The Scrap Book, Volume 1, No. 6: August 1906Various
History
The Scrap Book, Volume 1, No. 6: August 1906
Various
Periodicals
Hotel Breakfast.
Always take butter with the butter-knife, and then do not forget to return
that knife to the butter-plate. Carefully avoid cutting bread with your
own knife, or taking salt with it from the salt-cellar. It looks as if you
had not been accustomed to butter-knives and salt-spoons.
Ladies no longer eat salt-fish at a public table. The odor of it is now
considered extremely ungenteel, and it is always very disagreeable to
those who _do not_ eat it. If you breakfast alone, you can then indulge in
it.
It is ungenteel to go to the breakfast-table in any costume approaching to
full dress. There must be no flowers or ribbons in the hair. A morning-cap
should be as simple as possible. The most genteel morning-dress is a close
gown of some plain material, with long sleeves, which in summer may be
white muslin. A merino or cashmere wrapper (gray, brown, purple, or
olive), faced or trimmed with other merino of an entirely different color
(such as crimson, scarlet, green, or blue), is a becoming morning-dress
for winter. In summer, a white cambric-muslin morning-robe is the
handsomest breakfast attire, but one of gingham or printed muslin the most
convenient. The colored dress may be made open in front, with short, loose
sleeves, and a pointed body. Beneath it a white under-dress, having a
chemisette front down to the belt, and long white sleeves down to the
wrist. This forms a very graceful morning-costume, the white skirt
appearing where the colored skirt opens.
The fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete. It
was always inconvenient, and neither useful nor ornamental.
Hotel Dinner.
When eating fish, remove the bones carefully, and lay them on the edge of
your plate. Then, with the fork in your right hand (the concave or hollow
side held uppermost), and a small piece of bread in your left, take up the
flakes of fish. Servants, and all other persons, should be taught that the
butter-sauce should not be poured over the fish, but put on one side of
the plate, that the eater may use it profusely or sparingly, according to
taste, and be able to mix it conveniently with the sauce from the
fish-castors. Pouring butter-sauce over anything is now ungenteel.
It is an affectation of ultra-fashion to eat pie with a fork, and has a
very awkward and inconvenient look. Cut it up with your knife and fork,
then proceed to eat it with the fork in your right hand.
Much of this determined fork-exercise may be considered foolish; but it is
fashionable.
It is, however, customary in eating sweet potatoes of a large size to
break them in two, and, taking a piece in your hand, to pierce down to the
bottom with your fork, and then mix in some butter, continuing to hold it
thus while eating it.
If a lady wishes to eat lobster, let her request the waiter that attends
her to extract a portion of it from the shell, and bring it to her on a
clean plate--also to place a castor near her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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