I was taught how to set a formal table at a very early age and given that responsibility for formal meals. mainly feast religious feast days and invited gatherings.....with the exception of Boxing day which was ever laid back and relaxed.
Style setting changes of course with important movement in  design   reflected in the  table ware of its time.  When it all started I know not but the evolution is interesting. Many cultures still - for special occasions, anyway, sit about heaped platters of  food to be shared, in I assume, the ancient way. From finger food to using ones onw knife is an obvious progress but what of more sloppy food - stews and sauces - would one have carried a spoon also?

Yes, as you say, until the late 16th century in England you were usually expected to bring your own cutlery - a knife and spoon (and if you were poor your spoon would likely be made of wood or horn rather than metal). Your personal dining set (usually carried in a small a box or pouch called a cadena, hence canteen) might include a pointed skewer to be used to take things out of the common dish in the days when people generally ate in "messes" of four people of equal rank, although having your own serving-spike wasn't really necessary nor particularly common, and it rather indicated that you thought you were somewhat above your 'mess-mates'. Medieval etiquette already said you could use the point of your knife to take things from the common platter - just so long as you didn't then lick it or use it to pick your teeth before delving again into the shared dish.



However if you didn't have your spoon all was not lost as the staple for nearly everyone, pottage, was usually quite a bit thicker than most soup is now and so could be scooped up with a slice of bread.

Forks had been part of a cook's equipment throughout Europe and the Middle East since Roman times however dining forks appeared only much later. They started to appear around the 11th century in Italy and they had become commonplace there by the 14th century. From Italy they were introduced to the French court with Catherine de' Medici's entourage, however forks did not become a normal part of British dining until well into the 18th century, being viewed as as an unmanly Italian affectation, and they did not become popular in North America until almost the time of the American Revolution. I wonder if their late adoption in the 13 Colonies is related in some way to how Americans still use their fork - as a scoop after cutting everything up rather than as a piercing implement used simultaneously with the knife.

I thought this was a new Daily Rant thread - for when one is past ranting, just in a state of despair and accidie...

But no, the history of laying the table is a much more interesting and healthy thread for these miserable times.

I always wanted to own some Lomoges china, not as a status symbol, but for just for the sheer beauty of the designs.

I may buy one plate one day, just for me to eat off.

Here's an unusual little dish:



There's another dish called a "Turducken", which consists of a deboned chicken inside a deboned duck inside a deboned turkey.

Turducken with added sausage stuffing:

When canoe-camping (or on an RN "scheme") the preferred eating iron was a dessert spoon with one edge sharpened. Sometimes you needed to ensure the correct mess tin was presented to the cooks or your duff or Chinese wedding cake would be added to your Train Smash and Babies Heads.

On caving expeditions - such as when for several years running we maintained a camp for about two months up in the high mountains of Slovenia - nearly all food had to be laboriously carried up in the form of dehydrated potato powder, pasta, rice, lentils, soya-granules, dried vegetables, dried mince and dried egg - and so inevitably meals were simple variants of rehydrated slop-and-stodge. These reconstituted meals contained nothing remotely solid that was bigger than say a sugar-cube nor longer than a piece of macaroni and so a spoon or even just a very small scoop was really all you needed to eat. Moreover since water was in such short supply that we couldn't indulge in any general washing-up, one's own spoon and food bowl had to be carefully licked clean, perhaps wiped with a wisp of grass and sun-dried, but then finally hidden away for personal use only. Maintaining strict own-use cutlery rules might sound very medieval, but the intention was largely the same in that if anyone did get ill it would be less likely to be passed on to everyone else.

My father was a great fan of British Army mess tins and we were made to eat out of them when camping. It would be a sad disappointment to him to know his daughter hankers after eating her comestibles off Limoges china - what ridiculous frippery.

I haven't given these horrible, ugly food receptacles much thought for decades - not until this thread, that is. I did a spot of googling and came up with this article - from British Empire (sorry) Militaria:



Tales From the Supply Depot - Mess Tins

The history is actually quite interesting - the mess tins shown (I hope) below are the new-fangled tins issued in 1937. The older version of the mess tin was over a hundred years old - presumably the tins which were used during the Crimean War(?).

This is a better description from the Imperial War Museum site. They say the older version was "D-shaped" . How odd. I can't find a picture though.


From Imperial War Museum


You have to click on "Show more" to read about the tins.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30013360

 has a pic of d-shape mess tins.

We used to get time-expired (or nearly so) "Compo" rations from school CCF stores when canoeing  (normally down the Severn then bac up the Staffs & Worcester canal). I gather some time later the choice was drastically reduced till only the 2 "Arctic" recipes remained. They needed penty of water (snow melt in the field) which proved a problem in the Falklands, where safe potable water was at a premium.

