The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  It has always been a rule of politeness that people in groups should show no favouritism. There must be no whispering in corners, no sharing of private jokes or blatant preference for particular company; attention should be given to everyone present, as equally as possible. This is the reason why it is customary to separate engaged and married couples at table. Etiquette manuals remind us that dinner parties are for opening out towards other people; pairs or groups who do not want to do this should stay at home.

  The dining-room table round which people in the Western world sit on separate chairs to eat not only raises food waist-high—which is necessary because of the chairs—and provides a sort of stage upon which the dishes can make entrances and exits; it also pins everyone down to specific places and both unites and separates everyone seated round it. All the diners are spread out and on view; nobody can escape, because it is forbidden to leave the table before everyone has finished eating and all agree to rise. Dining-room tables are usually oblong, to fit our oblong rooms; the shape provides four sides, at two of which only one person can ordinarily sit. That one person is distinguished thereby from people sitting at the table’s long sides. (A round table, or everybody sitting on the floor in a circle round the food, does not give rise to the same hierarchical distinctions; substituting a round table for an oblong one is often resorted to when wrangling cannot be stopped.)

  The “top” people at dinner, in Anglo-Saxon custom, are those most plainly in everyone’s view; which is why the advantage of an oblong table’s “short ends” is repeated at large banquets or in college dining halls, where there is a “high” table, one literally raised from the level of the rest, set along one short side of the room, often at right angles to the other tables running lengthwise. This layout survives from medieval usage; at that period long tables set perpendicular to the high table and along the side walls of the hall were called “sideboards.” In France, and in several other Latin countries, the hosts are traditionally placed not at a short end but in the middle of the long sides of the table, host and hostess facing each other, and the guests of honour on each side of them; the ends of the table are therefore distinguished as being low, not being “in the centre of things.” In the past, where great banquets were themselves theatrical events with a crowd of spectators watching and processions of servants bearing dishes, seating was on one side of the tables only; the metaphor of tables as stages was even stronger. At the high table, which was designed to be on view to the whole gathering, the most important people sat in the middle, honour radiating from their persons and diminishing with distance towards the table’s ends, as in the traditional French system, and in the arrangement of the modern high table still. In several countries in Latin America, the host’s desire to honour his guest results in the guest of honour being placed at the head of the table (one of the short ends) with the host on his or her right.

  Where women are allowed to be present at all, they may sit in a separate group, or take their seats all together observing precedence among themselves. Alternatively the women may sit together without any seating order: the men’s having to rank themselves then becomes a sign of the political status of males, and of the extent to which they count. Among the Sherpa, rank among men is not fixed, but renegotiated at every party. There are no formal seating positions, but the men all work together on moving the more honourable higher, the less honourable lower, with everybody present looking on; it is the way society dramatizes its shifting power structure.

  In our own culture, women were once commonly relegated to the spectators’ gallery. Then they were permitted at table, but all together at one end—the lower end, of course—while the men sat at “the top.” Fierce ranking sorted out the women as it did the men. Very important men at large banquets were once permitted to demand that the women who attracted them most sit at their table, or at a nearby table at which they might easily be viewed. Eventually (the change came gradually, sporadically, and with regional variations and occasional reversions to former practice) men and women sat alternating at the table. A lady never sat at her companion gentleman’s left because, as Emily Post put it, “a lady ‘on the left’ was not a lady”—and the custom survives that a woman’s place is at the right hand of her male partner.

  Formal table precedence—even in our own culture, where the rules in this matter seem crude, even coarsely rustic in their simplicity, to some foreigners—is not only rigid but a study in complexity. “The lady of highest rank,” says Emily Post, “is on the host’s right. The lady of next highest rank is on his left. The third lady sits on right of man of highest rank. The fourth lady on left of man of the second rank …” (Notice that the definite article begins to be left out, as is the practice when writing recipes.) At dinners where guests are multiples of four, the hostess relinquishes her place and the host keeps his; this will avoid either two males or two females being at the table’s two ends.

  With a dinner for twelve, seating problems are massive. The hostess takes the seat on what would have been her left; she does not move to the right as in other multiples of four, or else she might occupy the seat of the person who is always served first, and that would never do. The host will be served second, an unfortunate circumstance which is thought preferable to its alternative, which involves breaking the sequence of serving moves by skipping him and returning to him later. It is almost impossible, says Emily Post, to seat twelve in the house of a widow. She is advised to solve the conundrum by appointing a male guest to take the place of the host; otherwise she might find herself having to commit the rudeness of serving herself from an untouched dish. Then the lady of honour must be seated at the right of the gentleman of honour, who sits at the right of the hostess. The choreography of serving moves is even more intricate than the seating plan.

  Very important diners, at medieval banquets for example, used to be distinguished by having a canopy erected over their seats, rather as an Eastern potentate or a West African chief has been marked out in a throng by an umbrella being held over him. (People used to have such canopies over their beds as well; a “canopy” was originally a mosquito net, from the Greek konops, a mosquito.) In the East—in Korea, for example—honour was given by the placing of a screen behind a distinguished back.

