EXTREME CUISINE: Table manners reflect how we see ourselves and others. And, like wider society, they are constantly changing, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
The second meal I ever cooked was a boeuf bourguignon and when I recalled the meal in conversation with friends later one of them announced, provocatively, that this simple French stew was the quintessential man's dinner party trick.
Men cook to impress, she said, a novelty of the second half of the 20th century, and boeuf bourguignon, in her view, was the easiest way for a man to achieve his real objectives, to be the star at dinner.
This wine-soaked stew needs no skill and that's why most men choose to cook it, just as most go through a Beethoven phase telling everybody: you just have to listen to the Piano Concerto Number 5, while you chew on your boeuf.
Meals are about manners and in the widest possible sense. They incorporate such important issues as what we think about each other, how we think our friends are motivated in life, and how sophisticated or naive they might be.
Meals present opportunities for praise, celebrity and rejection. To be included at dinner is more important than sex, in the sense that we are programmed to forget sexual rejection whereas losing our place on the dinner party list is the painfully memorable judgment of a whole group.
Modern table manners go back a long way. The Renaissance philosopher Erasmus, as well as masterminding a revolution in thought, was also much exercised, in his book On Civility in Children, by the appropriate way to blow the nose at the table as well as when and where to vomit. Table manners were thus created.
The need for instruction has not gone away; nor have the advisers. Manners International is a US company that offers instructional videos and website FAQs on similarly profound issues: how to blow your nose at the table.
Michael Jackson's recent trial revealed that the blanched singer even trained his monkeys to behave at the table. All very American, you might say. At Quarry View primary school in the northeast of England, table manners have been brought onto the curriculum. In Ireland, we wait and see.
The table is where humans learned to judge each other and also to impose their views of civility. Manners are now created outside the disciplining stage of a table and four, six, eight or more chairs where people sit facing each other, knives in hand, and that might be why we have a substantially worsening problem with teenagers. They don't sit opposite mum and dad 300 and more times a year.
I remember it as the occasion when parents could check on the progress of their children, survey their manners and their willingness to give in to parental pressures.
Humans have relied on guidance at meals for more than 4,000 years. What is different between now and then is the purpose we bring to learning about food.
In previous centuries the purpose of works of etiquette was to accommodate people to the limitations of their shared lives, perhaps to persuade people to recognise that life was easier if they respected the social hierarchies and left the salmon rivers to the king and his lords, or that a better life for all could be achieved by getting people to use individual plates and use long forks that kept contaminated fingers off the roast, and, of course, through permissions that allowed the less aggressive of the group, the children for example, to get a fair share of the meal, or recognition that the mother was due a little extra instead of being the first to sacrifice.
Early etiquette books are social treatises that helped shape society and social relationships. Today's etiquette is really a shopping list for everybody's extras. They are guides to how everything is not only possible but can also look good and taste pukka. The health aspects of food have bizarrely become a separate issue from food preparation, the proper combinations of food separate from its celebration at dinner parties.
To engage people at the table in a serious discussion about food and its health effect, to make people think at dinner about their own habits and possible errors and their effect on their good health, is to make the kind of faux pas that discomforts. Nobody likes to feel discomfort when they are physically so close together, in an environment they cannot easily escape, while they are trying to impress. It is the equivalent of Erasmus seeing you sneeze after you've read his book.
Nonetheless the battle is joined. A new etiquette is evolving, as it did five centuries ago when Erasmus first advised the aspiring young gentlemen of Europe, the problematic teenagers in his day, what to do with snot (do not, he counselled, wipe it on the sleeve and if it must go to the floor, quickly tread it in). We've come a long way but we need to be clear that we came a long way because people changed their minds and their points of view. As for those problematic teenagers of today, in some of the words used by the infamously generous victim of the French guillotine, Marie Antoinette, perhaps we should let them bake cake or stew meat.