Service à la russe

Service à la russe takes its name from the Russian court, where dishes were carved and handed to each guest in sequence rather than set out together on the table. It was introduced to Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it is commonly associated with the Russian ambassador Prince Alexander Kourakin and with the cook Urbain Dubois, who wrote in its favour. Escoffier, working in the great hotels and restaurants of the later century, inherited it as the established manner of the professional kitchen and built the organisation of Le Guide Culinaire upon it.

The older service à la française placed each course on the table in a single display: soups, entrées, roasts and entremets stood together in symmetrical arrangement, and the guest ate what lay within reach. Much of the food was cold before it was eaten, and the cook's labour went into the architecture of the table as much as into the dish. Service à la russe reversed the principle. The table carried flowers, plate, glass and linen, and the food arrived course by course, each dish presented hot from the kitchen, carved or portioned at the sideboard, and served to each guest in turn. The consequences for the kitchen were considerable. A fixed sequence of courses meant that the cook worked to a timetable, and that every dish had to leave the pass at its proper temperature and moment. It favoured a smaller number of dishes in each course, a clearer succession of soup, fish, entrée, roast, vegetable, sweet and savoury, and a lighter plan of the whole dinner. Escoffier's menus in Le Guide Culinaire follow this progression, and his advice on the composition of the menu assumes it: one dish at a time, each served at the point where it is best. The method also fixed the division of labour in the dining room and the kitchen. Because each plate was dressed and dispatched as an individual portion, the work of the brigade was divided by station, and the pass became the point at which the dish was judged before it went out. The service staff were required to carry, carve and present with skill, and the rhythm of the room depended on their coordination with the kitchen. In this way the manner of serving shaped the organisation of the professional house, and the restaurant of the late nineteenth century is largely its product. Service à la française did not vanish entirely. Elements of it survive in the buffet, in the dish brought whole to the table for carving, and in the family meal where dishes are passed. Yet the course-by-course dinner, with its heated plates and orderly sequence, is the form that Escoffier's book presupposes and that the French restaurant has carried forward as its standard.

The chief gain of service à la russe is temperature. A soup that reaches the guest hot, a fish served within moments of leaving the heat, a roast carved while it rests at its best: these are the benefits the method was designed to secure, and they allow the cook to rely on sauces and textures that would not survive a long wait on the table. The sequence also shapes the palate, moving from lighter and more delicate dishes to richer ones, so that each course is tasted in its proper place.