Made In America - Bill Bryson [143]
Americans, she felt, suffered from a ‘universal deficiency in good manners and graceful demeanour’.
The haste and indelicacy of American dining habits was a constant theme. Isabella Lucy Bird noted in 1856: ‘I cannot forbear mentioning the rapidity with which Americans despatch their meals. My next neighbour has frequently risen from his seat after a substantial and varied dinner while I was sending away my soup-plate.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, generally a sympathetic observer, was startled in North Platte, Nebraska, when a fellow diner asked another to pass a jug of milk and was turned upon in a fury and told there was a waiter for passing things. ‘I only asked you to pass the milk,’ replied the first man meekly. To which the second cried: ‘Pass? Hell! I’m not paid for that business; the waiter’s paid for it. You should use civility at table, and, by God, I’ll show you how!’ To Stevenson’s considerable relief, and presumably that of the milkless fellow, the threat was not carried out, and the meal was concluded in silence.3
The widespread American habit of chewing tobacco and disposing of the excess juice by expectorating in the approximate direction of a brass spittoon also excited much comment. Both houses of Congress, Dickens recorded in American Notes, ‘are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described.’ (In fact, of course, he had just described them.)
To be sure, there was something in this. Americans did often lack certain refinements. Louis Philippe, the future king of France, reported with dismay during a trip through the States in 1797, that when he asked for a chamber-pot his host told him there were none but invited him to make free use of the window.4 Even when they tried to haul themselves to a higher level of gentility, Americans often betrayed a certain misapprehension in regard to the conventions of society. A junior army officer named Nathaniel Tracy, charged with entertaining a visiting delegation of French officers, and being hazily aware of the peculiarities of French dietary habits, sent his men to a nearby swamp to gather a sackful of frogs, which were then boiled whole and served floating in a soup.
Only recently had Americans become generally acquainted with an appliance that had been around in Europe for some time: the fork. Before that, diners in the New World got by with knives (which often had two prongs on the end for spearing meat) and spoons. Because they were accustomed to using the right hand for both cutting food and raising it to the mouth, they developed the habit – curious to the rest of the world – of transferring the fork from left hand to right between actions.5 But even as late as the mid-1840s, many Americans were still struggling with the concept, as The Art of Good Behavior, a best-selling etiquette guide of the day, tacitly acknowledged when it cautioned: ‘If possible, the knife should never be put in the mouth at all.’
Having said this, the Europeans’ own manuals of decorum – such as the French tome that instructed its readers: ‘When the fingers are very greasy, wipe them first on a piece of bread‘6 – invite speculation as to the standards in their own dining salons.
What is certain is that until about the 1840s levels of hygiene and social sophistication did generally lag in America. Well into the nineteenth century, the bulk of Americans lived lives that were, in the words of one historian, ‘practically medieval’.7 Most Americans were by modern standards abysmally poor. A survey of Delaware farmers in 1800 found that only 16 per cent had a barn and only half had even one horse. A farmer who could not afford