TASTES

AND
TRADITIO
NS
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 TASTES
AND
TRADITIO
NS
A JOURNEY
THROUGH
MENU
HISTORY

NATHALIE
COOKE
REAKTION BOOKS

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 Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London N1 7UX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2025

Copyright © Nathalie Cooke 2025

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 9781836390688

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 CONTENTS

Introduction: Where Can Menus Take Us?

Chapter One: Feasts for the Eyes

Chapter Two: Menus as Mementos

Chapter Three: Cultural Encounters

Chapter Four: Menus for Children and for the Children

We Once Were

Chapter Five: Health on the Menu

Chapter Six: Riddle Me This: Menus That Intrigue

Conclusion: What Menus Can Do

References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

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INTRODUC
TION:
WHER
E CAN
MENUS
TAKE
US?
OceanofPDF.com
F
or diners, menus seem to serve an obvious purpose – to showcase
available food choices. The term ‘menu’, after all, comes from the
Latin minūtus, meaning ‘small, finely divided, or detailed’, signifying
a list presenting the dishes on offer. But, as we shall see, not all menus
present their choices in a straightforward way. When, for example, a menu’s
items are presented as riddles to be solved by diners, what first appears to
be a disadvantage is transformed into an advantage. The suspense provides
an opportunity for lively, speculative discussion around the table. But I’m
getting ahead of myself.
Generally, menus, in the sense of practical lists of food items, became
increasingly important when mid-nineteenth-century dining trends turned
away from presenting multiple dishes at the same time (service à la
française or French service) to serving individual dishes to diners in
sequence (service à la russe or Russian service). Despite the multiple
advantages of service à la russe, including minimizing the time for hot
foods to cool while on display, serving foods in sequence had the
disadvantage of keeping food items hidden, prepared behind closed kitchen
doors. Ordinarily, then, a menu’s first responsibility was to provide a
preview of the foods available, a glimpse behind the proverbial green baize
door into the kitchen to excite the appetite. Surely, then, no better example
could exist than a menu from an early Parisian restaurant, which typically
offered a plain list of food items written on unadorned broadsheets. Take,
for instance, this seemingly very matter-of-fact and extraordinarily lengthy
alphabetized list of items offered by one of the earliest restaurants in Paris,
Les Trois Frères Provençaux. With a misleading curatorial note in pencil
suggesting that the menu dates from 1783, prior even to the restaurant’s
establishment in 1786, this menu reveals the tremendous variety of meats,
fish, vegetables, wines and liqueurs, and pastries on offer.
Charles Fichot, Café Restaurant des Frères Provençaux, 1846, lithograph.
Les Trois Frères Provençaux, c. 1800–10, print menu

But on this relatively unadorned Parisian menu, a couple of items are

strategically positioned for effect. In the range of food options, for example,
why does plum pudding appear in English among the list of items
categorized as ‘Entremets de Douceur’ (sweet desserts)? (The only other
dish named fully in English is the anglicized ‘Beef-stakes’.) Why evoke the
pudding’s British roots? Initially, we might suspect that it is given special
prominence because of the pudding’s iconic status. But this menu is from
the turn of the nineteenth century and plum pudding only achieved its
height of fame in the mid-nineteenth century by an association with
Christmas in Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, reinforced
by the recipe’s appearance as ‘Christmas pudding’ in Eliza Acton’s 1845
Modern Cookery. Perhaps one answer is that ‘pudding’ was a distinctly
British dish, one served at French tables but never wholeheartedly
embraced by French cuisine – a subtle distinction communicated through
language choice. Curiously, plum pudding earns the same privilege of being
presented in its English spelling in such French-language cookbooks as the
popular 1915 edition of La Cuisinière Five Roses, in which the 75 or so
other pudding recipes are titled with the anglicized word ‘pouding’, even
the very British sounding ‘Pouding du Yorkshire’.1 In other words, this
Parisian menu signposts the significance of plum pudding and positions
itself as part of a long tradition of doing so. As linguist Dan Jurafsky
reminds us: ‘every time you read a description of a dish on a menu you are
looking at all sorts of latent linguistic clues, clues about how we think about
wealth and social class, how our society views our food.’2

Bouillon Chartier, 7 rue Gozlin, 1905, print menu.

Perhaps the most powerful argument to illustrate that menus do not

always serve to clarify choices, but work to intrigue, mystify, engage and
allure, involves the frequent use of what is known as ‘menu French’ even to
describe dishes prepared by and for individuals whose mother tongue is
other than French. We will discover many examples of menus written in
menu French in the following chapters. For now, suffice it to say that during
the rise of menu French in the nineteenth century, terms of meal etiquette
that aligned with the customs of service à la française were also presented
and referred to by French terms that did not necessarily align with their
literal translation – creating menus written in this distinct culinary dialect
that impressed rather than instructed, offering sophistication in preference
to straightforward description.3

Grand Bouillon Chartier, c. 1907–10, photograph.

Traces and Transformations

In this book, I approach the broad banquet of menus rather in the way a
diner might approach the bounty of a buffet; by sampling particular items. I
begin by exploring evidence of creative design ingenuity that ensured
menus engaged the attention of diners of their day, paying close attention to
their texture, tone and target audience.
 Over time, of course, restaurants identify their particular public and
target demographic. As restaurant historian Rebecca Spang notes, early
restaurants in Paris tended to specialize in a very small range of dishes,
beginning with the titular ‘restaurant’: a kind of thick bouillon or broth
intended to provide sustenance for those with weak digestion, which began
to figure in the name of restaurants themselves.4
Twenty-first-century food providers, however, appear to have taken
customization to the extreme. Marketers bet on enticing audiences by
targeting a very specific type of clientele. This is especially true for menus
intended to appeal to children, which ultimately need to pay close attention
to the interests of both their consumers and their guardians. For example,
London’s Ampersand Hotel offered a sci-fi kids’ tea menu served on a
rocket-shaped stand, which breathes atmospheric mist from dry ice hidden
beneath, and includes treats such as jelly in petri dishes, chocolate
spacemen and edible ‘not-so-old’ fossils.5
Mammy’s Shanty, c. 1960, print menu.
 Since attitudes and values change over time, there are some menus that
affect twenty-first-century audiences dramatically differently from the way
that they might have engaged their contemporary audiences and diners.
Take, as one striking example – which I include here, although it will, and
justifiably should, make readers feel uneasy – the ‘appeal’ of the menu
cover image for Mammy’s Shanty (a restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia), with
‘Mammy’ ringing the dinner bell and a young boy licking his lips,
advertising the place for hungry stomachs to ‘come an’ get it’.
And remember the American restaurant chain Sambo’s, which met its
demise in the 1980s?6 In 1979 the chain had 1,117 restaurants and claimed
that the origin of its name came from a combination of Sam and Bo – after
the two founders, Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett. However, the name
came to strain credibility. It was just too close to the discomfiting title The
Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), which as early as 1956 (arguably not
nearly early enough) became cause for concern and was removed from
library shelves.7 In 2020 the restaurant chain, then reduced to a single
restaurant and run by Battistone’s grandson Chad Stevens, announced on its
Instagram account:

Our family has looked into our hearts and realize that we must be
sensitive when others whom we respect make a strong appeal. So today
we stand in solidarity with those seeking change and [are] doing our part
as best we can.8

The restaurant changed its sign to read ‘[peace] & LOVE’ until it was renamed
‘Chad’s Café’.
It is certainly tempting to avoid raising the topic of racist menus at all,
a decision taken by many books about menus to date. One notable
exception, though, is Jim Heimann, who reproduces in his book menus
containing explicit racist imagery, but ultimately opts not to problematize
them for a modern audience.9 It is largely writers who address issues such
as social history and consumer/food culture, including restaurant historian
Jan Whitaker and reporter-commentator Nadra Nittle, who have taken up
the gauntlet. They have problematized racist restaurant names (including
Mammy’s Shanty and Sambo’s), reminded readers of the travesty of whites-
only restaurants (Whitaker),10 and called out ways in which corporations
have attempted to romanticize and normalize harmful stereotypes (Nittle).
Why, asks Nittle, has rebranding taken as long as it has?11

Dan Wayne Lee, Kan’s, 1953, print menu.

Dan Wayne Lee, Kan’s, 1953, print menu.

 One way in which menus have romanticized and distanced the
unfamiliar involves the long-standing tradition of exoticizing Asian cultures
– while also making them enticing, inviting and approachable. Asian
women in restaurant publications were often depicted with white-presenting
features, for example.12 As the number of Chinese restaurants increased
dramatically across North America from the late nineteenth century to the
1980s, rather than developing culinary sophistication in relation to specific
Chinese culinary traditions, North American diners were put at ease by
restaurateurs serving a hybrid ‘chop suey’ cuisine. A menu from Kan’s, a
mid-twentieth-century Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, is significant
for its explicit resistance to offering its customers the chop suey cuisine that
would have been familiar to U.S. diners in 1953. Indeed, while the first
Chinese restaurants in America were opened in San Francisco as early as
1849, Chinese restaurants only became a widespread presence on the
American landscape after 1915, when the Chinese Exclusion Act declared
that restaurant owners could receive merchant visas.13 The back cover of
Kan’s menu carries a message highlighted in red, concluding with ‘a word
of warning’: ‘Don’t ask for chop suey.’ ‘The highest compliment to Kan’s
conception of Chinese food is the absence of this most ersatz of Oriental
dishes from his menu.’

Tactics to Tempt
Today, the term ‘menu’ is generally associated with the ‘carte’, or ‘map’,
that guides diners’ restaurant meal selections. By definition, menus help to
present and to clarify choice, appearing only when there are choices
available. By contrast, a ‘bill of fare’ is a simpler ‘list of food in a
restaurant’ and presents ‘food that is served in a restaurant as a complete
meal at a fixed price but with little or no choice of dishes’: what we know
as a table d’hôte.14
But for belated readers – rather than those diners using menus in real
time – menus are invaluable artefacts of their moment and are especially
prized when bearing details of date and location. These menus are treasured
by curious readers, collectors and scholars for the volumes of information
they contain. After all, they describe what people ate, when and where,
while also illustrating the evolution of popular art, of printing techniques
and, more broadly, of communication technology. In addition, they allude to
moments of both pivotal change and tenacious continuity in the ebb and
flow of social, political, cultural, medical, business and culinary history.
Through asking questions about the role of the selection process in
menu development, in Tastes and Traditions I approach the menu as a
cultural artefact. What is a menu? What information does it contain? What
does it do? Answering these questions with illustrated examples reveals
how menus conveyed meaning to the diners of their day and, in perhaps a
different way, to belated readers. I argue that, more than being merely
descriptive lists, menus are motivating, affective documents, mustering a
range of resources to move their readers – not simply to purchase but also
to care, often deeply, about their choices.
In the chapters that follow, I explore some of the tactics in a menu
designer’s conceptual toolbox that collectively wow contemporary diners
with visual and graphic brilliance, pull on diners’ heartstrings, claim to
assuage physical and emotional hunger, pique consciences, promise exotic
taste sensations and evoke curiosity.
But menus also tempt belated readers because they are historical
artefacts reflecting and attesting to social, cultural and linguistic norms;
they are culinary accounts of particular dining experiences that shed light
on the specific dining practices and strategic marketing tools of their time.

Transforming Traditions
In Tastes and Traditions, I invite you to take a leap of the imagination in
order to glance over the shoulders of diners at particular moments in
history, to sit for a spell in their chairs and see the menu and its fare from
the worldview of someone in that particular time and place. But there are at
least two others in this figurative room also looking towards the menu and
possibly over other shoulders. First, there is a reader, an individual from a
later time who journeys back to engage with the menu, bringing with them
the baggage of knowledge gleaned from world events in the intervening
years. For example, the belated reader of a menu signed by Toulouse-
Lautrec knows well that the artist, who illustrated menus and likely enjoyed
the rewards of a few meals on the house, went on to a formidable career.
And, second, there is an adult who reads over a children’s menu, bringing to
it a knowledge of nutrition, an understanding of children’s food preferences,
as well as memories of their own childhood favourites.
 But there is one other perspective in this book – my own: a twenty-
first-century, Canadian perspective, and one that has been inevitably
coloured by the experience of a global pandemic during which I began
writing this book and the implications of lockdowns on the practices of
dining out. Inevitably, despite my best efforts, I do fall into the trap of
‘presentism’, by which I mean seeing things through the lens of a Canadian
in my own particular place and time. I mention this here in part to explain
what might seem like an analytical sensitivity to questions of language and
cultural identity, born of my living in a country strengthened by the
diversity of all those who have come here from many different countries
and the extraordinarily rich heritage of our land’s First Peoples.
More specifically, in each of this book’s six chapters, I focus on the
material life of menus by approaching them as historical artefacts, as
strategic communications originating from particular times and places,
which I glimpse through six different thematic lenses.
In Chapter One, ‘Feasts for the Eyes’, I discuss menus as products of
careful print, artistic and graphic design. Menus can whet appetites, tempt
diners to pay particular attention to certain items, and enhance and even
shape the dining experience. After all, a menu is often an aesthetic object as
well as a textual document. Take, for example, a marvellous illustration of a
diminutive chef feeding a rather concerned-looking Man-in-the-Moon. The
occasion is an 1890 Sainte-Barbe (St Barbara) dinner, celebrated on 4
December in Provence to mark the beginning of the Christmas season.15
Yes, the popular Poulet Marengo here perhaps nods to Napoleon’s 1800
victory, but the dish itself, its tomato sauce fragrant with garlic, surely
suggests an affinity with cuisine provençale, originating from the southern
region of France where Sainte-Barbe is most celebrated. The venue is the
iconic Café Anglais, the renowned restaurant where Babette was chef
before taking refuge in the remote Jutland village that is the setting for
Babette’s Feast (best known as the Oscar-winning Danish film of Isak
Dinesen’s 1958 short story, directed by Gabriel Axel in 1987), a restaurant
also mentioned by such writers as Umberto Eco, Marcel Proust and Alice B.
Toklas.
Later in this chapter, I muse, why might such famous artists as
Toulouse-Lautrec or Picasso have signed their names to menu illustrations,
ephemeral pieces of paper that might well have found themselves in a
dustbin rather than in a museum collection? And what is it about menus’
afterlives that has enabled them to come to us in the twenty-first century?
In Chapter Two, ‘Menus as Mementos’, I turn to menus that transcend
their status as ephemeral objects to reveal how they have the staying power
to become prized elements of personal and even institutional collections.
Their materiality might take the form of anything from ribbons to a three-
dimensional format, and with everything in between: perhaps lace, twigs,
handwritten annotations and/or beautiful colour illustrations. I also explore
the range of menus that declare themselves, even in the very moment they
were created, to be the object of commemoration. Sometimes these menus
distinguish themselves not so much through the importance of the occasion,
the guests or the artist responsible for their design, but by their own
intrinsic charm.
Café Anglais Versailles, 1890, illustrated menu with handwriting.
 This ‘Fish Dinner’ menu is one of such menu mementos. Each time I
see it, I am particularly taken by this plate-shaped attention-grabbing list of
menu items from Charles Best’s restaurant, for ‘Simpson’s Celebrated 2/- [2
shillings] Fish Dinner’ at the Three Tuns in London’s Billingsgate Market,
likely in the 1920s. What might otherwise be a simple pub menu
distinguishes itself both by boasting a good-value filling meal – only two
shillings for a variety of fish, haunch of mutton, vegetables, cheese and
bread – and through its eye-catching design. That the central fish and key
messages are red further calls for attention: ‘Absolutely the Best Dinner in
London’ is to be had at the Three Tuns, run by the appropriately named Mr
Best. Like the collectable porcelain dishware that inspires its design, such
ephemera beg to be kept by individuals for their own private collections.

Simpson’s celebrated two-shilling fish dinner, c. 1920–29, print

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 While political change is perhaps most evident to us in the form of
shifting geographical boundaries and population migrations, menus offer us
another, different kind of insight into the evolution of global foodways. In
the third chapter, ‘Cultural Encounters’, I look at a number of restaurant
menus, including those from international world’s fairs, that offer diners a
taste of nations in the compressed space of a single exhibition. I also
explore travel menus that offer tantalizing hints of what awaits in exotic
destinations yet are tempered with familiar tastes of home. Each of these
menus adds nuance to the ever-dynamic portrait of international foodways
in an increasingly globalized world. More broadly, I explore how menus
shape and bear witness to moments of cultural exchange by focusing on the
representation of national and hybridized cuisines. In particular, I consider
how these menus, one of the most ambitious of menu genres, involve
documents and curated sets of dishes designed to serve diners a taste of the
nation.
The expansion of the travel industry was yet a further factor in the
introduction of menus specifically targeting a younger clientele. In the
fourth chapter, devoted to ‘Menus for Children and for the Children We
Once Were’, I explore menus designed specifically for children, with dishes
appealing to young taste palates, their designs and accompanying
distractions meant to occupy children during the time they were tethered to
the table. However, this chapter, like all the others, is very aware that these
menus have more than one audience. In this case, the first two audiences
come to the menus simultaneously – young diners and the adults who
accompany them. But then, these children’s menus afford belated readers a
glimpse into how they were designed to appeal to children at that time and
what that says about how children were then perceived.
For example, the mimetic-architecture restaurant in Pasadena known
as Mother Goose’s Pantry clearly fascinated onlookers – adults and children
alike. While the 1959 menu design might invite us to assume that this was a
dining establishment for children, as do such items as ‘candy bars’, ‘gum’
or ‘Mother Goose Ice Cream’, the hours, from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., and
cigarettes on the menu confirm that it also targeted an adult clientele.
The inclusion of cigarettes on this menu brings us to the fifth chapter’s
topic, ‘Health on the Menu’. Our definition of what constitutes ‘healthy
living’ and the drive to identify, source, serve and consume healthy fare is
continually undergoing its own dramatic evolution. We have always needed,
and will always continue to need, to find ways to nourish our bodies and
satisfy our appetites through food while paying close heed to our health.
Soda appeared on menus after the introduction of root beer at Philadelphia’s
1876 Centennial Exposition. Coca-Cola was first hailed as a virtual cure-all.
Consequently, one of the most important frontiers for menus is neither a
national nor a geographical boundary, but rather a conceptual one. In
‘Health on the Menu’ I consider fundamental tenets of healthy foodways
that have withstood the test of time, and those that have fallen by the
wayside with emergent medical discoveries (tobacco smoking, as one
example). For instance, one New York Hospital menu from 1948 likely
looks remarkably familiar to anyone acquainted with hospital fare today.
The menu has been created with economy in mind, cost saving aligned with
the mention of availability of ‘small portions’, no doubt a frequent request
from ailing patients with diminished appetites as well as those simply bored
by the routine nature of bland hospital food. Nevertheless, we see the
balance of protein, vegetables and fruit available, with extenders like
potatoes, noodles and bread to ensure patients did not go hungry. There are
no sugar substitutes (likely to disappear on future menus as well now that
aspartame has come under suspicion), so the dessert course offers
unashamedly sugary treats but probably in carefully controlled portions.
One difference for today’s readers is the presence of buttermilk, a beverage
appearing on many menus of the day from store cafeterias to dining rooms.
Milk, having caused a scare earlier in the twentieth century, would have
been pasteurized, and the mention of it being ‘bottled’ was a nod to assuring
patients that it was carefully packaged for hygiene.
In the sixth and last chapter, ‘Riddle Me This: Menus That Intrigue’, I
explore menus serving up fare for the imagination. Here, I look back over
the course of close to three centuries at what I call enigmatic menus, those
containing riddles and conundrums that diners would have had to solve
before they could be sure exactly what fare they were choosing or what
would be served, as well as those designed to deliberately mislead diners as
to what was on offer. These menus that confused rather than clarified the
food choices available challenged both diners in the moment and those of
us who, belatedly and serendipitously, have stumbled across their mealtime
playscapes. This chapter also includes contemporary examples of menus
designed to engage, entertain and, in some cases, educate their enthralled
audiences. Objects of curiosity all.
Mother Goose Pantry, 1928, photograph.

Tastes and Traditions argues that menus chart our impulse to attribute
meaning to our meals – what we choose to eat, how we eat it, when we eat
and with whom we eat. Whether before, during or after the meal, menus
bear witness to our universal need to come together at the table, to share
food and to make of that experience a story, an occasion, a lasting memory.
Menus invite us on wondrous journeys – to travels of the imagination.
For diners in the moment, the journey promises to quench hunger, fulfil
aspiration, sate curiosity. For readers, many removed from the original meal
by considerable time and distance, the journey promises a glimpse of the
experience of being seated at the table. The greater the distance between
diner and reader – perhaps they live centuries and continents apart – the
more is revealed through interpretation of a menu’s selection of food, its
language and its description.
This is where Tastes and Traditions comes in, as it directs belated
readers to notice some of the nuances and subtle signposts of menus that
might not be readily apparent at first glance. In the chapters that follow, I
invite you to look at particular menus, and then to look at them again, and
this time even more closely. I am inviting you to scrutinize such details as
the implication of the inclusion of a particular dish or the way that it is
described, in order to understand more fully – with the benefit of hindsight
– the significance of a particular meal or venue, of the presence of a
particular guest, or even, perhaps, of an artist’s signature on the menu
illustration.

Menu from Mother Goose Pantry, Pasadena, California, 1932.

Menu from Mother Goose Pantry, Pasadena, California, 1932.
 Why should we trace the shaping of food practices and tastes over
time? Why do dining traditions matter? They matter because they are a
primary way in which we assign meaning to our meals. Their existence
bears detailed witness to our having gathered together to sate both our
hunger and our desire for community at a particular moment in time. Menus
offer us concrete traces, testimony of the stories we told – through our food
choices – about who we were and who we aspired to be.

Dietician sitting at a desk and writing the week’s menu at St Bartholomew’s

Hospital, 1939, photograph by Norman Kingsley Harrison.
Luncheon menu, New York Hospital, 1948, print menu.
 As we shall explore together through this book, the stories menus tell –
through their design, format and content – anticipate their diners’ wants,
needs and aspirations. The first two chapters speak to diners’ appreciation
of menus that offer fulfilment through their design and format (‘Feasts for
the Eyes’ and ‘Menus as Mementos’); the third provides diners with
opportunities to see fare that reflects their own region and nation, as well as
engaging their desire for self-expression and their curiosity about others and
their foodways (‘Cultural Encounters’). The next two chapters look to
menus designed with particular audiences in mind: the first at menus for our
smallest restaurant diners (‘Menus for Children and for the Children We
Once Were’); the second, at how some menus address a fundamental human
concern (‘Health on the Menu’). And the book concludes with a chapter
about the way menus delight not only through what they offer, but through
what they withhold from diners, as well as the manner in which the menu
items are offered. We all need food for survival and for centuries menus
have contrived to enliven our engagement with food, to make all aspects of
our dining experience memorable. In this final chapter (‘Riddle Me This:
Menus That Intrigue’), I offer some specific examples.
I, as the author, and you, as the reader, of Tastes and Traditions both
come to these menus belatedly, after the dishes have been washed up, so to
speak. With the book’s conclusion comes that magic hour after the meal
when those at the table can perhaps sit back and converse with one another,
maybe over a cup of tea, digesting the various dishes offered and consumed.
We can then ponder whether menus tempt diners to anticipate meals to
come, serve as reminders of meals consumed or, as I hope to convince you,
chart the evolution of some tastes and traditions that enable us to describe
our place in the world through a diversity of food voices.

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 CHAPTER
ONE
FEAST
S FOR
THE
EYES

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M
enus surely serve as a tangible, two-dimensional trace of an all
too short-lived dining experience, a roadmap guiding the reader’s
imaginative return to a particular moment in time. While nearly
all menus are waypoints in the historical evolution of design, only those
extraordinarily rich in visual appeal offer themselves as feasts for the eyes.

Setting the Stage

Let us begin with a very early menu taken from an elegant dinner held at
the Château de Choisy in June 1751 when that palace served as a royal
retreat for Louis XV. Charming figures adorning the frame of the menu nod
to the chateau’s role as a country lodge. Hunters with guns, assisted by their
dogs, take aim at wild boar. What appears to be a fox or deer at the bottom
left stands in observation of the hunters rather than as their target. Musical
instruments and colourful berries add sophistication to what might
otherwise seem to be an overly rustic scene for a royal banquet.
The menu itself depicts a meal served à la française, with a veritable
wealth of options. The term ‘dormant’ indicates dishes set out at the
beginning of the meal that remained on the table throughout, here beef and
veal rather than game meat. One section is devoted to ‘Oilles’, a highly
seasoned stew of vegetables and meat.1 In addition to lamb, beef, turkey
and chicken, there are a variety of game birds not figured in the illustrations
– pigeon, for example, and quail. A variety of vegetables – among them
green beans, peas, artichokes, cauliflower and asparagus – as well as nuts
and ‘une Crème de Chocolat’ are served as ‘Petits Entremets’, essentially a
course of delicate dishes to conclude the meal (earlier there are ‘Grands’
and ‘Moyen’ entremets served as part of the ‘Relevés’ or ‘Remove’ course
involving dishes that replaced earlier ones when taken away from the table
after being enjoyed). This menu welcomes diners to the pleasures of the
rural landscape during the height of summer, when Paris would have been
uncomfortably hot.
A second menu from the Château de Choisy, this time from 1757,
makes the sequence of settings very explicit, revealing how the elegant
meal was served in the French style. The menu moves from the first setting
– ‘Oilles, Potages and Hors d’oeuvres’ – to a second course, of ‘Grandes
Entrées’ such as ‘Choisy’ lamb or beef and ‘Moyennes (Entrées)’ that
include pigeon and pheasant, and then to a third featuring other game birds
and salad. The meal finishes with an ‘Entremets’ course divided between
hot and cold dishes. Gone are the charming rural figures of the 1751 menu –
they are replaced by a visual elegance that is also deliberately functional.
That each dish is listed on a written menu is in itself forward-looking, since
the French style did not require a menu or map to guide diners. Rather,
because all dishes were presented at once, diners were expected to help
themselves to those dishes placed within their reach. An individual diner
would not therefore expect to sample the full range of fare, as what they ate
was determined largely by their place at the table and the dishes available in
proximity to their seat. This innovation of a written menu, long before they
became commonplace at the modern Parisian restaurants of later decades,
meant diners presumably could take a copy away with them – precious
though these handwritten versions would have been – as a memento of a
memorable occasion of royal favour.
Of course, menus often include the specific date and sometimes even
the location of the meal. While their design and illustrations can complicate
the clarity of that message, they can also enhance it by inviting diners to
appreciate the significance of their present moment, to imagine themselves
venturing into a bold, elegant future or later reminiscing about the past.
Brain de Sainte-Marie, A Souper, Château de Choisy, 1751, handwritten
menu with illustrations.
 A banquet menu for Les Cent Bibliophiles, a literary society active in
Paris during the first half of the twentieth century, whose patrons included
Charles Baudelaire (author of Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) and Émile Zola
(author of Germinal, 1885) among others, features in its design an elegant
woman in traditional Alsatian costume – including a distinctive black
knotted-bonnet headdress – waving the French flag. Aside from signposting
the menu’s nod to French nationalism and the country’s pre-war history, the
inclusion of this figure celebrates the end of the First World War just
months before, which saw the return of the region of Alsace-Lorraine to
France after more than forty years of German control. Yet, despite the
regional flavour of the illustration, the cuisine is decidedly Parisian. ‘Sole
Marguery’, for example, honours the Parisian restaurant by that name rather
than referring to a regional speciality.
Brain de Sainte-Marie, Souper de Louis XV, 1757, handwritten menu.
Diner, 26 février, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1919, print menu.

