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By Dean Norman

I was watching a TV show that showed the dining hall at a castle — the long table that would seat a lot of important people who would be served gourmet food in fancy pots and eat off of expensive dishes with a special spoon, fork or knife for each bite. If I am ever invited to dinner at such a place I will try to think of some polite reason why I can’t be there.

How can you enjoy eating if you are seated between two important people and are expected to talk to them while you eat? One of them asks you a question, and of course you have to answer. But you can’t talk with food in your mouth. So you have to chew and swallow, and then try to remember what they asked. You can’t bother to think about what the food tastes like, unless the question is about the food.

There are also important people sitting across the table who can see the food you splash onto your clothes. If you have to eat a whole meal without splashing anything on your clothes...well, that is too much tension. To enjoy what you are eating, you have to concentrate on the taste of the food, and who cares if you splash something on your clothes?

And there is expensive wine served with dinners at a castle. Oh, you can bet on that. They wouldn’t let you eat at the King’s table and drink a coke or a beer or just water. You get the best wine, and you will have to say something about the wine to your table mates. To say something about wine at a castle dinner, you have to know wine language. You can’t just say, “Man, this is goooood stuff!” You have to say words like fruity, full bodied, presumptive, unassuming, assuming or I don’t know. I don’t know wine language. And you can’t just gulp it down and burp. You have to sniff the wine before you drink it and swish it around in your mouth as if you are cleaning something that is stuck in a tooth. You have to do that before you swallow a sip of wine. A sip! Don’t try to take a good mouthful and slug it down. You must SIP wine.

OK, this is what a really good dinner is like. You are at home, or a friend’s home, and you order take out or delivery. Chinese, pizza, whatever. Anything so you don’t have to compliment the cook. You hang out at a table, or in the rec room, and watch a movie or a game on TV while you eat. You don’t have to say anything about the food or anything about anything. You can rest your elbows on a table if there is a table. Nobody is looking at you; they are looking at the TV. You can be as sloppy as you want and who cares? You can concentrate on the taste of your food and drink. Or you can concentrate on the game, or you can imagine you are somewhere else doing something else.

I like pizza with everything except anchovies. Amber beer, with a big dish of vanilla ice cream for desert. Then some dark French roast coffee. Fat chance I would get that at the castle.

— Dean Norman 

Dean Norman is a cartoonist and humor writer, whose work has appeared in greeting cards,The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine and The Kansas City Star. He's also written comedy for cartoon shows and written and illustrated children's books. He illustrated a cartoon book for Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland Metroparks Adventures.