Etiquette and the “Napkin Burrito”

 

Gloves, once removed, had to join evening bag, fan, and large damask napkin, all precariously balanced on a slippery, possibly satin-sheathed lap. Emily Post suggested rather daringly (‘this ought not to be put in a book of etiquette, which should say you must do nothing of the kind’) that one might cover all these objects with the napkin placed cornerwise across the knees ‘and tuck the two side corners under like a lap robe, with the gloves and the fan tied in place, as it were.’” Basically, what she described results in a “burrito” of sorts.

“Creating what I call the ‘napkin burrito’...

“Gilded Age fashion for women dictated every little detail. And when it came to dressing for formal, Gilded Age dinners, bare shoulders for women with covered arms, was the reigning style. Very long, elbow-length, buttoned gloves were the fashionable evening choice, even though the gloves would have to be removed prior to eating one morsel of food. 

These long, multi-buttoned, gloves proved quite difficult to remove gracefully for many women. So difficult, that manufacturers designed gloves that could be rolled back upon the top of the hands in a ‘tacky’ effect, leaving the fingers sticking out from below. It gave a gluttonous appearance of someone in such a hurry to dine, that she just couldn’t be bothered to do what other female members of the dinner party had done — unbuttoned the gloves and removed them completely.

According to Margaret Visser in her book with The Rituals of Dinner, ‘The etiquette manuals were never very sure whether they approved of this labour saving device; Emily Post pronounced it ‘hideous.’ Gloves, once removed, had to join evening bag, fan, and large damask napkin, all precariously balanced on a slippery, possibly satin-sheathed lap. Emily Post suggested rather daringly (‘this ought not to be put in a book of etiquette, which should say you must do nothing of the kind’) that one might cover all these objects with the napkin placed cornerwise across the knees ‘and tuck the two side corners under like a lap robe, with the gloves and the fan tied in place, as it were.’ She went further, since one could no longer count on receiving a very large napkin, and promoted the carrying of paper clips, by gentlemen as well as ladies, to hold the napkin in place. All this assumes that a civilized diner would never require any dabbing at the lips with a napkin during dinner.’

“Basically, what she described results in a ‘burrito’ of sorts. – From Maura J. Graber’s book, “What Have We Here? The Etiquette and Essentials of Lives Once Lived, from the Georgian Era through the Gilded Age and Beyond...”, 2021

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Spaghetti’s Western Etiquette

 

Old Italian artwork in background on magazine cover, shows how pasta was once properly eaten.

“A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged 15, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as ‘a big dinner meeting.’ When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. ‘I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,’ he admitted. ‘My dad took some grief about it.’ The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. ‘When we have spaghetti,’ he announced later, ‘you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.’ 

What he described, after having learned it, is the dinner-table ritual —as automatic and unquestioned by every participant in it, as impossible to gainsay, as the artificial rules and preferences which every cannibal society has upheld. Practical reasons can be found for it, most of them having to do with neatness, cleanliness, and noiselessness. Because these three general principles are so warmly encouraged in our culture, having been arrived at, as ideals to be striven for, after centuries of struggle and constraint, we simply never doubt that everyone who is right-minded will find a spaghetti eating companion disgusting and impossible to eat with where even one of them is lacking. 

Yet we know from paintings and early photographs of spaghetti eaters in 19th century Naples (where the modern version of spaghetti comes from) that their way of eating pasta was with their hands— not that the dish was likely to appear at a formal dinner. You had to raise the strings in your right hand, throwback your head, then lower the strings, dexterously with dispatch, and without slurping (there are invariably ‘polite’ and ‘rude’ ways of eating), into your open mouth. (The spaghetti in the picture does not seem to have sauce on it.) Today, spaghetti-eating manners demand forks, and fist fulls of wet pasta are simply not acceptable on any 'civilized' occasion.” —Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

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

European 17th-18th C. Seating Etiquette

 ‘Eating together is a sign of friendship and equality, and yet people have always used the positioning of the “companions” as an expression of the power of each in relationship to the others.’ — The old Latin root word for “companion” meant to break bread with another person or people.

