The Service 

Dinner was served à la Russe, so called because it was said to have been introduced by the Russian ambassador at the court of Naples in the early nineteenth-century. Service à la Russe became the usual method of serving dinner in England from the 1870s. It superseded Service à la Française, where a great number of dishes were set out on the table, and were then removed to be replaced with a second course of much the same mixture of game, fish, sweetmeats and roasts.

In Service à la Russe guests were presented with a succession of courses, beginning with soup and ending with desert. The cutlery for subsequent courses was arranged so that guests worked inwards. Service was always from the left, though wine was served from the right. Dishes too heavy to carry round, like roasts, were carved, often by the host, at a side table.

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