A banquet at St George's Hall, Windsor Castle, in 1838
Pliny the Younger writes to Septicius Clarus, 1st or 2nd century AD: “What a fellow you are! You promise to come to dinner and then fail to turn up! Well, here is my magisterial sentence upon you. You must pay the money I am out of pocket to the last farthing, and you will find the sum no small one. I had provided for each guest one lettuce, three snails, two eggs, spelt mixed with honey and snow (you will please reckon up the cost of the latter as among the costly of all, since it melts away in the dish), olives from Baetica, cucumbers, onions, and a thousand other equally expensive dainties. You would have listened to a comedian, or a reciter, or a harp-player, or perhaps to all, as I am such a lavish host.”
The menu for a banquet held by the Sforza family in Milan in 1491 includes: “Food: three swans with their skins, decorated with gold and mottoes; two roasted reared geese per plate with bowls of grape juice on the side; one large golden pastry of game per plate. Wine: from Calabria. Presentation: the lids of the said game pies are to be in the form of three very high and ornate mountains with forts on top... “Food: a course of large boiled meats: two whole calves; four whole heifers; four whole kids; two whole roe-deer; eight hares; pigs, and two wild boar, all served in three large biers... On large platters should be served six large capons; six geese; six pheasants; six ducks; twelve pigeons, and ten partridges. On other large platters should go the large golden cured meats, ie. the eight hams; two salami; six large sausages; six tongues; six soppressate... Wine: red S. Severino. Presentation: a centrepiece with a laurel tree which is cut open and squirts blood; a small boy comes out on horseback reciting apposite verses and mottoes with much grace and skill.” These are two of 11 courses. London at Dinner, written anonymously in 1848,describes the banquet held at Windsor Castle during Ascot week: “The Ascot dinner in St George’s Hall is one of the finest sights imaginable. The hall itself is upwards of 200ft in length, and about 35 in width. The table for a hundred, which occupies nearly the whole length of the room, is ornamented with epergnes, vases, and candelabras... The hall is brilliantly illuminated; two military bands occupying the gallery... and the numerous servants in state liveries, give a grand effect to the whole... At a quarter before eight, Her Majesty... leads the way to the banqueting hall. During dinner the bands play some popular waltzes, marches, overtures, and quadrilles; the repast is royal, and served on an entire service of gold plate... The soup, fish, entrées, &c. are handed round in a state of caloric [energy] that astonishes you. The sideboards literally groan (as the newspapers term it), under the weight of home and foreign luxuries, game and truffle pies, pasties, boars’ heads, Russian tongues, caviare, sardines, &c. The wine, of the highest order, is handed round plentifully during dinner... Everything is conducted as well as if there were only a dozen people present.” Lieutenant Henry “Birdie” Bowers, a member of Captain Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition, records their Christmas celebration on the way to the South Pole, 1911: “At last [Scott] stopped and we found we had done 14 3/4 miles. He said, ‘What about 15 miles for Christmas Day?’ so we gladly went on... “[For dinner] we had a great feed which I had kept hidden and out of the official weights since our departure from Winter Quarters. It consisted of a good fat hoosh [stew] with pony meat and ground biscuit; a chocolate hoosh made of water, cocoa, sugar, biscuit, raisins, and thickened with a spoonful of arrowroot. (This is the most satisfying stuff imaginable.) Then came 2 1/2 square inches of plum-duff each, and a good mug of cocoa washed down the whole. In addition to this we had four caramels each and four squares of crystallized ginger. I positively could not eat all mine, and turned in feeling as if I had made a beast of myself.” In her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes a luncheon party in a male Cambridge college: “Lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled... How good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.”