“A 17th century French print shows the well-marked squares on the tablecloth made by the linen press.” From Patricia Easterbrook Roberts,’ “Table Settings, Entertaining and Etiquette... A History and Guide”

Eating together is a sign of friendship and equality, and yet people have always used the positioning of the “companions” as an expression of the power of each in relationship to the others. Hierarchical seating arrangements make up one of the most intricate aspects of protocol, for placing guests at a table is a deeply political act. Where diners are not ranked, a political, or social and religious, statement is just as surely being made. 

A great and deliberate distinction is always created between meals that are formal and carefully structured, and those that are casual and relaxed. Intimacy can be fostered by “breaking the rules” (though one of the apparent paradoxes of social communications is that some level of formality must be maintained or relationship among dinner companions will be forfeited.) Seating arrangements are made to be rigidly adhered to, kept only in part, or rejected; in every case they are important.

Hierarchy at dinner is usually enforced when a group comes from a mixture of social backgrounds. we hear a good deal about what seems to us the outrageously discriminatory practices at medieval banquets. (One source of frustration for the scholars who research the history of medieval food is that the text of the period — and the Middle Ages are not unique in this — seldom describe the food served at a banquet in any detail; but they do make clear everything to do with precedence in the seating arrangements. This is because food was regarded as beneath literary consideration, whereas the seating was fascinating enough to be recorded.) 

Special guests and the host of the banquet sat at the raised “high table,” upon which stood a huge silver salt cellar, marking the place of the host or of an outstandingly important guest; the other people sat therefore “below the salt,” and the further away from it, the lower. The high-ups were deliberately given better food, and more of it.

Seventeenth-and-eighteenth century aristocrats in Europe, on the other hand, increasingly ate together in small groups, and would not hear of hierarchical seating; their host decided who would be a compatible group to invite, and guests sat down near the people they preferred. Tables were often quite small and, significantly, round. What had in fact happened at these “intimate suppers” was that the people who sat “below the salt” had simply been banished from the party.

During the course of two centuries, the lord of the manor had gradually removed himself, during dinner, from the side of his retainers, to eat with chosen companions in a room set apart from his great hall. It is easy— and so very modern— to be egalitarian once the lower orders have been placed in a totally different sphere, out of sight and out of mind, and certainly not invited to one's table. — From Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

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

Profiles in Etiquette — Margaret Visser

“The Rituals of Dinner” is a compendium of information about the world at table, from the Sherpas who send a child to summon guests to a dinner party (thus reducing the number of rejections, since the child knows neither the exact time nor the reason for the party, and is too young to be trusted with a reluctant guest’s contrived excuse) to the London hostess of the 1920s who sent handwritten invitations, again and again, until an elusive invitee, exhausted, gave in.
— Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

Review of “The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners,” By Margaret Visser

Author Margaret Visser writes on the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. Born in 1940 in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia Zimbabwe, in France at the Sorbonne and the University of Toronto Canada where she earned a PhD in Classics. She now spends her time at homes in Toronto, Paris, and South West France.
— Photo, Etiquipedia’s private library

The memory is about five years old, but vivid: A woman takes a table for one at a trendy Italian restaurant, orders a Caesar salad, and proceeds to eat it with her fingers. She picks up one long leaf of silvery green Romaine after another, always grasping the stem end, and then chews her way from the top of the leaf to her fingers.

The only thing more remarkable than her choice of utensils was the other diners’ reaction to it. All of us watched her. It was impossible not to. In a room full of people who were eating in the accepted manner, with a lot of gnashing flatware, this woman was breaking the unspoken rules. We were titillated and appalled. Who was this stranger, and how had she gotten in?

Food rules are a reassuring discipline, a way to prove who we are or to demonstrate who we’d like to be, a societal shorthand that betrays broad cultural attitudes. You are not only what you eat, but when, where, why, how and with whom. Margaret Visser may be a professor of classical literature at the University of Toronto by trade, but she is at heart a journalist, determined to answer the five W’s and an H that are the bedrock of that profession. To her credit, and to the reader’s unending, startled delight, she has succeeded.

“The Rituals of Dinner” is a compendium of information about the world at table, from the Sherpas who send a child to summon guests to a dinner party (thus reducing the number of rejections, since the child knows neither the exact time nor the reason for the party, and is too young to be trusted with a reluctant guest’s contrived excuse) to the London hostess of the 1920s who sent handwritten invitations, again and again, until an elusive invitee, exhausted, gave in.

