The Rituals of Dinner

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The Rituals of Dinner Page 39

by Visser, Margaret


  An ancient Greek example of extreme laziness was the Mariandynian, Sagaris (not a Greek, of course), who “was fed until he was an old man at the lips of his nurse, not wishing to take the trouble to chew …” The trouble with Sagaris was that he never grew up; weaning has usually been achieved by mothers pre-chewing food for their babies. This has long seemed distasteful in our own culture, the main reasons probably being the sliminess of the procedure and the taboo against adults removing chewed food from their mouths; the risk of germs spreading is, historically speaking, a secondary and late explanation. Yet we as parents are usually able to accept slimy sucked food from our toddlers without shock. One of the maturing rites of passage for new parents is learning to deal with slime, and with excreta generally. Babies reintroduce us to all of that. We learn to face what we had been taught was disgusting; we shall continue to be disgusted, but with more conscious awareness of the cultural dimensions of the taboo. And in any case our own babies are special: they are not to be separated from us, as other people are, by distancing reinforced with pollution avoidances. For somewhat comparable reasons, Indians hold saliva and left-overs to be horrible and polluting—yet men share food remains with their wives, and mothers with their children.

  Where people eat with their hands from a common dish, it is etiquette that nothing bitten should be put back; it must be eaten entirely by the person who took it. In the days when it was good-natured to share food directly with others at table, people had to be reminded “not to offer a pear or some other fruit into which you have bitten.” Such rules are made largely irrelevant by the modern custom of serving everybody separate portions, but we keep to the spirit of them by disliking teeth-marks left, for example, in bread. Bread is to be broken in pieces small enough to be consumed entire and not put back on the side plate: teeth-marks remind us of teeth, and anything bitten is “left-overs.”

  If a mouthful of meat proves too tough to chew, we are presented with a problem. In Erasmus’s day it was polite to “turn away discreetly and toss it somewhere”: the only area that counted, and had to be kept clean, was the table-top. However, bones and left-overs were on no account to be thrown on the floor in Erasmus’s book, even though the dogs would have appreciated them. They were to be placed neatly at the side of one’s trencher, or discarded in the dish called a voider. Special dishes for left-overs have officially returned to European dining-room tables in very recent years; the French call them poubelles de table, “table garbage containers.” They are useful nowadays because they obviate some of the table-clearing. The disgust value of left-overs standing on the table is apparently reduced by carefully relegating them to their own particular, consciously provided dish.

  Setting the table with knives and forks for everyone makes it possible for meat to be cut in small pieces before introducing it into the mouth, which is to be opened only just before the food reaches the lips. Gradually it has become improper for us to remove anything from one’s mouth at all. “If food has been taken into your mouth,” wrote Emily Post implacably in 1931, “no matter how you hate it, you have got to swallow it.” “Only dry bones [my italics] and stones can come out again”—an example given is the tiny “second joint of a squab”—and those are to be taken “between finger and thumb and removed between compressed lips,” or lowered discreetly onto a fork or into a cupped hand, and thence to the plate. They must first have been “made as clean and dry as possible in the mouth (with the tongue and teeth).” On no account must anything go directly from mouth to plate; a mediating, hiding, controlling hand or a deftly managed implement must always intervene.

  Strictly speaking, what lifted the food to the mouth should also be used to remove bones or stones. But fish bones, having been lifted on a fork, may be removed with the fingers: fish bones are not only fine but frightening, and a special allowance is made for them. The special care demanded by fish enforces a delicate manner of eating it, and the myth of fish as “female” food—tender, pale, and not too copious—is underlined in consequence. Fish “tends to be regarded as an unsuitable food for men,” writes Pierre Bourdieu of the French working class. It “has to be eaten in a way which totally contradicts the masculine way of eating—that is, with restraint, in small mouthfuls, chewed gently with the front of the mouth, on the tips of the teeth (because of bones).” The manner in which one must remove the bones with the fingers and deposit them on the plate is correspondingly fastidious. Fish makes one “nibble and pick,” like a woman, and prevents “wholehearted male gulps.”

