Eating together is a potent expression of community. Food is sacred, and must also be pure, clean, and undefiled. It crosses the threshold of the mouth, enters, and either feeds or infects the individual who consumes it: anything presented to us as edible which is perceived as impure in any sense immediately revolts us. Homage is paid to the purity of what we eat, and precaution taken to preserve it, in many different ways: we have already considered washing, white cloths and napkins, dish covers, poison-tastings, prayers, and paper wrappings, and we shall see many more of these. In our culture, lavatories (literally, “wash places”—only euphemisms are permissible for this particular piece of furniture) are kept discreetly closeted, either alone or in a bathroom; a “washroom” or a “toilet” (literally, a “place where there is a towel”) is nearly unthinkable without a door for shutting other people out. The lavatory bowl is covered (sometimes the cover is covered as well), usually white, wastefully waterflushed (people even like to tint this water an emphatically artificial blue), and hedged about with special paper rolls and hand-washings.
Our fascination when we learn that people exist who will not touch food with their left hands is rather interesting. It begins with our conviction that “civilized” people (ourselves, of course) should eat with knives and forks in the first place—that is, try not to handle food at all. We do not like the reason left hands are most often said to be banned among certain “foreigners,” fastening as we do upon one reason when it is only one from a whole category of “profane” actions, because our taboo about washrooms is so strong that we cannot bear to be reminded of excretion—which we are, by the prohibition. In other words, our taboo is even stronger than theirs. Moreover, left hands have in fact an “unclean” connotation in our own culture.
“Right,” after all, means “correct” or “okay” in English. “Sinister” originally meant “left.” In French, a just man is droit, meaning both “right” and “straight,” while gauche (“left”) describes one who lacks social assurance, as well as dexterity and adroitness (both of which literally mean “right-handedness”). We raise right hands to take oaths and extend them to shake hands: left-handed people just have to fall in with this. In fact, left-handed people, like left-handed ancient Greeks, have always been regarded as an awkward, wayward minority, to the point where left-handed children have been forced, against their best interests, to use their right hands rather than their left. When sets of opposites (curved and straight, down and up, dark and light, cold and hot, and so forth) are set out, our own cultural system invariably makes “left” go with down, dark, round, cold—and female. Males are straight, up, light, hot—and right. Our metal eating implements free us from denying the left hand—but most of us are right-handed anyway, and knives (quintessentially “male” weapons, by the way) are held in right hands. And as we shall see, North Americans still prefer not only to cut with the right, but to bring food to their mouths with the right hand as well.
Eating with the help of both hands at once is very often frowned upon. The Bedouin diner is not permitted to gnaw meat from the bone: he must tear it away and into morsels using only the right hand, and not raise the hand from the dish in order to do so. Sometimes right-handed eaters confronted with a large piece of meat, a chicken, for instance, will share the task of pulling it apart, each of two guests using his right hand and exercising deft coordination; no attention should be drawn to this operation by any movement resembling a wrench or a jerk. Even on formal occasions our own manners permit us, occasionally, to use our fingers—when eating asparagus, for example (this is an early twentieth-century dispensation), or radishes, or apricots. But all of these are taken to the mouth with one hand only. We are still advised that corn kernels should be cut off the cobs in the kitchen, or that corn should, better still, be avoided altogether unless the meal is a very intimate affair. One reason why this vegetable has never become quite respectable is that corn cobs demand to be held in two hands. (More important reasons are of course that teeth come too obviously into play when eating them, and cheeks and chins are apt to get greasy.) When we chew, we should also be careful to fill only one cheek—not too full, to be sure. Two hands and two cheeks both signify indecent enthusiasm; cramming either hands or mouth is invariably rude.
People whose custom it is to eat with their hands make a further rule: Never take up and prepare a new morsel while you are still chewing. When left hands are allowed as well as right, it is quite dreadful to be feeding one’s mouth with one hand while the other is groping in the dish for more. (We are far more lax than they on this point: we are permitted to use the knives and forks in our hands, and chew at the same time.) Ned Ward, in O Raree Show, O Pretty Show, or the City Feast, describes the dreadful manners of guests at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, 1704:
Then each tuck’d his Napkin up under his Chin,
That his Holiday-Band might be kept very clean;
And Pin’d up his Sleeves to his Elbows, because
They should not hang down and be Greas’d in the Sauce.
Then all went to work, with such rending and tearing,
Like a Kennel of Hounds on a Quarter of Carri’n.
When done with the Flesh, they claw’d off the Fish,
With one Hand at Mouth, and th’ other in th’ Dish.
Eating with one’s hands is very often done from a common dish. “Rending and tearing,” and hurrying of any kind, become absolutely shocking behaviour, because you look as though you want to take your companions’ share of the food. You might also pay for such precipitousness by hurting yourself: Montaigne ate very quickly, and confessed in his essay “On Experience” that he sometimes bit his tongue and his fingers in his haste.
