What the Dead Once Ate
by Jeff Weinstein
NOVEMBER 7, 2011 TAGS:
We were sitting together in the balcony, my high-school buddies and our pre-prom dates, giggling at Liz Taylor’s housewife voice and cartoon eyes in the new and scandalous Burton-Taylor Cleopatra. All of a sudden, some hunky slave onscreen carried out a gilded platter of apples.
Did they have apples in ancient Egypt, I wondered? Were they Delicious or McIntosh and, most important, did they taste the way they do now?
[VIEW SLIDESHOW]
I had been obsessed with such questions ever since I heard some talk-show pundit say that we couldn’t really know if hieroglyphed Egyptians, or anyone from the deep, dark past, moved and felt the same way we did. Perhaps they walked and talked at half our speed!
That scary, childish doubt goes far to explain my lifelong search for some connection to a particular past, one that, were I able to visit, I could negotiate with confidence and treat as my own. For some reason I can’t explain, food has always seemed to be the most reliable constant, a true passport back.
That must be why I collect old restaurant menus.
The New York Public Library also collects them – about 40,000, from the 1840s to the present. Recently, the library’s menu people have asked online denizens to transcribe individual dishes and prices in order to create a database from 10,000 menus already scanned. I’d like to have been a fly in the soup at the meeting in which this What’s on the Menu? project was born: “We don’t have the staff, so why not crowd-source, using foodies with too much time on their hands as the crowd?”
Transcription instructions are a bit complicated, but we may go online to see exactly which menus are up for grabs or are in the process of being parsed. At this moment, most of those on offer are from the 1970s, including those of Keen’s English Chop House — which has served delectable mutton chops since 1885 in the same brown space on Manhattan’s West 36th Street — and the Little Campus Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, “Fine Food Since 1924.”
Sometime ago, when I was restaurant critic for New York’s Village Voice, I was given a tour of the menu collection by its librarian, the late dancer and author Reynaldo Alejandro. He led me into a dark room and began to take down a few of the stacks’ 400 boxes, arranged chronologically. I don’t recall if he wore the usual Rare Books Division gloves, but he did treat each sample as if it were his delicate child.
Most of the elaborately printed menus he opened were made for political banquets or top-hat special events, frilly objets d’art often saved as keepsakes. They left me cold. Where were the mimeographed throwaways from the diners, coffee shops, and automats where secretaries and ribbon clerks ate 20-minute lunches?
More of those ephemeral menus, the kind I pounce on at flea markets and yard sales, have since been acquired, which happens to benefit What’s on the Menu. The database is being created, its website explains, to answer a range of culinary questions:
“Where were oysters served in 19th century New York and how did their varieties and cost change over time? When did apple pie first appear on the Library’s menus? What about pizza? What was the price of a cup of coffee in 1907?”
Well and good. But I’d suggest that something more can be discovered on those stained pages. Open almost any old menu, especially one from a restaurant long gone, and you enter a world whose flavor is bittersweet.
Look, for example, at this beige bill of fare for the Hotel Oxford Restaurant and Coffee Shop at Market and Mason Streets in San Francisco (slides 1 and 2). Someone wrote on it, in blue script: “Dinner with Momie, March 19, San Francisco.” We also see, sideways in caps, “HAM WHAT AM!”
The letterpress menu opens to three parts, appearing modest and elegant simultaneously. We know it’s wartime: “By O.P.A. [Office of Price Administration] regulations our ceilings are the highest prices from April 4, 1943 to April 10, 1943.”
Vintage menu prices delight contemporary readers: just 60 cents for an open-faced, hot Virginia ham sandwich with French fried potatoes; 70 cents for fried Eastern oysters; 80 cents for two French spring lamb chops; 90 cents for a “half spring chicken, toast.” Wartime’s grain-cut “compound coffee” is a thin dime. But we also know that the bargain is false, because a 1943 dollar is worth $13 now. Yet the fantasy of restaurant cornucopia is hard to resist.
