Chopsticks seem to have evolved in the East specifically for use with rice: the staple grain in China was originally millet, which the Li Chi insists must be eaten with a spoon, not with chopsticks like rice. Chinese rice is not loose and dry like that chosen by Indians, Arabs, and Africans, who prefer eating it with their hands, but sticky and slightly moist even without sauce; it is easily handled with chopsticks. The earliest word for chopsticks seems to have been zi, related to the root meaning, “help.” This is pronounced, however, like the word for “stop,” or “becalm” used of boats. Chinese boatmen are said to have renamed them kuaì-zi,” which sounds like “fast fellows,” because Chinese think of chopsticks as swift and agile, the very opposite of halting and being becalmed. This is now their Chinese name; “chopsticks” is of course a Western barbarism. In Japanese, chopsticks are called hashi, “bridge,” because they effect the transition from bowl to mouth.
Chopsticks are thought of as fast, then, and helpful. Meals in China often surprise visitors by the speed with which they are eaten; chopsticks enable the Chinese and Japanese to eat food which is sizzling hot, but because it is often served in small pieces it gets cold if people dawdle. Chopstick-users remain more likely than we are to use their hands as aids in eating—but it is not at all advisable to get them greasy: chopsticks, and especially the lacquered chopsticks common in Japan and Korea, are extremely difficult to manage with slippery fingers. Porcelain spoons are used for soups and the more liquid dishes; children are allowed to use spoons for everything until they are about three or four years old, when chopstick training begins.
Chinese tables are round or square rather than oval or oblong: diners sit equidistant from the dishes of cài (meat, fish, and vegetables), all set out in one “course,” in the middle. Each diner gets a small bowl for fan, literally, “food,” meaning rice. The rice is the substance of the meal; the cài is merely relish, unless the occasion is a banquet. The host, or the mother, doles out the rice into the bowls. Each guest must take the filled bowl in two hands: receiving in one hand shows disrespectful indifference. You never eat cài before being served rice, because that looks as though you are so greedy and selfish that you would be prepared to eat nothing but meat and vegetables, which are the expensive part of the meal, centrally placed in order to be shared with others.
When the host gives the sign, you may begin to take cài with your chopsticks. The gestures used by Chinese, Japanese, and others to do this are fascinating for Westerners. They look accomplished, delicate, precise, and gentle—much more polished than our own behaviour at meals. Roland Barthes in The Empire of Signs speaks eulogies on the Japanese manipulation of chopsticks: “there is something maternal, the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child … the instrument never pierces, cuts, or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts. For the chopsticks … in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting and piercing, in the manner of our implements; they never violate the foodstuff; either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels) thereby rediscovering the natural fissures of the substance.”
A Westerner feels like a brute butcher before this Oriental delicacy. Barthes says that we are “armed with pikes and knives” like predators rather than gentle mothers, our food “a prey to which one does violence.” B. Y. Chao tells us that the Chinese are aware in themselves of a sequence of commands: “Await, avoid, attack!” You must pause, think of others, consider which piece you want, then zero in on it. You may have to stretch across the path of another’s chopsticks—though Chinese, too, try to restrict themselves to taking from the side of the dish more or less facing them; fellow diners cooperate with each other and are not greatly offended by another’s “attack.” You should never look too intent on obtaining a particular morsel, however. Chinese children are taught that “the best mannered person does not allow co-diners to be aware of what his or her favorite dishes are by his or her eating pattern.”
It is politer to transfer food first to your rice bowl, and eat it from there, than to take it directly from the cài dish to your mouth. Chopsticks must never be licked or bitten. Japanese bad manners include neburi-bashi: licking chopsticks with the tongue; mogi-kui: using your mouth to remove rice sticking to your chopsticks; komi-bashi: forcing several things into your mouth with your chopsticks; utsuri-bashi: one must not break the rule that a mouthful of rice is to be taken between every two bites of meat, fish, or vegetables; saguri-bashi: searching with chopsticks to see if anything you want remains in the dish; hashi-namari: hesitation whether to take one thing rather than another; and sora-bashi: putting back with the chopsticks food you intended to eat.
