"The most social utensil in the world": chafing dish recipes for popularity, 1890-1920

Date
1991
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University of Delaware
Abstract
Between 1890 and 1920, the chafing dish was a stock article for home entertaining, dorm room larks, and bachelor camaraderie. Basically a double-boiler over a portable heating device, the chafing dish cooked meals at the table. This fashion is charted through analysis of trade catalogues, etiquette books, cookbooks, household manuals, magazines, and popular literature. Not a new invention, the chafing dish became popular after 1890 because manufacturers and home economists aggressively marketed the chafing dish to middle-class Americans as the means to a more rewarding social life. Associated with both feminine domesticity and the male dominated public world of clubs, restaurants, and theaters, the chafing dish party combined nineteenth-century requirements for propriety with twentieth-century expectations of intimacy and gender mutuality. When public leisure activities became the dominant mode of courtship and informal socializing in the twenties, the chafing dish lost popularity.
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