Round table dining is an old Southern boarding house ritual for which guests are seated at a circular table big enough for fifteen or twenty places. In the center is a lazy Susan nearly as big as the table, leaving enough room at the perimeter for plates, tea tumblers, and silverware. All the platters, bowls, casseroles, breadbaskets, pitchers, and condiment jars are set out on the lazy Susan. When you want something, spin it and grab.
What fun! It’s practical, too: cuts down on the reaching, stretching, and “pass-it-to-me’s” that obstruct ordinary boarding house meals. Whenever a serving tray on the lazy Susan gets close to empty, a member of the staff snatches it back to the kitchen and returns with a full one.
A few matters of etiquette and protocol need to be mastered to take full advantage of a round table meal. For instance, it is considered bad form to spin the table counterclockwise merely to nab something out of reach to your left. If the table is moving in one direction, you’ll just have to wait until those candied yams come around again. (Don’t worry; round tables travel fast!)
You will also have to figure out what to do if you have hefted the squash casserole off the lazy Susan so you can spoon some out, but the table has spun on, leaving you no free space in which to return the bowl. (You might try offering it to your neighbor, sticking him with the problem of waiting for an empty space to circle ’round.) As for how much it is polite and proper to eat, that was explained by a needlepoint sampler on the wall of the late Mendenhall Hotel in Mendenhall, Mississippi, where round table dining was devised nearly a century ago. It read: EAT TIL IT OUCHES YOU.
On the wall in the dining room at the old Mendenhall Hotel in Mississippi, this sampler encouraged guests to reach for seconds.