Teeth, among eaters with their hands, are even less on view than in our meals, partly because the kind of food politely eaten with the hands needs less immediate cutting and chewing than the slabs of steak or roast which we are often served. Hunks of meat are rarely taken up and bitten again and again by polite diners; this is the sort of behaviour which tends to be attributed to those whom people like thinking of as barbarians—Poseidonius reported with a thrill that the frightful Celts “clutch whole joints and bite.” Those eaters with their hands who do consume a lot of roasted or dried meat may lift a manageable piece of it in the left hand, grasp a small bit between their teeth with the mouth closed decorously round it, and cut it off at their lips with a sharp knife, as Owen Lattimore saw it done in High Tartary, and as other travellers among nomad meat-eaters have attested. These travellers—French, German, English, Canadian, or American—love describing this action, precisely because it violates our own taboo against approaching the face with a knife.
In our own culture, knives are never used if we can possibly manage without them: they are sharp and dangerous, too suggestive of violence. A similar attitude obtains among eaters with their hands with regard to biting, and even chewing. Amazon Indians are reported, by T. Whiffen for instance, as finding the sight of biting so offputting that they manually tear their food into tiny pieces before putting it into their mouths. Many African tribes approve of swallowing porridge morsels without any chewing first. Something of the same aversion may be seen in our own dislike for the sight of teeth-marks left in food as yet uneaten: we prefer to break or cut bread into single morsels. People who take their food from a common dish must eat the whole of the piece taken; it is usually considered revolting to return a bitten morsel to the central bowl. (Natural circumstance may always mitigate these points: Farley Mowat describes an Inuit feast at which unfinished pieces of meat were allowed back in the boiling pot to keep them “warm between bites.”)
It is a universal temptation to play with food before eating it. People pick their sandwich cookies open and scrape the filling off with their teeth; they make themselves rules about when and how to prick the yoke of a fried egg; they twirl and squish ice cream on their cones, pushing it down inside with their tongues and then eating the cone from the point up. Elizabeth A
dler, analysing this phenomenon, concludes that we long to separate foods that have been combined in the cooking, and to mix those kept separate. We enjoy triumphantly destroying elaborate but fragile structures and creating new ones of our own; there is also a pleasant need both to challenge and to reward our sense of self-control by saving the best thing on the plate till last. We go so far as to ritualize this sort of behaviour, always playing in the same sequence and with the same rules. We might invariably eat, for example, first all the green vegetables, then all the starches, and finally all the meat. People may seize their food as ammunition for fights, as the seventeenth-century spectators would after a royal banquet, or as children might if they hate what they have been given to eat. Professor G. Nenci has pointed out that tryphe, meaning “luxurious living” in ancient Greek, derives from a verb meaning “to crumble or reduce to fragments”: it almost certainly reflects the manners of the rich, who could bear to take their time when eating, and luxuriate in rolling food into balls or delicately breaking it into morsels of a “refined” size.
People who eat with their hands have far more opportunity for what Adler calls “creative eating” than we have. An Arab hostess of the feasts described by Aida Kanafani customarily stirs in with her hands the last-minute additions to a dish, such as sauces and juices, in front of the guests; this becomes a satisfying and appetizing part of the ritual “delay before eating.” Diners themselves must manipulate their food, often being allowed—indeed, expected—to make artistic selections from what is available. For example, Arabs will create morsels of rice enclosing different fillings, chosen and juxtaposed at the will of the eater: a bit of meat, for instance, a date, a nut, and some rice. The whole is dexterously moulded into a self-sufficient “bite-sized” riceball, which may be different from all the other “creations” put together by the diner in the course of the meal. All this is done with one hand—it is nevertheless very rude among rice-eaters to drop any rice at all while doing it—and diners are conscious of enjoying the feel and temperature of the food before it goes into their mouths. In the creation of such a morsel (the Arabic word for it is a logmah), one must select, pinch, fold, and compress in the hand—but never fiddle, or smear; there should be as little disturbance as possible of the carefully decorative design of the various heaps of food set out in the centre of the group of diners. It is often the done thing to flick the finished ball into the mouth with the thumb. This prevents mouth and hand contact, and is performed with expertise and nonchalance enough to make it a politely ornamental gesture in itself.
Handling food is always tightly controlled by rules of etiquette. One is forbidden to play with food distractedly, or for its own sake. Europeans so often committed this fault before knives and forks became common that seventeenth-century French had a disapproving word for it—gadrouiller or gradouiller. Civilité books of the time say one should not dip one’s bread into the sauce “too deeply,” or the fingers will go in as well; neither should one turn and turn the bread so that it soaks up gravy on all sides. One should dip neatly and chastely, once. Licking fingers is either sternly forbidden or allowed only if certain constraints are applied. B. Meakin tells us for example that in Morocco in 1905, diners were allowed to lick their fingers, but only in this order: fourth (little) finger, second, thumb, third, first. Such a licker proved conclusively that he or she was not neglectfully lapsing from good form.
