[Sca-cooks] French vs Russian Service

[David Friedman]

Thanks.

So it sounds as though "French Service" was roughly the medieval 
practice--several courses, each of a bunch of dishes (for a luxurious 
feast) brought out at once. The change to Russian service was further 
subdividing it, so that you only served one dish at a time, or at 
least a small number of them.

Does that seem to be right?

>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/
>_______________________________________________
>Sca-cooks mailing list
>Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
>http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org


-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/