Dinner Plate History

TABLE TEST

Q: TRUE OR FALSE: At a very formal dinner, you are expected to place your dinner roll directly on the tablecloth.

A: TRUE. Butter is not served at a dinner that has many courses, because the food is very rich. Since there are so many dishes on a formal table, the bread plate is dispensed with, and diners are expected to (neatly) set their bread right on the table, although still in the spot where a bread and butter plate would have been, above the fork.

Plate Use and Plate’s History 

If you were sitting down to dinner in medieval times, you would eat your meal from a trencher, a thick, often stale slice of bread with the crusts pared off. Although you could in theory eat your plate at the end of the meal, it was more common to collect the used trenchers and give them to the poor.

Trenchers were succeeded by wooden plates (or metal plates for the wealthy), and, with the growth of the ceramics industry in the seventeenth century, the adoption of ceramic dishes. Gradually the custom of using individual ceramic plates for each diner replaced the tradition of eating from individual trenchers or from communal bowls, and the use of the dinner plate became common by the nineteenth century. Over time, the dinner plate itself evolved into a variety of plates of different sizes.— From “Elements of the Table,” by Lynn Rosen, 2007

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