[Sca-cooks] Where does the "remove" error come from?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Oct 11, 2010, at 4:00 PM, David Friedman wrote:

> I was recently in a Usenet exchange in which a U.K. reenactor described a feast reenactment, set in 1500, as having fifteen removes. It isn't yet clear whether the term was his or was from whomever organized the reenactment, nor whether he meant fifteen courses, which would be a second error.
> 
> But that got me curious. Where did the idea that "remove" is the period term for "course" originate? Was it in the SCA? In historical novels read by people in the SCA? Somewhere else?

My suspicion is that at some point some basic and erroneous assumptions were made; one is that once upon a time, a formal dinner was served in courses (and now they mostly are not, except in fancy-schmancy effete French restaurants that "real people" don't go to anyway). Therefore, the old system as used prior to, say, the nineteenth century, is obviously as old as time itself. Old way = period, new way = Bobby Flay (or whomever).

It may also be a translation error; the term shows up as a verb in descriptions of 18th and 19th century meals, and by extension remover could be the act of clearing the table or the dish immediately put in place of what was removed: normally this applies to the fish course after the soup.

Maybe someone was reading Larousse and thought it sounded kewl.

Adamantius







"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter