Turtle Soup and Pickled Pigs Feet: Dining Out in the Archives
I have long been fascinated by ephemera as a window into the past. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I thought it would be fun to look at food-related ephemera. To that end, I’ve found some digitized collections of menus, pamphlets, and other culinary items.
Culinary Institute of America Menus
The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) has digitized over 5,000 of the over 40,000 menus in their Archives, spanning the 1830s through the 1980s. They represent food service in restaurants, cruise ships, and railroads around the world. Among these are 48 Thanksgiving menus, like this one from Desert Inn in Palm Springs California, 1939. The Desert Inn first opened in 1909 as a sanatorium before expanding to become an elite resort in the 1920s.
University of Washington Libraries Menus Collection
The University of Washington has a large collection of over 700 digitized menus, including travel menus, novelty menus, hotel menus, and more. My favorite is this adorable novelty menu from the Blue Jay Inn, circa 1935. The wiener dog shape opens up to show an array of sandwiches and salads ranging in price from 10 cents to 50 cents (For the chicken salad. The shrimp salad is only 25 cents!).
Transportation Menus
The Libraries at Northwestern University house two collections of transportation menus from railroads, airlines, and cruise ships - the Railroad Collection (245 items) and the Transportation Collection (964 items). These menus date from the 1930s onward and span the globe. By far the easiest way to explore the collections is to browse by Subject.
In browsing the Railroad Collection, I found several menus that referred to the “railroad tradition” of writing your breakfast order on a meal check. This meal check was to be handed in at dinner for the following morning’s breakfast. At breakfast, then, you would be served your requested breakfast and your meal check would serve as your bill.
Note from Erie Lackawanna Railway Company, Dining service breakfast menu, 1969.
Private Party Menus
Restaurants and transport aren’t the only place you find menus. The New York Public Library houses several large collections of menus that include private parties. Often, these were one-off menus for parties hosted at restaurants, but some parties were hosted in private homes as well. For example, check out this menu from a January 23, 1888 dinner hosted by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt at their home at 1 West 57th St, New York. The menu featured hot and cold dishes and entremets, all in French. My 7 years of French (25 years ago) is not quite up to the task of translating the old-fashioned culinary terms, though I can say with confidence that they served cold glazed ham and cold chicken salad.
Other Collections
There are a few other collections of menus online.
World’s Fair Menu and Recipe Book (on Internet Archive)
All of these collections provide a glimpse into the trends, economy, and culinary traditions of the past. If I were more ambitious, might have done a history of children’s menus, or the evolution of airline food, or featured diner food, Great Depression dining, travel dining… you name it. But, alas, I am living in a constant time crunch, so this is what you get. My hope is that someone much more qualified than I am will find something that sparks their imagination or fills a gap in their knowledge. Then maybe they will write that history of children’s menus so I can read it!
