I am obsessed with the expression "kitchen supper". Who, apart from Francis Maude and his friends, uses it? And what, exactly, does it mean? In fact, it takes a while to unpick it, for within these two words lurk such a dizzying array of assumptions. The knowledge that one's kitchen is big enough to contain a table. The suggestion that, elsewhere in the house, there might be another room where, on a more important occasion, one might also eat. The deft swerve around the words "dinner party" (these, being aspirational middle class, are presumably non-U in Maude-ian circles) and "meal" (also non-U, though I've no idea why; I'm only aware of this at all because a horrible old Etonian I once met ticked me off when it fell sluttishly from my lips). The polite dampening of expectations which signals: prepare yourself for bagged salad, lasagne bought in from Carluccio's, and Green & Black's ice cream. It may even, I'm guessing, contain a warning to guests that tonight – my dear! – the staff will not be in.

I am not someone who grew up calling the meal – aargh! – you eat in the middle of the day "dinner" (we called it lunch). But I did call the meal – aargh! again – you eat in the evening "tea", and I still do, sometimes, for all that I now dine at 8pm rather than 5.30pm. It just sort of slips out. Supper, though, was unknown to me as a child, and we never ate in our kitchen: it was not big enough. The same was true at my grandparents', whose dining tables were in their sitting rooms and of the gate-leg variety, so you could fold them up after eating, the better that people might move around. One of my grannies called her kitchen "the kitchenette", a word that is no doubt unknown to Francis Maude – and if he is reading this, it means a small kitchen, not a fake one, unlike leatherette, which means plastic as opposed to leather. The other granny's kitchen was so small that on washing day, when she got out her top loading twin tub and her mangle – I know this sounds incredibly Monty Python, but she really did use one – it was impossible either to enter or to leave the house until she'd finished (the back door opened straight into the kitchen; the front door had not been opened since 1954).

It's fascinating all this: the way social history is a guest at every meal, whether you eat off a tray in front of Coronation Street, or in the kitchen with Dave and Sam. Dining tables in particular have immemorial meanings. As Margaret Visser notes in The Rituals of Dinner (my go-to book on the subject of table manners), the chamber into which a medieval lord withdrew from his hall to eat his stag pie and cardoons was a forerunner of our living rooms and, by about 1450, increasingly exclusive, used by only the most important of men. It was later that the table moved into a separate room: the word "dining room" originates from 1601 and isn't in common usage until the 18th century.

Meanwhile, the peasants continued to eat in the kitchen, by the fire. According to Visser, the nobility favoured trestle tables for their banquets because heavy, stationary tables were what you got in the kitchen, and were thus a touch common. It was for this reason that a tablecloth – the best were from Syria – was seen as being far more expressive of the quality of the host than the table beneath.

Although I laugh in the face of "kitchen suppers", I must admit that I'm quite the snob when it comes to dinner. I like napkins, and always put linen ones out when I set the table. I light candles, too (in the 19th century, by the way, no description of a feast was complete without an enumeration of the candles; the French literary gourmet, Grimod de la Reynière, liked to light 365, one for every day of the year). I have lots of hand-me-down, bone-handled Sheffield plate, and use it for best, with our David Mellor "Pride", which we saved up for, reserved for second best. You will never see cream in my house that is not in a jug, nor salt that is not in a cellar. And – la pièce de résistance – I have a lovely sideboard, bought after a long search on eBay, on which fruit, cheese and alcohol may patiently await diners' attention. Sideboards, of course, are a whole other story. I mean, what is the correct terminology there? I have a feeling that "sideboard" is non-U, too. But where, then, does Francis Maude keep his condiments? On a buffet table? No. A credenza? Surely not. Answers on a Smythson postcard please.