Surely Limoges tableware is de rigeur when glamping?

Further up this thread there was mention by Trike of turducken. I remembered something of the sort at a Christmas dinner put on by one of my sons (all of my sons and my husband enjoy cooking) and when I looked it up on my computer it was in 2012 and I said in my annual Christmas letter, "It was very special to sit down to a version of a ‘turduckin’ on Christmas day – venison, wrapped in proscuttio, inside a guinea fowl, inside a duck inside a turkey. No, we’d never heard of such a thing either."

Meles meles wrote:

Forks had been part of a cook's equipment throughout Europe and the Middle East since Roman times however dining forks appeared only much later. They started to appear around the 11th century in Italy and they had become commonplace there by the 14th century.

The 11th century Italian monk Petrus Damianus, when not fulminating against sodomy in his Liber Gomorrhianus also took perverse pleasure in his Institutio Monialis pointing out that the rich and elegant wife of a former Doge of Venice had (despite all her sophistication and refinement) nevertheless succumbed to the plague and that her body had putrified. This in his view was a sure sign of an ungodly life led. He noted how during her lifetime she had disdained from washing in commonplace water but rather had had her servants busy themselves collecting dew drops for her ablutions. She also used very expensive perfumes which he frowned upon. Most of all, however, he was critical of her eating habits:

'Cibos quoque suos manibus non tangebat, sed ab eunuchis ejus alimenta quaeque minutius concidenbantur in frusta; que mox illa quibusdam fuscinulis aureis atque bidentibus ori suo, luguriens, adhibebat.'

'She would not touch wholesome food with her hands but had her eunuchs minutely cut down her food into small pieces which using golden forks she then passed to her mouth.'

The fact that not only did she use forks when eating but that these were also made of gold seems to have had her doubly damned in his eyes. Yet the idea that using a fork is somehow luxurious, decadent or even diabolical is something which has persisted down the ages. I remember, for instance, a great aunt who would refuse a three-pronged fork (such as a fish fork of a cake fork) if ever one were offered her. This was on the grounds that using a three-pronged fork was simply ‘bad luck’. She would insist upon a four-pronged fork or else a spoon with which to eat her cake.

Yes, the early putrefaction of the body of Father Zosima in "Brothers Karamazov" is regarded as undermining his religious status.

In the days when you had to bring your own eating tools to a meal, most people's knives resembled a modern paring knife such as for peeling fruit or vegetables; about six inches long and typically single bladed so that if necessary extra pressure could be exerted on the blunt back of the blade. Since they were typically carried at all times, they doubled as a general purpose knife used, in addition to eating, for sharpening quills, splitting kindling, cutting string, pruning plants, cleaning your fingernails, personal defence or whatever. The first specific dinner knives, provided by one's host and laid out on the dinner table adjacent to each guest's place, were similarly pointed. The move to rounded dinner knives was supposedly prompted in the mid-17th century by Cardinal Richelieu (or possibly it was the French chef La Varenne), who was so disgusted by seeing guests using his pointed knives to pick their teeth and then using the same knives to spear another morsel from the common serving dish, that he had the points of all his knives ground off. This trend was picked up by Louis XIV who, in an attempt to reduce violent knife crime, made it an offence to carry any knife in the streets, the only exception being a rounded dinner knife (although this injunction was of course only for the common people: gentlemen and nobles could still openly carry their swords).

Until the 19th century the formal presentation of dishes and hence the layout of the table was usually in accordance with the style known as service à la française (an evolution of the medieval style of formal dining) in which the meal was divided into usually three courses, with each course comprising numerous different dishes - hot, cold, fish, fowl, meat, vegetable, sweet and savoury - all placed on the table at the same time in a strictly symmetric fashion and aiming to cover the table with choice ... before being swept away and the table recovered with the next course's display of food.


The groaning tables à la française during the coronation feast for James II held in Westminster Hall on 23 April 1685.

You were not expected to eat everything but just sample whatever you wanted from the dishes closest to you - if you really fancied something at the other end of the table you had to get a servant to fetch a portion of it for you leaving the dish in place to maintain the overall intricate symmetry. Dining à la française showed off the host's wealth and status, not only by the sheer amount of food and the number of different dishes (typically two per person per course, plus entrées-"betweens", small plates of nibbles to fill the spaces between the principal dishes) but also because it required a great many servants.


