Thanksgiving Manners: Different Views

                    

“… whoever got his dessert first started right in without waiting for the others to be served. We cleared the table by stacking the dishes. Once we were invited to our fancy relatives for supper. When we sat down at the table, my sister - who was about 11 – announced gleefully, as children do when they figure they have caught a grown-up in a mistake, ‘Somebody gave me two forks!’ We had never heard of a salad fork.”

Saints and Sinners – Etiquette at the Table

No matter how memorable your Thanksgiving was, the chances are it didn't hold a drumstick to the riotous holiday festivities of Robert Allen and his young friends on one Thanksgiving Day past. Robert was 12 at the time. The parents of one of the two boys he hung out with were suddenly called away for the day.

The food for Thanksgiving dinner had already been bought, so it was arranged that the three boys would try their hand at cooking the small turkey and making their own meal. “We were given full instructions, which we followed with much horseplay,” Allen wrote in a magazine article years later. “As the smells began to emanate from the big wood range, we went around clumping one another on the back and chortling with satisfaction.

“What made the meal memorable,” he recalled, “was that we were on our own, free of sisters and mothers and able to dispense with such things as napkins, bread-and-butter plates, manners and all civilized restraint. We heaped mounds of mashed potatoes on our plates, took all the gravy the plates would hold, eliminated sissified thin slices and just cut the turkey in chunks - to match our appetites. If someone reached across the table and clawed off a choice piece, nobody sent him from the table. We just laughed and yelled and kept on eating.

“About halfway through the meal, we all got quiet. Nobody finished his mountainous serving. We cleaned up the dishes Without any enthusiasm and wandered off in different directions, not talking. I wasn't able to think of turkey with any sense of pleasure for quite a while. Whenever the meal was mentioned afterward, we had to pretend we had a wonderful time.

“Actually, we had all had an early lesson - that joy and lack of restraint are not synonymous. That there is something to be said for women’s ways. That there is real value in etiquette, formality and civilization. Robert Allen’s story brought back memories of what mealtime was like at our house when I was growing up. You could usually find the milk bottle on the kitchen table when we were eating.

“And whoever got his dessert first started right in without waiting for the others to be served. We cleared the table by stacking the dishes. Once we were invited to our fancy relatives for supper. When we sat down at the table, my sister - who was about 11 – announced gleefully, as children do when they figure they have caught a grown-up in a mistake, ‘Somebody gave me two forks!’ We had never heard of a salad fork.

“So I suppose you could say we grew up without any table manners. You could if you were talking about the kind of manners you read about in etiquette books. But after I grew up, I realized that we had been learning the kind of table manners that count. We were not allowed to stuff our mouths or talk with food in our mouths.

“We never criticized anything our mother put on our plates. We had to say ‘Please’ and ‘May I?’ and my father insisted on no nonsense at the table. Each of us said a table grace before we started eating, and another prayer before we left the table. I remember how shocked I was when I saw my first food fight at the fraternity house when I went to college. My father would have taken me out of college if he had seen the rolls and other food flying around the dining hall.

“As for Robert Allen, looking back with chagrin at the disastrous Thanksgiving dinner of his boyhood, he confessed. “In the future, whenever I let my appetite get away with me. I practically glowed with pleasure as my mother would lean across the corner of the table, rap me a good one behind the ear with her knuckle, and say sternly. ‘Robert, you're at the table!’” – George Plagenz, ©1999 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

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

Etiquette for New Salad Forks in 1930

Salad forks, since their first arrival on the table in 1885, came in a variety of types and shapes, just as salads themselves do. 

AN EDITORIAL writer in the Los Angeles Times sees a brighter future for Imperial Valley lettuce growers as a result of the recent invention of a new table tool designated to simplify the problem of eating lettuce salad.

The Western Growers Protective association is given credit for introducing the new lettuce fork to a public that has been trying for several years to devise a graceful method of devouring lettuce leaves.

Probably our former fellow-townsman, C.B. Moore, had something to do with this. If he did, we ought to erect a monument to C.B.

FOLLOWING is the Times editorial:

“Not content with starting new religions and ‘new architecture’ and new styles for the flappers, California has invented a new lettuce fork with a blade attachment to cut succulent salads. We are inventing a new etiquette to go with it.

“This naturally cuts the old-timers to the quick. We grow more lettuce in Imperial Valley than anywhere else on the globe and something just had to be done so that so much of it would not be left on the plate. The Western Protective Association has taken the heroic initiative in the matter.

“Heretofore it was regarded in good form to twist the salad into a large gob and thrust it into the maw even as the hayfork jams the grass into the mow of the barn. Not even the best circles could see anything pleasant in the struggle to drape one's facial foliage around these large, unwieldy quantities of fodder.

“But with this new trick salad fork, with a combination like the old jackknife with a corkscrew and fifty-seven other varieties of tools, we are able to inhale lettuce with comfort and stimulate another of California’s products.”

“The silversmiths are also said to be backing the innovation and that means that the best families will lend themselves to the cause. For many of them have stock in the concern or have mines and will be pleased to have old cutlery out of date. 

“California has taken the orange out of the Christmas stocking and got it on the breakfast table. For a time it was in peril of being put up in prescriptions like spinach by the doctors; but it has turned the corner and can be gedunked at the soda fountains. The whole country is alkalizing its system by orange juice and we are picking the profits for our purses.

“Once we got the world full of prunes; but it woke up one morning and turned to fruit cocktail instead. It got grapefruit in its eye and hope in its heart. The great question a few years back was how to eat an orange. But now the spiffy are acquiring lettuce forks and the price of sterling silver is about to take a sudden advance.” – Calexico Chronicle, 1930

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

New Lettuce (aka Salad) Forks

A salad fork on the left and gilded lettuce forks (shown with a matching lettuce spoon on the right.) Lettuce forks and spoons soon became attached and were then known as “salad tongs.” The writer clearly had the two confused and also had no idea that salad forks were first introduced to the public in 1885.
Lettuce forks are for serving lettuce, thus the length of up to 9” and longer. Salad forks are a bit shorter than dinner forks. The gilded Towle salad fork above was also marketed as a “pickle fork,” however many salads were pickled up until fresh lettuce and greens, along with other perishable vegetables and fruits, were widely available in markets and as more people acquired refrigerators in their homes. This made fresh, green salads more popular and seen on more tables.

AN EDITORIAL writer in the Los Angeles Times sees a brighter future for Imperial valley lettuce growers as a result of the recent invention of a new table tool designated to simplify the problem of eating lettuce salad.

The Western Growers Protective association is given credit for introducing the new lettuce fork to a public that has been trying for several years to devise a graceful method of devouring lettuce leaves.

Probably our former fellow-townsman, C. B. Moore, had something to do with this. If he did, we ought to erect a monument to C. В.

FOLLOWING is the Times editorial:
"Not content with starting new religions and new architecture and new styles for the flappers, California has invented a new lettuce fork with a blade attachment to cut succulent salads. We are inventing a new etiquette to go with it.

"This naturally cuts the old-timers to the quick. We grow more lettuce in Imperial valley than anywhere else on the globe and something just had to be done so that so much of it would not be left on the plate. The Western Protective Association has taken the heroic initiative in the matter.

"Heretofore it was regarded in good form to twist the salad into a large gob and thrust it into the maw even as the hayfork jams the grass into the mow of the barn. Not even the best circles could see anything pleasant in the struggle to drape one's facial foliage around these large, unwieldy quantities of fodder.

"But with this new trick salad fork, with a combination like the old jackknife with a corkscrew and fifty-seven other varieties of tools, we are able to inhale lettuce with comfort and stimulate another of California's products.

"THE silversmiths are also said to be backing the innovation and that means that the best families will lend themselves to the cause. For many of them have stock in the concern or have mines and will be pleased to have old cutlery out of date.

"California has taken the orange out of the Christ- mas stocking and got it on the breakfast table. For a time it was in peril of being put up in prescriptions like spinach by the doctors; but it has turned the corner and can be gedunked at the soda fountains. The whole country is alkalizing its system by orange juice and we are picking the profits for our purses.

"Once we got the world full of prunes; but it woke up one morning and turned to fruit cocktail instead. It got grapefruit in its eye and hope in its heart. The great question a few years back was how to eat an orange. But now the spiffy are acquiring lettuce forks and the price of sterling silver is about to take a sudden advance."– By R.H. In the Calexico Chronicle, 1930

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

The Etiquette of Gilded Age Salads

Due to the diversity of salads available in Western or European dining, salad forks were rather late to the table as a proper implement for dining. The first known “salad” fork was created in 1885. Prior to that time, salads were eaten with regular table forks, which had very little differentiation of tines. Lettuce knives or “salad knives” arrived on dining tables after 1926.
Above— Three different sterling salad forks, with distinctly different tines, all designed to pick up several different sizes, shapes and textures comprising a salad. The Towle Empire pattern salad fork has gilded tines, making it even more beautiful and more functional.

The term salad is applied to certain cold dishes composed either of meats, fish or vegetables. For generations, these have been served with a mixture of oil and vinegar, or oil, egg and vinegar. The oil furnishes the fatty matter for the meal, and being purely vegetable is more wholesome than the ordinary animal fats. 

Butter and cream are wholesome if taken unheated, but to make salad dressing, the butter is usually melted; hence its digestibility is destroyed, and under such circumstances a salad is robbed of its mission.

In these latter days many American cooks make a mixture of fruit, sugar and alcohol, and serve them as “salads.” These are not salads; are heavy, rather unwholesome, and will never take the place of a salad. I much prefer to call them fruit cocktails, and serve them as first course at luncheon or a twelve o'clock breakfast; or a dessert, and serve them with the ices at the close of the meal. 

Fruits mixed with mayonnaise dressing, and served as a salad are unsightly, unpalatable and a little nauseating. One cannot think of anything more out of keeping than white grapes in a thick mayonnaise. The simple so called French dressing is delicate and most worthy of recommendation. Over lettuce, cress or celery it certainly makes a palatable and wholesome dinner salad, and one in which children can be freely indulged. Such fruits as apples, pears, cherries, and pineapples, mixed with celery or lettuce, with French dressing, make an agreeable dinner salad.

A salad, simple in its construction, should be seen on every well regulated table three hundred and sixty-five times a year. Persons living in the country or on the outskirts of towns can, without cost, always pick sorrel, long dock, dandelions, and lambs’ quarters. In the city, one can, for a few pennies, buy sufficient greens for a dainty salad. 

If you cannot afford salad and dessert, choose the former by all means. The happiest closing to a real good dinner is a crisp salad well dressed, served with a bit of cheese and bread and butter or toasted cracker.

Left-over green vegetables, as beans, peas, carrots, turnips, may be used separately or mixed, dressed with French dressing, and served as a dinner salad. When you are cooking vegetables to-day for dinner, cook double the quantity, saving a portion to serve cold for to-morrow’s salad. Asparagus is much better cold than hot. Cold boiled cauliflower, carefully cooked spinach, leeks, beets, may all take their place in this delightful dish.

The Romans and Greeks used salads at the beginning of their dinner to create an appetite. In later days, however, salads are served at the end of the heavy portion of the dinner, or with the game, to bring back or sharpen the flagging appetite to the greater enjoyment of the final sweet.

The green vegetables contain the salts necessary to the well being of our blood, and oil is an important and essential food. The garlic and vinegar aid in the digestion and assimilation of other foods. In the use of garlic we must be most temperate. Rub the bottom of the bowl, or the bowl of the salad spoon. 

Bits of garlic throughout the salad are most unpleasant. Better use decided flavorings, in the form of flavored or scented vinegars. Put a few cloves of garlic into your vinegar cruet; into another, a little celery seed, or chervil; a mixture of these vinegars, or alternate use, will give variety and agreeable flavor. 

Tarragon vinegar is commonly used with mayonnaise dressing, sauce tartare, sauce Bearnaise and rich dressings of this character. Any small, fine greens that are in season, such as chives, mint, or chervil, may be finely minced and sprinkled over the dinner lettuce.

Standing at the very head of salad vegetables is the cos, or Romaine lettuce, and the ordinary delicate head lettuce, and corn salad, endive, chicory, sorrel, celery, garden and water cress, tomatoes and cucumbers. In the early spring the young tender dandelion leaves mixed with lettuce and a little carefully cooked beet root make a delightful dinner salad. Radishes, tomatoes and turnips are frequently used chopped fine, sprinkled over lettuce. 

Cauliflower, string beans, delicate shelled beans and peas, all add to the dinner salad. In the winter, cabbage and celery furnish us our daily salads. Nothing can be more delicate and delightful than the crisp, carefully cut, hard portion of a well bleached head of cabbage.

A spherical wire basket, known as a salad shaker, or drainer, is used to dry the salad materials after they have been thoroughly washed. The leaves of very curly lettuce frequently hold the water, even after shaking. Dry them with a soft piece of cheesecloth. If not dry, the dressing will not be evenly distributed.

Salads are digested largely in the small intestine. The oil contributes to the heat of the body; the small amount of vinegar aids in the digestion of other materials. —Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1898

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

Place Settings and Good Taste

The salad knife, cutting side toward the plate, is put next to the plate on the right. A silver bladed knife is especially correct for salad– but if you prefer knifeless salad eating, choose your salad accordingly and omit the knife.

Choice of Silver is Declaration of Good Taste

The silver on your table is a declaration of your taste. Whether it be sterling or plate, there is, in an excellent pattern and in the perfect form and proportion of the utensils, an unmistakeable aristocracy that gives a proud hearted splendor and distinction to your table. In your linens, you achieve the desired background for your tables and in your glass and china you have unlimited means for the expression of beautiful form. Then, in your silver utensils, you add the important accessories which are beautiful and decorative and which, because of their constant usefulness, are essential in furthering the “art of gracious living” and of table etiquette. 

Will the tops of the handles fit perfectly into the center of the palm of the hand? Determine if the handles are comfortable to hold and examine all of the pieces, when choosing your flatware.

Study All Pieces 

When you have determined upon the pattern of your silver, you must supplement its beauty by its practicality. For instance, when you choose a pattern of silver, you should examine all the pieces to be sure you are going to like the shapes of all the rest of the pieces. Determine if the handles are comfortable to hold and that the tops of the handles of the knives and forks fit perfectly into the center of the palm of the hand. Then ascertain, if possible, if the pattern is apt to be “discontinued.” 

The amount of flat silver to be placed beside each plate depends upon the menu to be served. The question of which fork or spoon to choose is no longer a problem if the table is properly set, since the outside implement is always the one you are meant to use. In setting the table, therefore, you put the fork or spoon that is to be used last next to the plate, and mentally continue through the courses backward, until the implements for the first course are on the outside or farthest from the plate. 

Placing of Forks and Knives Correctly

The dinner fork (or meat fork) is put next to the plate, prongs up, and about two and one-half inches from the edge of the table. The salad fork is placed on the left of the meat or dinner fork. The salad knife, cutting side toward the plate, is put next to the dinner knife (or meat knife) which is closest to the plate on the right. A silver bladed knife is especially correct for salad - but if you prefer knifeless salad eating, choose your salad accordingly and omit the knife. 

For “Continental Dining” the order of the courses is reversed and the dinner fork is placed to the left of the salad fork ,while the dinner knife goes to the right of the salad knife.

  

Spoons at Right 

The spoons are placed on the right of the knife in the order of the courses in which they are to be used.  The soup spoon, then, would be the spoon farthest from the knife. Some authorities affirm that it is correct to place only five pieces of sliver on the table for each cover, and that if more are required they may be brought in with the course for which they are needed. 

Glasses are put above or at the upper right of the knives. At luncheon or supper, if you serve iced tea or coffee in a tall glass, the long spoon is placed on the table beside it. – La Habra Star, 1935

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

Salad Etiquette

The Waldorf’ Astoria’s maître d’hôtel, Oscar Tschirky is credited with creating the Waldorf salad. After working at other establishments, including Delmonico’s, he retired in 1943, after working at the famous New York hotel  for 50 years.

Everything About Salad Etiquette

🥗 Questions and Answers on Salads 🥗 

Q. Should one eat the lettuce or salad green under the salad? 

A. Yes. It is part of the salad, is intended to be eaten, and polite guests will eat at least a little. 

Q. May lettuce be cut with a knife? 

A. Yes, if necessary—providing the knife has a sliver blade. (This custom arose because steel knives turned black.) Most hostesses serve salad that does not require cutting, but in many homes a salad knife is always provided with leafy salads. 

