Dinner
Dining Etiquette
Serving Dinner
Dinner at Emo Court in the Early 1800s
A Sample Dinner Menu for the Party of 12 Guests at Emo Court
in 1821
Dinner at Emo Court in Victorian Times
A Sample Dinner Menu for Eight Persons (1890)
A Sample Dinner Menu for Six Persons (1892)
Special Dishes for Dinner Parties and Balls
A Sample Menu for the Ball Supper held at Emo Court, December
1879
Entering the Dining Room
By the 19th
century, it was customary to have an aperitif in the drawing room before
dinner. Ladies and gentlemen always wore formal dress for dinner, even if it
was just an ordinary affair of five courses (soup, fish, meat,
sweet and savoury courses). When the dinner gong was sounded, the ladies and
gentlemen would rise and file into the dining room in a previously-arranged
pattern of precedence. Each gentleman took the arm of the lady who would sit on
his right, the host and honoured female guest entering first, the hostess and
highest ranking gentleman last.
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Table manners were extremely important at dinner. The correct cutlery and glass had to be used for each course, and one ate only a little of each dish, and that delicately. When wine was taken, it was customary to drink to another person, making firm eye contact across the table before raising glasses together and drinking with great gravity. During the meal, each gentleman attended to the lady seated to his right, ensuring that she was served with the wine she preferred, choosing the same wine for himself, and bowing his head to her with each sip taken, for even the gruffest country gentleman sipped his wine rather than quaffed it. If a dinner was given in someone’s honour, toasts were made after the main course. |
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Until the
mid-19th century, dinner was served à
la française, with all the food laid on the table at the
same time. As many dishes were served, dinner was laid in two vast courses
of firsts and seconds. Carving was done at the table and to carve well
was one of the gentlemanly arts. Ladies were also expected to carve
and serve well, although at large dinner parties they only served the
soup and sweet dishes. Around 1860, the French system was replaced by
service à la Russe, where food was served up course by course by liveried
footmen. With this new serving method, which needed an average of one
servant to every three diners, each diner was now guaranteed a taste
of every course on offer and the food reached their plate at the correct
temperature. The hard part was choosing which of the many courses to
partake of, and which to pass over. |
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Plate
bucket from
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Dinner at
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the dining room at In this period, dinner would have been served à la française. A plain everyday dinner might consist of only three or four savoury dishes, followed by dessert or cheese. A formal dinner, however, consisted of a large number of dishes served in two main courses or ‘services’. The first course began with a light broth and a fish dish, perhaps crimped salmon or fillets of sole de Savoy. |
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A
selection of salads (Mrs Beeton) |
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The
second course consisted of another six or more lighter
dishes of vegetables, meats, cold sweets and savouries. These too
were placed on the table together. Typical seconds were oyster vol-au-vents,
mutton soufflé, pickled salmon, lobsters, sweetbreads, macaroni, scallops,
roast quail, peas, asparagus, omelette, wine jelly, almond blancmange,
lemon soufflé and orange tart. After the second course, the outer table
cloth was removed to reveal the finer one underneath, upon which the dessert
was set. Dessert might comprise hothouse fruits, preserves, and stomachic
ginger, washed down with claret, port, and sherry or |
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Cellarette
used to serve drinks in the dining room at |
A Sample
Dinner Menu for the Party of 12 Guests at Emo Court in 1821
(based on the Abbeyleix menu book
in the National Library of
Ms.
39,250/1)
First Course
Beef head soup
Six entrées
Veal à la chicore
glace
Ragoût de mutton
Sausages with marinated cabbage
Chicken à la tartare
Black pudding
Grilled turbot
Roast suckling pig
Second course
Four roast pigeons
Oysters in the oven
Creamed spinach
Asparagus
Coffee soufflé
Orange jelly
Dessert
Hot-house fruit
Biscuit à la crème
Dinner at
In the Victorian
period,
By about 1860,
there had been a radical change in the way that dinner was served, with service
à la Russe taking
the place of service à la française. With this change, dishes were now served up
in many successive courses. The quantity of food eaten at a Victorian dinner
party was enormous - even a modest dinner for six diners typically contained at
least 13 courses and dessert. As one butler observed, a dinner under five
courses was hardly considered a dinner!
According to Mrs Beeton, a complete dinner consisted of the following
courses:
1. Hors d’oeuvres
2. Soup
3. Fish
4. Entrée
5. Remove
6. Rôti
7. Entremets
8. Dessert
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This list
is deceptive, however, as two soups or fish dishes might be served,
along with a choice of entrées, while the ‘entremets’ course typically
contained three distinct courses. |
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Fish
dishes: turbot, whitebait and mackerel (Mrs Beeton) |
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Next followed
the soup course: usually a clear consommé
although if there were more than twelve guests a second soup of a thicker
consistency was also served. Victorian favourites included mulligatawny,
potage à la Reine (a thick soup with chicken,
bacon, vegetables and almonds), and chestnut soup, which was laborious
to prepare, as the roast chestnuts had to be rubbed through a fine sieve.
