eating. Even eating out, which tends to be thought of as happily sociable, can be regarded as antisocial, in that it absolves us of responsibility for sourcing and preparing our food, allowing us simply to be blithe consumers, eating alongside others but not eating with them. And even if you are an expert cook and prepare everything you eat from scratch, insisting on sit-down family meals, you will have been affected by the general trend towards speedy, unsociable meals. An incidental point, only half flippant: the more expensive a person’s kitchen, the less likely it is that a lot of cooking happens there, and the modern English kitchen, splendid with steel and granite, may well set back its owner more than a car or a wedding.
English eating habits have become markedly less predictable. When we look back at medieval dining practices, we glimpse an array of attempts to limit uncertainty and improvisation. John Russell’s fifteenth-century Boke of Nurture issues instructions about how to lay the table: salt within reach of the lord’s right hand, and to his left a napkin (a newish contrivance, replacing the communal cloths known as the doublier and the longière) with a spoon folded inside it. There is also guidance on how to carve different meats and fish: the
nape of a rabbit’s neck should be cut out and discarded; peacock should be carved with its feet on; cod should be split up and spread out on the plate; and eels should be boned before being seasoned with vinegar. Until the seventeenth century, knowing how to carve meat was an essential skill for upper-class men – highlighted by Erasmus among others. In medieval households cooked animals were brought to the table whole, and cutting them up was a source of pleasure, but, as society became more refined, so the association between the whole animal and the food derived from it became uncomfortable, and squeamishness dictated that carving should be performed by experts, in kitchens or shops. This is part of a larger pattern whereby things that are considered distasteful are removed from view. Today we are not prim about carving, but, for want of practice, we are mostly not very good at it.
The space in which we eat has changed, too. The dining room became a discrete area within the English house only in the eighteenth century. Although grand ceremony was uncommon, a smart eighteenth-century dinner involved each course being brought to the table by handsomely liveried footmen; the butler remained by the sideboard, in charge of the wine. Turning to The Habits of Good Society, published in 1859, we get a taste of Victorian dining arrangements: ‘The dining room must be, of course, carpeted even in the heat of summer, to deaden the noise of the servants’ feet’, ‘Each person should be provided with a footstool’, ‘A little green tea is necessary after wine.’3 It all sounds so sedate. Now, even at a chic dinner party, we are likely to see and hear the hosts fussing over the preparations.
For most readers of this book, service will be something experienced in hotels and restaurants, not at home. So it is worth calling to mind how large a part of society until quite recently had servants at its disposal and how many people were in service. Perhaps we think here of Upstairs, Downstairs or Downton Abbey, in which we see again and again the protocols about who can access certain parts of a house. The juxtaposition of the servants and those they serve is most striking at mealtimes. In the nineteenth century few guides to household management even allowed time for servants’ meals in the schedules they set out: more important than when they ate was their not exceeding their allowance.4
Imagine the effects on your behaviour of having a retinue of domestic servants and the consequences of not having to dress yourself or make your own bed, clean your own clothes or comb your own hair. In the medieval period domestic servants tended to be male, and the senior roles were taken by the sons of what would later be thought of as gentlemen. By the end of the seventeenth century, the majority of domestic servants were women, and it was rare for the sons of gentlemen to go into service. Whether the work is done by men or women, though, being served at table puts distance between food and the means of its preparation, and this is corrupting, for it suggests that food is something that is always abundant and appears on our plates as if by the magic of our desire. In a house with servants, meals can be elaborate; without them, and with the labour palpable as well as visible, meals are likely to be more simple, and the intricate manners of formal dining melt away.
The ways in which we behave at mealtimes, especially with regard to the people who prepare the food and serve it, bear unsettlingly intimate witness to how we feel about ourselves. But then so does the nature of the things we consume. You are what you eat, as the old proverb has it. It is better in German: Der Mensch ist was er isst. The English are adept at nabbing bits of other people’s cuisines (and their words), but are apt to bastardize them: chicken tikka masala has the reputation of being one of the essential Anglo improvisations, though possibly originating in Glasgow. They have also, notoriously, tended to insist on eating ‘proper English food’ when abroad. This is a blend of imperialism, insensitivity, incuriosity and fear, passed off as justifiable caution. It is not so very far removed from the practice, when trying to make oneself understood to people who speak little or no English, of repeating oneself at ever increasing volume.