Mannerly diners with chopsticks never “fish about” for morsels; they must take the bit they touch first. This means that one begins by eyeing one’s target carefully: if you prod it, you must take and eat it. Using chopsticks need in no way mean that people eat food touched by implements which have been in other people’s mouths. Yet a very Western distaste for even the thought of touching the food of all with the utensils of each has spread. In 1984, Hu Yaobang, the former Communist Party Secretary, criticized the traditional Chinese way of eating and urged change on sanitary grounds. A good deal of such concern must in fact be a desire to participate in Western prestige as being somehow more ineffably “modern.” The admiration of people like Roland Barthes for superior Oriental wisdom seems to be less satisfying than the allure of technological hygiene and “modern” metal instruments. A compromise with “modernity” is the Japanese pre-wrapped, disposable set of wooden chopsticks. But unfortunately there is an ecological price to pay for this, as hundreds of millions of trees are chopped down every year to supply throwaway chopstick wood—in 1987, 20 billion chopsticks were used and discarded in Japan alone.
It has never been acceptable to return bitten morsels of meat, vegetables, or fish to the common dish; but because the bowl of rice is “private territory,” a piece of meat or vegetable may be held in chopsticks and bitten, and the rest put down on the rice in the bowl, to be finished later. One must never, in Japan, stick the chopsticks upright in the rice. This is done only when offerings are made by Buddhist mourners for their dead: standing chopsticks are rather like our own taboos about an empty chair at table.
With perfect propriety one lifts the small china bowl in the left hand and sweeps the contents into the mouth with precise, busy movements of the two sticks together, held in the right. Barthes’s delicate gestures suddenly become swift and purely efficient; the bowl held under the chopsticks is moved dexterously about so as to prevent food spills. We ourselves are surprised to see this done because we are never allowed to lift dishes containing solid food—and we count soup, unless it is in a cup, as “solid food”—to our lips; we gave up doing this when we agreed that formal politeness involves using our cutlery. The Chinese may be thought of as treating the little bowl like a cross between a teacup and a large spoon, with the chopsticks as “helpers.” Table manners always impose difficult restraints: “If you rattle your chopsticks against the bowl,” says a Chinese proverb, “you and your descendants will always be poor.” Whatever happens, however, at an ordinary meal every single grain of rice in one’s bowl must be eaten before dinner is over. Leaving rice is disgusting behaviour, because it shows a lack of knowledge of one’s own appetite in the first place, together with greed for meat and vegetables, and no respect for rice—its culture, its history, and the hard work that has been involved in getting it to the table.
Rice is never to be gripped, lifted, and eaten grain by grain, as Western novices in the art of chopstick-handling find themselves doing with so much frustration and so many complaints. “Picking” at one’s food is very rude, in fact, for Oriental manners, more than our own, demand demonstrations of delight and pleasure in eating, and inept fiddling with one’s chopsticks is apt to be interpreted not merely as a want of competence but as a depressing unwillingness as w
ell. The problem that Westerners experience is often the result of attempts to eat rice with chopsticks from flat plates: the small bowl raised towards the face is far easier to manage with the proper zest. Chinese themselves, given food on a flat plate, prefer to use a porcelain spoon (to stand in for its sister, the bowl). This spoon, like a bowl, has a flat bottom, so that it can be laid down without spilling the contents.
The kind of food we ourselves eat, together with the way we cook and serve it, predisposes us to use knives, forks, and spoons, and our idea of what constitutes a “place setting” also influences our food choices. Oriental food is cut up in the kitchen so that it can be eaten with chopsticks—but also, as Barthes points out, chopsticks came into being because each mouthful is regarded as comestible partly because it is small; being confronted with a large slab of meat on a dish can be a disgusting experience for people from rice-and-chopstick cultures. In addition, rice-growing is a land use which reduces the amount of fuel available, so that meat and vegetables must usually be cooked quickly to save wood. Cutting them up small facilitates stir-frying and other quick-cooking methods.
