Dining Rooms and Meal Service: Evolution of the Dining Room

To dedicate a room exclusively to eating is an unusual and luxurious allocation of space. Few cultures conceived of such single-purpose domestic spaces. Wealthy ancient Greeks and Romans had their andrones (men’s rooms, a place where men gathered to eat and be entertained) and triclinia, sometimes with immovable stone tables and couches, but by the Middle Ages no abode, regardless of the socioeconomic standing of the owner, reserved a space solely for dining, with tables and seating permanently displayed. Whether one dined in the great hall of an aristocrat’s castle, the main room of a comfortably middle-class home, or the only room of a peasant’s shanty, the eating area was used for other functions once meals were finished. Crude, wooden trestle tables, disguised by silky damask or serviceable linen, were set up and broken down as needed. The affluent sat on chairs; those of more modest means pulled up a limited number of stools or benches; and the lowest in rank, such as children, stood. In the poorest households, there was frequently neither table nor seat for anyone, with a common cooking pot or a large trencher set on the floor or improvised surface for all the eaters to dip into. In the mid–seventeenth century, just as Europeans were colonizing America’s Eastern Seaboard, dining rooms were beginning to emerge as distinct domestic spaces for the most affluent, although the process would not be complete even in these classes until the eighteenth century. Simultaneously, the middling classes were enjoying homes with multiple rooms, devoting some to more public and others to more private functions.