In Vergil’s Aeneid, the hero receives a terrifying prophecy both from his father and from a harpy: that his company of refugees would not find a home until they had reached the point where they would “gnaw and devour their own tables” out of sheer hunger. One day years later Aeneas and his men realize with enormous relief that they have just fulfilled the prophecy: after eating what modern people would call a picnic on the banks of the Tiber, the company proceeded to finish off the bread upon which they had set out the meal. Having “eaten their tables,” the founders of the future Roman Empire knew they had reached their fated goal.
Many modern societies still eat their meals off bread, baked broad and flat like large pancakes. Just as the Chinese believe that a meal should consist mostly of their starchy staple, rice, and expect it to be eaten to the last grain, so people who eat off bread “tables” often make it a point of etiquette to eat plenty of the bread. Traditional Rwala Bedouin make each diner eat a pathway through the bread, starting from a point near him on the edge of the food tray, and heading towards the central mound of meat and vegetables. The bread is torn swiftly and silently into bits, squeezed into pellets, and swallowed without chewing. When the eater finally reaches the meat he may not grab or even choose a piece, but must work his way under the heap and take whatever falls into the gap he has torn in the bread.
Medieval bread trenchers were sometimes placed on top of wood and pewter bases; these gradually in the course of the sixteenth century came to replace the bread. The extravagant dukes of Burgundy boasted trenchers made of silver-gilt. With individual knives and forks came hard dishes for everybody at the table; for ordinary people in England this could mean a square wooden plaque (the same shape as most bread trenchers, but larger), which might be hollowed out to hold food both solid and liquid, and fitted with a small separate hollow for the salt. Sometimes a wooden trencher could serve for two courses: you cleaned one side of it thoroughly, and turned it over to be used again. During the seventeenth century—a century earlier in Italy—trenchers became circular, which is now the traditional European shape for plates.
Spoons for everyone meant no more lifting of soup bowls to drink their contents. You ate your soup, even though soups had become far more liquid than they had formerly been—and “eating” now meant using a spoon. Our words “soup” and “supper” both come from “sop,” the soaked bread that so often used to fill out the broth in its bowl; “soppy” people are as squishy as this bread. The bread left the soup as courses at banquets multiplied. Soup at a formal meal had never been a dinner in itself, as it most often was at simple and informal tables; and now it became merely a liquid overture to a banquet. It remained a fortifying “food,” however.
A French etiquette manual of 1782 enumerates serviette, plate, knife, spoon, fork, and goblet for every guest, and warns that “it would be utterly gross-mannered [against honnêteté] to do without any one of these.” The “cover” had been standardized, and the move towards the diversification of implements was already under way. It coincided with the specialization of the rooms in the European house, and with the proliferation of furniture with specific uses: different tables for dining, writing, kitchen, drawing room, cards, by the bedside, for tea, and so on; chairs made especially for the living room, dining room, kitchen, parlour; rocking chairs, couches, love-seats, and chaises-longues. By the mid-nineteenth century, the dining-room table set for a formal banquet was laden with floral arrangements, centre-pieces, and ornaments (epergnes, plateaux, silver and silver-gilt trees and animals, “compotiers” or large glass footed bowls), candelabra, glasses, serving dishes, and plates. All were laid out in an orderly fashion which still left defining areas of clear white tablecloth. The table bristled with cutlery. There were knives and forks made especially for cheese, for fruit, for fish, for shellfish, salad, melons, ice cream, cakes. Apostle spoons, or little Dutch spoons crossed, were laid on the table as ornaments. Ranks of glasses were set out for every guest, with distinctive shapes and sizes depending on whether they were to hold brandy, wine, champagne, sherry, or water. In 1890, Madame la Baronne de Rothschild owned a vast silver service which included, as serving dishes alone, a roast beef platter, lots of other covered meat dishes, two salmon dishes, a turbot dish, ten different dish covers, several serving dishes provided with warming devices, eight champagne buckets, numerous sauce dishes and dispensers, vegetable dishes of various kinds, eight dessert presenters, and much else besides.
A full dinner service now included soup bowls, dinner plates, and dessert plates; it became essential that formal dishes be given a rim, to distinguish them from merely “luncheon” dishes. No bread and butter plates were supplied at formal meals. It is still “not done” at formal dinners to provide butter, or side plates for spreading it on bread: a banquet is supposed to be rich enough not to need more butter; bread is broken and laid on the tablecloth in the French manner. The custom has for Anglo-Saxons an obstinately archaic air—which is often just what formality demands; it is like the aristocrats clinging so long to trestle-tables for dining, or modern women wearing veils at their weddings.
Bernard Gille, a Frenchman writing on English manners in 1981, explains to his countrymen that the English think of food as a matter not usually important enough to treat as a ritual, or worth interrupting other activities for; the English might, for example, watch television while eating. His French readers are warned that Anglo-Saxons lay their cutlery upside down, with spoon bowls and fork tines facing upward. (The French custom, bowls and tines down, used to hold in Britain, too. British and North American owners of very old silver may lay their cutlery in the French manner in order to make sure no one misses the monograms, which were placed on what are now, for us, the backs of the forks and spoons.) The English, Gille goes on, lay the table for an ordinary meal with no plate in the space surrounded by cutlery; the French are accustomed to entering the dining room to find plates in place. French visitors to England typically feel their worst suspicions confirmed when they see the side plate, take it for a dinner plate, and think they will not be getting very much to eat. Not being used either to side plates or to cutting their bread, they often fail to leave the tablecloth crumbless and fear that Anglo-Saxons judge them unkindly for it.
