Dining Rooms and Meal Service: Dining for the Aspiring: Vernacular Emulation from 1830 to 1920

Many middle- and upper-middle-class Americans wanted to emulate the wealthy’s “genteel” meals; the conundrum was how to dine elegantly when one was neither to the manner born nor possessed of a phalanx of European-trained servants. Imagine a young housewife’s jitters in navigating the shoals of dinner à la française upon reading in Recollections of a Housekeeper (1834) by Clarissa Packard that “a lady may as excusably stand on her own head at her table, as have her turkey or goose in an unauthorized posture.”