The close physical contact which fellow diners knew at a Roman banquet would seem exceedingly strange and uncomfortable to us today, after our habituation for several centuries to sitting on separate chairs to eat. Modern lovers who merely lean across a restaurant table to hold hands are making a heavily significant gesture just because our table manners work so insistently on keeping diners from touching while a meal is in progress. (Keeping “elbows in” is not only practical but also part of this taboo.) In one of Plutarch’s symposiac conversations, the question discussed is “Why is there lack of space for the diners at the beginning of a meal and ample space later?” In general, one of the participants informs us, “each guest, while eating, assumes a posture almost flat, since he must stretch his right hand forward to the table; but after eating he turns back more upon his side, forming a sharper angle with the couch and occupying no longer a flat surface, but merely, one might say, a line.” Then the down-filled cushions, used to prop people up and increase their comfort, slowly flattened out during the meal and left more space. And in any case, he continues, as the wine smoothed everyone’s irritability out, people relaxed and did not perceive themselves as being squashed together.
In Palestine at the time of Christ, Jews normally sat in the ancient fashion on the floor round the trays of food; at banquets, however, they lay in the Roman manner, on couches. The Last Supper was a reclining meal, in a room larger than a triclinium. The apostle John lay alongside Jesus, each of them raised on his left elbow. John would have had to lean back, as the Greek says, “on [his master’s] breast,” that is, leaning against the chest of Jesus, in order to talk to him. The movement was quite unexceptional, and in fact necessary, given the table manners of the time; but several hundred years later, when depictions of the Last Supper became a favourite subject for artists, the Greek words had become completely baffling. Everyone was thought of as sitting on chairs, stools, or benches at the Last Supper, as people contemporary with the artists did. In order to accommodate the Greek text, John is made in these pictures to lean sideways, droop over, lean on Christ’s shoulder, and even fall asleep in his master’s lap or with his head on the table. Any of these actions would have displayed shocking table manners, of which the apostle was almost certainly quite innocent.
THE PROSPECT BEFORE US
Tablecloths are first heard of in Rome at the time of the emperors. Gradually they became essential to the beauty of a banquet, and by the high Middle Ages they were even more expressive of the community of the diners than was the table itself. “To share the cloth” of a nobleman was to be seen to be treated as his equal. When a master dined with servants at the same table, either he was the only person with a cloth before him, or the whole table was covered with a cloth but at his place another small napkin was laid. One of the most horrible insults a medieval nobleman could endure was to be publicly humiliated and separated from his brethren by having the herald of an angry knight stride up to him at table and slit the tablecloth to the left and the right of his place, or across the top of it. Nothing but a sworn vendetta could redress honour smirched in this fashion. The host of the party must have been considerably irritated as well.
Damascus in Syria was where all the best tablecloths came from. “Damask” was patterned with lozenges and other figures; quite early on, purity and cleanliness won out as a most important message of the tablecloth, and it became almost invariably white. Today, damask is pure white twilled linen with only a discreet woven white pattern in it. Absolutely nothing else will do for a formal table setting. A good deal of its prestige rests upon the trouble such a tablecloth entails: it must be washed and pressed every time it is used, and a single stain ruins it. Chinese diners are said to rejoice in a messy table: the more bones, shells, pods, and crab-claws litter the table, the more fun the meal has obviously been. Nothing could be further from our own ideal. By the late seventeenth century, the tablecloth was no longer, as it had been earlier, “a space of common disorder,” as the French historian Jean-Claude Bonnet puts it; it had become a pristine white space, separating out the place settings, and meant to be kept as clean and clear as possible.
Table linen was always a mark of wealth. Until quite recently in France, tablecloths and sheets were often handwoven, and made up a substantial part of the trousseau of a well-endowed bride. They could last for generations, and were handed down as heirlooms; the idea was to amass, if you could, a great deal of such linen. At late medieval banquets, splendid cloths were laid over the simple wooden boards used for tables: they were what made the setting luxurious. There were several of them, typically an undercarpet first, then a large cloth covering the whole table, then two upper ones each covering the table-top and falling to the ground of one long side. A “sanap” (French sauve-nappe or “tablecloth-saver”) was a narrow strip of cloth lying along the table edge nearest the diners; it took most of the dirt from grubby or greasy wrists, and was presumably easier than damask to wash. The sanap could be made of several layers of cloth, and might be used only until the washing ceremony was over. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, when meals were divided into two set courses and then dessert, two tablecloths, or three, were laid one above the other; one was removed after each course, so that the succeeding course began with a clean cloth. Some modern restaurants have revived the practice by laying two cloths, the top one of which is removed before dessert.
When a substantial lunch became a regular feature of everyday life, which it did only in the nineteenth century, it was a meal to which guests could be invited far less formally than they were to dinner at night. A luncheon tablecloth was allowed to be only a runner, or lacy or pierced, so that the table showed through. By this time, of course, the dining-room table had become a valuable part of middle-class household furnishings, made of precious wood, polished till it gleamed, and proudly treasured. It became perfectly correct in the late eighteenth century to show off the table by removing all coverings for the last course, the dessert, of a formal meal, leaving only “doilies,” rather substantial flannel squares, in place to protect the wood from being scratched by the plates. These doilies, named after a seventeenth-century London draper called Mr. D’Oyley, were the forerunners of our place mats.
The message of these mats, apart from their function and convenience, is clear: each person is as separate and self-sufficient as possible, given the unification represented by the table. For the past ten years we have found them perfectly acceptable even for formal dinner parties; but tablecloths have recently returned to favour. For some time these have not been always white except on the most formal occasions. Modern washing machines and detergents have made cleanliness easier to achieve, so that we no longer require whiteness, in sheets or tablecloths, to make the point as strongly as possible that the linen is clean.
The first objects set on the medieval tablecloth, after grace and the hand-washing, were the “salts,” or containers for salt; the custom is recorded as being recommended by Pythagoras (sixth century B.C.). There are dozens of superstitions and ancient customs surrounding salt—a mysterious, powerful, pure, but dangerous substance which people have always treated with respect. At medieval banquets, salt had to be separately poison-tested. Families would prize their inherited cellar (a word, from French sel, which means “salt dispenser”: saying “salt cellar” is strictly tautological). “Standing salts,” stout cylinders of silver with a shallow depression at the top to hold the precious salt, were the custom at formal British banquets. Noble households on the Continent of Europe might possess a nef: a silver table-top ship which contained, often in a quite small compartment of the whole, some salt. It was occasionally fitted with wheels, and could be rolled along the high table to be admired for its value and splendid craftsmanship—and so that the diners could help themselves to salt. The lord and his special guests sat in the middle of the long side of the high table, as diners sit at high tables today; a standing salt or nef (sometimes several of them) would be set before the lord, and perhaps each o
f the highest ranking diners, as an “object of prestige” and indication of status. When the lord sat at what we call the “head” or the host’s short end of the table, it became customary to place a standing salt as a marker, dividing the lord’s intimates grouped at his end of the table from those who were not quite accepted into his inner circle and who sat “below the salt.” As late as the Victorian period, the salt container might be combined with an elaborate centre-piece decoration, as when the pretentious Veneerings in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865) had “a caravan of camels” to “take charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down to be loaded with the salt.”
At the beginning of the sixteenth century in England, dinner, the main meal of the day, used to begin at 11:00 a.m. Meals tended over time to be eaten later and later in the day: by the eighteenth century, dinner was eaten at about 3:00 p.m. French déjeuner, like “breakfast,” once meant the first food eaten after waking from a long night spent foodless (jeûner means “to fast”). Déjeuner is now used for “lunch,” and French breakfast, its name having been pre-empted, has now to be called petit déjeuner, while dîner is eaten at night. In English, lunch or luncheon (originally also called “nunch” or “nuncheon”) was in the first place a snack between meals. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) said Lunch or Luncheon was “As much food as one’s hand can hold”; he suggests that it derives from “clutch” or “clunch.” (The modern American term “munchies” for snacks points similarly to small amounts, although it refers, more openly than our ancestors might have liked, to mouths and chewing.)