Our system of serving the meal in courses means that we must supply many eating plates; but they are all very similar, their shapes corresponding to the three main sections of a meal: soup, main course (hors d’oeuvres are served on plates similar to, though often smaller than, those of the main course), and dessert. The French custom of supplying knife- and fork-rests, so that diners might use the same utensils for more than one course, was common in Britain and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For some time it has not seemed proper to Anglo-Saxons, for whom formal hospitality should be expressed through the marshalling of as many dishes and implements as one can muster. Among family and friends, people have doubtless always saved their cutlery for another course. The story continues to be told, because of the charming informality, the consideration, and the insouciance about formal manners which it displays, that a Canadian waitress once advised visiting British royalty: “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie.”
We now use fewer implements at banquets than we did in the nineteenth century, but there are still so many of them that correct table manners are often described as “knowing which fork to use.” At a correctly laid table there is supposed to be no problem whatever. The diner starts with the outermost knives and forks and moves inward, the innermost pieces being the last used. In countries where it is the custom not to lay the dessert spoon across the top of the “place,” this spoon lies at the right, closest to the plate. One formal rule is that there may never be more than three knives laid at any one place; if there are more courses than three, a servant must supply the other knives. This seems to be another example of the curb on knives, a small and rather feeble complication one would have thought, but a rule which has nonetheless stayed in the book.
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At a Japanese meal, chopsticks never vary except in size (hosts may use extra-long ones for passing on delicacies to guests), and spoons are occasionally needed. It is the shapes, sizes, and colours of plates, trays, bowls, boxes, and stacked drawers for food which are extremely variegated. The Japanese feel that the shape of a container and the material from which it is made should determine what food it shall carry; that taste, as well as factors such as seasonal changes and the character of festivals and occasions for celebration, should be reflected in the dinnerware chosen for a particular meal. Bernard Rudofsky (1965) quotes a haiku by Jûgaya, expressing Japanese astonishment at our lack of imagination in this regard:
A European meal:
Every blessed plate and dish
Is round.
Japanese pride in their porcelain, glazed pottery, and lacquer dishes leads them to make a special point of contemplating and praising the dinnerware, quite apart from the food or drink served in it. The Japanese Tea Ceremony, Cha No Yu, raises these civilities to a sort of sacramental ritual. (Praising the utensils is of course only one among the many strands of ceremony which make up Cha No Yu.) The host of a Tea Ceremony takes enormous trouble first to lay out cups and other objects which are “of a nature to harmonize with the probable thoughts and moods of the guests.” They, in turn, must react and respond to his or her thoughtfulness. Once all have taken their carefully pre-ordained places—there is a special spot created by the seating rules for anyone present who might be the owner of a celebrated tea utensil—the person being honoured as “superior guest” must praise the arrangements. An extremely polite host will absent himself or herself while this is going on, so that the guests may be left at liberty to look around and comment on the dishes, the room, and its furnishings without embarrassing the host.
Later, as the host is making the fire so that incense may be lit and the kettle set to boil, the superior guest must ask to see the host’s incense-burning equipment; the other guests should then manifest curiosity and admire it. If Cha No Yu takes place at noon, a few morsels of food may be eaten, and the guests go for a walk in the exquisitely laid-out garden while the host completes preparations for tea-drinking. He or she adorns the room with flowers and changes into different clothes, strikes a gong, and the guests return. The contemplation, admiring, and commenting begin again—the vases, the tea canister, the water-jug, everything is noticed, experienced, appreciated. The host traditionally provides only one special, simple, but intensely valued cup. It is filled with tea and each guest, beginning with the first, sips two or three times from it, wipes its edge carefully on a napkin, and passes it on. The first guest asks questions about the tea: where it came from, its name, its properties; the other guests silently savour it. The host drinks last, and—invariably—apologizes for the poorness of the infusion. The cup is then handed round the company, turned over, examined, and exclaimed over. Smoking may follow, then sweetmeats are served, with more, weaker tea in small cups, one for each person.
A traditional Chinese banquet takes a form that deliberately contrasts with an ordinary meal. Rice no longer is the meal, with all other food being thought of as luxurious relishes; at a banquet, eating too much meat and too little rice does not constitute extremely bad form. Instead, rice may not be eaten at all until the banquet is over, and asking for rice means you intend to stop eating—or drinking, if a drinking party follows the meal. Even at the end, you should not eat more than a mouthful or two of rice for fear of accusing your host, by implication, of not supplying you with enough special meats, vegetables, and fish. At a banquet, guests praise the food unstintingly; they apologize for putting the host to so much trouble, and wonder what they can have done to deserve such generosity, to become the recipients of so much skill. The host responds that they shouldn’t be polite—it is they who honour this small and simple house. They then protest that they would never be merely polite—they really mean every word: the food is utterly extraordinary. One Chinese writer explains to Westerners that there are “no rules” to follow at a Chinese meal. You just do whatever you like (we have seen that this is far from being the case) and show appreciation. It is not enough, in Oriental manners, to “do the right thing”: you must convince everyone present that you are impressed and delighted. Hosts work hard to earn this praise—and then respond to it by deprecating themselves and apologizing for their insufficiency.