Of particular interest is that a prestigious affiliation seems to have been

sufficient motivation for French artists to sign their names to menus created
for the special occasions of well-regarded societies. Les Cent Bibliophiles
was one such organization. Their summer gatherings boasted a pleasant
spread, typically including bisque or consommé, fish and poultry, and an
array of French desserts, together with excellent wine pairings. One elegant
1913 summer banquet menu, by the pastel artist Émile Auguste Renault
(who signs as Malo-Renault), showcases a woman in a cloche-style hat with
feathers alongside her sleek saluki dog. The menu nods to the esteemed
Auguste Escoffier’s culinary influence, and specifically to his wonderful
Pêches Melba honouring Nellie Melba, through its ‘Fraises Melba’,
strawberries layered with ice cream and whipped cream, as one of the
desserts. The Art Nouveau-style pastel depiction of the sophisticated young
woman and her sleek pup on a sunny summer’s day speaks to a decidedly
optimistic and forward-looking modern moment, despite the trouble that a
belated reader might have in ignoring the grey clouds of war looming on the
horizon and the devastation that was to befall France and her allies the
following year as they entered the First World War.
Émile Auguste Renault (Malo-Renault), Diner, 18 juin, Les Cent
Bibliophiles, 1913, print menu.
 But perhaps the most striking Les Cent Bibliophiles menu is that
produced for the 1907 banquet, featuring an intimate portrait by French
artist Adolphe Beaufrère of a woman undressing on a chair. Its title, Les Bas
(The Socks), draws attention to the lower right portion of the page, far away
from the bill of fare, which is positioned almost as an afterthought and at a
distinctive remove from the intimate glimpse of the figure provided by the
drape of her undergarment. The classical statue at the top left of the page,
complemented by the traditional floral display and vase and echoing the
angle and tone of the female figure, directs both diners and readers to
appreciate the menu’s classical aesthetics. For diners, the variety of wines
nearly outmatches the variety of food items, and the languor of the woman’s
pose suggests quite clearly that the literary society’s summer meal will be
an unhurried one.

Art of the Moment

Menus bearing artist signatures deserve a full-length book of their own, but
here let us focus on one particularly well-known artist who turned his hand
to menus in addition to participating in the larger art scene of fin-de-siècle
Paris, an artistic milieu that included, among others, Vincent van Gogh and
Edgar Degas. For belated readers, these signed illustrations by artists of
renown might be surprising: today, we are used to seeing their names on
gallery walls rather than on dining ephemera.
What, we might well ask, brought Toulouse-Lautrec to menu
illustration? Born into the aristocracy, he was disabled by a series of injuries
during his teenage years that never properly healed and was thus unable to
participate in the active outdoor recreational pursuits of the station to which
he was born. An ‘aristocratic, alcoholic dwarf known for his louche
lifestyle’, as Cora Michael described him, Toulouse-Lautrec instead pursued
the arts, seeking to represent the lives of late nineteenth-century Parisians
and particularly those of the middle and lower classes.2
Much of Toulouse-Lautrec’s career coincided with two major cultural
movements: the start of modern printmaking and an enthusiasm for
nightlife culture.3 Alan Birnholz writes that Toulouse-Lautrec’s style

employed freely handled line and colour that in themselves conveyed the
idea of movement. Lines were no longer bound to what was anatomically
correct; colours were intense and in their juxtapositions generated a
pulsating rhythm; laws of perspective were violated in order to place
figures in an active, unstable relationship with their surroundings. A
common device of Toulouse-Lautrec was to compose the figures so that
their legs were not visible. Though this characteristic has been interpreted
as the artist’s reaction to his own stunted, almost worthless legs, in fact
the treatment eliminated specific movement, which could then be
replaced by the essence of movement. The result was an art throbbing
with life and energy, that in its formal abstraction and overall two-
dimensionality presaged the turn to schools of Fauvism and Cubism in
the first decade of the 20th century.4
Adolphe Beaufrère, Diner d’été, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1907, print menu.

Toulouse-Lautrec began illustrating posters in the 1880s, which ‘afforded

[him] the possibility of a widespread impact for his art, no longer restricted
by the limitations of easel painting’.5 John David Ike argues that ‘Perhaps
his most significant contributions were his original and iconic lithograph
posters for various dancehalls throughout Montmartre, and his intimate oil
paintings of the working-class prostitutes and the aristocrats who frequented
these lively venues.’6 Posters were attractive to artists and marketers alike
because they promoted both product and artist.7 For Toulouse-Lautrec,
working on posters also gave him creative freedom because, as Ruth E.
Iskin observes,

the poster was a primary site for audacious innovation. It was in the
poster that he simplified form, flattened colour masses, avoided any
modulation, used brilliant colourations and prominent outlines,
emphasized the surface and used bold compositions and striking points of
view.8
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Programme pour le Théâtre-Libre pour
L’argent, comédie en 4 actes d’Emile Fabre, 1895, lithograph.
Arguably, ‘Toulouse-Lautrec helped set the course of avant-garde art well
beyond his early and tragic death at 36.’9 For example, the programme for
the 1895 production of Émile Fabre’s play L’Argent reveals Toulouse-
Lautrec’s bold style and, yes, includes figures with legs that are not visible.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le crocodile, menu, 1896, lithograph.

 Toulouse-Lautrec’s menus include fine sketch lines that add
qualifications to the otherwise bold figures on the page. Nevertheless, his
signature indicates his presence in a particular upper-class social scene and
his menu illustrations are an important part of his documentation of Parisian
life of the time. His menu illustration of 23 December 1896, for example,
suggests an exuberance for the social scene around that Christmas season,
with nightgowned and candle-equipped men as much a threat to a young
woman as are the wild reptiles. But the menu itself offers familiar French
fare of the time: oysters, two soups, venison, salad, chocolate mousse, wine,
champagne and a self-portrait of the artist hard at work.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Suisse, menu, 1896, lithograph.

A menu from the previous day, 22 December, privileges the key

components of a fine, celebratory meal in good company, toasting tradition,
wine and fine, friendly women. One of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most charming
menu illustrations documents the alluring Parisian styles of the time,
depicting an elegant woman selecting a hat from the milliner, presumably
anticipating what ensemble she will wear for the evening meal that, the
menu tells us, will commence at 8 p.m. Illustrating restaurant menus with
scenes of daily life offered Toulouse-Lautrec the opportunity to venture into
popular culture and increase the exposure of his artistic style and influence,
thereby enabling him to gain greater currency for his more serious and
expensive work.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Modeste, menu, 1893, colour lithograph.
RMS Armadale Castle, menu, 1922, print menu.

Other artists also took advantage of menus’ popular currency to fill

their wallets, appealing unapologetically to diners’ appreciation for the
entertainment trends of their time. The British illustrator and cartoonist Will
Owen’s career, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s, also coincided with modern
printmaking and nightlife culture. His works, particularly the Old London
Town illustrations, were part of a patriotic effort on the part of Britons to
provide a positive, homely and nostalgic vision of London for soldiers
returning home during the First World War.10 One of these illustrations
appears on the dinner menu of the RMS Armadale Castle and depicts the
mischievous Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). By
1922, the year of the menu’s printing, the novel had been adapted into a
silent film for international distribution. Owen’s evocations of popular
culture conjured up both a sense of general audience recognition and of
British nationalism, allowing the shipping line to champion its British roots
and making the artist’s nostalgic illustrations readily accessible and
appealing to the ship’s passengers.11
The Ambassador, New Year’s Eve supper, 1921, print menu.
 Arguably, Will Owen’s illustrations – squarely positioned among
popular cultural trends – reinforced a sense of British identity in the years
following a fierce defence of that identity and lifestyle. However, other
menus of the same period offered diners a way of journeying beyond the
sober post-war reality. Menus for New Year’s Eve celebrations took
particular advantage of the opportunity to champion turning the figurative
page on the war years.
Another 1922 menu, this one from the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic
City, wishes guests a Happy New Year and exudes celebration and
merriment. From looking at the two revellers, one might not guess that
Prohibition was in effect at the time, specifically from 1919 to 1933 in New
Jersey. In lieu of champagne flutes, the evening’s diners would also have
relied on the confetti depicted here to provide a New Year’s celebration’s
requisite festive flair.
A very handsome New Year’s Eve menu from Montreal’s Piccadilly
Club, likely during the 1930s, dazzles with sophistication and promise. The
cover profiles a dapper man in a scarf and top hat, escorting an elegantly
attired partner on his arm. The four-toned illustration reveals Montreal as a
trend-setting urban metropolis surveyed by Apollo readying his bow. Yet
there were few surprises on the menu for those with dainty and worldly
palates. No items represent the host city; indeed, the same fare might have
been expected in any major urban centre. And descriptions assume diners
with little culinary knowledge. Montreal’s iconic smoked meat has been
replaced in the sandwiches available by the generic ‘corned beef’, and
Welsh rarebit is described as ‘fluffy cheese’ on toast. Generally, the menu
disappoints in relation to the extravagant cover image.
If the Piccadilly Club menu cover communicates sophistication
through its timeliness and even future-facing anticipation, then a menu from
the French Line Steamers does precisely the opposite. Although the menu is
from 1927, the illustration is pointedly dated 1887 – a full forty years
earlier – and depicts an anachronistically attired family: father, mother and
young son, together with their travelling accessories, emanating the
elegance of yesteryear. For belated readers, the subtitle ‘Voyageurs d’hier’
(Travellers of Yesterday) signposts the decidedly retrospective glance, one
that would also have been immediately apparent to diners and observers of
the day.
Piccadilly Club menu, c. 1930, print menu.
Piccadilly Club menu, c. 1930, print menu.

The temptation to visit other lands and cultures as well as other time
periods, if only while at the dining table, is realized in a wide range of
colourful menus. For guests on the SS Kamakura Maru, who had literally
embarked on an ocean voyage, that possibility presaged a reality. Here the
menu consists of an elegant, illustrated template showcasing a Japanese
samurai warrior. The day’s fare for 26 August 1900 is handwritten in
English and contains no items of Japanese cuisine. Rather, diners would
have found fairly pedestrian chicken and ham patties, boiled anchovies,
beef with horseradish or duck with currant jelly. Only the adventurous
might venture to try ‘curry prawns’ with rice. Curiously, diners that summer
could enjoy English plum pudding for dessert, something we think of today
as served only at Christmas dinner, but that was served more frequently as a
meal’s conclusion through the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The ‘mock turtle’ soup on the menu suggests that the turtle has successfully
escaped the tureen, but his presence would not have been expected in 1900,
as a result of the scarcity and exorbitantly high cost of that prized food item
in 1900. Mock turtle soup emerged as early as the mid-eighteenth century
after the green turtles that originally featured in the dish were overhunted.
Often containing offal to imitate the texture of the original turtle, the soup
was economical and quickly became such a classic dish in the British and
American culinary repertoires that Lewis Carroll was able to amuse his
readers by including an illustration of the mythical ‘mock turtle’ in his
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland of 1865.
Paquebot Ile de France, dinner menu, 1927, print menu.
Menu, SS Kamakura Maru, 1900, print menu with handwriting.

For non-travelling diners, a tranquil lotus-flower-covered menu with a

mauve ribbon welcomed Chicago guests to the Japanese Tea Room in the
Congress Hotel in January 1908. The menu, written in English, offered a
range of teas, including ‘orange pikoe’ [sic] and the intriguingly named
‘howdah’. The menu French – ‘patisseries francaise’ [sic] – adds a touch of
elegance. And surely the sophisticated ‘specialties’ such as crystallized
pineapple, ginger or oranges, or, alternatively, spiced pecans or almonds as
well as pistachio nuts, promised to transport Chicagoans away from the
quotidian world of sardine sandwiches and toast (although these remained
part of the basic tea service for 50 cents per person).
Daily menu, tea, Congress Hotel, 1908, print menu.
Daily menu, tea, Congress Hotel, 1908, print menu.
Albert Robida, detail from Le Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000, 1902, hand-
coloured lithograph.
Albert Robida, Compagnie nouvelle d’alimentation, illustration and printed
text from Le vingtième siècle (1883).

Menus of the Future

Two delightful futuristic visions, the first not so much a menu per se as a
depiction of the possibility for restaurants to transport diners and readers to
other realms, concludes this part of the chapter devoted to menus’ visually
supported invitations to the imagination. A wonderful watercoloured detail
from Le Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000 (1902), by the French artist Albert
Robida, envisions a futuristic space age where restaurants have been raised
to the skies. Notice the Eiffel Tower in the background, completed in 1889,
as well as traces of smog – air pollution noticed as one effect of the
Industrial Revolution was already becoming apparent by the turn of the
twentieth century. Even in today’s post-2000 reality, opera-going diners do
not yet enjoy the considerable aerial infrastructure constructed in Robida’s
imagination.
Daniel Spoerri, menu cover and interior, Restaurant de la Galerie J., Paris,
1963.

The second image – from Robida’s 1883 illustrated science fiction

novel (a ‘roman d’anticipation’), Le Vingtième Siècle – offers the artist’s
take on the ‘Compagnie Nouvelle d’alimentation’, a fictional restaurant on
the Champs-Élysées in Paris.12 The chef is depicted overseeing operations,
his authority earning him the title of Chief Engineer (‘L’ingénieur en chef’).
In Robida’s futuristic vision of 1950s Paris, diners still value aged wine
from established vineyards, and so the elegant menu offers ‘Pomard 1920’,
referring to Pommard in the Côte de Beaune region of Burgundy, a wine
with very long ageing potential. Also, ‘Madère, Saint-Émilion 1925’, a
madeira from the appellation Saint-Émilion, which is a fortified wine that is
‘indestructible’ and ‘good for centuries’.13 Both wines were so renowned at
the time of the novel’s writing that Robida could safely assume that they
would continue to be benchmarks of quality in decades to come. However,
one wonders why he chose not to serve Margaux or Pauillac, which would
have been classified at the time of his writing. Côte de Beaune reds are less
prestigious than the reds from Côte de Nuits (also in Burgundy). Saint-
Émilion is on the right bank of the Gironde, and when the 1855
classification of Bordeaux properties was released only left bank properties
were included (Saint-Émilion received classification only in 1955).14
‘Champagne frappé’ refers to champagne served on ice, something that
might seem rather commonplace to us in the twenty-first century, but the
luxury of using such a precious commodity as ice in such quantities that it
could keep a bottle chilled anticipates the then-still-futuristic technology of
refrigeration that would only arrive in 1913.15 Classic dishes retain their
prominence – a bisque to start, pike quenelles with anchovy butter, venison,
partridge, aubergines and strawberry ice cream to finish.
Daniel Spoerri, menu cover and interior, Restaurant de la Galerie J., Paris,
1963.

Visual Food for Thought

Robida’s flights of the imagination serve as an ideal transition to the final
section of this chapter, which explores the ways in which the material
culture of meals, table settings and even the post-meal detritus resulting
from the rituals of eating, can be transformed into art. For example, in a
bold initiative, artist Daniel Spoerri launched an exhibit titled ‘723 Cooking
Utensils’ on 14 March 1963, the day after he closed his pop-up restaurant in
the same Parisian art gallery. The launch announcement warns Parisians
that the restaurant can accommodate only ten diners (twenty for the ‘buffet
exotique’) and that they should communicate their meal selections in
advance. Spoerri is both artist and chef, and the exhibition invitation makes
it explicit that the project is aligned squarely with ‘New Realism’, a
commitment to the recycling and ‘direct appropriation’ of reality in the
service of art.16
 Spoerri’s restaurant exhibit was unusual in multiple ways. The waiters,
for example, were well-known art critics. Pierre Restany, who served the
appetizing Monday menu, actually coined the term Nouveau Réalisme.
Jean-Clarence Lambert, who served the very affordable but meagre Tuesday
‘menu du prison’, is a poet and translator as well as an art critic, and
became involved with André Breton’s Surrealist group. In turn, Breton
himself is acknowledged in the Friday menu not as a Surrealist poet or
writer, but rather as the supplier of eclairs, which are listed directly after the
classic French dessert, Far Breton. Presumably the pun on the writer’s last
name – Breton – is part of the irony. Friday’s extensive menu honoured
Raymond Hains, one of the founders of and signatory with Restany and
others of the Manifesto of New Realism. This menu seems both lavish and
confusing, including a variety of items both edible (‘Coquilles Saint
Jacques au gratin’) and inedible (‘Négresse blonde en chemise’). Mont
Blanc here refers to the sweet chestnut purée dessert rather than the iconic
mountain itself. But what is ‘Himalaya’? Or the side dish ‘Hommes-
Sandwich’?
Diners also found their meals interrupted so that Spoerri could capture
the stories contained in the very evidence of what had been consumed.
Perhaps, however, diners were given fair warning, as the exhibition
invitation contained this text: ‘L’activité gastronomique du chef SPOERRI
“Daniel” entrainant d’immédiates conséquences esthétiques (dans la plus
pure orthodoxie du Nouveau Réalisme).’ (The gastronomic initiative of chef
Spoerri ‘Daniel’ brings with it immediate aesthetic consequences – in the
purest orthodoxy of New Realism.) In practice, Spoerri effectively
transformed the ephemeral nature of the meal into something permanent by
fixing the items on the table securely, which enabled him to mount his
tabletops vertically for exhibition.
In 1968, Spoerri opened the Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, and in
1970 the Eat Art gallery opened above the restaurant. The gallery displayed
art that was either derived from food and its material culture, or art that was
edible. In this artistic project, Spoerri was interested in bringing life into art
in concrete ways. One of what are referred to as his ‘snare pictures’ from
this time, Aktion Rest (1972), from a meal consumed on 7 May 1972,
illustrates how Spoerri’s Nouveau Réalisme tended towards displaying the
gritty detritus of twentieth-century humanity’s bodily needs and desires.
Here, the only items of food are the discarded corn cob and what could be
overcooked vermicelli noodles. The two diners clearly shared a bottle of
wine and lingered over multiple cigarettes, though sticking to their own
particular favoured brand. While a fish knife suggests that fish might have
been an option on the menu, the knife seems not to have been used.

Daniel Spoerri, Aktion Rest (Tableau Piège), 1972, mixed media

assemblage.
Wako Pork Chop, Tokyo, 2014, photograph.

More importantly, Spoerri’s snare-picture experiments reinforce the

distinction that I have been making between the diner and the belated
viewer. Here, as belated viewers, we cannot help but be intrigued by the
aesthetic effect even though we don’t know who the diners might have been
who sat at that particular table. Ironically, then, these ‘Menus Pièges’ tell us
that the table scenes are not entirely trapped or fixed as the term piège (trap)
suggests. Signposting the concept of these pieces fixing or trapping
evidence of the meal, Spoerri assigns the subtitle ‘Tableau Piège’ to Aktion
Rest. But instead of defying the inherently ephemeral nature of food
consumption, the meal has been eaten, the diners have departed – and only
a small portion of the actual dining experience has been captured.
Just as Spoerri seems to capture the random detritus of the afterlife of
meals, while the timing of his meal interruption actually enables him to
stage telling detail, so too menu designers gained sophisticated mastery of
their craft as of the twentieth century.
It was menu ‘engineers’ who saw the advantage of careful product
placement on the menu’s pages, or what they refer to as its real estate.
Rendering explicit what was already implicit in creative menu design, the
twentieth century saw the advent of menu engineering, which quantified the
impact of design elements on consumer behaviour. In particular, Gregg
Rapp popularized menu engineering and is considered within the restaurant
industry to be the ‘original’ menu engineer, a designation underscored by
the name of the company he created, Menu Engineers.17 In addition to
advocating balance and variety as key to menus’ appeal and success,18
menu engineers isolate the top right quadrant of the menu as prime real
estate. Albin Seaberg finds that when most people look at a menu, their eyes
are drawn to the ‘area just above and to the right of the center point, so this
would be the best place to list the restaurant’s most profitable items’.19 As
well, restaurateurs’ knowledge of what is popular and profitable allows
them to assign accurate prices to appropriate items.20 And their placement
of items on the menu increases profitability. For example, Seaberg suggests
that the first main-course item listed has the best chance of being selected,
and therefore the most expensive item – such as steak or seafood in an
American-style restaurant – should be placed first.21 He believes main
courses in general should be typed in the largest and boldest font, and have
more descriptors than other items. Certainly they can benefit from certain
buzzwords that draw attention to a dish’s attributes (taste, ingredients) or
preparation (will the fish be grilled, fried, poached?). Absent from such
description typically are details of the killing process. Not surprisingly,
McVety cautions against such explicit terms as ‘butchering’ or
‘slaughtering’.22 For restaurants serving certified halal or kosher fare,
where the ritual slaughter of meats is rigorously supervised, no explanation
is needed, and symbols of certification themselves constitute powerful
marketing.
Moving to more recent menus, one particularly unsatisfying visual
feature of contemporary menus involves the now omnipresent QR codes.
While QR codes were invented as early as 1994,23 it was really with the
challenges of COVID-19 lockdowns, as of 2020, that restaurants turned to QR
codes to give diners quick and germ-free access to their menus. Prior to
this, QR codes’ privileging of expediency over visual appeal rendered them
unattractive to menu designers, and even the tweaking of their design as
COVID obliged restaurateurs to keep using them far longer than anyone might
have anticipated, did little to help them win the diner’s eye. They remain on
the restaurant landscape, of course, because of the advantages they offer for
controlling the costs of producing multiple print menus.
Gaggan restaurant menu, 2017.
 Photographs represent another visual form of representation that has
come to saturate food communication. As a result of the Internet, rarely
today do diners go to a restaurant without knowing something about the
venue, menu and type of fare available offered, in addition to how the place
might look. And even restaurants who wish to keep their cards very close to
their chest in terms of unique dishes or presentation formats have had to
resign themselves to having a presence on such platforms as Instagram and
Facebook, which feed the frenzy of viewers who seem to hunger for
restaurant menu fare in ways different from diners who enjoy frequenting a
bricks-and-mortar restaurant and getting seated at an actual, rather than a
virtual, table.
In some ways, photos and their digital forms are today’s equivalent of
a long-established form of visual food representation. An earlier art form –
one that is still used today and that captures and displays meal items to
entice potential diners – involves the practice of restaurants offering three-
dimensional window displays of the dishes on their menu. One such display
window, typical of popular tourist restaurants across Japan, allows potential
diners to see the variety of menu options rather than forcing them to attempt
to decipher available offerings from a paper menu. Here, those options
include tonkatsu, deep-fried breaded pork, and deep-fried shrimp, each
served with rice, miso soup and pickled vegetables. The banner on the left
and the sticker with two pigs on it on the right are promotions signalling
that children are offered the fixed menu at half price.24
More intriguing for the contemporary diner, perhaps, are menus
comprised entirely of emojis. How they communicate draws from
contemporary mobile-phone culture in which emojis have become a
shorthand for human expression. This menu is from Gaggan, each emoji
alluding to a particular course in the meal. Emoji menus surely also contain
an implicit suggestion that food serves up far more than human sustenance:
for diners in the moment, this small menu offers some emojis that are
difficult to interpret in relation to food items (to what does a star or a
rainbow refer?), thereby offering diners the anticipatory pleasure of not
knowing exactly what dish is in store for them. One wonders, years from
now, what such artistic interpretations will offer belated readers.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER
TWO
MENUS
AS
MEME
NTOS

OceanofPDF.com
W
hy do diners save some menus yet leave others on the table?
What is it about specific menus that, in the moment when the
decision is made to pocket them or leave them, spurs diners to
save them? And what happens to those that are left on the table after the
dishes and table decorations have been cleared away and everyone has gone
home? What is it that goes through the minds of the diners of the moment?
Perhaps they wish to keep the menu for posterity, to know they were part of
this significant event; perhaps it is because of the attractiveness of the
menu’s design; perhaps it is for the fare offered. For some menus do have
an afterlife. Those that are kept endure well beyond the ephemeral moment
of their use and are safeguarded by diners, admirers and, later, collectors.
In this chapter, I look to the afterlife of menus, focusing on menu
readers and collectors more than on what the menu may have meant for
diners in its original moment. Here, I look at menus as artefacts, as things
worthy of safeguarding. For instance, illustrated here is a fan-shaped menu
for a special Chinese luncheon aboard ship that is an ideal example of a
menu designed to serve more than one function. It was surely conceived as
something to be saved and treasured, possibly used in the heat, its role as a
souvenir eclipsing its first role as a functional luncheon menu.
Special Chinese luncheon, MS Tijluwah, 1960, fan.

I have decided to focus in this chapter on how belated viewers and

readers interact with menus since it is they who will spend a far longer time
with menus than did the diners of the moment. They are the ones who
ponder, with the benefit of time and hindsight, the decisions that went into
selecting the dishes, appreciating the phrasing, images and layout. Diners of
the moment, after all, tend to consult menus rather more pragmatically,
often simply to choose what they will eat, distracted by the conversation
and conviviality that accompanies a meal.
This chapter therefore begins by looking at menus that seem to
anticipate, from birth so to speak, that they are destined to be more than
mere ephemera. These self-confident show-offs shout out to diners that they
are special, encouraging diners to take them away, to consider keeping and
treasuring them as souvenirs and mementos. Next, it considers menus
designed for royalty, menus that even as early as their initial conception
know they will be saved, collected and treasured. I conclude the chapter by
musing on a wider variety of ways in which menus have earned a place in
memory. At times, this involves modest menus that have since become
special because of collectors who recognized something worth noticing
about them or who bestowed meaning on them by gathering them together
with other objects to tell a story. And sometimes, as we will see, the most
poignant souvenirs are of meals that had no paper menus to archive, but
instead must be savoured in the mouth and recorded carefully for posterity.
Before exploring specific menus, however, let us pause for a moment
to acknowledge dedicated collectors who have bequeathed a rich legacy to
belated readers of the twenty-first century. Two collectors in particular have
played a foundational role in creating important menu collections, and
deserve specific mention here. First, the New York Public Library’s menu
collection is deeply indebted to one donor in particular, Miss Frank E.
Buttolph (1850–1924), who first donated her collection of menus to the
library in 1899 and continued collecting on the NYPL’s behalf for the rest of
her life, ultimately contributing more than 25,000 items. Second, the New
York Academy of Medicine’s menu collection benefited from the foresight
and acumen of Margaret Barclay Wilson, professor of Home Economics
and head of the department of Physiology and Hygiene at Hunter College.
Wilson’s collecting interests ranged from books to specimens and papers.
Her particular focus on menus lay not so much in gastronomy, but rather in
the stories they told about nutritional food practices and changing notions of
health.
Both these foundational menu collectors recognized the value of what
others might see as the seeming detritus of everyday ephemera. Building on
the foresight of these early collectors and so many others – including the
visionary John (de Monins) Johnson, former Oxford Printer to the
University, whose ephemera collections are foundational to the Bodleian
Library – today’s collectors use the vehicle of menu collecting to prompt
and catalyse careful consideration of social and cultural history. Today, too,
dealers trade in and publicize menus to respond to an increasingly
enthusiastic buying public. Understandably, menus pique our interest for the
many rich and varied stories they tell and, may I suggest, for the
reminiscences they conjure for original diners and the journeys upon which
they allow belated readers to embark.

Self-Confident Menus
What is a self-confident menu? A show-off menu? A menu that assumes a
self-importance beyond what one might at first be inclined to grant it? Take,
for example, one seemingly ordinary menu that has the audacity to
announce its intention to journey into posterity and has actually succeeded
in doing so. Were menus animate, we would declare this one positively
boastful. The menu comes from Le Moulin de Pont-Aven in Paris and
makes its claim to importance explicit, even drawing attention to the
declaration with a bold star graphic. The back cover reads: ‘Ne jetez jamais
cette carte, un jour elle vous intéressa …!’ (‘Do not dispose of this menu,
one day it will pique your curiosity …!’) Inside, it offers a summary review
of its cuisine – ‘très appréciée’ – and in the details of fare, it boasts of a
litany of regional delicacies that are only ‘quelques unes de nos spécialités’
(‘some of our specialities’). It goes on to mention the barman who takes
credit for creating the celebrated cocktail ‘Le Normandie’, and then offers
Crêpes Bretonnes flambéed with such extravagant varieties of liquor that,
again, the menu has only enough space to hint at them: ‘flambées au Grand
Marnier, etc. …, etc. …’.

Le Moulin de Pont-Aven – 7 rue Sainte-Anne, c. 1919–28, print menu.

