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Last but Not Least
In offering a second portion of anything do not remind one that he has already been helped. "Can't I give you another piece of meat or pie?" "Won't you have some more tea or pudding?" Expressions like these are frequently heard.
It is in far better taste to say, "Will you have some hot coffee?" "May I give you some of the salad?" "Let me help you to this choice portion." We trust none of our readers will regard this suggestion as trivial. For, concerning kindness, we know that perfection is no trifle. It is the essence of that second commandment which we are divinely told is like "the first of all the commandments;" and it cannot be attained without assiduous attention to all the minor words and the common acts of life. "Among all the Cook-Books this will certainly take its place as one of the very best."--THE CHRISTIAN UNION.
Not a recipe and not a carving instruction. This is the closing page of the book, on how to offer a second helping, and the rule it gives is small and still exactly right.
- Offer; do not auditThe entire instruction is to stop reminding a guest of what they have already eaten. Another piece of pie makes them account for the first one. Will you have some pie does not. The words cost the same and the difference is real.
- Why it belongs in a carving bookThe host carved and served from the table, so the host was the one person who could see every plate in the room. That is precisely the seat from which it is easiest to say the wrong thing, and the page is written for someone holding a knife and a serving spoon.
- Platter serviceThe practice behind the rule is serving from a dish at the table rather than plating in the kitchen. It is still the better way to feed a group in which anybody is eating less than the others, because nobody has to refuse food that has already been put on their plate.
- The modern form of the same courtesyWhat the page protects is a guest’s right not to explain their own appetite. The current version of it concerns what people do and do not eat: put the food out, say once what is in it, and ask nobody why.
- The last lines are an advertisementThe press notice about cook-books that closes the page is not part of the text. Publishers bound puffs for their own list into the back of a book, and this one has ended up attached to the final paragraph.
The passage grounds a very small point of table manners in the second commandment, and then apologises in advance for anybody who thinks the point trivial, on the ground that where kindness is concerned perfection is no trifle. That move locates the book exactly. Household manuals of this period were not written as collections of technique but as instruction in character, with carving, serving, economy and courtesy all treated as branches of the same subject, and a chapter on how to address a guest who has finished their plate sits in such a book without any sense of a change of register. The defensiveness is the interesting part. The author expected to be thought fussy for raising it, raised it anyway as the last word of the whole volume, and chose to close a manual about knives with an argument about kindness.