It is extremely rude to take away a person’s plate before he or she has finished eating. An ancient Roman would interpret this to mean sudden death to the person whose plate or “portion” it was: a meal, even a plateful, is symbolic of a life. Nowadays, a polite guest might be embarrassed to show too much interest in finishing the food: he or she might, in order to save face, swallow the resentment and let the error pass. Guests must, accordingly, have a means of letting it be known when they intend to eat no more. A Chinese guest will put down his chopsticks, often resting them across the top of his bowl, and tell all the other people to take their time eating. They ask him if he is full; he says he is, and by this means excuses himself from further helpings. He may leave the table at once without offence, or stay on until the others have finished. (The guest of honour is an exception; he, like the host, must stay till everyone has stopped eating.)
Users of knives and forks employ these implements to indicate whether they have finished eating or not. In Europe, every country has its own method, and foreign visitors are carefully instructed, in etiquette manuals for travellers, how to make this sign; it is one of the most obviously distinctive customs left, and not knowing what to do could have unfortunate consequences. In Greece, you cross your utensils on the plate, the knife safely under the fork, which must lie with the tines down. Alternatively, one may remove the napkin from one’s lap and lay it beside the plate—an action which in other countries signifies a readiness to rise from the table. In eastern Germany or in Czechoslovakia, crossing the knife and fork would mean that you are not finished eating, just pausing for a break. (It must be a fairly long break, however, for it is rude to put the knife and fork down merely between bites; presumably people will receive a signal that something more important than mere chewing is about to occur.) The Belgians find it impolite to cross implements for whatever reason; when finished eating, they place their knives and forks (tines up) together across the top of the plate, pointing left. (Crossing things at table is often thought to be ill-omened: the Greek poet Hesiod, for instance, in the seventh century B.C., said a dreadful fate would attend the action of placing the ladle over the mixing bowl or crater.) If your fork is laid tines down in Denmark, it means you want more food: tines up expresses the end; but in Italy, forks are finally laid parallel to knives with tines down. If your knife and fork lie apart on the plate in Spain, you want more food. In Yugoslavia, both implements lying on the plate signify the end of the meal. Between courses, handles rest on the table, with tines and points on the edge of the plate—an arrangement from which Anglo-Saxons are severely discouraged from childhood. Americans are reminded by Emily Post never to push the plate away or to lean back and say, “I’m through”; they must lay down their knives and forks, tines up, usually parallel and either vertical or slantwise on the plate’s surface, with the sharp edge of the blade facing in.
“When sitting by a person of rank,” says the Li Chi, “if he began to yawn and stretch himself, to turn round his tablet, to play with the head of his sword, to move his shoes about, or to ask about the time of day, one might ask leave to retire.” It is the host’s duty at most parties to decide when the meal is over. At a Western meal, the serving of dessert and cheese, of course, alerts everyone that the last act of the drama is under way. At formal dinners until fifty years ago it used to be the custom to provide a dessert setting—dessert plate, doily, finger-bowl with flower petals floating in the water, dessert fork and spoon—which the diner had to set out on the table herself or himself. The finger-bowl was placed on its doily to the left of the place, the spoon and fork to the right and left of the plate. Dessert being over, fingers were dipped into the water (fingertips only) and dried on the napkin. The finger-bowl, as its restriction to formal occasions and fingertips shows, had become almost entirely ornamental.
We once rinsed out our mouths and spat the water back into this bowl—a custom which fell into disuse in the course of the nineteenth century. We once needed quite heavy washing, when we ate with our hands: finger-bowls were a faint echo of that ritual, surviving only because at dessert people peel fruit and eat smelly cheese. Polite diners—certainly if they were at a function formal enough to give rise to finger-bowls—never actually touched the cheese, however; they carried it to their mouths on pieces of bread. And at formal meals fruit requiring peeling should be attended to with knives and forks, not fingers. (“Never,” advised a Victorian manners book, “embark on an orange.”) Having achieved a uselessness sufficient to turn it almost entirely into a status symbol, the finger-bowl became the stuff of legends about ignorant foreigners and unaccustomed base-born guests who drank the contents of the finger-bowl; they had never seen a finger-bowl and took it for a sort of tumbler. Well-bred hosts had to put them at their ease by calmly following suit and drinking from their own finger-bowls, to save such guests from knowing how badly they had blundered and how much they had revealed of their unfortunate background.
