Service à la russe

Service à la russe (French: [sɛʁvis a la ʁys]; 'service in the Russian style', Russian: русская сервировка) is a style of serving food in which dishes are brought to the table sequentially and served separately to each guest. Service à la russe was developed in France in the 19th century by adapting traditional Russian table service to existing French gastronomic principles. The new service slowly displaced the older service à la française ('service in the French style'), in which a variety of dishes are placed on the table in an impressive display of tureens, platters, and other serving dishes.
In service à la russe, each dish is arranged in the kitchen and immediately brought to the table, where guests choose what they want from each platter as it is presented to them. In service à la française, many platters are placed together on the table, where the dishes often grow cold and lose their freshness before the guests can eat them; and in practice, guests can choose from only a few of the dishes on the table. Service à la russe, which includes only flowers and cold dishes on the table, is less magnificent than service à la française, with its elaborate display of many dishes. Service à la russe also reduces the time spent at the table.
In 1553, Richard Chancellor, the first Englishman to visit Moscow, recorded his impressions of an elaborate banquet at the court of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Chancellor described the Russian practice of serving the dishes of the meal in succession, with individual plates prepared and presented to each guest.
Later writers in the 17th century, including Adam Olearius and Grigory Kotoshikhin, describe serving the bowls or platters in succession, but they describe them as being set on the table for guests to help themselves to the food. The early-18th-century Honorable Mirror for Youth implies a similar arrangement.
Also in the 18th century, Johann-Georg Korb describes a variety of dishes with no mention of table service. Just Juel and Friedrich Christian Weber describe a variety of dishes presented in several courses, also with no discussion of table service—a first course of cold, salted and pickled food set out in abundance on the table (an early version of zakuski); a second course of hot soups, roasts, and other hot dishes; and a third course of sweets. That arrangement derives from the reforms of Peter the Great and differs from the practices described in older accounts.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Denis Fonvizin and Marie-Antoine Carême, both writing in France, compare Russian and French table service. Fonvizin prefers the Russian style of presenting the food sequentially, but Carême prefers the French style of arranging a variety of dishes on the table.
Alternatives to a strict observance of service à la française were already evident in France in the early 19th century without direct reliance on Russian table practices.
As early as 1804, Grimod de La Reynière roundly criticizes the display of many dishes on the table, encouraging instead serving dishes in succession.
Later authors, including Carême, Élisabeth-Félicie Bayle-Mouillard ('Mme Celnart'), Bernardi, Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard, and Isabella Beeton, recommend presenting certain dishes as assiettes volantes ('flying plates') for foods that must be served 'straight from the oven', like soufflés, fritters, beignets, and various pastries. Celnart also writes that at large dinners, the soup tureen and large joints are not set on the table, but instead are placed on a sideboard where the servants portion the soup and carve the joints and serve them individually to the guests. That sort of presentation was unknown in the 18th century and earlier.
In 1810, the first dinners à la russe were served in France by Russian Ambassador Alexander Kurakin at his residence in Clichy. All of Paris was abuzz with the novelty. Even so, the transition from service la française to service à la russe took place over decades, and the differences between the two services were not always clear. But by the 1850s and ʼ60s, culinary writers, including Dubois and Bernard, Charles Pierce, Isabella Beeton, and Jules Gouffé, began to describe them as distinct types of service, each of which had supporters and detractors.
The principal difference between the styles was the presentation of the food, not the sequence of dishes, which in both styles was the existing "Classical Order" used in service à la française throughout the 18th and 19th centuries—potage (soup), hors d’œuvre, entrée (including relevés), roast, entremets (savory and sweet), and dessert. The growing popularity of service à la russe, though, led to some changes in the sequence of dishes, including the introduction of cold hors d’œuvre before the potage, and the introduction of a distinct fish course as one of, or the only, relevé.
Service à la russe is characterized foremost by serving each course separately. The specific details of presentation and table setting are variously described by culinary writers from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, including Dubois and Bernard, S. O. Johnson (‘Daisy Eyebright’), Mrs. Van Koert Schuyler, Lida Seely, Emily Post, and Prosper Montagné.
