What does "entree" mean in the US?

[hawthorne]

I’m confused by this article in the New York Times (free registration required). References to veal chops and other things in the article suggest that an entree is a main course (perhaps requiring an extra order of side dishes).

Is that right? To me, an entree is a small dish you have before the main course. 100 grams of carpaccio and various things that go with it, but never a steak. So if you go out for a leisurely dinner, you have the odd nibble on an olive or whatever, then an entree, then a main course, then dessert and/or cheese.

Has “entree” come to mean “main course” in the US, or am I just confused?

[light_strand]

No you are not confused. Entrée means main course in the US.

[HazelNutCoffee]

In the US, entree means main course. I dunno why, but there it is.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Take Our Word For It, page two, Words to the Wise

Whenever I visit America I am always slightly annoyed that, as opposed to the rest of the world, where the word entree means “the beginning or opening course of a meal,” the Americans insist on using the word for their main course. I am perplexed on how such an obvious mistake has become mainstream. Is there some kind of logical explanation for this?
Actually, there is indeed a good explanation for why Americans do this. They got it from the English. At some point in the 18th century, the English began using entree to mean “a ‘made dish’, served between the fish and the joint”. But in French, entrée was defined as “qui se servent au commencement du repas” (“serving as the commencement of a meal”). So the English got it wrong first, and that “wrong” meaning simply stuck in America once it arrived here, while the French doubtless harangued the English so much about misuse of the term that the meaning was corrected in the U.K. (well, maybe not, but…).

In America the word eventually came to refer not to the ‘made dish’ (which was often a ham) but to the main course (usually a ham or some other meat).

[Campion]

You know, I’d never thought about it. We do refer to the main dish as the entree, and until now the oddity of that hadn’t struck me. Here’s the menu for one of my favorite LA steakhouses. If you scroll down, you see the listing for “composed entrees,” which it appears that they use to mean “entrees with the sides chosen for you.” Normally at Nick & Stef’s you pick your entree, then select sides for the table.

[RickJay]

Canada uses the American terminology as well. “Entrees” are main dishes. A smaller dish served before the entree is an “appetizer.”

[smiling_bandit]

These days, the main course usually is the first (and only) one served, unless you get a salad.

[CairaJade]

In most American restaurants, the entree is a 2-3 serving main dish consisting mainly of meat and starch, frequently smothered in cheese or a creamy sauce, and very occasionally an odd vegetable or two snuck in to be labeled “healthy.” It’s usually served after a fried appetizer and before a ridiculously named saccharine concoction big enough for an entire birthday party.

And we eat every bite.

[Wendell_Wagner]

hawthorne writes:

> So if you go out for a leisurely dinner, you have the odd nibble on an olive or
> whatever, then an entree, then a main course, then dessert and/or cheese.

Four-course (or even three-course) meals are uncommon in the U.S. In certain hip (and expensive) restaurants recently, it’s become the in thing to serve an amuse-bouche before the appetizer. This is a small item served just after you sit down and before you order anything. It’s always the same item served to all the customers. (Or, at least to all the customers that day, although it might change from day to day.) In effect, it’s like the chips and salsa in a Tex-Mex restaurant or the bread and olive oil dip in an Italian restaurant.

[Athena]

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Four-course (or even three-course) meals are uncommon in the U.S.
[/QUOTE]

They are?!?

Even here in the middle of nowhere, once you get even slightly above fast food, the 3 or 4 course meal is common. Appetizer + soup or salad + main course (which is indeed called the entree) + dessert = 4 courses. Of course, not everyone opts for all the courses, but it’s not like everyone in Europe does, either.

This has been the case is most places I’ve lived and visited in the US. Is it different where you are?

[Wendell_Wagner]

Yes, it is different where I am. Most restaurants I go to people order just an appetizer (which may be a soup or a salad, not just a small dish of a main course item) and a main course, or just a main course and a dessert. Getting an appetizer, a main couse, and a dessert is rather rare. Where you live in the U.P. (of Michigan) and where CairaJade lives in Chicago may indeed be quite different from here on the East Coast.

[guizot]

[QUOTE=Athena]
They are?!?

Even here in the middle of nowhere, once you get even slightly above fast food, the 3 or 4 course meal is common. Appetizer + soup or salad + main course (which is indeed called the entree) + dessert = 4 courses.
[/QUOTE]
It’s precisely that you DO live in the middle of nowhere that they still do that. On the coasts, the steak houses that did that went out of business, but now they’re coming back into fashion.

[Antonius_Block]

[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]

Take Our Word For It, page two, Words to the Wise

Actually, there is indeed a good explanation for why Americans do this. They got it from the English.
<snip>
So the English got it wrong first, and that “wrong” meaning simply stuck in America once it arrived here, while the French doubtless harangued the English so much about misuse of the term that the meaning was corrected in the U.K. (well, maybe not, but…).

[/QUOTE]
No disrespect to you, Exapno, but I found that linked “Take Our Word For It” (TOWFI) answer to be rather disingenuous in its “blame it on the British” approach. It also provides no sources for its quotes or descriptions of its methodology, and mangles its French noun-verb agreement through poor cutting-and-pasting [“Entrée … qui se servent au commencement du repas”].

