Setting the Table Trivia Quiz

The napkin is always placed to the left of the plate. There is not full agreement on whether it should be to the left of the utensils or underneath. Napkins should be folded, with the folded side next to the plate. When you sit down, the first thing to do is to remove the napkin and place it on your lap. Open fully for dinner, half for lunch.

The butter plate is placed on the upper left. There are some etiquette rules about buttering and eating your bread. The recommended method is to use the table's communal butter knife to put a pat of butter on your butter plate. Then you pick up your bread, break off a piece, and butter it with your own butter knife, buttering and eating the pieces one at a time.

The salad fork is slightly smaller than the dinner fork. They can also be referred to as lunch forks. If you're in a posh restaurant, you might find that your salad fork has been chilled, to match a chilled salad.

A full set of silver comes with many different types of forks, but the one used most often is the simple dinner fork, which is a long fork used for the main course. It can also be called the place fork.

Other forks you might find in a full set of silver include specialty forks for pickles, fish, and oysters.

A soup bowl is placed on top of the dinner plate for a casual setting. If you had a separate plate for salad, then, from the bottom, it would be: dinner plate, salad plate, soup bowl. Soup has its own etiquette: you move your spoon away from you as you scoop up the soup. This has to do with not spilling or dripping onto your clothes. A term for "away from you" is "thitherwardly."

The dinner knife goes to the right of the dinner plate. The sharp edge always faces the plate: this is considered polite, and less threatening, to your neighbor. Using a knife and fork varies depending on the location: in Europe, right-handed people eat with the fork in their left hand and the knife in their right, throughout the meal.

In the U.S., right-handed people cut their food in that position, but then they put down the knife and switch the fork to the right hand for eating. It's not as efficient and no one really knows why it's done! One theory is that right-handed people want to use their dominant hand to cut their meat.

The dinner plate goes right in the middle of the setting, below the salad plate and soup bowl if they're provided. Dinnerware can come in a variety of materials: a ceramic kind called earthenware; another ceramic with glass added is called stoneware; porcelain or china, which are a mix of fired clays; treated plastic; and glass laminate.

There is also bone china, which mixes in animal -- human in the past! -- bones to strengthen the clay mix.

The spoon is placed to the right of the knife. Generally, we use basic table spoons for meals. But a full silver set has many more types of spoons: there's the berry spoon which might have grooves on the outside; the caddy spoon which is used simply for scooping tea from a tea caddy into a tea pot, as opposed to the teaspoon which is for stirring your tea; the egg spoon, which is narrower at the top to help you dip it into a soft-boiled egg; even a mustache spoon for those with long mustaches.

After chopsticks, the spoon is the first eating utensil used by humans: knives for eating and forks came later.

The butter knife is placed across the butter plate at the start of the meal. After you've placed a pat of butter onto your butter plate from the communal butter, you use your own butter knife to smear a bit of butter on a small piece of your own bread. A butter knife is smaller than a table knife and is dull, as it's not used for cutting but for spreading.

The glass goes to the upper right of the dinner plate. The basic table setting is designed for right-handed people, so the assumption is that people will be drinking with their right hand and want their beverage close by.