  Erasmus advised the boys to whom his essay on manners was addressed not to be first to take from the dish in case the food turns out to be too hot; one will be forced then “either to spit it out, or, if he swallows it, to scald his gullet—in either event appearing both foolish and pitiful.” Knives, forks, and serving spoons, of course, made it less easy to judge whether a morsel was too hot. Seventeenth-century French etiquette demanded, if a scalding mouthful should inadvertently be taken, that one should lift the plate to one’s mouth, spit out the food, and hand the plate to a servant; it was rude, in spite of the urgency of the situation, merely to let the food fall to the plate. Another method, mentioned in eighteenth-century French books of civilité, was to spit out the hot mouthful, but hold up one’s napkin to hide the unpleasant sight. Again, it seems unlikely that someone in pain and shock would have the necessary presence of mind to carry this off. We are now much more used to hot food in the mouth—but probably far more cautious than we realize, sensing heat as the food approaches our lips. In any case the reappearance of the hot piece, since it would be unchewed, would not offend others too greatly, although the violence and the oddity of such an eventuality might.

  Our dislike of seeing chewed food finds an echo in our distaste for people who squish and mash together the ingredients on their plates: everything should remain clean-cut and clear, even when it is speared or balanced on the fork, until it disappears neatly into the mouth. It was thought a “solecism to be avoided,” in 1879, to carry two different things at once on a fork to one’s mouth. Condiments were an exception—though smearing them with a knife onto food already impaled on a fork was fiddling too intently with the food and forcing one’s morsel too insistently upon the attention of everybody present to be polite. Mashing food is a kind of chewing, performed on the open plate; such a view of mixing food is an important part of our own prejudice against many ingredients being amalgamated into one mass.

  When Roland Barthes wrote his eulogy of Japanese food (1982), he praised it for displaying qualities that are, in fact, not only Japanese but deeply ingrained modern European values. Even though he was himself French, he pooh-poohs what he calls “accumulation” and thickening, the blending and “enveloping” which are traditional in French but not Japanese culinary art. Barthes foreshadows nouvelle cuisine in his praise for the “uncentredness” of the Japanese menu, and for the “raw, washed, fragmented” look of the food. (It is interesting to compare the fussiness of the Brahman, and his preference for the purely and safely raw.) Barthes writes ecstatically that tempura (which was, in fact, originally a Portuguese dish) is not only cooked before your very eyes and not glistening with oil as it would be in Mediterranean cuisine, but it is also “light, aerial, instantaneous, fragile, transparent, crisp,” produced as it is by a cuisine of “precision and purity.” It is as different as it could be from how it will end up, chewed.

  Eggs are problematic for us, because although we love eating them—what could be sounder or more innocent than a fresh egg?—they are, when less than hard-cooked, runny in the middle; when soft-boiled, the whites might even fail to coalesce, and turn out glaucous and jelly-like, what we most wish to avoid. The result is that we are very fussy about how we eat soft-boiled eggs (indeed, many prefer not to risk them at all). Opening up the shell was once a miniature display, like carving. Louis XIV, according to Madame Campan, would slice the top off his boiled egg with a panache that excited admiration in the watching crowd. Erasmus h
ad warned boys not to touch the egg’s innards with their hands (special small spoons were rare): “It is ridiculous to clean out an eggshell with finger-nails or thumb; to do so by inserting one’s tongue is even more ridiculous; the polite way is to use a small knife.” It was also permissible to dip small bits of bread into a soft-boiled egg.

