Dining Rooms and Meal Service: Russian Service

In dinners à la russe, rather than enter a room redolent of the delicious savors of dinner, one sat at a table laid with a plate, wineglasses, water glasses, and, as the century progressed, a thicket of forks, knives, and spoons, many of specialized shape and function, used serially to consume the successive courses. Etiquette writers struggled with how many forks, knives, and spoons properly could be laid on the table, as it was spatially impossible to have all the silverware needed for a fifteen-course meal set in advance. By the end of the nineteenth century, the consensus was that no more than three forks (excluding the tiny seafood fork), two knives, and a soupspoon were appropriate at the meal’s start. The center of the table could be decorated with a mirrored plateau, porcelain figures, candelabra, condiment castors, or epergnes (all of which had appeared at extremely elite tables in eighteenth-century French service), plus dishes of hors d’oeuvres, bonbons, and desserts. Missing, however, were the substantial comestibles, leading some to worry whether their appetites would be sated. Philip Hone, the mayor of New York City in 1825, condemned his first dinner served in this modern style in January 1838:

The table, covered with confectionery and gew-gaws, looked like one of the shops down Broadway in the Christmas holidays, but not an eatable thing. The dishes were all handed round; in my opinion a most unsatisfactory mode of proceeding in relation to this important part of the business of a man’s life. One does not know how to choose, because you are ignorant of what is coming next, or whether anything more is coming. Your conversation is interrupted every minute by greasy dishes thrust between your head and that of your neighbor, and it is more expensive than the old mode of shewing a handsome dinner to your guests and leaving them free to choose. It will not do.