The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  In modern houses the ancient hall has dwindled into a little space just inside the front door; in North American English, a corridor is called a “hallway”—an important artery in a house, but utterly subservient to the rooms which open off it. Rooms specifically for dining began to be built into middle-class houses only in the seventeenth century; they are unnecessary luxuries, and modern apartments, and houses too, often do without them altogether. The dining-room table in North America now tends to occupy one end of the living room—an arrangement which returns somewhat to the ancient concept of the hall, especially since living rooms are where the fireplace (if any) is to be found. As we have seen, the hearth or focus once provided the site for meals, as it provided the heat source for cooking them. We do not cook at the fireplace, of course: we have kept to the distinction between kitchen and “hall” which began with the trend towards separating out the functions of the house into specialized rooms.

  The “chamber” into which the medieval lord withdrew from his hall to eat was a more recent forerunner of our “living,” “sitting,” or “[with]drawing” room. It originally contained a bed and fireplace; often the women would eat there while the men dined in the hall. But by 1450, the privacy offered by this chamber was increasingly being claimed by the most important of the men. It held only a few people, and exclusivity is ever the promoter of chic. John Russell explains in his Boke of Nurture (1460):

  The pope, an emperor, king, cardinal, prince with a golden royal rod, archbishop in his pall—

  All these for their dignity ought not to dine in the hall.

  The withdrawing chamber, later called a “parlour” or “conversation-room” (from French parler, “to talk”), eventually split in two. The table, which it now normally contained, moved into a room of its own, which was known first in English as the “eating-room,” and then the “dining-room,” a word which is first found in 1601, and which attained common usage during the eighteenth century, as dining rooms in bourgeois houses became the norm. At the table in this private room, the diners could sit facing each other, not ranged along one side only, as they were when “on display” in the hall.

  In the sixteenth century, after dinner in the hall or the chamber, the head of the house and his chosen companions might withdraw for dessert to what was called a “banqueting house.” This was either a separate building, like the famous Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, London, or, if a house was situated in the country, a room at the top, ideally one with a splendid view. A “banquet” was a collation of fruit, cakes, sweets, and wine; it could be a separate meal, rather as we serve afternoon tea. An alternative word for a banquet was a “voydee,” from a French term for the withdrawal from or “voiding” of the hall for the chamber; a voydee could also be a final collation of wine and spices, just before the departure of the guests. The word “banquet,” which derives from the same root as “bench,” usually denoted a simple repast, or only a part of a meal; it has now come exclusively to mean a costly feast of the highest status. The banquet and voydee became what we now call dessert, which was often eaten in the drawing room after everyone had left the table. Eighteenth-century diners would sometimes stand or stroll about to eat and drink dessert, in the manner of a cocktail party, but held after the dinner. The tradition of moving somewhere else for the end of the meal is still maintained at such places as traditional men’s clubs, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and the British Inns of Court.

  A special dining room contains a special table—solemn, solid, perhaps extensible but otherwise immovable. Kitchen tables, at which the peasantry continued to eat near the fire, were all-purpose but not meant to be moved about. (It is this ancient custom to which we are returning as more and more of us find it cosy as well as handy to eat in the kitchen.) In the Middle Ages and later, tables called dormantes, “sleeping” because they were heavy and seldom moved, were often placed before a bench with its back to a fire for warmth in middle-class houses. The practice among the nobility in their châteaux was different: tables were boards laid on trestles, set up for dinner and removed afterwards. (When the earliest specifically dining-room tables were made for the rich, their makers were apparently unable to imagine them totally stationary and provided them with a “break” in the middle so they could be removed. The normal run of seventeenth-century Parisian apartments, short as they were on space, also required folding tables; “to lay the table” in French is dresser [“set up”] la table.) For a long time after the introduction of permanent eating tables, the aristocracy often maintained their boards and trestles; they decided that tradition in this matter lent them a distinction which recent, upstart bourgeois arrangements could not match. Trestles and boards were always very simple and definitely not created to be seen; they were invariably covered, first with an undercloth or sheet of leather or carpeting, then with various, often magnificent, draperies.

  At formal medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque dinners, an edifice of shelves known as a “buffet” was erected to one side of the dining hall; upon it the family silver—which was often far too valuable to be subjected to the hazards of use—was proudly displayed. Later the food was displayed there as well, so that guests could have a preview of what they would be eating, rather as modern restaurants often exhibit dishes of food to tempt their customers. Later still, yet another little room led from the dining room, where guests could visit the “buffet.” These shelves for display, like the tables, had often been boards set up (dressées in French) for special occasions; they are the origin of our “dressers” and “cup boards.” The number of shelves a medieval cup board could boast was sometimes regulated: five shelves for a high-ranking duke, four for a lower duke, three for a nobleman, two for a knight, and one for a mere gentleman.