In the Middle Ages, the final hand-washing was followed by a minstrel show. Some of these players were also experts in the art of making after-dinner wafers. In France, according to LeGrand d’Aussy, fruit, and presumably more hand-washing, came after the entertainment—but this changed in the fourteenth century, so that one last hand-washing, sensibly, followed the end of dinner. In England, the host or an honoured guest would say the end-grace; then the host stood and toasted the guests to finish off the meal. English royalty in the early seventeenth century had the high table dismantled so that it lay on the ground. They would then stand upon the “board” to wash their hands, a custom which the Constable of Castille, who witnessed it in 1604, called “very old”; he obviously thought it also quite exotic. In France, hot aromatized wine called hippocras was the vin de congié, the “parting wine”; it was accompanied by sweets, and taken standing. This was, LeGrand d’Aussy wrote in 1782, “the way we now drink our coffee.”
We make a very heavy point of not permitting anyone to rise from the table before everyone has finished and agrees to leave. It is the host’s responsibility to see that all have eaten their fill. He then puts his napkin on the table and rises to his feet, and all his guests follow suit: it would be extremely bad form, remarks Branchereau (1885), for a guest to make any sign of wishing to leave the table before this point. In Scandinavian countries, the end of the meal must include the formal thanks of the guests to the hostess, before leaving the table; this may be preceded by a tap on his glass from the male guest of honour, calling everyone to attention before he thanks the hostess on their behalf, and the female guest of honour then thanks the host. The Li Chi prescribes that polite guests, before leaving the dining space, should try to clear away the dishes; the host must, with forceful authority, prevent them from doing so. When processions into the dining room were important, processions left the room also—exactly the same precedence being observed.
In Assam, an orthodox Hindu diner must keep constant contact with his food, most often holding on to his plate with his left hand throughout the meal: to lose this connection is to turn his food into “left-overs,” which are cuva—a pollution, capable of transmitting impurity. For this reason, all must finish their food and rise together. They then wash their hands, rinse their mouths, and chew betel nuts to purify them further. A Chinese host of a banquet asks his guests if they want any rice. They say they do, and this marks the end of the meal; no wine may be drunk with rice. When his small ritual serving of rice was completely finished, the extremely formal guest first placed his chopsticks on the bowl, then lifted it, bowed, and showed the company that all the rice in it had gone; it is still very bad manners to leave any rice uneaten. If the bowl was provided with a lid, he had then to cover it.
At the end of a European or American dinner, and perhaps again towards the end of an evening devoted to dinner and conversation, coffee is served. Where women left the men for the drawing room, they were there given coffee, and perhaps liqueurs; in the 1870s in Britain, one way of summoning the men fro
m their port, claret, and manly conversation was to send in coffee. Then, when the men had finished their coffee and returned to the womenfolk, everyone drank tea. The custom is a strange one, for caffeine prevents most people over the age of about forty from sleeping well that night. Part of the folklore of coffee and/or tea, however, is that it combats the effects of alcohol; it is served also because in our culture (in contradistinction to many others) we are expected to socialize after dinner, and not go to sleep.
