The serving table is a halfway station between the dinner table and the pantry.  It holds stacks of cold plates, extra forks and knives, and the finger bowls and dessert plates.  The latter are sometimes put out on the sideboard, if the serving table is small or too crowded.

At little informal dinners all dishes of food after being passed are left on the serving table in case they are called upon for a second helping.  But at formal dinners, dishes are never passed twice, and are therefore taken direct to the pantry after being passed.

=CLEARING TABLE FOR DESSERT=

At dinner always, whether at a formal one, or whether a member of the family is alone, the salad plates, or the plates of whatever course precedes dessert, are removed, leaving the table plateless.  The salt cellars and pepper pots are taken off on the serving tray (without being put on any napkin or doily, as used to be the custom), and the crumbs are brushed off each place at table with a folded napkin onto a tray held under the table edge.  A silver crumb scraper is still seen occasionally when the tablecloth is plain, but its hard edge is not suitable for embroidery and lace, and ruinous to a bare table, so that a napkin folded to about the size and thickness of an iron-holder is the crumb-scraper of to-day.

=DESSERT=

The captious say “dessert means the fruit and candy which come after the ices.”  “Ices” is a misleading word too, because suggestive of the individual “ices” which flourished at private dinners in the Victorian age, and still survive at public dinners, suppers at balls, and at wedding breakfasts, but which are seen at not more than one private dinner in a thousand—­if that.

In the present world of fashion the “dessert” is ice-cream, served in one mold; not ices (a lot of little frozen images).  And the refusal to call the “sweets” at the end of the dinner, which certainly include ice cream and cake, “dessert,” is at least not the interpretation of either good usage or good society.  In France, where the word “dessert” originated, “ices” were set apart from dessert merely because French chefs delight in designating each item of a meal as a separate course.  But chefs and cook-books notwithstanding, dessert means everything sweet that comes at the end of a meal.  And the great American dessert is ice cream—­or pie.  Pie, however, is not a “company” dessert.  Ice cream on the other hand is the inevitable conclusion of a formal dinner.  The fact that the spoon which is double the size of a teaspoon is known as nothing but a dessert spoon, is offered in further proof that “dessert” is “spoon” and not “finger” food!

Dessert Service

There are two, almost equally used, methods of serving dessert.  The first or “hotel method,” also seen in many fashionable private houses, is to put on a china plate for ice cream or a first course, and the finger bowl on a plate by itself, afterwards.  In the “private house” service, the entire dessert paraphernalia is put on at once.