Vintage view: Christmas crudities or raising little Furcifers

As the youngest unmarried makes several elastic laps at the melting butter from a steak knife at Christmas dinner, you might wonder — what’s the point of table manners?

I mean, all that posturing is really a means of conducting food from the plate to the mouth, right?. Why unseat your paper crown and get pop-a-vein about the mechanics? ‘Proper’ behaviour surrounding food is a relatively recent development, but it had its first course in the burgeoning social snobbery of the Renaissance. Do the scruffy little offspring want to get in the way of 500 years of social evolution? Selfies, thong underwear, six year olds with Facebook accounts- but seriously — disrespecting the Renaissance?

The poet Giovanni della Casa, advising his readers on polite behaviour in his book Galateo (1558), emphasises the importance of outward appearance: “One should not comb his hair nor wash his hands in public. The exception to this is the washing of the hands when done before sitting down to dinner, for then it should be done in full sight of others, even if you do not need to wash them at all, so that whoever dips into the same bowl as you will be certain of your cleanliness.” So, you could be gutting rats for breakfast or tidying up your cesspit all weekend, but as long as your fellow guests believed your hands were clean — you were in.