In ancient Rome, guests often used two table napkins each, one tied round the neck and the other for wiping fingers. Each guest brought at least one of these with him; his slave would use it to wrap round the food that was given to the guests to take home after the party. During the Middle Ages and later, napkins were not always provided for the diners, and tablecloths seem often to have been used for wiping hands and mouths. “It is equally impolite to lick greasy fingers or to wipe them on one’s tunic,” wrote Erasmus in 1530. “You should wipe them with the napkin or on the tablecloth.” Late medieval table napkins were very large, luxurious, and fringed, more like a bath towel in size, and draped over the diner’s left arm or over his left shoulder. By the mid-seventeenth century, napkins had moved to cover the eater’s front, being worn quite commonly round the neck to protect elaborate lace falling collars when they were fashionable for men. By the early nineteenth century they were still very large, about a yard square, and being laid on laps; it was considered polite not to unfold them completely first. Fastening one to a button or tying it round the neck had become a sign of a lower-class upbringing—though at the time of the change, the gastronome Brillat-Savarin regretted the passing of yet another custom which contributed to prandial comfort.
Nowadays, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least, an expanse of napkin covering one’s chest reminds us of a baby’s bib. In Graham Greene’s novel Doctor Fischer of Geneva, the malicious host, bent on demeaning his dinner guests, has his servants tie giant napkins round their necks. They think they are going to be served crayfish (a lobster, mussel, or crayfish dinner is one of the rare occasions when biblike napkins are still permissible)—but instead he gives them porridge. A napkin knotted round the neck also looks far too much as though the diner means business; and the expression of gross appetite is frowned upon in modern manners.
Napkins, in our culture, are to be kept clean—a wholly unreasonable requirement in view of the purpose for which napkins were designed in the first place, which is to wipe away spills and grease. The idea is that we do not wish to be made aware of grease, and spills ought not to occur; napkins should be used, if at all, merely to give the most unobtrusive dab to the lips. The movement towards the unneeded napkin began with the introduction of forks. Ben Jonson wrote in The Devil is an Ass (1616) that forks had arrived in England from Italy “to the saving of napkins.” Montaigne had confessed to preferring the old-fashioned method of eating with his hands; he said he used his napkin a lot: “I would dine without a tablecloth, but very uncomfortably without a clean napkin German fashion; I soil napkins more than they or the Italians do, and make little use of spoon or fork.”
Washing hands and wiping them is of course always important where people eat with their fingers. There is some evidence from several societies that people used quite commonly to wipe their hands on their hair—or on that of a slave if they were very grand. There could be prim rules, of course, limiting even this practice: the Flathead Indians of Montana thought it was very rude to wipe your hands on your hair if you had been eating fish. When people shared cups and spoons, it was polite to wipe them before passing them on; and before serving spoons were provided, diners were expected to take what they wanted from a dish with their own spoons, but to wipe them on their napkins before plunging in. Even when napkins were so heavily used, politeness manuals pleaded that diners should not dirty the whole cloth. Until the early nineteenth century, napkins were dipped into finger-bowls and then used to wipe mouths and chins at the end of dinner; the subsequent repression of this habit is a reminder to us of how very neatly and carefully we now cut up our food and place it in our mouths. The comfort value of a final wiping of the face, however, is not underrated by airline companies, which arrange for damp wiping cloths, heated and ceremonially handed to us with tongs, to be provided either before or after meals. Childhood memories probably survive in us of mothers cleaning us up after eating. Providing hot rough cloths for wiping hands and faces is a traditional Chinese custom.
For a very long time one of the virtuosities of the dinner table was the folding of the linen. Tablecloths when spread out were criss-crossed with creases; these had to be straight and clear (there was a superstition that a wrinkled fold, forming what was called a “coffin,” meant death to one of the diners). The delight taken in effects derived from fastidious folding can still be seen in Tudor “linenfold” wood panelling. Until the eighteenth century, tablecloths were screwed into linen presses to keep them sharply folded when not in use. The cloth had to be laid with perfect symmetry on the table; we still like the central crease to lie down the exact middle of the tabletop. But during the nineteenth century folds went so severely out of fashion that careful housewives kept their tablecloths rolled on tubes so that they would lie as smoothly as possible on the table.
However, the glory of linen-folding, beginning apparently in the late sixteenth century, was the napkins. In rich households and on special occasions, these were starched, then folded, bent, and twisted into enormously intricate shapes—“of Fish, Beasts, and Birds, as well as Fruit,” wrote Giles Rose, translating from the French, in 1682, “which is the greatest curiosity in the covering of a Table well.” Napkin-folding was an art and a profession in itself. One day before he was to give a dinner party, Pepys went home “and there found one laying of my napkins against tomorrow, in figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty, and, it seems, is his trade, and he gets much money by it.” At Versailles in the seventeenth century, napkin-folding probably reached its zenith. Serviettes were folded into frogs, fish, boats, herringboned pyramids, chickens with eggs, peacocks, swans, into the Cross of Lorraine if the duke of Lorraine was the guest of honour, and into a score of other shapes. It was a breach of etiquette to demolish these, however; other napkins were provided for mere use.