So are the fundamental recipes themselves. I myself don’t feature the “Day and Night Special” of Italian spaghetti and Parmesan cheese, but fresh crab and shrimp salads, avocado cocktails, “genuine” calves’ liver and bacon? Yes, bring them on, with maybe a Black Eyed Susan Fizz to start. Does fast-food innocence make the Oxford deluxe cheeseburger, served on French or sandwich bread, a potential ground-beef madeleine? The hungry boy I would have been is counting his quarters. So what if the “Real Mexican Enchilada” comes with bread and butter. Just like his 1943 double, a 2011 menu-reader salivates at the very thought of treats to come and is ready to flag the nearest pert waitress – pert waiters are overseas.
On March 19, 1943, Anne Frank heard “a bit of Hitler’s propaganda on the radio.” The teen having hotel dinner that evening with Momie is, if alive, maybe 80 now. Was Dad at war? What did they order, other than ham?
It’s likely Momie’s boy or girl is gone, because the menu is in my hands.
Next is a small card (slide 4) that lists dinner for May 12, 1910, on the “Twin Screw Express Steamer ‘Bermudian.’” I can’t read any shipboard menu without first thinking of MFK Fisher’s description of the florid, chair-filling traveler who took one look at her liner’s menu, nodded to the waiter and said, “Yes.”
Cod with anchovy sauce, ox tongue and turnips, lamb and peas with apple fritters, roast beef or turkey. Would I begin with pâté de foie gras (probably) or puree of Jackson, which I find out from the Google waiter is cream of potato soup?
The Bermudian was built for the Quebec Steamship Company in 1904 and accommodated 405 passengers on the Hamilton to New York, not Bermuda, route. The two hatted ladies in the faded photograph pasted on the back of the menu (slide 8) would have enjoyed either destination, because they look so happy to be in each other’s company. As someone wrote on the photo, they’re “Two of a Kind.”
Whether sisters, best friends, or lovers makes no difference now. They cruised together, ate together, and kept a fond record of both for all of us.
Dessert? “Pine apple, and café noir. For two.”
Frequent Obit contributor Jeff Weinstein writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
Did they have apples in ancient Egypt, I wondered? Were they Delicious or McIntosh and, most important, did they taste the way they do now?[VIEW SLIDESHOW]
I had been obsessed with such questions ever since I heard some talk-show pundit say that we couldn’t really know if hieroglyphed Egyptians, or anyone from the deep, dark past, moved and felt the same way we did. Perhaps they walked and talked at half our speed!
That scary, childish doubt goes far to explain my lifelong search for some connection to a particular past, one that, were I able to visit, I could negotiate with confidence and treat as my own. For some reason I can’t explain, food has always seemed to be the most reliable constant, a true passport back.
That must be why I collect old restaurant menus.
The New York Public Library also collects them – about 40,000, from the 1840s to the present. Recently, the library’s menu people have asked online denizens to transcribe individual dishes and prices in order to create a database from 10,000 menus already scanned. I’d like to have been a fly in the soup at the meeting in which this What’s on the Menu? project was born: “We don’t have the staff, so why not crowd-source, using foodies with too much time on their hands as the crowd?”
Transcription instructions are a bit complicated, but we may go online to see exactly which menus are up for grabs or are in the process of being parsed. At this moment, most of those on offer are from the 1970s, including those of Keen’s English Chop House — which has served delectable mutton chops since 1885 in the same brown space on Manhattan’s West 36th Street — and the Little Campus Inn in Annapolis, Maryland, “Fine Food Since 1924.”
Sometime ago, when I was restaurant critic for New York’s Village Voice, I was given a tour of the menu collection by its librarian, the late dancer and author Reynaldo Alejandro. He led me into a dark room and began to take down a few of the stacks’ 400 boxes, arranged chronologically. I don’t recall if he wore the usual Rare Books Division gloves, but he did treat each sample as if it were his delicate child.
