The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  Brewing beer is an ancient female preserve; and where beer is central to the economy and nutrition of a society—as it often still is in Africa, among South American Indians, and elsewhere—control over it naturally becomes a source of female power. It may link up with another commonly traditional female skill and responsibility: that of making and controlling the use of clay pots. (The ancient Greek god Dionysus—feminine in so much of his nature—had power both over wine and over the area of Athens called Ceramicus, where pots were made.) We have seen how the Newar women of Nepal must personally serve the beer they have made, even at a public feast. Among the LoDagaa of Ghana, a woman’s good beer can turn her home into a beer house, a place where people gather to exchange news and gossip. She sells her product, and pours it out for her clients, always setting aside a calabash of it for herself to show she has not poisoned the batch. She plays a role rather like that of European society hostesses who used to keep “open house” or a “salon” on certain days of the week where people could collect together and socialize. The hostess of a tea party, like the LoDagaa breweress, must pour the tea.

  Because food and drink usually reach the family through the women’s hands, fear of women frequently translates into suspicion that they are poisoners. Knives, in the traditional view, are “male” weapons. They are wielded aggressively, and they pertain to the masculine realm of fighting, war, and the hunt; they are essential for carving meat. From a symbolic point of view, knives are phallic. We have seen how in medieval Europe, men were supposed to cut for their womenfolk at table. Poison, on the other hand, is a secretive, sneaky way of killing anyone, in addition to which it is often liquid, and administered in food—all of which makes poison a peculiarly “female” weapon, certainly in the folklore and mythology of all races, and possibly in fact as well. Fear of poison can strengthen the pressure upon men not to rove, but stay with their families: they might eat only what is prepared for them by their wives or mothers, or by women otherwise in their control.

  Alcoholic drinks, like knives, have always been thought especially dangerous in the hands of women, and men have taken great care to prevent their own partiality for alcohol from infecting “the fair sex.” Their solicitude has, until recently, been effective: the percentage of female heavy drinkers has usually been comparatively very low. (It is now rising alarmingly, according to Noel and McCrady for example.) Women must take responsibility for their unborn children, and it is certain that heavy drinking during pregnancy can have ill effects. In any case, what was disgraceful behaviour in a man was always far worse if seen in a woman. During the nineteenth century in Europe, women at table were not to ask for wine; the men were expected to keep them supplied. A man would serve himself and his female partner simultaneously: he would bow, then drink with her. Women were expected not to accept wine every time they were offered it. In France it was correct for a man to offer a woman water at the same time as wine, for a woman, says the Baronne Staffe, never drinks wine neat except at the dessert: she always insists that it be trempé, mixed with water.

  Women in the Mediterranean countries, from the sixteenth century until recent times, appear to have astonished visitors by their sobriety. In France, in particular, men “cut” their wine with water, but “honourable” French women, if they touched wine at all, “used it merely to redden their water slightly.” Wine, these days, has become an object of awe and reverence; the only people who add water to it are those who can obtain it cheaply and drink it regularly, and who pay comparatively little regard to its quality. Women drink it at table as much as men do—but even the most recent of etiquette manuals cling to the idea that men should really serve women with the dangerous liquid, “regardless of the symbolism,” as Miss Manners puts it. If the host (not the hostess) does not get up and refill glasses when necessary, then “each man should pour wine for the woman on his left.”

  “Young ladies do not eat cheese, nor game, nor savouries,” states a late Victorian etiquette book. The reason was almost certainly the same as that occasionally suggested for women not drinking: their breath would cease to be pleasing to men. Women still conform to expectations about eating less than men do, and preferring lighter, paler foods—chicken and lettuce, for example, over beef and potatoes. In Japan, women were actually given smaller rice bowls and shorter, slimmer chopsticks. In the Kagoro tribe of northern Nigeria, men use spoons, but women are not allowed this privilege. Among the Pedi of South Africa, in the 1950s, women and children used the special men’s porridge dishes, but only when they were cracked and “no longer sufficiently respectable” for male use. Cooking and serving food to the men as they do, women are accustomed all over the world to eating what is left over from dinner; they are often able, of course, to look out for themselves while preparing the meal. In Assam, where pollution rules mean that lower castes may accept food from higher castes but not the other way round, a woman eats from the same plates as her husband, after the men have finished their meal: nothing could make the pair more intimate, and nothing could more clearly demonstrate that she is lower than he.

  In Europe, families have often eaten all together at home, though where several families lived in one dwelling and dinners fed a lot of people, it was probably most common for the men to be fed first, served by the women. It was the nobility who took part in most of the formal banquets, and among them women were sometimes admitted, sometimes allowed on sufferance, and sometimes excluded altogether. During the Middle Ages, women might sit in a gallery or balcony especially provided so that they could watch the men at dinner. But noblemen could at certain places and times sit each with a female partner beside him—“promiscuous seating,” as the Victorians were to call this arrangement. Another possibility was for all the women to sit at one end of the table, apparently as meticulously ranked as were the men at their end. At very big banquets there might be ladies’ tables, apart from the men’s. We are told that Louis XIV would invite particular women whose company he fancied to join him at high table, or have the noblest and most beautiful women seated at his table for him; his wife the queen, who might be present, or obliged to preside over a separate, all-female dinner elsewhere, did not have the equivalent privilege.