Visser is a partisan of ritual, an admirer of structure at a time when newspaper stories herald the end of the family meal, and the at-home dinner party seems likely to become a museum diorama. She is aware that manners can be constraining, as in the story of the 15-year-old boy who humiliated his father by eating spaghetti with his hands at a business dinner, and was packed off to boarding school as a result. 

She knows etiquette can be foolish, as she shows in a wickedly insightful section called “Learning to Behave,” in which she examines how we cope with our children’s heinous crime of not being miniature adults. But she acknowledges the more important freeing aspects of ritual, of feasts that are “celebrations of relationship among the diners, and . . . expressions of order, knowledge, competence, sympathy and consensus at least about important aspects of the value system that supports the group.”

Manners have belonged to the masses of the Western World since 1530, when Erasmus published de civilitate morum puerilium (On the Civility of the Behavior of Boys), which offered instruction on everything from table manners to behavior in the bedroom; before that, manners were the province of the social elite.

We have managed, in the intervening centuries, to act as though we made up the eternal rules of this game, and one of the best things about Visser’s book is the way she deftly skewers Western pretentiousness. She need only explain the genealogy of the chopstick--called kuai-tzu (fast fellows) by Chinese boatmen, and hashi (bridge) by the Japanese, since they close the small gap between the lifted bowl and the mouth--to make the reader realize the idiocy of trying to transport rice from a flat plate, at table level, as we do.

She is as sharp as the knives that symbolize, to her, the violence that lurks just beneath the service of every meal, and requires the imposition of manners to keep one of us from slicing up the lout who refused to pass the potatoes.

The wry tone of “The Rituals of Dining” is reminiscent of the scene in the Japanese film “Tampopo” in which a group of proper young women are being taught to eat pasta properly. Their instinct is to lift the dish and slurp appreciatively, but their teacher cautions them to swirl with a fork, lift, and chew silently, a discipline that dissolves quickly because it makes no sense to them. The same foodstuff but different cultures— and Visser has seemingly endless permutations with which to enlighten the reader. A dining room chair (or a stool, or a dirt floor, or whatever the seat of choice happens to be) is a wonderful vehicle for a trip around the world, and through time.

Is there anything missing? It seems a quibbling question. Visser’s range of knowledge is so broad that it’s impossible to know what to ask for: Since I never knew it was acceptable behavior to place bitten pieces of meat back in the boiling pot for warmth at an Inuit feast, I could hardly have faulted Visser had she omitted that morsel of information. There may be a detail out there that escaped her, but I defy anyone to name it. Having been served a sumptuous meal, the sated reader would be perverse to inquire if there was anything left in the literary kitchen.

The only thing that Visser does leave to the reader’s imagination is the deep emotional component of some of the rituals she describes. Yes, a seating arrangement might have everything to do with power, but some food rituals spring from a more intimate source, from the link between food and the life we share with the people who eat at our tables. Take, for example, the use of candles. “Candles last their predestined, visible length,” writes Visser. “They represent spans of time for us: a lifetime, with the flame as life itself, fragile but still alight (they become, with this meaning, potent symbols during political demonstrations); or a significant period of time, as when candles on a birthday cake mean ‘years lived.’ ”

That brief, lyrical passage, with its imitations of mortality, of the delicate ways in which we both celebrate and deny our temporary status, was almost shocking to read, sandwiched in between so many other bits of information. Perhaps the best way to approach “The Rituals of Dinner” is as thought were a meal shared with a remarkable friend— slowly, reflectively, savoring every exchange, not just for what it says but also for what it implies. — By Karen Stabiner, 1991

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

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 

Dining History and Knife Etiquette

A silver and steel “bird” knife, which was a forerunner of the serrated-edged, steak knife
 =======================
According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image...” 
– Margaret Visser

Ever since the 16th century there has been a taboo against pointing a knife at our faces. It is rude, of course, to point at anybody with a knife or a fork, or even a spoon; it is also very bad form to hold a knife and fork in the fists so that they stand upright. But pointing a knife at ourselves is viewed with special horror, as Norbert Elias has observed. I think that one reason for this is that we have learned only very recently not to use our knives for placing food in our mouths: we are still learning, and we therefore reinforce our decision by means of a taboo. We think we hate seeing people placing themselves even in the slightest jeopardy, but actually we fervently hope they will not spoil the new rule and let us all down by taking to eating with their knives again.

