My ironic need to show I’m not off my trolley

For the purposes of this article, I carried out a wide-ranging and statistically accurate survey on the subject. (In other words, I wrote a post on Facebook asking, "What do you think of toast racks?") The question elicited some very strong feelings.

"I don't think I'll ever be able to get behind cold toast," said one friend, adding, "Whatever people do behind closed doors is their business, but I don't want any part in it."

"Toast racks are unutterably evil," added another. In the interest of impartial journalism, I should add that others said they actually liked cold buttered toast. One friend described how his 90-year-old grandmother gave him a toast rack for his birthday, emblazoned with the words, "Nice rack!".

"It is, isn't it," she said, proudly.

There are lots of other rules and specialised equipment associated with dining that I was taught about as a child. For example, my mother explained that one must never serve biscuits to a guest without first putting a doily underneath them; that vegetables should be placed in a serving dish, not directly on to people's plates; and that - the ultimate crime - one must never, ever put the milk bottle on the table. The milk goes in a jug, and that goes on the table.

This last fact was drummed into me so strongly that even now, at the age of 42 and with three children of my own, I feel a frisson when I put the big plastic milk bottle on the table at breakfast time. "I know it's wrong," my conscience whispers, "but I'm going to do it anyway. That's just the kind of edgy, independent woman I am."

But the sad thing is that some of the dining equipment which is now considered not merely obsolete, but positively fogeyish, must have been really useful.

Take the hostess trolley. Is there any item more evocative of middle class entertaining in the 1970s?

The hostess trolley is still in regular use in my parents' house, and very handy it is, too, though we don't let my mother forget the memorable occasion when she switched it on to discover a dish of sausages inside from a meal produced three months previously.

Like any average, married Jewish woman living in north London, I have friends and family round to eat all the time. It's a major logistical challenge getting everything hot and ready at the same time. How useful a hostess trolley would be! If only owning one wouldn't be terribly embarrassing.

And what about grape scissors? My children pick incessantly at the bowl of grapes, plucking one or two off as they go by. How much more civilised to have a pair of grape scissors standing by, preferably silver and ornately engraved with grapes lest there should be any confusion as to their purpose?

I would make the children cut themselves a bunch of grapes, put it on a plate (china, obviously), and sit down to eat them at the table.

Of course, a key reason that these quaint traditions have disappeared over the years is because houses no longer tend to contain servants and full-time housewives.

Busy working families need to be pragmatic in their eating habits, or nothing else would ever get done.

And there's a huge amount of class-related baggage attached to some of these objects. They were always considered to be a sign of a bourgeois outlook, the folk higher up in society liking to mock their use in order to emphasise their superiority.

This idea perhaps rings particularly true in the Jewish world, where first- and second-generation immigrants were working to establish themselves among the British middle classes, and were therefore likely to adopt their trappings with particular fervour.

Anyway, I think I need to acquire an ironic hostess trolley which I can use as a talking point, acknowledging how extremely uncool and anachronistic it is, while at the same time relishing the ability to make my vegetable side dishes in advance and warm up my plates.

I'll definitely avoid putting any sausages in it, though.

@susanreuben