We accept that people’s diet varies. We may even exult in the details. In Bali roasted dragonflies are a popular snack; among Aboriginal Australians the larvae known as witchetty grubs are a delicacy; in Vietnam and Thailand cobra is eaten, and the chef Anthony Bourdain reports being offered a cobra’s heart in Saigon, ‘a Chiclet-sized oysterlike organ’ which he gulps down while it is still beating. Wilfred Thesiger writes in Arabian Sands about seeing a man in the desert drinking camel’s urine to ease a stomach pain. Sir Walter Scott records in Tales of a Grandfather the story of a woman and her daughter, tried for witchcraft as a result of looking ‘fresh and fair’ during a period of famine; their secret was a diet of salted snails.5 But the English, even those who think of themselves as cosmopolitan, recoil from unfamiliar food, often without considering the possibility of its virtues. For instance, there are dietary and environmental arguments in favour of eating insects (entomophagy), yet few readers of this book would contemplate chowing down on a bowl of termites or crickets, however nutrient-rich. In many cases, the technique required to consume such alien food seems to cause more consternation than the nature of the food itself: gourmets unfazed by the idea of eating an ortolan that has been drowned in Armagnac will balk at having to munch through the little bird’s ribcage with their heads shrouded beneath napkins.
Although this particular convention is beyond the ken of most diners, we can be quick, where everyday table manners are concerned, to assume that our way is the best way. The hazards of denying variation were well illustrated by an episode in Canada in 2006: seven-year-old Luc Cagadoc, a boy of Filipino heritage, was disciplined at his school in Montreal for using a fork to break up his food, which he then ate from a spoon. His behaviour was at odds with Canadian norms. The harsh manner in which he was treated caused uproar and became a ferociously contested issue of human rights. A tribunal eventually ruled that the school should pay damages of $17,000 to Cagadoc’s family. I don’t know of a comparable incident in Britain, but I can recall that when I was eight or nine a left-handed boy at my school was beaten for insisting on eating with his knife in his left hand and his fork in his right. When he questioned why this was considered so terrible, he was told, not obviously in jest, that if necessary a fork could be strapped or glued to his left hand. This happening in a less litigious time and place, he acquiesced.
In Korea belching after a meal is interpreted as a compliment to the chef. Some tribes in Nigeria forbid men to talk about food. Germans do not cut potatoes; to cut them is to suggest that they have not been properly cooked. The French believe that one should not cut through salad with a knife; lettuce should be folded rather than sliced. There is also a French convention of not praising the culinary efforts of one’s host, because to do so sounds like a veiled request for an extra helping. In ancient Greece children ate with their parents, but were seated rather than recumbent like the adults. In ancient Rome, nine was regarded as the ideal number for a dinner party; in the formal dining room known as a triclinium there were three couches, each of which could seat three diners. There, as in Greece, it was normal to recline while eating. All guests would have two napkins: one to stop food getting on their clothes, the other for wiping their fingers. The usual English response to foreign practices of this kind is to assume that everyone is merely waiting to learn a better way of doing things, namely the English way.
At a Chinese dinner party you are expected to leave some of your food; if you finish everything on your plate, your host will give you another serving. There is much about Chinese eating habits that appals outsiders, the insensitive and the hypersensitive alike. If a Chinese diner encounters a bone in a mouthful of food, he spits it out on to the tablecloth. Burping is not considered offensive. An English friend of mine who has spent an extended spell living in Chongqing reports seeing a child allowed to pee on the floor in a fast food restaurant; when the foreign diners fled from the next table in disgust, the child’s parents plundered their leftover food. Reporting for Vanity Fair in October 2011 on the new high-speed train line
between Shanghai and Beijing, Simon Winchester wrote: ‘Cultural attitudes toward personal space – litter, chicken bones, soda cans – which may be fine on a country line in Yunnan, where you share with goats and chickens and pay just a handful of dollars for the privilege, may not be entirely acceptable on high-speed expresses between China’s major cities.’6 Yet while visitors are shocked by this behaviour, Chinese diners are often puzzled by the lack of deference those visitors show to their elders at table.
Among the foreign eating habits of which the English are most aware is the tendency in many cultures for the use of the left hand to be forbidden at mealtimes. In modern Muslim society, the left hand is little used at table because it is understood to be reserved for unclean acts; one should not put one’s left hand near one’s mouth or into a shared dish, though it is acceptable to use it for peeling fruit. This makes sense. Yet some English people believe that the left hand has a specific role to play in conveying food to one’s mouth. I can remember being told off – as an adult, and certainly not by either of my parents – for holding a sandwich in my right hand. ‘Is there something the matter with your left hand?’ came the question. I offered reassurances that my left hand was fine. These met with three words: ‘How peculiar, then.’ When I pointed out, rather gauchely, that in some parts of the world the left hand was reserved for baser functions, I was sharply told that this subject was not ‘suitable for discussion’.
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