The formal dinner parties we have been considering cost a great deal of money, and were not expected to be everyday occasions, even for the rich. The formal dinners held today continue to be ceremonious expressions of various kinds of consensus and relationship. The food at a large banquet may struggle against being a mere pretext through its copiousness, complexity, and magnificence. A “buffet” meal foregoes table, immobility, and precedence, but partly compensates for loss of formal éclat by means of the display of food; it is a return to some of the principles of dinner à la française. But ceremonial intensity need not be commensurate with the quantity of food consumed: it is possible for a meal to consist of very little, as for example in the Eucharist or in the Japanese Tea Ceremony or Cha No Yu, where the simplest elements bear all the ceremony of a huge banquet.
The recent fashion for nouvelle cuisine is a social expression of the modern ideal that successful people ought to contrive to be not only very rich but also very thin. Food is not mounted in an extravagant and copious display, to be divided among the guests; modern individualists receive individual plates, each already bearing its exquisite and exotic, though meagre, portion. This might consist, for example, of a scattering of colourful shreds of vegetables and flowers. Or there may be three slices of duck breast lying on a sheet of concentrated but unthickened sauce; this sauce may be streaked or dotted with sauce of a different shade, ton sur ton. Sauces go under, not over, the food, lending it background and visual enhancement rather than comfortably cloaking it; the sophisticated skimpiness, expensive simplicity, and image-consciousness of nouvelle cuisine remind us of the fashionable clothes designed for its consumers. Japanese restraint and refinement of taste are suggested by layout, conscious juxtapositions, and the attention to colour, shape, and texture. Restaurants love nouvelle cuisine because anyone tempted to pander to an appetite must order several artistic creations in order to make up a meal.
The ancient three-fold pattern of the formal European dinner, even the dinner à la française—overture, climax, sweet final flourish—provides the structure for much simpler, and more simply filling, family meals: soup, meat and two veg (notice the threefold principle in microcosm for this central course), and dessert. Tea and a biscuit do not constitute a proper meal; nor would a series of sweet dishes, or nothing but greens. Soup is a meal, but only if it is thick enough, and accompanied, say, by bread and cheese. Breakfast often fails to be considered a meal. The French are amazed by the British breakfast because—unlike the “Continental” repast consisting of coffee and a roll—a traditional British breakfast is a real meal, with cereal and milk or grapefruit in the place of soup or hors d’oeuvres, then eggs and bacon, and finally toast and jam (for dessert). For many people a meal is not really a meal unless it features something hot. And leaving out meat changes the entire structure of the proceedings. Vegetarian dishes cost less, are shared more easily, and can be cooked more quickly, in spite of the peeling and chopping, than meat. But they generally force us (to whom vegetarianism is not traditional) to use considerable imagination and effort to keep everyone happy, and convinced that they are eating a meal.
An airline dinner is a useful device to keep passengers pinned to their places and occupied for an appreciable length of time. People hurtling through the air in a metal tube, both uneasily aware of what could go wrong and stupefied with boredom, are deemed to require solace. Eating is comfort—provided that nothing untoward or unexpected occurs during dinner. In the early days of air travel, until the early thirties, travellers ate at tables set out in the plane, as in a restaurant. There were wine bottles, flowers, cloths on the tables, and male stewards (then called couriers) in white jackets, serving the meals. The shuddering and dipping of the aircraft caused spills, and the noise was so infernal that conversation had often to be carried on by means of written notes—but still things were done “properly,” which is to say as far as possible as they were done on earth.
The first passenger aircraft in service after World War II fitted people into planes as though they were in a bus: airline management had realized that the future lay in cutting corners, increasing the numbers on board, and relying on the prestige of technology to make up for any loss in luxury. The gamble paid off. The new air travellers packed themselves into small spaces with a sense of fun, awe, and excitement. At first, seats were reversible so that passengers could turn them round and sit facing each other for meals; soon even that kind of encouragement to companionship was denied. But a three-course dinner with a hot meat component is still provided for everybody (except those who exempt themselves on health or vegetarian grounds), whether they are ready to eat or not, on the fold-out flap which anchors us to our places while dinner is served.
