Dining Rooms and Meal Service: Dining after 1920

The 1920s brought major transitions to a head. For the elites, the twenty-course Russian dinners were fading; already in the first decade of the twentieth century, “short” six- or seven-course dinners were touted as modern. Changing notions of health and slimmer body ideals certainly contributed, but the shrinking servant population was key. Factory assembly lines offered more attractive employment than did live-in servitude. Moreover, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland points out that the radical dislocations engendered by World War I led many to question the propriety of the master–servant relationship. Although Congress declared one servant to be the “inalienable right of every American family” in defeating a 1918 proposed “Servant Tax,” the debate was academic: the days of resident domestics butlering multi-course dinners were largely over.