The menu for an informal dinner would leave out the entree, and possibly either the hors d’oeuvre or the soup.

As a matter of fact, the marked shortening of the menu is in informal dinners and at the home table of the well-to-do.  Formal dinners have been as short as the above schedule for twenty-five years.  A dinner interlarded with a row of extra entrees, Roman punch, and hot dessert is unknown except at a public dinner, or in the dining-room of a parvenu.  About thirty-five years ago such dinners are said to have been in fashion!

=THE BALANCED MENU=

One should always try to choose well-balanced dishes; an especially rich dish balanced by a simple one.  Timbale with a very rich sauce of cream and pate de foie gras might perhaps be followed by French chops, broiled chicken or some other light, plain meat.  An entree of about four broiled mushrooms on a small round of toast should be followed by boned capon or saddle of mutton or spring lamb.  It is equally bad to give your guests very peculiar food unless as an extra dish.  Some people love highly flavored Spanish or Indian dishes, but they are not appropriate for a formal dinner.  At an informal dinner an Indian curry or Spanish enchillada for one dish is delicious for those who like it, and if you have another substantial dish such as a plain roast which practically everyone is able to eat, those who don’t like Indian food can make their dinner of the other course.

It is the same way with the Italian dishes.  One hating garlic and onions would be very wretched if onions were put in each and every course, and liberally.  With Indian curry, a fatally bad selection would be a very peppery soup, such as croute au pot filled with pepper, and fish with green peppers, and then the curry, and then something casserole filled again with peppers and onions and other throat-searing ingredients, finishing with an endive salad.  Yet more than one hostess has done exactly this.  Or equally bad is a dinner of flavorless white sauces from beginning to end; a creamed soup, boiled fish with white sauce, then vol au vent of creamed sweetbreads, followed by breast of chicken and mashed potatoes and cauliflower, palm root salad, vanilla ice cream and lady-cake.  Each thing is good in itself but dreadful in the monotony of its combination.

Another thing:  although a dinner should not be long, neither should it consist of samples, especially if set before men who are hungry!

The following menu might seem at first glance a good dinner, but it is one from which the average man would go home and forage ravenously in the ice box: 

A canape (good, but merely an appetizer)
Clear soup (a dinner party helping, and no substance)
Smelts (one apiece)
Individual croutards of sweetbreads (holding about a dessert-spoonful)
Broiled squab, small potato croquette, and string beans
Lettuce salad, with about one small cracker apiece
Ice cream