In the West, wealthy hosts once grandly displayed their silverware on buffet shelves erected in full view of the banqueters, who were expected to be impressed. Yet today we do not lavishly praise the food—let alone the dishes it is served in. In France, for instance, a reverent silence might fall over the company as a magnificent instance of culinary art arrives on the table, and the convives might permit themselves murmurs of approval. But actually to praise the food, says a modern French work on manners, “makes you look as though you want some more.” There is also, surely, a kind of inverted politeness involved: receiving food with exclamations of joy could be taken as surprise, or relief. Not praising it (while showing unmistakable if carefully subdued appreciation) shows that you would expect nothing less than excellence from your host. “Did you expect,” one Victorian hostess is said to have asked with acerbity, “not to eat well in my house?” The host, similarly, must under no circumstances praise his or her own food, or comment upon it. “One rejoices silently in one’s success,” lays down the Baronne Staffe.
Given their officially cool and distant attitude to food, carefully instilled as it has been by education and relentless social pressure, Europeans and Americans are shocked and self-righteous when they encounter the other point of view. In many societies, guests are expected to express their appreciation not only verbally but also through inarticulate sound and action. Persians and Arabs are asked to slurp their tea or coffee with sighs of satisfaction, and always to drink more than one cup or risk offending. (Slurping tea and other drinks is very common; practitioners claim that it improves the actual flavour of the beverage enormously.) It is often customary to suck every scrap of meat from the bone, or to belch at the end of dinner, in order to gratify the hosts.
English and North American manners, on the other hand, insist that one be prepared to forego even the most delicious final morsel if it should prove difficult to raise it from the plate with a correctly constrained fork. (This is in complete contrast to the Chinese attitude that not a grain of rice should be left in the bowl.) The French share the general European reticence about showing enjoyment for food, yet feel at the same time that their sauces, and everything else they serve, deserve more respect: is it not polite to show an inability to resist eating everything because it is so good? On informal occasions they may take bread in one hand and wipe up the remains; it is more polite (because it denies the fingers and their facility) to break small bits of bread, impale them on a fork, and use these to mop up the sauce. One Parisian restaurant tried a few years ago to introduce a special spoon, to be used for collecting every last drop of their renowned sauces. It is a brilliant idea, but does not appear to have “taken.”
Guests should never criticize the food. This is based on the same principle as not praising it, distance being the goal in both cases. Equally, distaste must be disguised out of consideration for the host. “If dishes are failures, you do not notice,” states the Baronne Staffe with her customary firmness. “You eat bravely what is offered, as if it were good.” She tells the story of a heroic Frenchman visiting England, who drank and (with perhaps excessive politeness) pronounced excellent a “frightful beverage” offered to him as a rare wine—he had been served medicine by mistake.
One should, in many societies, try at least a taste of all the dishes presented, on pain of offending the hosts. Even to hesitate is sufficiently reprehensible to be given a name in the Japanese list of faults. In our own culture, a guest may “beg off” a particular dish, especially if he or she can think of a reason with even vaguely medical associations. The excuse must be very sound if
one is to escape eating the soup, however: soup is a basic foodstuff to our way of thinking, a symbol of love, and often thought of as a remedy for ill health. Served at the beginning of a meal, it is supposed to take the edge off everyone’s hunger, so that refusing the soup is a little like avoiding rice at an Oriental meal. The corollary of this is that hosts must not serve too much of it—“to fill, or even to half fill, a soup-plate with soup would be in very bad style,” says a nineteenth-century English book of etiquette. Full bowls of soup could conceivably represent a host’s hope that the guests will not eat too much thereafter.
It is possible to criticize by eating “with the ends of the teeth,” as the French put it, and this is strongly discouraged by the etiquette manuals. Even if an insect is discovered, says Branchereau, behave as though nothing has happened; hide it under a leaf at the side of the plate and carry on. A children’s manners book (1701) recommends that one should eat without investigating too closely: “Smell not to thy Meat, nor move it to thy Nose; turn it not the other side upward to view it upon the Plate.” It is rude in China to make obviously for the fresh and sizzling dishes; if there are warmed-up offerings from a previous meal, a polite guest will show equal interest in those—and others at table will notice whether or not he or she does so. Another thoughtless action is to reach for the salt or to sprinkle it over the food before you have tasted it. Different societies exhibit varying degrees of sensitivity to this. Visitors to Hungary, for instance, are advised to taste food before adding salt or paprika, otherwise the hosts might be insulted. According to the Li Chi, a guest who adds salt should elicit heart-rending apologies from a polite host.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 27