WOM 620

Cheese or dessert first?

The divine order clearly ordains that cheese should follow dessert. Doesn't it?
Cheese platter
A cheese platter, the civilised way to end a meal or a prelude to pudding? Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

My family didn't go in for table manners much. We didn't exactly fight with forks over the last chip (well all right … but it was only once and dammit he's still got one working eye) but there was never any attempt by our parents to instil in us the tedious bourgeois codes that had been beaten into them.

Generally, I thank them for this. Eating is a pretty un-neurotic experience for me and I've learned enough to pass in polite company. It didn't take long to pick up that you worked from the outside in with the cutlery; that nobody much cares which wine glass any more; that though you're supposed to pile your peas on the back of your fork, even the Queen packed it in around 1958. In fact some newer rules have sprung into being unique to our generation. My parents had to learn to tilt their soupbowl away from them and never use fingers. We've had to learn to pick up our sushi and slurp our noodles direct from the bowl.

But there's one point at the average social meal where I still lock up in confusion. It's at the end of the main course, when the plates are cleared away and a frisson runs round the table. Cheese or dessert first?

When I was younger, this gave me no pause. I always assumed cheese came last because I'd read enough Wodehouse and Waugh to know it went with port, just before cigars and was therefore posh. It was only later that I realised there was a whole generation of middle class 'yes, we spend every August at our gite in the Var' Francophiles who followed an entirely different code. For the French, sucré must follow salé and therefore it would be a dishonour to the wide board of redolent local fromages to have them as an afterthought to the pud like some sock-perfumed petit four.

The English on the other hand, have always felt that our magisterial salty / sharp cheeses go well with the rich fortified wine we invented. Each swill of port should be chased with a nubbin of stilton, by a mouthful of port, and so on, in an unending cycle of pleasure (unsurpassable until the aristocracy discovered they could do the same thing with vodka shots and cocaine). No trueborn Brit could imagine interrupting a nightlong binge of stilton and stickies with some faffy dessert and so we have always got it out of the way first.

Personally, I've grown to mistrust the French way. When the host calls for the cheese first, it's as sure as oeufs are oeufs that dessert will be followed by the terse offer 'coffee anyone?' before you're chivvied, blinking into the suburban street, the door bolts shot loudly behind you as you wonder how the hell to explain to the babysitter why you're home at 10 o'clock.

When, as God clearly intended, the pud is served first, it's followed by a brief stretching, leaning back, tie-loosening hiatus and then out comes the cheese. At this point you know that you're in for the duration. It will begin with free-ranging and highly lubricated conversation about everything from politics to perversion and, unless you host has had the foresight to lock you in, may well end three months later when they find you lying face down in a bar in Macau, heavily bearded and with the name of a transvestite fire-eater tattooed on your left buttock.

No, for me, 'cheese first' means joylessness and restraint; it is counterintuitive and foreign. 'Pud first' is patriotic, cocks a snook at a generation of pusillanimous Peter Mayle types and foreshadows an evening of Bohemian excess.

How about you?

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