Meanings of delightfully difficult and judicious customs?

Question

I’m reading *The Greedy Queen* by Annie Gray. Gray talks about a dining style called à la Russe in the Victorian age, and she says:> The upper middle classes were the first to really embrace service à la> Russe, which was easy to manage, simple to understand, but could be> rendered delightfully difficult in practice. A few judicious customs> around the ‘correct’ way to handle your fruit fork could be invented> which were unique to each family or group, and enabled people to make> those all-important judgements about others which litter Victorian> literature and filled the pages of magazines.One thing I understand about this paragraph is that this dining style was a writing material for Victorian literature and magazines. But the rest of it seems confusing and contradictory to me. Firstly, if it is difficult in practice, how can it be easy to manage? What does she mean by “delightfully difficult”? And “judicious” seems to be a positive term, but the tone of the author doesn’t sound approving. Is this part saying that people (each family or group) all have different understandings about the customs of à la Russe, they all think they are doing it right and criticize other people for doing it wrong? Can anybody explain her ideas for me?

Answer 1

Hi! You’ve started breaking down the passage well; I think looking closer at some of the nuances will help clear it up. We can also make quite a few comparisons to high school to put it in our terms.

1. You said, “if it is difficult in practice, how can it be easy to manage?” Let’s flip those two concepts. ‘Easy to manage’ comes first in the passage and is directly describing service a la Russe (easy to manage, simple to understand). She then says it can be rendered delightfully difficult in practice. That means it isn’t difficult unless you make it so.
2. You’re right that the passage is saying each family or group (you can think of this like a high school clique) has its own customs. However, she’s not saying that they disagree about what the correct customs are; she’s saying they’ve added a few of their own customs that only they know, and they judge the people who aren’t part of their group and don’t know how to hold a fruit fork in the way they decided is ‘cool’. Imagine a group of popular kids in high school who have all started wearing the same brand of sneaker- other kids probably don’t even realize yet that there’s a ‘cool’ brand of sneaker to buy because nobody told them, so they’ll wear ‘uncool’ sneakers and the popular group will judge them.
3. Now, the use of the word ‘judicious’. The author isn’t particularly approving or disapproving, but you’re right that the tone here is important. In some contexts we’d read judicious as meaning they’re making a few sensible changes, but the author isn’t saying they’re improving the service style. She’s saying they’re customizing the service style so their social group has its own way of doing it that other people won’t know. They want to see other people mess up without looking like they’re intentionally trying to make them look like idiots, so they’re only making a few small, subtle changes, and they’re being clever about it. Based on that context, she’s using judicious to mean something more like shrewd, maybe even a little sneaky.
4. Why would you want to make it difficult? The end of the passage has the answer. The point was to be able to judge other people and gossip about them. It wasn’t the dining style itself that Victorian magazines were writing about; they were society magazines writing about society gossip, and by making the dining style a secret test you could judge the people who got it wrong. That’s why she describes it as ‘delightfully’ difficult- when other people got it wrong they got to feel like the cool crowd and have fun gossiping about the people they didn’t like. It was a mean game of social politics.

I hope that all makes sense! I’m sorry if this answer is to late to be helpful.