[Sca-cooks] French vs Russian Service

[Elise Fleming]

David/Cariadoc wrote:

 >But 14th and 15th c. medieval meals were not served all together but
 >in courses, so I'm not sure exactly what and when "French service"
 >was.

I think I found a decent reference while waiting for a new muffler for 
the car.  I'd brought my copy of Jean-Louis Flandrin's "Arranging the 
Meal - A History of Table Service in France", (translated by Julie E. 
Johnson), 2007, University of California Press.  Here are some excerpts 
that might shed light on French vs Russian service.

Page 48: "...the sequence of dishes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century 
meals is not easy to grasp: it clearly differs from both our own custom 
and that of the 'French-style service' practiced in France between the 
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries."

Page 122: "Until the first half of the nineteenth century, French 
service divided the meal into three or four sequences, each of these 
'courses' containing numerous dishes.  The dishes were not presented to 
each guest, and it was not expected that everone eat from every dish. 
Everything was placed on the table and guests helped themselves 
according to their fancy, just as in today's buffets.  French 
commentators generally maintained that this method was more luxurious 
than the much more costly Russian service, and that it was the only way 
to accommodate the guests' range of tastes, long believed to depend on 
personal temperament and physiological requirements.

"But French service also had its drawbacks.  For Grimod de La Reniere, 
in 1805, "A glance at this multitude of dishes satiates rather than 
tempts; and...the overabundance of choice is so confusing that the 
appetite wanes and the dinner gets cold before one can make up one's 
mind.  We have seen...how detrimental symmetry is to fine dining.  But 
formal dinners force the sacrifice of one for the other, and there is no 
way to serve a forty-place table one dish at a time."  (My note: The 
symmetry that is being referred to is the custom of following designs in 
cookery books for setting out a table, the dishes being placed in 
geometrical and symmetrical order.  This basically is post-SCA time.)

Page 94: "While more pleasing to the eye, the French tradition had a 
drawback: dishes to be eaten last remained too long on the table and got 
cold, despite the use of dish-warmers and covers.  To avoid this 
problem, Russian service placed on the table only could dishes that 
could wait, while hot ones were passed around to all the guests 
immediately after being carved in the kitchen....This Russian service, 
which apparently came to prevail in France only during the second half 
of the nineteenth century, was already being discussed fifty years 
earlier."  (My note: Flandrin then cites mention in an 1804 publication 
that "Germany, Switzerland, and most of the north" were using The 
Russian style."

Does this give you an answer, Your Grace?

Alys K.
-- 
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
http://home.netcom.com/~alysk/