By the early nineteenth century, lunch, what Palmer in Moveable Feasts calls “the furtive snack,” had become a sit-down meal at the dining table in the middle of the day. Upper-class people were eating breakfast earlier, and dinner later, than they had formerly done. Lunch having displaced the afternoon dinner (Jane Austen, in a letter written in 1808, could spell the older term “nuncheon” as “noon-shine”), and having become a substantial regular meal with a name of its own, “dinner” was now a late meal, and “supper” a snack taken at the very end of the day, before people retired to bed. For a long time luncheon was a very upper-class habit: ordinary working people dined in the early evening, and contented themselves as they had done for centuries with a mid-day snack.
By the late nineteenth century, luncheon had become a social occasion mainly for elite women; at this time of day their menfolk were busy seeing to their financial affairs; they might be doing so over meals at restaurants in “the city.” The corresponding French institution was déjeuner à la fourchette, the lady-like “fork luncheon.” Nowadays, lunch (“luncheon” sounds pretentious because of the elitist connotations of the term) has returned to its ancient function as a workday snack—unless it is a long heavy meal, taken if possible at the company’s expense: it is then called a “business” lunch. Sunday lunch still survives, in England for example, as a weekly family celebration, a “dinner” in the middle of the work-free day. Since it is not the clock that gives shape to our day but our own repeated actions, the most essential and repetitive of which is undoubtedly eating, the gradual invention of regular lunch came to divide our day in two. Palmer calls the afternoon “the Nineteenth Century’s great gift to mankind.”
“Supper” now means a light evening meal that replaces dinner; such a meal is especially popular if people have eaten a heavy lunch. “Dinner,” in North America, increasingly means any evening meal, light or heavy; the word “supper” is used less and less, and “dinner” can now be quite swift and small. Dinner parties must usually take place at night, when friends are free from work and can spend time visiting. Inviting friends to dinner is much more flattering than asking them to lunch, because night time is, except on yearly celebrations such as Christmas or Easter, the only free time. Meeting people for lunch on weekdays almost invariably means eating “out,” while a dinner, carefully home-cooked with all the expenditure of time and trouble that such a project implies, is one of the highest compliments a busy modern person can offer to friends.
A dinner, then, when guests are invited into one’s home, is now nearly always a night-time occasion. The table laid for it is lit, if at all possible, by candles in candelabra, even though we no longer use candles as our normal light source. Lit candles cast a flattering light on food, faces, china, and glass, and their use for evening meals and little else has become a marking ritual: “We now have gathered,” they say, “for dinner.” For millennia we sat round a fire to eat, and fires remain for us symbolic of the group which gathers round for light and warmth. Candles last their predestined, visible length. They represent spans of time for us: a lifetime, with the flame as life itself, fragile but still alight (they become, with this meaning, potent symbols during political demonstrations); or a significant period of time, as when candles on a birthday cake mean “years lived.” A candle burning before a statue in a church represents for its duration the person who placed it there. A superstition common since Roman times is that snuffing out a candle (or the wick of an oil lamp) while a meal is being eaten means death to somebody present; again it is clear that a candle flame easily means “a life.” Candles have a luxurious connotation, which is enhanced for us by the fact that they are now quite unnecessary. In the nineteenth century, an eminent host or “amphitryon” would go to enormous expense to provide as many candles as possible. The extravagant French literary gourmet Grimod de la Reynière liked significant numbers of them: 365, for example, for the days of the year. No description of a feast was complete without an enumeration of the candles.
