"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.
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