Or consider a particular menu from the Shanghai Royal restaurant in

New York City. Yes, the menu boasts a very attractive woman on its cover,
glancing alluringly at the viewer from behind her fan, and the menu’s
visuals, with their bold red elements, demand attention. But the menu seems
to have been saved and treasured for two other specific reasons. First, it
records a milestone in the life of two diners: their first date. That it has been
kept so carefully surely signals that this date was the first of many. Second,
the designers very cleverly included a section on the bottom left of the
menu encouraging diners to consider this piece of paper as offering
something more than a guide to available fare. Instead of a spontaneous or
furtive slipping of the menu into a handbag or suit pocket, diners are
explicitly invited to fill in their address and give the menu back to their
server so it can be posted to them, thus giving them the opportunity to relive
their experience, at which point they will themselves also become belated
readers of that same menu. In this way, the Shanghai Royal encouraged the
‘souvenir-ification’ of its menu.
Of course, it is the business of menus to trumpet and market their
dining establishments. The Seattle Space Needle cleverly offered an
inexpensively produced, numbered certificate attesting to young visitors’
presence at the rotating restaurant with its 360-degree view. That the
certificate is numbered attests both to the popularity of the attraction and
the Space Needle’s deliberate effort to valorize the menu as a souvenir.
Le Moulin de Pont-Aven – 7 rue Sainte-Anne, c. 1919–28, print menu.

Soaring to even higher altitudes, diners savoured menus from the early
days of aeroplane travel, when food offerings were positively luxurious.
Rather in the way that restaurants in the national pavilions of world’s fairs
showcased the bounty of their country, flights boasted luxurious meal
service with menus designed to showcase the range and quality of the home
nation’s foodways. In its inaugural service in 1950, Pan American [World]
Airways included culinary highlights from across the country for the world
travellers it welcomed on board. From New York, they selected ‘Filet
Mignon au “21” Club de New York’ and ‘Salade Waldorf’, suggesting that
they perhaps be washed down with a Manhattan cocktail. From other parts
of the country, Florida gains a reference in ‘Coupe Floride’ and Hawaii is
represented by Tartes Ananas and ‘Délices d’Hawaii’, curiously described
in menu French without any clarification as to what particular délices or
delicacies diners might expect. In all, with its whimsical and eclectic visuals
depicting a diversity of regional fares, the menu offers passengers a sampler
of restaurant cuisine that diners would find on terra firma across the USA in
the mid-twentieth century.

Howard Low, Shanghai Royal, 1946, annotated print menu.

Space Needle children’s menu, c. 1960, print menu.
Pan American inaugural B-377 service: New York to Buenos Aires, 1950,
print menu.
Egremont Inn, Olde Egremont Tavern, and the Berkshire Inn, menu, 1933,
print menu.

Throughout the 1950s, Pan American Airways designed postcard-style

menus that would be given to passengers in-flight and then posted back to
them free of charge if they wrote in their home address and returned them to
a flight attendant before they disembarked. Generally, as corresponding via
postcard became increasingly popular in the early twentieth century,
postcard menus became practical give-away items for tourists and a
relatively inexpensive marketing tool.1 While postcard menus are a menu
genre in themselves, one characterized by the chutzpah of self-confidence,
even everyday dining establishments that offered convenience rather than
sophistication assumed diners would want to save their menus as mementos
of their visit. Take, for example, a rather dated-looking postcard menu from
the Olde Egremont Tavern, which contains three menus for three separate
restaurants in Massachusetts. On the back, the postcard is addressed to Mr
A. K. Smiley II, Mohonk Lake, New York, owner of the Mohonk Mountain
House resort (an establishment still run by the Smiley family, now in their
fifth generation of proprietorship).2 Might he have been sending himself a
reminder to adopt a similar marketing technique for his own establishment?
That the stamp cost one cent signals inflation’s impact on postal costs since
1933!
Hotel Carls-Rite, 1928, print postcard.
 For belated readers, postcard menus not only publicize travel
possibilities but reveal the emergence of new dining practices. For example,
a 1928 postcard menu from the restaurant at the Hotel Carls-Rite in Toronto
both advertises the fare on offer – in this case including instant Postum, an
increasingly popular caffeine-free coffee substitute in the century’s early
decades – and invites customers to send along the postcard to their friends.
It also signals that the venue, in 1922, was welcoming to new dining
clientele: women and children.
Menus did not have to be formatted as postcards, however, to find
themselves being taken away by visiting travellers. Travellers wanting to
remember a particular meal or location quickly realized that one method of
doing so was, quite literally, to take the menu away with them. Certainly,
travel providers also quickly saw the promotional advantages of producing
menus suitable for use as souvenirs. For example, one menu from about
1912 commemorates a rail journey from Bombay to Agra as travellers
visited the Taj Mahal. The scenery would have been exotic for American
travellers and one can well imagine how tempting it was to keep the menu,
both as a reminder of the train journey and the meal, and also as proof to
themselves and others that they were really once there. In comparison to the
scenery, though, the food itself would have been very familiar. Although
there is a slight nod to French elegance on menus of the time (‘Fried Fish au
Citron’), the lack of any accent on the adjective ‘Saute’, and its placement
before the noun it qualifies, ‘potatoes’, in the style of English-language
usage, confirms the menu’s intention to convey to diners the availability of
the comforts of home even as they found themselves in a faraway place. So
comfortable were diners with taking souvenirs to commemorate their travel
experiences that, in the late twentieth century, James Porterfield suggests
that not only were railway menus designed to be taken as mementos, they
were ‘intended to induce passengers to take them and not the silver or china
as a souvenir of the trip!’3
Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Hamburg America Tours, c. 1912,
annotated menu.

Royal Menus
Some menus immediately call attention to themselves and expect to claim a
place in dining history, so important are the venue, occasion and assembled
cast of dignitaries. A handsome menu for a coronation luncheon hosted by
Mr and Mrs George at London’s elegant Hotel Cecil deservedly bears
Edward VII’s royal crest and an elegant ribbon that, in the menu’s own
words, qualifies it as a ‘Coronation Souvenir’. These generous hosts
presumably endured considerable logistical headaches in planning their
luncheon. As the cover of the invitation reads, the luncheon was to be held
on 26 June 1902 to coincide with the date originally scheduled for the
coronation.
Yet a souvenir menu for a different hotel luncheon planned to celebrate
the same coronation has received much more attention, with multiple copies
reproduced in printed books and available for purchase. While the designers
knew it would be a collectors’ item because of the royal occasion, it has
succeeded in earning its place in posterity largely because it marks a
particularly poignant moment in British and hotel restaurant history.

Menu for the luncheon given by Mr and Mrs A. A. George on the occasion
of the coronation of His Majesty King Edward VII, 1902, print menu.

Dated 24 June 1902, this menu calls attention to itself with its regal
graphics, dishes named to honour the new king and the handwritten
signature of revered chef Auguste Escoffier, author of the watershed
textbook Le Guide Culinaire (1903) and developer of the brigade system of
food preparation still used by modern hotel and restaurant kitchens. It was
guaranteed to earn its place in the canon of revered menus, expected to be
taken away as souvenirs. But although there have been multiple
reproductions, only some of these have noted that the menu records a lunch
that was never held as planned at London’s Carlton Hotel. On that very day,
Edward VII was taken for an emergency appendectomy and the luncheon had
to be unceremoniously cancelled. In a further dramatic unfolding of events,
Escoffier’s business partner in the ambitious Carlton Hotel endeavour,
César Ritz, succumbed to a health crisis brought on by the trauma of
cancelling such a momentous event. While the king recovered and was
ultimately crowned on 9 August 1902, Ritz never regained his full strength
and lived the rest of his life as a semi-invalid. This menu, then, is a
particularly poignant memento of the time when Escoffier and Ritz were at
the height of their professional success, anticipating feting their esteemed
and long-time customer. Not only does the menu feature a chicken dish
named in the new king’s honour, ‘Poularde Edouard VII’, but the handwritten
endearment to ‘mon Caillou’ (literally ‘my pebble’ – often an endearment to
a young child before he gains his full head of hair) is likely another, more
familiar and personal, dedication to the balding monarch. Although this
menu and inscription are so often reproduced, no such explanation of the
handwritten endearment has yet been offered.
Carlton Restaurant, Gala Dinner, 1902, print menu.
 There is an additional royal menu that deserves mention precisely
because it was so deliberately unassuming – modest both in terms of its
appearance and the fare on offer. It dates from 1939, when British monarchs
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited the United States to strengthen
friendship between the two countries in the context of the impending war in
Europe. Imagine what was involved in the decision to serve visiting royals
hot dogs at a picnic venue. What were the contingency plans for inclement
weather? As we know, the sun did actually shine that day, and the United
States eventually became a staunch ally of Great Britain in a way that
defined the trajectory of the Second World War. Amusingly, James
Roosevelt later recalled the king asking his father how to eat a hot dog. His
reply? ‘Put it in your mouth and keep on chewing until you finish it.’4
Menu for the picnic with the British Royals, 1939, typewritten note.

Personal Mementos
We all play starring roles in our own stories. That is, we are ‘the royals’ of
our own autobiographies. We save menus – and other things – as mementos
of special occasions to allow us to recreate those moments later in life, to
bring them back to life, so to speak. Private menu collections therefore
include menus that may not be notable as records of a certain time or venue,
or even of specific food items, but rather because they evoke memories of
particularly significant occasions in our lives.

The Roosevelts and the Royals at Hyde Park, 1939, photograph. From left
to right, are First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, King George VI, the president’s
mother Sara Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

What are some of the milestone life events that herald ceremonial
meals? Weddings, certainly. An 1898 souvenir menu from the well-known
New York restaurant Delmonico’s traces the events associated with a lavish
wedding celebration. Signed by the bride and groom, it also includes a
reception agenda. One menu page even has the small five-line marriage
announcement reproduced as a cut-out from the newspaper in which it
appeared. I particularly like the cheery illustration of two babes (cherubs?)
speaking by primitive telephone, using the name of the couple as their
greeting: ‘Hahlo-Hahlo’. In 1898 very few households indeed would not
have had their own telephone, an invention only patented in 1876, so the
charming graphic also hints at the excitement about communication
technologies at that time.
Ceremonies other than weddings also led to the creation of menus
designed to be lasting mementos of the occasion. A 1953 menu for
Lawrence James Lesser’s formal bar mitzvah celebration at the Manhattan
Beach Jewish Center sets out a remarkably varied spread, including chicken
gumbo, roasted turkey with cranberry sauce (unusual for a May event, but
perhaps someone’s favourite meal?) and a birthday cake. The folded menu
is elegant, clearly designed to last beyond the day’s festivities, whether it
was a lunch or an evening meal that followed the service and ceremony,
though presumably the former given the lack of information about music or
dancing. The adult hosts seem to have had considerable influence over the
fare offered, judging by the inclusion of period-popular choices like ‘Cherry
Jubilee’ and ‘Coconut Julip’. But one must wonder just how popular
‘Sweetbreads aux Champignons’ were with the teenage guests?
Wedding dinner held by Henry Hahlo and Jeannette Wise at Delmonico’s,
New York, 1898, print menu.

Menus from regular meetings of intriguing clubs and societies also

take us on a fascinating journey of discovery. Let us turn here to two
organizations that offer much to capture the imagination.
The first involves the annual meetings of the Explorers Club. Founded
in 1904 but only welcoming women to its ranks in 1981, the group is ‘a
multidisciplinary, professional society dedicated to the advancement of field
research, scientific exploration and resource conservation’.5 Its annual
events include awards to an impressive group of adventurers, scientists and
explorers, a keynote address, and a formidable dinner. One way in which
these meals are rendered extraordinary involves the curation of an appetizer
course titled ‘Exotics’. On offer in 1987, for example, were Burmese
chicken feet, moray eel tongue, Islands of the Moon sambusa (‘sambusa is
one of the most common and favorite pastry appetizers found along the
coast of East Africa’), titbits of Patagonian rodent (‘Paca’, a nocturnal
animal ‘some-what like a rabbit’ but larger, and difficult to capture),
Calcutta sea snake, freeze-dried astronaut ice cream and Comoran ginger
tea.6 As of 2015, the Exotics were explicitly curated to privilege
consumption of insects over mammals, as well as invasive plants and
aquatic species, in the interests of sustainability.7
Another fascinating group hosting regular meal events is ‘The Thirteen
Club’, founded in 1881 by Captain William Fowler to counter negative
superstition about the number thirteen and, appropriately, meeting on the
thirteenth of every month.8 Its first meeting took place in January 1882 at
Fowler’s cottage in New York.9 Members dine thirteen to a table and, to
defy superstition, enter the dining room by walking under a ladder. If they
spill salt on the table, they refrain from throwing it over their shoulders, and
broken mirrors are often part of the decor during these events.10 Siobhan
O’Shea mentions a story that the club was founded when the captain was
upset that an acquaintance would send her nine-year-old daughter away if
the numbers at the table reached thirteen.11
In particular, the 1899 menu shown here contains the signatures of the
thirteen people seated at TABLE NO. 2. That there are exactly thirteen
signatories is testimony that the club’s members really did challenge the
negative mythology of the unlucky number thirteen. The cover photo of the
menu seems to show only the male diners, not the ladies, at the Roof
Garden Dinner. The New York Times explained that at this event ‘The
candlesticks were skulls, with a good article of grave mold clinging to
them, and further beautified by the drippings which ran down on them and
made a very fair representation of clinging wisps of white hair.’12
The first evening gatherings of the Thirteen Club would follow a
script: at 8:13 p.m., in the thirteenth room of Captain Fowler’s cottage,
thirteen candles would be lit prior to thirteen courses. By 1890 the club had
grown enough in popularity to inspire a second club in London, signalling
not only that the club had gone transcontinental, but that it was now too
large to hold in Fowler’s cottage.13
Menus bearing signatures attest to the presence of a particular group of
people on a particular day. During wartime, where life seems all the more
precarious, the act of writing one’s name on a menu to acknowledge being
part of a celebratory occasion takes on a certain poignancy. One example is
a 25-course meal from the 1942 Australian Wireless Air Gunners (‘WAGS’)
dinner banquet. As a memento, the menu is notable for the number of
signatures it bears, where the ‘WAGS’ have taken the time to sign their names
– presumably on many such menus. One imagines that some, if not all, of
the signatories may have thought they were leaving a lasting legacy, given
they had no guarantee of returning from the battlefield. The very candid and
bone-chilling lines from the menu’s poem, ‘Hop into the cockpit, shaking
like hell,’ is telling as to what these gunners were thinking, knowing full
well that their fate would depend on the accuracy of the plotters and Morse
Code – ‘and drink the health of de der de der dit’. This dinner was held in
October 1942, eight months after Japan launched its first bombing
campaign over Australian soil. Japan would continue to bombard Darwin
until November 1943.14
Manhattan Beach Jewish Center, 1953, print menu.

175th Regular and Annual Ladies Roof Garden Dinner, Central Restaurant
and Roof Garden, 1899, print menu.

Collecting Menus
Perhaps most fascinating of all are menus that might, at first glance, seem
entirely inconsequential. The decision to preserve such a menu, possibly
even to annotate it and gather it together with other menus to illustrate a
particular story about the evolution of foodways, however, can endow a
menu with unforetold significance.
 . . . . Dinner, Parkes, 1942, print menu.
W A G S

When menus are not only preserved but enhanced by marginalia, they
become even more interesting since they offer insights into the immediate,
lived experience of the meal that would otherwise have been lost.
Handwritten annotations on menus – such as the signatures on the 1942
WAGS banquet – are of particular interest. Just as marginal notes in a
cookbook provide evidence that a recipe has been tried and tested, so too do
menu marginalia offer belated readers a glimpse into how the dishes might
have been received and how they tasted, as well as details of the dining
venue’s atmosphere and decor.
Take a 1970s pizza parlour menu from Turino Pizza as one illustrative
example. Turino’s in New York City earns its place in the historical record
primarily through collector Bernard Fread’s extensive documentation and
his wife’s donation of the collection to the New York Public Library (NYPL).
Precisely because it now finds its place at a venerable institution that
catalogues, digitizes, publicizes and makes available one of the world’s
largest collections of menus, this terribly modest pizza menu has made the
journey from the ordinary to the extraordinary and takes on a whole new
significance. What fascinates is not so much the fare, but rather the care
taken by one particular diner to document his dining experience. He
includes the restaurant review he consulted prior to his visit and his specific
choices once he arrived. Fread’s handwritten notes thereby serve to draw us
into a particular moment in the 1970s.
Fread’s annotation on the menu for Alda’s Ristorante is another
example of his careful record of food practices. This time, he even includes
what he and his wife ate at home after leaving the restaurant: ‘Sunshine
cookies’. Together, the menus the Freads donated offer a remarkable
window onto descriptive food practices for a professional and his wife
living in New York City in the mid- to late twentieth century. Through what
was essentially a hobby, transforming eating out in his neighbourhood
(often alone, because his wife tended to diet frequently) into an analogue
database of restaurant information of the period, Fread steadily amassed a
collection of dining ephemera.
Turino Pizza, 1970, annotated print menu.
Alda’s Ristorante, 1970, annotated print menu.

The menus in Fread’s collection range in date from 1930 through to

1980 and are, for the most part, from restaurants within walking distance or
a short bus ride from his home on the Upper East Side of New York City.
Fread was an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital and lived nearby on
Madison Avenue.15 His collection benefits immensely both from his
commitment in later years never to eat in the same restaurant twice and the
greater diversity of restaurants he patronized in the late 1960s. As culinary
curator at the NYPL, Rebecca Federman summarized:

Fread’s menus come from some of the most ordinary restaurants

imaginable – the restaurants where no one would think to ask for a
keepsake menu … But Fread kept [those menus], and today they tell a
story that would be impossible to document elsewhere.16

Efforts to ensure an afterlife for menus was never limited to North

America. Down under, in Australia’s Museums Victoria, there are menus
that have been preserved for posterity by having found their way into a
curated collection. Two teenagers travelling on the last leg of their journey
to Australia donated the menus from their voyage on the SS Kamo Maru in
February 1939, months before the Second World War. The Museums
Victoria collection tells the story of these menus’ provenance in a way that
sheds light on the lived reality of children who were separated from their
immediate families and homes and sent overseas to the Commonwealth
realms of Australia, Canada and elsewhere during the Second World War.
SS Kamo Maru, NYK Line, 1939, print menu bound in silver string.
SS Kamo Maru, NYK Line, 1939, print menu bound in silver string.

Museums Victoria’s curatorial note explains that Hanns-Georg and his

sister Marie-Charlotte were ‘children of a German father and Jewish
mother’ who ‘both eventually left Europe for England after facing
persecution. They obtained passage to Australia as refugees with the
assistance of the Quakers in England.’17 Both Hanns-Georg and Marie-
Charlotte settled in Australia. With the exception of a death notice for
Hanns-Georg, relatively little additional information is forthcoming about
the two siblings and there is virtually none about their parents. Yet their act
of saving the shipboard menus, which eventually found their way into a
museum collection, sheds light on their own experience and that of other
children during wartime. A number of other menus in the Victoria
collection, grouped together as items of ‘Migration and Cultural Diversity’,
were donated by some of the million Britons who emigrated to Australia,
travelling under the £10 assisted passage scheme funded by the British and
Australian governments.18

Institutional Menus
I end this chapter by looking at some meal regimens that are carefully
discussed and planned, certainly remembered: institutional meals. In some
cases, these are documented in the form of tangible records, but mostly we
know about institutional food, or the food remembered during time spent in
forced incarceration, through written recollections.
Specifically, bills of prison fare seldom take the form of menus in the
sense of documents that offer choice. And when choice is available it is,
unsurprisingly, very severely limited. However, despite and perhaps
because of the limited range of choice and variety, descriptions of food
served in prisons or other spaces of confinement illustrate how the
experience of confinement prompts a heightened engagement with food and
the sensory experiences surrounding food consumption.
There seem to be two contradictory approaches to feeding the
incarcerated: one aims to feed prisoners as cheaply and efficiently as
possible, prioritizing low cost over nutrition or taste; the other approximates
what the time and place consider to be a wholesome diet. For example, the
Abashiri Prison in Japan, which opened in 1890, was known to be a place
reserved for serious offenders from which escape was extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, its menu suggests that its dietetics programme involved
simple yet healthy fare. Sections of the prison were relocated in 1983 to
become the contemporary Abashiri Prison Museum. The museum offers
‘prison meals’ as one of its visitor experiences at the modest cost of 900 yen
per meal. Its website claims that ‘these meals are similar to those served to
prison inmates at the current Abashiri Prison.’19 On offer are two different
lunch combinations (kangokushoku).20 Both options look very much like
typical home cooking, explained my Japanese friend: Option A includes
grilled Pacific saury (fish), glass noodle salad, stewed dried radish and miso
soup. Option B includes rice, miso soup, grilled atka mackerel and stewed
Japanese butterbur. On occasion, coarse green tea is substituted for the miso
soup.
By contrast, menus at American prisons seem to be defined primarily
by economy. Ru-Al Jones makes the point bluntly: ‘jail and prison food is
not meant to taste good.’21 In his self-published book, Our Last Meals?:
San Quentin Death Row Cook Book, Jones explains that the menu on death
row only changed three times during the nineteen years he was incarcerated
there. Nevertheless, at San Quentin, just as at other prisons in which he has
been incarcerated, there was always one ‘special’ meal. In San Quentin that
was a Sunday breakfast:

two fried eggs sunny-side up, tatter [sic] tots [deep fried grated potato
balls], a slice of ham, two slices of wheat bread, two pads of butter, a
jelly pack [mini carton of jam], shredded potatoes, a carton of milk, and a
carton of orange juice. Everyone eagerly looked forward to this meal at
the end of each week.22

A 2020 prison news article talks about Martha Garcia, who brought her love
of cooking to work when she joined San Quentin as prison food manager.
Garcia is credited with improving the food service conditions of the prison
– offering a better variety of food, using fresh ingredients and cooking with
better techniques.23 One incarcerated man says that he ‘really appreciate[s]
the addition of the yogurt’.24 Another appreciates the improved quality of
the eggs and reports that ‘the food is good at least 3 times a week now.’25
The importance of adding variety to inmates’ meals can also be seen in the
push for California’s legislature to require accommodation for inmates’
dietary preferences. Legislation passed in 2018 requires prison menus to
offer vegan options in addition to other dietary meals such as kosher, halal
or vegetarian.26 Although these changes were made on the basis of human
rights, they also afforded prisoners the much-wanted option of variety of
choice. Prison officials in Florida, for example, report that when the option
of kosher food is made available to inmates, the number of requests to have
kosher meals increase heavily, regardless of whether inmates identify as
Jewish.27 This may in part be because of the novelty of seeing individually
boxed lunches, or inmates’ belief that pre-packaged and sealed meals are
both safe and follow USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)
guidelines.
Prison meal A (Pacific saury): 900 yen, Abashiri Prison Museum, 2021.

Henry Voigt recognizes that old menus from San Quentin were saved
as mementos – likely because many of these menus are for special
occasions, such as Christmas dinner, the Chinese New Year celebration and
legal holidays such as Armistice Day.28 The Annual Yom Kippur meal menu
from San Quentin is particularly poignant since the occasion of Yom Kippur
is the most solemn in the Jewish calendar, a time when Jews appeal to God
to be written for another year in the Book of Life.
However, perhaps most poignant of all memento menus are those
written down or even spoken aloud to commemorate foods that could be
neither obtained nor transformed into edible fare – meals that were not, and
could likely never be, eaten. Wilhelmina (Mina) Pächter compiled a
cookbook of recipes remembered and shared by starving women at the
concentration camp in Terezín, about 70 kilometres north of Prague, then in
German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The cookbook has been published as In
Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, translated into
English by Bianca Steiner Brown, who was herself an inmate there.
 Holocaust survivor Jaroslavv Budlovsky is quoted as writing in 1943,
on a death march to Terezín: ‘The hunger was so enormous that one
constantly “cooked” something that was an unattainable ideal and maybe
somehow helped us to survive it all.’29 Terezín survivor Susan E. Cernyak-
Spatz explained that Terezín detainees called the act of imaginary cooking
‘cooking with the mouth’.30 Inspired by In Memory’s Kitchen, the Terezín
cookbook has also been made into a film, Mina’s Recipe Book (2017).31
The rigours of incarceration extend across gender, time and shifting
national boundaries. We have inherited painful stories of hardship and
menus of meals ‘cooked in the mouth’ from a wide range of individuals and
from different wars. Also from the Second World War, but continents away
from Terezín, U.S. army colonel Halstead Clotworthy Fowler commanded
the 71st Field Artillery of the Philippine army. He was wounded in January
1942, captured after the Battle of Bataan, and survived the Bataan Death
March, after which he was imprisoned in the Bilibid POW camp. During his
time at Bilibid he collected recipes from fellow POWs, which were then
compiled and published in 1946 by his aunt, Dorothy Wagner, as Recipes
out of Bilibid.32 Food historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton thought the book
project helped Wagner deal with the death of her nephew;33 however,
Kristen Howard notes that publication of the cookbook pre-dates his death
by four years.
Why would these men at Bilibid share detailed accounts of food
preparation? According to Wagner, the primary purpose of these prisoners
giving her nephew their family recipes and his collecting them was
‘strengthen[ing] their resolution to survive’. It also brought them, at least in
their minds, closer to home.34 As Recipes out of Bilibid explains:

No matter how conversation began, it always turned to food, the food the
prisoners had once relished and were determined to enjoy again. For they
talked in the future tense, harking back to the past only to make concrete
their plans when they should finally be rescued. They gave reality to their
dreams by dwelling, not on the flavors or sentimental recollections of
feasts, but on a painstaking accuracy in describing the constituents of the
dishes they remembered and longed for and resolutely purposed to enjoy
again.35
The recipes themselves are called both ‘dishes’ and ‘recipes’ and are
organized alphabetically according to nationality: American, British,
Chinese, Filipino, French, Italian, Javanese, Mexican, Polish, Russian,
Scandinavian and Swiss. There is a section titled ‘Tips on Technique’ – tips
that come from the recipes written by the POWs themselves, and not from
Wagner.36 Each recipe includes a brief biographical sketch of the POW who
contributed it, his (usually harrowing) experiences leading to him becoming
a POW, the origins of the recipe, and sometimes Fowler’s relationship with
the prisoner.
In his Italian section, Fowler writes that due to the voluble
disagreement of the many Italian prisoners he encountered, despite their
similar food preferences, he ‘limited himself to the recipes on which they
all agreed’.37 Of these, Fowler’s own commentary breaks through in a
recipe titled ‘Holiday Cake’:

1 doz. egg yolks 2 lbs sugar

5 lbs flour ½ cup milk
3 cups chopped nuts 1 teaspoon anisette

Beat the egg yolks until they are pale, adding the anisette, then the sugar,
gradually till they are blended. Knead in the flour, adding the milk as
required (the exact amount can be only approximated; the dough should
be stiff, but should hold together sufficiently to roll). Sprinkle the nuts
over the dough and knead them into it. Roll lightly, cut in any desired
shape, and fry in deep olive oil. (These are really glorified doughnuts.)38

While today this recipe goes by names such as zeppole, frittelle,

screppelle or castagnole, and when made with honey the treats are also
called sfingi or struffoli, Fowler’s recognition that all of the prisoners could
agree on the significance of this holiday cake, and how it is prepared,
reminds the reader of the importance of shared pleasures even in destitute
circumstances.
Mina Pächter, ‘Gesundheits Kuchen (Pächters)’ or ‘Healthcake’, c. 1943,
excerpt from cookbook.