No effort is spared to impress upon us that we might be cramped and uncomfortable, but we are certainly experiencing a technological miracle. A tray is usually the receptacle for dinner, with pre-moulded compartments or fitted containers keeping every course separate. The separateness is spatial, not sequential: an airline meal is one course of a tiny dinner à la française. There will be cellophane coverings and plastic lids (we are hygienic, we are safe) and cutlery, pepper, salt, and paper napkin in a neat bundle. Until air travel became entirely banal, people used to save their little plastic knives, their mustard packets, and swizzle-sticks stamped with airplane motifs, as souvenirs; they were familiar objects, but small and sufficiently odd-looking to remind us of those strange meals aloft, and to prove to others that we had been there. The knife, for instance, often has an almost triangular blade: its bizarre shape looks convincingly modern, but it is actually designed so that we can eat with elbows so tightly compressed to our sides that the blade must descend almost vertically upon the meat. Nobody with any sense would eat the hors d’oeuvres of an airplane meal first. They are almost always cold, and the heated meat and two vegetables will cool off in a matter of minutes. We therefore attack the main course first, then rip open the hors d’oeuvres, toy with the stiff lettuce (most of us leave this “entremets” uneaten), then attempt the block of cake.
For the higher price of their tickets, first class and “business” class passengers get better food as well as wider seats. In their anxiety to please their richer customers, and to mark as clearly as possible the difference between them and the mere “economy” or “coach” class, airlines spend as much as four times the amount on meals for the well-heeled in their curtained-off enclosure up front as for those in more straitened circumstances behind. In North America food service is becoming an important selling point on aircraft, now that the few airline companies which are left have agreed among themselves to refrain from the turbulence that used to be caused by competitive fare cuts. So more imagination is being tried when compiling menus, china and metal cutlery are increasingly supplied, and meals, especially in the upper class, may even be served in courses (à la russe).
The “companions” close to our sides (we face other people’s backs) are likely to be strangers. Meals are provided in strict accustomed sequence: breakfast, lunch, dinner, with “proper” tea-breaks and drinks, in spite of time changes, and regardless of the fact that eating events may take place with very short periods of sedentary time between them. An airline meal is not large: who would expect a large meal in our cabined and confined state? But it is invariably complete, and as complex as possible. It tries to carry all the connotations of a shared, comforting, “proper” dinner. It is supposed to supply a nostalgic link with the cultural presuppositions with which flying conflicts, such as warm kitchens, stable conditions, and the products of the earth. Manners, here, impose passivity and constraint; ornamentation is taken care of by the oddity of our being served dinner at all in such circumstances. There is no question of argument, and only very limited choice. Airline passengers are extraordinarily docile and uncomplaining. They give up space and ceremony, believing that this is only fair since they are gaining time and ought to be grateful for safety.
The three-part meal turns
up again in another “food event,” the time-saving hamburger. Here we have a meal wherein all references to companionship have been firmly deleted. Circles are symbols of completeness and self-sufficiency. The traditional European plate is round: diners at table are separated from one another, marked off by the cutlery, and expected not to trespass upon others’ places. Circular hand-held hamburgers make the most individual and unshared of meals; table, tablecloth, conversation, and cutlery are all unnecessary. Utterly round buns (giant hamburger industries destroy every imperfectly circular bun) enclose disks of ground meat, every one of them exactly alike in weight, consistency, and colour. Subordinate to bread and meat, but colourful, glistening, and frilly, are the tomato slices and lettuce leaves. Trimmings may be chopped onions, ketchup, pickles, or mustard; a slice of processed cheese can supply an extra course.
