Party Like It’s 1889

NOTE: The following transcript corresponds to an earlier version of this show. Some passages may not match the rebroadcast audio above.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. On Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: The 19th Century Guy. Peter Onuf, our 18th Century Guy, is out this week, which is actually kind of great, just between you and me, because this show in particular is one that I want a little extra share of for myself.

BRIAN: Yeah, Ed. Today it’s all about the history of meals in America. And we’re going to go ahead and start with, well, an outsider’s perspective. In the mid 1800s, a lot a high class Europeans were coming to visit the United States, and one thing quite a few of them seemed to write about was how Americans ate.

JOHN KASSON: Charles Dickens among them described Americans as eating gravely.

ED: Nobody says anything at a meal to anybody.

JOHN KASSON: Hastily.

ED: Every man sits down, dull and languid.

JOHN KASSON: Eating food as if they were simply fueling themselves.

ED: Swallows his fare as if breakfasts, lunches, and suppers were necessities of nature.

JOHN KASSON: Without any kind of semblance of pleasure.

ED: Never to be coupled with recreation or enjoyment.

JOHN KASSON: Bolting their food, and then going off to do something else.

BRIAN: This is John Kasson, an historian at UNC Chapel Hill, and an expert in, among other things, 19th century dining. He says Dickens was shocked at American table manners, or lack thereof.

JOHN KASSON: They would eat characteristically then with a two-pronged iron fork, and then a knife in the right hand. And they would put the food in their mouths with the knife. Dickens said that he’d never seen such contortions, except for a sword swallower in a circus.

ED: If Dickens had come just a little bit later, however, in the 1870s and the 1880s, say, he would’ve encountered a very different scene. By then, upper class Americans had picked up on the trends of their European counterparts, and table manners took on a whole new importance.

BRIAN: That’s right, Ed. There was kind of her arms race based on forks, if you will, and how many you could have. And this was born the strange ritual you’ve probably seen reenacted in countless costume dramas. The Victorian dinner party.

JOHN KASSON: It’s typically going to start with oysters and champagne, and then you’re going to have soup, either white or dark soup. Then an entree of vegetables, perhaps sweet corn or asparagus. And then– are you still with me, Brian?

BRIAN: I’m here.

JOHN KASSON: And then you will be given a slice of the roast, with either claret or champagne. This is moving right along. Now you have the game, and then you have a salad course. Then you have cheese, then you have pastry or pudding. Then you are offered liqueurs.

Oh, and I forgot. I left out the fruit and nut course. How careless of me.

BRIAN: Now, there was nothing new in the mid 1800s about feast that involved insane amounts of food. What was new, at least to Americans, was that manners now really mattered. Every meal that’s a minefield rife with opportunities to make mistake after mistake in etiquette.

JOHN KASSON: There are many, many, many mistakes you might make. You might, in fact, bite off your roll and show the teeth marks of your roll as you put it back on the right.

ED: You might try eating an apple with your hands.

JOHN KASSON: Well, my goodness. We know then that you don’t belong, because you’re supposed to master even how to use the fork for this. You don’t talk about the food. You don’t say, oh, this is yummy. That’s just a little unseemly.

BRIAN: I have to say, Professor Kasson, that this doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Why are people doing this?

JOHN KASSON: They don’t sound like a lot of fun, and that’s precisely because they sound like such an exacting performance. It’s a kind of trial by fork. And part of the notion of the performance is that we’re going to tell who belongs and who doesn’t. These dinners are already kind of rituals of exclusivity. And then even the dinner itself, it’s as if it becomes a test of how habituated you are to these performances of self-control.

We could have likened the dinner to a courtly dance of some sense. If you know the steps, then you can relax and enjoy it. But if you don’t, then you’re sweating all the time.

Brillat-Savarin, the famous French writer who wrote the physiology of taste, said, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.” We might say that the correlary of this in the 19th century was tell me how you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are. And this sense of how people mastered the forms of dining, or what separated from simply people who fed.

ED: So as you recover from you Thanksgiving feast, on today’s show, we are going to give you all the historical knowledge you might need to survive your next family meal. We’ve got the story of America’s earliest restaurant chain. We’ll try to understand one of the least revolutionary aspects of the American Revolution– the food. And we’ll look at the political hotbed of American mealtime– school lunch.