It's A Good Thing

Training Your Maid To Be A Waitress from The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, 1942

"Smooth service at the table is the ambition of all hostesses. Whether you have a full-time maid or only a waitress who comes in by the hour to assist, giving a dinner or luncheon may be a real joy or a perfect nightmare. Everything depends on the training and instructions which you give the waitress.

If your waitress is inexperienced:

1. Reduce luncheon or dinner to three or even two courses.
2. Make the setting of the table your responsibility as hostess, especially if the waitress is unfamiliar with your linen, dishes, silver, etc.
3.  Make it your responsibility, too, to see that all serving dishes and plates are in the kitchen ready to be heated or chilled.Make sure that serving silver, such as serving spoons and forks, is placed in the kitchen ready for use.
4. Have a first course that can be served in the living room, as a fruit, tomato, clam, or vegetable juice cocktail. Pass in small glasses with cocktail napkins on a tray. Pass canapés or hors d’oeuvres if desired.
5. If a hot soup is being served as first course, let waitress place it on table, on a plate at each cover, just before dinner is announced.
6. Cut down on number of dishes to be passed in main course by arranging one of the vegetables on platter with the meat.
7. If you prefer to have host carve or serve meat, let waitress remove the first course service and the plate under it, from each cover, leaving each place plateless. Then the waitress places the carving fork to the left, and the carving knife and serving spoon to the right, in front of the host, bringing them in on a tray or napkin. Next she places the meat platter before the host.  Then she places a pile of hot plates in front or a little to the left of the host. As he fills each dinner plate, waitress places it in front of the person to be served and then returns to the host for the next plate. After all are served meat she passes vegetables, gravy, bread and relishes.
8. Serve crisp relishes such as celery, radishes, raw carrot with main course and omit salad course. These may be placed on the table and passed by the guests.
9. Place such accompaniments as crackers, bread, jellies, sauces on table to be passed by the guests.
10. Use a bell to call waitress from the kitchen. It is wiser to have an inexperienced waitress in the dining room only when needed.[emphasis added]
11. Have coffee served in living room rather than with or after dessert at table. This allows the waitress to clear the table and begin washing dishes without disturbing guests with noise. It also makes it possible for waitress to get away earlier—a point by no means unimportant with a waitress by the hour."

I can’t help but wonder if this is a wartime Martha Stewart  thing: selling an idea of a lifestyle that no one reading this book is actually going to have: hired maids and formal dinner parties when really you’ve been shoving clothes thru the wringer washer and canning green beans all day.