In our own culture, of course, we use our fingers only in special circumstances, or when the rules are being consciously ignored. Licking fingers is more deliberately relaxed behaviour still—even though we do not use our hands to take from a common dish, and other people do not therefore risk our touching their food with fingers we have licked. The marketers of a well-known brand of fast food, in claiming that the product is “finger-lickin’ good,” stress the informality with which they expect it to be eaten. (Even the “g” has gone from “licking.” Rusticity is especially useful for advertising the most industrialized of foods: “country” people, we feel, are not only more relaxed and more cheerful than us, but must surely eat better than we do.) The advertisers also suggest that their customers will not be able to resist polishing the product off to the last smear.
The Table Boor, Gnathon (“Jaws”), among La Bruyère’s Characters is revolting because he fingers all of the dishes, and not only those directly in front of him. “He paws them over and over again, tearing and dismembering them, so that if the other guests wish to dine they must do so on his leavings”; he spills the gravy over his chin and beard, and dribbles it over the other dishes and the tablecloth as he transports his handful to his mouth: “you can find him by following his track.” Hands and fingers, so much swifter and more adept than knives and forks, must not only be kept under a tight rein, but everyone at table must constantly be reassured that one is exercising this control. And just because handfuls of food have constantly to be carried across the table, codes of manners warn that nothing should be spilled. Three centuries before La Bruyère described his Boor, Chaucer’s Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, was being praised for having manners precisely opposed to his:
At meat her manners were well taught withal;
No morsel from her lips did she let fall
Nor dipped her fingers in the sauce too deep;
But she could carry a morsel up and keep
The smallest drop from falling on her breast.
For courtliness she had a special zest.
And she would wipe her upper lip so clean
That not a trace of grease was to be seen
Upon the cup when she had drunk; to eat
She reached a hand sedately for the meat.
It was our own choice to retreat, eventually, from the touching of food, but the process of giving up hands and taking up forks took many centuries to complete. At familial meals, it was common in Europe until recent times for a central dish of food to be placed in the middle of the table; from it everyone helped themselves. In medieval Hungary, for example, dining tables had holes cut in the middle of them to hold the communal cauldron of meat. Professor Robert Muchembled of Paris says that his own great-grandfather, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was the very first person in his village in Artois to renounce the traditional table with its thick top hollowed out in the middle to hold the food. He decided he would henceforth dine à l’assiette, “at his own place, and from his own plate.” For a long time it was the height of sophistication to cut up our food with a knife and fork; but we would then put these instruments aside and lift the pieces with our fingers.
Sometimes individual foods would demand a retention of the old ways long after knives and forks were used for everything else: this was usually, but not always, for the sake of convenience. Lobsters and crayfish require both hands, as well as a napkin worn bib-style. Erasmus says that salt should be taken with the point of a knife, but “three fingers thrust into the salt-cellar is, by common jest, said to be the sign of the boor.” Yet salt has often been taken from its dish with the fingers in very polite society, largely because at luxurious tables every person, or every couple, is provided with a salt dish; these were not always provided with little spoons. The salt shaker has still a rather new-fangled, vulgarly practical air; it has not yet been quite accepted into the conservative usages ordained for salt on formal occasions. Salt, Anglo-Saxons still feel, should be placed in a little heap on the edge of the plate, to be dipped into with each mouthful. Sprinkling it over the food may be less likely to ruin the taste of the food, but it is not strictly proper. It is even quite correct to revert to the ancient custom of piling salt on the tablecloth by one’s plate at formal dinners—but, Emily Post warned in 1937, dipping celery or radishes into this pile “is never permitted.”
Potatoes in their jackets, boiled or baked, were properly eaten at the turn of this century by being broken open in the hands, peeled, and cut (never mashed!), then lifted to the mouth with the fingers. We immediately note that they cannot have been preferred ve
ry hot, and that they were being treated as though they were bread. A more modern fashion, since our taste demands that a baked potato should be served hot, is to eat it out of its skin with a fork. It is still thought proper in some circles to break it open with the fingers in spite of the heat. It must not be attacked with a knife; any butter which is applied must be put on with the fork. Mashing, a whole new possibility which came in with the fork, has never been formally accepted at the dining table. It is both too destructive and too creative—too much like chewing done on the open plate; we shall look at the problematics of chewing later. Mashing leads to what Branchereau calls “mixtures unsuitable and contrary to good form.” It should take place in the kitchen, firmly out of sight.
CHOPSTICKS
The ultimately restricted—and therefore it may be thought the ultimately delicate—manner of eating with one’s hands is to use the thumb and two fingers of the right hand, only the tips of these ideally being allowed to touch the food. This gesture, refined even more by artificially elongating the fingers and further reducing their number, is of course the origin of chopsticks. Once people become accustomed to fingers remaining clean throughout the meal, napkins used for serious cleansing seem not only redundant but downright nasty. Father João Rodrigues observed in the seventeenth century that the Japanese were “much amazed at our eating with the hands and wiping them on napkins, which then remain covered with food stains, and this causes them both nausea and disgust.” Napkins laid on knees are still an “ethnic,” Western affectation in China and Japan. There is, however, a tradition of supplying diners several times during the meal with small rough towels wrung out in boiling water, for hand- and face-wiping.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 22