The Observer Magazine of 4 September 1988 announced it was ‘no longer smart to slum it – manners are back in fashion’. Moyra Bremner ‘restates the rules that will save you from social disaster’.
Bremner said ‘good manners tell you about someone’s character, while etiquette tells you about someone’s class’ and for those pesky peas on the cover, her advice was very specific: ‘The difficulty of balancing peas on the convex side of a fork means that forks are turned over, more and more. This is now almost acceptable, provided it is done elegantly and the food pushed on to the inner edge.’
Bremner also fulminated against frisée. ‘That antisocial mainstay of the nouvelle salad bowl does not belong at the civilised table. It cannot be tamed with knife and fork.’
In France, apparently, ‘socially selective mothers would vet prospective sons or daughters-in-law by serving raw peaches at dinner. Anyone who failed to eat one with due elegance – and a knife and fork – was unlikely to gain acceptance.’
One golden rule was to do as your hosts do, not as you do at home, ‘unless their manners are so dreadful that you can’t go quite that far’. Awkward if you’re ever at David Cameron’s, known to eat a hotdog with a knife and fork.
A section of ‘problem foods’ included asparagus (‘a real test of dexterity if it is thin and floppy’) and even bread (‘almost the only time you can correctly use your bread to mop up the juices from food is when eating snails’) and a warning from a Victorian book of etiquette to avoid ‘embarking on an orange’.
Jane Churchill, ‘specialist in soft furnishings for country houses’, could well have been writing in the Victorian age when she said: ‘I like to see children stand up when a grownup comes into the room.’ But what if the grownup proceeds to eat their peas on the outside edge?