For the fact is, that people have commonly eaten food impaled on the points of their knives, or carried it to their mouth as balanced on blades; the fork is in this respect merely a variant of the knife. With the coming of forks, knife points became far less useful than they had been; their potential danger soon began in consequence to seem positively barbaric. The first steps in the subduing of the dinner knife were taken in the 17th century, when the two cutting edges of the dagger-like knife were occasionally reduced to one. The blunt side became an upper edge, which is not threatening to the fingers when they are holding knives in the polite manner.

According to Tallement Des Réaux, Richelieu was responsible for the rounding off the points on table knife blades in France in 1669, apparently to prevent their use as toothpicks, but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals. It became illegal for cutlers to make pointed dinner knives or for innkeepers to lay them on their tables. Other countries soon followed suit. Pointed knives for all diners were later to return to the dining room table, but as steak-knives, which have a special image, linked deliberately with red meat and “getting down to business” when hungry. They are still quite rustic in connotation. — Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

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

Etiquette and Hands at the Table

Renaissance etiquette and one's hands at the table– On the Continent of Europe, propriety enjoins diners to sit with both hand in full view of the company; most correctly, unused hands should rest on the table's edge, being visible only from the wrists. 

Anglo-Saxon table manners allow, even prefer, the diner should eat where only one hand need be used, with the left hand lying on his or her lap.  It is a limitation upon one's ability to grab things, like the decision to use only the right hand, or only three fingers.  On the Continent of Europe, however, propriety enjoins diners to sit with both hand in full view of the company; most correctly, unused hands should rest on the table's edge, being visible only from the wrists.  (Erasmus had commanded boys to “have both hands on the table, not clasped together, nor on the plate.”)  The Anglo-Saxon custom of permitting guests to sit with one hand hidden seems, to Continentals, at best a sad sign of naiveté.

One reason for hands being kept in sight used to be the people had to learn not to scratch at table. Della Casa’s, “Galateo” says, for instance, that waiters were not to scratch their heads– or anything else –“nor place their hands on any part of the body which is kept covered, nor even appear to do so, as do some careless servants who hold them inside their shirt or keep them behind their backs hidden under their clothes. They must rather keep their hands in sight and out of suspicion... .” 

This rule holds even more strongly for diners, who are constantly warned not to stroke their beards, twiddle their mustaches, rub and pat themselves, or scratch their heads. Erasmus says it is unsightly to scratch, especially if it is done through habit rather than necessity. John Russell's “Boke of Nurture” counsels against “clawing your back as if after a flea; or your head as if after a louse.” Fleas, like gristle in the mouth or fibers wedged between the teeth, are to be ignored by polite people. The discomfort they cause must be heroically endured and not only hidden from view, but kept from the suspicions of others. – Margaret Visser’s, 1991, “The Rituals of Dinner” 

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

Etiquette and Napkin History

In Roman antiquity, napkins known as “sudaria” and “mappae”were made in both small and large lengths. The sudarium, Latin for “handkerchief,” was a pocket-size fabric earned to blot the brow during meals taken in the warm Mediterranean climate. The mappa was a larger cloth spread over the edge of the couch as protection from food taken in a reclining position. The fabric was also used to blot the lips. Each guest brought his own large mappa “napkin” and they became the first known “doggy bags”mas guests leaving a Roman dinner had their mappa filled with leftover delicacies from the enormous feasts to take home. With the fall of Roman Empire, napkins disappeared from the dining table. – Public domain image of “The Gourmand” by Henri Brispot

Napkins have been recorded as being in use, from the times of ancient Roman Empire and prior to then, in ancient Greece. References to word napkin dates back to 1384 AD. It is believed that the first napkin was a lump of dough the Spartans called "apomagdalie." It was a mixture that was cut into small pieces, rolled and kneeded at the table, that led to using sliced bread to wipe the hands.

In Roman antiquity, napkins known as "sudaria" and "mappae" were made in both small and large lengths. The sudarium, Latin for "handkerchief," was a pocket-size fabric earned to blot the brow during meals taken in the warm Mediterranean climate. The mappa was a larger cloth spread over the edge of the couch as protection from food taken in a reclining position. The fabric was also used to blot the lips. Each guest brought his own large mappa "napkin" and they became the first known "doggy bags" as guests leaving a Roman dinner had their mappa filled with leftover delicacies from the enormous feasts to take home. With the fall of Roman Empire, napkins disappeared from the dining table.