Every burger is as self-contained, as streamlined and as replete as a flying saucer, and just as unmistakably a child of the modern imagination. Yet its substance is no more novel than hot meat and two veg, with sauce, condiments, and bread; and the roundness is not only self-sufficient but also old-fashioned, plump, and comforting. The middle section of the traditional three-course meal is piled up, each part clearly identifiable and contrasted with each, the whole symmetrically bracketed with bread. Our teeth bite down through the lot, as we skilfully hold it all together with fingers which must simultaneously contrive not to get bitten or to let parts slide out from the whole. The formality of hamburgers lies in their relentlessly predictable shape, and in the superimposed and separate layers of food which make sophisticated references to parts of the sequential model for a formal meal. Hamburgers are ready very fast (we do not see, and therefore discount, all the work which this speed and availability presuppose), and they take only a few minutes to eat: informality in this case cuts away time and clearly signals a disinclination to share.
The native Cantonese institution of sihk puhn uses informality to achieve something very different. A sihk puhn (literally, “eat pot”) takes the sequence of nine courses which make up a formal Chinese banquet and collapses them all into one mass of food. (The English word “mess” originally designated a portion of food or a course; then it came to mean a portion shared among two, three, or four people; then a number of people eating together; and finally—perhaps because of a set of ideas similar to that expressed by sihk puhn—it signifies structure destroyed.)
Into a large wooden basin go bits of fat back pork, white turnips, chicken, dried beancurd skin, fish balls, dried pork skin, dried fish, fresh fish, and dried squid. Each ingredient is fried separately in peanut oil, and all are mixed together at the last moment—rather as a hamburger is assembled before the customer’s eyes. A sauce is made of chopped green onions, sugar, black peppercorns, dried cassia bark, cloves, fennel, star anise, rice wine, fermented soy beans, fermented beancurd paste, garlic, and water; this is poured over all. Sihk puhn is consumed at a great concourse of people, and each bowl is shared among about eight of them. Every person takes a pair of chopsticks and an individual portion of rice. A party might sit at a table or squat on the ground; the first to come are the first served. People root about in the bowl with their chopsticks for bits of food; they eat at their own pace, and leave whenever they feel like it. There are no hosts for the groups (and we have seen how important the leadership of the host is to the conduct of a formal Chinese meal), there are no speeches, very little talking, no toasts, no precedence or places of honour, no dressing up, no head table, no waiters.
The point about a sihk puhn is that it is most emphatically not formal; and this expresses the intention of everybody at the feast to practise equality. As a local rice merchant told the anthropologist James Watson, “It shows that we all trust each other.” Factory workers, bank managers, and farmers sit or squat side by side; the destruction of sequence is symbolic of the (temporary) collapse of distinction among the people present. Sihk puhn banquets are used to legitimize social transitions, such as marriages, the birth of male children, the “coming to personhood” of all babies thirty days after birth, and the adoption of male heirs.
While hamburgers demonstrate an agreement to be separate, sihk puhn signifies cohesion and trust. In both cases, equality is expressed not only through informality but also through careful attention to the principle of simultaneity, in one case through the careful stacking of the ingredients, and in the other through the wanton mixing of them. Hierarchy, both in America and in the Canton Delta, is expressed by formality, and therefore informality breaks down rank. And where formality takes time, its relaxation requires speed.
HELPINGS
We no longer eat from a common dish, but are each served, or each take, a portion on a plate. Seated upright on our separate chairs, we keep elbows in and hands off anybody else’s dish. It was once a friendly gesture to give fellow diners choice morsels from our plates or from serving dishes set near us on the table, or for the host to express esteem for particular guests by passing them special delicacies. It is now permissible only where there is considerable intimacy for fellow diners to give each other “tastes” from their plates. Correct behaviour guarantees the absolute sovereignty of every diner over his or her domain: the individual plate in its designated “place,” an area of the table safely bordered by its metal implements and impermeable to incursions from without, except for supplies and replenishments of food as permission for these is given.