  From Elizabethan times women seem to have carved meat at British tables; this is a marked departure from the outlook which insisted that knives were the perquisites of males. In the early eighteenth century the hostess often did all the carving and serving of meat at table. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as a young girl took carving lessons; on the days when she presided over her widowed father’s table, “she ate her own dinner earlier in order to perform without distraction.” As the century progressed, men would offer to help their wives or daughters in this task. But by the end of the eighteenth century, servants increasingly carved for the diners; and with the arrival of dinner à la russe in the mid-nineteenth century, carving at formal meals was invariably done by servants, away from the dining table itself. At family dinners, the tradition has survived in Britain of the chief male portioning out the roast before the assembled group.

  At the end of dinner, wrote Emily Post in 1922, the hostess, having decided that the moment has come, “looks across the table, and catching the eye of one of the ladies, slowly stands up. The one who happens to be observing also stands up, and in a moment everybody is standing.” The choreography is strict: the gentlemen give their partners their arms and conduct them out of the dining room into the drawing room. They bow slightly, then follow the host to the smoking room for coffee, cigars, and liqueurs. If there is no smoking room, the women leave the dining room alone. The host sits at his place at the table, and the men all move up towards his end.

  Where port is served, the bottle on its coaster stands before the host, the tablecloth having been removed before the ritual begins. He pours for whoever is on his right—to save this person, seated in the honourable place, from having to wait until last to be served. Then the bottle is slid reverently along the polished wooden table-top (origi
nally so that the dregs might be disturbed as little as possible, though all good ports should be decanted before they are drunk); or it is rolled along in a wheeled silver chariot; or it is handed with special ceremonial gestures from male to male, as drinking cups were handed at ancient Greek symposia. But port is passed clockwise (to the left), not as drinks circulated in ancient Greece, to the right. “Beg your pardon, sir,” says Jingle in The Pickwick Papers, after the waiter has left the men to themselves, “bottle stands—pass it round—way of the sun—through the button-hole [both these expressions are ways of saying “to the left”: men’s buttonholes are traditionally placed on the left]—no heeltaps [meaning “leave no wine at the bottom of the glass”].” At the British Factory House dinners in Oporto, the men move into a second dining room in order to enjoy vintage port, for fear of any smell of food interfering with the drink’s aroma.

  The men discuss politics, and sit with whomever they like; hierarchical seating is often suspended at this time. It is even correct for a man “to talk to any other who happens to be sitting near him, whether he knows him or not,” wrote Emily Post in 1922: the men are at last among themselves, and rules can be relaxed. The women, meanwhile, are served coffee, cigarettes, and liqueurs in the library or the drawing room. The hostess sees to it that no one is left out of the conversations which take place. By the 1920s, all of this lasted no longer than fifteen to twenty minutes. The host “takes the opportunity of the first lull in the conversation” to shepherd the men to “join the ladies” in the drawing room. When the men arrive, they must cease talking to each other and find a woman with whom to converse.

  This ritual performance was commonly carried out at formal dinner parties in Britain at least into the 1960s; it probably still occurs. Americans were told by Emily Post exactly how it was done into the middle of this century, even though at least one American etiquette book a hundred years earlier had professed disgust for the idea. Several foreign visitors to Britain in the eighteenth century had found the custom exotic and distasteful. On the Continent, the company and conversation of women had become essential to the makings of a good dinner party; there was no question of doing without them at any point in the proceedings. Men of polished manners were not supposed to hanker after the kind of behaviour, associated with male company, which could not stand the scrutiny of women.

  For the point of the ceremony of women “leaving the table” and men being left alone until they “joined the ladies” was not only that men wanted to discuss matters which could not be expected to interest their wives or be understood by them. The origin of it lay in the heavy drinking and toasting, the coarse jokes and laughter among men which the presence of women might inhibit. The ladies would leave the men to it, and perhaps eventually have to go home alone, as drinking and roistering continued into the night. In eighteenth-century Scotland, according to Lord Cockburn’s Memorials, “saving the ladies” meant that the men would take their womenfolk home, then return to the scene of the dinner party to drink competitive healths to them. They paired off to see who could imbibe more in honour of his true love, “each combatant persisting till one of the two fell upon the floor … These drinking competitions were regarded with interest by gentlewomen, who next morning inquired as to the prowess of their champions.”