During the nineteenth century, napkin-folding came to be considered over-ornamental and pretentious, like crooking the little finger when holding a cup. Emily Post, in tune with the bare and functional ideals of the 1920s, pronounces that “very fancy foldings are not in good taste,” and she also disapproves of what had recently been the custom, of folding the napkin simply and hiding the bread roll in it: she says the bread “usually fell on the floor” when the napkin was lifted. Napkins should be folded square and flat, she states, and laid on top of the place plate. Never put the napkin at the side, because it looks as though you are showing off the beauty of your place plate: “it is very much like wearing a ring over a glove.” (We are talking of formal dinners, so there is no question of side plates on the table.)
At the end of dinner, it was an ancient practice—recorded for instance by Athenaeus in the second—third century A.D.—to wipe one’s hands, and later one’s knife and other implements, on bread which one then threw to the dogs. From time immemorial dogs, and often cats, have accompanied humankind at dinner; they are faithfully depicted on ancient Greek vase paintings of dinner parties, in pictures of the Marriage at Cana or of the Last Supper, in paintings of people at banquets in every age. The Greeks kept especially fine “table dogs,” which the host would show off to the guests—and perhaps guests brought their own animals to the party. When there were several dogs present, they were often tied to different couches to prevent them from fighting. The famous sixteenth-century painting in Chantilly of the duc de Berry at dinner shows little dogs actually permitted to amble and root about among the splendid dishes on the table. Medieval etiquette manuals ask children to ignore animals at table, not to “stroke or cat or dog.” The animals got not only “the children’s crumbs,” as the Gentile woman in the New Testament put it, but also all the bones, gristle, and fish heads anyone threw down for them. Ancient Roman dining-room floors often turned this litter into an artistic conceit: they were designed in mosaic to look scattered with refuse, which was skilfully made to appear as three-dimensional and as indistinguishable from the real mess as possible. A floor like this was known as asaroton, “unswept,” in Greek.
But by t
he early nineteenth century throwing food onto the floor was considered quite barbaric, and dogs, which continued to be allowed in the dining room at some family meals and at country mansions, were less and less acceptable at city banquets. Knives, we are told by Branchereau in 1885, should be wiped on the napkin, not on bread: it was important to be very clear that you were neither wasting bread nor accustomed to throwing it to the dogs. Nowadays we still hate seeing an unwiped knife left on the plate after a meal and skilfully manage to get it at least fairly clean, if necessary by surreptitiously scraping it with the edge of our fork, but we would never wipe implements on the napkin.
When we rise at the end of the meal, we leave our napkins loosely rumpled on the table—never on the chair, presumably because it might look as though somebody has gone off with the hidden napkin. But chairs at dinner are, we recall, vibrant with taboo, and a European superstition has it that a guest who leaves his or her napkin on the chair will never come again to dinner at that table. In modern Portugal, it is correct to fold the napkin before leaving the table, but in most countries the unfolded napkin shows that you know your host will wash it, not give it again to someone else, and that you do not think you are to stay on for a second meal. Napkin rings may be provided for family members; it used to be a great honour, as a guest, to be asked to fold your napkin or to be given a napkin ring. Into this you slid your rolled and almost immaculate napkin (your modern manners having all but forbidden you to get it dirty), and it was saved for you, as family napkins are saved, for another meal in that hospitable house.
FINGERS
One of the more spectacular triumphs of human “culture” over “nature” is our own determination when eating to avoid touching food with anything but metal implements. Our self-satisfaction with this marvellous instance of artificiality, however, should not lead us to assume that people who habitually eat with their hands are any less determined than we are to behave “properly”; for they too overlay “animal” instincts with manners, and indulge in both the constraints and the ornamentations which characterize polite behaviour. Forks, like handkerchiefs, look dangerously grubby objects to many people encountering them for the first time. To people who eat with their fingers, hands seem cleaner, warmer, more agile than cutlery. Hands are silent, sensitive to texture and temperature, and graceful—provided, of course, that they have been properly trained.
Washing, as we have already remarked, tends to be ostentatious and frequent among polite eaters with their hands. Ancient Romans, like the modern Japanese, preferred to bath all over before dinner. The etiquette of hand-washing in the Middle Ages was very strict. During the washing ritual, precedence was observed as it was in the seating of diners at the table; the bows, genuflections, and ceremonial flourishes of the ewerers or hand-washers were carefully prescribed. It was often thought disgusting, as it is in India today, to dip one’s hands into the basin of water: a servant had to pour scented water over the hands so that it was used only once. (The modern North American preference for showers over baths is similar.) In modern Egypt, the basin is sometimes provided with a perforated cover so that the dirty water disappears at once from view. Hand-washing rules always insist that one must not splash or swish the water; be careful to leave some dry towel for the person washing next; and above all touch as little as possible between washing and beginning to eat. If an Abbasid (ninth-century Arab) guest scratched his head or stroked his beard after washing, everyone present would wait before beginning to eat, so that he could wash again. An Abbasid, like a modern Egyptian, host would wash first, so that guests need not look as though they were anxious to start the meal; alternatively, washing was done outside, and the meal began directly after the seating, usually when the guest of honour stretched his hand out to take the first morsel.
