Gilded Age Dinner Table Etiquette

“Fish should be eaten with a silver fish-knife and fork.” – Not only were there special fish forks and knives for dining in the gilded age (to the far right and far left of the setting), there were special fish motif plate sets, as well.

Soup should be eaten with a table-spoon and not with a dessert-spoon, it would be out of place to use a dessert-spoon for that purpose. Dessert-spoons, as their name implies, are intended for other purposes, such as for eating fruit tarts, custard-puddings, etc..., or any sweet that is not sufficiently substantial to be eaten with a fork; but whenever a fork can be used it is best to use it.

Fish should be eaten with a silver fish-knife and fork.

All made dishes, such as quenelles, rissoles, patties, etc..., should be eaten with a fork only, and not with a knife and fork.

For sweetbreads and cutlets, etc..., a knife and fork are requisite; and, as a matter of course, for poultry, game, etc…

In eating asparagus, a knife and fork should be used, and the points should be cut off and eaten with a fork as is sea-kale, etc…

Salad should be eaten with a knife and fork, it is served on salad plates, which are placed beside the dinner-plates.

Cucumber is eaten off the dinner-plate, and not off a separate plate.

Peas should be eaten with a fork. 

Dîner à la Russe, is the Russian fashion introduced into society many years ago. The whole of the dinner is served from a side-table, no dishes whatever being placed on the table save dishes of fruit.— From “Manners and Rules of Good Society or Solecisms to be Avoided,” 1898

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Gilded Age Grocery Shopping

Gilded Age dining room with table set, Potter Palmer mansion, Chicago, ca. 1895-1902… Art Institute of Chicago

On Foods of the Gilded Age …

Fried Artichokes… It's 1896: Let's Go Shopping

The year Fannie Farmer published her cookbook, 1896, was a shopper's paradise. One could walk through the doors of S. S. Pierce, the preeminent grocer of the day, and purchase Formosa oolong, Penang cloves, authentic Parmesan from Italy, a bottle of Château Lafite or Château Margaux (they would set you back $20 to $30 per case, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 in today's dollars), six types of preserved cherries, green turtle soup, Jamaican ginger, California peaches, hothouse cucumbers, potted ham, medicated toilet paper, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Havana cigars, cherry blossom toothpaste, truffles, jarred French peas, and Tangle foot sticky fly paper.

But this bounty, all neatly displayed and offered for immediate home delivery, was a far cry from Boston's beginnings— a time before Faneuil Hall and Quincy Markets, before the railroads brought oranges from Florida and canned fruit from California, before ships were unloading mushrooms from Paris and olive oil from Italy. The most venerable method of purchasing foodstuffs was through vendors-butchers, fishmongers, and farmers who went door to door. This old English custom endured well into the eighteenth century…

Shopping was not done just by professional cooks or the middle-class housewife with list in hand. By the 1890s, some upper-class women were also going about doing their own shopping, as described in a November 17, 1895, article in the Boston Globe. These “ladies of leisure” would go to market in carriages driven by liveried coachmen, keeping their shopping lists in “leather and gold notebooks.” (Other well-to-do women came by public transportation or walked, of course.)

The experience of shopping for Thanksgiving in 1896 was recorded by one intrepid Boston Globe reporter, who wrote about the tremendous last minute rush for turkeys with “sounds worthy [of] the realms of Beelzebub” as bargain-hunting shoppers descended on Quincy Market to secure the main event in the biggest meal of the year. The streets were lit with both torches and electric lights and the birds formed fences and walls along the lines of the curbstones, hung from their feet by ten-penny nails pounded into improvised wooden scaffolding. As the evening progressed, the prices fell from 20 cents a pound at 8:00 P.M. down to 15 to 17 cents by 9:00 P.M., which was closing time for the market itself. 

