'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen.

It's [a kitchen/dining table] where we teach our children the manners they need to get along in society. We teach them how to share. To take turns. To argue without fighting and insulting other people. They learn the art of adult conversation. The family meal is the nursery of democracy.

On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint. "I like your board arrangement," said Stella. "It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back."

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.

Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions.

One result of the nobility and gentry becoming more mobile and mixing more together was new kinds of parties. From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, whenever people decided to entertain, they did so in much the same way. They gave either a dinner on its own, or a dinner combined with dancing. The latter combination started with a meal, sometimes enlivened by music. After dinner the company retired to a withdrawing room, and passed an hour or so by taking tea or dessert, or playing cards, or listening to more music. They then returned to the room where they had dined, for dancing or as it tended to be called, a ball; in the early eighteenth century as few as seven couples dancing together could be described as a ball. After dancing there was normally some kind of light refreshment, and then everybody went home. The refreshments at the end might, according to the century, be described as a banquet or a supper, the room for dinner and dancing a great chamber or a saloon; the dances danced, the music played and the food eaten changed, but the pattern remained much the same. The guests did one thing at a time, and they all did it together.

"I love tables. And dancing. Oh, and I love table dancing, although Grandmother always says, "Wait until we're finished eating.

B is for Bachelors
... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos.
Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.

In fine weather we always had our meals on the veranda at the rickety marble-topped table and it was here that all the major family decisions were taken.

Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

The first thing I noticed about the Executive Dining Room was its beauty... The second thing... was the seating arrangement. In my family, you could always gauge your worth by where you were seated...