  Even when special spoons became available, they were used for digging the egg out of the shell, and then half-drinking the yolk and white out of a glass or eating it off a plate. This habit itself came to be thought revolting in England during the late eighteenth century. The spread of egg-cups and the arrival of increasingly specialized cutlery seem to have been the reasons—and of course the distaste for any kind of mashing on the plate. Americans clung to the custom, however, and many nineteenth-century English-language etiquette books mention this disapprovingly. They generally (except for a few defiant American authors) advise taking the meat out of the egg in decorous, unmessy spoonfuls and eating them at once, so that the egg’s flesh is scarcely visible to anyone. “Dipping” with bread became very informal behaviour. The Illustrated Manners Book advises Americans not to dig egg out and mash it, for fear of offending foreigners. “It may be, and probably is, the best way, notwithstanding, but not the fashionable method.” Branchereau was still advising French priests against eating eggs in the old way in 1885; Newnham-Davis (1903) described, with an Anglo-Saxon frisson, the Italian institution of egg da here (“to drink”): an egg with “the chill just taken off it” was drunk out of the shell, in front of everybody. It was, Davis complains, “not a pleasant operation either to see or to hear.” In many places today mashing eggs with butter on the plate persists, on informal occasions. Italians still like drinking eggs, but they do it from a glass, and are not supposed to be noisy about it.

  Since mouthfuls of food are so likely to cause offence, they are to be carefully limited as to size. Small mouthfuls have always been polite. Eubulus in The Hunchback (fourth century B.C.) describes a well-behaved ancient Greek courtesan, “not like other women, who stuff their jaws with leeks rolled up in balls, and greedily and disagreeably chomped great gobs of meat; no! from each item, as politely as a Milesian virgin, she popped in a tiny taste.” One was never to fill both cheeks, of course, nor was even one cheek to bulge suggestively out; filled cheeks are constantly referred to in medieval manners books as reminding polite people of the behaviour of monkeys. Chewing was to be performed as noiselessly as possible, a requirement that reinforced the principle of the closed mouth. It was wrong to add food to an as-yet-unswallowed mouthful, and also to drink with food in the mouth. This was not only disgusting to watch, in case food might escape from a mouth strained to capacity, but it could also lead to choking. One should have only so much in the mouth at once that one could quickly swallow it if need be:

  If any man speak that time to thee

  And thou shalt answer, it will not be

  But wallowing [i.e., shifting the morsel about in the mouth], and abide thou must—

  That is a shame for all the host.

  In ancient China, respect for one’s father was more important than any such decorum. The Li Chi ordains that if a father calls his son while he is eating, the son must immediately eject the food from his mouth and run.

  During medieval times, tongues were tightly monitored: no licking anything—not even one’s own plate if it looked dusty, said John Russell—or your own lips and chin; rather use a napkin, or the tablecloth. We ourselves are not allowed to lick our eating implements—not knives, it goes without saying, but not even forks or spoons. Tongues, of course, might be seen as themselves questionable objects—soft and versatile, slippery, and often very distasteful to behold. Tongues belong very definitely inside mouths, which is one reason why it is rude to stick them aggressively out at anyone.

  Although it is difficult to prevent grease from spreading round the mouth, an attempt should nevertheless be made. It was holding and chewing bones that caused a good deal of the trouble. In the course of several centuries, lifting bones became very relaxed behaviour indeed, and frowned on in correct company; the knife and fork were supposed to remove the meat, even if a lot of it was sacrificed to the ideal of avoiding both the use of hands for eating, and grease. “There used once to be a rule,” wrote Mrs. Humphry in 1897, “that a bone might be picked, if only the finger and thumb were used in holding it. But that was in the days when table cutlery was far from having been brought to its present condition of perfection. There is now no excuse …”—except in perhaps “the lowest grades of society.”

