At Table

The fish fork may wait until the ordinary conduct of a shared meal has become habitual, for consideration at table matters more than expertise in obsolete silver.

The full table setting I was trained to lay was a beautiful thing: logical, functional, refined over generations so that a meal of many courses might proceed with little confusion. Gone from common use. I have made what peace I can with this, and some days the peace holds. The useful part survives the silver service. Someone had thought, in advance, about how to make the meal pleasant for everyone at the table.

Place the napkin upon the lap when you sit, upon the chair when leaving temporarily, and loosely to the left of the plate when the meal is finished. These are small but visible habits, and soon require less thought than the alternative arrangement in which the napkin is left balled beside the water glass.

Begin eating when everyone at the table has been served, or when the host has begun, whichever comes first. The person still waiting for food should be spared the spectacle of your fork at work. The few minutes of patience this requires are a modest demand on any man whose self-control extends beyond the purely theoretical.

Keep approximately to the pace of the table, slowing down or attending to the meal as your own habits require. A man who finishes while the others remain upon their first course has forgotten that the meal is shared, however correctly he has used the fork.

Speak after swallowing. One resents the necessity of saying so, though enough modern meals provide evidence that food in the mouth is now treated as a private concern when it is plainly visible to the table.

On the subject of the telephone at table: remove it from the table entirely. Face down still announces its presence and your attachment to it. Put it in your pocket or your bag. The telephone on a dining table is the modern equivalent of reading a newspaper at breakfast, which was considered rude in my day and which at least had the defence of containing information worth reading.

Sit upright. The rule against elbows on the table was never the rigid prohibition that people suppose; it was a practical instruction to prevent a man from hunching over his plate. You may rest your forearms on the edge between courses. Eat with some semblance of posture, and the exact location of the elbow becomes less interesting.

If there is more than one fork, use them from the outside in. If there is only one fork, you have been spared the decision entirely. The knife remains in your dominant hand if you are cutting, the fork in the other. You may eat in the manner favoured across the Atlantic, setting the knife down and switching the fork across, or you may eat in the Continental style, keeping each implement in its hand throughout; choose one tradition and follow it with enough consistency to avoid the appearance of improvisation.

Approach a meal in company as a social act whose success is measured partly by the comfort of the other people present.