Spearing the animal was especially important, Cervio wrote: there was intense shame to be endured if the meat fell from the fork in front of the assembled company, most of whom were presumably watching the carver intently; such shame was proportionate to the glow of pride he enjoyed when he performed his feat perfectly. It was not uncommon that the high table would applaud an especially fine demonstration of carving technique. As carver, one had to know exactly where to drive in the tines; how to stand, for the whole of one’s body was on view: one was not to twist the torso or agitate the head, no matter how contrary the joint proved to be. Then there was the manner of lifting the roast from its dish, touching it with the knife’s point in a beautiful gesture; the skill involved in turning the heavy burden on the fork with precision and an appearance of effortlessness, so that the knife could pare the surfaces as thinly as possible and dispatch the slices to their best positions on the tondo lying on the table below. Everything had to be done as speedily as possible, for a roast in mid-air is a roast that cools fast. An especially impressive trick—performed, admits Cervio, out of pure galanteria—was to cut with two knives at once, both gripped in the right hand with one finger separating them. One could of course give in when confronted with something as large as a shoulder or leg of mutton, and facilitate matters by wrapping a napkin round one end and holding the joint up to depend from the left fist while it is cut with the knife in the right; but brandishing meat aloft on a fork must always remain più hello.
Meat could be carved away from the table, on a credenza, but Cervio is contemptuous of would-be carvers who are not prepared to perform in full view. One could also cut the meat on the dish and present slices to the lord on a wide-bladed “presenting” knife, or even on a fork. The almost invariable scattering of simple salt over meat, as Cervio repeatedly recommends, was new; medieval carvers had been expected to know just what sauces each morsel necessarily required, and to slice or mince and sauce portions before serving them. (Especially large establishments sometimes employed a Saucer, working in tandem with the Carver, to prepare and serve these relishes.)
Some echo of the mystique attached to the carver’s art reaches us from sources such as John Lydgate’s poem, The Hors the Shepe and the Ghoos (1478), and Wynkyn de Worde’s Boke of Kervynge (1508, 1513). In such works, the carving of every bird and fish, and some meats and pies, is given a separate English verb, the effect being to make its performance a separate object of admiration. The carver is exhorted to “alay that pheasant” (remove its wing, aile), “rear that goose, lift that swan, raise that capon” (each of these terms perhaps refers to cutting upwards from underneath the joints, or to the methods Mrs. Beeton was later to advocate, such as lifting the body of a partridge from its rear end, up and away from the legs, which are held fast to the plate). “Untach [untie] that bittern,” the list goes on, “unbrace that duck, unlace that coney; leach that brawn” (slice it, from the Catalan term llescar, “brawn” means lean meat, usually pork), “frust that chicken” (reduce it to frusta, or fragments), “spoil that hen, disfigure that peacock, dismember that heron, brawn that gull” (slice the breast only), “thigh and shred that pigeon, wing that partridge and that quail, splay, splat and chine that bream, gobbet that trout, unmail that crayfish, tame and mine that crab” (broach it—French entamer—then take the flesh from the shell). A crab, says John Russell crossly in 1460, is “a slutt to kerve and a wrawd wight” (a froward or perverse creature).
Heads were always difficult to serve, and sometimes not worth eating at all, but the larger animals’ heads were well worth mastering, for everyone knows that the head is the most honourable part of the body. People ate many different parts of a head, and the conscientious carver had to know which bits were best and who deserved to have first refusal of them. John Trusler, who was writing in 1791 for people who carved in far more relaxed and intimate circumstances than were customary for the readers of Wynkyn de Worde or Cervio, explains in The Honours of the Table that “many like the eye” of a calf’s head, “which is to be cut from it’s [sic] socket by forcing the point of a carving knife down to the bottom on one edge of the socket, and cutting quite round, keeping the point of the knife slanting towards the middle, so as to seperate [sic] the meat from the bone.” The palate, “a crinkled, white thick skin,” required some adroitness to get at it, as did the sweet tooth: “There is a tooth in the upper jaw, the last tooth behind, which having several cells and being full of jelly” is a favourite of some, though Trusler himself thinks that “It’s [sic] delicacy is more in the name than any thing else.” When all the other edible pieces have been distributed, what is left of the head should be set before the most honoured guest, who will be invited to spoon out the brains. (It was often considered crude, on the principle that knives suggest nastiness and are to be avoided wherever possible, to insert a knife into a brain.) Kitchen staff had probably been instructed to saw off the top of the skull in advance, and replace it carefully so that it could be lifted off at the end; in other places and times, the opportunity to cleave the skull was itself a part of the honour of being invited to eat the brain.
