Hints for the table: or, the economy of good living / [Anon].

  • John Timbs
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints for the table: or, the economy of good living / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    142/188 page 126
    120 divides the day, instead of winding it up. I do not think, moreover, that people were ever meant to enjoy themselves in the day-time.—Miss London. Lord Byron once made an odd experiment; to dine at midnight, after the theatre was over; hut the freak failed; the repast was servi as a dinner, hut it was more like a supper. Potted meats make elegant sandwiches; which, if cut into mouthfuls, may he taken up with a fork, and conveyed to the mouth of the fair one, without soiling her fingers or gloves. Theodore Hook describes a stand-up supper, as “ tables against the wall, covered with cold negus and warm ice; where men, women, and children, take perpendicular re- freshment, like so many horses with their noses in the manger.” Ball suppers were mostly unsatisfactory affairs, until M. Ude hit upon a plan of serving a supper, which should at once satisfy the guest by the excellence of the repast and the novelty of the arrangement, and the host by the small- ness of the expense. This plan is to ornament the sideboard with a basket of fruit, instead of insignificant pieces of pastry. Place in their stead things that can be eaten—such as jelly, plates of mixed pastry, and sandwiches of a superior kind, but not in too great profusion. Affix a label to each plate, indicating its contents, and you will find this arrangement will give the guests an opportunity of taking refreshments without being obliged to seat themselves at a table, from which the ladies cannot rise without disordering their dresses, which to them is a matter of far greater moment than the best supper in the world. This is what is called a stand-up supper, which Theodore Hook has humorously described above. A supper of the old school, however, affords the prettiest opportunities for flirtation ; it being always understood that the sexes are to be intermingled as at a dinner party. The waste at ball-suppers of old was almost incredible: Ude states that lie has known halls, where the next day, in spite of the pillage of a pack of footmen, lie has seen twenty or thirty hams, 150 or 200 carved fowls, and forty or fifty
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