The Gilded Age Dinner Party

Dinner party functioned on several levels to achieve a very specific goal. Diners would enter a dining room with all the dishes for the first course laid out at the same time, perhaps up to 20 depending on the elegance of the meal. The idea was to create an atmosphere of delight and amusement as you quaffed your moe chandon 18 88 or savored your canvas back duck. A dinner could be a testing ground to see how one acted, were one's manners and etiquette appropriate. If you passed, you may advance on to perhaps the greatest invitation of them all, missus Astor's grand annual opera ball. And if you didn't, well, there was usually