Table Manners

Southland Times, Issue 22728, 2 November 1935, Page 16

Table Manners

ARE THEY DYING OUT? One of the things that seem to have no place in modern life are table manners. A glance round a restaurant at lunch or dinner time reveals the majority of men and women with their elbows on the table, eating and talking with their mouths full, interrupting each other, buttering bread in the air ... in faqt, committing the thousand and one sins of bad manners which we as children in our generation were taught so painfully to avoid, writes Evelyn Taylor in the News Chronicle. Is this a good thing that table manners should be dying out? Certain of the arbitrary rules which made mealtimes a misery to children in the old days seemed io have very little to commend them, such as the dictum that it was bad manners to discuss food at table and also to express too violent an admiration for food or drink. Well do I remember lunching out for the first time at the age of seven with a much-dreaded aunt, who asked me as she helped me to baked custard—which I loathed—if I liked it. In my efforts to please I replied that I loved it, with well-simulated enthusiasm. “You should never love your food,” was the crushing reply. » Children soon discover that all grown-up people talk with food in their mouths, but the difference between them and children is that the grownups do it more cleverly and it gives offence to none. When my small niece the other day remarked on the fact that I was talking to her with my mouth full, and why would Nannie not allow her to do the same, I told her it had taken me 30 years to learn how to do it well, and she must’ be patient. But there is one feature of table manners, or rather the lack of them, that makes me feel Bolshevik every time I come into contact with it—and that is the habit of taking more of a dish than

is wanted and then leaving it messed about on the plate. Any child over the age of eight with ordinary training ought to know how much it wants of a dish, and if it is made to finish an over-generous helping will seldom make the same mistake again. Grown-up people who pick at their food and then leave it are really only fit for the nursery. Surely this revolting and wasteful habit might be avoided by giving children small helpings always in youth and insisting upon “a clean plate” and allowing them as soon as possible to help themselves and to gauge their requirements? Straws show the way the wind blows —and it is because modern men and women are too lazy or too selfish to pass each other butter and marmalade, salt, pepper and mustard, as they were solemnly taught to do in the Victorian days, that individual condiment sets, and individual jam pots and butter dishes are now a feature of breakfast, luncheon, tea and dinner services.