What’s the point of table manners?
Don't put your elbows on the table, don't talk with your mouth full. Who made these rules, and why, asks Felicity Lewis.
It was once an article of faith, in some families, that one should be fully equipped to dine with the Queen.
It wasn’t that the doorbell might ring and it would be Her Majesty popping in for lunch. It was more that one should know how to handle oneself – and a dizzying array of cutlery, glasses and goblets, dinner rolls and butter pats, troublesome foods and fellow diners – should one be asked to a fancy do.
Even today, manners still matter, even if attitudes to them vary. So, what are considered ‘‘good’’ table manners? Says who? And why can’t you put your elbows on the table?
Where did table manners come from?
The custom of meeting for meals goes back two million years ‘‘to the daily return of proto-hominid hunters and foragers to divide food up with their fellows’’, writes Margaret Visser in The Rituals of Dinner.
From her home in France, Visser says, ‘‘I start the book by saying there’s no such thing as a society with no table manners. And that’s why I started with cannibals, because even they have table manners – very strict ones – that make a big difference between eating an animal and eating a person.’’
Table manners express ‘‘all kinds of usually unconscious prejudices’’, she says. ‘‘You can find out a huge amount about any society by watching them eat: who’s higher than you, who’s missed out, who’s not invited.’’
Sociologist Norbert Elias put 1000 years of manners under the microscope in his 1939 study The Civilizing Process, studded with gems fit to make modern readers chortle. The 13th-century German poet Tannhauser spells it out: ‘‘It is not decent to poke your fingers into your ears or eyes, as some people do, or to pick your nose while eating. These three habits are bad.’’
By the 13th century, courtesy was gaining currency with a warrior nobility in Europe, writes Elias. When merchant and diplomat William Caxton set up a newfangled printing press in England in 1476, it was no surprise that a book of manners was among the first titles he cranked out. Caxton’s Book of Curtesye (1477) spoke unabashedly of belching and farting at the table – ‘‘Beware no breath from you rebounde’’.
Such talk of bodily functions was typically medieval in its directness, notes Elias. Life was a visceral affair. If you wanted to be delicate, you used three fingers to pick up your meat, and you refrained from offering a half-eaten hunk to someone else, even if you liked them. But the impression you made mattered, and gradually the code of behaviour became stricter.
By 1605, French King Henri III was being satirised for chasing peas around his plate with a pretentious implement called a fork, writes Visser, and in Versailles under Louis XIV, florid displays of feasting were de rigueur. It’s thought the word ‘‘etiquette’’ (ticket) came from place cards, which indicated where each guest was to sit at banquets. While a hereditary title could get you a place at the table, soon enough money could buy a way in, too. Learning the rules was a highstakes enterprise for the bourgeoisie – one didn’t want to commit a faux pas (false step).
The peak of fusty formal dining may well have been in the 19th century, says culinary historian Professor Barbara
Santich, of the University of Adelaide. It was by then accepted that cutlery was a good idea, and the Industrial Revolution meant factories could pump out the stuff. ‘‘You had a fish knife, an oyster fork, a cheese knife,’’ says Santich. ‘‘You would have a teaspoon and a coffee spoon and a soup spoon and dessert spoon.’’
Crockery proliferated. ‘‘There were tea cups and little coffee cups and saucers . . . A dinner service might have a dozen different items for each person. For each item of cutlery, there had to be a new rule.’’
But in the colonies, manners were more relaxed, right?
In a socially mobile colony, it was manners, more than a family coat of arms, that ‘‘reveal[ed] to us the lady and the gentleman’’, declared the Australian Etiquette, or the Rules and Usages of the Best Society in the Australasian Colonies in 1885. ‘‘Manners and morals are indissolubly allied,’’ it contends, ‘‘and no society can be good where they are bad.’’
But free from the strictures of British deportment, colonials did relax some rules. ‘‘The picnic became terribly popular in Australia,’’ Santich says, ‘‘much more so than in England. The picnic was, in a way, a deliberate infringement of table manners.’’
Barbecues do away with some of the rules, too, says Visser. They dissolve the hierarchy that comes with sitting at a table, although she suspects not entirely, noting how it tends to be the men ‘‘doing the fire’’.
‘‘You look at people in restaurants. There are ways that some people hold their knife and fork that would have been frowned on, or even a more American style [of cutting one piece of food, putting the knife down, transferring an upturned fork to the knife hand, then bringing the cut morsel to the mouth] – you wouldn’t have been allowed to do that.’’