The table is set with candles, flowers, and cold foods. In the late 19th century, sweet entremets, cakes, pastries, fruit, nuts, and bonbons were typical. In the 20th century, nuts, olives, celery, and radishes, or only nuts, were more common.
The cover (place setting) for each guest is laid with a service plate (also called a place plate), napkin, flatware, and stemware. The cover may also include a roll or other piece of bread, a place card, and a menu. Salt cellars and pepper pots are placed between guests.
Forks are laid to the left of the service plate and knives to the right, placed in the order they will be used, going from the outermost fork and knife to the innermost. A tablespoon for the soup is laid to the right of the knives, and a small fork for oysters or other cold hors d’œuvre is laid to the right of the spoon. No more than three forks and three knives are laid with the cover (apart from the oyster fork), enough to accommodate the first three courses after the soup (typically fish, entrée, and roast, or fish, roast, and salad). If there are more courses, additional flatware is brought to the table at the time the course is served. Separate glasses for water and each wine served at the meal are placed on the right of the knives and spoon.
Servants remove the soiled plates, flatware, and glasses after each course and lay a clean plate for the next course. In general, the servants set down the soup plates, remove the soiled plates and glassware, and pour the drinks on the righthand of the guests, and they place the clean plates and present the platters on their lefthand, although culinary writers have different recommendations on some of the details. Seely notes that service plates are not always used. Culinary writers generally agree that the flatware for the cover is limited to three forks and three knives, but Schuyler states that the table can be set with all the flatware needed for the meal, a practice Post considers old-fashioned.
If the first course is oysters or another cold hors d’œuvre, it is typically prepared on separate plates and placed on the service plates. Johnson and Schuyler suggest placing the first course on the table before the guests enter the dining room, another practice Post considers old-fashioned. After the hors d’œuvre are consumed, the servants remove the soiled plates, leaving the service plates on the table.
The soup is apportioned by the servants at a side table or in the pantry or kitchen. The servants set the plates of soup on the service plates. After the soup is consumed, the soup plate and service plate are removed together. A clean plate is laid for the next and each subsequent course. For each course, the servants present platters to the guests, who serve themselves from the dish. Foods that are easily portioned or divided, like entrées and entremets, are presented as they come from the kitchen. Large joints, like relevés and roasts, are carved at the sideboard or in the kitchen and arranged on the platters before the servants present them to the guests. Servants may also present vegetables, sauces, and condiments after the main dish has been served.
The table is cleared before the dessert course, leaving the water and wine glasses needed for dessert. The servants place a dessert plate in front of each guest with the dessert fork and spoon on the plate, and the guests move their own flatware to the sides of the dessert plate.
If a fruit course follows, the servants remove the dessert plates and flatware and place a fruit plate in front of each guest, arranged with a fruit fork and knife on the plate, as in the dessert course.
If finger bowls are used, they are typically placed on a doily on the dessert plate (or the fruit plate, if fruit is the last course) with the flatware on either side of the bowl. The guests move the flatware to the sides of the plate in the usual way and move the finger bowl with the doily to the upper left of the plate. After dessert (or after the fruit, if fruit is the last course), guests lightly dip their fingertips into the water, one hand at a time, and then wipe them on the napkin in their laps.
The guests usually leave the table after dessert or fruit and take coffee and liqueurs in another room, but they are sometimes served at the table. The Anglo-American custom is for women to go to another room and leave the men at the table or in a separate room to enjoy whisky and cigars.
The number of courses served at a dinner à la russe has changed over time, but an underlying sequence of dishes—potage (soup), hors d’œuvre, entrée (including relevés), roast, entremets (savory and sweet), and dessert—persisted from the 19th century to World War II, and continued for formal meals in a much-reduced form into the 21st century. The sequence of dishes descends directly from the much older service à la française.
Additions to the meal introduced at various times in the 19th century include cold hors d’œuvre at the start of the meal; a distinct fish course in addition to or in place of the usual relevés; the coup du milieu, a glass of frozen punch taken at the midpoint of the meal; and coffee and liqueurs at the end of the meal.
Dubois and Bernard present menus that include all the stages of “Classical Service”, often with a fish course and frozen punch as well. The menus include multiple dishes in many of the stages, creating meals of a dozen courses or more.
