The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  There are many societies today where spitting is not viewed with the horror we feel. There, however, people are likely to be appalled by our custom of using a handkerchief—blowing into it, then rolling up one’s snot and putting it carefully away in one’s pocket. They might think it far less disgusting to dispose of it completely, as one ejects other excreta. We have now provided ourselves with disposable paper handkerchiefs, so we can partially meet this objection. And as for spitting, we have tabooed that so successfully that most of us never think we need to spit at all.

  We were not the first to think of such total abstinence. Polite ancient Persians, as Xenophon and Herodotus tell us, were expected to refrain altogether from spitting. Greeks thought this an impressive, if “ethnic,” display of self-control, as remarkable as the Persian insistence on always telling the truth. Giovanni della Casa, in his Galateo (1558), alludes to these finical Persians and asks, “Why, therefore, should not we too be able to refrain from it for a short time?”—that is, as long as it takes to eat a meal. Erasmus had complained about people who spat “after every third word, not through need but through force of habit.”

  Spitting is always regulated in some degree, and is unlikely ever to have been thought a particularly enjoyable sight; it was necessary to the body’s cleanliness, and everyone therefore put up with occasions when other people spat, as a fact of life. Gradually, in the West, spitting was performed more guardedly, until a special piece of furniture was created, especially for spitting into. The provision of spittoons was an important proof of civilized forethought in Europe and America during the nineteenth century; they were common in public places until the mid-twentieth century in some Western countries, and still exist for example in modern China, where, although spitting in public is not really good manners, spittoons are often found in restaurants.

  The spread of the smoking habit had increased the felt need to spit, especially in America where tobacco was often chewed. Visitors to the United States in the nineteenth century constantly bemoaned the necessity of witnessing tobacco-spitting in public. The nineteenth-century English gentleman spat only in private: his “smoking chair” often included a drawer underneath the seat, into which he could demurely spit from time to time. Spitting at the dinner table, however, was by this time out of the question; indeed, polite women never spat, and men “had to” do so only in certain circumstances. “If you must spit,” the Illustrated Manners Book advises men in 1855, “then leave the room.” By the early twentieth century, spitting had become officially unhealthy; the terrors of tuberculosis certainly contributed to society’s categorizing spitting as a spreader of disease. This made the practice a mark of extreme disregard for the well-being even of people who were not present when one spat. Notices everywhere ordered pedestrians, restaurant customers, and train passengers not to spit; such signs were common in public places as late as the 1950s. Today, the signs are not posted because there is little need; most people rarely even think of spitting. If anyone does so, he or she gets a “filthy look” and other signs of disgust and avoidance from everyone near by. Die-hard spitters usually wait at least until they are out of the reach of direct obloquy. It may well be that people nowadays cough less and sniff less than they used to, because of changes in diet or control over the worst colds or for other physical reasons. But it remains true that there is a social taboo against spitting—one that has been increasingly enforced, with outstanding success.

  Extra-fine sensibilities are put off by fellow diners who blow over their food to cool it. If the soup is too hot, what should I do? The polite Edwardian child was supposed to answer, “I should put my spoon down and wait a little while.” Such restraint is part of the “proof,” which is commonly required, that one is not actually longing to start eating: the ancient Chinese were told never to spread their rice out so as to cool it; it is better far to wait. Blowing is too busy, too much of a performance; it draws attention. Breath is also slightly disgusting. As Giovanni della Casa put it rather coarsely in the Galateo (1558): “There never was wind without rain.” John Russell’s Boke of Nurture says you should beware of “puffing and blowing,” for it might “cast foul breath upon your lord.” Antoine de Courtin warns in 1672 that one should not blow the ashes off truffles, “for the breath of the mouth sometimes disgusts persons.” This is mentioned with the same pride in modern sensibility that he feels when explaining that spoons must be wiped after use, “because there are some so delicate that they would not wish to eat soup into which you have dipped the spoon after having brought it to your lips.” Ancient Chinese servers were forbidden to breathe on the food or drink they were carrying to their superiors; if anyone chanced to speak to them while food was in their hands, they had to turn their heads to one side in order to answer.

  Yawning is rude because it proclaims that you are tired, and perhaps bored. It involves opening the mouth wide, which is disconcerting, especially at dinner. People who try to speak while yawning are particularly trying. “Speak not in your Yawning, but put your handkerchief or Hand before your face and turn aside,” said the Rules of Civility which George Washington copied out as a boy. But polite society fought hard to outlaw yawning, like spitting, altogether. De Courtin had written in 1672 that “time was when one was allowed to yawn, provided only that one did not speak while yawning: nowadays, a person of quality would be shocked [by any yawning at all].” Yawning is involuntary, and difficult to prevent; the battle on this point has not been nearly so successful as that against spitting.