Q. May salad be served with the meat course ? 

A. Yes, a simple tart salad may be served right with the meat course. The individual salads are placed at left of dinner plate. When salad is a separate course, place it directly in front of the guest, after removing the dinner plate. 

Q. Where does the salad fork go, in the table setting? 

A. The salad fork goes to the left of dinner plate, then come the meat fork and left of that the fork for fish or entree. If a salad knife is used, it goes at right, next to the plate. 

Q. May salad be passed? 

A. Yes, and this is an effective way to serve salad at a party or buffet supper. Be sure, however, that each individual salad is easy to remove from the platter. 

Q. Is salad ever eaten from the dinner plate ? 

A. When garniture salad is served, such as a bit of slaw or similar mixture, to accompany meat or fish course, it may be eaten right on the dinner plate —either taken with a spoon or served as a garnish. 

Q. Must salad always have a plate to itself ? 

A. For parties, such as bridges, teas or luncheons, what the restaurants call a “club plate” may be used—the salad (in lettuce cup or shell) is then right on the large plate, with the other foods grouped on the same plate. 

Q. Should dressings be passed, even when the salad has been prepared with salad dressing? 

A. This is at the discretion of the hostess. Some salads are served without dressing, so that their beauty of arrangement will not be marred, and these require the passing of dressing. Too, some guests may prefer more dressing, and it is courtesy to permit them to have it. — Coronado Eagle and Journal, 1938

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

How Lettuce Changed Etiquette

“Salad forks” were not heard of prior to their creation in 1885. Prior to that time, luncheon-sized forks were often used for salads. It took 41 years before they would be joined at the table with their own “lettuce knives” or “salad knives” — “In the American book of etiquette, according to J. T. Saunders, freight traffic manager for the Southern Pacific company, who says that lettuce knives must soon be added to the list of table cutlery required by the perfect hostess.”           

Lettuce Changed American Table Etiquette in 1926

California is writing a new paragraph in the American book of etiquette, according to J. T. Saunders, freight traffic manager for the Southern Pacific company, who says that lettuce knives must soon be added to the list of table cutlery required by the perfect hostess. 

“For ages past,” Saunders explained, “authorities on etiquette have insisted that lettuce at table must be cut, speared and conveyed to the mouth entirely with the salad fork. Just try this on a sector of crisp and tender giant California head lettuce, and you will quickly discover that it is not so simple as it sounds." Hence the need for a lettuce knife. 

“From 9,744 carloads in 1922, shipments of California lettuce to eastern markets this year will reach the amazing total of 27,000 carloads, a gain of almost 200 per cent in four years. In 1920 shippers on our coast division shipped only 62 carloads of the salad delicacy.      

Special lettuce serving forks, most often with lettuce serving spoons, were a Gilded Age neccesity. In fact, gilded tines were needed to help prevent corrosion to the silver, caused by citric acids, vinegar, etc... and other salad dressing ingredients.— Salads were not popular in the U.S., until the mid 1800s. Their popularity, when they did become fashionable, was due to the fact that they were seen as very French. And “salad” could mean many different types of dishes, across the U.S., not necessarily just what we view as salads today. A salad could be a dish of asparagus or something served in aspic.  Salads were also a delicacy, as they needed refrigeration to keep fresh longer. Those who could afford large ice cellars, could also afford perishable salad greens.

This year, from the same territory, approximately 12,800 carloads will be shipped. “Equally startling has been the growth of Imperial Valley lettuce shipments. From 1,079 carloads in the 1918-19 season, the Valley will, during the coming season, send eastward more than 16,700 carloads of lettuce.” The famous California “Iceberg” head lettuce, developed and perfected by Imperial Valley growers, has created thousands of new lettuce lovers throughout the land. 

“There is no finer lettuce grown anywhere than in California and to this bears witness the fact that all the nation now eats lettuce. Fifteen years ago lettuce was regarded as a luxury, while today it is as commonplace in the American home as oatmeal and coffee.” — The Sausalito News, November 1926 

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