Baron Brisse, in his Calendrier for 1867, gives menus for every day of the year, all of which include 6 courses—typically, on meat days, potage, fish as a relevé, entrée, roast, savory entremets, and sweet entremets. A common variation is to serve meat or fowl as the relevé (often an old-fashioned bouilli) followed by fish as the entrée in the third course. On lean days, fish and eggs replace the meat and fowl in every course. Dessert (fruit, dairy dishes, and ices), not mentioned in the menus, was likely intended as a last course.
Sarah Tyson Rorer criticizes the elaborate dinners of her time, with their "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." She recommends instead to begin with "oysters, soup, and fish, add some made dish to the meat, and put salad before and ice cream after the pudding or sweets", which loosely corresponds to an 8-course menu of oysters (in winter), soup, fish, entrée, roast or other joint, salad, sweet entremets, and ice cream (dessert).
About the same time, Alessandro Filippini wrote a book of menus for "every family of means in the habit of giving a few dinners to its friends during the year", in which he recommends the types of menus criticized by Rorer but common among the wealthy. He suggests beginning with oysters or clams, soup, and hors d'œuvre, followed by the three "main courses" of relevés, entrées, and a roast, and ending with sweet entremets, ices, fruit (dessert), and coffee. Filippini does not include a distinct "fish course" in most of his menus, as his relevés and entrées were of meat, fowl, or fish indiscriminately. His savory entremets are the vegetables and salads served with the relevés, entrées, and roasts, not a separate course, although they are often listed as such.
A few years after Filippini wrote his book, Charles Ranhofer outlined in great detail the dishes necessary for restaurant dinners ranging from six to fourteen courses. The six-course dinner includes oysters, soup, fish, entrée, roast, salad, and dessert. Longer dinners are created by adding ever more hors d’œuvre (which Ranhofer calls “side dishes”), relevés, extra entrées, frozen punch, cold dishes, and hot and cold sweet entremets. Ranhofer also gives extensive instructions for serving wines.
Several decades later, shorter meals like those recommended by Rorer had become the norm, and the extravagant dinners of the Victorian period were considered vulgar, as noted by Emily Post in 1922:
In the 1920s when Post was writing, cold hors-d’œuvre to start the meal were common, but hot hors d’œuvre after the soup were rare. Dessert consisted of molded ice cream with perhaps a bit of cake, to the exclusion of all other sweets. Despite Post's complaints about extra entrées, many dinners continued to feature two meat courses between the fish and the roast. Notably, Post's book was first published during Prohibition, and she suggests serving colored water to imitate wine.
After the 1920s, dinners were curtailed even more. As Post writes in the 1945 edition of her book, the shorter "informal" meal of 5 courses and after-dinner coffee in the first edition of her book had become the norm for formal dinners—soup or oysters or melon or clams; fish or entrée; roast; salad; and dessert; followed by after-dinner coffee in the library or drawing room.
In addition to the set courses, little relish dishes of radishes, celery, olives, or almonds could be set on the table as a sort of "hors-d'œuvre". Wine service could include a separate wine for each course or, as Amy Vanderbilt notes, "champagne may be the only wine served after the service of sherry with the soup." Dinners in the American style often placed the salad in the first course as a sort of cold hors d'œuvre, an innovation that appeared before World War I. Escoffier and Louis Diat disapprove of the practice. Vanderbilt notes that first-course salads were popular in California in the 1950s, but none of her menus follow that arrangement.
Alonzo Fields describes dinner at the White House in the Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Over the course of his 21 years of service, formal dinners included 6 or 7 courses—cold hors d’œuvre (on many, but not all, menus), soup, fish, roast, salad (often with cheese), ice cream, and fruit, with coffee after the meal.
In the 1960s, Jackie Kennedy reduced the menus at the White House to a mere 4 courses—fish, meat, salad, and dessert or, on lean days, soup, fish, salad, and dessert. That style of service remained common for formal menus through the end of the 20th century.
Even in the late 20th century, though, dinners in the French style usually included 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); alternatively, one or more of the other courses can be omitted (see, for example, the formal menus in Simone Beck's Simca's Cuisine).