  Our manners decree that mouths must be kept calm, controlled, and quiet, except of course for the clear and clever conversation that must be carried on between (but not during) mouthfuls. There is to be no “squirting or spouting,” says Russell’s Boke of Nurture, no clacking of the tongue. All sounds, except those of well-modulated speech, are to be kept to a minimum—no scraping and clattering of plates and implements, no slamming down of glasses. Other cultures allow noise during eating, chiefly when the intention is to demonstrate delight, as when the Japanese slurp their noodles, the Chinese suck their bones, and lips are smacked for pleasure. None of these, be it noted, involves the baring of teeth; and chopsticks, like fingers, are much quieter than even well-controlled knives and forks. We are likely to eat as much as, and probably more than, the Chinese and Japanese, but we do not approve of dramatic expressions of enthusiasm about the food. We even forbid the universally enjoyable slurping of liquids, the sound of vigorous swallowing, the sigh of satisfaction at the end.

  Chewing, above all, must be as silent as possible. A closed mouth helps achieve this, but even a closed mouth needs to be controlled for silence. We must never draw attention to the threat implicit in savagely grinding teeth: the specific fear of possible violence lurks behind all of our “civilized” fussiness. We certainly feel, at some level, like the Kwakiutl of British Columbia in Canada, who are extremely aware of the importance of table manners and regard fast eating and noticeable chewing as potentially disastrous: these will, the Kwakiutl say, “bring about the destruction of the world more quickly by increasing the aggressiveness” in it.

  Picking one’s teeth in public after a meal is disgusting for bringing to mind firstly teeth, and secondly what was chewed but not successfully swallowed. Relief for the very real discomforts of continuing to converse with particles of food wedged between one’s teeth is offered by the ancient and convenient toothpick. This implement does discourage people from plunging their fingers into their mouths—a most improper crossing of boundaries, especially in a society which bans most eating with the fingers. But English and American sensibilities are so appalled by the thought of food stuck, unswallowed, in the mouth that we expect polite people to suffer and pretend they are perfectly at ease rather than admit the need for grooming of such humiliating directness. Yet tooth-picking is allowed in many societies today; it can very easily be regarded not only as common-sensical but hygienic. (The first toothbrushes, after all, were sticks chewed to a fur at one e
nd. They were fastidiously discarded after use, unlike our own long-labouring brushes.) One is always expected, where toothpicks are offered, to use them with careful consideration, and a covering hand.

  As early as the Boke of Curtasye (fifteenth century), polite English people were being exhorted:

  At meat cleanse not thy teeth nor pick

  With knife or straw or wand or stick.

  By “cleansing the teeth,” the author means rubbing them with his finger and a napkin, or even using the tablecloth; at that date most people in England never brushed their teeth, but polished and flossed them with cloth. Hugh Rhodes’s Boke of Nurture has a more lenient attitude towards toothpicks:

  Pick not thy teeth with thy knife nor finger-end,

  But with a stick or some clean thing, then do ye not offend.

  By the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Europe, having one’s own toothpick had become extremely chic. The clown in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale knows a nobleman “by the picking on’s teeth”; jewelled gold or silver toothpicks were sometimes proudly pinned onto hats and jackets. Where disposable toothpicks were desired, people used feather quills, scented woods like mastic, or “small bones taken from the drumsticks of cocks or hens,” as Erasmus suggested.

  The permanent kind quite quickly came to be thought vulgar because they made people deduce that one was fixated on food. For della Casa in his Galateo, a toothpick is “a strange tool for a gentleman to be seen extracting from his shirt … It also shows that person is well equipped and prepared for the service of his gluttony. And I cannot tell exactly why these men do not carry a spoon as well tied to a chain around their necks.” But carrying a toothpick almost permanently in the mouth is to this day jaunty and macho in several Mediterranean societies. Like chewing gum, toothpicks can be categorized quite differently from chewed food, even when carried for long periods in the mouth; chewing gum and toothpicks held carefully between the teeth do not disintegrate, and they are often given cooling anise-related flavours, which symbolize to us cleanliness and hygiene. Besides providing a satisfaction of the infantile urge to chew and flex the tongue and mouth, they are signals that teeth and breath are pure.

  Toothpicks, fairly successfully banished in England and America, have never been entirely rejected from the European Continent; it would be interesting to know just who uses them today, when, and what the strictures are. But another once-common hygienic measure has been abolished in Europe, though only very recently. This is the mouth-rinse after dinner. In 1885, Branchereau described how polite Frenchmen used the water supplied in finger-bowls at the end of the meal: you were not to swallow the water, but to swish it about in the mouth and spit it out into the deep saucer provided; a little was kept in the bowl, for dipping the fingers and wiping them on the serviette. It was important, Branchereau adds, to wash out one’s mouth with as little noise as possible: no gargling. The rinsing habit had apparently gone out of fashion in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it returned during the nineteenth. In Branchereau’s day, one could rinse one’s mouth or not, as one wished. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the British and the Americans seem to have dropped mouth-rinsing at table, its business and drama and its similarity to spitting, and did not take it up again. (North Americans remain, however—away from the dinner table—some of the most dedicated garglers and mouth-washers the world has ever seen.)