What is especially interesting about these cookbooks of the

imagination is that they are often called into being by individuals who did
not have actual cooking experience themselves. For instance, political
dissident Hongda ‘Harry’ Wu was imprisoned in a penal labour camp for
more than nineteen years and wrote a memoir, Bitter Winds, about his
experience.39 There was a famine throughout China during his
imprisonment, and his memoir is particularly focused on food, hunger and
starvation. Wu describes ‘food-imagining parties’ that began as he and his
fellow inmates came closer and closer to actual starvation:40

Before going to sleep at night, we would take turns presenting the others
with elaborate descriptions of a favorite dish, sometimes a specialty of
our native province or a secret recipe from our family. We would explain
in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and
 arrange them on the plate. We would describe the smell and then the
taste. Everyone would listen in silence.41

Ironically, then, while one thinks of memento menus as tangible objects

decorated in finery and stored safely with reverence, some of the most
powerful are those existing only in the mind, cooked ‘in the mouth’ and
savoured in memory.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER
THREE
CULTU
RAL
ENCOU
NTERS

OceanofPDF.com
M
enus are invitations to flights of the imagination. For diners, these
journeys of the imagination take them perhaps to an aspirational
present, a romanticized past or a bold future. For belated readers,
these menu-inspired journeys take them back to a particular moment in
time, to which they bring with them both the advantages and disadvantages
of a twenty-first-century perspective. In this chapter, such figurative
journeys become all the more explicit as diners and readers visit different
countries across the globe, through sampling or seeing what was on offer.
Here, I look to depictions of national cuisines and intercultural culinary
encounters to ask how countries seek to define themselves through their
cuisine on the world stage. I begin by exploring menus that showcase
nations’ foodways, such as those of the national pavilions at the
international world’s fairs. Next I turn to menus that envision other cultures,
looking to ways that chefs and restaurateurs represent otherness – as we
will see, often problematically. And I will also look at examples of cultures
that ‘talk back’ to the othering of their cuisine by redefining it on their own
terms, concluding with glimpses of how fusion cuisine facilitates culinary
encounters through menus that not only ‘talk back’ but ‘listen’ to what other
cultures bring to the table.

Food on the World Stage

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson provides an authoritative definition of
‘cuisine’, which she distinguishes from ‘cooking’. Whereas cooking
‘humanizes food by making it fit for human consumption’, Ferguson writes,
‘cuisine socializes cooking.’1 For cooking to be transformed into a cuisine,
in other words, there must be an accompanying literature to document its
components and evolution as well as the relationship of individual dishes to
the repertoire of flavours and production techniques of which it is
composed. Beyond its written formulations, though, a cuisine is learned and
appreciated through embodied knowledge, something acquired and
experienced over time. As linguist Dan Jurafsky writes, beyond ‘its
component flavor elements’, a cuisine is made up of a ‘set of combinatory
grammatical principles, learned early and deeply’.2
 What kinds of documents make up the record of a cuisine? Certainly, I
think here of watershed cookbooks such as Julia Child’s Mastering the Art
of French Cooking (1961; written collaboratively with Simone Beck and
Louisette Bertholle); rare accounts of historical foodways, for example
Yuan Mei’s late eighteenth-century gastronomic treatise translated as The
Way of Eating (2019); and even literary depictions of foods and mealtime
rituals (think of the Cratchit family’s Christmas meal in Charles Dickens’s
1843 A Christmas Carol).3 But menus are fundamental contributors to the
record of a cuisine. In their brevity, they both signpost and summarize local,
regional or national cuisine at precise moments in time.
Let us turn, then, to menus that take upon themselves the responsibility
of representing a nation’s cuisine. World’s fairs – also known as
international or universal exhibitions, expositions or expos – offer a bounty
of menus specifically designed to showcase national cuisines. The Great
Exhibition of 1851, brainchild of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert,
was held in London, inaugurating the tradition of such events being truly
international affairs. Subsequently, each world’s fair gave participating
countries the opportunity to play host to the world and, in terms of food, to
invite chefs to showcase the best of their nation’s often signature dishes in
the restaurants in their country’s pavilion. While world’s fairs also gave
industry a remarkable opportunity to market its manufacturing, publicity
reveals that one of the most attractive draws for visitors was the food on
offer. The magazine spread advertising the New York World’s Fair in 1964–
5 is a case in point, with its large, bold lettering stating, ‘there is a world of
wonderful food to enjoy.’
Food at the fair, 1964–5, print advertisement.

Let us take a figurative tour around a number of world’s fairs’ pavilion

restaurants, starting with my home country, Canada, and then moving
further afield with each pavilion. The sequence is determined by geography
rather than chronology as the aim of this chapter is to explore moments of
cultural encounter, the ways that menus and those who read them identify
foods and factors of national importance, those worthy of being
communicated and exported. Of all the chapters in this book, this one is the
least historical, focusing as it does squarely on cultural geography.
The 1967 ‘Expo 67’ was hosted in Montreal in the year of Canada’s
centennial. Visitors to the Canada pavilion were invited to dine at La
Toundra, a restaurant named to evoke romantic notions of the mythical
north, something that was done again more recently with the slogan ‘We the
North’ to celebrate the astonishing tennis victory of Canadian teenage
newcomer Bianca Andreescu at Wimbledon and the strong performance of
Toronto’s basketball team, the Toronto Raptors, at the NBA championships,
both in 2019. I can’t help but wonder as well if the name La Toundra might
have been a winking reference to the assumption of those unfamiliar with
Canada that it is a country entirely blanketed by snow and ice for most of
the year? Canada used the menu at its national pavilion for Expo 67 as an
opportunity to weave a nuanced national origin story. Rather than
emphasizing Canadian cuisine’s roots in British, French and American
foodways, this menu underscores Indigenous culinary influences through its
striking design and signals the extreme temperatures and rugged landscape
of a vast, sparsely populated country.

La Toundra, 1967, print menu.

What, though, is Canadian cuisine? Over 55 years later, the question

still remains an unresolved and often fraught one, but the answer that this
particular menu seems to offer is decisive: a cuisine derived from local
ingredients – bison, trout, beluga, beaver tail – and distinctive production
techniques. Fiddleheads or cœur de fougères, for example, are an early
spring delicacy, the shoots of young ostrich ferns that have to be boiled
multiple times to eliminate toxicity. On other pages not shown here,
however, the menu discloses culinary influences brought by settlers –
particularly from France (snails bourguignonne, Vichyssoise) and Britain
(potatoes with parsley) – announcing the country’s multiculturalism
explicitly in a later section devoted to ‘International Cuisine’. Despite the
moniker ‘Hochelaga’, the name of the Indigenous settlement understood to
have been where Montreal now stands, the pork dish ‘in the menu’s
international section’ is flavoured with a cinnamon and clove mixture, the
spices harking back to medieval flavour combinations, and the pork itself to
farming practices of British settler colonials. Although Expo diners may
have been familiar with menus written in French and a few hours spent in
Montreal would have reminded them that their host city was fully bilingual,
this menu is unusual in that it does not always offer translations, especially
for Indigenous terms. What is ‘umiak’, both French- and English-speaking
diners must have wondered, or ‘smoked Ilkalu’? For the most part, diners
were guided to navigate Quebec’s culinary terms – marmites or ‘bubbling
kettles’, provendes or ‘hearty fares’, chaudronées or ‘steaming crocks’,
frittoneries or ‘nibbles and morsels’ – which are distinct from those of other
French-speaking countries. In an effort to translate fully, the accents were
removed in the English version of the menu, but to an often-confusing
effect. ‘Baked dore’, for example, is baked doré or walleye, the accent
critical to its pronunciation, whereas the iconic pie ‘Tourtière’ suffers less
from the loss of its accent. ‘Sagamite’ is actually ‘Sagamité’, referring to an
Indigenous dish – a stew made with cornflour and some version of meat,
fish or fruit.4 ‘Picoune’ is a purée of potato, turnip and carrots.5 That the
English menu page bears the title ‘Cuisine Canadienne’ – written in French
– reveals the city’s comfort in moving between Canada’s two official
languages and the expectation that others can, and perhaps should, be able
to follow along.
The drinks menu from Jamaica’s pavilion at Expo 67 again provides a
study in contrasts. Here each drink earns a lengthy story that speaks perhaps
to the nation’s history (the 1692 earthquake), folk legends (such as the
‘White Witch’) or local figures (such as ‘Joe the Snowball Waggon Man’).
Each drink is also pictured in bold colours, adorned with eye-catching
ornaments (paper umbrellas, straws and sprigs of fresh mint), against a
backdrop of scenes from the sun-filled island. Curiously absent are specific
details of the drinks’ ingredients, with the exception of the country’s pride:
Jamaican rum. What is the ‘hell’s fire’ to be found in ‘The White Witch’,
for example? And what exactly is to be found in the ‘Port Royal
Earthquake’, presumably also rum, since this was the booty of Henry
Morgan. What does this menu say about Jamaica? Surely that this is a
country of bold colours and personalities, a tropical isle of music and
celebration.
The Japanese pavilion of the World’s Columbian Expo, held in
Chicago in 1893, also offers a menu organized around drinks, all derived
from a single ingredient that is this country’s pride (tea in this case rather
than rum), with the introductory narrative describing the central relationship
between the country and its signature beverage. But the design concept here
is very different: understated elegance. The paper is itself a point of
Japanese pride, here rice paper ornamented with delicate raised designs. We
are told the teahouse was built according to the principles of ‘proper’
Japanese architecture, and ‘under the auspices of the Central Tea
Association of Japan’. The whole is intended to showcase how ‘tea is
prepared and drunk in the Land of the Rising Sun’, with the unstated aim of
educating Americans in particular, who then imported an astounding almost
23 million kilograms (50 million lb) of Japanese tea annually, but who had
never had the opportunity to taste either ‘gyokuro’ (with tea bushes grown
in the shade before harvest to bestow a mellow taste) or ‘tencha’ (the same
leaves used for matcha, when they are finely ground) tea served in the
Japanese style.
Cocktail menu, Jamaican Pavilion at Expo 67, 1967, print advertisement.

Ceremonies of cha kaiseki, Japanese tea cuisine, began in the sixteenth

century, long before the date of this menu.6 However, the menu does not
attempt to provide a nuanced or more detailed description of the deep
tradition of the ‘way of tea’, or explain that the elegant ceremony was an
experience enjoyed by a privileged few and not an everyday experience.
Rather, this pavilion menu suggests that tea of excellent quality was
enjoyed throughout Japan by all sectors of the population. Notably, neither
the tea master credited with originating the ‘way of tea’, Sen no Rikyū, nor
another tea master instrumental though overlooked in its emergence, Endō
Genkan, are mentioned. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to expand the
discussion of Japan’s cuisines here, but for those interested it is well worth
consulting Eric Rath’s book of that name, which argues that the foodways
for which Japan became known the world over – cha kaiseki, and more
recently, washoku (Japan’s traditional dietary cultures) – do not just emerge
organically from daily food practices but rather from the strategic and
centralized initiatives to depict Japanese cuisine both within the country
(especially during times of hardship, as during wartime) and externally in
particular ways.7 This menu, and the cultural phenomenon of the Japanese
Teahouse, positioned as the outreach of an official body – the Central Tea
Association of Japan – is an excellent example of the country’s strategic
and effective cultural outreach.

The Japanese Tea House, c. 1890–93, print advertisement.

The USSR pavilion menu from the earlier New York World’s Fair of
1939–40 seems stark in contrast. There are no references to cultural tropes
and the food items are described in text only, with no ornamentation or
graphic design elements. The food itself sounds delicious – cherrystones (a
variety of small clams), sturgeon prepared in different ways, shrimp in a
cocktail or omelette, lobster Newburg, spring lamb, filet mignon, broccoli,
peas and potatoes, followed by a variety of fruit-based desserts. With the
possible exception of ‘Baltic Sea Food Salad’ and ‘Bitotchki Ukrainskia’
(chopped chicken cutlets), there are virtually no references to regional
ingredients or appellations. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have, it
seems, deliberately represented themselves as one entity rather than a
collective of regions and states.
Generally, menus from world expos identify and underscore national
values and seize the opportunity to anticipate and, at times, counter visitors’
assumptions. The USSR pavilion both cautioned patrons to avoid tipping and
explained its rationale: ‘Our employees are adequately compensated.
Following Soviet custom, please do not give tips.’ This notation does much
more than describe Soviet tipping custom, of course, offering a contact zone
between cultures, creating a moment when the menu ‘talks back’ to
perceived assumptions and misassumptions about their national character.
Certainly, this menu underscores the way Soviet communism’s wage
structure functioned differently from that of Western capitalism. Hindsight
reminds belated readers that 1939 also saw the start of the Second World
War, with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany both invading Poland in
September of that year. The luxury foods on this menu would not be
enjoyed by either Axis or Allied countries for quite some time after this.
USSR Pavilion Restaurant, menu, 1939, print menu.
 Our last stop on this tour of the world through world’s fair menus takes
us to the 1964–5 world’s fair in New York City, where one pavilion took on
the monumental task of paying homage to the foodways of an entire
continent. The African pavilion was composed of small, circular enclosures,
representing the then 24 nations of Sub-Saharan Africa. ‘The Tree Houses’
restaurant, the pavilion’s main attraction, was itself composed of a group of
multi-level structures ‘inspired by the thatched-huts of Africa’ and built into
a fabricated banyan tree with an enormous base over 4.5 metres (15 ft) in
diameter.8 Diners reached the restaurant via a winding staircase and were
entertained along the way by Suzy, a live giraffe who liked to beg for treats.
Appropriate to the architecture, the menu displays an image of a banyan
tree and giraffe enjoying its delicate leaves. The pavilion’s publicity
material explained, ‘In the restaurant, amid weapons, masks and caged
birds, waiters in tribal attire serve African dishes modified for the American
palate.’ But while the publicity material acknowledges that the food items
are modified to suit the American palate, the menu itself emphasizes the
regional origin of each dish – groundnut soup and couscous from
Mauritania, for example, and chilled paw-paw soup and curry of beef from
Kenya, with ‘authentic accompaniments’. Each dish is associated with a
particular tree house, where it could be sampled. In the ‘Tree House of
Legends’, diners could find a remarkable assortment of desserts: peanut
mousse, a novelty for diners in 1964, and mango, a rare treat unfamiliar and
decidedly less available to American diners of the time. Biscuits served
with all the desserts were defamiliarized through their unusual name, ‘Chin-
Chin’. Similarly, the Chicken Moamba from Congo included chopped
avocado, another relative novelty for American diners (though they might
have known it by the earlier name of alligator pear prior to 1915), who also
would have been unfamiliar with the preparation method of baking bananas.
Curiously for a continent struggling even then with food security, perhaps
strategically, the menu offers bounteous fare. The options available are
meals focused around lamb, beef, chicken and lobster tail. There is no
budget- and resource-saving vegetarian option, such as bean-based dishes
like moin-moin, maharagwe or chakalaka. The overall impression is one of
a continent with a vibrant diversity of cultures as well as a legacy of varied
food preparation methods that take advantage of regional ingredients – the
lobster from Malagasy, for example, and coconut, mango and banana.
Tree Houses, dinner menu, 1964–5, print menu.
Tree Houses, dinner menu, 1964–5, print menu.

Envisioning Other Cuisines

While world’s-fair menus provide the countries themselves with the
opportunity to define their national cuisine for others, albeit in a necessarily
simplified and abbreviated format, menus written by outsiders offer a more
complex portrait of intercultural foodways. For example, menus constructed
by companies in the travel industry often use food and menus to sketch an
introduction to cultural practices entirely foreign to their patrons. Again,
such representations are necessarily limited, not least because of the sheer
brevity of the menu form, but also because they can be rendered all the
more problematic by the distance between the host company’s place of
origin and corporate culture on the one hand and the national character of
the destinations to which their travellers voyage on the other.
For example, passengers travelling with the Messageries Maritimes
liner Le (Paquebot) Sénégal were, for the most part, treated to familiar
European fare. The shipping company enjoyed success in what was the
golden age of ocean travel, 1880–1920, coinciding with French colonial
expansion in the East. Le Sénégal herself, launched in 1870, would hit a
mine near Smyrna, and be scrapped in 1913.9 In 1901, though, she voyaged
between Marseilles in France and the Orient.
For lunch in 1901, first-class diners on Le Sénégal could choose
between hors d’oeuvres of radishes, olives, sardines, or mortadella with
rolls and butter, mains of egg, veal, cod, pork or beef, with nuts, and
between cheese or fruit for dessert. The visual elements of the menu are
striking, depicting a female server with European features and a Western
hairstyle, dressed in an amalgam of non-Western styles. She presents
champagne and wears the unicorn insignia of the Messageries Maritimes
company on her dress, indicating that she is employed to serve the guests of
the ball scene pictured here. The patrons themselves are elegantly attired in
fashionable mid-nineteenth-century European ballgowns, fashions that
accentuate the distinction between the modish voyagers and the ship’s
exoticized staff.
Déjeuner, Paquebot Sénégal, 1901, print menu with handwritten items.
Déjeuner, Paquebot Congo, 1899, print menu with handwritten items.
 This lunch menu aims to enchant diners with the ‘exotic’ allure of
Asian cuisine, and of the Orient more generally, but on closer scrutiny
becomes discomfiting, especially for a twenty-first-century viewer.
Certainly, one aesthetic visible here is orientalism, an artistic style with
roots in the nineteenth century and in which non-Western cultures are made
to seem unfamiliar or ‘other’ to the Western viewer, often through
hypersexualized imagery and derogatory caricatures.10 Here, we see a
group of ostensibly white European passengers with an orientalized server
of unclear ethnic or cultural descent. She is wearing what looks like a
Japanese kimono emblazoned with the Messageries Maritimes insignia,
although she is without any Japanese features. This collage of cultural
stereotypes seems to play to some abstract, depersonalized idea of the
‘exotic other’.

The Colony Room menu, front and back cover, 1962, print menu.
The Colony Room menu, interior, 1962, print menu.

Another menu, this one from the paquebot Le Congo, of the same
French shipping line, makes the point even more clearly. Again, the menu
presents a racialized figure of indeterminate origin, but he does not seem to
be Congolese, as might have been expected given the ship’s name. The red
script may initially seem foreign and ‘exotic’, but a tip of the head reveals
the mock Chinese characters to be nothing more than a realignment of the
phrase ‘Messageries Maritimes’. And the graphic on the gentleman’s shirt,
illustrated in imperial red and gold, is, in actuality, a stylized version of the
shipping company’s logo. These illustrative and typographic markers
gesture to a thinly veiled orientalism more interested in appearance than in
inspiring cross-cultural engagement. The European menu items,
handwritten and described in menu French, signal the same, and would
have been very familiar to diners of the day: they include melon, radishes,
butter and pâté to start; fish, grilled cutlets and ‘Entrecôtes Bordelaise’
(steak in red wine sauce) are offered for a main course. ‘Oeufs à
l’Américaine’, eggs in the American style, makes it clear that, while the
imagery nods to the Orient, the menu itself does not attempt such gestures.
Menus That Talk Back
While the two Messageries Maritimes menus offer their guests the promise
of ‘exotic’ scenes, a number of menus attest to the range of ways by which a
restaurant might speak out, ‘talk back’ or define and then showcase its
particular culinary heritage.
Menus articulate their national allegiance not only by showcasing
distinctive foods, but by shedding light on national values and priorities.
Some are explicit, such as a 1962 menu cover for the Arawak Hotel in
Jamaica, which features images portraying the history of slavery on the
island. As a cultural artefact, the menu seems to gesture to a kind of change
but also alludes to the very slow nature of that change. For example, the
wording on the menu’s back cover has been chosen carefully: it refers to
Arawak Indians as the ‘original inhabitants’, and to the Spanish as ‘settlers’.
The fare offered, however, is not at all rooted in Jamaican cuisine. One
finds the ubiquitous cocktail of the 1960s, the Manhattan, and such staples
of American cuisine of the period as steak, ham and veal in cream sauce, as
well as a (British) sherry trifle. Only the pineapple-flavoured ice cream and
chilled mango juice nod to tropical climes, and the luxury of soup made
with real turtle suggests the bounty of local seas. As Dan Jurafsky wryly
notes, ‘The history of which foods are called “real” or “genuine” on menus
is a mini lesson on what was considered valuable enough to create a fake
substitute.’11 He rightly remembers that ‘1960s menus had real butter (not
margarine),’ and the days of concern for genuine turtles in the soup, or ‘real
German beer’, had passed with the turn of the century, in 1900.12 So the
reappearance of authentic soup ingredients here, so many decades later,
speaks volumes.
However, given that the hotel bears the name of the ‘original
inhabitants’, it is disappointing not to see more thoughtful engagement with
their traditions in the selection of fare. Besides the restaurant’s name, one
can see Jamaica’s former Coat of Arms. The country’s motto, ‘Indus
Uterque Serviet Uni’ – Latin for ‘The Indians Twain Shall Serve One Lord’
– was changed in the same year the menu was printed, 1962, to an English
motto: ‘Out of Many, One People’.13
Ishii Garden, menu cover and interior, 1967, print menu.
Ishii Garden, menu reverse, 1967, print menu.

In Chapter Two, ’Menus as Mementos’, we saw how Bernard Fread’s

collection began to include menus from ethnic restaurants in the late 1960s
in New York City. This trend was not limited to urban centres; as we see
increasingly across North America in the late 1960s, restaurants began to
distinguish their particular culinary niche.
A 1967 menu from the Ishii Garden in Honolulu takes it upon itself to
educate diners about the fare expected of a typical Japanese teahouse.
Against the stylized scene of a Japanese garden, the Japanese woman on the
menu’s cover, wearing a kimono with lotus-flower design, communicates
the delicate elegance of the geisha. Similarly, the second page of the menu
provides a quick overview of the different types of food available,
providing an itemized description of a ‘Sukiyaki Dinner’. However,
sukiyaki and tempura, in particular, are two examples of dishes adapted to
suit American palates and illustrate how restaurateurs tailored traditional
elements of Japanese cuisine for North American venues and diners. It also
seems as though, even in the late 1960s, the restaurant assumes its patrons
will have no familiarity with using chopsticks. The fact that it provides
instructions suggests diners will nevertheless be served chopsticks to use as
their primary utensils.

Kaiseki dinner at Oyado Kiyomizuya, Noboribetsu, 2016.

Today, Japanese foodways are also closely associated in the popular

imagination with sushi, itself a popular form of fast food adapted for and
embraced in the West. But the distinctive Japanese food practice that is a
source of national pride is surely the elaborate multi-course kaiseki meal,
menus for which were created in Kyoto by chef Sen no Rikyū and later
recorded in the 1671 book Ryori Kondate-Shu, the oldest menu book in
Japan.14 To ceremonial tea selections, teahouses added food served in
aesthetically pleasing arrangements to create a sophisticated dining
experience. Following the death of Rikyū, his sons each continued the
kaiseki tradition, creating their own schools of cooking that continue to
influence fine dining today.15

Culinary Adaptation and Fusion Cuisine

Examples of adaptation of Japanese foodways for Western palates serve as
an ideal transition to the larger discussion of culinary adaptation. I begin
here by looking at menus showcasing cuisines in transition, that is, menus
offering a particular definition of regional or national foodways, but also
acknowledging explicitly or through accommodation the taste preferences
and customs of their diners.
Of the myriad examples of culinary adaptation, two in particular
deserve attention because of their international reach and impact. One is the
adaptation of Chinese cuisine for Western palates in the twentieth century,
now colloquially known as ‘chop suey cuisine’. Another is the influence of
Indian flavours and preparation methods on British foodways. Both fusion
fares are a product of travel, exchange and empire.
The 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia gave
many Americans what might have been their first glimpse of ‘Oriental’
culture. Visitors to the Chinese and Japanese exhibitions, as Samuel King
writes, ‘noted the “magical” power of the sights, smells, and objects of the
showcases to allow them to vicariously experience their Orientalist
fantasies, as if they had been transported away from the modern, industrial
world’.16 While the Philadelphia fair was originally meant to ‘celebrate the
hundred-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence’, it appears as if the event was more focused on highlighting
the cultural differences between the West and the East.17 King further notes
that ‘the exoticism of “Oriental” cultures was particularly associated with
food and restaurant spaces … offering white consumers the opportunity to
“tour” the Orient through the consumption of Asian cuisine.’18
Articles of food served at the Chinese Restaurant at the International
Health Exhibition, London, 1884.

When, in 1884, London hosted the International Health Exhibition,

visitors could attend the first substantial Chinese restaurant that offered
refined, Asian food. There were meals complete with ‘Chinese delicacies
such as sharks’ fins and birds’ nest soups and difficult-to-use metal-tipped
chopsticks for the first time’.19 While this depiction also veers into
orientalist tropes, presenting Chinese culture as entertainment within a
European venue, Bruce Makoto Arnold and his co-editors discuss the
promotional phenomenon of ‘self-orientalization’ in their book about
Chinese and Japanese cuisines.20 They point out that

Some restaurants, especially those in California Chinatowns, were even

built in the shape of pagodas and externally electrified with neon
lighting. This commodified construction of the orient through physical,
visual, and linguistic props not only guaranteed the popularity of Chinese
cuisine, but also laid the foundation for self-orientalism that would
persist through the twentieth century.21

Fong Wan’s Club Shanghai, 1950, print menu.

Fong Wan’s Club Shanghai, 1950, print menu.