KNIVES, FORKS, SPOONS
The Chinese knife is a cleaver, useful, so the Andersons tell us, for “splitting firewood, gutting and scaling fish, slicing vegetables, mincing meat, crushing garlic (with the dull side of the blade), cutting one’s nails, sharpening pencils, whittling new chopsticks, killing pigs, shaving (it is kept sharp enough, or supposedly is), and settling old and new scores with one’s enemies.” Keeping this all-purpose tool apart from the dining table shows a resolute preference, in the table manners of the societies which use chopsticks, for polite restraint.
Men in the West used always to carry knives about with them, finding them indispensable for hundreds of purposes—including that of slicing food at the table. St. Benedict’s Rule (sixth century) requires monks to go to bed dressed and ready to rise the next morning, but advises them to detach their knives from their belts in case they cut themselves during the night. In the Middle Ages only the nobility had special food knives, which they took with them when travelling: hosts were not usually expected to provide cutlery for dinner guests. To this day in parts of France, men carry with them their own personal folding knives, which they take out of their pockets and use for preference at intimate gatherings for dinner. Small boys love being given folding penknives with many attachments; these are the descendants of this ancient male perquisite.
Women must also have owned knives, but they have almost invariably been discouraged from being seen using them. Swords and knives are phallic and masculine. In ancient Greece, when women committed suicide, people hoped they would politely refrain from using knives and opt for poison or the noose instead. At many medieval dinner tables men and women ate in couples from a bowl shared between them, and when they did, men were expected courteously to serve their female partners, cutting portions of meat for them with their knives.
Prevention of the violence which could so easily break out at table is, as we have seen, one of the principal aims of table manners. In the West, where knives have not been banished, we are especially sensitive and vigilant about the use of these potential weapons. “When in doubt, do not use your knife” is a good all-purpose rule. We must cut steaks and slices of roast with knives, but the edge of a fork will do for an omelette, or for boiled potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables, especially if no meat is being served with them. If a knife is needed, in a right-handed person it will be occupying the right hand. The American way is to put the knife down when it has done its work, and take up the fork in the right hand; the fork is now available for breaking vegetables as well as lifting what has been cut. Europeans hold on to the knife and have to cut vegetables with it, since the fork is kept in the less capable hand.
Fish may be gently slit down the side facing upwards and separated into portions with the help of a knife, and a knife-blade held flat is useful for lifting fish bones; but everything has been done to by-pass knives, because they are not necessary for cutting, at the fish course. Cooked fish must not be cut into fillets, for instance, but lifted from the bones bit by bit. Being gentle with fish had its aesthetic aspect. “In helping fish,” pleads a cookbook in 1807, “take care not to break the flakes, which in cod and salmon are large and contribute much to the beauty of its appearance.”
Before the invention of stainless steel in the 1920s, the taste of blade metal was often said to ruin the flavour of fish, especially if it was seasoned with lemon. (Fruit-knives were made of silver because of the acid in fruit.) Special fish-knives were invented in the nineteenth century: they were silver or silver plate, ostentatiously unsharpened, and given a whimsical shape to show that they were knives whose only business was gently deboning and dividing cooked fish. Before fish-knives, fish was eaten with a fork in the right hand and a piece of bread, as a pusher, held in the left. Two forks were used to serve it, and sometimes to eat it as well. Eating fish with forks long remained the choice of the aristocracy: silver fish-knives and their matching forks were middle-class, a parvenue invention. Laying one’s table with them was a sign that one had bought the family silver, instead of inheriting it and the ancient ways that it was made to serve. Fish-knives have often been frowned on during this century, being thought quaintly decorative, too specialized, or over-refined; they are said to be reasserting themselves on middle-class tables.
The French insist that salad should never be cut with a knife: it must be torn in pieces by hand before it goes into the salad bowl, and then, after dressing, eaten with a fork. The rule probably arose from the taste and stain of metal from a steel knife, an especial danger for French lettuce because it was always dressed with oil and vinegar or lemon. The British and Americans, who used far less “French dressing,” have always found this French fashion effete. We ought to be given a silver knife to eat lettuce (since we cannot count on salad being torn into little pieces in advance), says Emily Post, but if not we should simply go ahead and cut each leaf into “postage-stamp samples.” We should not be misled, she adds, by falsely French manners into eating large lettuce leaves with a fork, “wrapping springy leaves around the tines in a spiral. Remember what a spring that lets go can do!”
