[Sca-cooks] Question remove vs. course

Elise Fleming alysk at ix.netcom.com
Sun Dec 30 18:02:18 PST 2012


Joel Lord wrote:
 >Since the article is a touch vague on one detail - when the term
 >"remove" really did start getting used in a culinary serving sense - I
 >figured I'd answer that.

C. Anne Wilson, noted food researcher and librarian, edited a series of 
articles for the 1991 book "The Appetite and the Eye".  This was a 
compilation of papers for the Second Leeds Symposium on Food History and 
Traditions, April 1987.  She contributed the article, "Ideal Meals and 
their Menus", in which she gave the documentation for the use of 
"remove".  It is on page 111.  She was writing about the second edition 
of Henry Howard's book, "England's Newest Way in All Sorts of Cookery, 
Pastry, and All Pickles that are Fit to be Used", published in 1708. 
The book contained diagrams for table settings.  The first course 
(labeled "First Course"!!) contains a circle in which is written "A 
Pottage for a Remove Westphalia ham and chickens".  This illustrates 
very clearly that the course is called a "course" and that one dish is 
called a "remove".

Wilson continues with the following explanation which I quoted in my 
article.  "...there is even the recently adopted usage of the 'remove' 
(a dish to be succeeded by another). The circle at the head of the 
first-course table is inscribed: 'A pottage, for a remove Westphalia ham 
and chickens.' The pottage was served out to everyone present, and its 
large serving-bowl or tureen was then removed (emphasis mine). In its 
place was set the item of meat or fish written in the lower half of the 
circle. The soup and its 'remove' or replacement marked the first step 
towards a different division of the courses which led eventually, after 
the coming of Russian service early in the nineteenth century, to the 
usual sequence of courses at today's formal dinners."

I don't know how this could be clearer documentation for the difference 
between a course and a remove - and the dating of the later to around 1700.

Alys K.
-- 
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
alyskatharine at gmail.com
http://damealys.medievalcookery.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8311418@N08/sets/



More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list