It was always important to include morsels of fat on every polite plateful, and carvers are told to establish the diners’ tastes, for, Trusler wrote in 1791, “there are some who prefer soft fat, and others the firm.” A special flame was provided to keep some kinds of fat warm, for instance, that of venison, which was appreciated only in a fairly liquid state. “There is some nice, gristly fat to be pared off about the ear” of a calf or a pig. Ears were great favourites, especially those of the hare: “Before you dissect the head, cut off the ears at the roots, which if roasted crisp, many are fond of, and may be asked if they please to have one.” A medieval lord, or an honoured guest, expected to be given a fish’s head, with “a finger [width] of flesh” attached to it, mostly because of the honour it signified. But a cod’s head and shoulders was a dish itself to be carved. There were liver, palate, roe, and tongue to be offered to those favoured, the sound or swim-bladder lining the fish beneath the backbone, and certain “gelatinous parts” about the head and neck. “The jelly parts,” writes Trusler, “lies [sic] about the jaw-bones, the firm parts within the head … the green jelly of the eye is never given to any one.”
A nobleman’s education was never complete until he had learned to carve. Gradually noble women were given this training also, so that they could “do the honours” at family dinner parties. Carving masters, like fencing and dancing masters, gave classes to their charges, often several times a week. As ancient Roman teachers had done, they appear to have used wooden demonstration models of various fowl and joints, carefully marked out so that students could learn the placing and order of the cuts. As the rise of monetary wealth spread “the civilities” of the nobility among the bourgeoisie, it became necessary that every gentleman worthy of the name should know how to carve. “How would he be put to the non-plus,” wrote Giles Rose in 1682, “for shame, that he knows not how to make the dissection of a Fowl.” The eighteenth-century gentleman might find carving a bore, and consider it beneath him, but Lord Chesterfield thought such an attitude a mistake: “To do the honours of the table gracefully, is one of the outlines of a well bred man, and to carve well, little as it may seem, is useful twice a day, and the doing of which ill, is not only troublesome to ourselves, but renders us disagreeable and ridiculous to others.”
Grimod de la Reynière reminded post-Revolutionary French gourmands that although carving might be troublesome to learn (he admitted that the days when one could recognize a man’s breeding by his carving skills were now gone), it was something which added prestige to a man of accomplishments. A host or “amphitryon” might, in 1808, be permitted to carve at a side table, and Grimod advocated standing up while doing it. (It had become very chic to sit down to carve, because it was difficult and required practice, and perhaps also because it looked less histrionic and less formal.) The Manuel des amphitryons even suggests that a carver should s
pread a large napkin over his chest so that the fear of getting splashed might not prevent freedom of movement; polite guests ought to refrain from staring at him while carving proceeds. Everyone should learn to carve, Grimod adds, because this is a skill that often makes one a useful guest, and highly recherché.
Grimod’s remarks make it clear that virtuoso carving had begun its long decline; it is less and less an entirely necessary part of a “polished” man’s education. Mrs. Beeton, in the mid-nineteenth century, gives a good deal of information on carving (which she says should be performed sitting down). Britain clung to carving ritual long after Continental dining custom had delegated it almost invariably to kitchen staff. In her day, when roasts were served at middle-class dinner tables they were cut and distributed by the knife-wielding chief male of the family. “We can hardly imagine,” she says, “an object of greater envy than is presented by a respected, portly paterfamilias carving … his own fat turkey, and carving it well.” Yet she fears that the new fashion of serving dinners à la russe “may possibly, erewhile, save modern gentlemen the necessity of learning the art which was in auld lang syne one of the necessary accomplishments of the youthful squire, but until side-tables become universal or till we see the office of ‘grand carver’ once more instituted, it will be well for all to learn to assist at the carving of this dish”—a roast hare, which had always been for the carver “an opportunity of display.”