  Beginning apparently in the nineteenth century, a “buffet” meal used to be laid out, not on the dining-room table but on the dresser or sideboard. (This solid, very permanent piece of furniture still plays the role of the ancient buffet in that it often displays the family china.) People would help themselves at the sideboard, and then carry their food to the table to eat it. This is still a customary way of presenting a copious British breakfast, and it is commonly used in modern hotels. A “buffet dinner” now refers mainly to the action of helping oneself to the food and then carrying it away to eat it elsewhere; guests often stand to eat, or sit down with their loaded plates on their laps.

  The idea, which we take for granted, that everyone usually sits round a table to eat is in fact very specific to our own culture. Many people sit on the floor to dine, round a tray or trays of food. Another widely followed custom is for each diner to have his or her own table, like the small tables we provide in the living room for drinks or tea. The formal Japanese diner has a beautiful little lacquered table all to himself; he might even have two or three of them. Greeks in the Classical period each had a small oblong three-legged table. In these cases, the sharing which is universally important at mealtimes is expressed by passing the wine from one to another in a single cup, or by everyone bursting into song, or through complex interrelationships being continually stressed, as in the pouring of saké at a Japanese business lunch. In our own culture, we have worked extremely hard to achieve separation among the diners; but for the expression of unity we have the single, solid table.

  Where tables are provided for every guest, they are rarely covered with cloths. The ancient Greeks, for instance, used their individual tables like large dishes, with some of the food placed directly on the wooden table-top; vase paintings show us loaves of bread in heaps, tidbits on the table or on plates, large cups, and long slices of meat, unwrapped from the spits on which they were cooked, and draped decoratively so that they hang down over the tables’ edges. A new course was called second or third “tables,” or “things brought next”: either other tables were brought in, sometimes with food already on them, or the tables were all wiped down with sponges in preparation for the next round of food. Tables were light and portable: they were bro
ught in and removed at the beginning and the end of every meal.

  A distinction is always made between structured and unstructured meals: “structured” usually means “of higher status.” We reserve a whole type of eating experience for “out of doors,” where for once we eat seated on the ground. We are very self-conscious about picnics, and the freedom we grant ourselves to lounge about on a blanket eating cold food with our hands. We travel long distances and put up with a thousand risks and inconveniences to reach this state. The French might have invented the word “picnic,” pique nique being found earlier than “pic nic.” (The meaning, aside from the probable connotation of “picking,” is unknown.) It originally referred to a dinner, usually eaten indoors, to which everyone present had contributed some food, and possibly also a fee to attend. The ancient Greek eranos, the French moungetade described earlier, or modern “pot luck” suppers are versions of this type of mealtime organization. The change in the meaning of the term, from “everyone bringing some food” to “everyone eating out of doors” seems to have been completed by the 1860s.

  The impromptu aspect, together with the informality, are what the new meaning has in common with the old; there is a connotation too of simple food, which may be quite various, but which is not controlled, decorated, or strictly ordered into courses. Picnics derive, also, from the decorous yet comparatively informal sixteenth-century “banquets” mentioned earlier, which frequently took place out of doors. People often think that “there is nothing like the out of doors” for lending one an appetite. Fresh air and natural beauty, adventure, no cooking, and no tables and chairs—a good picnic is a thrilling reversal of normal rules. Not very long ago, picnics were rather formal affairs to our way of thinking, with tables, chairs, and even servants. But everything is relative: what was formal then made a trestle-table in the open countryside seem exhilaratingly abandoned. The general feeling of relief from normal constraints might even lead to the kind of liberty depicted in Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a faint and distant echo of the shocking behaviour of ancient Greek Bacchanals, who escaped the constraints of city living by going wild in the woods.

  In societies where sitting on the ground is unexceptional, chairs and tables are regarded as stiff, formal, and status-ridden. Chairs and tables might be kept for extremely formal visits in the “public” part of the house, as they often were in China. An African chief might sit on a quite simple stool, but its being raised and decorated, perhaps covered with an animal’s skin, made it a throne, an object of reverence. The fact is that chairs are extraordinarily constraining devices, and for that reason, in many societies other than our own, they are kept for exceptionally solemn occasions. They force us to sit where they are placed and, if we habitually use them, quite early in our lives they reduce the ability of our muscles to encompass the postures required for floor-sitting; a healthy middle-aged Westerner may expect to suffer agonies if forced to live even a few weeks without the use of any chairs.

  Anthropologists tell us of at least 132 main ways of sitting; only about 30 of these involve anything resembling a chair. Among this restricted number of postures, many are thought impolite in our society, even for men. Women should strictly speaking sit in only very few of them, with legs either together or crossed; crossing their legs at the knee represented a revolutionary relaxation in quite recent times. Our clothing is designed with chairs very much in mind. Broad, flowing robes are required for floor-sitting, if much clothing be worn at all. The most “liberated” mini-skirted modern woman in nylon stockings is peremptorily forbidden the floor, even if she should be capable of sitting for hours with her ankles on the same level as her sitting bones and without leaning on anything. Shoes are a nuisance, and men’s pants are quickly creased and stretched and usually become uncomfortable if worn on the floor.

