At one of General Washington's ceremonious dinners there was soup, fish roasted and boiled, "gammon of bacon" and fowl. The middle of the table was decorated with artificial flowers and small images. The dessert was a pudding and apple pie, ice-cream, jellies, melons, apples, peaches, nuts. This dinner was recorded as "a great dinner." Today it would be considered "a good enough dinner, to be sure, but not a dinner to _ask_ a man to!" Some of the receipts for these old Virginia dinners have been preserved in the Randolph family--notably the receipts for English plum pudding, and for the Christmas mince pie. Tables were richly furnished with burnished pewter and handsome silver. So many articles of silver--bowls, cups, and salvers--were imported from England that the thrifty planter was constrained to import an engraver as well, in order that his arms and crests might be engraved under his personal supervision. The china was, of course, English or of English importation. We manufactured no china, imported none from the East--probably none from France. Mary Washington's china we know was blue and white. Knives were of fine Sheffield steel, and served other uses than cutting. How else did the colonial dames eat their peas? Surely not with the little steel fork with two wide-apart prongs. This is a painful reflection, but we must remember that a good many ladies whom the world has admired--Helen of Troy, the Mother of the Gracchi, all of its earth-born goddesses, in fact, until Queen Elizabeth--had to content themselves at dinner with the utensils God had given them. They had no forks at all--not even a chop-stick! Hence the early need for napkins. There was no lack of good napery in Mary Washington's time, but the usage of napkins differed somewhat from the usage of to-day, at least at General Washington's dinners. The destruction of cattle by Tarleton's Red Dragoons caused almost a famine of cream and butter, immediately after the war, so that "trifle" and ice-cream were articles of prime luxury. To obtain sufficient cream for the dish known variously as trifle, syllabub, or floating island, it was sometimes necessary to save it until it soured or grew rancid. Mrs. Morris tells of such a misfortune at one of Washington's state dinners. She did not hesitate to consign her own unswallowed morsel to her napkin, but records with wicked glee that "poor Lady Washington ate a whole plate-full without wincing."