Dining History, Politics and Power

An individual fish knife and fish fork... Telltale signs that your host or hostess is a parvenu!

Where besides “The Rituals of Dinner” would you learn that by setting out silver fish knives you give yourself away as a sorry parvenu? Visser reports that fish knives were introduced long after the other components of a table service had taken hold.
“Laying one’s table with them was a sign that one had bought the family silver, instead of inheriting it and the ancient ways that it was meant to serve,” she writes. True aristocrats eat fish with forks.
 — Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

Forklore, Food Fights and the Politics of Placecards : Manners: Margaret Visser has spent years studying the way we eat— and what it says about us.

Margaret Visser estimates that humanity has been meeting for dinner for two million years. That gives the author of “The Rituals of Dinner,” a humane and learned meditation on why people eat the way they do, plenty of sociology and history to examine— lots of pots and pans and burps and toasts and food fights. Visser deconstructs them all, telling us a very great deal about ourselves in the process. 

Visser never intended to become the world’s leading authority on the folkways of the table. Fifteen years ago, having completed her doctoral studies in ancient Greek religion, she was living in Toronto, making do by writing the occasional academic article and accepting the odd teaching appointment. One day a friend mentioned that she had just done a radio talk show and that Visser really ought to try “doing” radio herself. 

Radio talk shows were not Visser’s idea of an edifying expenditure of time; she barely recognized the name of the show her friend cited: CBC’s “Morningside,” which in fact is the best-known radio show in all Canada. She looked up the number and dialed, having no idea that doing so was comparable to an unknown American calling up Ted Koppel and proposing to stop in for a chat on “Nightline.” 

“What do you want to talk about?” asked the dubious voice at the end of the line. 

“Ancient Greek mythology,” Visser replied with the utter certainty of vocation. 

The booker told her they’d be in touch and tried to hang up. But before he could cut her off, Visser got in a parting remonstration, advising him that he couldn’t possibly understand life in contemporary Toronto if he didn’t understand the ancient Greeks.
The remark was to be Visser’s great beginning, though she didn’t know it at the time.

Months after the kiss-off, “Morningside” had a last-minute cancellation. Visser’s phone rang, and there was the CBC booker on the line, now with a desperate tone in his voice. 

“Aren’t you the lady who said we couldn’t understand life in Toronto if we didn’t know about the Greeks?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Visser said. 

“Well, we want you to go on the radio and prove it,” he said.
Visser, seldom at a loss for something to say, came right over and delivered an authoritative and captivating recitation on just why it is that North Americans don’t eat insects. She happened to have well-developed views on the subject, having grown up in Zambia (when it was still called Northern Rhodesia), a part of the world where people do, in fact, eat bugs. 

The many thousands of Canadians who tune in to “Morningside” each day loved it. The CBC called her back. And back again.
The essay on insect-eating was the prototype for what would ultimately become Visser’s stock-in-trade: Learned but accessible explanations of commonplace items and practices that most North Americans take for granted. 

Visser says she sees these things, and asks questions about them, because she is something of a cultural orphan. 

“I was brought up by nuns in the jungle,” she reminds an interviewer. “I’ve got the classics, and I’ve got Africa and I’ve got the Victorians--it’s all part of my life.” 

In any case, Visser was soon making regular performances, and “Morningside” listeners were writing in to ask where they could buy her book. Visser hadn’t written a book, but she decided it was high time she did. 

She settled on food, she says, because “everybody’s interested in food.” Her first book, “Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal,” published in 1986, is an exhaustive social and economic history of eating, organized around the courses of a simple North American dinner. 

“A wonderfully learned, intelligent book about food; in every few lines one learns something one did not know before, about something important,” Robertson Davies, probably Canada’s greatest living man of letters, offered in a review. 

Inviting Visser to dinner is a daunting prospect. In person, she is . . . imposing. Tall and vital, with a strong head of auburn hair, she is the daughter of an English father and Irish mother who raised her (in Visser’s estimation) in a high Edwardian manner. 

And then there is the book. “The Rituals of Dinner” is, for all its good-naturedness, a scary work, devoted as it is to the mystery and menace of entertaining, the politics that underlie each decision confronting a host, the risks borne in each seemingly innocent gesture of hospitality. 

Faced with all this, I went ahead and asked Visser to dinner . . . and found myself worrying. 

Consider, for example, the seating plan. “Placing guests at table is a deeply political act,” insists Visser. Even “where diners are not ranked, a political, or social and religious, statement is just as surely being made.” 

Visser’s sub-chapter on seating plans opens with an account of a Han dynasty dinner where the party-givers planned to assassinate one Liu Pang at table, but relented when Liu graciously took what was considered the worst seat in the house and foiled the schemes of his would-be assailants. 

What prospective hostess would not be unnerved reading this?
Setting the table for Visser is equally unsettling. Where besides “The Rituals of Dinner” would you learn that by setting out silver fish knives you give yourself away as a sorry parvenu? Visser reports that fish knives were introduced long after the other components of a table service had taken hold. 

“Laying one’s table with them was a sign that one had bought the family silver, instead of inheriting it and the ancient ways that it was meant to serve,” she writes. True aristocrats eat fish with forks.
Then there’s the matter of the tablecloth. Visser reports that the best came from Damascus--hence “damask"--and were of “pure white twilled linen with only a discreet woven white pattern.”
” '(The correct tablecloth) must be washed and pressed every time it is used, and a single stain ruins it,’ ” my husband read aloud from Visser’s lengthy passage on linen. “See? That’s Visser talking. I think she means it.” 

And what about a centerpiece? Visser writes, I would say approvingly, of the Roman emperor Nero, who fitted out his ceiling with ivory panels that could swing open and shower his guests with flower petals. The ancient Egyptians preferred to wear their own decorations, “large cones of scented fat fixed to the tops of their heads; these were designed to melt during the feast, and drizzle deliciously down over the diners’ faces and bodies.” 

