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A couple of weeks ago, eating alone, I found myself sat next to a family with small kids. We made eye contact and exchanged low-bandwidth verbals. I usually do this as a courtesy. I’ve eaten out with children so many times that it seems a simple kindness to quietly signal that, honestly, it’s OK, we’ve all been there and I’m not going to be an asshole about it. But as the meal progressed, I became more uncomfortable. Not because of the behaviour of the kids, God no, but of the dad, who was loudly, in fact performatively, admonishing his kids for their “table manners”.
The ancients covered acres of parchment with instructions for “proper” comportment at table, but it was in medieval Germany that the first “courtesy books” were created, codifying manners for courtiers. The Italians loved the idea and during the Renaissance made quite a thing of it. Baldesar Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, or The Book of the Courtier, became a bestseller across Europe, not just to those who needed social graces for the day job at court, but also those who aspired. Once the genie was out of the cut-glass decanter (clockwise, please), anybody who had any kind of social cachet could bang out instruction manuals for those who feared they didn’t.
There’s obviously a perpetual market. People are always socially insecure and desperate for advice on how to behave. Ask Emily Post or “Miss Manners”, who waxed fat upon the insecurities of their readers. And, of course, I’m conscious that in my role as a public expert on hospitality, I ought to have an opinion and monetise it. Surely Mr Hayward’s Manual of Manners could be my retirement package, or at least a modestly self-funding Substack. But in truth, I picked up most of my behaviour from school and a weird combination of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook and American Psycho. (Full disclosure: I was a grammar schoolboy, so I walked under William of Wykeham’s motto “Manners Maketh Man” every morning from the age of 11. The adults had the adorable, if flawed, belief that manners would make us gentlemen, even if we failed academically).
Living in Cambridge, I am occasionally invited to dine at a college high table, one of the few places where the full-rig panoply of table manners is properly played out. Tables are set with an unimaginable armoury of kit. Glasses in all sizes, knives, forks, surgical instruments and, at one point, I swear, some sort of adjustable wrench, usually in heavy silver, kept in strongrooms in the bowels of the ancient buildings. There are many graces said, directions and orders in which decanters can be passed and, at one meal, a bowl and a silver ewer of fragrant water for handwashing between courses. I have never felt so weirdly unclean. There is also a convention that you don’t discuss high table outside of the college, so I’ll shut up.
But I run a certain gamut. I often dine with my own people. A grotty mob of cooks, gout sufferers, orally fixated self-gratifiers without impulse control and general greed-heads. Among them, the conventions of table include: freely sampling from each other’s plates, handing round of forkfuls, slurping promiscuously from plate and glass, broad-pattern spatter and occasional eructation. Dinner calls to mind TE Lawrence’s description of a Bedouin feast in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where he’s simultaneously as disgusted at the barbarity of the “manners” displayed as he is completely seduced by the joyous hospitality.
The laws of dining might seem immutable, but when novel foods appeared we did absurd things to adapt. When the English began encountering spaghetti, they decided it should be spun around the fork using a spoon, to be fully compliant, which would have caused any Neapolitan to stare in bafflement. I remember with heartbreaking clarity my well-meaning headmaster showing me how to mash my frozen peas on to the back of my fork so I shouldn’t commit the solecism of “using the fork like a spoon”.
My generation learnt to adapt by a kind of code switching. Chips with my steak, where I don’t want grease on my martini glass? I’ll ply the silverware like a ninja. But sit me at a diner counter and I joyfully scarf them with my fingers. My offspring, though, has already moved on. She only sees chips as finger food and will lay aside the tools when presented with them. Eating chips any other way than digitally makes about as much sense to her as mashing peas on to a fork.
Should I correct her, like the dad at the next table?
Let’s face it. In a week, she’ll use chopsticks as many times as she uses a fork. She’ll remember to raise the rice bowl to her mouth for Chinese but not Korean, slurp ramen to aerate the broth, hold a wine glass by the stem, text me with a picture of a “fish knife” and the quite justifiable message “WTF”. She’ll eat “sharing concepts”, negotiate tapas or family-style, or just sit in the car park of a fast-food joint where the only other human present at dinner is talking through bulletproof glass and a headset. Who am I to correct her “table manners”, because there’s every chance, in the past fortnight, she’s picked up a few I don’t know yet. I’m in awe of her. Where did she learn you’re supposed to tip your head 45 degrees to politely eat a taco? How the hell do you tear injera with only the right hand?
Of course, manners are important. Manners still Maketh Woman, but we need to make them simpler and fit for purpose. I suggest a single rule that must never be broken under any circumstances.
“Never judge another human being by their behaviour at table. After that, all bets are off.”
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