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 

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

Etiquette, Italian Renaissance Style

They dine and hold court with sprezzatura. "Sprezzatura" is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance" or "slightly contemptuous indifference." 

Even before Louis XIV contained the nobility of France at court, groups of French aristocrats had performed an important experiment in manners. They were following in the tradition of Italian Renaissance treatises on behaviour, such as "Il Libro del Cortegiano" (The Book of the Courtier) by Baldassarre Castiglione, (published: two years before Erasmus's book "de civilitate"), the Galateo of Giovanni della Casa (the word for "etiquette" in Italian is still "il galateo") (1558), and "La Civil Conversazione" by Stefano Guazzo, (1574). These works --more philosophical, ethical, and political then regular manners books had set out to be -- were addressed to aristocrats only, although like Erasmus's treatise they soon became much more widely read, translated, adapted, copied, and discussed.

They emphasized the uniqueness, the grace, the innate good taste of the ideal courtier. You do not learn these graces, you just have them, and you know them when you see them; you recognize them in yourself and the people you choose to associate with. People who do not possess them are pitiable perhaps, but most probably irredeemable. You try your best to keep them out of your life.

An essential part of the charm of those with taste is its effortlessness: you must, says Castiglione, show "sprezzatura", a word meaning slightly contemptuous indifference. You are not trying to be charming --to try is to ruin the entire effect, for you become thereby pretentious. To "reach" in this manner is by definition to pretend to a level you have not attained. Indeed, the very fact that you are pretentious means you can never achieve it. Pretentious people sweat and struggle in their attempt to be what they are not -- whereas the elect, the born "powerful because best" (which is the original meaning of the Greek term "aristocrat"), must achieve nonchalance, literally, the state of "not being heated." Apart from the quality of being cool (that is, relaxed and unpretentious), it was very difficult to say in what, exactly, such charm consisted. One was forced to fall back on admitting that it could not be explained. The person in question just had a je ne sais quoi, an "I don't know what."- By Margaret Visser, from "The Rituals of Dinner"

Judith Martin, aka “Miss Manners”

“Galateo” by Giovanni Della Casa, published in 1558 

Of the three most prominent surviving Italian books on conduct, “Galateo,” by Giovanni Della Casa, published in 1558 and now out in a new translation by M. F. Rusnak, is the one that promotes civilized manners for their own sake. The respective aims of Baldassare Castiglione’s “Courtier,” which recommends sprezzatura, the Renaissance equivalent of being cool, and Machiavelli’s “Prince,” devoted to realpolitik (and therefore stressing effective, rather than genial, behavior), are admiration and glory.

Don’t Be Disgusting
A book review by Miss Manners

In Renaissance Europe, Italy was Etiquette Central, attracting all the fascination and ridicule that go with that honor.

English readers in the early 17th century assumed Tom Coryate, a professional jester turned travel writer, was joking when he reported that Italians did not attack their food with hands and hunting knives as did normal people, even normal royalty. Those finicky Italians wielded forks, a nicety that did not become common in the rest of Europe for another two centuries.

Italian princes, courtiers and patricians sought instruction on improving their behavior toward others. That was not a goal that often appeared on the to-do lists of the power elite elsewhere.

Although “Galateo” is addressed to a favorite nephew, only in passing does Della Casa, an ecclesiastical diplomat, mention career advancement as an incentive to learn the ways of society. Nor, although he was an archbishop, albeit a worldly one who wrote salacious poetry, does he evoke God as his source, as did the earliest writers of rules of behavior. Rather, as a classics scholar, he uses an aesthetic standard.

Della Casa’s message is: Don’t be disgusting. Pretty much everything that comes out of a bodily orifice meets his definition of disgusting — so much so that the mere sight of someone washing his hands would upset people, as their minds would leap to the function that had necessitated that cleansing.

“Don't be disgusting.” Giovanni Della Casa 

Spittle is not the only unpleasant thing emerging from the mouth, he warns. People who recount their dreams or brag about their children or sing off key are also offensive. Other unfortunately surviving etiquette problems he mentions include checking mail when in company, monitoring what others are eating, grooming in public and joking about disabilities.

Another one is targeting individuals for correction, always a conundrum for the etiquette writer. Della Casa squeaks himself through as a father figure who wishes someone had so instructed him in his youth. But he also excuses his hero, Galeazzo Florimonte, the bishop whose Latinized name he gave to this book. It seems the original Galateo, whose name even now is a synonym for good manners in Italy, once ran after a departing guest to inform him that he ate disgustingly. But because the complaint was bathed in compliments, Della Casa classifies it as a kindness.

A worse handicap is the general belief, then as now, that concern with how people mistreat one another, short of violence, is trivial and pretentious. The author, already known for his writing on subjects considered serious, anticipated that his latest interest would be considered frivolous. Being “appropriate, pleasant and polite,” he writes in response, “is either virtue or something very like virtue. And even though being liberal-minded or loyal or generous is in itself undoubtedly more important and laudable than being charming and courteous, nonetheless perhaps pleasant habits and decorous manners and words are no less useful to those who have them than a largeness of spirit and complete confidence.”

But he might not have expected his subject to be ridiculed by someone who took the trouble to translate “Galateo” (as dozens of others have, in many languages, over the centuries). In his introduction, Rusnak suggests that the book is intended to be comic, not only in its charmingly related examples but also in the above defense of etiquette, which he considers “too presumptuous to be anything but ironic.”

He then claims that “Giovanni Della Casa would be shocked” to be classified with the early- and mid-20th-century etiquette writers Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, having nothing in common with their presumed preoccupation with “finishing schools, regulations for place settings, bridesmaids’ gifts and formal invitations to showers.”

On the contrary. The Americans emphasized the underlying moral impetus of kindness and consideration. And while Della Casa was unfamiliar with bridal and baby showers, he stresses the necessity of observing prevalent customs and even fashions, and he devotes a chapter to the importance of ritual. The Americans kept making the point that etiquette could be acquired by all; Della Casa, being of his time and station, declared that gentle ways are not for the lower classes and that “silly and tender manners are best left to the ­women.”

Therefore, implying that etiquette has lately taken a turn for the foolish and snobbish is not the way to tout “Galateo.” It holds an important place in the long and rich history of etiquette books, written at a time when the medieval openness about bodily functions was being discouraged. From Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his “On the Civility of Children’s Behavior,” to the late-16th-century Jesuits who wrote rules that are often mis-attributed to George Washington (because he copied them), Renaissance etiquette writers were all begging their readers to stop spitting and touching themselves in public.

More significant, they were coaxing people — or rather, the upper classes — into the modern idea of refined urban life. This is what makes the book of interest historically — its vivid picture of the widespread behavior being condemned. Della Casa’s explanation for his rules of dress, table manners, gestures and speech is the need to avoid offending others. That is the basic bargain required to live in peaceful communities.

Naturally, it never happens without a struggle. Although the fork had been introduced in France by the Italian Catherine de’ Medici when she married the future Henry II, Louis XIV was so annoyed to see a court lady use one a century later that he had hair put in her soup. In “Richard II,” Shakespeare has the Duke of York complain to the dying John of Gaunt about “proud Italy, / Whose manners still our tardy apish nation / Limps after in base imitation,” surely a violation of Galateo’s rule against lecturing people to death.

So the French and the English disparaged Italian etiquette, only to lay claim in succeeding centuries to being Etiquette Central themselves; the translator of “Galateo” disparages American etiquette, and Della Casa writes that snobbery and “affected ceremonies have been brought into Italy from Spain.”

Can’t we all just get along?

—Originally printed on NYTimes.com- Judith Martin writes the Miss ­Manners books and newspaper and internet columns.

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