One very self-conscious (and showy) project of self-definition, which most

definitely ‘talks back’, is Fong Wan’s Californian restaurant empire. The
1950 menu from Club Shanghai includes an extensive origin story about
Fong Wan’s emigration journey to the American West during the gold rush
as well as his first forays into the restaurant business as a means to steadily
support his family. Club Shanghai further sought to distinguish itself by
providing entertainment, hiring troupes of ‘acrobats, magicians, glamour-
girls’ that rate with the ‘finest Chinese-showbusiness has to offer’. Wan’s
aim was not to provide an authentic Chinese dining experience, but rather to
succeed in the industry through providing welcome offerings and
entertainment. His was the ‘Chinese Folies-Bergère’ of the Americas.
Like many Chinese restaurateurs of the twentieth century, Wan offered
both a ‘Chinese Menu’ and an ‘American Menu’. The latter provides a
glimpse of American cuisine as it was understood by a restaurateur in the
1950s. It is heavy on meat and chicken, sandwiches and soups. Diners
would have found such American staples as clam chowder, French fries and
a clubhouse sandwich. One salad, the ‘Shanghai Gesture’ – a rather bizarre
mixture of tomatoes, egg, pineapple, cottage cheese, anchovies, peppers and
celery – nods to the Orient in name only, hesitantly acknowledging that any
relation the dish has to Shanghai proper is only a ‘gesture’. The ‘Chinese
Menu’ offers a decidedly North Americanized version of Chinese food,
using preparation methods that mix the sweet and savoury flavours
expected by American customers. For example, it is heavy on chow mein,
egg foo yeong and chop suey. Only a very small phrase at the bottom of the
menu – ‘native dishes upon request’ – signposts other, more authentic
Chinese dishes available for those who know well enough what to request.
If there was ever a quintessential menu or book that ‘talks back’, it is
surely Sue Cheung’s popular book Chinglish, inspired by her experiences as
the daughter of Chinese restaurant owners in the UK, which portrays
instances of such culinary fusion. The book follows Joanna Kwan and her
family as they navigate life running a Chinese takeaway in Coventry.
Throughout the book, there are several references to the types of dishes
served in Chinese restaurants in the West and the hybrid language that the
main character, Joanna, dubs ‘chinglish’.22 She describes how, despite
being a Chinese takeaway, they serve English food such as steak and chips,
fried chicken, and mushroom omelettes, in addition to ‘pretend’ Chinese
food like spare ribs, spring rolls and chop suey, which have been ‘designed
to suit the Western palate’.23 This is contrasted with some of the ‘proper’
Chinese food that their family eats, such as steamed cabbage, pig trotter
soup, fish heads, chicken feet and lobster for Christmas.24 She also
mentions that authentic Chinese cuisine is served in ‘the kind of restaurant
only Chinese people go to’ and includes ‘delicacies such as tripe [and]
intestines’.25
Such hybrid menus were typical of Chinese restaurants owned and
operated by the Chinese diaspora in the twentieth century, where a visitor
from China would have been hard pressed to find anything even remotely
recognizable. What was on offer more precisely was a cuisine born of the
negotiation between available ingredients, the abilities of cooks and
restaurateurs who had been trained in the host culinary tradition, and the
limited willingness of the public to try new foods. Canadians call this ‘Chop
Suey Chinese Cuisine’, in part because of the inevitable presence of the
catch-all dish chop suey on every menu. To see such an offering on a menu
signals the restaurant’s distinctly North American origin, since chop suey
itself did not originate in China at all. It is likely that the phrase is a
variation of tsap seui, a Cantonese dish that translates to ‘miscellaneous
leftovers’.26
La Choy Food Products, Chinese Recipe Booklet, 1929, print booklet.
 North American cookbooks also slowly began to incorporate
preparation methods for adapted fusion cuisine and depict the phenomenon
in their visuals. By way of just one example, a booklet from 1929 depicts a
woman in her kitchen being shown how to make chop suey from a ghostly
Asian chef, likely meant to be her imaginary inspiration.
Food preparation and service has a long and noble tradition in the
Orient that dates to well before the emergence of the modern restaurant, as
we know it, in late eighteenth-century Paris. Indeed, there are similar
parallels between the West’s lack of acknowledgement of histories of the
emergence of restaurants in East Asia and its same lack regarding the early
role of China in the development of book history and the printing press.
While many histories of the book, for example, begin with the rise of the
Gutenberg press in Germany in 1450, movable type was invented in
Hangzhou, the capital of the Chinese province of Zhejiang, around the year
1080.27 And books printed with the use of woodblocks, as Jeremy Norman
argues, originated in China in the year 868.28
Restaurant history also reveals misconceptions where a European
origin story is privileged over one focusing on the Orient. Nicholas Kiefer
agrees with many commentators when he writes that ‘Revolutionary Paris is
often cited as the birthplace of the modern-day restaurant, but restaurants
existed long before the French Revolution in other locations where
economics and social mores made them feasible.’29 Katie Rawson and
Elliott Shore rightly point out that before what we think of as the restaurant
existed, travellers still needed to eat. They mention Mesopotamia’s
cafeteria-like distribution of food in ceramic vessels in 3300 BCE and the
festivities of the social symposia of ancient Athens.30 Most strikingly for
this discussion of incorrect assumptions about the European origins of the
restaurant, they additionally point out that restaurants in their fullest form
‘rely on service and choices’, and that the first restaurants that fit these
standards ‘opened during the Song Dynasty, around 1100 CE, in Chinese
cities, seven hundred years earlier than the emergence of restaurants in
Paris’.31 According to Dave Roos, these first restaurants were located in
entertainment districts that also included hotels, bars and brothels, and
‘resembled a downtown tourist district in a 21st-century city’, Kaifeng and
Hangzhou becoming centres of trade.32
 These restaurants, though, tended to have a monopoly over particular
items. First-hand accounts of the dining experience during the Song dynasty
are seen in Yuanlao Meng’s memoir Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (1187),
usefully translated and interpreted by Stephen West (1985). SiLin Ye Meng
(quoted in West) names a number of restaurants and their specialities that
make them unique to their establishment’s style of cooking:

there were the plumflower dumplings of Wang’s Loft, the meat cakes of
Old Lady Cao, the lamb rice of the Xue Family, the ducks and geese of
the Mei Family, the stuffed dumplings of the Cao Family, the calabash
stew of the Xu Family, the oily rolls of the Zheng Family, the milk
products of the Wang Family, the shifeng crackling rice and boiled goods
of the Jia Family.33

Noteworthy, I find, is that this level of personalized specialization is so very

different from the tradition of extraordinarily extensive and varied menus at
Chinese restaurants in the contemporary diaspora.
Indian cuisine is another example of a national cuisine with an
influence that has extended across centuries and continents. Even before the
1851 Great Exhibition, the host city of London was the site of restaurants
serving food from across the British Empire. ‘What Britain conquers,’ sums
up Thomas Prasch, ‘it also eats.’34 Thanks to travel between the colonies,
Indian spices and sauce-based dishes became popular outside India much
earlier than Chinese cuisine. The shorthand for this style of cuisine abroad
was and still is ‘curry’, a term that is used as a catch-all for any dish with a
sauce seasoned with spices. We know from Colleen Taylor Sen’s history of
curry, as well as from Rosemary Raza, that curry was consumed in Britain
as early as the late eighteenth century.35 One establishment serving curry
was the Norris Street Coffee House in London’s Haymarket. David Burton
writes that ‘by 1773 curry had become the speciality of at least one coffee
house, and from about 1780 the first commercial curry powders were on
sale.’36 The first purely Indian restaurant in England was the Hindoostanee
Coffee House, which opened in 1809 at 34 George Street, near Portman
Square, Mayfair, London.37
Plaque commemorating the Hindoostane Coffee House, Westminster, 2012.

By 1848, curry – transformed from its original form such that it

figured as a staple of a newly established cuisine of Anglo-Indian
adaptation – was so familiar to Britons that the novelist William Makepeace
Thackeray, in his popular 1840s novel Vanity Fair, could poke fun at his
character’s lack of worldliness through her unfamiliarity with the dish.
When the fictional Mr Sedley returns from his tour with the East India
Company, he enjoys an extraordinarily hot goat curry prepared for his
English table and goads the unsuspecting Becky Sharp, who is already
‘suffering tortures with the cayenne pepper’, to ‘“try a chili with it”’.38
Veeraswamy’s Restaurant, menu cover, date unknown, print menu.
 Consequently, by 1851, when London hosted the first international
world’s fair, there had already been considerable penetration of Indian
cookery into British consumer markets and cookbooks. While the
Hindoostanee may have been the first Indian restaurant in England, it
heralded the beginning of a momentum that resulted in the then British
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declaring, in 2001, that chicken tikka masala
was the UK’s national dish.39 As Elizabeth Buettner points out, while Cook
claimed chicken tikka masala to be an Indian dish, and although it is
foundational to what is colloquially described in Britain as ‘going for an
Indian’, the dish is likely not of Indian origin, but rather something devised
by Indian cooks to appeal to British diners.40 As such, chicken tikka masala,
as well as other variations of Indian cuisine prepared in the British context,
make up part of the continually evolving repertoire of hybrid Indian
cuisines.

Veeraswamy’s Restaurant, menu interior, date unknown, print menu.

It is unsurprising then that Veeraswamy, one of London’s oldest

continually operating Indian restaurants, offers a menu where the
ambiguously broad category of ‘Indian cuisine’ is just as nuanced as its
varied history. This undated menu probably from the 1960s or 1970s
judging from prices (since they are slightly higher than those of a 1950
menu) claims inspiration from ‘Indian, Pakistani, Ceylonese, Parsee &
Malayan Dishes’. In addition to a number of dishes described as curries, it
offers other Anglo-Indian staples including mulligatawny soup and various
chutneys. Of note is the Bombay duck (the nickname for a fish that
historically was transported by train along with the mail, or Daak in
Bengali) and also that one of the curries is beef, something that would have
been distasteful in India with its significant Hindu population, even in
restaurants serving meat. As with Chinese restaurants operating in the
diaspora, this restaurant also offers a section of ‘European Dishes’ for those
diners unwilling to venture from the comfortable territory of ‘Brussels
Sprouts’ and ‘Cold Ham’. Included are fish, meat, potato and vegetables,
turtle soup with sherry and oysters in addition to the exceptionally British
‘Welsh Rarebit’, ‘Scotch Woodcock’ and fruit trifle.
Both chop suey cuisine and Anglo-Indian cuisine are examples of
national foodways that have had an extensive impact on the food tastes and
practices of their host countries and also, as we have seen above, involved
strategic depictions of the emerging hybrid cuisines. Such menus refuse to
position their culture and cuisine as something seen but not heard, unlike
orientalist depictions including those from the Messageries Maritimes
shipboard menus.

Menus that Talk to Each Other

But what happens when menus talk to each other? We see this when
culinary cultures meet in what Mary Louise Pratt has called ‘the contact
zone’, a phrase used to describe ‘social spaces where disparate cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other’.41 A number of the menus already
discussed exist in very limited versions of the contact zone – in national
pavilions of world’s fairs, for example, or on ships and aeroplanes
transporting international travellers.
When culinary cultures meet and exchange flavours and concepts –
that is, when their menus engage one another by talking and listening –
what emerges is one version of what we understand to be fusion cuisine.
One such instance is a wonderful, if perhaps surprising, example of a menu
from the restaurant Shalom Japan that dates from the wave of
cosmopolitanism that struck New York in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Shalom Japan, a Brooklyn-based establishment, reveals the rather unlikely
pairing of Japanese cuisine and Glatt (strictly) kosher Jewish food practices.
In the tradition of restaurants that also offer fare for more hesitant diners,
the menu reserves a section for American cuisine, here defined very strictly
as select cuts of steak and Salisbury steak, along with a few salads and tuna
from a can.
What emerges from a Glatt kosher restaurant that greets – or, in this
case, says ‘Shalom’ to – Japanese cuisine? One answer is that the menu
becomes innovative. Dishes such as ‘Mount Fuji Matzo Ball Soup’, which
pairs Jewish matzo balls with a Japanese bean broth, stand in contrast to
menus listing two foodways side by side, such as the dichotomous deli and
Chinese sections of North American restaurants like Toronto’s beloved
Ginsberg and Wong, which combined Jewish deli food with Chinese cuisine
to great success through the 1970s and 1980s. There is also, for example,
chopped liver ‘Japanese style’, or sashimi with an ironic Yiddish
endorsement: ‘Oy Ge’vald’, a colloquial expression articulating amazement
familiar to many Americans. While this particular Shalom Japan closed its
doors sometime in the 1990s, another Brooklyn restaurant of the same name
and similarly inspired by fusion cuisine is seeing good success. Chefs
Aaron Israel and his wife, Sawako Okochi, run the restaurant and are also
authors of a cookbook, Love Japan, which, Israel explains, ‘tells our stories
and shares recipes as told through our multicultural family’.42 Their dinner
menu from June 2023 draws from both cultural traditions, pastrami and
sauerkraut finding their way into okonomiyaki (a savoury pancake typical of
street food) along with bonito flakes. This version of Shalom Japan is
neither kosher nor kosher-style, serving shellfish and pork (tonkatsu,
accompanied by seasonal pickles). Yet it also offers Ashkenazi-Jewish
staples like challah, lox and matzo balls (traditional egg bread, smoked
salmon, and matzoh-flour-based round dumplings, essentially), the last
served with ramen in a chicken broth with spring onions and nori.
Shalom Japan, menu cover and interior, c. 1980, print menu.
 Let us turn now to some light-hearted examples of menus where the
potential of cultural and culinary exchange suffers some missteps. The first
involves a simple error of terminology. For example, an Australian menu
for a dinner held at Sydney Town Hall features an inaccurate French term
for a course served prior to dessert (named as such): entremets suive. A
pencilled note crosses out the word ‘suive’ (a variation of the verb ‘to
follow’ presumably – or suivre – here intended to suggest something like
entremets ‘to follow’). ‘Sucrés’ (sweet) is then the replacement suggested.
The phrase ‘entremets sucrés’ is often used for an end-of-the-meal course
consisting of small delicate dishes, the vegetables originally found in such a
course (think of those two menus from the Château de Choisy in the 1750s)
replaced in more recent times, when sugar is more readily available, by
sweet ones. Hence the substitution is a logical one. As many key culinary
terms are French, it should come as no surprise that mistakes may arise
when transcribed by English typists! Here, a keen patron corrected the
mistake by crossing out ‘suives’ and pencilling in a clarifying term beside it
– ‘sucrés’ (sweet) – to explain that the ‘entremets’, which were precursors
to the modern dessert, are sweet ways to conclude the meal. But what then
might diners have expected during the subsequent and explicitly named
dessert course?
Dinner menu, Sydney Town Hall, 1883, print menu.
 The next two, however, are cause for outright amusement. A menu
from the Hotel Excelsior in Naples features a curious translation of a biscuit
popular in Europe known as lingua di gatto in Italian, or cat’s tongue in
English. To those unfamiliar with the dish, the translation in question,
‘Tongue of Ket’ (that last word perhaps alluding to ketamine in the minds of
today’s English speakers, though of course the drug was first compounded
decades later in the 1960s), would certainly be confusing and possibly even
shocking. As the biscuit is not described in detail as being a biscuit, patrons
might understandably have hesitated when placing their order!

The President Special, Pan American inaugural air service, 1965, print
menu.

The second example, a Pan American flight menu offered by the

prestigious ‘Maxim’s de Paris’, features a mistranslation from English to
French. Here, ‘selected delicacies from the cart’ is translated as ‘Les délices
culinaires de la voiture’. While voiture à bras (handcart or tea trolley) is
one potential, albeit unusual, translation for cart, voiture alone means car –
a mode of transportation one would not expect to find on a plane!
 Examples of menu translation gaffes could be the subject of a book in
themselves. I encourage you to look at a blogpost from travel publishers
Rough Guides,43 which serves up twenty hilarious menu blunders, from
‘detonation eggplant’ to ‘crap sticks’ and, my favourite, ‘Happy Family in
hot casserole’ (this one spotted by Allen Watkin at a restaurant in Lanzarote
in 2009).44 Not to be outdone, Bored Panda offers up eighty uproariously
funny mistranslations, largely of Asian menus into English.45 Unfortunately
the author doesn’t provide particulars of restaurant, date or location
(perhaps to protect the translator?). The blogpost opens with a wonderful
menu from an ostensibly Chinese restaurant: menu highlights include
‘Mermaid in deep sea’, ‘I can’t find it on google but it’s delicious’,
‘McDonald’s best friend’, ‘Mr. Oyster’ and ‘Ms. French fries’. Notice that
the punctuation is correct, but what is the rationale for gender assignments
in these last two?
Such misstep menus neither ‘talk back’, ‘talk to’ nor engage fully in
the conversation of cultural exchange. As well as providing moments of
levity, they do participate in the important endeavour of cultural encounter,
an endeavour in which culinary curiosity enlivens the imaginative journeys
of chefs and menu designers as well as diners and readers.
Let me end this chapter about cultural encounter, imaginary and real
travel, with one visually attractive example of a menu that invites Chicago
diners to travel the world in their imagination. Those enjoying a cocktail in
1930s Illinois could celebrate the end of Prohibition there in 1933, raise a
toast to an elegant menu that tipped its hat to European sophistication, and
imagine themselves a continent away. Part of an increasingly globalized
world, they enjoyed a drinks menu offering a mosaic of hotel publicity
showcasing cutting-edge design. Notice the diagonal lines and Art Deco
accents of the graphics representing the Beau Rivage in Geneva, the Hotel
de Rôme in Florence and the Hôtel Metropole in Milan. If a picture is worth
a thousand words, then this truly is heralding a future of cosmopolitan
sophistication!
Menu, Hotel Excelsior, 1928, print menu.
Drink list for the Blue Ribbon Spa, Chicago, Illinois, 1934, print menu.

OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER
FOUR
MENUS
FOR
CHILD
REN
AND
FOR
THE
CHILD
REN
WE
ONCE
WERE
OceanofPDF.com
S
o far in this book, I have spoken about the distance between the
perspectives of the diner and belated reader as involving a lapse of
time, viewers often coming to the menu years or even centuries after
the dining moment has passed, with the advantages – or possibly the
disadvantages – of hindsight. However, this chapter’s menus, even at the
moment of their creation, anticipate two different audiences encountering
the menu simultaneously: the child diner, whose tastes the menus appear to
address explicitly, and an accompanying adult, whose wallet feels the
damage.
The phenomenon of menus for children at dining establishments
outside the home is a relatively recent one, emerging only in the last
century. In the early twentieth century the trend of including children in the
restaurant dining experience was driven by the rise of the consumer classes
and the availability of disposable income. A gradual shortening of the
working week as a function of labour advocacy from the late nineteenth
century (the Kellogg Company adopted a six-hour shift in the 1930s),
dramatic expansion of industrial production and a concerted outreach of
retail venues and early marketing initiatives through advertising in print and
on the radio placed more shoppers in shops and as a result in nearby dining
establishments.1 One January 1900 menu, for instance, seems to indicate
that children were accompanying adults visiting London’s Crystal Palace
restaurant. Only later in the twentieth century, though, do we see entire
menus specifically addressed to youngsters. In the January 1900 menu,
mention of children’s fare is clearly for the eyes of an adult reader, one who
skims the information quickly to arrive at the important detail of price for
the less elaborate ‘children’s luncheon’ described rather offhandedly as
consisting of ‘Joint, Veg & Sweet’.
The logic of this chapter is loosely chronological, starting with the turn
of the twentieth century as adults not only acknowledged children’s
developing personalities and sense of personal taste but turned their
attention to cultivating them. I will then consider the implications of
wartime on children’s foodways – how it impacted on what they ate, when
and with whom. In its conclusion, I survey the crescendo in children’s
menus represented by purpose-built sections of restaurants and sometimes
even restaurant concepts designed with the child customer uppermost in
restaurateurs’ minds.

Crystal Palace restaurant, 1900, annotated menu.

Considering Children’s Dining
Beginning in the nineteenth century, we find examples of menus appealing
directly to children in places where the need to feed them was inevitable;
for example, on ships and trains. Artwork designed to appeal to children in
French popular publications, which both entertained them and at the same
time offered them information about food choices, provides evidence that
thought was being devoted to shaping youthful palates rather than offering
them food items based purely on the practical necessities of the venue.
Mary Brandès, Bébé cordon bleu, 3e édition, 1888, illustrated print booklet.

One example is an 1888 charmingly illustrated cookbook targeting

young aspiring chefs. French researcher Françoise Hache-Bissette muses
wryly that

While in Canada and the United States, railway menus indicate that
children at this time were limited to bland and simple menu items, these
 illustrations reveal the degree to which French children may have been
developing a more refined palate.2

Booklets such as Bébé cordon bleu and artworks such as the drawings of
Georges Delaw confirm that, at least at the turn of the century in France,
children’s relationship with food was becoming a point of public and
commercial interest. These booklets and drawings, designed to be both
educational and attractive, introduced children to the culinary world that
their parents knew, as well as the brands their parents purchased.
The wonderfully imaginative sketches by Georges Delaw further
suggest that French youth was being guided towards an appreciation of
visual as well as culinary sophistication. Delaw’s delightful sketch ‘Le pot-
au-feu, fantaisie culinaire’, for example, is one of his most iconic and
memorable. The humorous caricatures are reminiscent of the visual satires
of William Heath in England, created to entertain adult diners.3
Georges Delaw, Le pot-au-feu, fantasie culinaire, c. 1896–1903, print
image.

Institutional Meals with Children in Mind

Due to the commemorations of significant dates and history books, there is
an illusion of familiarity with the wartime history of one’s own country. But
menus offer a remarkably candid glimpse of particular aspects of wartime
experiences. In Britain during the First World War, for example, county and
city councils provided meals for what were termed ‘necessitous’
schoolchildren. These were children in need of additional nourishment –
possibly because of the injury or absence of their parents, or delays in the
very modest pay packages of fathers in the military. Writing of Birmingham
schoolchildren, Alison Laitner and Cathie Paton remind us that free
breakfasts were provided for children even before the war, though war
increased the demand dramatically, with schools even providing meals at
the weekend by 1915.4 The list of menus shown here, provided to
‘necessitous’ schoolchildren in London and funded by the city council,
reveals attempts to offer them something that was filling and enjoyable, yet
easy to produce at school at low cost. We see protein – stewed beef, mutton,
sausage (or ‘toad’, for the familiar British staple ‘toad-in-the-hole’) and
sometimes fish – lots of potatoes, bread and various puddings. For
breakfast, there was porridge, bread, cocoa and milk. Notably, there was
very little fruit, and no fresh vegetables. Hopefully, the children’s families
were able to scratch around and get together a ‘victory garden’ of home-
grown foods near where they lived.
Lunchroom scene with menu and students in line, Seattle, c. 1940,
photograph.

By contrast, a black and white photo from 1940 captures the

lunchroom scene at Seattle’s Bagley Elementary School. America had not
yet entered the Second World War by the time this photo was taken, and
food was certainly more abundant than in the war-rationed Britain of 1940.
Again, there are the same children’s favoured drinks: milk, generally agreed
to be tasty and healthy, especially after pasteurization regulations were
introduced earlier in the century, and cocoa. But the children were probably
tempted to spend their lunch money on the sweet treats, cupcakes or a
chocolate sundae offered at the same price as the ‘Molded Fruit Salad’.
Perhaps the one adult in the queue (a teacher?) might be recommending this
last option. Hot dogs were the only protein on offer, and presumably very
popular given that the one alternative for a savoury main was tomato soup
with rice.
First World War school menu, London, c. 1914–18, print menu.
Rail Travel
Generally, the 1920s and 1930s are understood to be the golden age of rail
travel, offering luxury as well as expedience and so encouraging guests to
travel just for the pleasure of it. Prior to 1920, trains had a virtual monopoly
on business and leisure travel. In 1916 American ‘railroads carried about
77% of all intercity freight traffic and 98% of all intercity passenger
business.’5 As the travel industry expanded it became necessary for travel
providers to consider the needs of the full range of travellers, including the
younger ones.
While train travel gained momentum in Europe in the first half of the
1800s, America celebrated the drilling of the ‘last spikes’ on its
transcontinental rail line only in 1869, Canada in 1885.6 On the North
American side of the Atlantic, the sheer distances required to travel across
the continent captured the imagination and challenged train companies to
muster food and entertainment for their charges. Indeed, long before
children were considered a target audience for menus in public
establishments, train companies understood the need to supply provisions
for them as they often hosted their young charges for multiple-day journeys,
each one involving a range of meals from breakfast through to tea and
supper.
Consequently, some of the most extensive menus for children early in
the twentieth century are those produced by train companies. One Union
Pacific Overland 1930s dinner menu for children, for example, offers a
strikingly whimsical design. Despite depictions of the small rabbit at a
dining table, the menu is reserved for ‘Little Girls and Boys’ only, with
vegetable items tending to be puréed (spinach, carrots, peas) or strained
(tomatoes), suggesting that some of the children were so small that they
were only then being introduced to solid foods. The bunny’s busy
decoration of eggs suggests this was a seasonal Easter menu.
Luxury travel, 1955, photograph.

In addition to describing the foods on offer, a number of train

companies opted to communicate something more about the experience of
travelling vast distances. In a charming Canadian National Railways menu
from 1928, the rhymed verse alludes to meals charged with significance
beyond that of the everyday, served as they are ‘in the national style’. But
what is it about this menu that speaks to a Canadian ‘National Style’ and to
what extent was such a claim directed at the ‘little Folk’? The meal options
are simple, most accompanied by the ubiquitous milk and cocoa, though
one tea option provides the variation of malted milk. Notice perhaps the
corn meal muffin and baked apple for breakfast, likely hailing from
Okanagan Valley, Ontario or Quebec harvests. The fresh fish for dinner is a
reminder of the vastness of the country, stretching from the coasts of the
Maritime provinces to that of British Columbia. The presence of toast in all
breakfast and tea options may remind the young diners’ parents of Canada’s
breadbasket in the prairies. Taken together, items on this menu surely also
remind us of the British origins of Canadian foodways at the time, along
with influences from the USA – seen in the Graham-brand biscuits and the
preference for raisin toast. Generally, the lack of mnemonics would have
meant adults were directly involved in helping their youngsters navigate the
various options, so although the menu is ostensibly aimed at child
travellers, it was the adult travellers who likely made and communicated the
children’s selections.
Union Pacific Overland, children’s dinner menu, c. 1933–9, print menu.
Dining car menu for the little folk, c. 1928, print menu.

At about the same time, young travellers on the New Haven Railroad
in 1938 were treated to a menu in the shape of a charming elephant (with
his – her? – disarming glance) and with meal options identified by their
association with other zoo animals. Children could theoretically order ‘by
the picture’, empowering youngsters to quickly remember and identify their
choices without the intervention of an adult. Some of the options include
meat (a lamb chop, sliced or creamed chicken), and fresh vegetables seem
to be widely available, as is vanilla ice cream. All options offer Horlick’s
Malted Milk, a product conceived and produced in 1880s America as a food
for infants, and later manufactured in Britain when its developers returned
to live there.7 Perhaps young American palates have changed in the
intervening years, but the vegetables likely appealed to the adult menu
readers while the ice cream helped to make all options somewhat more
enticing to the child travellers.
New Haven Railroad, 1938, print menu.

New Haven Railroad, 1938, print menu.

 A very colourful three-page menu was served to children travelling on
the ‘Frisco’ Railroad, which, ironically enough, did not extend to San
Francisco. Although the menu is undated, prices suggest it accompanied
young travellers in the 1940s or ’50s. The cover page depicts a vibrant array
of nursery rhyme characters all wanting ‘your meal to be fun’, and the back
cover features an ensemble cast of characters such as Humpty Dumpty and
Little Boy Blue. The menu itself provides predictable items listed in easy-
to-read capital letters, and children could presumably order quite well by
pointing to the very descriptive illustrations: ‘I want that please!’ However,
they might have been puzzled by at least one of the descriptions – ‘egg as
desired’ – and should they have pointed at the picture of a bowl of prunes
(but why would they?) or a piece of pie (a more likely scenario), they would
have been disappointed to find they were not available. In what way did the
nursery rhyme characters add fun to the meal? Beyond their endorsement
on the menu’s cover illustrations, they suggest only supporting roles for the
meal’s lead actors: the chef and the waiter, as well as the accompanying
adult-cum-menu-interpreter. As for so many of these children’s menus, they
market themselves to two distinct audiences simultaneously.
Frisco, children’s menu, c. 1930–50, print menu.
Department Store Dining
If children increasingly accompanied their families on long journeys in the
early twentieth century, they also accompanied them to department stores.
These retail establishments therefore began catering to children on the
menus of their in-house eateries because those children accompanied the
household consumer, typically their mother, on shopping trips.8 By
anticipating the needs and food tastes of child diners, retailers could extend
the amount of time that shoppers remained, and ideally shopped, in their
stores.
The cover page of a luncheon menu at New York department store
Macy’s, from December 1939, shows a projector beaming out a nostalgic
portrait of a young family – father, mother and young daughter – all at the
dinner table, anticipating what looks like a holiday roast, the parents’ wine
glasses fully charged and the requisite ‘Home Sweet Home’ tapestry on the
wall behind them. From this image, we would not suspect either that war
was starting to rage on the other side of the Atlantic or that food rationing
would soon appear on the horizon. The menu cover suggests provisioning
for all members of the family, but the menu itself caters to adults. The
dinner wine list is extensive, and for luncheon there is no section signposted
for children in particular. Of course, a number of the items, actually marked
with a pencilled check mark, suggests they may have been selected: cake,
ice cream sundaes and a bottle of chocolate milk. The menu also shows that
the diners had juice with their potatoes and beans. But there are no pencil
marks indicating that any other items had been sampled. What about the
‘Deviled tongue on bran bread’, for example? Perhaps it was not entirely to
the liking of young children accompanying their parents on a shopping trip?
Lunch menu for Macy’s Restaurant in Macy’s department store, 1939, print
menu.

The Frederick & Nelson department store realized the potential of

appealing directly to youngsters. One distinctive menu likely dates from the
1950s, after Frederick & Nelson dramatically expanded its flagship Seattle
store to include the Paul Bunyan dining room on its lower level.9 The menu
itself is origami-style, encouraging young diners to fold it in a certain way,
such that they created a cardboard box where the ‘F&N’ logo popped out as
the ‘jack’ in the box when the menu was manipulated. Presumably this
provided a good activity over lunch, should the adults be eating too slowly
or carrying on adult conversations. Rather than animals or nursery rhyme
figures, the menu host here is Jack himself, a clown by occupation. He
offers some light lunch options for young diners – soup, sandwiches or
poached egg, milk and possibly a dessert of pudding or ice cream. The real
prize, though, is the menu itself: ‘This menu is yours to take home!’ As any
adult who has been given a gift packaged in a box can imagine, what child
could resist playing with a box, the most tempting of all toys?

