At Home - Bill Bryson [101]
What caused dining rooms to come into being wasn’t a sudden universal urge to dine in a space exclusively dedicated to the purpose, but rather, by and large, a simple desire on the part of the mistress of the house to save her lovely new upholstered furniture from greasy desecration. Upholstered furniture, as we have lately seen, was expensive, and the last thing a proud owner wanted was to have anyone wiping fingers on it.
The arrival of the dining room marked a change not only in where the food was served but also in how it was eaten and when. For one thing, forks were now suddenly becoming common. Forks had been around for a long time but took forever to gain acceptance. Fork originally signified an agricultural implement and nothing more; it didn’t take on a food sense until the mid-fifteenth century, and then it described a large implement used to pin down a bird or joint for carving. The person credited with introducing the eating fork to England was Thomas Coryate, an author and traveler from the time of Shakespeare who was famous for walking huge distances—including once to India. In 1611, he produced his magnum opus, Coryate’s Crudities, in which he gave much praise to the dinner fork, which he had first encountered in Italy. The same book was also notable for introducing English readers to the Swiss folk hero William Tell and to a new device called the umbrella.
Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly—and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one’s lip or tongue was great, particularly if one’s aim was impaired by wine and jollity. Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines—sometimes as many as six—before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people seemed to be most comfortable with. Why four should induce the optimum sense of security isn’t easy to say, but it does seem to be a fundamental fact of flatware psychology.
The nineteenth century also marked a time of change for the way food was served. Before the 1850s, nearly all the dishes of the meal were placed on the table at the outset. Guests would arrive to find the food waiting. They would help themselves to whatever was nearby and ask for other dishes to be passed or call a servant over to fetch one for them. This style of dining was known as service à la française, but now a new practice came in known as service à la russe in which food was delivered to the table in courses. A lot of people hated the new practice because it meant everyone had to eat everything in the same order and at the same pace. If one person was slow, it held up the next course for everyone else, and meant that food lost heat. Dinners now sometimes dragged on for hours, putting a severe strain on many people’s sobriety and nearly everyone’s bladders.
The nineteenth century also became the age of the overdressed dining table. A diner at a formal gathering might sit down to as many as nine wineglasses just for the main courses—more were brought for dessert—and a blinding array of silverware with which to conduct an assault on the many dishes put before him. The types of specialized eating implements for cutting, serving, probing, winkling, and otherwise getting viands from serving dish to plate and from plate to mouth became almost numberless. As well as a generous array of more or less conventional knives, forks, and spoons, the diner needed also to know how to recognize and manipulate specialized cheese scoops, olive spoons, terrapin forks, oyster prongs, chocolate muddlers, gelatin knives, tomato servers, and tongs of every size and degree of springiness. At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 different types of flatware for the table. Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: