The Queen uses tupperware?!

Voici one snarky piece that trashes the very thought of a sit-down meal.

No one shows off about their dining rooms anymore. Dining rooms were for hostess trolleys and hot plates, vol-au-vents and souffles. They required a huge amount of effort. If you have a dining room you can't serve the carrots out of the saucepan.

You have to put them in a serving dish. Even the ice-cream has to be decanted and, along with the rest of the food, either has to be trundled along a corridor or dispatched through a hatch in the wall.

The washing-up involved in having a dining room is horrendous. Most are also filled with silver which means several hours a week polishing the candelabra. And the cutlery. You must have serious cutlery, as well as a proper dinner service.

I suppose a "straw man" argument is applicable to a room as well as a person, since no one has polished a candelabra this side of the pond in lo, fifty years. Still, if one is assuaging the guilt attached to the demise of the family meal, then comparing [what was once ubiquitously known as] "communion the domestic church" to "lifestyles of the rich and irrelevant" is de rigeur.

Of course, sentimentality may creep in to the jettisoning of this hallowed room.

But like chandeliers and chaise longues, once we have forsaken this seeming anachronism we will miss it. The dining room inspires good manners. Here you can talk late into the night without being distracted by the sight of all the washing-up and there is no one to watch you unwrap the M & S red cabbage and pass it off as your own.

You see, the very walls of the dining room allowed for pretence, indulgence and deceit. Alas, if one considered the countless family conversations, the shared delight in age-old recipes, the decompression at the end of hectic days, the solidarity, unconditional love, and sense of belonging, then the demise of the concept of family meals wouldn't make for such sophistry.

Let's see. If the choice is between "dining rooms" and "modern life," and the latter is clearly the winner, then perhaps it's more of an indictment of the writer and her generation than she would care to admit. Thankfully, a couple of quotes at the end breathe sanity into the piece, though the trend is clearly going against them.

Comments

[MelanieB]

Some of the assumptions in the piece seem very tied to peculiarly British ideas of class and culture.

This bit for example: "You have to dress the part too. Pyjamas look as out of place as a milk carton at a dining room table."

Growing up, we always had a dining room and my parents always enforced sitting down to family meals (they still do, as a matter of fact). And yet our dining room was where we had breakfast in our pajamas with milk cartons and cereal boxes on the table and the newspaper too for good measure. The dining room was a formal room for Christmas dinners with table cloths, candles and the best china; but it was also an informal space for the family to congregate.

My parents' dining room table was where we did our homework and ate our snacks and in recent years is where the flock of laptops congregates during the day when all the children are home for a visit. Only to get cleared off in time for everyone to sit down to dinner.

Maybe that's partly because we didn't have a dine-in kitchen. But in our current home Dom and I have both a kitchen table and a dining room. We tend to eat breakfast and lunch in the kitchen but sit down to dinner in the dining room. Sure it doubles as an office with the desk on one wall and, yes, as a sewing room too; but I do like to have a place where we can sit down to a more formal meal. I do sometimes serve the carrots out of the saucepan in the dining room, though. For me it's a comfortable mixture of the formal and informal. I cherry pick which etiquette rules to follow. Her description seems strangely absolutist as if a dining room must be all or nothing.

[gsk]

You're right, Melanie. One of my pet themes has been etiquette. It should always be based on charity. Unfortunately, the rules of etiquette became so labarynthian that they were intimidating and harsh. (I.e. which fork to use, how to use a finger bowl, and the minutiae about how to pass things properly.) When they lost their essence (making guests welcome and the meal civilised) they became first a burden, and then a parody of themselves.

Our feminine genius should be applied to the question of how to maintain a certain dignity combined with an atmosphere of love and inclusion. Of course, it will vary from family to family -- that's the fun. But we have to remember that it's a piece of civilisation as well as a foundational piece of theology. Sharing meals is an intimate thing, and should be recognised for the truth it carries within it. (Btw, we slouched for breakfast with the rest, but the milk cartons had to remain on the floor besides our chairs. They blocked the view.)

[Maureen]

About polishing the chandelier, make that thirty years. Growing up, I spent time polishing the dining room sconces and the chandelier. They were beautifully etched German silver and I loved the chore. Admittedly, I was less enthusiastic about polishing the silverware...

ps. I like your blog