Audra Lowe: With all the holiday gathering and full in swing and never hurts to
get a few reminders on etiquette so we asks the leading consultant
and social protocol Sharyn Kennedy Amoroso, to give us some
few pointers when heading off to dinner parties.
Sharyn Kennedy Amoroso: Force of the holiday is when we bring out our good China and
perhaps will set the table to look a little more elaborate than we do
everyday over the weeks. So, here we have what call the simple
place is setting although it may not look too simple to some. It’s
really set for a four course meal of soup, salad on tray and dessert.
Of course we have our dinner plate, our charger or our service
plate in the center. The bread plate is always to the upper left the
drink glasses are always to the upper right. And a nice trick to help
your children remembered this is if they pick up there left hand and
make a lower case B and there right hand and make a lower case
D, the B on the left stands for there bread plate, the D on the right
stands for there drink glass. So, they then can help the set the table
at your holidays knowing bread plate and drink glasses.
We then use our utensils from the outside in so, the table should be
set according to the courses that are following. If we have soup as
our first course then of course soup is to the outside right. And the
reason for that is that a place setting really favors the right handed
person, more people are right handed than left handed. So, a right
handed person will pick up the spoon with the right hand and then
so are soups spoon is on the outside right. Then we have the pork,
the salad pork, the smaller fork on the outside left and all of the
forks are on the same side. So we begin with soup and there we
have our salad and in working in towards our on tray with our
dinner fork and our dinner knife, this is always tricky the
continental way of setting the table for dessert is to put the dessert,
fork and spoon at the top of the plate.
So, if you set down to a place setting this is where soupspoon is
here, salad for both is for dessert. Never want to take a use utensil
and then put it back on the table or the cloth again, you would then
rested across your bread plate or on the side of your dinner plate.
But one you pick up a using never back on the table again. One of
the biggest mistakes is when saying help people cut there food
very often you see people hold the fork more like peach fork where
they’ll stub there food like this. So, the proper way to cut your
food is to pick up the fork with the left hand, point the tines to the
ceiling and then high the handle with the palm of the hand. We do
the same with the knife pointing our fingers with the handle across
the palm.
So, the proper way to cut food is to secured food with the tines
down and then cut this way. So, we don’t want to be looking
stubbing and carving our food this way. Electronics at the dinner
table they just shouldn’t be there, that’s not the place for
electronics and everyone seems to you know have this extra
appendage this days everyone has there iPhone or Blackberry there
cell phone but there really is the time in a place. And this holiday
meals you know if you look at Thanksgiving or Christmas the time
that we sit down at the table together with our family and friends is
you know such a small amount of time with our family and friends
that are really is time to just disconnect to get connected.