The Country House Dining Room: A History of Georgian Feasting

Georgian dining rooms were theaters of power, and no one understood the stagecraft better than the women who ran them. Amy Boyington, whose credentials span English Heritage, Kensington Palace, and Queens' College, Cambridge, brings formidable scholarly access to a subject that turns out to reward close attention in unexpected ways.

The Country House Dining Room draws on previously unpublished accounts of feasts at Holkham Hall, Hardwick Hall, and Blenheim Palace (whose Baroque Saloon signals that "country house" is being interpreted with some latitude). Boyington is attentive to the full range of surviving evidence: floorplans, inventories of family silver, and Thomas Chippendale's own sketches for dining chairs sit alongside paintings and satirical press illustrations with titles like "A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion." That last detail points to one of the book's more pleasurable threads—the Georgian dining room generated not only elaborate ritual but also a robust popular literature of excess and its consequences, including what passed for miracle cures for obesity and alcoholism.

The illustrations are strong, and the period images Boyington has selected are well-chosen for a book of this kind, including surviving dining rooms that remain largely as they were in the eighteenth century.

This is not a food history in the kitchen sense. Recipes don't appear, and the gustatory detail serves social and architectural argument rather than culinary instruction. For readers interested in the material culture of Georgian England, in the history of entertaining, or in how rooms were designed to perform status, it is a genuinely diverting piece of scholarship.

Hardcover.  Color drawings and photographs throughout.