CONCERNING DINNER GIVING
The formal dinner is the most dignified function in the social calendar. Even a big luncheon is less stately, and, by comparison, breakfasts, afternoon teas and evening parties are mere child’s play.
A dinner is the one meal with which liberties can not be taken. Yet there are rash souls who have attempted it and have even introduced at a dinner a course cooked in a chafing-dish. Such efforts may meet with the approval of a few youthful and frivolous souls, but they can only shock those who have a proper appreciation of the esthetics and ethics of gastronomy.
All this applies to the formal dinner, to which guests are invited long in advance and where the staid succession of courses can be compared only to the progress of the units of the solar system. One can understand the dismay of these when a comet darts across their established orbits. Such is the effect produced upon the graduate diner-out when variations are attempted in the solemn dinner of state.
But there is another sort of a dinner—The Little Dinner. It would never claim capitals on its own account, but they are bestowed willingly by those who have fallen victims to its charms. At the little dinner the bill of company is considered as well as the bill of fare, and neither is chosen without deep thought. No chances are taken when there can be but four or six or eight to sit down to the table and where the courses are few enough to demand perfection in each.
As a matter of course, this can not be managed without labor. The hostess must give close attention to every item on the menu. She must see that her table is all it should be in appearance and that there is no chance for any hitch in the proceedings. For while not so tremendous an affair as the many-coursed dinner, the little dinner still has a dignity all its own and with this one may not trifle.
A LITTLE DINNER
The table should be spread with the finest and whitest of damask over the “silence cloth” that is now indispensable in every well-regulated household. More and more the fancy is growing to have the center-pieces at a dinner, of pure white, with no touch of color. That may be supplied by the flowers, the china, the candle shades. The center-piece may be of linen, rich in embroidery or heavy with lace, but all must be colorless.
The flowers that are in the center of the table may be in a rather low receptacle, so as not to interfere with the conversation or glances of the guests seated opposite one another. The candelabra, or dinner lamps, may stand at the corners of the table. Here and there may be little dishes in silver, cut glass or rare china, holding such hors d’oeuvres as salted nuts, radishes, olives and the like, and bonbons. Except for carafes of water there should be nothing else on the table besides the furniture of the individual covers.
This is substantially the same as at a luncheon. The service plate, the knives on the right, the forks on the left,—one for each course,—the soup spoon laid with the knives, the water glass and wine glasses to the right, the napkin, a piece of bread folded in it, to the left. There is no butter used at a dinner and the bread and butter plate is therefore not needed. Always space enough should be allowed between the places to prevent crowding.
Of the menus that follow two are for the little dinner. The third is for a rather more elaborate function, and the fourth may serve as an outline for one of the big dinners that every one has occasion to give once in a while.