The Last Supper by Dieric Bouts depicting the use of napkins. 

Napkins returned to adorn the dining table many centuries later and the classic painting Last Supper from 1464-1467 AD by Dieric Bouts depicts the use of napkins on the dinner table. The use of the napkin in Europe began in 1400 on the tables of royalty, where they started to use napkins made from warm or even perfumed cloth. By the 16th century, napkins were part of rich dining experience and came in many sizes, known by various names like diaper, serviette, touaille (towel) depending on the size and intended use.

The art of napkin-folding in Europe began in Italy. The most popular, were those that were resembling animals. The folded napkins, or "serviettes", caught the eyes of all fashionable British, after the Restoration. Samuel Pepys wrote in 1669 in his diary, of a grand dinner held. The day prior, he wrote of having a caterer come to lay the table cloth and fold the napkins.

17th century saw the use of big sized napkins measuring 35" by 45" inches to help accommodate the needs of eating with bare hands instead of spoons and forks. The size reduced when forks and spoons were accepted as part of regular dining experience in major parts of Europe in the 18th century including Great Britain.

The 17th century also saw French come up with elaborate rules for nobility class which included instructions on napkin usage, a predecessor to modern day napkin etiquette, including the one which instructs the guests to not use the napkin for wiping the face or clean teeth or worse, rub one's nose.

“The French court imposed elaborate codes of etiquette on the aristocracy, among them the way to use a napkin, when to use it, and how far to unfold it in the lap. A French treatise dating from 1729 stated that "It is ungentlemanly to use a napkin for wiping the face or scraping the teeth, and a most vulgar error to wipe one's nose with it.” And a rule of decorum from the same year laid out the protocol: 

“The person of highest rank in the company should unfold his napkin first, all others waiting till he has done so before they unfold theirs. When all of those present are social equals, all unfold together, with no ceremony.

“Fashionable men of the time wore stiffly starched ruffled collars, a style protected while dining with a napkin tied around the neck. Hence the expression "to make ends meet." When shirts with lace fronts came into vogue, napkins were tucked into the neck or buttonhole or were attached with a pin. In 1774, a French treatise declared, "the napkin covered the front of the body down to the knees, starting from below the collar and not tucked into said collar.”– Margaret Visser

Napkin rings or "serviette holders" began in the Napoleonic period in Europe. The rings were used mainly by upper class families as a way to identify which napkin belonged to what family member. At the beginning of the 1800s, napkins became part of the bourgeois lifestyle, mostly to protect the sumptuous dresses of the period during meals. The art really took off around 1880 with the incoming prosperity of the Industrial Revolution. One etiquette book advised "one should, if possible, avoid taking the bones into your mouth and when removing any, should shield your mouth with your napkin."

A napkin folded into a kimono with the chopsticks tucked in for the diner to pull out for use.

Mrs Beeton’s book of Household Management, published in 1861, had an extensive reference section on napkin folding.  It also offered tips for the home's servants:

“Dinner over, the housemaid removes the plates and dishes on the tray, places the dirty knives and forks in the basket prepared for them, folds up the napkins in the ring which indicates by which member of the family it has been used, brushes off the crumbs on the hand-tray kept for the purpose, folds up the table-cloth in the folds already made, and places it in the linen-press to be smoothed out.

“After every meal the table should be rubbed, all marks from hot plates removed, and the table-cover thrown over, and the room restored to its usual order. If the family retire to the drawing-room, or any other room, it is a good practice to throw up the sash to admit fresh air and ventilate the room.”– Mrs. Beeton

In 1860's "The Ladies' Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness" by Florence Hartley, Mrs. Hartley recommends one bring a pincushion to a dinner party for use with the napkin:

"Sit gracefully at the table; neither so close as to make your movements awkward, nor so far away as to drag your food over your dress before it reaches your mouth. It is well to carry in your pocket a small pincushion, and, having unfolded your napkin, to pin it at the belt. You may do this quietly, without its being perceived, and you will thus really save your dress. If the napkin is merely laid open upon your lap, it will be very apt to slip down, if your dress is of silk or satin, and you risk the chance of appearing again in the drawing-room with the front of your dress soiled or greased."– Florence Hartley

And Arthur Martine's book of etiquette from the same period, gave advice on napkins and finger-bowls:

“Finger-glasses are generally handed round as soon as the viands are removed, but they are intended merely to wet the fingers and around the mouth. When the finger-glasses are passed, wet your fingers in them and then wipe them upon your napkin. The habit of rinsing the mouth at table is a disgusting piece of indelicacy, which is never practiced by any well-bred person.Upon leaving the table, lay your napkin beside your plate, but do not fold it." 

