Service à la française

Service à la française is the manner of serving a meal in which every dish of a course is set upon the table at once, and it governed the great tables of France from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. It belongs to the courts and noble households, where the banquet was a display of rank as much as a meal, and its rules were refined over several centuries before the service à la russe replaced it in the restaurant and the bourgeois dining room.

The principle was simple and the execution exacting. A meal was divided into a small number of services, each one a complete table in itself, and the dishes of a service were arranged on the cloth in a symmetrical pattern before the guests entered. Soups and hors-d'oeuvre, the relevés, the entrées and the great roasts were placed according to their kind, with the grander pieces at the centre and the smaller dishes balanced about them. When the first service was finished, the table was cleared and a second laid in the same fashion, and the dessert, with its sweet dishes, fruit and confectionery, formed a last tableau of its own. The guest did not wait to be served a plate prepared in the kitchen. He ate from the dishes within his reach, helped himself, and relied upon his neighbours or the servants to pass what lay at a distance. The host or a person of skill carved the principal joints at the table, and the carving was an accomplishment of the household. Conversation and courtesy therefore ordered the meal, since each diner was obliged to attend to those beside him. The form had real consequences for the cook. Dishes stood on the table while the company ate, so that hot preparations lost their heat and sauces their finish, and the kitchen was bound to produce a great number of dishes at the same moment rather than in sequence. Cooking in this manner favoured preparations that tolerated waiting, such as pâtés, galantines, braises and elaborate cold pieces, and it encouraged the decorated centrepiece, the pièce montée and the sculpted pastry, which gave the table its architecture. The service à la russe, in which dishes are carved and plated away from the table and handed round in succession, gradually displaced it in the course of the nineteenth century. Its advantage was that each dish arrived hot and in order, and it suited the brigade of the modern restaurant, with its division of labour and its sequence of courses. The French meal as it is eaten today, with its ordered progression from first course to cheese and dessert, descends from that change. Traces of the older manner remain in the buffet, in the family dish passed from hand to hand, and in the great platter brought whole to the table before it is carved.

At the table of the service à la française the diner met a wide choice of dishes at one moment, and the pleasure lay in selection and in the contrast of flavours across the cloth. Because the food stood while the company ate, the dishes that served best were those that held their flavour at moderate warmth or cold, such as terrines, glazed meats and preserved preparations. The hot, freshly finished dish that the modern diner expects belongs to the later service.