In our own day, coffee plays an important role for us as a kind of initiation ritual, helping us to cross over boundaries which we have made increasingly strong, between work and leisure, home and “out.” We take coffee “to wake us up in the morning” and to set us up for a day’s work. Unless we have decided to treat coffee as an unhealthy and unworthy crutch which competent adults ought to do without, we drink it all day long in the office as well. (People trying to do without coffee provide themselves with sodas, juice, or water—often especially bought, purified water.) There may be a permanent coffee pot ready, full and hot, in one corner of the workspace. People often bring their own distinctive coffee mugs to work, a touching attempt to import some humanity and individuality into the office. Where tea is more popular, as it is in Britain, office workers listen for the jingle of the tea trolley arriving for the “break,” or again have a set of teabags, sugar, milk, and permanent hot water on tap. Coffee and tea “keep us going” or “up to the mark.” Coffee in North America is, mythically speaking, the opposite of alcohol: it is supposed to engender sobriety. When people have finished dinner, coffee “wakes them up” for conversation afterwards. Taken at the end of the evening it “gets them ready for driving,” being felt to dispel any last lingering effects of alcohol. It ends the relaxation and pleasure of an evening out and marks the beginning of the return home. People afraid of not getting a good night’s sleep if they drink coffee (they have to be ready for work in the morning) may be provided with coffee deprived of its caffeine: the taste, the colour, the social symbolism of the drink have become so important to them that they settle for coffee without what makes it (physically speaking) coffee.
Digestion, biologists and doctors tell us, is an exhausting business. Many cultures recognize this, and either end the evening immediately after dinner so that everyone can go home to bed, or they allow time for the guests to sleep off the meal before leaving. Lunch, in Hispanic countries, is followed by a siesta, as it is in traditional Iran. When H. Lichtenstein travelled in Bechuanaland in the first decade of the nineteenth century, he lunched with the African king, who sought out a quiet spot after the meal, lay down on the grass, and slept. The guests had to keep very quiet until he awoke; his councillors stood about meanwhile, waving ostrich feathers gently over him.
Since the women have often not participated in the meal, they feel less sleepy afterwards; indeed, even when they have taken part they need sleep less, and must clean up and do the dishes. Among the Newars of Nepal, a feast in honour of a tutelary divinity is a mixed male and female affair, eaten at a shrine in the country. A special clearing is made and a covering constructed beforehand. Lunch ceremonially ends with everyone being given a fraction of an areca nut to eat. Then the men smoke, chat, and sleep while the women wash the pots. (The convenient ceremonial dishes are leaves sewn together; they have become polluted by being left, and must be thrown away.) At about 4:00 p.m. the party feels sufficiently restored to return home to the village.
Dinner guests, especially if they have not been obliged to sit on chairs at a table, are often free to leave as soon as they have eaten their fill. After five minutes’ eating at the slametan feast, an Indonesian guest in a low tone requests permission to “follow his will”; he gathers up the uneaten portion of his meal and leaves. In nineteenth-century Egypt, a guest needed only to say his end-grace aloud, and then he was free to go; and in Russia, where people used to eat a lot of food very quickly, they would soon go home to sleep it off. In such cases, the conversation takes place on arrival at the host’s house; dinner itself is the climax and end of the occasion. A Chinese custom is for guests to attend several dinners in one night. They spend the evening coming, going, greeting, tasting, thanking, leavetaking; although they do try if possible to catch the “Four Heavies” (the Chinese version of the pièce de résistance), the four main dishes of the last course offered by the last host of the evening. (We should recall that Chinese banquets do not end with dessert.) This idea of moving from dinner to dinner, perhaps from restaurant to restaurant, one for each course, is enjoying some popularity in America today. It fits nicely into the mobility myth, and with the desire to cover as much territory, metaphorically as well as physically, as possible in the time allowed.