Beeton proposes several other occasions for demonstrating a knowledge of etiquette in the distribution of meat: in the stillritual carving of the forequarter of lamb, for example, where the shoulder has first to be removed, and the cut sprinkled with lemon juice and salt before proceeding; and in the knowledge of “best parts”—skin and thick parts of fins in a turbot, backbone of grouse, thigh of blackcock, and “the finely grained meat lying under the part … called the Pope’s eye” in a leg of mutton. A rule of thumb for the best part of ducks was “the wing of a flier, and the leg of a swimmer,” with ducks’ feet a particular delicacy for some. One must never give a lady a bird’s leg: legs were much too corporal, and suggestive of what lay under skirts. Women might be helped to breast (delicately referred to, in some circles, as “white meat”—though Mrs. Beeton is robustly forthright with this word), wings, and merrythought or wish-bone. Beeton says that Byron did not like dining with ladies because “they always had the wings of the fowls, which he himself preferred.” And of course one’s carving should always be cool and assured; she recommends a “fine keeping of the temper,” even if a tough chicken or an old goose proves hard to disjoint.
In 1922, Emily Post complained that carving was “an art being lost.” In 1928, she still preferred that carvers should perform while seated; but it was perfectly in order for Cook to carve the meat in the kitchen to keep it warm, reassemble it on a hot platter, then bring it into the dining room to be served. In 1945, Post dropped the section on carving technique from her handbook on etiquette; she did not reinstate it. The finer points of carving are now the province of cooking professionals. These may still on occasion show off their expertise before a fascinated audience, even holding a bird up in the air to slice it, as is traditional with Rouen or American canvas-back ducks. Proust provides us with a picture of Aimé, the mâitre d’hôtel at Balbec, taking on the role of “hierophant” and himself carving the turkey-poults in the restaurant: “He carved them with a sacerdotal majesty, surrounded, at a respectful distance from the service-table, by a ring of waiters who … stood gaping in open-mouthed admiration.”
At family festal dinners, fathers may still be called upon to stand and divide the turkey or the joint. Very often family traditions are adhered to, such as the ceremonial sharpening of the carving knife; ritual questions about preferences, asked in a hierarchical order; joking phrases: “Little fat, Mummy?”; and “red gravy” from a spoon for the smallest child at the very end. But such occasions are rare. Indeed, they tend to be kept for festivals, precisely because festivals demand unusual, though traditional, behaviour. Families are mostly too small nowadays regularly to require large joints of meat; festivals bring together the numbers, making it worthwhile (it being a holiday) to take the time and trouble roasting, gravy-making, baking, and attending to ceremony.
The very idea of seeing our portions being cut and prised from something as vividly recognizable as a whole calf’s head has become strange and unpleasant to most of us. Carvers no longer “perform,” and “amphitryons” never permit themselves to rank their guests with the devastating clarity of Talleyrand, who taught a young protégé the famous “beef lesson” by his example at dinner one night.
“Monsieur le duc,” said Talleyrand, with an air of deference, picking out the honourable piece (le meilleur morceau) for him, “may I have the honour of presenting you with a little beef?”
Then, with a graceful smile, “Monsieur le marquis, may I have the pleasure of offering you some beef?”
To his third guest, with a familiar, affable gesture: “My dear Count, shall I offer you some beef?”
To the fourth, with a benevolent air: “Baron, will you accept some beef?”
To an untitled though upper-class fifth: “Sir, would you like some beef?”
And finally, to a man at the end of the table (table ends are “low” in France), he raised his eyebrows slightly, smiled, and said: “Beef?”
