Never Reach Across the Table

Reaching across the table is another common no-no when it comes to table etiquette. It’s hard to say exactly when this became frowned upon, but it follows the same logic that made elbows on the table a widespread faux pas. During a cramped and rowdy medieval gathering, reaching across the table ran the risk of dragging a sleeve through someone else’s plate, crowding a neighbor mid-bite, or simply appearing greedy — all of which could be enough to provoke an angry rebuke that could spill over into a knife fight. 

Using Blunt-Tipped Dinner Knives

In medieval Europe, people weren’t normally provided with cutlery at a meal. It was typical, therefore, to carry your own knife — almost always a sharp, pointed blade that could be used both as a tool to skewer food (forks weren’t common back then) and as a weapon. 

This was far from ideal when it came to keeping things civilized at boisterous dinner gatherings — indeed, one well-known historical figure, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France, was highly unimpressed by the situation. He grew tired of watching dinner guests use their knife points to pick their teeth and settle arguments, so in 1637 he ordered that the tips of all his knives be ground down and rounded. These were then provided to guests to stop uncouth behavior — and in so doing the cardinal invented, or at least popularized, the table knife. 

Not long after, in 1669, King Louis XIV made things official: He banned pointed knives from both the street and the table specifically to reduce violence. The rounded dinner knives we use today evolved from this decree.

Keeping Your Knife Facing Inward

The etiquette surrounding knives didn’t stop when they lost their points. Table-setting tradition holds that a knife should always rest on the table or plate with its blade facing inward — not toward a neighbor — and it should never be picked up to gesture with or wave around while talking. It’s impossible to say categorically if this started specifically to prevent an easy slash across a nearby throat, as some etiquette historians suggest. It could just as well be a logical way of setting down a knife so that it doesn’t need to be turned around in the hand when it’s picked up. But it’s easy to see how a knife pointed at someone, even by accident, could read as a threat, and how pointing it away from an adjacent diner is at least a subtle gesture of goodwill. 

Waiting To Eat Until Everyone Is Served

The common custom of waiting for everyone to be served before eating isn’t aimed directly at preventing brawls, but it can be seen as a way to avoid social friction at the dinner table. Victorian-era etiquette guides such as Isabella Beeton’s 1861 Book of Household Management describe elaborate, sequenced courses that required plenty of planning and order. Digging in early would not only have thrown off the entire meal’s rhythm and left other diners behind, but could also have meant that someone was left with an empty plate while everyone else was eating. The awkwardness of being left out was, and still is, exactly the kind of slight that could sour a shared meal — and if there was already some friction in the room, it might have boiled over into an embarrassing ruckus.

Gelatin

Modern gelatin requires little more than opening a packet and adding water. But its ancestors required boiling animal bones or calves’ feet for days, then repeatedly straining, clarifying, and cooling the extracted collagen. Few households could spare the time or labor, which led elaborate (and sometimes bizarre) molded jellies and aspics to become centerpieces on elite tables. From the medieval era to roughly the mid-19th-century, serving one announced that you possessed a well-equipped kitchen and plenty of household help. 

American engineer and inventor Peter Cooper patented a powdered “portable gelatin” in 1845, but the biggest transformation came after the Jell-O brand arrived late in the century. Early advertisements promised that ordinary homemakers could serve what rich people ate for just 10 cents a box.

Pineapples

Europeans went wild for pineapples after encountering the fruit in the Americas, but supplying inventory to meet that enthusiasm proved difficult. Pineapples frequently rotted during long ocean voyages, while growing them in northern Europe required hothouses and specialist gardeners. Around the 1600s, the fruit became such a recognizable emblem of wealth that it appeared in architecture, furniture, linens, and tableware. Affluent hosts displayed actual pineapples as centerpieces, sometimes keeping them until they began to spoil. Those unable to buy one could rent a pineapple from a confectioner for an evening of entertaining. By the 20th century, steamship transportation, commercial plantations, and canning finally made the fruit affordable to eat rather than merely admire on the dinner table.

Ice Cream

Before mechanical refrigeration, serving ice cream in summer implied that someone had harvested ice in winter, transported it home, and preserved it for months in an insulated icehouse. Making the dessert also required costly sugar and cream, plus the tedious work of stirring a container set inside a bucket of ice and salt. By the 18th century, European confectioners were molding ices into elaborate fruits and flowers for royalty, flavored with botanicals such as orange blossom, jasmine, and rose. 