Desert Arabs go outside the tent, both before and after the meal, to perform ablutions by rubbing their hands with sand; they often prefer to perform this ritual before washing, even when there is plenty of water available. It is thought very rude to perform one’s final washing before everyone else has finished eating; it would be the equivalent of our leaving the table while the meal is in progress. The corollary of this is that people who eat with their hands usually try to finish the meal together, since it is uncomfortable, for one thing, to sit for long when one has finished eating, holding out one greasy hand. Where family eating is done from a shared pot, there are rules about leaving some food over for the children, who eat more slowly than adults do. A great deal of attention, forethought, and control is required in order to finish a meal together, or at a moment agreed on in advance; it is a manoeuvre few of us have been trained to perform.
A monstrously greedy Greco-Roman banqueter is said to have accustomed his hands to grasping hot things by plunging them into hot water at the baths; he also habitually gargled with hot water, to accustom his mouth to high temperatures. He would then bribe the cook to serve the meal straight from the stove, so that he could grab as much food as possible and eat it while it was still hot—before anyone else could touch it. The story reminds us that eating food while it is hot is a habit both culture-specific and modern; a taste for it has developed in us, a taste which is dependent both on technology and on the little brothers of technology, the knife, fork, and spoon. People who eat their food with their hands usually eat it warm rather than steaming, and they grow up preferring it that way. (It is often said that one of the cultural barriers that divide “developed” from “developing” peoples is this matter of preference in the temperature at which food is eaten.) Where hot drinks are served, on the other hand (an example is the Arab coffee-drinking habit at mealtimes), people tend to like them very hot, as a contrast, and because the cups or glasses, together with the saucers under them, protect their hands.
Delicacy and adroitness of gesture are drummed into people who eat with their hands, from childhood. It might be considered polite, for example, to scoop food up, or it could be imperative to grasp each morsel from above. Politeness works by abjuring whole ranges of behaviour which the body could easily encompass—indeed, very often the easier movement is precisely what is out of bounds. It was once the mark of the utmost refinement in our own culture to deny oneself the use of the fourth and fifth fingers when eating: the thumb and first two fingers alone were allowed. Bones—provided they were small ones—could be taken up, but held between thumb and forefinger only. We hear of especially sophisticated people who used certain fingers only for one dish, so that they had other fingers, still unsticky and ungreasy, held in reserve for taking food or sauce from a different platter. This form of constraint was possible only if the food was carefully prepared so that no tugging was necessary: the meat must be extremely tender, cut up, or hashed and pressed into small cakes. None but the rich and those with plenty of servants were likely to manage such delicacy; it followed that only they could be truly “refined.”
Distancing the fourth and fifth fingers from the operation of taking food can be performed by lifting them up, elegantly curled; the constraint has forced them to serve merely as ornament. A hand used in this manner becomes a dramatic expression of the economy of politeness. When a modern tea-drinker is laughed at for holding her cup-handle in three fingers, lifting the two unused digits in the air, we think it is because we find her ridiculously pretentious. What we really mean is that she is conservative to the point that her model of social success is completely out of date, and the constraints and ornaments with which she clothes her behaviour are now inappropriate—which is another way of saying that, although she is trying very hard to be correct, she succeeds merely in being improper. Modern constraints and ornaments are, quite simply, different. We should remember that snobbery has usually delighted in scorning what is passé.
Left hands are very commonly disqualified from touching food at dinner. The Li Chi tells us that ancient Chinese children were trained from infancy never to use their left hands when eating. Ancient Greeks and Romans leaned on their left elbows when reclini
ng at meals, effectively withdrawing their left hands from use. You had to lean on the left elbow even if you were left-handed: if you did not, you ruined the configuration of the party by facing the wrong way. The same problem confronted, even more vitally, an ancient Greek hoplite soldier. He formed part of a phalanx of shields, all of which had to be held on left arms so that they could overlap; fighting was done with swords grasped in the right. A shield on the right arm would have created a gap in the closed phalanx. It must have been very difficult to be left-handed in the ancient world.
Abbasid Arabs used to hold bread in their left hands because this was the part of the meal not shared from a common dish, and even strict modern Middle Eastern manners permit the use of the left for operations such as peeling fruit; the main thing is not to take from a communal dish with the left, and to avoid bringing the left hand to the mouth. The left hand is traditionally discouraged at table because it is the non-sacred hand, reserved for profane and polluting actions from which the right hand abstains. One example of these tasks is washing after excretion. Now it is invariably important for human beings both culturally and for health reasons to understand that food is one thing and excrement another: the fact that they are “the same thing,” that is, different phases of the same process, merely makes it imperative that we should keep the distinction clear, and continually demonstrate to others that we are mindful of it.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 21