Dining Rooms and Meal Service: French Service vs. Russian Service

The demand for fashionable dishes to serve “2 genteel Courses of Victuals” is enormously telling. Through the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, prosperous diners aspired to eat in what is generally known as the French style, used by the affluent not only in France, where the style originated in the seventeenth century, but also throughout Europe, England, and America during the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, a very different style of dining, called Russian service, dominated fashionable tables. While the foodstuffs offered could be similar, their mode of presentation varied. In a nutshell, a meal served à la française, or “French style” (sometimes called à l’anglaise, or “English style”), was divided into two main courses plus a separate dessert course. Each course consisted of many platters placed on the table simultaneously, much like contemporary groaning Thanksgiving boards, from which the diners would receive their portions. A meal served à la russe, or “Russian style,” did not place platters on the table but instead presented a succession of separate courses to each diner. Although fifteen- to twenty-course meals were most typical, some accounts describe a very few grandiose meals estimated at one hundred and fifty separate courses.