Wealthy Americans adopted the spectacle: George Washington owned a “Cream Machine for Making Ice,” as it was known, while Thomas Jefferson’s papers preserved a handwritten vanilla ice cream recipe. At Monticello, filling the icehouse in 1803 required 62 wagonloads. The invention of the hand-cranked freezer in 1843 expanded commercial ice cream supplies, and eventually electric refrigeration brought the frozen dessert to the wider public.

White Bread

Long before mass-produced sandwich bread became a byword for blandness, an airy white loaf reflected considerable means. Wheat was costlier than grains such as rye and barley, and refining it required repeatedly sifting away the bran and germ — discarding nutritious portions that people dependent on bread could scarcely afford to waste. 

Small white loaves and rolls consequently appeared on elite tables, while laborers ate dense, dark breads made from mixed grains and sometimes peas. Until milling became industrialized in the 19th century, white bread remained closely associated with wealth. Modern food culture has nearly reversed that symbolism: Supermarket white bread is cheap, while a rustic whole-grain loaf can command a premium.

Cloves

Cloves now spend much of the year forgotten in spice cabinets, awaiting the arrival of mulled cider, eggnog, or holiday ham. But in medieval Europe, these dried flower buds were a delicacy shrouded in myth. They traveled from a small group of islands in present-day Indonesia, although their location was so well-protected that some outsiders thought they were cultivated by genies. In the 15th century, they cost a skilled London artisan nearly five days’ wages per pound. Wealthy hosts displayed their means by seasoning numerous dishes and even filling fountains with fragrant spiced wine. 

European demand eventually led to a violent competition to control the clove trade. In the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company ordered clove trees outside its territory uprooted and burned to protect its monopoly. That monopoly weakened after clove seedlings were smuggled to Mauritius in 1770, and cultivation subsequently spread through the Indian Ocean.

Vanilla

The word “vanilla” now describes anything conventional, plain, or unadventurous — an odd fate for a flavor once enjoyed largely by royalty and aristocrats as a symbol of colonial wealth. Native to Mexico and Central America, vanilla initially reached Europe as an accompaniment to another luxury import: chocolate. 

Around 1602, Queen Elizabeth I’s apothecary, Hugh Morgan, reportedly created sweets flavored with vanilla alone, which the queen adored. Attempts to cultivate the orchid elsewhere produced flowers but few pods until 1841, when Edmond Albius, an enslaved 12-year-old on Réunion (a French island in the Indian Ocean), developed the efficient hand-pollination technique still used today. Cultivation spread, but real vanilla remained laborious and expensive to produce. Beginning in the late 19th century, inexpensive synthetic vanillin helped transform the formerly exotic spice into the default flavor of cookies, cakes, sodas, and ice cream.

Eating Black-Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day

In the American South, eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is a common tradition and superstition said to bring luck and prosperity throughout the year ahead. When enslaved Africans brought black-eyed peas to America, the beans were initially used as food for livestock and enslaved people only. Black-eyed peas gained wider acceptance during the Civil War, when they were one of the few foods left untouched by Union troops, who considered them animal feed. Southerners therefore managed to survive on black-eyed peas during the winter, and so began the association with good luck and prosperity, and the tradition of eating them on New Year’s Day. 

Breaking the Wishbone

Breaking the wishbone of a cooked chicken or turkey is a common Christmas practice in the United Kingdom and a Thanksgiving tradition in the United States. Objectively, it’s a very strange thing to do, no matter how much luck might be up for grabs: It involves making a wish while pulling the bird bone in two with another person, and the person who gets the bigger piece will have their wish granted.

The origins of this peculiar superstition are debatable. One common theory goes all the way back to the ancient Etruscans, who saw birds as potent oracles. They extracted wishbones from chickens, dried them in the sun, and then touched the bones as a form of divination. The Romans picked up this practice later, by which time the bone was being snapped in half, possibly to double its power. The Romans then introduced the concept to Britain, and it eventually found its way to the Americas via English settlers. 

It’s hard to say whether the superstition really has such a long and storied history with a direct link all the way back to the Etruscans. We do know that the wishbone-breaking tradition as we know it today existed at least as early as the 17th century or early 18th century, when the bone was known as a “merrythought.” The term “wishbone” first appeared a century or so later. 

