Part of the reason I set up this blog is to help people "put a little royalty into their life". To that end, I've kicked off this semi-regular series of postings about bringing the castles of Europe to you, sort of. Similar to the "Gothic Homemaking" series of videos that were put out by Aurelio Voltaire (over on YouTube), this will be a recurring series on how to make your own life, well, a bit more royal.
Part one of this series can be found here. Part two of this series can be found here. Part three is here. Part four is here. And, of course, part five is here.
Setting a royal table (as briefly discussed in part five) is one thing, but you can't serve blue-box-brand macaroni and cheese to royalty. Well, you CAN, if you're the king/queen, and it would certainly be memorable, but maybe not in the way you'd hope.
Royal banquets are usually in the format of a "full-course meal". In modern society, these are typically either three or five courses.
A three-course meal consists of:
- Starter or salad
- Main course
- Dessert
A five-course meal consists of:
- Hors d'oeuvres
- Soup
- A fish/seafood course
- A main entrée (such as a roast with sides)
- Dessert
Emily Post [
Wikipedia] recommended a seven-course meal:
- cold hors-d'oeuvres
- soup
- fish
- entrée (meaning a main, unlike Charles Ranhofer's menu below)
- roast
- salad
- dessert (followed by after-dinner coffee)
Of course, if you want to go over-the-top, you can follow the
14-course menu of Charles Ranhofer [
Wikipedia]:
- Oysters
- 2 Soups
- Side dishes, hot and cold
- 2 fish and potatoes
- 1 relevé or remove (i.e. a light roast, such as lamb) with vegetables
- First entrée with vegetables (Note that entrée here does not mean a main dish; it means "entrance" and implies a lighter starter dish such as a goat-cheese salad or escargots the use of entrée to mean a main dish is a uniquely American phenomenon)
- Second entrée with vegetables
- Third entrée with vegetables
- Punch
- 1 or 2 roast meats
- 1 or 2 cold dishes with salad
- 1 hot sweet dessert
- 1 or 2 cold sweet desserts
- 1 or 2 ices, plus the last dessert [fruit, served with the ices]
Regardless of the number of courses, service can be "Ă la française" or "Ă la russe". Service "Ă la russe" is probably what you picture when you think about, for example, Downton Abbey - each course is brought to the table separately, and served individually to each guest. Hopefully, you have a large staff for that! Service "Ă la française", on the other hand, means that the individual courses above are grouped together (often into three groups: first, any potages + hors d’Ćuvres + entrĂ©es + relevĂ©s, then all roasts + salads + entremets, and finally the desserts. However, the individual items are still eaten in the "correct order" according to classical dining, so (for example), during the first course you'd eat the potage, then the hors d'oeuvres, then the entrĂ©es and finally the relevĂ©s. Unless you're sure that your guests are up on their table service manners, service "Ă la russe" is probably the way to go.
As for what to make for these various courses, there are literally thousands of recipe websites and cookbooks out there. The only advice I can provide is this: the more courses you're serving, the lighter each course should be. If you're having someone sit through fourteen courses, you probably shouldn't be serving big plates of pasta. Oh, and test every recipe before the day of the banquet! There's nothing worse than having your recipe flop when your guests are waiting at the table!
And, if all else fails, there's always pizza delivery.
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The desserts we served at MicroCon 2019
(They were sponsored by Westarctica, hence the flag) |
