A Lazy Susan is a revolving tray in the middle of the dining table for easy access to condiments and shared dishes.
What a strange name for this turntable that became fashionable in the early 20th century.
If your name is Susan, I am sure you are not lazy, but you are probably interested in the origin of the name for this handy serving aid. Well, like many other English expressions, it is not clear.
The Lazy Susan is a fairly new term, replacing dumbwaiter for the small turntable in the middle of a larger table. Perhaps the re-naming was to distinguish it from the small food elevator which saved the legs of waiters carrying food between floors, also called a dumbwaiter.
There are two theories as to who ‘Susan’ was. Firstly, it was a common name for a servant girl, who was made lazy by the device’s invention. Secondly it could have been a reference to a ‘lazy’ hostess who no longer had to offer around the selections to her guests, merely to spin the revolving tray.
Lazy Susan : origin
While most references allege that the source is unknown (though one source suggests, wrongly, that Jefferson invented it !), the origin is, in fact, known.
While working for what was then the EEC in Brussels in the late 1970s before coming to Australia, I often stayed with a Belgian friend who originated from the French-speaking Ardennes region, whence I learned the origin of the term.
In the 18th century, cheesemakers and other farmers both in France and in what is now Belgium, only sold their cheeses and patés through the local country markets to which people would travel for miles to buy. The most famous of these in the Ardennes region included a stall run by a Frenchwoman with a Flemish husband, named, (you guessed it) Suzanne. The practice was then for the different cheeses to be on display, with samples for tasting set out on a special carved wooden board (no reputable housewife would have bought before tasting !) But Suzanne got tired of turning the heavy wooden cheese-board round and round, back and forth, for customers to reach their selected tasting sample of her different cheeses and patés. So she ordered her husband to make her a board with a second wooden circle underneath which swivelled, so that she could turn the board with just a finger, without effort.
She became consequently known in the region as Suzanne La Paresseuse (Suzanne The Lazy), and the swivelling cheese-board her husband made, became known as the Plat-Suzanne. When the cheeses and patés began to travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the name travelled with them. When I studied at the Universities of Paris, Strasbourg and Rennes in 1955-56, I heard the French term frequently as I sampled and bought cheeses at the local markets. In English, instead of the literal Suzanne-platter, it became Lazy-Susan.