How to pull off a Georgian dinner party

Imagine being invited to a dinner party in the Georgian period. Weighted on hand and foot, you feast on a huge array of dishes in a candlelit room glittering with silver and glassware. It might sound romantic, but as you'll discover in this episode of the History Extra podcast, it's not quite true. Amy Boyington, author of The Country House Dining Room, A History of Georgian feasting, tells Lauren Good about what an event like this would really have been like, from peculiar dishes to urinating with an audience. Hello, Amy, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's lovely to be here, Lauren. I always love coming on here, so it's wonderful to do it again. Last time we spoke, it was about your first book, Hidden Patrons, Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain. What made you decide to home in on the dining room for this book? Well, I think so many reasons.

So the dining room in a Georgian country house is spectacular. It's the room where everyone really wanted to show off. Because you were going to have all of your guests over and it was a place for you to really shine and basically show off your wealth, your taste and your learning, as well as like how good your French chef was in the kitchens. And as a result of that, I just thought, you know what, we need to do a deep dive because we don't think about that. We don't think about what goes into creating the perfect Georgian dinner and the perfect dining room.

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