  Heavy toasting died out during the nineteenth century, but a new reason for the men staying on alone came in with the advent of smoking, which at first respectable women would not dream of trying. By the time the ceremony of the ladies’ withdrawal was described by Emily Post, it had been firmly contained within constricted time limits. There had been significant changes: for example, it had previously been necessary for the women to send a servant in to call the men to them—in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Headlong Hall (1816), “the little butler now waddled in with a summons from the ladies to tea and coffee.” At a later date, coffee would be sent in to the men to remind them soon to adjourn. Later still, the men were expected to curtail their own gathering and show at least ritual eagerness to rejoin the women. Both men and women, Post is careful to insist in 1922, now smoked; women must be supplied with cigarettes too, and the thought of anyone getting drunk does not even arise.

  Another idea behind the ceremony was that when men and women were together, they felt constrained to behave very formally; only when the sexes were segregated could they relax and “be themselves.” The dinner party, with its newly necessary “promiscuous” seating (men and women alternating at the table), had been an exhausting performance; it had actually been quite difficult, because of the seating, to speak to people of the same sex as oneself. The after-dinner time among men at the table or women in the drawing room was conceived as a relief from having too strictly to “behave.” English nineteenth-century novelists often use the separation of the sexes after dinner as a chance to further the plot by means of free conversation, and a male character’s arrival from the dining room, his choice of a female partner for conversation, became dramatic expressions of the women’s interest in him, and of his preferences.

  All through history, women have been segregated from men and from public power, and “shielded” from the public view; they have been put down, put upon, and put “in their place”—a place defined by males. Yet this is not the whole story; and in the long run it may not be the most important story. For women—and men have very often admitted it, in their behaviour if not always in words or in kindness—have been an enormous civilizing influence in the history of humankind. It is not only that the way women are treated in any specific society is an infallible test of the health of that society. Women have also played the role—and it has been with the connivance of men—of consciousness-raisers in the domain of manners, comfort, and consideration for others. And the more men prized civilized manners, the more they “behaved” in the presence of women. The ideal claimed by Americans in the nineteenth century, when the custom of the ladies leaving the men after dinner was found distasteful, was in fact a sign that grown men were ready to think it normal to behave decently even when there were no women present.

  Women certainly felt more immediately the advantages of courtesy—“la courtoisie généreuse,” the Baronne Staffe called it—and accepted the ceremonial artificiality which saw them as “weaker” than men, but also “finer.” Women had to be bowed to, have hats lifted to them, doors opened for them, seats offered to them; they were served first at dinner. Theirs was, ritually speaking, the higher place, in spite of the underlying realities of their social and economic position. Women in “polite society” consequently became sticklers for etiquette—conservative perhaps, but also protective of the gains conquered. The etiquette manuals, many of them written by women in the nineteenth century, are filled with comments about male difficulties with correct behaviour, and bristling with advice about how men might improve themselves. They always assume that women find it far easier to manage all the skills and nuances required.

  And in fact it has come to pass that in many important respects women have won. Men who succeed and are admired in our culture must demonstrate that they have opted for finesse, sympathetic awareness, and self-control. “Male” vices which men forbade in women, such as alcohol abuse and smoking, have become disreputable in men also—although many women are now claiming the “right” at last to indulge in them. Fighting, swaggering, overeating have all gone out of style; one result of the technological revolution has been to remove the requirement that “real men” should show themselves to be rough, tough, and overbearing: one does not need to be physically powerful in order to control the instruments of technology. The gap between the sexes has closed not only because women have increasingly entered what has until now been the men’s public sphere of operations, but because men have gradually been made to feel that they should attain the level of behaviour which previously they expected only from the opposite sex. In short, they have become more like women.

  ALL GONE

  The last piece of food left, either on the s
erving dish or on one’s own plate, is important. Either it must be eaten—it is offensive and irritating, lying there: someone must be encouraged to take it by being assured that the last piece brings prosperity; or it should be left—it is greedy to grab it, or to wipe one’s plate too clean, and the one who does so will suffer misfortune later in life. Either the last piece is a “thrive bit” or a “force piece,” promising future health and strength; or it is the “etiquette piece,” which is there to be refused—the one who takes it will be an “old maid,” remaining as single as that last piece on the plate. The host (or the mother of the family) wants the food eaten; diners at one’s table are there to be given to, and an empty plate shows the host or the cook to be both generous and appreciated. But diners must not be greedy, must not be there merely for the food. Greedy people, especially greedy women (no one is called “an old bachelor” for taking the last piece), are not attractive to others.

  The host, wishing to override the unwillingness of a polite guest, may force the issue by saying something like “Do take the last piece—or my daughter won’t get married!” and the guest, who may or may not have wanted the last helping all along, will have to comply; it is an opportunity to show a desire to be obliging. A “last piece” from one’s personal portion of food may be set aside because it is the most delicious morsel on the plate, as a “reward” to the eater, who has “saved the best for last,” in the manner of dessert. A Chinese fortune cookie is a “last piece,” rounding out the meal with a bland crunchy mouthful, and—now that dinner is over and we are ready to return to the fray—containing a message about the future.