Lazy Susan

A Lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant

A Lazy Susan (or Lazy Suzy) is a turntable (rotating tray) placed on a table or countertop to aid in moving food. Lazy Susans may be made from a variety of materials but are usually glass, wood, or plastic. They are usually circular and placed in the center of a circular table to share dishes easily among the diners. Owing to the nature of Chinese cuisine, especially dim sum, they are especially common at formal Chinese restaurants both on the mainland and abroad.^[1]

History

It is likely that the explanation of the term Lazy Susan, and who Susan was, has been lost to history.^[2][3][4] Folk etymologies claim it as an American invention and trace its name to a product – Ovington's $8.50 mahogany "Revolving Server or Lazy Susan"^[5] – advertised in a 1917 Vanity Fair,^[6] but its use well predates both the advertisement and (probably) the country.^[2][4]

A mahogany George III dumbwaiter (c. 1780), auctioned for $3,900 by Christie's in London on 20 Jan. 2010.^[4]

Part of the mystery arises from the variety of devices that were grouped under the term dumb waiter (today written dumbwaiter). An early 18th-century British article in The Gentleman's Magazine describes how silent machines had replaced over-garrulous servants at some tables^[7] and, by the 1750s, Christopher Smart was praising the "foreign" but discreet devices in verse.^[8] It is, however, almost certain that the devices under discussion were wheeled serving trays similar to those introduced by Thomas Jefferson to the United States from France,^[9] where they were known as étagères.^[9] At some point during or before the 3rd quarter of the 18th century, the name dumb waiter also began to be applied to rotating trays.^[2] (Jefferson never had a Lazy Susan at Monticello but he did construct a box-shaped rotating book stand and, as part of serving "in the French style", employed a revolving dining-room door whose reverse side supported a number of shelves.^[10]) Finally, by the 1840s, Americans were applying the term to small elevators carrying food between floors as well.^[2] The success of George W. Cannon's 1887 mechanical dumbwaiter then popularized this usage, replacing the previous meanings of "dumbwaiter."

The Lazy Susan was initially uncommon enough in the United States for the utopianist Oneida Community to be credited with its invention. They employed the devices as part of their practice of communalism, making food easily and equally available to residents and visitors at meals.^[11] An American patent was issued in 1891 to Elizabeth Howell for "certain new and useful Improvements in Self-Waiting Tables". Howell's device ran more smoothly and did not permit crumbs to fall into the space between the Lazy Susan and the table.^[12]

The rotating serviette at "Penates", the estate of Russian painter Ilya Repin at Kuokkala. Made in 1909 by Finnish carpenter Ikahainen.^[13]

Despite various folk etymologies linking the name to Jefferson and Edison's daughters, the earliest use of these "serviettes" or "butler's assistants"^[14] being called a lazy Susan dates to the 1903 Boston Journal:

John B. Laurie, as the resuscitator of "Lazy Susan", seems destined to leap into fortune as an individual worker. "Lazy Susan" is a step toward solving the ever-vexing servant problem. She can be seen, but not heard, nor can she hear, she simply minds her business and carries out your orders in a jiffy.

Laurie was a Scottish carpenter who made his "Lazy Susan" to the design of a Hingham-area lady; finishing the device too late for her to present it as a gift, Laurie received an abusive tirade and then, asked for the price, "told her it wasn’t for sale, though of course it is".^[15] The name was repeated in a 1911 Idaho Statesman article – which describes it as "a cousin to the 'curate's assistant', as the English muffin stand is called"^[16] – and again in the 1912 Christian Science Monitor, which calls the "silver" Lazy Susan "the characteristic feature of the self-serving dinner table".^[17] By the next year, the Lima Daily News described an Ohioan "inaugurat[ing] ... the 'Lazy Susan' method of serving".^[18] Henry Ford used an enormous one on his camping trips in the 1920s to avoid bringing a full contingent of servants along with his guests.^[4] In 1933, the term was added to the Webster's Dictionary.^[19]

Unusually, the 1916 American Cookery describes the device as a German invention:

There is a table arrangement used much in Germany, which has now found its way to America, though it is still by no means common. The German frau calls it "Lazy Susan", but it is entirely different from our product used for salt and pepper shakers. Its only point of similarity is the swivel upon which it turns. The one which joys my heart is of mahogany, and it turns automatically at the slightest touch. It contains seven china dishes, six of which are trapezoids, the center one being octagonal. The trapezoids fit about the center octagon, forming a perfect whole.^[20]

By 1918, Century Magazine was already describing the Lazy Susan as out of fashion,^[21] but beginning in the 1950s its popularity soared once again after the redesign and reintroduction of the Lazy Susan by George Hall, an engineer, soy-sauce manufacturer, and partner in popular San Francisco-area Chinese restaurants, and the rotating tray is now ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants and homes around the globe.^[22] The decline in America's domestic service sector after World War I and its collapse following World War II,^[23] combined with the post-war Baby Boom, led to a great demand for them in US households across the country in the 1950s and '60s. This popularity has had the effect, however, of making them seem kitsch in subsequent decades.^[4]

Other uses

A Lazy Susan may be employed as a cake turntable for cake decorating.

Smaller Lazy Susans are used for spice racks and rotating TV or monitor platforms.

By analogy, the term "Lazy Susan" is sometimes applied to cabinets (especially corner cabinets) whose circular shelves rotate around a vertical axle to allow easy access to a greater area of space. Such corner cabinets cut out a fourth of the circle to permit two "doors" to be mounted at right angles to one another. These are especially common in kitchens.

The term is also infrequently used for the much-older turntables employed in pottery wheels and related tasks like sculpture, modeling, repair work, etc..^[24]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lazy Susans.

• Cake

References