'A State Party' by the cartoonist Richard Doyle, from 'Bird's Eye View of Society' (1864) satirising the, by then, increasingly old-fashioned form of dining à la française. The table is crammed with dishes and the servants outnumber the guests (to say nothing of all the cooking staff labouring away below stairs). The host was often expected to carve the principal dish at the table under the expectant gaze of all the guests, often with great difficulty hemmed in by food and ornaments, while the other dishes all gradually went cold.

But by this time a newer, simpler style, service à la russe, was becoming the norm, in which the dishes arrived one after the other either already plated-up or served directly onto one's plate at the table, and in a established order: starter, then soup, fish, poultry, meat, cheese, dessert etc. hence much like at a modern formal dinner or restaurant meal.


This is Mrs Beeton's illustration for a table arranged à la russe from her 'Book of Household Management' (1861) - the place where all the numerous dishes would have been placed with the older French style can now be occupied by a forest of flowers.

This new style with its strict order of dishes also encouraged the use of specific cutlery arranged left and right of ones plate (as in Mrs Beeton's illustration). It also, for the class-conscious Victorians, prompted the publication of numerous style manuals and etiquette books defining which knife, fork and spoon was to be used with each course, what to use, say, to eat peas, and how to 'correctly' hold a knife or use a fork.

Thus we end up with pretentious things like fish knives and their matching forks.


Sheffield sterling silver fish knife and fork, hall-marked 1889.

In Britain fish knives started to appear in the first half of the 19th century and with their scalloped shaped blades - the end is just pointy enough to pick small bones from a cooked fish and the flat blade useful for sliding between the flesh and skin - they were the epitome of Victorian gentility. The fish course itself had now become an essential component of any formal meal, made feasible by the railway network's ability to deliver fresh fish daily throughout the land. The fish knife - always made from either plated or solid silver because ordinary steel blades were believed to blacken when coming into contact with fish - offered hosts the opportunity to show the world that they could afford to dine in the finest fashion. However by the end of WW1 they had largely fallen from fashion, at least for the upper classes who had probably always found them rather vulgar and likely preferred to simply use two forks to fillet a fish. As the 20th century progressed fish knives quickly became an object of ridicule. However, the development of stainless steel in the 1920s meant that they could be manufactured cheaply and thus anyone who aspired to a posh kind of gentility would be in possession of a set. My parents, married in 1948, received an electro-plated nickel-silver set as a wedding gift (which I rather wish I still had if only for remembrance/historic sake).

Writers like John Betjeman rather mocked their use as being snobbishly middle-class, such as in his 1958 poem:

How To Get On In Society

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I'm afraid the preserve's full of stones;
Beg pardon, I'm soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

When dining on state occasions, whether the service was à la française or à la russe, perhaps the biggest problem for the Victorians was Victoria herself. She loved her food but ate very fast, gobbling it down without pausing to speak to those around her, and she never expected any meal to last more than about thirty minutes. Unfortunately for her fellow diners etiquette demanded than nobody was served before her and that when she had finished each course and laid down her cutlery, everyone else's plates were immediately removed too. Guests had to be very quick and hope the serving staff were up to speed if they were not to go hungry.



She also insisted on having all the dining room windows wide open, both summer and winter. Although often chilly this may actually have been a blessing as one of her favourite dishes was a flatulent gratin of brussels sprouts and jerusalem artichokes.

No finger bowls. Even as late as Victoria's reign there were concerns that, when it came to the loyal toast, some guests would pass their glasses over the finger bowls to toast "the king across the water" i

Finger bowls were used at royal occasions during the following reign, as by the early 1900s Jacobitism was no longer considered a threat.

Fish cutlery, or so I was raised to believe, was used only for fish and kept separate because of a possible lingering smell of fish. And we still use fish cutlery for all fish.... probably the only people in the world still doing so.

As for finger bowls, these are commonly used at high table in the east - I have seen fruit dipped in them as well as fingers if one has to use them to  say, select fruit or food by hand. 
I was once seriously chided for not providing finger bowls at the beach - a grand gritty feast from tupperware and greaseproof wrapped goodies littering the table, because I had mangoes there - and messy to eat. That the gentle sea of our  secluded bay, I pointed out, was  but 10ft away from the table  was scorned as a gauche and unworthy observation. When that lot were invited again I guess I suggested they brought their own finger bowls. On reflection they may not have been invited again.

Priscilla wrote:

Fish cutlery, or so I was raised to believe, was used only for fish and kept separate because of a possible lingering smell of fish. And we still use fish cutlery for all fish.... probably the only people in the world still doing so.