The “place,” at formal dinners still, is never permitted to stand empty. On entering the dining room, and nowadays on entering many an expensive restaurant, the prospective diner finds a “place plate,” and upon it a napkin, filling the area of the “place.” (If there is no place plate, a compromise may be made by having the napkin alone fill this space.) A place plate is often elaborate: it never has to submit to scraping and scrubbing, for it is never used for actual eating. It has no function but to ensure that the designated area does not lie empty; it will be removed when food is brought in. As each succeeding course is finished and the dishes are taken away, a clean place plate should always fill every place until the next course arrives—“A plate with food on it can never be exchanged for a plate that has had food on it; a clean one must come between.” It is as though these patches of bare tablecloth cry out to be filled, like guests who must not be left unsatisfied lest they become “demanding” and a source of future trouble.
A place is not a place at a formal dinner without its plate. Formal etiquette is said to require that, when a very correct diner eats alone, four places should be laid, one at each of the table’s four sides, and four even at a round table. Emily Post’s 1928 edition shows a picture of such a table laid for the lady of the house lunching alone. The objects customarily found on the dining-room table at meals, such as places laid for other people, or side plates even when no bread and butter is being served, are often necessary to a diner’s sense of well-being. An extreme example of this principle was the decision of the Igbo of Nigeria in the nineteenth century, made in a time of famine so serious that no coco-yam fufuu was available, and the people had to content themselves with soup. At the left-hand side of each diner, where comforting balls of fufuu would have been heaped up when people could eat their fill, a pile of stones was placed instead, and the soup was eaten with spoons since there was no food to dip into the bowl. In 1922, Emily Post suggested to Americans that hosts who could not provide wine set out at least two wineglasses and “pour something pinkish or yellowish into them” so that appearances at least would live up to expectations.
In fourteenth-century Europe, there were no “covers” or place settings as we now know them, set out at banquets for every diner. The “cover,” as we have seen, referred only to the king’s or the lord’s food and utensils, which were covered with cloth to prevent tampering en route from the kitchen. Goblets for drinking did not stand on the table: wine was something you specifically asked to be served. Utensils were extremely simple—knives usually brought with them by the gue
sts, and spoons, also occasionally the personal property of the diners, or shared with one or more companions. Soups and stews with their liquid sauces were served in bowls, one for every two diners; male and female couples shared, the men bringing out their knives to cut their partners’ meat for them. The size of a banquet was estimated by counting these bowls, or écuelles: a thirty-écuelle meal, for instance, was a banquet for sixty. In England, two or four people would commonly share a “mess” or portion.
There were platters or “chargers” of food from which to choose what to eat, and before each diner his or her own trencher, of whole wheat bread about four days old; it was cut from a boule (a “ball” of bread; hence the French word boulanger for a baker) with a wide-bladed knife called a tranchoir or “slicer.” Fresher, softer bread was also provided to accompany the meal. The trencher slices—often coloured a festive yellow with saffron, green with parsley or spinach, or pink with sandalwood—were trimmed into squares or rectangles roughly six inches across, and used by the diners as bases on which to place fairly solid pieces of food such as slices of meat cut from the roast. (A relic of this custom remains in the rounds of toasted bread upon which we serve certain kinds of meat, such as tournedos steak or game.) Thick sauces, into which pieces of meat could be dipped, were also placed on the trenchers, which might be changed several times during a meal. Lordly diners’ left-overs, together with their trenchers soaked in meat juices, were commonly given to the poor after a banquet. Alternatively one could, as we have seen, wipe one’s hands on the bread and throw it to the dogs. Bread could be used not only as a spoon and a plate, but as a napkin as well: waiters at table often used bread to protect their hands from hot dishes, though they were advised not to make the device too obvious. Firm trencher-bread was also hollowed out to make simple salt cellars or candle-holders.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 26