[Sca-cooks] Removes, Again: Was Period Pretzels, yet again...

[Elise Fleming]

Jimcheval wrote:

 >In the eighteenth century the English used "Remove" for a course that 
 >seems to have been the equivalent of the French entremets. or possibly 
 >just the food served after another was "removed": (snip)

I beg to quibble about "remove" being used for a course.  It was only 
one dish of a course.  According to C. Anne Wilson, writer, food 
historian and former librarian of the Brotherton Library, the term is 
first used in "England's Newest Way in All Sorts of Cookery, Pastry, and 
All Pickles that are Fit to be Used",(3rd edition, 1710).  There is a 
plate with the table setting diagrammed and the words "for a remove" 
written in one of the circles which represent the various dishes.

Wilson, in "The Appetite and the Eye", (which she edited) writes : 
"...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."

Additionally, in the chapter “Illustrations in British Cookery Books, 
1621-1820” (The English Cookery Book, edited by Eileen White) Ivan Day 
writes the following regarding table plans:  “Their plans reflect the 
triumph at this high stratum of English society of the new French style 
of regulating a table.  For instance, Henry Howards’s "England’s Newest 
Way of 1703"…shows how the soup was to be replaced with a remove – the 
English name for the releveé of French dining protocol.”

Since you recently joined the list, you couldn't be aware that we just 
came through another "Of course, it's 'course'! Remove 'remove'!" 
debates.  Cooks' List historical note - I/We have been trying for some 
10 years to get people to use the term "remove" correctly and to not use 
it within the SCA context since it didn't show up in its reference to 
food until approximately 1700, well past the SCA cut-off date of 1600. 
Many people have changed their usage back to "course" but a few haven't, 
with one or two being intransigent.

"Remove" is, as you noted, an 18th-century term for something on the 
table but, as far as I have seen, only referred to one dish of a 
multi-dish course.  It never did refer to an entire course.

I will close by sending any newcomers to the list to my article at 
http://damealys.medievalcookery.com/OfCourseItsCourse-Revised.html . 
The "international" version only downloads and doesn't show up on the 
web page.

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/