That is what my mother always said, although with modern detergents I really cannot see that being true today and I have my doubts it was true even when washing-up was done just with soft-soap and soda. Equally I can't understand the idea that steel knives would somehow discolour in contact with fish. While it has been well-known for centuries that silver can discolour when in contact with garlic, onion, artichoke, cabbage and other sulphurous foods I just cannot see fish having the same effect on steel. Nevertheless when I was growing up my mother insisted we always use the dedicated fish knives and forks when eating fish - even if the meal was just "three cod and two shillin' o' chips" wrapped in newspaper from the chip shop. That's just how we were. And as I said I wish I'd been able to keep my parents' set of fish cutlery, along with their pretentious patisserie forks and fancy dessert spoons.

However just to be clear we certainly weren't piscophobes. When I was young we used to eat a huge amount of fish as mum's family were all fishy folk. Granddad had been an in-shore fisherman (after an adventurous life as a mariner on merchant sailing ships) and from a fairly young age my mum and her brothers had often gone out to sea with him to help out on his boat. Even in the 1960s and '70s when going on holiday to Cornwall, Wales or Northumberland, we always packed cockle/shrimp nets and fishing rods, while at the same time various cousins still made their living as fishermen with their own boats. My home town on the south coast of England was a port with then (and even today) a small fishing fleet; accordingly fishing, fish shops, fish restaurants, eating fish and seafood, has always been a part of our culture.

In my experience, cheaper household cutlery - nickle? I've no idea  - that can hold a fishy, metallic taste.

Soap/detergent for washing up is probably quite recent  in the domestic scene. Places that had neither  - or indeed still have neither - use vim like grit, scourers, or not much else - apart from granting  the dog a lick round.

Cooking oily fish usually causes odour - our fire alarm always goes off for herrings. Kippers heated in a micro brought door knocking wrath from other apartment holders in my friend's block. I also know of a local wife who said she was leaving home unless he cooked his sprats outside. This he did and then he had probs with the neighbours. 

We also had to have a special pan for frying oily fish..... MM seems to have experienced none of these problems - but his mum had, I'm certain. River and white fish are much more bland, of course.

Long ago. on a visit to the Top Kepi Palace in Istanbul, I was stunned by the huge display of items  for the preparation and serving of food in huge quantities. Ming  (celandine as I recall) ceramics in thousands and huge cooking pots. As Turkomans - and assorted horsemen warrior tribes of the eastern plains - did not use table furniture - or chairs apart from encrusted thrones and low stools, the rich ones lolled about on exquisite carpets resting on heaps of cushions to pick from the choice bits before them.

I have happened on the style still used by old titled  families in the east in their personal quarters. I being given a chair and feeling a tad daft on it but no way could I have coped  otherwise with any style.... food being brought to me. Surprisingly large and often very aged ladies could get up and down from the carpets and cushions with a grace  that I never attempted.  Hands were always washed in rose scented water before eating from the shared platters... right hand only. Tables and chairs for dining are probably quite a recent addition to the domestic scene in the relative span of history. I assume cold and damp had much to do  with that.

Quality china .... made by Wedgewood, Noritake, Rosenthal and so on, were of course,  used for the these formal floor spreads  
Many eastern families still give full sets  of the highest quality china they can afford as part of a wedding dowry.

Much of that now sits in show cases as dishwashers destroy the gold and silver in the designs. But not that Ming. I wonder if it is still there in Top Kepi? Sturdy stuff, Ming. I know someone with odd ming plates bought over the years  for daily use and they are dishwasher safe... their dog had his own, also.

Oh yes P, I too remember those impressive pots in the Topkapi Palace kitchens.



All very reminiscent of Henry VIII's kitchens (or rather Wolsey's) at Hampton Court - which is hardly surprising as both places needed to produce massive amounts of food every day for the thousands that worked and lived there, as well as preparing a huge variety of different and spectacular dishes just to please their respective sovereigns and so allow the cooks to keep their heads. Of course parties and celebrations still demand catering on a large scale, with the cooking itself often being part of the show whether that's a simple garden barbeque, a village méchoui, a very grand ox-roast (like this one for the 21st birthday party of some lordling as depicted by George Cruikshank in 1829),



... or an enormous communal paella such as this one being prepared for a fiesta in Valencia (where they do really like their paella).

