The Omnivorous Fish

There’s a marvelous photo on Shuna’s blog today of a beautifully laid breakfast table. It has gorgeous mugs and plates and a teapot in contrasting colors and deliberate shapes. A lot of recent design elements are shapeless in an attempt to be elegant, so- for me- it’s nice to see something plain and well made. The other thing this photo put in my head was a memory of some very elaborate drawings of place-settings in the (extremely dated) Lily Wallace New American Cookbook (first edition 1941).

Lilly Wallace Place Settings

Books like these are part of an enormous literary tradition of ‘professional domestic scientists,’ like Lily Haxworth Wallace, and, if they have no other redeeming value as cookbooks (which they most certainly do), are fascinating snapshots of class attitudes and prejudices of the day. This book in particular illustrates the divide between the upper and working classes, and the emerging middle class. There are detailed menus planned around incomes from $1000 annually and less to $3000 annually or more. There are also instructions on training your servants to serve “in the Russian style.” I think my favorite quote from the book may be about wine:

“Wine, like music, eludes complete definition or description; and like music, its play upon the emotions covers a wide range of influence.”

That precedes this gem:
“As jazz may cause a music-lover to wince with spiritual pain, so may coarse wine cause the epicure to shudder with shock.”

Dated? Oh yeah, but like anything old, there’s a lesson in there… somewhere.