If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (42 page)

A description of the duties of a medieval waiter illustrates how tables were laid. ‘Put the salt on the right hand of your lord,’ the waiter is told, and ‘on his left a trencher or two. On their left a knife, then white rolls, and beside, a spoon folded in a napkin.’

Medieval and Tudor food was sent up to the great hall table in a big dish called a ‘mess’ (from the Latin
mittere
, to send), and you shared your mess dish with your three ‘messmates’. Those of higher status might be served up to fourteen or fifteen dishes, while the lower servants might only get one or two. On grander tables, a ‘second remove’ would see the table cleared and then laid all over again with another profusion of dishes. Pewter, horn or wooden cups would be filled with beer by the patrolling butler.

In a grand household the dishes would be carried from a service hatch or ‘dresser’ in the kitchen wall and up to the dining hall by an impressive procession of serving men (
plate 33
). The parade was masterminded by an officer called the ‘usher of the hall’. At Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, instructions from 1572 describe his duty at dinnertime: ‘he is with a loud voice to command all gentlemen and yeomen to repair to the dresser. At the nether end of the hall he is to meet the service, saying with a loud voice, “Give place, my masters”.’

Up on the dais at the upper end of the hall there were strict rules about which people could sit together. Often you see pictures of kings having dinner all by themselves because there was
no one else present of high enough rank with whom they could share a table. The instructions for the training of a medieval page remind the reader of the following rules of rank: a pope, emperor, king, cardinal, archbishop or duke might legitimately share a table, as might a bishop, marquis, viscount and earl. The Archbishop of Canterbury, though, was too senior to eat with the Bishop of York.

In the seventeenth century, you can at least see the royal family seated at the same table in a renowned picture showing Charles I, his wife Henrietta Maria and their son Charles sharing a meal. But the rest of their courtiers, unworthy of even approaching too closely to the royal table, are all standing back and watching respectfully, almost worshipfully, from behind a balustrade.

In the eighteenth century, this curious custom of watching the royal family eat was still occasionally performed at Hampton Court. But now, with the decline of monarchical power, the sight of royal mastication was no longer the treasured treat it had once been, and an element of farce entered the proceedings. Entry was open to any respectably dressed member of the public who joined the queue. This sometimes rowdy audience sat on ranks of seats, and one day the barrier holding them back collapsed. Those leaning upon it fell over and lost their hats and wigs, at which minor calamity ‘their Majesties laugh’d heartily’.

Even as the different ranks in society began to mix and share the same table,
placement
still held its sway, and at high-society parties throughout the nineteenth century the procession into dinner was organised according to status as defined by the peerage. It was Edward VII who eventually granted his prime minister the position of precedence immediately after the Archbishop of Canterbury. He did this after observing a dinner where Arthur Balfour, a plain ‘mister’, was seated below the undergraduate son of a peer. By the twentieth century, that struck even a king as wrong.

The Jacobean traveller Thomas Coryat came back from Italy
with news of a fabulous new implement called the fork. He had noticed how it obviated the need to have everyone’s dirty hands in the common dish. Of course, the English treated this novelty with the grave suspicion due to anything foreign: ‘we need no little forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our food into them,’ complained Nicholas Breton in 1618. But forks did eventually catch on, and with their adoption the position of the diner’s napkin changed as well. Formerly it had been laid over the shoulder to protect clothes from the messy passage of finger-held food from plate to mouth; in the seventeenth century, it moved downwards to be laid on the lap.

Along with more sophisticated eating utensils, behaviour grew increasingly genteel. To ‘belch or bulch’, wrote Richard Weste in his
Book of Deameanour
(1619) is ‘base, most foul and nothing worth’. ‘Roll not thy meat within thy mouth that every man may it see,’ was how the sixteenth-century Hugh Rhodes put it. He also advised that spitting was just about acceptable, but ‘let it not lie upon the ground … tread thou it out’.

After the meat course, Tudor or Stuart diners on a grand occasion might expect a ‘banquet’, the course consisting of sweetmeats and ‘subtleties’. Subtleties were feasts for the eyes as well as the mouth, strange confections of nuts, sugar, marzipan and spice formed into wonderful shapes. Other recipes for ‘banqueting’ food include marmalades of quinces and plums, and a set of instructions describing ‘How to Candy all sorts of Flowers, as they grow with their Stalk on’.

Because subtleties really existed for entertainment rather than nourishment, they gave rise to a curiously anarchic form of behaviour. Having admired them, people would smash them up, just as they throw glasses over their shoulders after a toast in some cultures today. The seventeenth-century Robert May described a riotous scene at one banquet of novelty food: ‘when lifting first the lid off the one pie, out skip some frogs, which makes the ladies skip and shriek: next after the other pie, when
out come some birds’. ‘The flying birds and the skipping frogs’ caused enjoyable chaos.

Some banqueting food wasn’t even edible. When the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury was celebrated in 1443, the subtlety consisted of ‘Saint Andrew sitting on high Altar of estate, with beams of gold’. It seems likely that such extravagant scenes were modelled in wood and plaster rather than sugar.