Most of the elaborately printed menus he opened were made for political banquets or top-hat special events, frilly objets d’art often saved as keepsakes. They left me cold. Where were the mimeographed throwaways from the diners, coffee shops, and automats where secretaries and ribbon clerks ate 20-minute lunches?More of those ephemeral menus, the kind I pounce on at flea markets and yard sales, have since been acquired, which happens to benefit What’s on the Menu. The database is being created, its website explains, to answer a range of culinary questions:
“Where were oysters served in 19th century New York and how did their varieties and cost change over time? When did apple pie first appear on the Library’s menus? What about pizza? What was the price of a cup of coffee in 1907?”
Well and good. But I’d suggest that something more can be discovered on those stained pages. Open almost any old menu, especially one from a restaurant long gone, and you enter a world whose flavor is bittersweet.
Look, for example, at this beige bill of fare for the Hotel Oxford Restaurant and Coffee Shop at Market and Mason Streets in San Francisco (slides 1 and 2). Someone wrote on it, in blue script: “Dinner with Momie, March 19, San Francisco.” We also see, sideways in caps, “HAM WHAT AM!”
The letterpress menu opens to three parts, appearing modest and elegant simultaneously. We know it’s wartime: “By O.P.A. [Office of Price Administration] regulations our ceilings are the highest prices from April 4, 1943 to April 10, 1943.”
Vintage menu prices delight contemporary readers: just 60 cents for an open-faced, hot Virginia ham sandwich with French fried potatoes; 70 cents for fried Eastern oysters; 80 cents for two French spring lamb chops; 90 cents for a “half spring chicken, toast.” Wartime’s grain-cut “compound coffee” is a thin dime. But we also know that the bargain is false, because a 1943 dollar is worth $13 now. Yet the fantasy of restaurant cornucopia is hard to resist.
So are the fundamental recipes themselves. I myself don’t feature the “Day and Night Special” of Italian spaghetti and Parmesan cheese, but fresh crab and shrimp salads, avocado cocktails, “genuine” calves’ liver and bacon? Yes, bring them on, with maybe a Black Eyed Susan Fizz to start. Does fast-food innocence make the Oxford deluxe cheeseburger, served on French or sandwich bread, a potential ground-beef madeleine? The hungry boy I would have been is counting his quarters. So what if the “Real Mexican Enchilada” comes with bread and butter. Just like his 1943 double, a 2011 menu-reader salivates at the very thought of treats to come and is ready to flag the nearest pert waitress – pert waiters are overseas.
On March 19, 1943, Anne Frank heard “a bit of Hitler’s propaganda on the radio.” The teen having hotel dinner that evening with Momie is, if alive, maybe 80 now. Was Dad at war? What did they order, other than ham?
It’s likely Momie’s boy or girl is gone, because the menu is in my hands.Next is a small card (slide 4) that lists dinner for May 12, 1910, on the “Twin Screw Express Steamer ‘Bermudian.’” I can’t read any shipboard menu without first thinking of MFK Fisher’s description of the florid, chair-filling traveler who took one look at her liner’s menu, nodded to the waiter and said, “Yes.”
Cod with anchovy sauce, ox tongue and turnips, lamb and peas with apple fritters, roast beef or turkey. Would I begin with pâté de foie gras (probably) or puree of Jackson, which I find out from the Google waiter is cream of potato soup?
The Bermudian was built for the Quebec Steamship Company in 1904 and accommodated 405 passengers on the Hamilton to New York, not Bermuda, route. The two hatted ladies in the faded photograph pasted on the back of the menu (slide 8) would have enjoyed either destination, because they look so happy to be in each other’s company. As someone wrote on the photo, they’re “Two of a Kind.”
Whether sisters, best friends, or lovers makes no difference now. They cruised together, ate together, and kept a fond record of both for all of us.
Dessert? “Pine apple, and café noir. For two.”
Frequent Obit contributor Jeff Weinstein writes about culture and gay issues at artsjournal.com/outthere.
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