Visser also seems to have a daunting appreciation of manners, good and bad. “The ruin of states, the destruction of families, and the perishing of individuals are always preceded by their abandonment of the rules of propriety,” she warns, quoting from Li Chi, the 1st-Century Chinese “Book of Rites.” 

With all this, the mere making up of a menu seemed easy--wild mushroom soup, beef tenderloin, salad, fruit ices and plenty of wine. The seating arrangements I left to my husband (Visser notes that this chore is traditionally left to the woman of the house, who is supposed to arrange and rearrange her guests’ calling cards around a plan of her table, “very much as though playing solitaire”). 

“People have always longed to fling food at each other, and to smash the crockery,” Visser writes. Even Louis XIV (“he who ruled over the etiquette of Versailles”) turns out to have thought it fun to flick soup at his brother’s wig. The Greeks had a sport called kottabos, which involved flinging wine-dregs at a bronze target. And in the 17th Century, European nobles, at a banquet’s end, would step aside and let hoi polloi move in to smash what was left of their gaudy table arrangements. 

There was somewhat less excitement at our dinner, although when I saw my guests falling upon an hors d’oeuvre of fresh shrimp, I realized I was guilty of what Visser calls “The Great American Rudeness”: I had forgotten to put out a receptacle for the tails.
So: Nine well-dressed adults are sitting with the shrimp tails concealed in their hands, trying to look as though they were paying attention to the conversation when in fact they were thinking only how they might rid themselves of their debris. Beneath the sofa? But the smell might give them away. What to do, what to do? 

Visser to the rescue. “The host gives,” she said, waving her shrimp tail unashamedly, “and the guest receives. That’s hospitality. The Chinese took this to such an extreme that if your host offered you a prune, you didn’t throw away the pip; you put it down your bosom and took it home, as a sign of his largess.” 

As I excused myself and headed down the hall to get a dish for the shrimp tails, I could hear Visser regaling the guests with a note about the insouciant Byron, whose mistress, she said, would swan along the canals of Venice in a gondola with polenta in her bosom to keep warm. 

When the meat was ready, my husband urged the guests on to the dining room. Visser, of course, has devoted no fewer than 27 pages to the ritual (none dare call it ordeal) of a group entrance into a dining room, a maneuver pregnant with meaning, politics and near-operatic complexity. 

‘ “After you” is manners,’ a 16th-Century English proverb has it,” she states. “Begging someone to precede oneself indicates attention being paid and a desire to respect others. . . .” 

“Chinese and Japanese etiquette is perhaps the most full-blown example. Dinner in China begins, B. Y. Chao tells us, with a fight over yielding precedence on entering the dining room: ‘Among familiar friends, it may come to actual pushing, though never to blows.’ ” 

At our house everyone went through the dining room door with touching displays of self-abnegation that resulted, briefly, in a sort of gridlock. My husband held his seating chart aloft and sent the guests to their places— until I realized as he directed me to the farthest chair from the kitchen that he was holding his floor plan upside-down. 

Everyone got up and changed chairs, “Chinese-fire-drill-style.”
As we ate, Visser explained that she keeps a running list of topics she feels qualified to lecture on. One item was the Roman cult of the “vestal virgins,” the four maidens of antiquity consecrated to tending an eternal flame in the temple erected to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. For reasons known only to them, the Inuit (Eskimos) of Iqaluit invited Visser to their village on remote Baffin Island— closer to Greenland than to anywhere in Canada except the northern tip of Quebec— to talk about vestal virgins. 

Whatever Visser told the Inuit was evidently a big hit, because at the end of her talk, a shaman came up to say that he wanted the Vissers to come home with him so he could perform a dance for them. The Vissers knew it would be a great affront— and spiritually risky— to turn down a shaman’s invitation. So they canceled all plans for the evening and arrived chez shaman at the agreed-upon hour. 

The shaman’s house turned out to be nothing more provocative than a prefab box, much like a suburban tract house, with broadloom carpeting. The Vissers sat on the rug and waited. The shaman emerged from a side room, dressed in a business suit and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals. He brought with him a zippered plastic case, like something you might put around a tennis racquet, only larger. From it, he took a drum. 

“He asked us whom we would like him to conjure,” Visser recollected. “We said, ‘Why don’t you conjure our grandmothers?’
“And then he started beating on his drum, and bounding around the room, yelling, ‘Hooo! Hooo! Hooo!’ ” 

So vigorously did Visser imitate the shaman’s cries that the steel strings of my guitar, propped in the corner, began to vibrate of their own accord. “And all our grandmothers were now there,” she said.
“My strict Presbyterian grandmother didn’t appreciate being conjured on Baffin Island,” huffed Colin Visser, in accents at least as Rhodesian as Visser’s. I laughed somewhat warily, mindful of a Visser passage on the parallels between dinners, wars and murders:
“Table manners commonly forbid what we call belly-laughs, partly because uproarious mirth is expressed by the baring of teeth. Erasmus (of Rotterdam) advises that ‘if something so funny should occur that it produces uncontrolled laughter . . . the face should be covered with the napkin or with the hand.’ ” 

At the end of Egyptian meals, Visser reminded us, a servant would bear in a skeleton and present it to the master’s guests, to remind them that they were all mortal. 

Not me. Our party finished with fruit ices and cookies; coffee and brandy waited on the sideboard. And Visser talked about her next book. 

“It will be on Fate,” she said. “The Greek word for fate is moira , which also translates as slice— what you are meted out in life. . . .” 

— By Mary Williams Walsh, Times Staff, 1992

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia