Social Class
What is it and why do we need to know when looking at food in the past, present and future?
For the moment, you will need to be content with "Wait-and-see cake" after reading the rest of this page..
Some of what you see at http://www.gastronomyafharrison.co.uk/page46.php will be used after suitable adjustment.
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If you think sitting up straight and keeping your elbows off the table is a bother, be grateful you weren't a child of America's early settlers. Back then, children didn't even get to sit at the table. They stood behind the adults and ate whatever was handed to them.
Later, children were allowed to sit at the table, but they couldn't speak unless an adult spoke to them. They couldn't ask for a dish, either. They had to wait until a grownup offered it to them. It was also considered rude to fidget, sing, or look at someone else who was eating.
Table manners are even older than tables. About 9,000 years ago, people cooked soups in pots. They dipped spoons of wood or bone into the cooking pot to eat. The first rules about eating determined who could dip into the pot first.
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More at http://www.hospitalityguild.com/History/How_table_manners_became_polite.htm
However, the original is at http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/1128/p22s1.html
That was shown at http://www.foodtimeline.org/food1.html and there's much more useful information.
The problem with using quotations is the question of who wrote the original version. The problem is easier to solve using books compared with finding text etc on the Internet.
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Table manners are just one part of social class. Within this project, we look more at what people eat today and why one "group" of people eats this and not that.