The hosts often decide when the guests should leave their house. One of the more spectacular exit rituals takes place in the United Arab Emirates. Aida Kanafani describes in detail an all-female dinner party, where the hostess announces the end of a visit by perfuming her guests in an elaborate ceremony designed to mark them with the honours of her house, so that when they return home their family will scent the difference, her difference, on their clothes. “Returning home, smelling nice, [the guest] is told: ‘You must have been somewhere. You smell nice. Where were you? Who did you visit?’” Food is thought of as having nullified the aesthetic purity with which the guest, clean and perfumed, arrived at the hostess’s house: she must have her purity renewed before she recrosses the threshold. When the food tray is removed, the end of the proceedings begins with the serving of coffee. The hostess then brings out her perfume box, and passes round several perfumes with bodkins for application. After all the guests have taken perfume, the incensing begins, with a lump of incense placed in the incense burner. Each guest first incenses her head, breathing the smoke in and passing the burner under her veil to let the scent impregnate her hair. At last she puts the burner under her robes and sits for a while with her dress and cloak tightly closed over the smoke; if any wisps of incense escape, she readjusts her clothes until it is all contained. After sitting like this for at least a minute, the guest hands the censer on to her neighbour. When all are done, the guests begin the ceremonial farewells that accompany their actual departure.
Deciding when to leave is often left up to the guests—but this does not mean that no rules apply. Guests must on no account leave too early, or stay too long. Formal dinner parties in western Europe and America used to last two and a half hours from arrival (on time) to departure, and a guest staying longer would not recommend him- or herself for another invitation. Leaving too early, on the other hand, can cause a whole party to break up; it is therefore very rude. “Never take out your watch to see the hour, as this would seem to remind others of the time,” wrote John Trusler in 1804; one should rather “steal off as unnoticed as possible, for if you chuse to go, it is not necessary that you drag others with you.” By this date, there was no longer the obligation to run the gamut of servants waiting for tips, then called “vails”; there was no need for an early leaver to feel suspected of skipping off without opening his wallet. Trusler actually says tipping is now impolite, because it looks as though you think your host is not giving good enough wages.
There are a few ways in which modern hosts can discreetly urge tardy guests to leave. In Germany, a guest must start being conscious of the time if the host ceases offering to fill the glasses; though if the hostess (as opposed to the host) pleads with one to stay, one should do so—but not for longer than thirty minutes. If a French host solicitously enquires “whether you would like something—fruit juice perhaps?” the cue has been given: either accept fruit juice or not, but leave in a short while. (Unfortunately, modern rules of this kind are usually unspoken and quite variable, so that one can never be absolutely sure, and must therefore opt for hypersensitivity.) A Romanian host is clearer: he quietly recorks the wine bottle.
In simpler, less time-constricted societies, feasts can last a very long time. Hosts may pressure guests, “prevailing
upon” them, to stay for days, eating, sleeping, and talking, as in the terrible story of the Levite’s concubine in the biblical Book of Judges, chapter 19. Or the guests, who might well have travelled some distance to make the visit, might simply refuse to depart. This clearly happens fairly often, because many societies have strategies in place for taking care of such an eventuality. The Pedi of South Africa take such abuses of hospitality very philosophically: they simply cease to consider the visitor to be a guest and turn him or her into a useful member of the family, with exactly the same work to do as everyone else, until the outsider gets tired and goes home. The Ainu of Japan actually have a feast they can give, called “the Feast of being Sent Back, the Mouth having been Cooked For.” If the guest still refuses to take the hint, the host and hostess simply move out of the house and go to live with relatives; this apparently does the trick. The Elizabethan English used to play nasty practical jokes on guests who outstayed their welcome, such as inducing them to wipe their hands and faces with a wet napkin impregnated with powdered vitriol and gall—the effect of which was to stain their skin black.
In the past, getting home from a feast could be quite arduous, if visitors came from far away; and in any case the host wanted his banquet remembered as long as possible. It is therefore an ancient custom to give guests food to take home with them, or for eating on the journey back. Men whose womenfolk have had to be left behind might find an expectant family awaiting them at home: the unfortunate parasites of Greece and Rome must have used their dinner invitations in this way, to help support their kin. Ned Ward describes a banquet in seventeenth-century London:
The Rituals of Dinner Page 36