THE RED, THE WHITE, AND THE GOLD
The liquid element in a meal is either placed first and “eaten” as soup, with a spoon, or it is poured over the solids as sauces, gravies, creams, or syrups. The accompanying drink is kept very separate, standing outside the meal: literally standing in a high glass, and literally outside, beyond the cutlery fence bounding the “place.” One ancient way of drinking beer is for people to distance themselves from the brew by means of sucking straws, as the Sumerians did and as many modern Africans still do. The reason is partly that straws may be attached to sieves, and many beers require straining; but also the straws can permit everyone present to drink from one container, while separating drinkers from what they imbibe, much as chopsticks and forks mediate between eaters and food.
We, however, carry the liquid in our beer and wineglasses directly to our mouths. Modern commercial beer is clear of solid matter, and we drink it from tall mugs or vaselike glasses which are often designed to enhance the colour and brightness of the liquid, and the sight of its foaming. Early northern European beers were often mixed with egg, and not attractive to look at; they were drunk from leather jacks in the Middle Ages, and later from pewter pots—the liquid in them was not visually stressed. The glass pint beer mug became conventional during the mid-nineteenth century, just when dark, opaque beers began to fall in popularity and seriously to give way to lighter, clearer, golden beers which were actually enhanced in appearance by faceted glass.
Wine-drinkers supply themselves with special goblets for all but the least formal occasions. A wineglass is like a flower, springing from a stem which not only lifts the wine from the table but provides it with a long, slim, distancing device. A glass of cold white wine—always more “lady-like” and ethereal than red—must be held by the stem; its bowl should not come into contact with our fleshy, warm fingers. The bowl of a glass of red wine (which is heartier, and better if chambré) may be touched, even lovingly cradled; but the fingers nonetheless remain aware of that stem, which subliminally signifies to us both refinement and respect. In Europe and America, beer, even for those of us who prefer beer, never achieves the kind of ineffable prestige that is granted to wine. Even if we did not know this, we would be able to deduce it from the difference between the glasses in which beer and wine are served, from the firm capacious utility of the one and the purely ornamental pedestal supporting the thin, fine glass of the other.
Wine and beer are alcoholic. This makes them as “cultural,” as dependent upon civilized control and organization as bread, in that human beings have to work hard and long to grow, pick, crush, and ferment the must and the malt,
and then patiently let them lie till they are ready, just as bread must be grown, harvested, ground, “fermented” with yeast, kneaded, left to rise, and baked. Care, planning, technology, and organization are required for both. Alcohol is to be treated with respect, not because it is “the staff of life” like bread, but because it is exactly the opposite: it gives pleasure, but is usually unnecessary and potentially dangerous. In ancient Greek myth, wine was a “latecomer” in human history, which meant among other things that people could live without it. Drinking it induced religious awe and direct acquaintance with Dionysus, the god of the vine, of ecstasy, of the group acting as one, of the loss of individual identity.
At Greek and Roman banquets, the drinking proper (that is, apart from the occasional mouthful of wine or water taken merely to wash down food) was set entirely apart from eating. It took place at the symposion (“drinking together”) after dinner, the guests having wreathed themselves, reapplied the perfumed oils to their persons, and lit the incense on its stand. The dishes were cleared away, and in came the cups, the crater (for mixing water and wine), the water-pots, pitchers, coolers full of snow to be floated in the mixed wine (or alternatively, pots of ready-mixed wine floating in iced water), and ladles for serving from crater to cups. A symposiarch, or leader of the drinking party, was chosen by lot from among those present; he judged amounts, allocated roles, and maintained what was considered to be a truly Hellenic triumph, the sympotic balance between the structured and the loose, the organized and the heady. First a libation was offered to the gods. This was an ancient Greek version of grace, a sort of “first fruits” taken from the wine to be drunk, and poured out over the altar if there was one in the dining room, or onto the floor. In this way the gods were given their share first, as though they were guests of honour. Then a hymn was sung, and drinking began.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 30