Double-Yolk Eggs Bring Good Fortune

Statistically, about one in every thousand eggs has a double yolk. So, if you regularly crack open and cook eggs, there’s a chance you’ll come across one at some point. For the superstitious, an egg with two yolks is widely considered a sign of impending good luck. It’s not known where or when this superstition emerged, but the reasoning behind it is clear to see. Eggs have long been associated with life, rebirth, and potential, making a double yolk a natural candidate for a symbol of abundance, prosperity, and good luck. Double yolks are sometimes regarded as a sign of an upcoming marriage, or that a woman will soon become pregnant with twins. 

Blowing Out the Candles on a Birthday Cake

The superstitious tradition of blowing out candles on birthday cakes has surprisingly ancient origins. Some historians believe it goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, who may have made cakes adorned with lit candles to honor Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and moon. This, in turn, was adopted by the Romans, who helped spread the tradition.

In modern Europe, the ritual of celebrating birthdays with a cake and candles — as we do today — has been around since at least the 18th century. One of the first documented accounts comes from the 1746 birthday party of Count Ludwig Von Zinzendorf, a German bishop, who had a massive cake covered in candles. At this point, in Germany at least, the act of extinguishing the candle flames was seen as a way to carry desires up to the gods — not dissimilar to how we blow out candles and make a wish today. 

Eating 12 Grapes at Midnight on New Year’s Eve

The tradition of eating a dozen grapes on New Year’s Eve comes from Spain, and while the origins are still debated, it dates back to at least the 1880s. According to some historians, the Spanish bourgeoisie decided to imitate the French New Year’s celebration of drinking champagne by skipping the middleman and going straight for the grapes. Others suggest the tradition began as a shrewd marketing tactic by grape growers who had a surplus harvest to unload in the early 1900s. 

Either way, the ritual caught on: By eating one grape at each of midnight’s 12 clock chimes, you are destined for a lucky year, with each grape representing one of the 12 forthcoming months. The custom soon spread throughout Latin America, in countries as diverse as Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Peru. Some Latino populations in the U.S. have also maintained the grape-eating superstition.

Calf’s Brains With Brown Butter

Calf’s brains were once a respected delicacy rather than an unusual curiosity. Recipes for preparing brains appeared in classic cookbooks such as Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), where organ meats were treated as valuable ingredients that could be transformed into refined dishes with sauces, butter, herbs, and seasonings.

The popularity of brains reflected a time when cooks used nearly every part of an animal and considered offal an important part of good household cooking. As meat became more commonly sold in convenient cuts and attitudes toward organ meats changed, dishes like calf’s brains with brown butter largely vanished. Today, the texture, preparation, and unfamiliar main ingredient make it a recipe few modern cooks would attempt.

Poached Eggs in Aspic

Savory aspics were once a symbol of careful cooking and formal dining. Recipes for egg, chicken, veal, and similar gelatin-based dishes appeared throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in cookbooks such as Fannie Fox’s Cook Book (1923). These recipes required preparing clear gelatin, arranging ingredients attractively, and creating a finished dish that was as decorative as it was edible.

Aspic was popular because it turned ordinary ingredients into something that looked elaborate and sophisticated. It was especially suited to formal meals where presentation mattered as much as flavor. Modern cooks, however, rarely have the time or interest required for clarifying gelatin and carefully arranging food inside a translucent mold. While savory aspics have made something of a comeback in foodie circles, they mostly represent a once-fashionable dish that has faded away.

Steamed Suet Pudding

Steamed suet puddings were a cornerstone of 17th-century British household cooking. In the United States, they appeared in 18th- and 19th-century cookbooks including Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879). Varieties such as plum or fig suet pudding combined flour, dried fruit, spices, and suet — a firm animal fat — before being slowly steamed or boiled for several hours until dense and rich.

These puddings were popular because they were filling, economical, and well suited to households that relied on preserved foods during colder months. The long cooking time and use of suet were once ordinary parts of domestic life, but modern desserts have moved toward lighter textures, quicker preparation, and more familiar fats. Today, a steamed suet pudding is more likely to be made as a historic novelty than as a regular family dessert.

Pigeon Soup

Pigeon soup is one of the oldest known soups, with a version appearing on a Babylonian clay tablet dating to around 1750 BCE. The dish made its way to the United States with early settlers and remained a familiar recipe through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, appearing in cookbooks such as How To Cook: The Housekeeper’s Friend (1902). At the time, wild pigeon and squab were commonly served in homes, hotels, and restaurants, and the soup was typically made by simmering whole birds with onions, celery, herbs, and broth.

Pigeon soup fell out of favor by the mid-20th century. The extinction of the passenger pigeon in 1914, the widespread availability of inexpensive chicken, and changing tastes all contributed to its decline. Today, few Americans would consider making soup from whole pigeons, but squab — a young pigeon that has never flown — is considered an expensive delicacy.

Mock Turtle Soup

One of the most famous examples of historical imitation cuisine is mock turtle soup, which appeared in many 18th- and 19th-century cookbooks. True turtle soup was considered a luxury dish, but because turtle was expensive and difficult to obtain, cooks developed a substitute using calf’s head and other ingredients to recreate the rich texture and flavor associated with turtle meat. The dish became so popular that it even inspired the Mock Turtle character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a sign of how familiar the recipe was to Victorian-era readers.

Mock turtle soup remained a dinner party staple for generations because it represented ingenuity and refinement. It was the kind of elaborate dish served at formal dinners and special occasions where cooks demonstrated their skill through lengthy preparation. Today, the recipe has all but disappeared because few home cooks are interested in preparing calf’s head, extracting gelatinous textures, and spending hours creating a soup designed to imitate a food that is itself rarely eaten.

Roman Defrutum

It’s well known that the ancient Romans enjoyed their wine, but it’s possible a component of the winemaking process fueled ill health in a manner that went beyond the typical hangover. The Romans made a sweet, syrupy substance called defrutum, which was prepared by boiling unfermented grape juice. This syrup was used as a preservative for wine and fruit, as well as in sauces for dishes of pork, veal, and lentils, as described in the famed Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria. 

The problem was in the sweetener’s preparation: Ancient scholars including Cato and Pliny the Elder called for the syrup to be boiled in a lead-lined pot, inevitably resulting in the syrup’s absorption of lead. Although the hazards of lead poisoning were known to the Romans, it apparently never occurred to these great minds that they were endangering the public with their instructions.

Tansies

Nowadays, a typical Easter meal might include a ham and a sampling of the chocolate left by the Easter Bunny, but for Christians in medieval England, the holiday was incomplete without the serving of the tansy. The dish was named for its primary ingredient, the yellow-flowered tansy plant, which was mixed with herbs and a hearty helping of eggs to produce what was essentially a large, sweet omelet. 

Coming on the heels of Lent, the tansy not only provided a welcome change from the strict diet of lentils and fish consumed over the previous 40 days, but also was said to provide relief from the gas-inducing Lenten meals. Despite its purported medicinal qualities, the plant is actually mildly toxic, its pyrrolizidine alkaloids dangerous to humans in high doses. Although the poison didn’t hinder the long-standing popularity of the tansy on dinner tables, people are generally dissuaded from eating the plant today.

Victorian Bread

You could highlight an array of foods in Victorian England that would fail to pass muster under any food safety laws, from the lead chromate found in mustard to the arsenic compounds used to color confectionery. However, given its ubiquity in households of the era, the most egregious example may well be bread. 

Seeking to create thick loaves of an appealing white hue, Victorian bakers mixed in such ingredients as ground-up bones, chalk, and plaster of Paris. Another common additive was alum, an aluminum-based compound that inhibited digestion and contributed to the malnutrition rampant among the poorer population. Although the dangers of adulterated edibles were known among the more educated members of the public, there was little stopping the food producers and distributors who ignored these health risks in favor of profits.

Rhubarb Leaves

Known for its reddish stalk and tart flavor, rhubarb in the hands of a capable chef can be used to create delicious pies, sauces, and jams. That is, the stalks can be turned into such kitchen delights — the thick green leaves are chock-full of toxic oxalic acid and therefore not meant for ingestion. Unfortunately, this fact was not well known a century ago, as rhubarb leaves were recommended as a source of vegetation during the food shortages of World War I. 

Consumed in small but regular doses, the leaves inhibit the beneficial effects of calcium and trigger the buildup of calcium oxalate, leading to kidney stones. While a human would normally have to eat something like 6 pounds of the stuff to experience the more acute effects (including vomiting, diarrhea, and kidney failure), there was at least one reported case of oxalic acid poisoning during the rhubarb leaf’s brief run as a lettuce substitute.