Tureen with cover (Terrine épis de blé or épis en or et plateau) ca. 1777-85 Sèvres Manufactory French Dining etiquette in eighteenth-century French aristocratic households required the table to be set with an array of serving dishes arranged in a decorative pattern. The diners helped themselves from the dishes and vessels close at hand, and servants reset the table for each course. This style of dining, in which all the components of a course were displayed on the table rather than presented by servants to the diners, was known as the service à la française (service in the French manner), as the custom was codified in France in the seventeenth century. It became the dominant mode of fashionable dining in Europe until the early nineteenth century, when it was supplanted by the service à la Russe (service in the Russian manner), in which the guests no longer served themselves but rather were waited upon by servants.An important component of the first course of a dinner was commonly a st