We are starting with a soup course. Soup might be ladled from a soup tureen, or as we have it, already in bowls as we sit down. Most of the guests tonight have rimmed soup bowls, also called deep plates. I have a cream soup bowl, which is smaller in diameter and taller with no rim and a little handle on each side. It sits on a large saucer. One guest has a rimless medium deep bowl called a coupe. All of them are placed on under plates called service plates, even mine with its saucer. We are using dinner-sized plates as service plates, but service plates are often larger. They may be as large as thirteen-inch chargers, but that’s rather grand.

Our soup spoons are at the far right on the right side of the place settings. My spoon is quite round and I explain that it is a cream soup spoon. A cream soup will not have solid pieces of food and so it may be sipped from the side of the spoon. The guests have table or place spoons which are shaped like teaspoons, only larger. Because the country tomato soup we are having has pieces of onions, they will eat the soup from the front of the spoon which can go right into your mouth.

A spoon is always held resting across the third finger, against the end of the index finger, and held in place by the thumb on top. The soup is spooned with a motion away from you toward the far rim of the bowl, allowing you to remove a drip by touching the spoon on the rim although this is to be done only when necessary. The spoon then makes a concave arc to your mouth. The soup spoon maybe left in the bowl until you have finished the soup, but it is better to place it on the underplate between sips and should always be placed on the underplate when you are finished. It is perfectly proper to tilt the soup bowl slighted away from you to get the last bite or two. And to general surprise, I explain that it is also proper for me to lift my cream soup bowl by the two little handles and drink from it. If the soup were a clear bouillon, the bowl would be a bouillon cup, a slightly smaller version of my cream soup bowl and the bouillon spoon a slightly smaller version of my cream soup spoon. Again I may drink directly from it using two hands.

To be continued…..

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Table set for Downton Abbey inspired dinner etiquette talk

We arrive into the dining room to find the table set for dinner. But tonight not all the place settings match. Sometimes it is fun and perfectly acceptable to use a variety of different china patterns and other things to make the table interesting. Here the china matches, but the differences are in the settings since I am illustrating several ways things might be done. The decorations include a flower arrangement flanked with candelabra and lines of cutlery which will become a classroom as guests try to name the pieces like a good footman doing his homework.

Still standing because the hostess is still standing as she wants everyone to be able to see each place setting, we note some differences. Some cutlery is upside down. Some place settings have spoons and forks at the top of the plate, some small salt and pepper shakers. One person has a menu. It will all become clear.

We do not touch the table. We do not touch anything on the table. We do not put anything on the table. A small purse may go on your lap; anything larger that has found itself here in the dining room should be left on the floor. Handkerchiefs, tissues and pill bottles should not even be seen. Cell phones and other modern electronic paraphernalia have no place in the room. Nothing on the table should be rearranged at any time and, with a very few exceptions which I will eventually mention, we never touch anything other than the napkins, silverware, and glasses.

To sit, you move to the right, pull out your chair, and sit to the left. A man may certainly hold the chair for a woman if he chooses, in which case, he should take care to push it in gently and not too far. You sit squarely on the chair with both feet flat on the floor, leaving a small space between your front and the table and a small space between your back and the chair back. You should not touch the chair back except between courses after the main course. This requires good posture. In a number of movies good posture, or the lack of it, effectively helps to identify the gentility of the characters. You should not move the chair after it is in place and all four chair legs should remain on the floor. You should not touch your face or head or wriggle around in any way. In a nutshell, hands belong in your lap and your attention belongs on the party.

Napkins come in many sizes. We are using damask luncheon napkins which are twelve to fourteen inches square. Dinner napkins are much larger, may be thirty inches square. They are folded and placed to the left of the forks. When the first course is not on the table as you arrive, your napkin may be placed across your plate or folded into an elaborate shape in the center of the plate. When the hostess places her napkin on her lap, that’s your signal to do the same. A napkin should never be tucked into your shirt; it belongs on your lap. The idea is to do it discretely, without flourish; just slip it off the table and down to your lap. It should be opened until it is still folded in half and placed flat on your lap with the folded edge closest to you and the open side toward your knees. All napkins are used this way with the exception of very small tea napkins which may be fully opened, but may also be left folded in half which is my preference. The idea is that you may easily reach down and pick up the center of the napkin on your lap to use it and then replace it without having to call attention to the process. There was a time when family members in many households reused their napkins and they were pulled into napkin rings to identify the users. Nowadays decorative napkin rings are sometimes used and they should be placed on the table to the left of your place setting when the napkin has been removed.