Lunch menu for Macy’s Restaurant in Macy’s department store, 1939, print
menu.

Today’s IKEA homeware stores continue to exemplify the marketing

strategy of these earlier, venerable department stores. They offer family-
friendly food offerings such as the ever-popular Swedish meatballs with
lingonberry jam, and provide attractive children’s play areas, which give
adult consumers the time to browse the labyrinth-like meandering aisles.
This can make an IKEA shopping trip a day’s outing for the whole family. Of
course, another memorable initiative to entertain young diners, and provide
them with a take-away object that also served as effective brand marketing,
emerged in the twentieth century from the fast-food chain McDonald’s.
Their Happy Meal came in a box containing a beverage, a main (a burger or
chicken nuggets, perhaps), a side dish and a toy.

Children as Valued Restaurant Guests

Restaurants began to replicate what department stores had already
innovated. Gradually, they found creative ways to occupy children’s time,
as they waited for the food to arrive and then, although they had finished
eating, when they inevitably found themselves waiting for their parents to
finish their meals – their parents being both slower eaters and prone to
lengthy conversations at the table. Wax crayons and blank sheets of paper
were one cost-effective solution; another involved creative menus
themselves. A 1950s menu from Ivar’s Acres of Clams in Seattle,
Washington, for example, was die-cut in the shape of a diver’s mask, with
menu items on the back. Here children could order seafood favourites and
wash them down with either milk or orangeade. Soda pop was a relatively
new interloper as a regular item on children’s menus, despite carbonated
beverages gaining popularity in America as early as 1832 and greater
currency as ‘soft’ (non-alcoholic) drinks during Prohibition.10
Frederick & Nelson children’s menu, c. 1955, print menu.
Ivar’s Acres of Clams children’s menu, c. 1955, print menu.

A menu from about 1953 for Glen’s Hik’ry Inn in Oklahoma combines
a number of tried-and-trusted ways of appealing to child diners, but might
be discomfiting to twenty-first-century eyes. The restaurant mascot and,
according to the second-page image, seemingly also the BBQ chef and
waitresses, are anthropomorphized pigs. Yet, as we have seen, children
would be very familiar with animals on their menus. On the cover page, a
pantaloon-clad pig points the way to Glen’s Hick’ry Inn. Once ‘inside’ on
the menu’s second page, children are told, ‘You may take this menu home
to color,’ which suggests that crayons were not supplied in the restaurant
itself. The apron-clad pigs seem to be having a bit of an argument, though
it’s unclear about what. Young diners would likely recognize two things, not
without some concern: the luscious cupcakes visible on a serving tray do
not appear on the dinner menu, but what does appear there is baked ham.
No ham is visible in the illustrations, unless one anticipates that the gun-
toting and cowboy-hatted pig is planning to shoot one of his own.
Glen’s Hik’ry Inn, children’s menu, c. 1953, print menu.
 One further example contributes another popular, familiar technique
that restaurants used to engage their young guests: games, in this a connect-
the-dot exercise. This menu from the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne,
Wyoming, a hotel that joined Best Western as a charter member upon that
hotel chain’s launch in 1946, dates from between 1970 and 1984, judging
by the presence of time-saving pre-prepared food products like potato chips
and ‘Jello Dessert’. The breakfast is squarely American in tenor, with
dollar-sized hotcakes, ‘jelly’ (rather than jam) for toast, and the possibility
of cinnamon toast. Although there is a Thanksgiving dinner option, one
assumes this was because of its popularity with children rather than the time
of year. Alternating menus with the season would have been expensive. But
the innovation that brings this Hitching Post menu to our attention here is
the ‘follow the dots’ exercise on the third page. Puzzle-solvers can easily
guess the solution with the horse’s head and tail clearly visible, a design
trick to prevent discouraging the youngest from trying their hand. This page
would have kept young diners busy, avoided the expense of coloured
pencils by taking the advantage of a pen or pencil that was probably
available, and ensured that the menu would be taken home to remind the
youngster of which venue to choose if they were lucky enough to be given
the opportunity to select a restaurant for the next meal out. Altogether, this
simple, circular, three-toned menu handily served multiple purposes.
As we have seen, then, over time children’s menus reveal changing
notions about what constitutes appropriate children’s fare and, indeed,
changing notions of children’s role in dining establishments. Today, the
presence of children in restaurants can still be contested. While Ashford
Castle hotel in County Galway, Ireland boasts a butler for its privileged
child guests, who can order LEGO toys from a menu with which to play
during their stay, other establishments, such as Caruso’s in North Carolina,
reserve the right to exclude children on account of their disruptive presence
to fine-dining experiences.11 That children are welcomed differently by
both establishments is due, of course, to market segmentation, which has
dramatically increased with the explosion of restaurants and the rapidly
increasing frequency of dining out.

Menus for the Child in Us

To conclude, I turn to menus designed for adults but that nevertheless have
the diner’s own younger self in mind. This is atypical of the kinds of
temporal distance that we have seen between diner and menu-reader
elsewhere in Tastes and Traditions. As with the other children’s menus,
there are two perspectives at play here, both ostensibly in the present
moment: that of the adults reading the menu and that of an earlier version of
themselves.
No chapter on menus evoking childhood imagination would be
complete without consideration of Heston Blumenthal’s Anthology Menus
for dining experiences hosted at his much-hailed Michelin-starred
restaurant The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire. The Anthology Menus were
introduced in August 2020 to commemorate the restaurant’s best dishes in
its 25 years of operation and, as it turned out, also to celebrate the
restaurant’s re-opening after COVID. In addition to the four planned quarterly
Anthology Menus or ‘Volumes’, Blumenthal launched a fifth stand-alone
Anthology menu and meal experience in December 2022.
Clean Plate Club, Hitching Post Inn children’s menu, c. 1970–84, print
menu.

Implicit in Blumenthal’s project was his own revisiting of his culinary

career – a retrospective of sorts for him as well as his restaurant – to bring
back to the forefront the highlight dishes of previous years. In the different
first Anthology Volumes (that word ‘Volumes’ suggests an extensive
retrospective, surely) one finds his signature ‘Nitro-poached Green Tea and
Lime Mousse, Lime Grove 2001’, ‘Snail Porridge 2003’, ‘Sound of the Sea
2007’, ‘Counting Sheep 2015’ and one dessert that appears in all Anthology
Volumes, ‘Like a Kid in a Sweetshop 2006’.12 That last dish also featured in
a thoroughly engaging audio-visual teaser for prospective diners of the
Anthology meals available on the restaurant’s site, which doubled as a hint-
laden video sequence for diners anticipating what they might expect by way
of loot bag at the end of their meal experience and a multisensory
complement to the meal.
But what do menus of a fine-dining establishment have to do with
childhood menus and imagination? One answer involves the allusions to
iconic childhood stories. For example, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
infuses the imaginary world evoked by the video on the Fat Duck restaurant
site. Perhaps a planned collaboration also had a hand in orienting
Blumenthal’s themes and graphics further towards a contemplation of
childhood imagination. That is, the Victoria and Albert Museum had been
planning an exhibition on Alice in June 2020, one that was necessarily
delayed until March 2021 because of COVID. However, this sweet shop
animated experience was available to all who visited the restaurant website
during the Anthology series, a website inspired by the nostalgia, wonder
and imagination associated with childhood.
In winter 2023, when I visited the restaurant site, the theme of
imagination and adventure was promoted by a video nodding to two
children’s classics, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
(signalled by a sign that says ‘Eat Me’ at an animated tea party) and also
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964 (overlaid with the
song ‘Pure Imagination’ written by composers Leslie Bricusse and Anthony
Newley and featured in the 1971 children’s film Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory). The restaurant video began with a message constructed
from sweets, reading ‘like a kid in a sweet shop’, and concluded with the
familiar refrain celebrating the pure imagination. Viewers were welcomed
to the website of the Anthology Menus wonderland world as ‘questioneers’,
and given a hint of the sequence of dishes they will enjoy after clicking on
the ‘Reserve a Ticket’ button.13 A conch shell anticipated the multi-sensory
dish ‘Sound of the Sea’, for example, and the striped bag of sweets hinted at
the personalized goody bag each diner would take away as a reminder of
the very special meal, rather as a child might take away a loot bag at the end
of a birthday party. The partial experience (for only those with a restaurant
reservation can unlock all three ‘wishes’) was still available in 2024 for
those with ten minutes to spare, in a remarkable audio-visual feast prepared
in collaboration with John Hurt, Zelig and Love Creative.14
A 24 May 2023 Facebook post from the Heston Blumenthal Team
account read: ‘What does Heston hope you experience at The Fat Duck?
Above all, a sense of anticipation and excitement. For us this can be
expressed by the metaphor of “a kid in a sweetshop”.’15
Blumenthal’s Anthology Menus relish resonant evocations of
childhood, but they are very much intended for adult consumption. By
contrast, menus featuring dishes intended for children’s consumption have a
more complicated position within the marketing landscape. They must find
a balance between appealing to two very different consumers of children’s
menus: wallet-wielding adults, concerned about feeding and occupying the
attention of their youngsters, and the children themselves, who have been
increasingly understood over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries to have their own distinct food tastes and opinions. This is the
paradox of children’s menus – they must make a case to both children and
their adults simultaneously. If they err too much on the side of only catering
to younger audiences, they risk the ire of health-conscious adult customers
and policy-makers. But if they err too much on the side of catering to the
adult demographic, they risk alienating a younger clientele who, while they
may not be the decision-makers, can certainly influence food choice
decisions – possibly in a very vocal and visible way.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER
FIVE
HEALT
H ON
THE
MENU

OceanofPDF.com
O
ur thinking about health has changed dramatically over time, of
course, shifting to accommodate emergent medical and nutritional
knowledge. Advances in medical procedures – for example, the
discovery and first use of anaesthetics in 1846 and the introduction of laser
surgery, first used in 1987 – reveal just how far we have come.1 Other
watershed moments brought us the seemingly miraculous vitamin C to halt
the perilous advance of scurvy, germ theories of disease, effective drugs
such as penicillin to cure infection, and insulin – discovered by Canadian
Sir Frederick Banting and his team in 1921 – to control diabetes. In
addition, health regulations have been put in place to render food products
and ingredients safer over time. In the United States, public concern about
food safety was so strong that the Pure Food and Drug Act was introduced
in 1906, prohibiting the sale of mislabelled or adulterated food.2 Before
that, it was very much diner beware, as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle
makes clear. Specifically Sinclair’s 1906 novel exposed food adulteration
and unsanitary practices in meat production, only adding to the public’s
already heightened discomfort. Menus, the inevitable bearers of the health-
related information that is the focus of this chapter, offer unique insights
into this evolving landscape.
Frederick Burr Opper, Look Before You Eat, 1884, lithograph.

Perhaps the most obvious example of how menus reflect changed

thinking about health involves tobacco smoking, with cigarettes, once given
pride of place on elegant menus, now in many countries banished not just
from menus but from restaurants altogether.
Some examples of menus encouraging smoking in their establishment?
In 1935 Keen’s English Chop House in New York produced an extensive
narrative-style illustrated menu singing the praises of taverns, tobacco and
tradition. The 1954 revision both continued to endorse pipe smoking and
included a very clever marketing tool: it offered gentleman diners the
service of a ‘Pipe Club’ so they could leave their pipes at the restaurant in
anticipation of their next visit.
The back page of one 1960s-era menu promotes Sweet Caporal
cigarettes, ‘The purest form in which tobacco can be smoked’. If the text
explicitly signposts the unadulterated nicotine punch, another tag line,
together with the graphic of a silhouetted couple, suggests elegance and
romance: ‘Remember two cigarettes in the dark? …’ It seems to say, what
could be a better way to end a special evening?
Indeed, cigarette smoking constitutes perhaps the most dramatic about-
face in terms of our thinking about health, and one recent enough for it to
have been experienced at first hand by today’s older generations. By the
1940s and ’50s smoking was almost the norm for both men and women.
Not only did tobacco companies advertise cigarettes with catchy bylines,
famous endorsers (baseball star Jackie Robinson in the ’40s, Ronald Reagan
and Santa Claus in the ’50s) and memorable characters (the Marlboro Man
was introduced in 1954), they also frequently used medical practitioners to
promote their product. In 1946, for example, T. J. Reynolds boasted that
‘More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.’3 My own mother
remembered her doctor in England suggesting that she take up smoking to
help her efforts to lose weight. American soldiers during the Second World
War, and until as recently as 1976, had a mini-pack of Chesterfields, Lucky
Strikes or Camels with waterproof paper matches included in their rations.4
And indeed, soldiers on both sides of the Second World War received
cigarettes with their rations, though the Wehrmacht instituted a number of
initiatives to curb tobacco smoking.
Krausmann’s Lorraine Grill, A la carte menu, c. 1960, print menu.

At the same time, strong statistical evidence linking smoking to cancer

emerged in Germany even prior to the Second World War,5 though there
had been concerns about adverse effects of smoking long before this. By
1964 the evidence was so damning that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a
report stating that smoking causes lung cancer, laryngeal cancer and chronic
bronchitis.6 In 2024 the United Kingdom moved to introduce a smoking
ban such that those born in 2009 or later would be unable to purchase
cigarettes.7
Coca-Cola is a second example of a menu item that was first
understood to contribute to health and well-being, only later to have that
positive association with health severely challenged. That is, Coca-Cola
was initially touted as ‘the Ideal Brain Tonic’, a claim that ironically had a
certain truth to it because, in its early decades, the drink contained a
residual amount of cocaine via extracts from the coca leaf.8 After legal
challenges by the U.S. government once cocaine had been restricted to
medical use, Coca-Cola began to dramatically reduce the residual cocaine
in its recipe.9 Today, the company still uses coca leaves to create an
important flavour ingredient, but strips out the cocaine by-product, selling it
to an opioid company.10

Keen’s Pipe Club and Chop House, 1954, print menu and membership card.
Keen’s Pipe Club and Chop House, 1954, print menu and membership card.

The menu for the George Washington Chemists Luncheonette makes a

rather different claim for the benefits of Coca-Cola, however, and one that
we now know very well is completely and utterly spurious. Notice the
drink’s presence on a list of ‘nutritious drinks’, right before buttermilk and
‘Hemo’ (a powder of malt, vitamins and minerals that was added to milk to
create a flavoured drink).11

Long-Standing Principles of Health

Discussing tobacco and cocaine on the menu is undoubtedly a dramatic way
to explore the ways that menus reflect health insights of their time. Both
examples might lead one to conclude that there is a significant distance
between the health concerns of diners ‘then’ and belated readers of menus
‘now’. Surprisingly, quite the opposite is the case. I would argue that our
tendency to assume that our own knowledge about health is so
extraordinarily advanced beyond that of earlier generations – and centuries
– is partially a function of a presentist bias. By ‘presentism’, I mean that
even with considerable effort, it is extraordinarily difficult, and some might
say impossible, when approaching historical material for us to put aside all
that we now know to be ‘true’ and approach the material from the
perspective of those who lived in that moment. This chapter reveals how, by
highlighting what they believe to be healthy fare at that moment, many
menus suggest both a consistent belief that food serves as a significant
source of well-being and a notable agreement on the fundamental principles
(if not necessarily the specifics) of health-beneficial provisioning.
Coca-Cola print advertisement, 1897.

Consider some fundamental principles of healthy eating, which seem

to be shared across historical and cultural contexts: balance, moderation and
discipline. Taking balance first, Chinese cuisine provides perhaps the most
elaborate statement about its importance. The first Great Prime Minister of
the Shang Dynasty of imperial China, Yi Yin, was also known for his great
cooking skills, having been trained by his father, chef to the king of the Xin
Kingdom.12 It was Yi who identified the classic five flavours of Chinese
gastronomy – sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty – asserting that a healthy
meal involves all five.13 Additionally, incorporating Taoist ideas, he
believed that meals should be balanced in temperature: cooling foods were
yin while warming foods were yang and the two must be in balance for a
healthy body.
For a type of foodway exemplifying virtues of moderation, one
instinctively thinks of Japanese cuisine, itself a testimony to the country’s
cultural outreach. Washoku is the term signifying the traditional dietary
cultures of Japan, and as a result of the Japanese government’s application
was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013.14 UNESCO
describes it in relatively ambiguous but uniformly positive ways, saying it
‘is associated with an essential spirit of respect for nature that is closely
related to the sustainable use of natural resources’.15 Its ‘guiding principles’
are rice as a food staple, complemented by various side dishes, soup and
pickles, which ‘together … form the basic structure of a meal’.16
Moderation influences the style of eating itself. Portions of both the main
and side dishes are relatively small,17 and the use of thin chopsticks perhaps
means that diners also take small bites and the pace of their consumption is
slowed. The presence of soup at each meal also contributes to health and
has been shown to correlate with a lower body mass index for Japanese
men.18 Additionally, it is said that those in Okinawa, which has a relatively
high proportion of centenarians, begin their meals with a greeting – Hara
hachi bu (literally, ‘belly eight parts’) – as a reminder to stop eating when
they are 80 per cent full.19
George Washington Chemists, before 1946, print menu.
 The dominance of white rice in Japan’s foodways is nuanced by the
historical record. Ironically, by mixing rice with other grains for their own
consumption in order to save the rare polished rice for sale, rural farmers
avoided the scourge of beriberi, which devastated the Japanese navy in
1878 and the army during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.20 While rice
was not the only starch on the Japanese menu, which also included barley,
millets and buckwheat, the Japanese government’s food management
systems during the Second World War, known as kokuminshoku, an
abbreviation of ‘civilian rations’, imposed significant hardships despite
being couched in positive directives rather than rules of constraint.
Ultimately, Eric Rath’s analysis concludes that while Japanese food
restraint during certain periods of the country’s history involved voluntary
self-restraint, it was very much encouraged, endorsed and even at times
enforced by the central authorities dealing with the reality of food
shortages.
Finally, discipline. Here my example of health-giving foodways looks
remarkably contemporary despite being a part of the distant past. It involves
the Knights Templar, whose full name was the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of
Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, and who followed the foodways
outlined in a rulebook developed for them by the French abbot Bernard de
Clairvaux in the late twelfth century.21 By way of context, the Knights
Templar was a French Roman Catholic military order, founded in AD 1119
and headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which thrived for
two centuries that included the Crusades before being disbanded by Pope
Clement V in 1312. In the thirteenth century, life expectancy in Europe for
males saw them reaching 31 on average, 48 if they survived into their
twenties. However, the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order, whose
lifestyle was balanced between devotional duties and fighting, could live
past sixty. What was their secret? The answer, according to Natasha Frost,
may not have been a divine gift but rather may be found in their food
practices. Their rulebook – essentially a statement of principles rather than
specific menus per se – came to be known as the Primitive Rule of the
Templars and governed all aspects of their lives, including specific rules
about when, what and with whom they could eat, as well as accompanying
rituals. A meal began, for example, with handwashing. Although it was
understood that ‘the custom of eating flesh corrupts the body’, knights
would eat meat three days a week to maintain their strength. Those higher
up in the order were also permitted to eat meat at both lunch and dinner on
Sundays.22 Fridays involved a Lenten fast, that is, doing without both dairy
and animal products. On the non-meat days, the Templars’ diet generally
consisted of a variety of vegetables and fruit. They also ate in silence, and
in pairs, so that one’s meal partner could ensure both that meal portions
were duly consumed and that food was not consumed in excess. They drank
alcohol, but only in moderation. There was no pecking order with regard to
alcohol. Irrespective of rank, each knight was given the same ration of
(diluted) wine.
Few recipes of the Templar Knights exist, but in the Archivo Historico
Nacional of Spain there exists a book containing the recipes of a chef to the
Templars in Jerez de los Caballeros, likely from the late thirteenth century.
The recipes include descriptions of boiled young asparagus with butter,
hermit’s salad (made with cerrajas thistles cut finely, olive oil and vinegar),
morcillas or blood sausage (prepared with white beans, turnips, chopped
onions and garlic), pig’s ear with turnip porridge, and ‘drunk’ slices of
bread (essentially a bread pudding made with eggs, honey and stale bread
soaked in red wine).23 Templar orders would have maintained gardens as
well as rearing livestock.
In short, the Templars developed a successful formula for healthy
foodways in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that in many ways
anticipated what the medical community today suggests as a healthy diet:
masses of vegetables, meat and wine only in moderation. Added to this was
plenty of exercise: a function of the active lifestyle of a crusader.

Vegetables on the Menu

The Templars’ notion that eating flesh frequently corrupted the body
transitions us smoothly to a broader discussion of menus devoid of meat,
and establishments dedicated to serving vegetarian and vegan fare. While
plant-based menus are very much a part of our contemporary food
landscape, vegetarian restaurants also have an extremely long history in
Western as well as Eastern foodways. High up the historical list might be
the Swiss restaurant Hitl (1901–), today the longest-running vegetarian
restaurant in the world, or perhaps the wildly popular vegetable-forward
Moosewood restaurant (1973–) in Ithaca, New York.24 Henry Voigt reminds
us that the menu for H.E.L.P. restaurant in Los Angeles (an acronym for
health, education, love and peace), 1971–4, which served a lacto-ovo
vegetarian cuisine and banned smoking on its premises, contained a 1,450-
word statement defending the health benefits of vegetarianism.25 More
recently, Michelin introduced its Green Star in 2021 to signal restaurants
with sustainable practices. It sent a further significant signal endorsing
mindful foodways when in 2022 Daniel Humm’s New York City staple –
the vegan restaurant Eleven Madison Park – received the coveted three
Michelin stars. However, there are rumours that this excellent vegan
restaurant does still serve meat, beef tenderloin specifically, but in a private
room.26
Pork meat, illumination from Tacuinum Sanitatis (1380–99), a medieval
health manuscript originally from the 11th century.

Vegetarianism is one example of a health philosophy that has been

remarkably enduring over time and across regions. It is evident as early as
1000 BCE in religious texts, particularly in southern Asia, discouraging the
eating of meat and targeting beef in particular.27 Followers of Jainism were
early proponents of a vegetarian diet, with strict Jains continuing to adopt a
particularly rigid form of vegetarianism that forbids honey, yeast, fungi,
roots, root vegetables and tubers.28 In medieval Persia, the ‘Constitution of
Akbar’, an important historical chronicle from the late 1500s, records a
royal Mughal feast that features breads, saucers of piled curds and plates of
pickled foods, fresh ginger, limes and various greens.29 Although meat was
absent from the menu, the chronicler marvels at the range and bounty of the
offerings, explaining that it was impossible to describe ‘all of the
preparations served at royal feasts’.30
Specimen bill of fare of a vegetarian dinner at The ‘Alpha’, 1889, print
menu.
 Britain saw James Pierrepont Greaves start a vegetarian community
outside London in Ham, Surrey, in 1838. Alcott House, the physical heart of
the community, included a school, and endorsed a strictly meatless diet.31
The community at Alcott House effectively took vegetarianism one step
further by adhering to what we would today call a strict vegan diet.32 The
Alcott House menus rejected all animal-sourced foods, including meat,
butter, cheese and eggs, and all stimulants such as chocolate, coffee and tea,
as well as mustard, salt, vinegar and spices. Subsequently, Britain’s
Vegetarian Society was formed in 1847 by the Reverend William Cowherd.
Cowherd, who had founded a denomination of Christianity called the Bible
Christian Church, believed that eating animal flesh and drinking spirits
prevented humanity from reaching its full potential.33
We learn that, as the century progressed, various high-profile British
figures became vegetarian and advocated for the benefits of such a diet.
These included George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sir
Richard Phillips. As restaurant dining blossomed in British cities, diners
were increasingly able to sample vegetarian fare. The January 1884 edition
of the official magazine of the Vegetarian Society in Britain lists fourteen
vegetarian restaurants in London, and three more establishments in London
offering vegetarian meals.34 At the Alpha, founded in 1879, diners in 1889
could enjoy lentil cutlets, vegetable marrow, stewed fruit puddings and
porridges.
In the United States, reformers gained a hearing in the early nineteenth
century. Ailments such as dyspepsia (indigestion) and neurasthenia
(nervousness) were common then and several well-educated figures within
the tradition of medical self-help emerged in the United States, including
the influential Sylvester Graham.35 Graham advocated vegetarianism, as
well as eliminating from one’s regular diet condiments, caffeine, sugar,
spirits, drugs and tobacco.36 Indeed, Graham’s proposed food practices
align directly with much of today’s thinking in relation to healthy
foodways. Anticipating our current thinking, he also suggested that many
foods should be cooked simply or eaten raw, chewed properly and taken at
fixed times and in moderation.37
Additionally, the American Physiological Society was founded in 1837
to promote human health and longevity. Advocating vegetarianism on a
physiological, medical and ethical basis was an important part of their
work. According to William Andrus Alcott (a primary organizer in the
society along with Sylvester Graham), vegetable eaters ‘enjoy better
appetite and digestion, stronger bones, and muscles, and healthier blood and
other fluids’. Alcott was particularly concerned about the potential
harmfulness of certain foods that he believed could cause disease. Among
the potentially poisonous foods, he lists ‘milk, cheese, eggs, bacon, and
cured meats’.38 Additionally, he argued, vegetable eaters were not as fat,
had ‘purer’ breath, did not ‘perspire excessively’ and were not ‘apt to be
thirsty’.39 Was he not, perhaps, yet another example of a man before his
time? Think of the controversies that the twentieth century saw swirling
around cholesterol in eggs, fat in bacon and sulphites in deli meats.
First Annual Banquet of the Brooklyn Physical Culture Society, 1904, print
menu.
First Annual Banquet of the Brooklyn Physical Culture Society, 1904, print
menu.

A menu from the first annual banquet of the Brooklyn Physical Culture
Society in 1904 reveals a commitment to understanding the link between
diet – and vegetarianism in particular – and health. In some ways, the
‘Running Order’ of the banquet reads almost like a religious ‘Order of
Service’ with only the biblical references missing. That the menu
exemplifies the principles of balance and variety, and that one of the
evening’s toasts is to ‘The Religion of Health’, makes the point that the
society’s endorsement of healthy fare is a point of faith as well as of
practice.
By the 1930s, New York City hosted thirteen ‘Schildkraut’ vegetarian
restaurants, the brainchildren of Sadie Schildkraut, who prepared vegetables
so that they ‘looked and tasted like meat’.40 Although not certified as
kosher, the restaurants followed principles of Jewish dietary law. Their
advertisements, appearing in English and Yiddish Jewish publications, sang
the praises of good tasting, and easily digestible vegetable meat substitutes
such as Protose and Nutose. In one 1953 menu from the New York
restaurant Ratner’s, Nutose and Protose steaks, described as made from
‘onions, vegetable, and potatoes’, are present alongside the more familiar
vegetarian options such as mushrooms and aubergines. This vegetarian-
friendly Jewish establishment essentially offers a dairy menu – fish but no
meat.

Substitutes, Vitamins and Calorie-Counting

Meat substitutes such as Protose, mentioned above, were helping to
facilitate vegetarianism in the United States back in the late nineteenth
century – decades prior to the Schildkraut restaurant menu. Protose was
created at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, which
was John Harvey Kellogg’s vegetarian health resort founded in 1876 by the
Seventh-Day Adventist Church of which he was a member. Also
manufactured by Kellogg, Protose was a double-boiled product of peanut
butter, wheat gluten, vegetable stock and cornstarch, meant to be sliced
once cool.41
Ratner’s, menu, 1953, print menu.

