Formal Dinner at Downton Abbey

If you remember the scene from last Sunday's Downton Abbey when Mary and her grandmother Violet are standing in the dining room admiring the table all set out for formal dining, and Violet says "Nothing succeeds like excess". That is a quote from Oscar Wilde by the way. The entire quote is:

"Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

 Anyway, I was looking carefully at the table to see how it was set and noticed that there wasn't a lot of flat ware at each place setting. I'd expected to see about two feet worth lined up on either side of the plate.

I have a book my sister gave me from a box of cookbooks she bought at a house auction.  It's called The Art of the Table, A Complete Guide to Table Setting, Table Manners , and Tableware. It was published in 2000 by Suzanne Von Drachenfels who was a table consultant for Fitz & Floyd.   I can imagine this is the kind of book Carson the Butler might have kept in his butler's reference library to help him lay a proper table for any occasion.

 I paged through to the section on flatware and found that a formal dinner setting is really quite simple, depending on what is being served.  "At a formal dinner, a multi-course meal is served, but to relieve clutter, the place setting is laid with no more than three knives, three forks and a soup spoon." 

The Downton Abbey place setting I glimpsed in the show last week was correct.