In 1895, George Rippey Stewart  lamented the British and their habits on the use of napkins:

“It is a matter of regret that table napkins are not considered indispensable in England; for, with all our boasted refinement, they are far from being general. The comfort of napkins at dinner is too obvious to require comment, whilst the expense can hardly be urged as an objection. If there be not any napkins, a man has no alternative but to use the table-cloth, unless (as many do) he prefer his pocket handkerchief— an usage sufficiently disagreeable.”

In 1911, Agnes Morton, in her book "Etiquette,"  wrote about napkins:

“Napkin rings are discarded by many who hold that a napkin should be used but once, and must be re-laundried before reappearing on the table.

Practically, such a fastidious use of table linen would exhaust most linen supplies, and overcrowd the laundry. The neat use of a napkin renders this extreme nicety superfluous as a rule of home dining, Care should certainly be taken to remove all soiled table linen. Nothing is more disgusting than a dirty napkin, but the snowy linen that comes spotless through one using may, with propriety, be retained in the ring to be used several times. This, of course, refers to every-day dining at home. On formal occasions no napkin rings appear on the table; the napkins are always fresh, and used for that time only. At the close of the dinner they are left carelessly on the table; not rolled or folded in any orderly shape.

Small fringed napkins of different colors are used with a dessert of fruits. Fancy doylies of fine linen embroidered with silk are sometimes brought in with the finger-bowls; but these are not for utility, the dinner napkin doing service, while the embroidered 'fancy,' a dainty bit of effect to the table decoration.

Origami flower folded napkin in the plate for the first course.

Modern Day Napkin Etiquette

Paper napkins can be flimsy, so it is okay to use more than one. In a pinch, a paper towel can be used as a napkin. 

Napkins are never a part of your clothing so do not use your shirt sleeve or shirt tail to wipe your mouth with. 

Napkins can never be dipped in your water glass to then wipe your face with, once you are old enough to eat on your own. 

Tablecloths are no longer napkins. They were at one time in history, but that was very long ago.

Your wrists and the backs of your hands are not napkins.

A napkin stays on your lap the entire time you are seated to eat.  If you have to leave the table for a moment and others are still eating, your napkin goes on your seat until you return. 

Napkins do not go back on to the table until everyone at the table is finished eating. 

Paper napkins can be crumpled and put on your plate when you are done, if the plate will be thrown away, as well.  Cloth napkins go beside your plate, to the left.  

Unless you are part of the family, do not put your napkin back into a napkin ring unless you have been advised to do so by your host or hostess. 

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Etiquette and the History of Forks

      

An assortment of fork designs, for everything from Victorian green corn, to baked potatoes, bread, butter, ice cream and cheese.

Early Forks and Use in Europe

Thomas Coryat was an English traveller and writer of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age (c. 1577 – 1617). He is principally remembered for two volumes of writings he left regarding his travels, often on foot, through Europe and parts of Asia. He is credited with introducing the table fork to England, with “Furcifer” (Latin: fork-bearer, rascal) which then became one of his nicknames. The fork he described had two tines. Since then, forks have been designed with many more than 2 tines. Some forks have up to 7 or 8, depending on what one is serving.

               

Antique melon forks ~ Perfect for cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydew melons, etc. Though the fork’s early history is obscure, the fork as a kitchen and dining utensil is believed by some to have originated in the Roman Empire, or perhaps in Ancient Greece. Others believe the fork’s origins to be in Africa or the Middle East. 