In one Battle Creek Sanitarium menu from 1903, which presumably

celebrated the new building since the previous one was consumed by fire in
1902, Protose features prominently. In particular, a Protose broth, a direct
alternative to ‘beef tea’, is listed. Kellogg patented Protose in 1899 and it
remained in production until 2000.42 Indeed, he also invented a number of
other products to treat specific ailments. If his name sounds familiar, it is
because it is he who we have to thank for a number of dry breakfast cereals,
including cornflakes first developed by Will Keith Kellogg in 1898 as a
health food, and granola in 1881, made from wheat, oats and corn.43
Granula, recognized as the first dry wholegrain breakfast cereal, was
actually invented by James Caleb Jackson in 1863.44 Kellogg’s colleague
and then competitor Dr Charles W. Post subsequently created Postum,
Grape-Nuts and Post Toasties. ‘Dextrinized’ grains on the Battle Creek
Sanitarium indicates grains that had been altered through heating in order to
render the complex carbohydrates into simpler, digestible forms.
 Graham’s influence resurfaced in a more popular way with ‘Graham’
quick and yeasted breads, which used wholegrain flours. They appeared
regularly in such popular products as Graham breads, Graham gems,
Graham flapjacks and Graham rolls.45 An 1891 menu from Montreal’s
Windsor Hotel includes a variety of options for cereals and explicitly
mentions Graham bread and Graham rolls.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Kellogg’s foodstuffs had
penetrated menus across America, as demonstrated by the section titled
‘Health Foods of the Battle Creek Sanitarium Food Co.’ on the 1901 lunch
menu of New York department store Siegel-Cooper. The section includes
Granose biscuits, nut gluten and wheat wafers, and this Windsor Hotel
menu refers proudly to its own ‘Creamery’. According to the advertising of
the day, Granose was a ‘thoroughly sterilized’ cereal food that ‘clears the
tongue and stomach of germs, cures constipation, biliousness, sick-
headache, and indigestion’ and was particularly good for ‘sedentary
people’, both the ill and the well. Note too that ‘Nut Butter’ was available,
something unusual for menus of the time, despite the ubiquity of peanut
butter on American menus in later decades. The ‘Bromose Tablets’ (10
cents) and ‘Fig or Apricot Bromose’ (15 cents) refer to nut-based products
originated by Kellogg as an alternative to dairy. The tablets (or sometimes
powder) would be dissolved in a little water to make it suitable for
spreading rather like jam, hence it appears in the ‘Toasts’ section of the
menu. That the luncheon was served in a ‘dainty’ parlour signals that the
menu was designed to appeal to a largely female clientele.
Breakfast, the Windsor Hotel, Montreal, 1891, print menu.

A significant shift in American foodways towards other forms of

healthy eating that we recognize today occurs in the 1920s and is
announced explicitly by Franklin Grace writing in the American Restaurant
Magazine. In 1927 Grace wrote:
Battle Creek Sanitarium, breakfast menu, 1903, print menu.
 In this issue we will give the first of several articles … [on] Vitamins. We
hope that in so doing we will aid the readers of this magazine to be just a
step ahead, by preparing them for what we have every reason to believe
is at hand: The time when, educated on the subject of foods, the public
will select for its eating place the one where foods are ordered not only to
please the palate but to promote health.46

Luncheon held by Siegel Cooper Co., 1901, print menu.

Both Casimir Funk and Wilbur Olin Atwater played fundamental roles in
the development of American foodways and practices at the turn of the
twentieth century. Funk was a Polish-American biochemist generally
credited with being among the first to formulate the concept of vitamins in
1912, which he called ‘vital amines’. Atwater was an American chemist
known for his studies of human nutrition and metabolism and is considered
the father of modern nutrition research and education. He is credited with
developing the Atwater system, which laid the groundwork for nutrition
science in the United States. Both contributed to the growing scientization
of American culture that would revolutionize the restaurant industry. But
while nutritionists pointed to the value of food’s scientific characteristics,
invisible to the human eye, these characteristics are understandably seldom
articulated on menus, as both chefs and diners tend to focus on taste, venue
and enjoyment. Nevertheless, as the twentieth century wore on, traces of
nutritional information began to appear with increasing frequency on a
range of menus. In New York City, for example, a Heritage Coffee Shop
menu from around 1950 mentions ‘vitamins’, ‘high protein’ and ‘lo-lo
calories’, as well as ‘waist watchers platters’ and ‘lo-cal salad’.
Heritage Coffee Shop, dinner menu, c. 1950, print menu.
Heritage Coffee Shop, dinner menu, c. 1950, print menu.

But we would be wrong to assume that calorie counting is a

phenomenon that appeared only in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Congress Hotel Room Service menu from Chicago in 1938 targets
consumers by offering low-calorie luncheons that nevertheless provide
important vitamins. Note in particular the central section offering a 420-
calorie lunch, which includes ‘2 V-B-W Wafers’ that fulfil a ‘Vitamin B
requirement’.
A J. Lyons & Co. menu from 1935 offers British consumers a hefty
dose of marketing along with its list of proffered fare. In contrast to that of
the Congress Hotel, though, this is not intended to be a menu full of healthy
foods. Cold sweet dishes are available all day, with additional hot offerings
over the lunch hours. The Lyons menu has separate sections for buns and
cakes, as well as for pastries and biscuits. Not only was Lyons well known
for its cakes and enjoyed for its teashops, but in the 1930s it was beginning
to launch a series of branded products onto the market, including cakes,
biscuits and teas. However, of the many name-brands mentioned at the side
of this menu, some still very familiar to consumers today (Colman’s
mustard and Hovis bread) and presumably also partly underwriting the
costs of its production, there are a few items relating directly to health.
Bovril, for example, is for ‘strength and stamina’, and diners could order it
alone or with milk as a hot or cold beverage. And Virol – a bone and malt
extract – is described as ‘Delicious and Sustaining’. While it doesn’t seem
to appear on the menu, diners would have known that it is to be consumed
‘with milk or on bread and butter’. The Lyons tearooms offered a good-
value proposition to their clientele with respectable, uniformed waitresses
and no gratuities expected. Cigarettes were, unsurprisingly for the time,
available for purchase.

Congress Hotel, Room Service Menu, Chicago, 1938, print menu.

If, in the 1930s, New York City consumers were tempted by ‘lo-lo
calories’ and those in London by the benefits of Bovril, wartime called for
different priorities. Indeed, war menus remind us that the explicit absence
of meat from menus is not always driven by a religious, scientific or ethical
philosophy. In the sophisticated venue of a Canadian Pacific (CP) Railroad
dining car, a 1946 menu from just one year after the end of the Second
World War suggests that diners still understood and accepted the importance
of restraint, even after years of wartime rationing. While the dinner menu
declared it to be a ‘meatless day’, the CP Railroad wanted its passengers on
this run from Vancouver through Calgary and Moose Jaw to Winnipeg to
know that they took their commitment to providing nutritious meals
seriously: the menu signals the presence of vitamin B in both the white and
brown breads offered. Menu items such as ‘Chow Chow’ and
‘Mulligatawny Soup’ signal influences on western Canadian foodways from
Chinese workers who came to work on the railway, as well as those
returning to this British colony from service in India. Incongruous, perhaps,
to the eyes of twenty-first-century readers is that alongside the concern for
healthful vitamins, the dining car offers both cigarettes and cigars. But it
was 1946 after all.
Menu, J. Lyons & Co. Ltd, 1935, print menu.
Menu, J. Lyons & Co. Ltd, 1935, print menu.
Canadian Pacific Dining Car Service, Table d’Hote [sic] Dinners Meatless
Day, 1946, print menu.

Health on Twenty-First-Century Menus

Lola Rosa is a beloved restaurant in Montreal, Quebec. While locals might
argue that its offerings are uniquely tasty, the health information it provides
on its menu (the one shown here from 2023 is in English, but of course as a
Montreal restaurant a French version is also available) aligns with the sorts
of careful signposting common on twenty-first-century menus. First and
foremost, at the very top of the page, just below a declaration that all fare is
100 per cent plant-based, the restaurant signals how seriously it takes
information about food allergens, both asking patrons to communicate any
allergies to the waiting staff, and reminding them of the possible presence
of gluten, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts and soy. Specific dishes are additionally
annotated with clear symbols: an ear of wheat crossed out to signal a dish’s
safety for those sensitive to gluten, two small acorns for those with nut
sensitivities. As a courtesy to diners’ tastes one additional symbol, a single
red chilli pepper, flags dishes that might be too spicy for some.
Lola Rosa menu, 2023, print menu.

The Good Earth, c. 1970–90, print menu.

Less obvious are inherent assumptions regarding twenty-first-century

notions about the value of certain ingredients for health as well as taste. The
‘Smoked Carrot Tartare’, for example, includes wakame seaweed –
seaweed being an item that would not have figured on a menu in mid-
twentieth-century North America or Britain. The salad includes ‘mesclun’,
not just any unspecified garden lettuce or greens. And it is just assumed that
diners are familiar with specialized food terms originating in different parts
of the globe – ‘garam masala’, ‘brioche bread’, ‘homemade queso’. One
exception is ‘poiscamole’, which appears in quotation marks. Most
Montrealers would recognize both the root word pois (French for pea) and
the approximation of ‘guacamole’ and so be able to intuit that Lola’s nachos
are adorned with a pea-based accompaniment rather than the more typically
avocado-based one. These details aside, surely the menu’s central message
is that Lola Rosa offers a diversity of dishes that will assuage hunger pangs
without jeopardizing diners’ health.
Today’s farm-to-table dining menus often identify the farm or food
producer by name, as a kind of shorthand to assure diners of the chef’s
intimate familiarity with the way the food they prepare has been raised,
sourced and transported. In earlier decades, menus detailed at greater length
key aspects of food production for their customer. For example, whereas
Lola Rosa in 2023 assumed diners knew their bharta from their vegetarian
house ‘brisket’, the Good Earth in Edina, Minnesota, felt obliged in the
closing decades of the twentieth century to explain at length the benefits of
its ingredients (carob, jicama, cafix, tofu), identify some of its production
techniques (wok cooking, ‘an ancient method of Chinese cooking’ that
allowed for the retention of ‘many of the nutrients and enzymes’), and share
its enthusiasm.
At the bottom of the introductory prologue to its menu, the Good Earth
invites its diners to find their meals ‘an exciting new adventure in good
eating’. By looking to earlier efforts to design menus around concepts of
health, however, is this really a new adventure? I suggest, quite the
opposite. The understandable human desire to identify health-giving fare is
an age-old phenomenon, as is the push towards novel ways of inventing
menus to incorporate the most recent nutritional and medical discoveries of
the day. By exploring the consistency of a number of dietary principles of
health over the centuries – balance, moderation and discipline – and then
circling back to the modern restaurant’s foundational notion of providing
fare designed to fortify diners’ health, I have endeavoured to make a case
against the temptation to fall prey to the pride of ‘presentism’. Next time
you go to a restaurant and survey the increasingly extensive catalogue of
health-related symbols and acronyms, I invite you to consider how such
menus are heirs to long-standing efforts to underscore how our foodways
can contribute directly to our well-being. We may have learned a few
specific things along the way – cigarettes are, indeed, bad for our health,
and Coca-Cola should not be considered primarily as a nutritional drink –
but on the whole we surely find ourselves in agreement with those from
earlier centuries who pursued moderation and other ideals of healthy eating.

OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER
SIX
RIDDL
E ME
THIS:
MENUS
THAT
INTRIG
UE
OceanofPDF.com
A
s we have seen in each of the earlier chapters, menus seek to serve
up fare for the imagination as well as imaginative fare. And
although we often tell children not to play with their food, menus
tell us that chefs and menu designers strive to inject elements of play –
surprise, puzzlement, even challenge – into the dining experiences they
create and curate.
Sometimes this is as simple as offering diners in the know particular
dishes that are not printed anywhere on the menu, common practice in
many Asian restaurants. Also of note is the beef tenderloin available in a
private room at the ostensibly vegan restaurant Eleven Madison Park in
New York.1 Or the wonderful Steak Diane, for which Brennan’s in New
Orleans is famous, but which is curiously absent from their dinner menu.2
And dog owners are familiar with Starbucks ‘pup cups’ or ‘puppuccinos’ –
small cups of whipped cream usually served without a charge upon request.
An Anigmatical Bill of Fare, c. 1733–5, handwritten manuscript.

I begin here by exploring what intrigued diners in the past for, as

menus’ belated readers, we are intrigued by what intrigued them: curiosities
embedded in menus that include riddles to solve, problems to unpack and
conundrums to ponder. We will then look at culinary curios: menus that
proceed by misdirection, even if through familiar strategies (such as ‘menu
French’); meal courses and interludes intended primarily as entertainment
(such as the medieval ‘void’, explained below); and menus that include
seemingly discomfiting or inedible fare, which read very differently for
belated readers compared to how they would have been received by hungry
diners anxious to make their meal choices. The chapter concludes with
examples of recent culinary experiments that serve not only to entertain but
to engage diners in thinking through what their responsibilities are in the
global food chain.
Menus in this chapter leverage strategies of implicit engagement:
indirection, enigma, storytelling. Sometimes they even employ ways to
limit diners’ ability to come to the table, thereby tantalizing potential diners
all the more.

Enigmatic Meals
Let’s start by looking at menus that take the form of games – riddling ones.
The menu subgenre of ‘Enigmatic Bills of Fare’, which provides us with
tangible evidence of the popularity of events described as ‘Enigmatic
Dinners’ or ‘Intellectual Feasts’, seems to first emerge in early eighteenth-
century England. Early examples take the form of handwritten manuscripts
that can be found filed away with other non-riddling recipes and medical
remedies in the drawers of old homes or on the shelves of rare and special
collections. The ‘Enigmatic Bill of Fare’ featured here is the first known
example, dating from 1733. Try your hand at solving some of these! The
solution to ‘Pryde revers’d in a Pye’, for instance, shouldn’t be all that
challenging, even almost three centuries after the riddle was penned. Not to
leave you hanging, the answer is: humble pie.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how long ago this genre of dinner first
appeared, very little information about what actually happened at these
‘Enigmatic Dinners’ survives. It remains unclear if these menus were first
sent as invitations to guests or if they were only placed on the table before
the meals to describe the dishes. Indeed, neither is it certain if the imagined
dishes were ever served at all.
However, the riddles themselves offer us glimpses of the kind of
knowledge and skills required of dinner guests, which was similar to that of
The Times cryptic crossword puzzle today. For example, many of the riddles
are word games and puns, playing to the wit and humour of those at the
table. Riddles could be embedded in phrases such as ‘Melancholy Soup
with Crooked Sarah’ (‘Sal-Awry’, to produce ‘celery’), ‘A Dutch Prince in a
Pudding’ (Orange Pudding via a nod to William of Orange) and ‘The Divine
Part of Man Boiled’ (stewed sole), all of which suggest the playful aspect of
these dinners. These riddles were probably designed to prompt appreciative
laughter when solved or perhaps appreciative groans when not. Other
riddles challenge guests’ general knowledge. ‘Part of the Zodiack Buttered’
(either crab or fish?) and ‘The Grand Seignor’s Dominions Larded’
(Turkey) both suggest that the riddle solvers had to draw on background
knowledge to predict what the dishes might be or to match them up with
what was served. The Enigmatic Bill of Fare shown here also contains a
biblical riddle, ‘The First Temptation in a Small Blast of Wind’ (apple puff),
one of many that begin to appear more frequently as the tradition gains
increasing currency in England and later in North America. But when being
served ‘An unruly Member’ (tongue), what was one to expect of it being
‘garnished with perpetual Motion’? If your curiosity is now piqued, you are
not alone – these ‘Enigmatic Bills of Fare’ gained popularity as the
eighteenth century progressed. Would that we could speak to the authors of
these menus. Who were they? And what came first: the riddles or the
decision of what to serve?
Although it is unclear where these cryptic menus originated or how
they enriched those who used them, such manuscripts are found
increasingly throughout England in the eighteenth century. One ‘Enigmatic
Bill of Fare’ published in the Publick Register advertised itself to ‘the
Learned and Ingenious’.3 This boast, in addition to the mention of the
vegetables and fruit served at the meal, including ‘Sorrowful Apples’
(pineapples, then very exotic and expensive), suggests that the intended
feasters were of the upper or aristocratic classes.4
‘An Ænigmatical Bill of Fare’ reprinted in The Lady’s Companion (1751).
 By 1751, or just before, the success of the riddling menu becomes
readily apparent when a cryptic menu is served at Christmas for King
George II.5 Until 1755, the ‘Enigmatic Bill of Fare’ remained largely
unchanged, offering the same dishes in the same order, even boasting an
identical page layout, though of course written by different hands as it was
copied and reproduced. In the ‘Bill of Fare for His Majesty’s Dinner on
Christmas Day 1755’, however, new riddling dishes are introduced and
some familiar dishes from previous menus are revised. In these later
versions descriptions become longer and the dishes become more complex,
befitting their regal venue. New riddles, such as that for bird’s nest soup
(‘The House of a Bird with the Life and Death of a Calf, season’d with
Lord Mayor’s pride and Welshman’s Delight, and garnished with an Old
Woman of ninety’) and ‘The Sign of the going out of March divided with
the Debtors Security, Sweet Wine, and the produce of a Walking Stick’, are
served on Christmas Day.6 Despite the lofty tone, an attempt at humour is
preserved. On the following day, King George II apparently partook of some
more familiar dishes of the riddling variety. For a first course, ‘The Grand
Seignour’s Dominions roasted’ and, as a side dish, ‘A Dutch Princesses
Pudding’. With the third course came the tongue-twisting ‘Quagmires,
quintessence of Toes, sweet Turds and a transparent Cock standing in the
middle’ (don’t ask me to solve this one!) with a side dish of ‘A Sign in the
Zodiack butter’d’. Despite the introduction of a few new and newly phrased
riddles, many were still featured as early as 1733, and similar versions of
most of these are mentioned above.7 These bills of fare indicate the success
and longevity of dishes described in riddling ways. Details of the king’s
holiday dinners suggest that riddling feasts were enjoyed on two successive
days. Imagine finishing a meal and raising a glass of ‘Counterfeit Agony’ to
toast the king’s health (‘sham pain’ or Cham-pagne)! Gradually food-related
riddles moved to the printed page – appearing in both cookery companions
and intellectual publications – and began to claim space by virtue of just
being fun.
William Heath, title page, Good Dinners, 1824, hand-coloured illustrations.

By 1824 these satirical depictions of food were popular enough to

deserve a folio edition. In that year, Thomas McLean, a successful London
printer of the period, published his Good Dinners. Dress’d by W. Heath and
Served by Thos. McLean at His Hotel in the Haymarket. It was a highly
stylized edition featuring coloured prints of characters represented as
dishes. At first glance – and as indicated by the title – this folio appears to
be an intricate menu, featuring several dozen meals, each engraved with an
appropriate – or, in many cases, inappropriate – caricature.
For example, various foods are presented in Good Dinners, from
‘French Rolls’ to ‘Vinegar’. Like ‘Enigmatic Bills of Fare’, they offer a
riddle designed to provoke laughter when understood. The depiction of
‘French Rolls’ shows two Frenchmen rolling down the hill, while in the
image for ‘Vinegar’ a man and wife sit facing away from one another, their
relationship soured. Some images, such as the depictions of a tailor for
‘Cabbage’ – which, along with ‘carbage’ or ‘garbage’, is ‘the name given to
the bits of fabric left over from cutting out an item’ – or that of a man
frustrated by women for ‘Spare Rib’, are almost exact representations, now
in visual form, of the riddles found in earlier cryptic menus.8

William Heath, interior illustration, Good Dinners, 1824, hand-coloured

illustrations.

The title page suggests that the folio was intended to be a hotel menu,
but no such hotel or restaurant existed in London’s Haymarket. While these
satirical bills of fare were perhaps originally to be enjoyed around the
dinner table, they also offered post- or non-dining entertainment. The
English publisher S. W. (Samuel William) Fores had the innovation of
developing a wide selection of humorous caricatures and charging those
who wanted to view them. He also assembled portfolio editions of these
caricatures, at a time when Georgian England was being entertained by
satirical prints, which individuals could rent to entertain their meal guests, a
fashionable form of amusement in the latter half of the nineteenth century.9
Supper menu, Second Baptist Church, 1893, print menu.

In other words, spurred on by the rise in popular satire, the riddling

tradition evolved into a humorous practice rather than a more intellectual
and puzzling one. Satires, parodies and other laughter-inducing
representations of food provided amusement to diners at the table and
readers of the magazines of the period, from London to as far north as
Glasgow.10 Although altered in form and purpose, the satirical food images
of nineteenth-century Britain recall and take after their predecessors. S. W.
Fores’s ‘library of caricatures’ and the folio Good Dinners remain as
testaments to many evenings of laughter.11

Conundrum Socials
Despite the lack of contextual information about British ‘Enigmatic Bills of
Fare’, American newspapers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shed
light on what were known on the other side of the Atlantic as ‘Conundrum
Suppers’. A quote repeated across multiple newspapers but attributed to the
Chicago Times-Herald describes the practice as follows:

The plan is to serve a supper a la carte, presenting the bewildered guest

with a menu card written in enigma. From this he must order at random –
eating, of course, what is received – unless he is clever enough to guess
some hidden viand.12

This advertisement makes clear that the ‘Conundrum Suppers’ do not

neatly, nor perhaps were they intended to, mirror the riddling dinners of
eighteenth-century Britain. They made little or no claim to require any
intellectual acumen, nor were they publicized as a strictly culinary tradition.
Rather like the rising British satire at the turn of the nineteenth century,
‘Conundrum Suppers’ emphasize entertainment: ‘It is great fun for the
guests,’ reported one correspondent to the Ithaca Daily Journal.13 What
appears to have been particularly enjoyable was the potential for hilarious
error, as ‘It caused much amusement to guess out what one wanted, and
many a person got rather a queer supper by his unlucky guesses.’14
‘Conundrum Suppers’ remained fashionable for about thirty years,
reaching the height of their popularity in the United States in the 1890s. The
example shown here from 1893 describes unusual fare for an elegant event,
such as tongue, again described as an ‘unruly member’, but perhaps the
food choices were driven by the availability of a suitable riddle? Some
clues are particularly suited to American diners, as with the conundrum
social that includes the telling puzzle ‘Boston’s overthrow’, for example.
(Tea, presumably.)
With the onset of the First World War, and afterwards the Great
Depression, ‘Conundrum Suppers’ feature increasingly less frequently in
newspapers in the 1920s and ’30s. Understandably, the times did not
encourage levity. Across the United States, almost half of all documented
riddling dinners occurred between 1890 and 1900 (approximately 560
events), most of the rest before war began in 1914.
Few people today are aware of the extensive shared history of riddles
and food. Yet, from Samson’s riddle for the Philistines to Symphosius’
Aenigmata, from the royal dining table of Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century
Dream of the Red Chamber to American Protestant churches of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, riddles have frequented dinners for
thousands of years. Whether in the form of intellectual banter, prize-
winning competitions or merely as a way to have fun, the combination of
riddles and food have encouraged people to sit down and engage in lively
conversation across countless tables.
Despite their apparent absence from modern dining practices, riddles
remain embedded in culinary culture. Speakeasies, for example, prompted
by Prohibition in the United States (1920–33) and growing popular during
the Depression years after 1929, employed riddles, mysteries and enigmas
to help consolidate illegal drinking communities. These venues not only
created places for people to gather and chat, but they offered many
marginalized groups spaces to claim as their own and in which they could
flourish.
Renewed interest in the cocktail culture and the return of speakeasies
in the twenty-first century have also brought back riddling as a form of
entertainment. Today, some bars and bistros require patrons to solve a riddle
in order to gain entry.15 Others, like the AnonymouS Bar in Prague, capital
of Czechia, feature secret menus that only discerning and inquisitive guests
will uncover. Many similar venues shroud even their physical location in an
enigma. A guest might only enter a bar or restaurant by walking through the
door of a Smeg refrigerator or by knowing or cracking a secret four-digit
code.16
Even in the midst of a global pandemic, riddles and food continued to
work together to both baffle and entertain. In May 2020, the Michelin three-
star restaurant Alinea in Chicago decided to celebrate its fifteen-year
anniversary with a conundrum event. As Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Alinea
announced: ‘Since we cannot party together, we decided … to create a
provocation for your brain to ponder during the month of May. Why? Just
for fun … and a bit of intrigue.’17 Alinea posed a competition containing
nine puzzles; the solving of each led the winners to a variety of potential
prizes. The ultimate prize? A dinner for two with wine pairings at Alinea.18
The initiative was highly successful. After all, combining riddling puzzles
with an enjoyable dining experience makes for a winning formula that has
endured for centuries.

The Pleasures of Misdirection

One of the ironies of playful engagement is precisely that the desire to draw
closer and to engage is prompted by playmasters establishing a sense of
distance between themselves and the players, a distance deliberately
designed to tantalize, to intrigue and to serve up food for thought.

Roasted peacock dressed in its feathers served at a banquet, illumination

from Le Livre des Conquestes et Faits d’Alexandre (The Book of Conquests
and Deeds of Alexander), mid-15th century.
 Perhaps the most ubiquitous of menus’ strategies of enticement, and
one that has persisted for more than two centuries, is ‘menu French’, often a
coy equivocation rather than a sign of outright playfulness. The popularity
of menu items written in French arose as early as the mid-eighteenth
century. Ironically, of course, it was precisely French-style service or
service à la française (which dominated meal service in Europe from the
Middle Ages through to the nineteenth century) that made the full range of
foods on offer immediately visible for diners to see. That is, while ‘menu
French’ obfuscates, inhibiting all but those diners familiar with ‘la langue
de Molière’ from understanding and visualizing dishes clearly, French-style
service was based on the principles of full transparency and its appeal to
diners had everything to do with showcasing food. After all, in this style of
service, menus were not really necessary at all. Diners selected from the
dishes placed directly before them. The downside was that diners were
limited to those dishes that were within easy reach as there does not appear
to have been any passing of plates or dishes. So, if you were not ‘worth
your salt’, as the saying goes, and therefore seated at a large table ‘below
the salt’, your options might be somewhat different from those seated
‘above’ it.
Service à la russe replaced service à la française during the nineteenth
century in Europe and became dominant even in France after 1850.19 It was
precisely this dramatic shift from French to Russian service that rendered
menus both necessary and desirable. To avoid the problem of dishes
remaining on the table too long and getting cold, as they did with service à
la française, ‘Russian service placed on the table only cold dishes that
could wait, while hot ones were passed around to all the guests immediately
after being carved in the kitchen.’20
When comparing French and Russian service, food studies writer
Cathy Kaufman explains that ‘service à la française was designed to dazzle
the eye as much as feed the stomach.’21 The attraction of this type of
service was extravagance and abundance. By contrast, serving meals à la
russe initiated a carefully orchestrated sequence of events that depended
upon a delicate balance between absence, anticipation and ambiguity.
Diners would ask themselves what the cooks were preparing behind closed
kitchen doors. In the most dramatic performances, servers might bring
dishes to the table on covered salvers only to lift their covers
simultaneously – to the delight and applause of their attentive audience.
 If Russian service achieves its effect through its initial concealment of
food preparation, and possibly even of the dish itself, from the diner, then a
similar strategy of engagement and entertainment is central to the tradition
of ‘disguised foods’. This is a masquerade tradition in which foods, rather
than individuals, are masked. Art historian Ann Bermingham muses that it
likely began with ‘the presentation of food at court, and jaded courtiers’
insatiable desire for novelty and spectacle’.22 Some of the earliest recorded
masquerades appear in late medieval and early Renaissance cookery books.
For instance, in the fourteenth century, Taillevent, cook to the royal court of
France under the Valois, suggested placing a pottage of small birds inside
the cavity of a peacock.23 Disguised foods were commonly served during a
course called the ‘void’, which, similar to the relevé (or remove course,
when the table was cleared of some dishes to make way for others), was the
‘moment in the medieval banquet when tables were being cleared or
voided’, when the food ‘deserted’ the table – and hence our name for the
sweet dessert course.24
The foods presented during this course themselves served as a kind of
entertainment:

Voids presented food for the eyes as much as for the palate. They
satisfied a hunger for something beautiful to look at and sweet to taste
after greasy courses of roasted fowl, red meat, and game. In their
delicacy and beauty they were thought to appeal particularly to ladies
whose dainty appetites could only be tempted by fanciful, sugared
delights.25

William Edward Mead, author of The English Medieval Feast, notes that
‘void’ refers to a ‘dish or course eaten just before leaving the table’ and was,
essentially, a precursor to our dessert course.26 In his description of a
medieval feast at which this ‘void’ course was served, Mead explains that
‘the King and the ambassadors were served at a banquet with two hundred
and sixty dishes, and after that a voidee of spices with sixty spice plates of
silver and gilt, as great as men with ease might bear’ would be served.27
English professor Patricia Fumerton, whose research areas fall between
1500 and 1800, describes the ‘void’ course as being ‘decorative sugar
models and sweetmeats – confectioned flowers, nuts, spices, and fruit –
together with sweet spiced wines and distilled spirits’.28 By the seventeenth
century, diners tended to relocate to a separate building, purpose-built to
host this particular course of the feast.29

Tyler Cave, bouillabaisse soup course from Le Petit Chef, 2023.

