A place setting with a red charger plate
4 July 2020
If you’ve ever been to a fine-dining establishment or to a formal dinner, then you’ve probably seen a charger. A charger or charger plate is a dish on which other dishes are placed, as opposed to one upon which food is placed directly.
The term comes from Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken by the ruling class in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman verb charge meant to load, a sense that’s still current in English in contexts like charging one’s glass before a round of toasts or charging a battery. And the Anglo-Norman chargeur was a dish on which other dishes were placed or loaded.
Here is an early use of charger in English, from the poem “Dispute Between Mary and the Cross,” lines 165–173, recorded c. 1305, in which the cross refers to itself as the charger holding Christ’s body, making reference to the Eucharist:
I was þat cheef chargeour,
I bar flesch for folkes feste;
Ihesu crist vre saueour
He fedeþ boþe lest and meste,
Rosted a-ȝeyn þe sonne;
On me lay þe lomb of loue,
I was plater his bodi a-boue,
Til feet and hondes al-to cloue,
Wiþ blood I was be-ronne.(I was that chief charger,
I bore flesh for the people’s feast;
Jesus Christ our savior
Roasted in the sun;
He who feeds both the least and the greatest;
On me lay the lamb of love,
I was the platter his body rested upon,
Until his feet and hands were cloven,
I was drenched with blood.)
This metaphor is rather grim, but it shows the early use of the word in the same sense it’s used today.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. chargeur, charge.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. chargeour n.
“Dispute Between Mary and the Cross.” In Legends of the Holy Rood. Richard Morris, ed. London: N. Trübner and Co. for the Early English Text Society, 1871, 137.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. charger, n.1, charge, v.
Photo credit: Gregory Thurston, 2009, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.