Michael Witbrock wrote an (IMHO, SDStaff-Report-worthy) article on the origin of the US usage of “Entrée”. He cites his sources (dictionaries, cookbooks, etc) and describes his research methodology, while somehow managing to avoid unsubstantiated snark (whereas the Cecilian ideal would of course be substantiated snark).

From Witbrock’s article:

However: The traditional French menu, (according to Larousse, and to an 1895 American cookbook I own) went something like:
[ul]
[li]Soup.[/li][li]hors d’oeuvres or/and fish[/li][li]entrée (or entrées) [i.e. the third course, as larousse points out, but not the last, as a the <AmE> usage would imply][/li][li]rôti[/li][li]final course (perhaps)[/li][li]dessert.[/li][/ul]

Note that even for the French, the “entrée” was not the very beginning of the meal, as was implied by the TOWFI answer. It was the dish immediately before the main course, and such usage was common to France, the US and Britain. As the number of courses in a standard meal dropped over time, the “entrée” came to mean the “first course” on French and British menus, whereas in the US “entrée” came to mean the “main course”. AFAIK, “entrée” has never meant “main course” in Britain, so I believe the TOWFI answer to be just plain wrong. I suspect the TOWFI writers back in 2001 read Witbrock’s article (written in 1994 and last updated 1995), misunderstood it, used some of the quotes from it without attribution, and added a snarky “wrapper”.

That said, I’d be interested to know the earliest known US usage of “entrée” as “main course” – I don’t currently have the relevant research materials at hand. It appears to be post-1895 at least.

[silenus]

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Four-course (or even three-course) meals are uncommon in the U.S. In certain hip (and expensive) restaurants recently, it’s become the in thing to serve an amuse-bouche before the appetizer. This is a small item served just after you sit down and before you order anything. It’s always the same item served to all the customers. (Or, at least to all the customers that day, although it might change from day to day.) In effect, it’s like the chips and salsa in a Tex-Mex restaurant or the bread and olive oil dip in an Italian restaurant.
[/QUOTE]

Our favorite Italian place does that. The first thing brought to the table is a small portion of slivered vegetables in a balsalmic dressing (antipasto) that is quite good. Then it’s either soup or salad, the main course, then dessert.

[jjimm]

According to a superb documentary I saw a few years ago on the BBC (can’t remember the name, alas), the term “entrée” in France originally referred not to the beginning of the meal, but to the “grand entrance” of the signature course.

This was coined following the adoption in the 18th century by the French court of dining à la Russe - “in the Russian style”- meaning the courses were served in order, rather than the prior habit of having all dishes on the table simultaneously.

If my memory about the documentary is correct, then the US usage of the word is indeed more historically correct than the interpretation of the word by the rest of the English-speaking world.

[jjimm]

Sorry, 19th century.

[Athena]

[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Yes, it is different where I am. Most restaurants I go to people order just an appetizer (which may be a soup or a salad, not just a small dish of a main course item) and a main course, or just a main course and a dessert. Getting an appetizer, a main couse, and a dessert is rather rare. Where you live in the U.P. (of Michigan) and where CairaJade lives in Chicago may indeed be quite different from here on the East Coast.
[/QUOTE]

I think we’re saying the same thing. The point I was trying to make is that restaurants still offer the courses, regardless of what people actually order.

Yes, I live in the UP, but we travel quite a bit. In the past 3-4 years, between my husband and I, one or both of us have visited Santa Fe and Taos NM, Madison WI, Traverse City MI, a lot of NE Canada (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and points between), Boulder/Denver CO (where we used to live), Las Vegas, Albequerque. We also just got back from 3 weeks in France (Paris, Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne.)

Most places we ate offered the typical appetizer/salad & soup/main dish/dessert thing. Are those not courses?

When we were in France, they did a lot the same. The big difference was that they didn’t often have a separate salad course (though you could order a salad as an appetizer (entree, in French)), but there was often a cheese course that you could have either instead of dessert or in addition to it.

From watching diners around us, people ate pretty much the same way people in the US do - some ordered all 3 or 4 courses, many just had 1 or 2 courses. The fancier the place, the more likely it was that people had more courses.

[Athena]

[QUOTE=guizot]
It’s precisely that you DO live in the middle of nowhere that they still do that. On the coasts, the steak houses that did that went out of business, but now they’re coming back into fashion.
[/QUOTE]

Interesting. So what are the steak houses like? Just one main course? What if people want salads or desserts?

[jayjay]

[QUOTE=Athena]
Interesting. So what are the steak houses like? Just one main course? What if people want salads or desserts?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t know about more upscale places, but most steakhouses I’ve been to have a salad bar, from which you can choose just a normal salad plus appetizers plus soup plus dessert, if you have a mind. The menu will normally only include the main courses (which are served with sides that are integral to the meal, such as baked potatoes).

[hawthorne]

All very informative both to use and origin. Thanks.

The meal structure I talked about in the OP was for a leisurely dinner. Now I have a child, I don’t get to do this very often, and eating out is usually one or two quick courses.