Outside, the vendors kept up their “seductive oratory” until almost midnight. By 11:00 P.M., turkey had dropped to 10 cents per pound and a vendor with just one chicken in in ventory hawked it at a mere 5 cents per pound, saying, “Here you go now, ladies and gents. This is the last bird I possess in the world. He's yours for 12 cents, and if you don't find him the tenderest chicken in Boston, I'll give him to you for nothing.” — From Richard Kimball in “Fannie’s Last Supper,” 2010

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Nut and Fruit Dessert Etiquette

We have well established, both in New York and London, large vegetarian societies, many with separate branches of “fruit and nut eaters.” Personally, I have tried the experiment, and find it most satisfactory. The difficulty is, one must always eat at home. The untrained cook does not understand “delicate feasting.” Nuts must be carefully prepared, and fruits correctly chilled and daintily served.

The word “nut” is used to express fruits of trees, enclosed in hard, woody covers, which remain closed even after the fruit is ripe. In some, the fruit is drupaceous. Of the almond, for instance, a drupe, we eat the stone kernel, and reject the pulpy covering; of the peach, a drupe of the same family, we eat the fleshy covering, and cast away the seed or stone with its kernel; the one we call a nut, and the other a fruit.

Nuts and fruits furnish the principal food for the inhabitants of many countries, and were, no doubt, the food of primitive peoples. To the vegetarian they are indispensable; they furnish his meat, milk and butter. They are palatable, nutritious, and, if well prepared, easy of digestion. Being of vegetable origin, they are free from the danger of disease germs. Their food value is frequently overlooked by Americans, as they are generally served as a dessert. Under such circumstances, they naturally disagree, as one is adding concentrated, highly nutritious food to a heavy dinner. Then, too, Americans eat rapidly and masticate imperfectly. Nuts of all foods require most thorough mastication; in fact, grinding is to be preferred.

From the general awakening in regard to healthful diet, societies have sprung up all over the world, recommending the use of vegetable foods, especially fruits and nuts. We have well established, both in New York and London, large vegetarian societies, many with separate branches of “fruit and nut eaters.” Personally, I have tried the experiment, and find it most satisfactory. The difficulty is, one must always eat at home. The untrained cook does not understand “delicate feasting.” Nuts must be carefully prepared, and fruits correctly chilled and daintily served.— Sarah Tyson Rorer, 1898

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Gilded Age Foods and Cooking

Fannie Farmer casually called for a can of “Kornlet,” a commercially processed pulp made from the inner kernel of sweet green corn. But the industrialization of the food supply was hardly complete in the Gilded Age.

Beyond the precision of modern recipes, we also know an unusual amount about Gilded Age eating because for the first time in American history people were regularly publishing menus. That is, they were recording detailed descriptions of meals, including information about which dishes were paired with which, in what order different dishes were eaten, and what time of day people were eating certain foods. Menus show up all the time in Gilded Age sources on food, in descriptions of banquets, in suggestions about how to entertain, and in cookbooks proposing recipe pairings. Menus make clear that meal planning in this era was influenced by the changeable availability of different foods in this era, as reflected in Christine Herrick's seasonal menus, for instance.

But while seasonality still mattered, by the late nineteenth century more and more foods were becoming available year round, thanks to the growing reach and speed of food transportation networks and the expansion of cold-storage facilities. Note, for instance, the Florida oranges, California pears, and other fresh fruits served at one February banquet in Detroit in 1891. National distribution of industrial food products was also changing how Americans cooked and ate. Note how regularly the cookbook authors here assumed readers would have access to brand-name products like Maillard’s chocolate, Cerealine, or Quaker Oats, or how regularly canned goods appeared in these recipes. 

For instance, in one of her recipes Fannie Farmer casually called for a can of “Kornlet,” a commercially processed pulp made from the inner kernel of sweet green corn. But the industrialization of the food supply was hardly complete in the Gilded Age. Some items we may think of as exclusively industrial products —like noodles and yeast— would have regularly been made at home in the late nineteenth century, while other products would have been less processed than we would expect: many cooks were still shelling peas and removing spinach roots themselves, for instance, and many still had to singe and pluck pinfeathers every time they wanted to cook a chicken. Sometimes, too, a recipe calling for a can of food was not referring to an industrial product at all, but to food canned at home, as in the Kentucky Housewife recipe for Canned Turtle Soup that was followed by instructions on how to can turtle meat by hand. — From Food in the American Gilded Age, edited by Helen Zoe Veit, 2017

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Gilded Age Fads for Dining, Etc…

A step further than the ices in natural fruit skins, is to hang them from a small tree, which is placed on the table where the course is served and afterward carried about to each guest, who plucks the fruit from its supporting branch.

