Letitia Baldrige Quotes

I invited myself. Thought this table needed some class.

I was expected to sit at the table, learn how to eat properly.

I think the time of the formal dinners is over.

I like to create what I call 'tablescapes.' It's so much more fun when you organize your table around a theme, don't you think?

Eating American-style, you put the knife down and clang. Continental is silent and efficient.

Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.

My notion of an elegant table is you don't leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.

Be able to set a table so that you feel like you're dining, not just sitting and eating.

Prince Charles is very relaxed at the table, throwing his salad around willy-nilly. I didn't find him stiff at all.

On many occasions, an informal buffet and casual seating offer a little more intimacy than a loud gathering around a big table.

I remember watching steak being cooked on TV and wanting to try it. As a special treat, my mother cooked it for me, and I thought this would be the time I would eat with a knife and fork. Alas, I ate it with chopsticks!

I was brought up in a way that when you're at a dinner party, you don't grab a chip unless it's been offered to everyone else. It's the manners of being brought up by English parents.

Know how to behave at a fine restaurant, which is a telltale measure of social maturity.

Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.

Don't touch my napkin. I do not want the server to pick up the napkin and put it on my lap. I know it belongs there; maybe I don't choose to put it there.

Arranging an official dinner in an embassy is a little like writing a script for a play. The prolog is the guest list, often the most difficult part of the whole creative operation.

Owning flatware makes me feel like a grown-up. That and knowing that flatware is called flatware.

I can judge a restaurant by its bread: it winds me up that a lot of places buy pre-packed ones in and don't bother putting them in the oven to crisp them up again. And you shouldn't put bread on a side-plate: it needs to be pushed back into the centre of the table.

When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

Do not speak of repulsive matters at table.

Do all your eating at a table.

In proceeding to the dining-room, the gentleman gives one arm to the lady he escorts--it is unusual to offer both.

There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.

Table the label and wear your own name.