Dog Bag It

The history of leftovers has yet to be written. It must be because there are delicate issues involved. Should the guest ask to take some of the leftovers home and risk seeming like a no-class pig and cheapskate?

On the other hand, would it be presumptuous for the host to offer a doggy bag when there’s a chance the guests were not quite as pleased with a dish as they let on? And come to think of it, isn’t the very expression “doggy bag” pretty embarrassing?

In the Middle Ages, things were simpler because everybody was a lot poorer. Well-to-do people used big square slices of stale rye bread, called trenchers, as plates. All the sauces and meat juices tended to soak into your trencher, which was also likely to have scraps of food stuck in it as well. The starving beggars at the castle door were not too proud to eat secondhand trenchers.

And in ancient Greece, doggy-bagging seems to have been customary at the Macedonian court. According to a description in the 4th century book Deipnosophistae (“The Dinner-Table Philosophers”), when Macedonian diners were about done, servants would go around the room putting together “happy baskets” (eutycheis spyrides), evidently full of leftovers, just before the major-domo signaled the end of the meal by honking a blast on a trumpet.

This was because of the monarch’s traditional role of distributing food to his subordinates, not simple thrift. But a happy basket is a happy basket.