- Photo source, Pinterest

A few fashionable notes on entertaining and being entertained in May of 1892…

Following the tall goblets of a few years ago succeeded the flat tumblers of recent date. These are in turn supplanted by a medium goblet, with not more than an inch of stem and bowl, which flares slightly at the rim.

A step further than the ices in natural fruit skins, is to hang them from a small tree, which is placed on the table where the course is served and afterward carried about to each guest, who plucks the fruit from its supporting branch.

Some of the florists are showing little sedan chairs of various sizes, which, flower-trimmed and with flowers piling the doorway, are used in decorating apartments and dinner tables.

Pink poppies and cultivated oats are announced to be the favorite London table decoration this season.

Card cases are now made to match gowns, and May shoppers get confused over heliotrope as a shade in stuffs and ribbons. The hue is a deep lilac rather than the purple shade of the flower itself. – New York Times, 1892

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Gilded Age Chafing Dish Party Etiquette

The etiquette of these parties is tacit but pronounced. A butler must not appear, or other servant, after the merest preliminaries of the supper, and a chafing-dish story or confidence, is one that would have been impossible in the formality of a dinner.
–Image Source, Pinterest

Chafing-dish parties have never been more fashionable than this season. Many of the thẹatre parties finish off in one of these informal feasts, in modish preference to a restaurant supper. The utensils from which the affairs take their name grow in elegance, naturally with the demand for them. Exquisite gold chafing dishes are by no means rare, and silver ones are on every side. And their use has extended from the swell artist set where it originated to the heart of the old Dutch aristocracy. 

Receipts for rum omelet, oyster stews with a dash of old Madeira, creamed oysters, terrapin, and dozens of other chafing dish receipts, are carefully treasured in the amateur cook's handwriting... and followed to the letter. The etiquette of these parties is tacit but pronounced. A butler must not appear, or other servant, after the merest preliminaries of the supper, and a chafing-dish story or confidence, is one that would have been impossible in the formality of a dinner. – New York Times, 1893

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

1893’s Etiquette Fads and Fashions

One popular girl, or popular family, can cause a raging fashion for an entire season and beyond. – Eloise Bridgerton in opera gloves.– Photo source, Pinterest

It is a caprice of the moment with a certain set of girls who strive for fads and eccentricities to omit all punctuation marks in their letters. Probably some one who couldn’t put them in, started the fashion. Just as a girl at the operá a few years ago, found that a sore finger throbbed and ached desperately if her hand lay on her lap, and was much relieved when she held it upright. So she sat all the evening in a conspicuous box, with one slender gloved-hand touching her cheek – with the result of making the attitude a marked and raging fashion that entire season.

It is a suggestion to slip a salted almond into the vacuum left by a date or French prune stone and try the surprise.

English tennis cakes are offered at the house tennis parties of the season. They are a good sized loaf cake, tasting like a pound cake, with a little fruit. A New-York caterer introduced them and still monopolizes the custom in them.

Up to a year or so ago, doilies were used in moderation for finger bowls and occasional small dishes. Then they suddenly became fashionable for nearly every separate bit of china. The table was dotted with them until it looked like the counter of a linen store. They were used to set the cup upon in one’s saucer– certainly the silliest and the furthest from neat of all napery whims. Now the reaction has set in. It is no longer form to employ doilies, save in the occasional manner of a twelvemonth.

A late Parisian novelty– Bats in diamonds are bizarre enough to attract the attention of those seeking after new and strange effects. Old jewels can be reset and rearranged in these bats, which are described as setting off to striking advantage a ball costume.

Linen collars and cuffs are again in high favor, but worn with a difference. The cuffs are no longer a mere strip of white below the sleeve, but protrude for an inch or two, like a man's wristbands. This would seem another saucy attempt to seize upon the masculine belongings. –“Her Point of View”, NYT, 1893

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia