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