  The provision of special implements for moving food from serving dish to plate, as opposed to placing it in the mouth, came about slowly. European manners gradually changed—from several people taking it in turns to dip the one shared spoon into the pot and eating from it, to wiping a spoon carefully on a napkin before passing it on, to being provided with a spoon each for dipping and eating, to having to wipe even that spoon on a napkin before dipping it into the common dish just because one had sipped from it, to using a special spoon for serving and nothing else: one must never forget and use one’s own spoon by mistake. More and more cutlery was required for all this purity—and of course owning a great deal of cutlery meant ensuring that it was all put to use. It is still a complicated business to remember, for example, not to take butter with one’s own knife because jam and crumbs might disgustingly bespeckle the butter-pat, to use the special butter-knife (differentiated from the others in some way so as to remind people to leave it on the butter-dish), not to stir with the sugar spoon but with one’s own teaspoon, and so on. Still, we are not as fussy as the ninth-century Abbasid gentleman who was flanked, as he ate, by servants whose job it was to hand him spoons from the right and take them away from the left. His standards were so high that he never used a spoon for more than a single mouthful.

  Sharing cutlery at meals, like sharing plates, meant that people accepted great intimacy with those present at table. Norbert Elias has pointed out how table manners, in our own culture in recent times, have increasingly separated the diners physically from one another. Distaste for sharing cutlery came about not, to begin with, out of any fear of spreading disease: that is a modern discovery, which we now use to strengthen and rationalize an already existing taboo. Keeping our bodies clean and separate, and (therefore) safe from the disgust of others, seems in us to be a physical expression of a mental state, the positive aspects of which are self-sufficiency, self-control, and a partly self-interested consideration for feelings in others which are similar to our own. The negative aspects include unwillingness to share, to care, to touch, or to trust. The most persuasive example of Elias’s thesis is the gradual choking off in our culture of the habit of spitting.

  Spitting has carried since ancient times meanings that range from showing contempt to healing and good luck. It is an aversion signal, like sticking out the tongue (which is in some respects similar in meaning); ancient Roman women would spit down the fronts of their dresses to avert the evil eye, symbolically to protect themselves, and to show disapproval generally. Saliva is a kind of excrement, and as such was always potentially dangerous and suspect. Disgust at the thought of other people’s saliva (unless they are our children or our lovers) is surely ancient and possibly universal. Take for example the horrid custom of saving a special morsel of food for oneself by spitting on it and so ensuring that nobody else will want it. This is recorded of the greedy ancient Greek Demylos, but it is a ruse doubtless older still; it has been used ever since, and is not unknown today. In the past it was often thought, in addition, that since saliva was excrement the body should occasionally get rid of it, no matter how revolting the process.

  If one felt an urge to spit, one spat—it was unhealthy not to. The question was not whether or even when one did it, but where. It was rude while at dinner, in seventeenth-century Holland, for example, to spit on the table, or at the wall opposite one’s seat. Polite people spat discreetly, on the floor beside them. They m
ight even, with one foot, rub any conspicuous traces away. If you have to spit while standing and talking to someone (there being no table to permit one’s spit to disappear from view), you should, Erasmus wrote, “turn away … to avoid spitting on or spraying someone. If any disgusting matter is spat onto the ground, it should, as I have said, be ground under foot lest it nauseate someone.” An earlier manners book says one should not spit too enthusiastically or too far: it draws attention to the action, and makes it hard to find and tread on the result. When hand-washing is performed at table, one should resist the temptation, even though spit counts as “dirt,” to expectorate into the wash-basin.

  It seems that what came from the mouth and what came from the nose were treated similarly; both were called saliva. Rich people, who might be expected to own handkerchiefs, were exhorted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to use them to spit into, just as they used handkerchiefs for blowing their noses, in the presence of people for whom they wished to express respect. In front of the lower orders, on the other hand, they could spit on the floor. Upper-class people have always tended to feel that they could treat the lower classes to very intimate views of their physical selves—after all, servants cleaned up after them, and did their laundry. Unless they were held back by puritanical attitudes, masters and mistresses might be unembarrassed to be naked in front of the servants, for instance, or to have them witness excretion or copulation; embarrassment, being a sign of consideration, regulated behaviour only before one’s equals or betters. The need to inhibit spitting and other physical manifestations before everybody is in part an aspect of increasing egalitarianism.

 

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