  Rigidity—sitting bolt upright on a chair and very still—is traditionally, with us, a sign of decorum. Never is this more so than at the table, where the need to show signs which conventionally demonstrate good will and self-control is, as we have seen, absolutely vital. Children are exhorted not to swing on chairs, not to lean over food. We must not put our elbows on the table—unless we can do so with an elegant lightness which makes it clear that we are not really supporting ourselves on the table and do not need to do so, and unless we demonstrate in everything else we do that we have earned this nonchalance.

  Sitting, provided that it is on a chair, enhances social stature: people who can arrange to sit while everyone else is obliged to stand are usually eliciting respect. There is only one posture which can beat sitting erect for status, and that is lying down. The furniture must again, of course, be raised, and sufficiently luxurious; we recall that beds, like the most important person’s chair at a banquet, used to be canopied. People lying down take up a lot of space; if nobody else is spread out full length, the distinction, and the focussing of everybody’s attention, can be impressive. Anyone who has received visitors in hospital will know what I mean—although you have to be feeling reasonably well, of course, to notice your advantage. It is still one of the satisfying luxuries of life, and a clear enhancement of one’s status, to be brought breakfast in bed.

  In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the ancient Greeks came into fairly close contact with the eastern Mediterranean. There they saw people who ate, in formal gatherings, while reclining on couches. An Assyrian bas-relief shows us King Assurbanipal lying down to eat in the presence of his respectful, seated wife; and Phoenician ivory couches of the ninth century B.C. have been found together with luxury dinnerware. The Hebrew prophet Amos (ca. 640 B.C.) railed against the inhabitants of Samaria who imitated their neighbours the Phoenicians and Aramaeans of northern Syria: “Woe to them … that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches … that chant to the sound of the viol … that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments: but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.” He goes on to warn that “the banquet of them that stretched themselves shall be removed.”

  The custom, perceived at the time as the acme of prestige and luxury, was adopted by upper-class Greek men, except in such isolationist and conservative societies as Sparta and Crete, where everyone continued to sit as the Greeks had in Homer’s day. The Romans learned the use of the dining couch from the Greeks and Etruscans in the second century B.C. Lying down remained de rigueur at formal banquets in the Roman Empire; it died out as late as the fifth century A.D. In Greek monasteries on Mount Athos there still exist halls containing couches on which monks may lie down and eat.

  Reclining on a couch (a kline in Greek), always a status symbol, was confined in Greece to upper-class males. The Homeric days of the lord eating in his hall with his crowd of retainers had given way to a social system where aristocratic groups of friends, equal among themselves but considering themselves superior to hoi polloi, met to eat and then to participate in the drinking party, the symposium. Such groups had to be quite small and exclusive: it did not take many banqueting couches to fill up a room. A small dining room in the archaic period accommodated seven couches; a large room about fifteen, each wide enough to hold two diners.

  Women lay down to eat where men were present only in exceptional societies such as that of the Etruscans, or if they were prostitutes. Upper-class women in Imperial Rome appear to have been allowed occasionally to lie down with the men, but for most of the history of the custom, “proper” women, if they ate with the men at all, sat on chairs with their small tables in front of them. It was definitely demeaning to sit while others lay: as late as the Hellenistic period in Macedonia, no male could recline at dinner until he had speared a wild boar without a net, and so initiated himself into manhood. “Cassander,” Athenaeus tells us, “at the age of thirty-five continued to sit at meals with his father, being unable to accomplish the feat, though he was brave and a good hunter.” When ancient Greeks portrayed the gods feasting together, they imagined them sitting, not lying down.
This may have been because archaic, “Homeric” scenes seemed to them appropriate to the gods; Greek writings sometimes express a suspicion that reclining at dinner was a late, “soft” custom. But a British archaeologist has recently suggested that the goddesses would have had to be shown sitting rather than lying down in any convincing depiction of such a banquet, and that to apply human social distinctions among the gods, ranking females lower than males, would have been rude to the goddesses: the misogynist Athenians themselves had a female divinity for a patron.

  An ancient Greek banqueter reclined on a couch so high that in some cases he needed a footstool to help him up onto it. He took off his shoes, climbed up, and then lay propped on his left elbow, facing his own small table which stood alongside his couch, and from which he took his food with his right hand. This posture required years of habit to maintain not only correctly but gracefully and without exhaustion. (One cannot, of course, rest one’s chin on one’s hand and still eat.) Greeks, unless they were feeling very amorous, usually had a whole bed to themselves, but Romans shared couches. One form of Roman dining room was called a triclinium, which as its name tells us held three couches, each sloping slightly downwards to the diners’ feet. Up to three men reclined on a couch, nine often being said to be the ideal number for a dinner party. There might be only one table in a triclinium. The diners lay with their heads towards it, so that they could all reach it with their right arms. Servants were essential if several courses were brought in to the recumbent diners; the fourth side of the table was left free of couches and facing the room’s entrance, to facilitate the presentation of successive dishes. Later the couches were placed in a semi-circle, or were melded into one semi-circular couch, with the table within the curve.