The Georgian age still saw a buffet-style profusion of dishes being served, albeit in two main courses followed by dessert. A footman’s instructions from 1827 describe how the serving dishes should surround a grand centrepiece such as a silver epergne, or ‘timesaver’, holding candles, fruit and condiments. The footman should arrange the table with military precision, the dishes being ‘set in a proper line’ or else ‘those who sit at the top and bottom will perceive it in an instant’.

Even though the table would be loaded with food, it was rude to reach over and grab. Ravenous guests would sometimes slip the footman a coin to position their favourite dish in front of their own place setting. If you were female, you might even feel forced to remain hungry, because ‘eating a great deal is deemed indelicate in a lady … her character should be divine rather than sensual’.

The carving of the meat, though, was a task reserved for the hostess, and while she wielded the knife everyone else would have had to conceal their impatience. This was quite a performance, but a necessary part of hospitality. The young Lady Mary Wortley Montagu received lessons in carving three times a week, and practised upon wooden models of ‘the different joints of meat’.

Georgian drinking glasses were filled by servants at the wine cooler standing in an alcove at one end of the dining room, and brought to the diner on request. Water glasses stood upon the table. The secret supporters of the Jacobite pretenders to Britain’s throne, the exiled, Catholic descendants of James II,
would covertly toast ‘the king over the water’ by picking up their wine glasses and passing them over the water jug. Water glasses were used not just for drinking but also for washing the fingers or teeth, and Tobias Smollett in 1766 complained how even polite people followed the ‘beastly’ custom of using their glasses to ‘spit, squirt and spew the filthy scouring of their gums’.

It was only in the 1830s that the centuries-old habit of buffet-style eating was changed, with the introduction of
service à la Russe
. This supposedly Russian innovation saw each serving dish placed upon the sideboard rather than the table, and the servants helped each diner individually. At first elements of the old ways survived: in the 1850s, a tureen of soup and the fish might still be ready and waiting on the table before the diners were seated. By the 1880s, though, all the food was served in completely separate courses as it is today.

Service à la Russe
delighted cutlery-makers, because the more courses you had, the more utensils you needed, and knives and forks began to be laid in thicker and thicker flanks on each side of the plate. But there was something a bit nouveau riche about taking this too far. The fish knife, for example, quickly became an indicator of vulgarity. (‘Phone for the fish knives, Norman,’ said John Betjeman in his poem parodying typical lower-middle-class sayings.) If you’d been lucky enough to inherit Georgian silver, you probably had little sympathy for the idea of separate courses or the requirement for new cutlery to eat them with. Only the late twentieth century saw a reverse in the general trend for more complicated cutlery: now the knife is on the decline as people eat upon their sofas, and various manufacturers are hoping that the ‘spork’, a combined spoon and fork for use one-handed, will catch on.

Contrary to first impressions, the change to
service à la Russe
actually made economic sense. If you were presenting a wonderful spread of food as the Georgians had done, you were forced to prepare more food than your guests were actually able to eat.
The abundance and wastage was justified because the leftovers were passed on to those poorer and needier as charity. (The best-known innovation that Consuelo, the new American Duchess of Marlborough, made to life at Blenheim Palace in the 1890s was to separate the meat from the sweet in the cans of spare food distributed to nearby villagers. Everything had previously been jumbled up together.) Serving food in courses, though, meant that you needed to cook only just the right amount.

1903. Today we imagine that people in the past ate a vast amount – but this is to misunderstand how food was served. Even so, some people were overweight!

A dinner party for ten in Edwardian times, the heyday of dining
à la Russe
, might easily have involved five hundred separate pieces of cutlery and crockery. Frederick Gorst, a butler, describes the way well-trained servants would almost dance in the successive courses: ‘each footman followed and complemented the others’, demonstrating ‘the technique which we had all spent years perfecting’.

You might see such a performance in a fine restaurant today, although not usually in a private home. The multicourse meal remains in existence only for special occasions, but it was still a standard, everyday event when, in 1939, the unemployed and upper-class Monica Dickens took a job as a cook. Her very first
client presented a daunting request for ‘just a small, simple dinner: lobster cocktails, soup, turbot Mornay, pheasants with vegetables, fruit salad, and a savoury’.

Such gourmandising on a daily basis might seem almost obscene, but then portion sizes were much smaller. And indeed, such a meal contains much more protein, and a lot less carbohydrate, than today’s bog-standard dinner dish of pasta and tomato sauce. Nutritionally speaking, turbot and pheasant provided a much better balanced meal than today’s time-saving middle-class standbys.

43 – The Political Consequences of Sauces

The English had twenty religions and only one sauce.

A French ambassador quoted by
Launcelot Sturgeon, 1822

Launcelot Sturgeon’s essay ‘On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces’ was first published in 1822. In it he examined the politics of food and our love–hate relationship with French cooking. He argued that the creation of a carefully blended, delicious sauce was vital to a nation’s well-being, as was the cook who made it: ‘the importance of an art which thus binds the whole fabric of society must be at once apparent’. Yet in his day, sauce, that ultimate French invention, was feared and derided. The British thought sauce was fashion, not food.