Service à la russe
The historical form of service à la russe (French: [sɛʁvis a la ʁys]; 'service in the Russian style', Russian: русская сервировка) is a manner of dining with courses brought to the table sequentially, and the food portioned on individual plates by the waiter (typically from a sideboard in the dining room).
It contrasts with the older service à la française ('service in the French style'), based on several courses brought to the table simultaneously in an impressive display of tureens and serving dishes with diners plating food themselves.
While it reduced the magnificent profusion of dishes and condiments on the table at a given time, it demanded many more footmen and required more tableware making it an option only the wealthy could afford.
It had the advantage of the food being much hotter when reaching the diner and ensuring that everybody could taste everything they wanted from the dishes offered which in practice the old system often did not allow.
[3] The Russian Ambassador Alexander Kurakin is credited with bringing service à la russe to France in 1810 at a meal in Clichy on the outskirts of Paris.
[4] It eventually caught on in England, becoming the norm by the 1870s and 1880s, though in France there was considerable resistance and service à la française lingered on until the 1890s and even beyond for the most formal state banquets.
A less formal style known as service à l'anglaise (French: [sɛʁvis a lɑ̃glɛz]; 'English service') in France has the hostess serving soup from one end of the table and later the host carving a joint of meat from the other end, with servants taking these to diners and diners serving themselves from other dishes.
[7] For the most correct service à la russe, in its modern form (significantly different from the original) the following must be observed:[8] The place setting (called a cover) for each guest includes a service plate, all the necessary cutlery except those required for dessert, and stemmed glasses for water, wines and champagne.
The number of dishes (or courses) served at a meal à la russe has changed over time, but an underlying sequence of dishes—potage, entrée, roast, entremets, dessert, and coffee—persisted from the mid-19th century (when this type of service was introduced to France) until WWII, and continued in a much-reduced form into the 21st century.
[9] An elaborate version of service à la russe, which reached its pinnacle in the last decades of the Victorian era, was described by Sarah Tyson Rorer in 1886.
Its triple triplets of oysters, soup, and fish, the relevé, entrées, and roast, a pause of rum punch to stimulate languishing digestion, game with salad, sweets and ice, coffee to close, and a bewildering series of wines, with an alcoholic appetizer to begin and end, have, however, had their effect in making many feel that a formal dinner must only follow this model from afar.
So, with only the resources of a simple household, they compass, with infinite labor, oysters, soup, and fish, add some made dish to the meat, and put salad before and ice cream after the pudding or sweets.But success here, with a moderate income, is as rare as success with the long dinner at the complete table.
Try to grasp the theory of the elaborate edifice which custom and convention has piled up, and see if your own resources cannot reproduce its purpose with better success.
[10]: 247–248 In Britain and the United States, fish is a distinct course; relevés are large, solid joints of meat or whole fowl, generally baked, braised, or boiled but not roasted; entrées are elaborate "made dishes" of, typically, fillets of beef or other butcher's meat (and sometimes fowl, but—apart from days of religious observance—not fish), served in fine sauces.
At the time Rorer was writing, Alessandro Filippini, a chef at Delmonico's restaurant on Pine Street in New York, wrote a book of menus for "every family of means in the habit of giving a few dinners to its friends during the year", with a brief discussion of table service and a guide to wines.
Hors-d'œuvre are usually small cold items (such as olives, celery, radishes, charcuterie, caviar), but they might also include hot made dishes (such as timbales, croustades, croquettes).
(Champagnes) Delmonico, Roederer, Rosé Mousseux, Pommery, Cliquot, Perrier-Jouët, Moët, Mumm.
Wine Liquors.—Muscatel, Malaga, Alicante, Malvoisie of Madeira, Lacryma Christi, red and white Cape, Tokay, Constance, Schiraz.
As a matter of fact, the marked shortening of the menu is in informal dinners and at the home table of the well-to-do.
[13]: 119–120 At the time Post was writing, hors-d’œuvre meant rather narrowly light cold dishes like oysters, clams, melon, or citrus.
[13]: 207 Despite Post's complaints about extra entrées, many dinners continued to feature two meat courses between the fish and the roast.
Dinners in the French style usually include a cheese course after the roast, generally resulting in a 6-course meal (see, for example, the formal menus in Richard Olney's The French Menu Cookbook[16]); alternatively, one or more of the other courses can be omitted (see, for example, the formal menus in Simone Beck's Simca's Cuisine[17]).
Dinners in the American style often place the salad as a first course instead of soup, an innovation that appeared in the 1950s in California and was noted by Vanderbilt;[15]: 340 in this arrangement, dessert is served immediately after the roast.
