If you have occasion to help yourself from a dish, or if any one else helps you, move your plate quite close to the dish.
At a dinner served in courses, it is better, as a rule, not to take a second supply of anything. It might delay the dinner.
The English eat boiled eggs from the shell, a custom that is followed to some extent in this country; but most Americans prefer to break them, or to have them broken, into a glass, a mode that certainly has its advantages, and that will commend itself to those that have not time to dawdle over their breakfast. In noticing a little book on manners that recently appeared, the New York _Sun_ feelingly inveighs in this wise against eating boiled eggs from a glass:
“We are glad to think that the time has gone by when Americans with any pretensions to refinement needed to be informed that an egg beaten up in a glass is an unsightly mess that has often turned the stomach of the squeamish looker-on. Those who cannot learn to eat boiled eggs from the shell will do well to avoid them altogether. If the author of this hand-book had watched American experiments with exhaustive attention, he might have deemed it well to add that no part of the contents of the egg should be allowed to drip down the outside of the shell, and that the eggshell, when depleted, should be broken before being deposited on the plate.”
It would seem to be as unpleasant to the writer of this paragraph to see an egg eaten from a glass as it is to a Bavarian to see a man wait till he gets over the threshold of a lager-beer saloon before he takes his hat off. A matter of mere prejudice in both cases. If an egg broken into a glass is really “an unsightly mess,” then let us have some opaque egg-glasses.
Bread should be broken. To butter a large piece of bread and then bite it, as children do, is something the knowing never do.
In eating game or poultry do not touch the bones with your fingers. To take a bone in the fingers for the purpose of picking it is looked upon as being a very inelegant proceeding.
Never gesticulate with your knife or fork in your hand, nor hold them pointing upward when you are not using them; keep them down on your plate.
Never load up your fork with food until you are ready to convey it to your mouth, unless you are famishing and you think your life depends on your not losing a second.