Trike and Caro have mentioned turducken as a somewhat showy novelty dish, popular for special occasions from around 2010 (the word entered the official lexicon of Merriam-Webster dictionary only in 2014). Credit for the popularization of the modern turducken is usually given to the Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme and the most common claimant for its actual creation is 'Hebert's Specialty Meats' a company in Maurice, Louisiana, whose owners Junior and Sammy Hebert say they created it in 1985 "when a local man brought his own birds to their shop and asked the brothers to create the medley". However stuffing one thing inside another (engastration, is the culinary term) has a far longer history. As a cooking technique it is documented in Roman and Byzantine texts but it almost certainly goes back very much further, if for no higher culinary reason than it's a good way of cooking a mixed bag of game over an open fire, the bigger outer beast protecting the smaller ones inside.

For example the Roman writer Apicius in his book De Re Coquinaria ("on cooking") has, 

Porcellum hortolanum: porcellus hortolanus exossatur per gulam in modum utris. mittitur in eo pullus isiciatus particulatim concisus, turdi, ficedulae, isicia de pulpa sua, Lucanicae, dactyli exossati, fabriles bulbi, cocleae exemptae, malvae, betae, porri, apium, cauliculi elixi, coriandrum, piper integrum, nuclei, ova superinfunduntur, liquamen piperatum, ova mittuntur trita. et consuitur et praeduratur. in furno assatur. deinde a dorso scinditur, et iure hoc perfunditur. piper teritur, ruta, liquamen, passum, mel, oleum modicum. cum bullierit, amulum mittitur.

The pig is boned through the throat and filled with quenelles of chicken forcemeat, roast thrushes and figpeckers, little sausage cakes made of pork, Lucanian sausages, stoned dates, onions, snails taken out of the shell, mallows, leeks, beets, celery, cabbage, coriander, whole pepper, nuts, and eggs. Thereupon sew it up tight, and roast in the oven. When done, open the back and pour over the following sauce: crushed pepper, rue, broth, raisin wine, honey and a little oil, which when boiling is thickened with roux.

Similarly from 13th century Islamic Andalusia, there's this recipe taken from Kitab al tabikh fi-l-Maghrib wa-l-Andalus fi 'asr al-Muwahhidin, limu'allif majhul, written by an anonymous author.

Roast Calf, which was made for the Sayyid Abu al-'Ala in Ceuta
Take a young, plump lamb, skinned and cleaned. Make a narrow opening between the thighs and carefully take out everything inside of it of its entrails. Then put in the interior a roasted goose and into its belly a roasted hen and in the belly of the hen a roasted pigeon and in the belly of the pigeon a roasted starling and in the belly of this a small bird, roasted or fried, all this roasted and greased with the sauce described for roasting. Sew up this opening and place the ram in a hot oven and leave it until it is done and browned. Paint it with that sauce and then place it in the body cavity of a calf which has been prepared clean; sew it up and place it in the hot oven and leave it until it is done and browned; then take it out and present it.
 
Then from Georgian England there's this recipe from Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747).

A Yorkshire Christmas Pie
To make a Yorkshire Christmas pie. First make a good standing crust, let the wall and bottom be very thick ; bone a turkey, a goose, a fowl, a partridge, and a pigeon. Season them all very well, take half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of nutmegs, a quarter of an ounce of cloves, and half an ounce of black pepper, all beat fine together, two large spoonfuls of salt, and then mix them together. Open the fowls all down the back, and bone them; first the pigeon, then the partridge, cover them; then the fowl, then the goose, and then the turkey, which must be large; season them all well first, and lay them in the crust, so as it will look only like a whole turkey; then have a hare ready cased, and wiped with a clean cloth. Cut it to pieces; that is, joint it; seaſon it, and lay it as close as you can on one side; and the other side woodcocks, moor game, and what sort of wild fowl you can get. Season them well, and lay them close, put at least four pounds of butter into the pie, then lay on your lid, which must be a very thick one, and let it be well baked. It must have a very hot oven, and will take at least four hours. This crust will take a bushel of flour. In this chapter you will ſee how to make it. These pies are often sent to London in a box as presents; therefore the walls must be well built. 

But of course you can always rely on the French to really go overboard with a culinary idea. Writing in his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, the gastronome Grimod de La Reynière was only half in jest when he presented his idea for 'Rôti Sans Pareil' (roast without equal) — a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler — with the final bird being just large enough to contain a plump olive.

I have just happened on an illustrated discourse re Retro desserts. In the fifties there was a whole range of desserts I had quite forgotten about.... flans. junkets. baked alaska and very goey looking angel cakes swathed in an inch thick swirls of sticky frosting - usually bright pink and on and on. Key to much of this was using gelatine, I think - and possibly because many 50's kitchen first had electric mixing/whipping gadgets and of course households began to have fridges. i shall make my Plat Jubilee trifle and feel very retro doing so, I think. Nothing new. Some days I feel ever so retro - sans trifle, too.