The origins of personal table forks are believed to be in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, when, according to “1843 Magazine” at the party celebrating her marriage to the son of the doge of Venice in 1004, Byzantine Princess, Maria Argyropoulina, niece to the emperor of Byzantium, scandalized the guests by using a fork to eat. Prior to that, forks were large, two-pronged utensils used for toasting or carving foods, and smaller versions could be used to retrieve food from jars or other containers, but no one had used one to eat with publicly. Her actions were immediately condemned. One priest declared that “‘God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers.’ When Maria died of the plague two years later, it was seen as divine punishment for her decadence.”

Use of the fork spread slowly during the first millennium CE and then spread into southern Europe during the second millennium. Forks did not become common in northern Europe until the 18th century and were not commonly used to eat in North America until the 19th century. By the mid 1800s, forks were being designed for nearly every type of food, and were considered necessary to every proper home's table.

It is common knowledge (and a flattering social myth for us) that our own ancestors used to have very different -- and much cruder -- table manners from those we practice today. We have “come on,” in other words; we have “progressed.” The simplest historical novel or movie can make an exotic effect by presenting a scene in which dinner guests gnaw meat straight off bones gripped in their greasy fists, then hurl the remains into the corners of the room. These, the audience accepts without difficulty, were the manners of the past, before we became modern and civilized. (This sense of superiority does not prevent us from feeling proud, at the same time, of modern simplicity and lack of pomp. We are as capable of despising our ancestors for their tradition-bound complexity as for their rudimentary standards of propriety.) 

Forks had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behavior. 

Manners have indeed changed. They were not invented on the spot, but developed into the system to which we now conform. Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative -- part of their purpose is always conservation -- they change slowly if at all, and usually in the face of long and widespread unwillingness. Even when a new way of doing things has been adopted by a powerful elite group -- using forks instead of fingers, for example -- it may take decades, even centuries, for people generally to decide to follow suit. Forks had not only to be seen in use and their advantages successfully argued; they had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour. After the eleventh-century date of the first extant document describing (with wonder) the sight of someone using one, the fork took eight centuries to become a utensil employed universally in the West. —From Margaret Visser’s, “The Rituals of Dinner” 

“It’s a dinglehopper!” Scuttle the seagull, answering an inquisitive mermaid Ariel, after she presents a dinner fork for his expert identification of a human item that she is unfamiliar with, in Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid ~ From “Let Them Eat Cake... The Strange Saga of the Mango Fork and the Unique Dining Habits of the Dutch” by Etiquipedia Site Editor, Maura Graber 

Meet Fork In Box. Fork, meet reader. “Meet Fork in Box” was the misspelled listing I found on eBay that allowed me to snag my second Dutch mango fork. Obviously a misspelling, I am sure the German Ebay seller who listed this beauty meant to list a “meat fork in box”. Before I go any further however, I should tell you a bit of my history with this odd utensil. In reality, I have never met a fork I didn’t like. My preoccupation with forks began not too long after Disney’s Ariel made her landing at the box office. Katie, my daughter, was almost three. She was enthralled with the precocious sea maiden who had red hair the color of her own. By the time the VHS tape was running continuously at home, I was starting an etiquette business for children and teens. The majority of the kids I taught were so used to fast foods, they rarely ate at a family dinner table. Showing them interesting and odd looking forks, along with other unusual utensils, was a way I found that kept kids interested when I talked of setting the table at home. I needed to do something to catch their wandering attentions, and strange utensils filled that need. 

Several Dutch mango forks ~ Many Dutch feel these forks are better suited to cake. All of these pictured are Dutch, save the fork on the far right. It was from South America. 

My husband was great at sussing out unique forks for me in the beginning. We stopped in thrift and antiques shops to find odd things for the table that were relatively inexpensive. Utensils over $10.00 seemed pricey. After all, these were props for my students to pass around and examine. Sales of very old used books on silver at the local library were how I did my research on pieces we’d found. Some were sold for only a quarter. I use them for reference still. 

Anything Victorian was popular during the 1990s. Tea rooms were sprouting up in malls, while magazines and books devoted to the subject were readily available. Over the next few years, as my collection of table silver oddities grew, my forays for the rarest of forks became more time consuming. Any weekend outing meant a side trip to a thrift shop or antiques mall. I was asked to give talks and lectures on not just my collection, but how people in America once dined with grace and forethought. At least more forethought than wondering if “... you want fries with that?”, before being handed a bag of fast food through the car window.– From various sources including the book, “Let Them Eat Cake,” by Maura J. Graber

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia