Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (17 page)

Here is a sampling of Erasmus’s advice (some of it is coarse by today’s standards):

• “If you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn round discreetly and throw it somewhere.”

• “Retain the wind by compressing the belly.”

• “Do not be afraid of vomiting if you must; for it is not vomiting but holding the vomit in your throat that is foul.”

• “Do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.”

• “Turn away when spitting lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls on the ground, it should be trodden upon, lest it nauseate

• “You should not offer your handkerchief to anyone unless it has been freshly washed. Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.”

• “To lick greasy fingers or to wipe them on your coat is impolite. It is better to use the tablecloth or the serviette.”

• “Some people put their hands in the dishes the moment they have sat down. Wolves do that.”

If some of Erasmus’s advice seems laughable today, we should pause to consider at least one admonition from an etiquette book in our own century. On the only way to eat large lettuce leaves: “They must be cut with the blunt edge of the fork—never, never with a knife.”

Emily Post: 1922, United States

European etiquette was based on precedence and dominated by the doctrine of exclusivity. American manners, on the other hand, were founded on the bedrock of equality and freedom. In the country’s short history, many hundreds of etiquette books were published, most having little effect on the vast majority of Americans. Etiquette—the practice and the word—was for society folk. In fact, no etiquette writer had ever got the public to pay serious attention to the subject of manners until Emily Post. She caused something of a revolution. Almost overnight, her name became synonymous with correct behavior.

In 1922, purchasers of Emily Post’s new, landmark book rarely asked for it by title, let alone its full title,
Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage
. It sufficed to ask for “Emily Post.” The book zoomed to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list, pushing Papini’s
Life of Christ
into second place and sharing the number one spot with Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt
, a novel that, ironically, highlighted social ineptitude. Everyone was reading Emily Post and in any social situation asking, “What would Emily Post say?”

But why was the book so widely received?

As Erasmus’s volume had appeared at the dawn of the Renaissance, Emily Post’s arrived when society was at another abruptly upward transformation. In the 1920s, the old standards were crumbling under the impact of the automobile, worldwide telephone communications, the movies, and general postwar prosperity and euphoria. The social trend for millions of Americans was upward and, as in Erasmus’s day, people were desperate to know how to behave in higher, if not high, society.

Emily Post had not intended to write an etiquette book. She was a prize-winning novelist and newspaperwoman from Tuxedo Park, New York. She had a loathing for the pretensions of virtually all etiquette books of her day and had often suggested to friends that someone should write an honest, unaffected treatment of American manners. A friend, Frank Crowninshield, then editor of
Vanity Fair
, goaded her with a copy of a recently published etiquette book that exuded snobbishness and elitism. Further, the book
was being promoted in accordance with a new trend in American advertising: an attempt to embarrass people into believing they needed certain products. For instance, the book claimed that not only were Americans ignorant of which fork to use and when, but they suffered from slovenliness, halitosis, body odor, and total social ineptitude.

Manners change with time. In America, formal etiquette was regarded antithetical to the principles of equality and individual freedom
.

Even before she finished the gift book, Emily Post decided to write a no-nonsense, lighthearted, egalitarian manual of her own. And that she did. By 1945,
Etiquette
, had sold 666,000 copies, and “Post, Emily” had become a dictionary entry.

Wedgwood Ware: 18th Century, England

Although pottery had been fashioned and fired for thousands of years, by the 1700s there were still no mass-produced, identical plates, bowls, cups, and saucers. A craftsman could produce an exquisitely delicate, multihued plate—or a whole series of plates, handmade and hand painted—but there was no way to ensure that each item and its color would be consistently the same. In fact, pieces from a set of high-quality dinnerware often varied from yellowish cream to pearl white. One determined man, Josiah Wedgwood, born in 1730 into a family of potters from Staffordshire, England, would soon change that.

The youngest of twelve children, Wedgwood received only rudimentary schooling before his father died, forcing him to work in the family pottery plant at age nine. While still a child, Wedgwood began exploring new ways to color clay—first by trial and error, then by painstaking chemical methods.
The idea of tampering with the family’s proven pottery formulas so infuriated his brothers that Josiah opened a rival pottery business in 1759.

As his own master, Wedgwood experimented with new glazes, clay additives, and firing techniques, keeping meticulous research notes so a particularly promising process could be exactly duplicated.

His systematic tenacity paid off. In the early 1760s, he perfected a method for uniformly coloring the popular earthenware of the day. Throughout Europe, the results were heralded as a major breakthrough. And the simple elegance of Wedgwood ware—delicate neoclassical figures applied in white, cameolike relief on a tinted background—captured the changing taste of European aristocrats, who were moving away from the ornate clutter of baroque and rococo designs.

Wedgwood’s high-quality, perfectly reproducible dinnerware arrived at the right time in history. With the industrial revolution under way in England, steam power and inexpensive factory labor greatly increased the availability of his product.

Wedgwood’s plates came to the attention of England’s royal court. In 1765, he was commissioned to make a tea service for Queen Charlotte. An instinctive self-promoter, Wedgwood was keenly aware of the publicity value of royal patronage. He sought and received permission to christen his service “Queen’s Ware.” If orders were brisk before, now it seemed that every aristocrat in Europe desired to own full place settings. From Russia, Empress Catherine commissioned service for two hundred guests—a total of 952 pieces of Queen’s Ware.

Despite his personal wealth and friendships with European nobility, Wedgwood remained a man of strong democratic views. He publicly supported the American Revolution and was outspoken in his opposition to slavery; an “antislavery cameo” he produced showed a slave in chains and bore the inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?”

Josiah Wedgwood died in 1795, leaving a large part of his estate to his daughter, Susannah Wedgwood Darwin, whose son, Charles, would one day be even more renowned than his grandfather.

Stainless-Steel Cutlery: 1921, United States

Until the early part of this century, knives, forks, and spoons were the bane of the average housewife, for great effort was required to keep them shining. Flatware was made of a compound of carbon and steel, which yielded a sturdy, durable product but one that quickly discolored. To retain a semblance of its original luster, table cutlery had to be routinely rubbed with a dry cork and scouring powder or with steel wool.

The great cutlery breakthrough came with the development of stainless steel.

As early as 1820, a French metallurgist, L. Berthier, observed that when
carbon steel was combined with an alloy like chrome, it yielded a rust-resistant metal. Not fully appreciating the significance of his discovery, Berthier abandoned the research. It was continued by British scientists, who in 1913 alloyed the pure element chromium with a variant of Berthier’s carbon steel (called 35-point carbon steel) and produced steel that held its luster and merited the name stainless. The following year, Krupp, the German steel and munitions manufacturers, introduced a stainless steel containing chromium and nickel. At first, in Britain and Germany, the metal’s industrial applications overshadowed its culinary possibilities. Not until 1921, at the Silver Company of Meriden, Connecticut, was the first stainless-steel dinnerware produced—not forks or spoons, but knives, and in a pattern the company named “Ambassador.”

Stainless steel liberated home-makers from the weekly polishing of flatware, while Bakelite handles (right) offered protection from burns
.

The glistening flatware was its own best advertisement. American hotels and restaurants, calculating the hours and dollars spent polishing carbon steel, ordered all their kitchen and dining room cutlery in stainless steel. Magazine ads appeared that seemed to promise the impossible: “No tarnish! No rust! No plating to wear off—it’s solid gleaming stainless steel!” By the 1930s, Gimbel’s and Macy’s in New York were offering stainless-steel flatware at nineteen cents apiece. And a further incentive to purchase the new product was the introduction of handles—in pastel and two-tone colors—made
of a durable new heat-resistant plastic called Bakelite. Even among the wealthy, stainless-steel flatware became a formidable contender for silver’s long-held position of prestige at the table.

Table Talk: Antiquity to Present

“Bottoms Up!” “Here’s looking at you!” “Mud in your eye!” “Cheers!”

The traditional things we say at the table—including toasts and grace—often originated in earlier times and for purposes that may not seem obvious or purposeful today. The same is true for table-and food-related expressions. A husband who is a ham may bring home the bacon, and his wife, a cold turkey, may make him eat humble pie. They may both take the cake. How did such customs and phrases originate? Well, let’s talk turkey.

Malting a Toast
. Anyone who has ever drunk a toast to a friend’s health or good fortune may have wondered how the word “toast” came to designate a ceremony that involves no roasted slice of bread.

The custom of a host drinking to a friend’s health originated with the Greeks, as early as the sixth century
B.C
., and for a highly practical reason: to assure guests that the wine they were about to consume was not poisoned.

Spiking wine with poison had long been a preferred way to dispose of a political rival or suspected enemy, or to circumvent divorce. Thus, a host sipped the first wine poured from a decanter, and satisfied of its safety, the guests raised their glasses and drank. This drinking in sequence—guests following host—came to symbolize a sort of pledge of friendship and amity.

The Romans adopted the Greek penchant for poisoning (the ambitious Livia Drusilla, empress of Rome in the first century
B.C
., made something of a science of the practice) and the custom of drinking as a pledge of friendship. The Roman custom of dropping a burnt piece of toast into a cup of wine is the origin of the verbal usage. The practice continued into Shakespeare’s time. In Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor
, Falstaff orders a jug of wine and requests “put toast in’t.”

For many years, it was assumed that the Roman slice of toast was a piece of spiced or sugared bread, added to wine for sweetening. More recently, it was scientifically shown that charcoal can reduce a liquid’s acidity, and that a blackened piece of bread added to an inferior, slightly vinegary wine can render it more mellow and palatable—something the Romans may have discovered for themselves. Our word “toast” comes from the Latin
tostus
, meaning “parched” or “roasted.”