  Separate chairs encourage separateness, and also status: it is hard to distinguish oneself as one of a row on a bench. It could matter desperately what kind of chair you sat on—an armchair, an armless chair with a back, or a mere stool. There was a lower level still: you could be expected to stand. (As we saw earlier, children frequently stood at table.) At Versailles the supreme dignity, the chairs with backs and arms, was reserved for the king and queen. Their family sat on three-legged stools, known as tabourets. The royal family—and only they—could use armless chairs with backs, but only when the king was not present. Being permitted a tabouret was a great honour, allowed only to certain women among the non-royal nobility; even their husbands had to stand. A woman with the privilege of sitting was herself called a tabouret, or a femme assise, a seated woman; the husband’s rank was raised by his spouse’s being allowed to be seated, so that courtiers would fight tooth and nail to obtain for their wives the tabouret. At Louis XIV’s ceremonial suppers he would “give his hand” to a guest of honour, that is, seat the person on his right. Tabourets sat, and everyone else stood. Standing, in our culture, has the opposite meaning from that among the Arabs whom we saw earlier striving not to raise themselves higher than their host. We still stand to show respect, for example, at an ovation, or when someone important enters a room, or when men are in the presence of women who are standing.

  Distinction can go no further than refusal to consort with anybody at all. In many African cultures, the father of the family is so important that he often eats separately from everybody else; his food is taken to him. The polygamous male may choose the family of one of his wives as dinner companions. However, eating being so important to marriage, he is usually obliged at every meal at least
to taste food cooked and sent to him by his other wives as well. He may be offered all the best morsels—and eat them, as his due, and perhaps also as his duty. He may be served by one of his children, kneeling so as not to tower above him, and reserve the right to demand the company of one of them, often the youngest son, for the duration of his otherwise solitary meal. A paterfamilias among the Tallensi would politely taste each of the dishes sent him by his wives (it was an insult to the cook if one of them was not tried), eat what his first wife had provided, then call in the children and share the rest out among them.

  Men rarely cook the food, but at dinner they often share out the most prestigious dishes, as when our own paterfamilias carves the roast. He sits at “the head” of the table, with his wife at “the foot,” or perhaps at his right. He is traditionally expected to rule over the meal (which is chosen with his preferences very much in mind), to control the conversation even if he does not say much, and to demand correct behaviour from his offspring. In many European societies he is served first. Far more egalitarianism reigns at mealtimes in societies where men eat together, separately from the women and children. Men and women quite often eat together in the home, but women in most places and times have been forbidden to attend public feasts, although they cook and often serve the food. Equality in human society usually turns out to mean equality among peers. The tautology is similar to that which upholds honour: people are honoured because they are honourable, and they become honourable by being honoured.

  The role of host as provider for his guests may make it the custom for him never to eat any of the meal. In Iran, for example, a host’s job was to circulate among his guests and ensure that they had what they wanted to eat and drink. Our own version of this expression of the host’s role is our rule that the host should be served last. He ceremonially “backs off” from the power he wields in his own house, in order to produce a flourish both of grand detachment and of polite deference to his guests. The guest served first is further honoured by being offered fresh and untouched dishes, with unused serving utensils; everyone else takes his or her “left-overs.”

  A different rule appears to have obtained in some circles in the United States, however, in the first half of this century: the hostess would serve herself first, even when other women were seated at the table. Emily Post was horrified by this. She called it “the Great American Rudeness,” and was forced to wonder what on earth it could mean. She thought it derived from earlier (much earlier) obsessions with the food being poisoned: the hostess was showing her guests that the food was safe to eat. Perhaps the idea had been revived because a host tastes the wine before he will let his guests drink it, in case it is a dud bottle or not sufficiently chambré—but only this sip is served first: the host’s glass is in fact filled last.

  Was it so that the hostess could add a last-minute coup de main to a dish, patting it and arranging it on the plate because kitchen help at frontier towns was formerly so lamentable? Was it so that the hostess could show her guests how to approach the food and the correct way to eat it? (Towering food edifices and heavily decorated dishes could be a problem for timid nineteenth-century diners; even Henry James remarked upon an “inscrutable entrée.”) An old-fashioned deference to age, Post goes on—Grandmother being seated in “a high-backed cushioned armchair” at the head of the table—might have been transferred by Americans to hosts. (In the nineteenth century, the higher ritual rank of host and hostess was underlined by their sitting, at the table’s roomy head and foot, on large stuffed easy chairs, the “stately appearance” of which “would be peculiarly appropriate,” according to an article written in 1897.) Perhaps, Post speculates, Americans confusedly remembered that royalty was served first. Or maybe staff have been so badly trained that they serve their employer (who is more important to them) before the guests, and “one whose early life has been spent in simple servantless surroundings” hesitates to criticize the butler. Or—and here Emily Post hardly dares contemplate the abyss—perhaps all that was taking place was “an epidemic of discourteous behaviour.” She is not surprised, she says, that “Europeans smile.”