  During the long period while mouth-rinsing after dinner was slowly being put down in Europe, there were shocked reports from travellers who saw foreigners doing it—it is often taken to be the proof of a superior sensibility to react with disgust. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt considered that the mouth-rinsing he encountered among the upper classes in England in 1784 was “extremely unfortunate,” and Louis Simond in 1810 described the English “all (women as well as men) stooping over” and washing out their mouths, “often more than once, with a spitting and washing sort of noise … the operation frequently assisted by a finger elegantly thrust into the mouth! This done, and the hands dipped also, the napkins, and sometimes the table-cloth, are used to wipe hand and mouth.” Fifty years later Mrs. Beeton was just as horrified by the idea of putting one’s refined and luxurious finger-bowls to such a use; she says it is a custom of “the French and other continentals.”

  THE PROPRIETIES OF POSTURE AND DEMEANOUR

  People photographed several decades ago often look strangely foreign to us. This is not only because of changing fashions in clothing, or in furnishings and photographic props, or the faded quality of the pictures. All these enter into it, of course, as does the technology of the time, which obliged people to “freeze” when their picture was taken. It is also their facial expression, their posture, their attitude towards the camera which are of another world.

  Modern faces are far more self-conscious than faces used to be, and their expressions conform far more strictly to socially preset patterns; our posture too is stylized and conventional. Even our striving to look “natural” and “relaxed” is learned from such specifically modern experiences as a lifetime’s acquaintance with photography. There have always been fashionable faces and expressions, as well as ways of moving and standing and sitting, which marked an epoch. There was for example in Europe a late seventeenth-century female face and gaze, which was de rigueur if a woman was to be considered desirable in fashionable circles; there was also an upper-class eighteenth-century stance, stiffly upright for women, deliberately nonchalant and carefully relaxed for men; there were nineteenth-century figures and a nineteenth-century walk; and so on. Today, there are new constraints (we prefer to call them “styles”; they change slightly every few years), imposed upon our demeanour by the ubiquity of images in our world.

  We cannot live in a modern city without seeing ourselves constantly, in mirrors and panes of glass, in shop windows as we walk down the street, in photographs and moving pictures. We know what we are supposed to look like, from posters and television images of people whose shapes, faces, and expressions are admired, widely publicized, and imposed upon us as ideals to be emulated. In movies with historical subjects, although everything may be done to make costumes authentically of the period, postures—and particularly faces—are seldom convincing; modern actors have modern faces, especially if they are “stars,” chosen for their value as trend-setting images.

  One of the reasons why we frantically endeavour to reduce our weight is that the thinner the body, provided it is healthy, the better it seems to look in a photograph. Photographs are “framed” to select subject matter from a single point of view and to reject other things, other moments, other angles of vision. They are two-dimensional, incapable of change or response, and reflect visual signals only; they do not offer the total impression a living person makes. But their power as images, and the impression they give of capturing “reality,” reflect social prejudices about body shape and stance; they then in turn manage those prejudices, and demand adherence to them. We learn how to stand, sit, turn our heads, smile when a photograph is taken. When we walk down the street or sit down in a restaurant, we compose our features and control our gestures to fit preconceived norms. We come to take up these poses and facial expressions habitually, and they then seem natural, to be taken for granted; people who fall away from the ideal look very strange to us, and are easily suspected of being mentally ill. As usual, eating together requires the utmost consideration for the expectations and sensitivities of others. It follows that, at table, faces and bodies should with especial strictness conform to the rules.

  Manners books that survive from the past give us some idea of the iron control which we exercise over ourselves, for in advocating the norms we now almost automatically follow, they remind us that there are (or were) other possibilities. People are often told in such books, for instance, not to roll their eyes: do not roll them back when drinking, or stare up at the ceiling. “It is discourteous to look askance at others while you are drinking,” Erasmus wrote, “just as it is impolit
e to turn your neck round like a stork lest a drop remain at the bottom of the cup”; it is preferable to confine your gaze by looking into the glass as you drink. Mouths must not pout or gape, twist, purse themselves up, or twitch, he went on; it is aggressive and threatening to bite the lower lip with the upper teeth, or the upper lip with the lower teeth. Facial expressions must not let feelings appear too obviously: an anonymous manners book advised, in 1701, that one should avoid frowning and glowering when one is not served with what is clearly a delicacy.

  People needed in the seventeenth century to be told not to stare at what is on others’ plates, not to look envious, or as though they were comparing amounts or keeping an account of how much everyone had eaten. One should even avoid the excessive piety which was suggested by rolling the eyes upward during grace. It was impolite, Erasmus had said, “to stare intently at one of the guests. It is even worse to look shiftily out of the corner of your eye at those on the same side of the table; and it is the worst possible form to turn your head right round to see what is happening at another table.” He advises also against staring at someone with one eye open and one shut, and against arching the eyebrows arrogantly or lowering them fiercely; one should not have an irresolute brow like a hedgehog, or a menacing one, like a bull.