Who invented dinner courses

Some men wrote angry letters to the Swanson company complaining about the loss of home-cooked meals. For many families, though, TV dinners were just the ticket. Pop them in the oven, and 25 minutes later, you could have a full supper while enjoying the new national pastime: television.

In , only 9 percent of U. Swanson took full advantage of this trend, with TV advertisements that depicted elegant, modern women serving these novel meals to their families, or enjoying one themselves. Tastemakers, of course, sniffed, like the New York Times food critic who observed in that TV dinner consumers had no taste. But perhaps that was never the main draw. TV dinners had found another niche audience in dieters, who were glad for the built-in portion control.

But when historian Rebecca Spang of Indiana University looked into this popular origin story, she found something completely different. In her book, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Gastronomic Culture , Spang explains that the very first French restaurants arrived in the s and s, and they capitalized on a growing Enlightenment -era sensibility among the wealthy merchant class in Paris.

Bouillon fit the bill perfectly. It was all-natural, bland, easy to digest, yet packed full of invigorating nutrients. But Spang credits the success and rapid growth of these early bouillon restaurants not just to what was being served, but how it was served. A little wine, perhaps, some stewed chicken.

So it makes sense that the first fine-dining restaurant in America was opened in New York City in the 19th century. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. We began to obsess over convenience at home, and the idea of cooking more than one thing a day became the stuff of nightmares.

Restaurants wanting to stand out from the crowd started serving a bewildering array of degustations, mini-degustations, small plates, big plates, sharing plates and tasting plates. And at home our the mindset has changed so that we now want to spend as little of our lives cooking as possible, leaving us more time to watch other people cooking on the telly.

Even the darlings of the neo-bistrot movement, touted as the resurgence of French cuisine, seem to have left behind the prix fixe holy trinity of entree-plat-dessert. The likes of Le Chateaubriand, Frenchie and Bones all opt for four or five course menus in search of that little extra je ne sais quoi.

Playwrights and dramatists have followed the three-act structure of setup, confrontation and resolution for thousands of years, so perfect is its clarity of message. A three course meal tells a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and when done well it resonates like the perfect pitch of a tuning fork. I rarely finish a good three-courser feeling anything other than comfortably satisfied.