Medieval banqueting trestle-tables had been narrow, seating diners along only one side so that they could be watched by a crowd of non-dining onlookers, and themselves enjoy the spectacles staged between the meal’s courses. There were no plates, no glasses on the table, and not much cutlery either. Festive display was concentrated on the size and grandeur of the assembly, on clothing, table linen, the choreography of splendidly costumed servers, on extraordinary dishes and theatrical events, and on the pyramid of buffet shelves displaying the lord’s family plate. When dining customs changed and the onlookers gradually retired from the scene of feasts, banqueters faced each other across the banqueting table as families always have done. The custom of mounting a buffet eventually died out, or rather the spectacle afforded by the buffet migrated onto the surface of the table itself. Decorations on the banqueting table were more and more lavish, while table surfaces became wider to hold them: the diners were now both partakers and audience at the feast.
At seventeenth-century banquets where tables were seated along one side only, and the diners themselves, together with the festive plenty, constituted the spectacle, the board groaned so that its surface was scarcely visible, but monumental centre-pieces were avoided because they would have obstructed the view. Tall pyramids of fruits and sweetmeats appeared at other kinds of dining events during the seventeenth century; Madame de Sévigné described a dinner-party accident, when a towering pyramid of fruit collided with the door-lintel as it was being brought in, and crashed to the floor: “the noise of [it] silenced the violins, oboes, and trumpets.”
In the eighteenth century, a “centre-piece,” or focal point, was felt to be necessary, to gather the diners round it; dinner guests, even at great banquets, were sitting all round the table. There were “middleboards,” wooden shelved pyramids placed in the middle of the table and loaded with fruits; and surtouts, towering “over all” the table, as their name says, and demanding a great deal of room. Sometimes these were dormants, “sleepers,” that stayed on the table throughout the meal. The grandest were sculptures—animals, temples, rocks and mountains, scenes from classical myths referring to nature, such as depictions of Flora, Diana, or the Seasons—of silver or silver-gilt; a great many of them are to be seen in the glass cases of our museums. Less spectacular surtouts were what the English call “epergnes,” a word that looks French, but whose origin is mysterious. These were fanciful glass, s
ilvered basketwork, or silver and gold salvers, lifted on branches, and containing sweetmeats and fruits or candleholders, and sometimes sugar, mustard, and other condiments; they were ancestors of the very homely cruet-stands mostly to be found in restaurants today, portable metal frames to hold salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil.
A fashion for low centre-pieces produced the plateau, a large flat tray which took up the centre of the broad table’s surface. Plateaux were common, but almost none have come down to us. One surviving example is a flat mirror six feet four inches long, and bounded by a small gilt balustrade; it came supplied with twenty-nine porcelain figurines to be set out when the surface had been covered with a miniature “garden,” complete with foliage, tiny hedges and walks, mirror ponds, and even streams and moving clockwork pieces. The early eighteenth-century French nobility delighted in “sand”-gardens as table centre-pieces, with elaborate patterns in various colours all dribbled onto the plateau by a professional sableur or “sand-man,” a designer in sugar powders and tinted marble dust. The sableur, who sometimes performed his difficult craft before the assembled guests, would cover his creation with sheets of glass to keep it in place; on and around this he placed the sugar or biscuit-dough statuettes, the miniature urns and the fountains, in imitation of a formal French garden. These ephemeral fantasies later gave way to more durable and precious pieces of porcelain and sometimes silver.
Fresh flowers were used extensively as table decorations during the ancien régime in France, and in Germany and Italy. But they were not always the first choice: flowers could be thought rustic, not “cultured” enough. People loved silk, feather, cut-vegetable and other hand-made flowers, and revelled in their artificiality. It was only in the early nineteenth century that fresh flower decorations began to be de rigueur at dinner parties; by the end of the century they had taken over the table. While broad tables were still in use, flower decorations covered the surface previously used for epergnes, silver sculptures, and plateaux; places were laid for the guests round the perimeter of the garden display. It was difficult to talk to anyone other than those people sitting to one’s immediate right and left. Modern manners emphasize conversation not only with neighbours but with guests across the table; we accordingly place flowers in vases, keeping them either low so that we can see over them, or standing tall in slender vases so that we can see past them. Flowers and candelabra constitute for us the vertical components of table decoration.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 20