  Her analysis is a marvellous illustration of hostly anxiety, and of the ways in which hosts wield the power but ought not to let it show. She does not mention another custom (which she advises against following, but which is in fact time-honoured) that might have contributed to “the Great American Rudeness”: if it is polite to wait until everybody has been served before all begin to eat together, then the first person served may wait until her food is cold. A hostess who takes this disadvantage upon herself would be showing that she effortlessly controls her appetite for food, and in fact is deferring handsomely to her guests. But polite customs have to interlock correctly: it must be admitted that if a hostess serves herself first and does not wait for everyone else to begin, the spirit of dinner-table conduct is threatened. Hosts should defer to guests precisely because they need not; guests always resent infractions of this rule.

  John Russell’s Boke of Nurture (1460, but deriving from sources more than a century older) speaks of the “cunning, curious and commendable” art of the usher or marshal, whose job it was to seat guests according to precedence. In his day the four different estates—royalty and high ecclesiastics, what we would call professionals, semi-professionals, and businessmen—should each “sit at meat by itself, not seeing the others, at meal-time or in the field or in the town; and each must sit alone in the chamber or in the pavilion.” Within the first group, he goes on, priority was to be given to birth over wealth: “The substance of livelihood is not so digne as royal blood.” For this reason the parents of a pope or cardinal have no status at all because of their relationship to their son; the parents and children of the king are another matter.

  The principle that “blood” ranks higher than one’s profession continued, and was applied to the aristocracy with greater and greater precision as wealth provided the bourgeoisie with increasing numbers of points of entry into the circles of the nobility. As time went on it became obvious that precedence, reflecting “blood,” was really all that the nobility possessed: as it frequently happens, the artificiality of culture was unmasked largely owing to the fact that the tradition which upheld it was already almost dead. In the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding could still advise that hosts and ushers should give the honours to nobility, but only because everyone knew that the real power lay with money: “for though purse-pride is forward enough to exalt itself, it bears a degradation with more secret comfort and ease than [pride of birth], as being more inwardly satisfied with itself, and less apprehensive of neglect or contempt.”

  The word “inwardly” is important. Outward show, the obligation to display magnificence and express power through giving, was passing away. As wealth became synonymous with power, rich people became less and less visible to the multitudes. Today, great wealth is almost never on view, except possibly from outside the pale of the owners’ grounds, as the amount of space occupied. The very richest people remove themselves from the public gaze so that they need suffer neither envy from others nor obligation towards them. They leave it to the nouveau riches, the flashy upstarts and trend-setters, to flaunt their money. Sharing they do only with each other; privacy in them achieves its apotheosis and becomes total exclusivity. Such people might find an insistence upon precedence at table to be an unnecessary affectation; but no doubt they manage to establish inequality among themselves.

  4

  Dinner is Served

  A Banquet, which includes the pleasure of eating, the room in which dinner is served, the tables and chairs (or the mats and the trays), the lights, the dishes, the decorations, and the companions themselves, is a common image for the cosmos, for life, or for Paradise. The Roman emperor Nero had dining rooms with ceilings made of ivory panels, which could swivel and shower down flowers; they were also fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. His main banqueting hall was circular and “constantly revolved day and ni
ght, like the world.” The dome above it apparently also moved, displaying the heavenly bodies wheeling in order—a conceit which reminds us of the modern love of restaurants slowly revolving high above a city skyline with stars overhead at night, and city lights stretching to the horizon. The table, cloth, or tray, the circle of guests, and the duration of the meal represent the earth and humanity as a whole, and the story of their existence.

  Death is remembered at feasts, just because food is life, and such a concrete, certain, but temporary joy. We have seen how bloody death could come to mind at dinner-time as a natural association of ideas, and how the dead may be thought of as joining the living at dinner. Banqueting ceremonies have often included entertainments reminding diners that life is short, that we should seize the occasion to “eat, drink and be merry.” Ancient Greeks, who dined on couches, were laid out on couches for the funeral ceremony—perhaps on the very beds they had used for dinner when alive. At the end of an ancient Egyptian meal, a man carried round among the guests a skeleton or a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, reminding them, before they started drinking, that they were all mortal. The Greek custom of wearing wreaths also had something of this connotation.

  Homer imagined a sort of vacation-land for the gods, where they could go to visit the “Shiny-Faced People” (which is the meaning of the originally Greek word Ethiopians), so named because they lived near the house of the Sun. There the gods would be invited to dine, for weeks at a time, from splendid tables automatically replenished for ever. The Persian Paradise was a land of banquets where the water of life was handed carefully round, as water was passed at Persian dinners on earth, to be sipped by every guest in turn from a ladle. Roman and early Christian funeral monuments commonly showed the dead feasting with friends in the hereafter. Christian poetry also makes Paradise a banquet, specifically a wedding dinner (the sexual imagery is direct), with death a solemn but triumphant procession into the dining hall, beyond the threshold of which lies bliss for the soul as bride of the Beloved.