Pamela Eyring, who heads the Protocol School of Washington, says Americans are more casual but, as with anywhere, table manners are all about context.
‘‘When I was the chief of protocol at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, we had German military counterparts who were visiting, and they wanted to go to an authentic cheeseburger restaurant. So, I took them, and they [wanted] to use a fork and knife. [But] I said, ‘Culturally, you have to pick it up and bite it – it tastes better this way’,’’ she laughs. In upscale restaurants, though, she uses cutlery to eat her burger.
What is behind table manners?
Rupert Wesson, academy director at Debrett’s – an authority on how to behave and who’s who among the British peerage since 1769 – says avoiding violence was an ancient driver of etiquette. ‘‘If you sat down for a meal, to a certain extent, you were vulnerable.
‘‘Was the food poisoned? Would that knife I’d just given a stranger end up being plunged into my chest? So [today], it’s rude to wave your knife, point your knife. The knife should never really come up much above the height of the plate.’’
There are more positive reasons for table manners, too.
In the Punjabi village where chef and restaurateur Jessi Singh grew up, families ate together sitting on jute mats on the floor. Some of his friends did not have enough to eat. ‘‘The biggest manners would be, you can’t leave anything, and you eat happily whatever you get in front of you,’’ he says.
Grasping at food is just not the done thing. ‘‘If you think about something really simple such as reaching across the table,’’ says Wesson, ‘‘and everyone says, ‘Gosh, that’s rude, we don’t do that’, you can even run that back [in history]: that’s the idea of grabbing more than your share.’’
Slouching is poor form, too, thus ‘‘Sit up straight!’’ Every place at a table has a boundary made up of the cutlery and the space between chairs, says Visser. Keeping your elbows in, and not spread out on the table, is a way of not invading your neighbour’s space.
Hygiene is behind many of the manners Santich studied from 14th and 15th-century Europe, which were not unlike the ones drummed into her as a child. ‘‘Not putting too much in your mouth, not talking with your mouth full and not wiping your hands on the tablecloth. The three of them I would call simple hygiene that would arouse disgust if you did them.’’
Can you have bad table manners and succeed?
Any head of state will have a team to advise on etiquette, says Eyring, but ‘‘they have gaps, they’re humans . . . they forget, or get casual. I mean, you might get sick’’. George H.W. Bush famously threw up in the lap of Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa while suffering from a gastric illness during a state dinner in 1992.
‘‘Meals are a tool of the trade both in conveying messages and forming relationships,’’ says Richard Rigby. As a diplomat from 1975 until 2001 in Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, London and Tel Aviv, he researched etiquette before each posting. Sometimes, the meal is the message. When John Hewson visited Beijing as Australia’s opposition leader in 1990, he was one of the first Western leaders to do so after the killing of protesters in Tiananmen Square. He declined to attend the Asian Games ‘‘to avoid being the focus of propaganda’’.
He was duly given the bum’s rush. ‘‘The warmth of the initial introductions faded as the meetings proceeded,’’ he later wrote, ‘‘to the point where, at the last formal banquet, a 13-course meal was served in about 12 minutes.’’
Rigby, who was there too, chuckles. ‘‘Normally, you would have an hour and a half. Courses were whipped away before you had a chance to get into them – I’ve never witnessed anything like it.’’
So, what is the point of table manners today?
‘‘There’s etiquette and there’s etiquette,’’ says Melbourne priest Father Bob Maguire. ‘‘The best etiquette is to make sure that you put other people first.’’
Maguire hosts a big Christmas lunch every year. ‘‘We have 100 people with knives and forks and plates and God knows what they haven’t seen before, but they do their best,’’ he says. ‘‘The best manners is to make sure that other people feel comfortable in your presence.’’
‘‘Etiquette is more about care and consideration,’’ says Wesson, ‘‘and all of those things that allow everyone to sit down at the table as equals, to share food and to feel comfortable doing it.’’ He points to a ‘‘weaponising’’ of etiquette where people are ‘‘consciously and overtly’’ judged for ‘‘incorrect’’ manners. ‘‘The sort of people who would notice and make a mental note probably aren’t the sort of people you want to be dining with anyway.’’
Another good reason for table manners, says Visser, is that they provide a kind of false morality. Even people who behave very badly must at least behave themselves at lunch, she laughs. ‘‘You can’t get out of it, in other words.’’