ABSTRACT
Travelers divided drastically over how to read the manners of the long table. The American traveler Charles Fenno Hoffman found the manner of the eaters to be "grave and decorous at table, to a degree approaching to solemnity, though they ate with the rapidity characteristic of Americans at their meals". Long-table dining favored large foods over small ones, since they were easier and quicker to transfer to one's plate. At the long public dining tables, moreover, speed, silence, and absence of complaint all together resulted in what might be called ideological dining: a fully social situation of dining at long tables with hundreds of others was conducted asocially, without connection to the other diners. On long tables in the hotel dining rooms and steamboat saloons, waiters set out all elements of the meal, every dish available, and enough of each dish to feed as many as three hundred eaters.