Soup was followed by one or more fish courses, often a boiled or fried
fish followed by a cold fish plate. |
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A selection of cold entrées: (Mrs Beeton) |
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The next
course was the remove, a joint of meat which formed
the most substantial part of the meal. The remove was perhaps a saddle
of mutton or fillet of beef, or a side of ham chaudfroid.
It was the pièce de résistance of the meal. The joint was, of course,
served with the most appropriate vegetables, fresh from the garden,
and liberal amounts of sauce or gravy. |
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Although
at this point the diners had eaten a substantial quantity of food (or
at least picked a little at each course), there were still many courses
to go! The next was the rôti, a dish
of roast poultry or game, such as stuffed quail, roasted plovers, or
dressed woodcock. |
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Cold
Sweet: Gateau St. Honoré (Mrs Beeton) |
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The
entremet comprised
three distinct courses: dishes of dressed vegetables and salad, followed
by sweet entremets and then savoury. Sweets might be hot and cold, with
hot sweets served first, as the cold sweets of jelly, blancmange, whipped syllabub
or sorbet were designed to clean the palate before the savoury dish.
Jellies were set in elaborate, highly decorative moulds, and often contained
layers of fresh fruit. Macédoine de fruit à la gelée, for
example, contained mixed fruit such as grapes, strawberries, red currants,
diced |
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Macédoine de fruit à la gelée |
The savoury
was the last course before dessert, and as the diners were undoubtedly
feeling quite full by this point, it was merely a mouthful or bonne bouche. As
this small dish should have a piquant flavour, items such as cheese straws or
anchovy aigrettes were deemed appropriate. When the savoury course was
finished, the dessert course was laid – a plethora of fresh, dried and
crystallised fruit, with an array of bon-bons and
homemade biscuits.
This substantial
meal was, of course, accompanied by fine wine and spirits. As it was customary
by the Victorian period to serve a different wine with each course, one wonders
how the guests could stand up by the end, in order to retire to drawing room
for tea and coffee!
Dinner Menu
for Eight Persons (January 1890)
(From Mrs Beeton)
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First Course Mulligatawny Soup Entrée Fricasseed Chicken Remove Rôti
Roast Pheasants Entremets Meringues à la Crème Desserts and Ices |
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A
supper table laden with delights (Mrs Beeton) |
Dinner Menu
for Six Persons (January 1892)
(From Mrs Beeton)
First Course
Vermicelli Soup
Fried Slices of Codfish with Anchovy Sauce
John Dory
Entrée
Stewed Rump-steak à la Jardinière
Oyster Patties
Remove
Leg of Mutton
Curried Rabbit and Boiled Rice
Rôti
Roast Partridges
Entremets
Apple Fritters
Tartlets of Greengage Jam
Plum-pudding
Desserts and Ices
Special Dishes for Dinner
Parties and Balls
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Dinner parties
were lavish events, and could include such rare delicacies as speckled
blue plover’s eggs served in their original nests or showpiece dishes
such as salamangundy, a magnificent salad with pickled herrings as
a centrepiece, surrounded by dishes of cucumber, celery, apple, lettuce,
anchovies, eggs, grapes and cooked fowl, all garnished with watercress
and nasturtium flowers. Such dishes allowed the cook to display her
expertise in combining different colours and tastes to the most decorative
effect. |
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A selection of tempting hors d’oeuvres: (Mrs Beeton) |
At special dinners,
turtle soup might grace the menu. This was usually made with sun-dried turtle
meat, as fresh turtle was hard to come by. Other special dishes included Prince’s
soup (a consommé with turnips, peas and finely shredded truffle), caviar pancakes,
‘angels on horseback’ (oysters rolled in thin strips of bacon, baked in the
oven and served on pieces of fried bread), and roast quails stuffed with liver
and served with slices of ham and truffle. The most extravagant showpiece
dishes, however, were surely the ‘coffin’ pies in which live birds were encased,
to the surprise and delight of the unsuspecting diners.
Large-scale dinner
parties and fêtes were invariably catered for - a fête held at Emo Park in
1911, for example, which 400 people attended, was catered for by George
Matthews of Portarlington. Similarly, the supper and wines for the 1858
subscription ball organised by the Countess of Portarlington, were brought in
from
At ball suppers,
the food consisted mainly of cold dishes, including various types of
mayonnaise, game, poultry, pies, galantines, salads, jellies and fresh fruit,
all laid out beautifully on a buffet table, garlanded with flowers and foliage.
At larger-scale events, the food was also of the highest quality. In 1848, for
example, 200 gentlemen and farmers who dined at Emo enjoyed a profusion of
pies, tarts, jellies, blancmanges and pineapples, as well as lobsters caught
fresh that morning in
Sample
Menu for a Ball Supper held at
(Based on Mrs Beeton)
Hot
dishes
Clear soup
Devilled lobster
Pigeons stewed in a casserole
Cold
dishes
Salmon mayonnaise
Oyster patties
Fillet of sole in aspic
Lobster mayonnaise
Partridges masked with sauce
Galantine of turkey
Roast pheasants
Pressed beef
Chicken creams
Sandwiches
Salad
Stewed pears and cream
Meringues with vanilla cream
French pastry
Neapolitan ice