Lettuce is not cut in France partly because lettuce leaves are supposed to be too tender to need cutting; in the same way, the French—overturning Erasmus’s advice in his famous book on the manners of boys—are shocked by knives being used on bread at table. The change to breaking rather than cutting bread, among the eighteenth-century French aristocracy, seems to have been part of the move towards an elegant simplicity in manners as the new hallmark of good taste. French bread is not usually sliced for buttering or for toasting; Anglo-Saxon methods of eating bread often require knives for spreading as well as cutting, and also the provision of butter plates. Pain de campagne, the large, solid, round country loaf of France, is correctly cut in pieces: a man may whip out his pocket knife, grip the loaf under his arm, and carve out a slice. He must cut from the outer edge and towards his own body, so that no one else is endangered by his exploit. “Viennese” baguettes, on the other hand, are soft white table bread; they are sliced, but away from the table, and served in a bread-basket. The refusal to cut them at table is a statement about the kind of bread it is, and a distinction that is being made between it and pain de campagne. In Germany, it is rude to cut potatoes with a knife, or pancakes, or dumplings; it looks as though you think they might be tough, and also these starchy foods are thought of as almost like bread. In Italy, it is never “done” to cut spaghetti.
Ever since the sixteenth century there has been a taboo against pointing a knife at our faces. It is rude, of course, to point at anybody with a knife or a fork, or even a spoon; it is also very bad form to hold knife and fork in the fists so that they stand upright. But pointing a knife at ourselves is viewed with special horror, as Norbert Elias has observed. I think that one reason for this is that we have learned only very recently not to use our knives f
or placing food in our mouths: we are still learning, and we therefore reinforce our decision by means of a taboo. We think we hate seeing people placing themselves in even the slightest jeopardy, but actually we fervently hope they will not spoil the new rule and let us all down by taking to eating with their knives again.
For the fact is that people have commonly eaten food impaled on the points of their knives, or carried it to their mouths balanced on blades; the fork is in this respect merely a variant of the knife. With the coming of forks, knife-points became far less useful than they had been; their potential danger soon began in consequence to seem positively barbaric. The first steps in the subduing of the dinner knife were taken when the two cutting edges of the dagger-like knife were reduced to one. The blunt side became an upper edge, which is not threatening to fingers when they are holding knives in the polite manner. According to Tallement des Réaux, Richelieu was so appalled by the sight of Chancellor Séguier picking his teeth with a knife, that he ordered all the knife-blades in his establishment to have their points ground down into innocuously rounded ends. It later became illegal in France for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining-room table, but as “steak” knives, which have a special image, linked deliberately with red meat and “getting down to business” when hungry. They are still quite rustic in connotation.
Cheese, which can be a very hard substance indeed, has usually required a knife to cut it, and as long as knives were pointed, hard cheese was spiked and moved to one’s plate or bread slice, or passed on the knife-point to a neighbour. So obvious and natural was this action that the Victorians found it necessary, despite the acceptance of the rounded knife-blade, to invent a special cheese-knife. It has a blade, but more than one point, like a fork; the points for impaling the cheese, however, are turned to one side, thus ingeniously preserving the blunted tip of the knife. People had repeatedly to be reminded by etiquette manuals in the late nineteenth century only to transport the cheese with this knife or any other, and not to eat it from the point: “When eating cheese, small morsels should be placed with the knife on small morsels of bread, and the two conveyed to the mouth with the thumb and finger, the piece of bread being the morsel to hold. Cheese should not be eaten off the point of the knife.” The morsels of bread were to protect the fingers from touching smelly cheese. In France, cheese must always be handed with a knife, exceptions being made only for Gruyère and Cheddar, which may be lifted, after cutting with a knife, by piercing on forks. French children are carefully taught never to serve themselves by cutting off the point of a triangle of cheese: in something like a Camembert or Roquefort this would be to take the delicious centre for yourself, under the noses of the furious other guests. Triangles of cheese must be cut like cake, in slices which include a substantial amount of edge, and taper to the middle.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 23