For families and friends gathering for Thanksgiving dinner this year, chances are that many of them will gather at some point in rooms called the “dining room.” For most middle-class Americans, maintaining a formal dining room for ritualized forms of entertainment popular decades ago is no longer especially popular. Yet, most homes still have a room separate from the kitchen for meals with larger gatherings or when the entire immediate family assembles. A 2016 survey, for example, suggested that 78 percent of American homes have a dining room. Unlike with bedrooms and kitchens, however, interior designers and builders have debated for thirty years whether or not dining rooms are really necessary. Some contend they are “wasted” space. Others say that the dining room is “making a comeback” as people stubbornly continue to embrace the importance of family and friends sharing meals together in a setting slightly more structured than the act of grabbing toast and coffee in the kitchen before work.
Perhaps more so than any other day of the year, Thanksgiving day is the day when the dining room is least “wasted” and most useful. It does indeed provide that extra space in which a larger number of guests can be comfortably accommodated for what historians call “domestic sociability.” That is, since the rituals of Thanksgiving day are generally performed within a domestic setting, a dining room can prove to be very useful indeed.
The Dining Room Is a Recent Addition
In our modern age in which many families eat out at restaurants several nights per week, and public activities at entertainment venues are extremely common, the importance of domestic sociability is often overlooked. Yet, as Thanksgiving demonstrates, the act of gathering and socializing in a private home remains important for many families. Moreover, in times of economic downturns, domestic entertainment and social gathering becomes more important because it is relatively more affordable.
In a certain sense, those who think of the dining room as unnecessary are right. The dining room is a very late addition to homes. Even among the wealthy, dining rooms were rare until the seventeenth century, and even then, the room was not often seen outside of northwestern Europe. The wealthy certainly had large rooms for feasting, but these were often used for a wide variety of gatherings, and the public nature of the space makes them unlike private dining rooms. By the late Middle Ages, many meals were eaten in taverns and inns, but these areas, of course, were not private dining rooms either. It is only after 1700 that we begin to read of ordinary people finding ways to entertain friends and neighbors within their homes in these new spaces that would come to be known as dining rooms.
The Economics of Dining Rooms
To abolish the dining room would thus be a return to the “tradition” or a pre-industrial age when homes were smaller and living spaces tended to consist of one or two large multipurpose rooms devoted to everything from…