All guests should finish each course at the same time. It is the job of the hostess to help make this happen. If you find that your plate is always empty when everyone else is only half-finished, then you should consider slowing the pace a little. If you find that everyone else is usually finished long before you are, you should do the opposite. An experienced hostess will slow down herself when she notices that you are not finished. The footman will not touch any plates until he sees the hostess place her knife and fork in the finished position. The hostess will try to dawdle along until you are finished, but if you see her indicate that she is finished, you are then finished as well and you should immediately put down your knife and fork.

A napkin is pulled through the napkin ring, not rolled or folded.

To be continued….

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The etiquette talk was an important part of the evenings and we started with a bit of definition.

Simply put, etiquette is the code of rules which a society holds to establish expected behavior. My talk is exclusively about etiquette at dinner and in western Europe and the United States which, for the most part, agree on what those rules should be. There are, of course, many geographic and ethnic traditions which differ in some ways from the rules I am describing and it is certainly correct to follow them when the circumstances call for it.

To start with, I’m the first to agree that the list of rules on table etiquette is a long list. The question might be, are they all necessary? The answer is that for each rule there is a reason. It might be safety or cleanliness, simple expedience or perhaps just to make dining a more attractive and pleasant experience. And I always say that one additional rule should be included. That is that anything you do that breaks a rule to make a guest more comfortable and the general atmosphere more congenial, isn’t breaking a rule at all, but doing exactly as you should. When I said this the other night, one of my guests said that she read somewhere that while Queen Elizabeth was entertaining a foreign guest at dinner, he did something out-of-the-ordinary so she immediately followed his lead to be sure he did not feel he had done something “improper”. A perfect example, just what I meant. In any case, it is certainly true that knowing the rules makes you feel more confident and at ease in any company and you may then choose which rules you wish to follow and which you wish to ignore.

Perhaps the best advice for anyone unsure of the rules is to be guided by your hostess. There is always a hostess at lunch or dinner or tea unless it is an all-male gathering. A single man giving a dinner party should ask someone to take that role, the job of seeing that everything happens as it should and making everyone feel comfortable. Simply put, nobody should do anything before the hostess does, so all you have to do is to watch her and follow her lead.

Before we moved to the dining room, I talked about seating arrangements. Long ago when noblemen and their families and their servants and quite possibly a large group of knights and squires and other assorted people occupied a castle or great house, they would all eat in the large hall and everyone knew his place, be it at the center of the high table or below the salt at the other end. In the very early 1800′s when the servants ate separately and the new smaller dining rooms held a group of more equally ranked society, guests chose their seats as they arrived into the room, although they did arrive in a strict order of precedence. Nowadays, I find that guests are usually more comfortable when given some direction as to the seating. One way to do this is to simply say, “Mr. So-and-So, won’t you sit here to my right and, Mrs. So-and-So, just across the way, etc.” Tradition dictates that the guest of honor is immediately to the right of the hostess if she is at the foot of the table with second honors going to the place immediately to the right of the host at the head of the table. If the host and hostess are seated together in the center of the table, then their guests flank them on either side. Another nice way to indicate places is using place cards with the guests’ names, leaving them to find their own places. With place cards, the guests should believe that the hostess has given care to the seating arrangement and the place cards should never be rearranged no matter how much you prefer not to sit across from your ex-mother-in law.

Once we go into the dining room, it is not considered polite to leave until the meal is finished, absolutely not until after the main course, and much better not until after the dessert unless it is an emergency. A visit to the ladies room is not considered an emergency so best to plan ahead. If it is truly an emergency, no explanation should be given. Simply say, ”Please excuse me.”, place your napkin on your chair, rise, and push the chair under the table.

To be continued….

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The final Downton Abbey inspired dinner and etiquette talk is over, the third leaf removed from the table, and the last of the leftovers delivered to the local food share. I think the guests enjoyed themselves; I certainly did despite all the work. I’m hoping to schedule a few more for next winter and looking forward to having as much fun.

I used notes for my talk so I would have at least some chance of remembering to mention everything I wanted to say. I was surprised when one of the guests asked to have a copy. It was nothing more than an outline and I didn’t think anything more about it. But now looking back on the evenings and with fewer dinner preparations to make, I think it might be fun to expend the outline and share.

The idea for the dinners was not my own; it came from several different people at various times. Perhaps that was because, as I said when announcing the dinners, my dining room has been the scene of elegant dinners since before the Titanic went down. Each time someone mentioned it, I immediately dismissed it as impossible for me to do without the staff that is so important to getting the style right. When it was suggested yet one more time, I started to think about alternatives to having a butler and footmen. I had been doing afternoon tea with etiquette talks for some time and I suddenly realized that if I could do the dinners as an etiquette lesson with everyone taking turns at being a footman who cleared and served, it would not only work without the actual staff, but it would be one more piece of the puzzle for everyone to try. Most of the guests did try both roles during the course of the dinners and I think that gave them a greater appreciation for how it all works.

We started in the library each evening. I explained that individual family members or guests would not have wandered into the dining room before everyone had gathered. There was a scene in an otherwise delightfully period take-off of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where two members of the party arrive into the dining room individually, actually sit, and begin the meal before the others. It simply wouldn’t have happened that way in the early 1800′s or the early 1900′s and still doesn’t in polite society. Everyone gathers in another room and they walk in together: hosts, guests of honor, titled lords, married ladies, etc. etc. taking their proper places in the progression. In a proper 1920′s household, the dressing gong would have been rung at 7:00 p.m. so everyone would be alerted to dress and be assembled before 8:00 o’clock when dinner was likely to be announced. In one episode of the series, one daughter kept the assembled group waiting while she put the finishing touches on her new frock and it was with great reluctance that her father finally decided they should go in without her. Luckily she arrived just before that drastic action had to be taken.

Sherry was to be served with the soup course. In preparation, guests were invited to try decanting it with an antique silver decanting funnel I found in London. It pulls apart into two pieces. The top has fine holes to strain the sherry or other wine like port which might easily have sediment at the bottom that is much better removed before it reaches a glass. A few layers of cheese cloth placed in the top of the funnel can easily catch any small pieces. The bottom section curves to send the stream of strained wine against the side of the decanter, causing fewer bubbles. Decanting would have been done by the butler in advance, but many guests gave it a try while waiting for everyone to arrive.

Two-piece silver wine decanting funnel

To be continued…

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It’s become commonplace here in the Governor’s House to step back 200 years and welcome Jane Austen enthusiasts dressed in long gowns for country weekends á la the Regency period. But with the first Downton Abbey dinner, we have just experienced a new time travel destination, back to the early 20^th Century, the time when the house was occupied by then Senator Page and his family. In a dining room equipped with a button on the floor under the table so the lady of the house could call the servants, the table was laid for a four-course dinner. The curious thing was that all the place settings did not exactly match although Carson, the Crawley’s ever-proper butler, would have approved the placement of everything just one inch in from the edge of the table. One place might been set with a rim soup, another a bouillon cup. One setting might have dessert cutlery, another none. And the table decoration was not just flowers, but an odd collection of silver serving pieces. It wasn’t just dinner; it was a lesson in dining etiquette that started when we gathered in the library and ended with decanting and pouring the sherry. In between we served ourselves from the platter with two spoons, passed the bread with the correct hand, and learned what foods should be eaten with the fingers. Everyone had a chance to take a turn at being a footman to clear the salad (from the right, of course), serve the sauce (from the left), or remove unused silverware (without a sound). And everyone came away full not just with dinner, but perhaps with a bit more confidence in the off chance that an invitation to come for dinner should arrive from Highclere Castle.

Downton Abbey dinners and etiquette talks are scheduled for February 5, 9 and 27 and March 2. Reservations are required in advance. Room rates are discounted for guests attending the dinner and a proper English breakfast is included.

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How appropriate that we just finished a Jane Austen weekend here. The house was built in 1893, making it 120 years old now. I sometimes wonder about the people who lived here long ago. I picture the senator and his wife where I know they used to sit on the back portico looking across the lawn at the Sterling Mountain range. And when I’m building a wood fire in the old Glenwood kitchen range in the kitchen, I wonder about the cook who did the same thing so long ago. But today I am wondering about Miss Page, the senator’s daughter, who had the large bedroom with the delicate detail on the fireplace that we call the pink room in her honor. I wonder – did she read Pride and Prejudice? What would she have thought of it. How did she picture Darcy so long before Colin Firth? As a spinster herself, what did she make of Jane Austen? And what about the family of five girls who lived here briefly years later? Did they read about that most famous family of five daughters and try to see which Bennet sister was most like each of them? I’ll never know, but I do hope that in another 120 years, the house will still be standing here and perhaps another girl not yet born will find Pride and Prejudice on the shelf and discover that some stories, the best ones, are quite timeless.

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