Tyler Cave, caprese salad course from Le Petit Chef, 2023.

While amusements accompanied early banquets in the form of

dancers, musicians and jugglers, the food itself could also be fashioned as
entertainment. In the medieval feasts of England and northern Europe,
diners were treated to subtleties known in French as entremets,30 a version
of the ‘void’ course.
One twenty-first-century version of the medieval void takes the form
of a charming video projection, by 2024 available in more than 67 locations
around the world (from Dubai to Zanzibar), involving an apparently six-
inch-high chef dubbed ‘Le Petit Chef’ – brainchild of the Belgian animation
studio Skullmapping. Each restaurant that ‘employs’ ‘Le Petit Chef’ serves
up customized video interludes, projected from overhead cameras directly
onto the dining table, with a humorous scenario depicting the little culinary
wizard wrestling with oversized cooking implements and negotiating
mishaps – a barbecue, to cite just one example, proves to be very trying. In
this figure, ‘Le Petit Chef’ proudly displays his bouillabaisse, the real
version of which the diner will be shortly enjoying. Caprese salad is another
menu option, with ‘Le Petit Chef’ having to source vegetables from the
garden while in competition with animated foraging animals – one cheeky
mole is particularly memorable – that compete with the tiny cook toiling on
the diners’ behalf. The video projection remains once the real dish is placed,
wait staff being careful to align the actual plate as exactly as possible with
the virtual one. Ian Jones, when manager of the Victoria Marriott Inner
Harbour hotel in British Columbia, explained that his customers were
‘blown away and amazed’ when they actually saw it, often applauding as
though it was theatre.31 One might imagine medieval feasters reacting in a
similar way to the curiosities and entertainments served up during the ‘void’
course in earlier centuries.

‘Inedible’ Fare
‘Le Petit Chef’ introduces elements to the table that are, literally, inedible,
all of which are designed to entertain. But one group of historical menus
from Paris details items that seem very ill-placed on formal dining tables,
including rat, kangaroo, bear and antelope. One example comes from a
ceremonial occasion to celebrate the Christmas of 1870. During the Siege
of Paris (1870–71), hungry Parisians were forced to be very resourceful in
order to put enough food on the table and therefore found themselves
confronted with dishes that were far removed from their typical, daily fare.
Menus from this period are cause for curiosity, surprise and shock for
belated readers. But looking closely at these intriguing menus, viewers must
read beyond their first instincts – likely disgust, certainly sadness – to
glimpse the underlying desperation that motivated these historical diners.
Notably the drinks offerings on such menus suggest that at least wine
supplies had not been entirely depleted. As wine specialist Max Campbell
confirms, Latour Blanche, Palmer, Mouton and Romanée Conti are all top-
priced wines today, and they would have been appreciated at the time. The
menu itself, however, is intriguing in that it seems to be classically French
at its foundation. However, some of the meats have been replaced – tête
d’âne (donkey’s head) for the more typical tête de veau, for example,
consommé d’éléphant instead of the usual beef consommé. As Campbell
points out, the substitution of kangaroo in the classic civet dish involving
lièvre or lapin (hare or rabbit) could be based on the animals’ shared
tendency to move by hopping. ‘Chat flanqué de rats’ (cat surrounded by
rats) suggests that the cat was being served on a dish with the very animal
on which it preys.32 The exotics on this elegant Voisin restaurant menu are
an indication that, by December and the 99th day of the Siege, Parisians had
exhausted the supply of butcher meats, even horse and dog, and had
resorted to eating animals from the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. By
November restaurants and cafes were mostly shuttered, with hungry
Parisians sourcing food from government-run canteens.33
Christmas menu, 99em jour de siège, restaurant Voisin, 1870, print menu.
 Writing about wealthy patrons enjoying dishes with rat meat during the
Siege of Paris, historian Alistair Horne explains that ‘because of the lavish
sauces required to make [rats] palatable, they were essentially a rich man’s
dish; hence the famous menus of the Jockey Club, featuring such delicacies
as salmis de rats (rat salami).’34
In his 1871 classic, a first-hand book-length account of the events of
the siege, Oxford-affiliated Englishman Henry Markheim writes that ‘in
spite of government tariffs and regulations, it is almost impossible to find
meat anywhere’ and that ‘Horseflesh is eagerly bought up in the public
markets; the filet or choicest part is reserved for the tables of Messieurs the
Rich.’35 American medical reformer Robert Lowry Sibbet found his plans
to visit hospitals in the major centres of Europe upset but nevertheless could
not resist travelling to France to see events at first hand. His well-written
account, not published until 1892, explains the gradual deterioration of
conditions both for travellers and for hospital patients, the latter initially
treated to food that was better than in restaurants, but soon finding
themselves in overcrowded rooms together with smallpox victims.36 When
it came to the point that the zookeepers agreed to slaughter their two
elephants, Castor and Pollux, the animals were mourned as numbering
among the war dead.37 However, the zoo animals – elephants, zebras and
yaks – were sold at the exclusive elite butchers Courtier and DeBoos, and
even less exotic animals like dogs, cats and rats were sold at high prices. So
the average hungry Parisian did not benefit from eating the zoo.38
In marked contrast, as revealed by one menu in the outstanding
collection of royal menus gathered by Australian collector Jake Smith, the
Prussians continued to enjoy fine dining. On a menu for a meal held at the
Château de Versailles in Paris for Wilhelm I on 26 November 1870, the
bounty includes saddle of venison, turbot with anchovy sauce, speciality
smoked beef, cheese, bread and butter.
Unfortunately, 1870 wasn’t the only period in Parisian history when
meat was scarce. The late 1930s were also a time of privation, during which
Parisian diners were sceptical about the meats that restaurants were putting
on their plates. In an article exploring the various substitutions for rabbit,
Rebecca Spang notes:
 While printed menus bearing the words gibelotte de lapin seemed to offer
the diner some assurance, guides to Parisian life insisted that in all but
the most expensive restaurants, menus more closely resembled works of
escapist fiction than accurate renderings of the kitchen’s contents. Fish on
the menu, but none in the kitchen; rabbits on the menu and cats in the
stewpot – such were the hazards to which restaurant dining exposed the
unwary eater.39

The scandal especially concerned cats. Spang claims that ‘the restaurant
patron was instructed that lapin, in the context of the menu, always meant
chat.’40 A 1944 menu from Paris does offer terrine de lapin, at a time of
similar food scarcity towards the end of the Second World War. The
whimsical illustration of the hunter’s full basket presumably gave comfort
to Parisian diners, as would the visibly heartened, celebrating hunting dog
pups.
Dinner at the Palace of Versailles, 1870, print menu with handwriting.
 Often, of course, the line between what is edible and inedible is a
cultural one, born both of habit and community values. So, a menu might be
surprising to one viewer, but not at all to another. Insects are one excellent
example of this because only recently have Western diners come to see
them as a food source amenable to their diets. Once again, however, the
first forays for Western diners involve encounters with insects in disguise.
Typically, the consumption of insects in Western countries most often
involves products such as cricket powder or flour. In this form, consumers
can easily forget, or unknowingly enjoy, eating insects, distracted by the
delicious taste of treats like banana bread or pancakes. (Caveat emptor!)
Cricket flour provides a wide variety of nutrients and one survey that
Preston Hartwick describes finds that ‘after participants learned more about
entomophagy, [the practice of eating insects] most were open to eating
crickets, more so when it’s presented as “flour.”’41 In this case, disguising a
new food as a familiar one enables consumers to try new things without
moving too far out of their comfort zone. I myself also have cricket flour on
my shelf and do cook with it to add protein to various recipes.
Refusal or resistance when it comes to consuming insects can also be a
function of community taboos and dietary preference, rather than the
product of an extreme psychological or physiological reaction. Arnold Van
Huis conducts research on edible insects and analyses the culinary
preferences of different groups in African countries. Regarding insects, he
writes:

It appears that the different ethnic groups have different preferences, for
example the Mofu-Gudur in Cameroun eat a number of grasshopper
species (Acorypha picta, A. glaucopsis, Acrida bicolor, Oedaleus
senegalensis, Pyrgomorpha cognata, Truxalis johnstoni), which are not
eaten by the Haussa in Niger, and vice versa (Humbe tenuicornis) …
There are also prohibitions to eat insects, for example the Pygmies eat the
larvae and the nymphs of the Goliath beetle, but not the adult which is
considered sacred and used in fetishes … Members of termite clans in
Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe have certain
termite species as totems, and members are forbidden to eat winged
termites.42
Prescriptions for feasts and fasting, as well as ritual methods of food
preparation, service and consumption, can account for the logic underlying
the content of a majority of menus over time. It is also precisely because of
such constraints that menus still surprise, as when a particular food item
seems to evade the logic of either its exclusion or inclusion as an
acceptable, edible choice. Of the many possible examples I could include,
here are a few.
Raymonde Hacker, Carnier plein recompense du chien, 1944, print menu.
 Mary Lagroue explains that while Catholics refrain from eating meat
on Ash Wednesday and on Fridays, they can still eat fish, with the rationale
that fish are not warm-blooded.43 According to this logic, Catholics could
also eat frogs’ legs on those days since frogs are a cold-blooded
amphibian.44 Rena K. Quinton and Michele Ciccazzo discuss fasting in
Eastern Orthodox Christianity, beginning first with an outline of the general
rules when fasting: ‘[Eastern Orthodox Christians] are to abstain from meat
and meat products, dairy products, fish, olive oil and alcoholic beverages
(represented by the term “wine”) during fasts according to Church
doctrine.’45 Fish is allowed on certain days and the rules are more flexible
regarding other kinds of seafood: ‘Fish is allowed on only two days during
Great Lent, but more frequently during lesser fasts. Shellfish, such as clams
and shrimp, which have no backbones, as well as vegetable, nut and seed
oils are not prohibited.’46 In this case, it is the lack of a backbone that
makes some kinds of seafood more acceptable to eat while fasting.
James LaForest explores the phenomenon of eating muskrat during
Lent in certain Detroit communities. This is perhaps due to the fact that
muskrats as well as beavers spend a lot of time in water and thus qualify, in
some way, as ‘fish’.47 László Bartosiewicz, Alexandra Gyetvai and Hans-
Christian Küchelmann elaborate on this classification, noting that, in
particular for the beaver, ‘its flat, scaly tail figures as “the tail of a fish” in
learned writings, offering a license to eat beaver tails during Lent.’48 This
interpretive creativity enabled individuals fasting for Lent to experiment
with more unusual types of meat: ‘For prosperous people, fasting often
meant an opportunity and a challenge to consume extraordinary and
expensive food.’49
In the case of a mid-twentieth-century menu from the Sports Afield
Club in New York City, diners can treat themselves to all they can eat –
including muskrat – for a whopping $700.01. The menu cover boasts that
the restaurant serves ‘wild game of the world’, but each item seems to be
priced such that the possibility of one individual eating their way to value
with this ‘all-you-can-eat’ deal is unimaginable. In addition to familiar
favourites – shrimps, lobster, scallops, lamb – the menu offers an exotic
variety of other meats, from venison and pheasant to llama, ‘Morocco Coast
Baby Octopus’, ‘Ecuador Swordfish’, ‘Great Plains Buffalo’, ‘Catskill
Mountain Black Bear’, ‘Prong Horn Mexican Antelope’ and ‘Tropical
Possum’. The menu explains that chefs are ‘frequently able to process the
following rare and special foods’ upon request, including beaver and beaver
tail, water buffalo, caribou, Australian kangaroo, porcupine, ostrich eggs
and moose.
As well, the menu pays careful attention to drinks pairings, with all the
stars of French wine: champagne, Burgundy, Hermitage, Bordeaux, Alsace
and Loire. With my thanks to insights from Max Campbell, Wine Director
at Montreal’s well-respected restaurant Joe Beef, I call attention to Musigny
Blanc 1945, suggested as a pairing for the venison steak. Campbell notes
that this is the only White Grand Cru on the Côte de Nuits, today made by
only one producer, and extols its virtues as ‘one of the true rare wines of the
world’, especially the limited edition of 2,000 bottles in 2015. And note the
many champagnes suggested – a pairing tendency we see today, Campbell
explains, for cities with sophisticated clientele.50 Particularly lavish is one
wine appearing beside English Partridge, itself prepared in a champagne
sauce: ‘Chambertin 1943’.
More recently, the tradition of sampling unusual fare has been
combined with a careful adherence to sustainable food-sourcing practices.
Revamped for twenty-first-century sensibilities, the annual Explorers Club
banquet – traditionally held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria but now in the
Glasshouse near the Hudson River – treats its intrepid diners to a course of
‘exotics’ rather than traditional hors d’oeuvres at the opening of each
banquet, a course that, in 2015, included edible tarantulas.

Engaging Edibles
The notion that food can be made an intrinsic part of elaborate forms of
entertainment is, of course, in no way limited to history. The acclaimed
Copenhagen restaurant Alchemist, now having seen two extraordinarily
successful incarnations helmed by chef Rasmus Munk, offers a dining
experience of more than forty courses. In her blog, Zoe Bowker writes that
chef Munk’s ‘passion for pushing the boundaries and cheeky (if not
sometimes macabre) sense of humour [is] evident throughout the meal,
much to [the diner’s] delight’.51 Bowker notes that ‘much of the thrill of the
… experience is in the continual stream of surprises.’52 She finds the dishes
are ‘provocative, evocative – but not at the expense of taste’ and that
Nino’s Sports Afield Room, c. 1947–50, print menu.
 Our experience had us smiling ear to ear, altogether excited, elated and a
little bit nervous – something we haven’t felt for a very long time when it
comes to fine dining. This is experiential and experimental dining at its
best, something that has to be seen (and tasted) to be believed.53

In many of the courses, Munk relies on disguised food to achieve

electrifying effects. Friend and food enthusiast Brigitte Witt, who dined at
Alchemist in 2017, was served 47 courses over five hours.54 ‘It was a
theatre of the mind using food as a medium,’ she mused. About ‘the Ash
tray’, one of the early dishes served to her, she explained it was ‘intensely
delicious and one of the vilest things I have ever put in my mouth. King
crab – or was it Alaskan? – looked like cigarette butts. Ash was made with
black garlic, with a sprinkling of paprika. [The] visuals were vile.’55

Nino’s Sports Afield Room, c. 1947–50, print menu.

Communicating in Danish and using the Danish name for the dish,
Munk explained to Witt that his grandmother used to make ‘Burning Love’
– a mixture of potatoes, bacon and onions – while she smoked. The name,
the delicious food, the act of smoking and what we now fully understand
are its consequences to health, are completely at odds with one another.
Here, we have another delicate dance between foods that distance and yet
also attract the diner.

The Explorers Club, 69th Annual Dinner, 1973, print menu.

Witt recalls one other memorable dish from her evening at Alchemist:
what she remembers as ‘Purée of Heart’, a cut heart containing tartare
served on a vibrating dish, which made it appear to pulse. That last dramatic
addition was eventually removed from meal service, but only because the
vibrating mechanism was so hard to clean. It was served with an organ
donor card, a reminder for diners to opt in to organ donation. When the fish
course arrived, it was accompanied by a goldfish in a blender. The server
explained that the motor is disabled and that, over time, they took away the
fish food that was served with the plate, since visitors overfed the fish.
Altogether, Alchemist diners speak admiringly of the dazzling dishes,
which dare them to engage thoughtfully with their dinner.
Whimsical Objects
I turn now to two menus that engage diners and belated readers through
their visual appeal and whimsy. The first playful menu involves a set of five
playing cards representing a royal flush. The set, titled ‘The Winning
Hand’, represents offerings at the Twelfth Annual Dinner of the Gridiron
Club in Washington, DC, of 1897. The cards depict President-Elect William
McKinley and his opponent William Jennings Bryan, who had sparred on
the question of how best to bring the country out of economic depression.
Whereas McKinley endorsed the gold standard, Bryan advocated for a
hybrid standard based on gold and silver. McKinley won the day in 1896,
and hence the King card bears a gold coin to represent this symbolically.
Bryan is represented in a menu item called ‘Clear Turtle Soup, au Billee
Bryan’ – perhaps a tribute to his undeniable stamina in conscientiously
crossing the country in a private railway car, stopping to give multiple
speeches a day.56 Or possibly a nod to Bryan’s platform of humility – is not
a turtle a humble creature? – announced in his pivotal nomination campaign
speech of 1896 in which he sought to expand the definition of businessman
to include those genuinely working for wages.57
Heart with donor card, 2016.

Goldfish in blender, 2016.

The Queen card is also historically significant and speaks to these

menu cards being both important mementos of a particular moment and
objects of curiosity. Here the Queen is represented by Hawaii’s then queen,
Lili‘uokalani, who attended the inauguration of President McKinley in
March 1897. The following year, however, the Hawaiian Islands were
transferred to the United States, with Lili‘uokalani and other Hawaiian
supporters refusing to attend the ceremony and see their flag lowered and
the U.S. flag raised in its place. Belated readers must acknowledge that the
king was ultimately the one with the ‘winning hand’, the Hawaiian queen
eventually thinking of the United States as a knave.

Dinner menu, Gridiron Club, 1897, print playing cards.

The second whimsical menu is a small cardboard replica of a

deckchair, which I found myself desperately wanting to set up, except that
the Bodleian Library in Oxford has it safely mounted on acid-free backing.
Surprisingly, despite the elaborate design, there is no artist signature or
printer name visible. While the Bodleian has a number of menus from
meetings of the Old Chapel Royal Boys – former choristers from St James’s
Palace in London, honoured by royal invitation to join the choir – this is the
only one I found that takes three-dimensional form. The dinner, held on 8
May 1909, was sponsored by Louis Roederer champagne, the menu’s
colours echoing the company’s corporate palate. Some of the menu items
are reminiscent of the other dinners enjoyed by the Old Chapel Royal Boys
and not eye-catching in themselves. However, the ‘Bombe Plombière’ here
is unusual, adapted from the Bombe Florence, and curious given that the
dinner itself was held at the Florence Restaurant in London’s Soho, making
the Bombe Florence perhaps a more logical choice. Despite the rather
pedestrian-sounding adjective, ‘Plombière’ signifies a nod to the French
village of Plombières-les-Bains and refers to an ice cream based on almond
milk and custard, often with whipped cream and added kirsch-steeped
candied fruit.58 Quite delicious. Bombe Florence, by contrast, was likely a
creation of the establishment, details of which have been lost to the mists of
time.
Menu, eleventh dinner of the Association of Old Chapel Royal Boys, 1908,
print menu.
What Is a Menu Fit for the Gods?
So far in this book we have looked at menus of fare served to a wide variety
of consumers – children, adults, royalty and commoner. And we have
looked not just at the food offered, but also at the significance of such
choices as what food is served, in what order, and how it is described. One
last stop on our journey in Tastes and Traditions compels us to consider fare
that is particularly intriguing because selected almost entirely for its
symbolic potential: meals for the gods. We are told that, in biblical times,
when the angels visited Sarah in the desert to tell her she was soon to expect
a son, Abraham told her to welcome them and ‘knead and make cakes’ –
possibly the unleavened bread we know today as matzo. Abraham later
proved willing to make the supreme offering of his precious son Isaac.
Thankfully for both, God accepted a sacrificial lamb in Isaac’s place, the
offering of a lamb on the altar in keeping with sacrificial practices of the
time. By contrast, for millennia and still today in South Asia, Hindu
religious practice holds another mammal, the cow, sacred. Hence the Hindu
religion prohibits the consumption of cow’s meat. Nevertheless, some
Hindu goddesses are honoured with gifts of other meats available in the
region: goat, for example, cockerels and so on.
Spirit houses at a road curve, Ko Samui, Thailand, 2016.

But perhaps some of the most intriguing and varied divine menus are
visible in Thailand, where small spirit houses or shrines are constructed to
‘a deity, guardian of the soil or the ghosts of former inhabitants’, intended
to protect the building and its inhabitants.59 According to Thai residents,
these spirits are not necessarily intending to kill or cause serious harm to
people, but if accidents or bad events occur, it can be explained by someone
failing to give the spirits enough offerings.60 Although most Thai people are
Buddhist, this spiritual practice seems to combine elements from astrology,
ghosts, Hindu gods, Chinese mythology, magic, superstition and ancient
animist beliefs.61
 So, what do Thai residents feed their spirits? In my own travels in
Thailand, when I did peer into a number of spirit houses, my curiosity
piqued, I concluded that the consensus seemed to be that soda pop (fizzy
drinks) was often on the menu. The World’s correspondent in Bangkok
writes that

There is a generally agreed-upon menu of ghost-friendly food and drink

offerings. Rice and plain water will do in a pinch (or if you’re broke). But
Thai spirits would much rather receive bananas or coconuts. Better still,
some starchy, eggy desserts. The best offering of all, however, is red,
fizzy soda. Preferably a bottle of strawberry-flavored Fanta.62

Chatgaew Pinjulai, ‘a 50-year-old woman who sells Fanta and other spirit
offerings by the roadside’, explains that

Angelic spirits like sweet things … and Strawberry Fanta is nothing if

not sweet. The typical Thai-sized serving is an 8.5-ounce bottle packed
with 32 grams of sugar. It is a high-calorie, syrupy brew, perhaps best
suited for beings that cannot gain mass.63

Why might red soda pop be appropriate for a food offering to an esteemed
deity? Per Meistrup, who took the photo shown here, suggests that it might
‘symbolize blood’.64 Thinking of it as an alternative to animal sacrifices in
this modern era of processed foods may be one possibility. However,
Patrick Winn captures a priceless quote heard on The Ghost Radio, ‘a call-
in program devoted entirely to paranormal activity in Thailand’, from one
Thai who deplores such a suggestion.65 The speaker’s sheer vehemence
surely carries conviction. Watcharapol ‘Jack’ Fukjidee, the host of The
Ghost Radio, claims that angels are strictly vegetarian. ‘Angels want fruit
and Fanta and other nice things. They won’t touch anything bloody, nothing
that was killed. Only a demon would be interested in that.’66
Of course, at some level, we suspect that angels – and other beings of
celestial realms – do not require physical sustenance. Instead, they are
surely sustained by menus composed of symbolic fare, benefiting from and
bestowing blessings on those who serve them and select what to offer them
in life as in literature. That some of the food served up in the spirit houses
of Thailand does get consumed could suggest that the gods can take
advantage of physical sustenance. Or, more likely, does it not also suggest
that hungry mortals take advantage of the spiritual fare readily on offer, a
practice that, like early-morning offerings to the Buddhist monks in that
country, contributes to sustaining the community? To my knowledge, there
are no written menus involved in this practice, no rigid prescriptions for
food selection or quantity. Rather, spirit houses and their daily menu
offerings make tangible the spirit of giving and sharing that is at the heart of
the endeavour of menu creation, of making meaning through the acts of
food selection, service and consumption.

OceanofPDF.com
 CONCLUSI
ON:
WHAT
MENUS
CAN
DO

OceanofPDF.com
M
enus whet our appetites. They tell us stories. They open windows
on our past. They are designed both to pique and satisfy our
curiosity. Menus in this book will also enable you to entertain or
stump your friends with a wide range of food-related trivia. What soda was
originally advertised for its properties as an intellectual – even a nutritious –
drink? And what soda is fit fare for the gods? When were hot dogs served to
royalty? Why did Parisians once resort to eating zoo animals? What are
some of the ways in which adults have devised rule-based food rituals to
create a space for play at mealtimes? What can one make with Bromose and
a little water? What is the first temptation in a small blast of wind? In Tastes
and Traditions I have moved across themes and over space and time, both
to tempt readers to ask probing questions and to offer satisfying answers to
sate their appetites.
Menus, by definition, promise to serve as guides for diners, presenting
or at times clarifying food choices. But in Tastes and Traditions I have
argued that menus are also – and even more so – strategic documents: they
shape diners’ choices, guide diners towards particular decisions and
enhance their dining experiences. In particular, I have scrutinized how
menus attract attention, inviting diners to engage with food’s potential for
interaction, play and performance. I have also explored the ways in which
menus continue to engage those I call belated readers, readers like you, who
are removed from the original dining moment by miles and years and who
approach these same menus with all the knowledge they have accumulated.
If diners were inevitably influenced by the practical imperatives of hunger
and personal food tastes, belated readers – who, after all, expect from
menus not the food itself but rather the pleasures of the page, the charms of
the concept – are free to read ‘between the items’, as it were, to discover
what these menus can tell us about the times in which they were constructed
and designed.
This exploration was driven by four central questions. What is a menu?
What does it contain? What does it do? And why does it matter? I hope that
if this book only begins to provide some answers to these questions, it will
compel you to investigate the terrain of menus further. In each chapter, I
have offered answers in relation to the particular menus chosen for the
insights they offer up through their images and text and the connotations
that emerge between them. Drawing on the evidence provided by the menus
themselves, I have looked at: what people of a particular place and time ate
and enjoyed; how particular dishes or the way they are described conveyed
contemporary notions of health or of the region or country they came from;
how the particular design of the menu contributed to the dining experience;
and what might underlie some menu items’ curious names and descriptions.
In each chapter, I also considered menus’ different audiences, both
diners of the original moment and belated readers. Sometimes, those two
audiences are worlds apart – desperately hungry, besieged Parisians in
1870, for example, and readers in the twenty-first century who look at that
historical menu with absolute horror. Or 1960s diners enchanted by the
romance and elegance of a couple depicted in silhouette enjoying a cigarette
after their meal, as compared with twenty-first-century readers who are well
acquainted with the dramatic images of tobacco’s carcinogenic effects now
required on cigarette packaging.
But equally surprising is how the relationships between diners and
belated readers are sometimes closer than we might ever have imagined. In
the chapter exploring what menus tell us about time-specific notions of
health, for example, I found it striking how the fundamental principles of
healthy eating – balance, moderation and self-discipline – have persisted
over the centuries. And in the chapter exploring menus that intrigue we saw
how, over the centuries, meals have served as opportunities for solving
puzzles or simply for engaging in playful games: from the void course of
the medieval feast, through the riddling practices of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to the dazzling delights of some of today’s best
restaurants.
H. Johnson, Holborn Restaurant, Savage Club Lodge, 1891, print menu.

Ultimately, what I have endeavoured to do is to emphasize the

persistence of key menu elements over time and across contexts despite the
myriad variations in menu design. How, for instance, did menus maintain a
balance between familiarity and novelty, and how did they propose the
ways food and the experience of sharing it could contribute to the
development of community and individual well-being?
I will leave you with examples of striking menus that evoke a number
of the different themes discussed in the book. One three-dimensional menu,
which assembles to form a pyramid shape, commemorates a banquet from
February 1891 at the very grand Holborn Restaurant in London that was a
meeting of the exclusive gentlemen’s club called the Savage Club to install
or appoint a number of club officers. The Holborn was described by one
commentator as a restaurant that added ‘a spice of poetry to the dull prose
of everyday life’.1 In a study exploring the wide-ranging influences on
British restaurant menus in the late nineteenth century, Brenda Assael notes
that in 1882 the Holborn offered diners menu items in French and English,
and desserts with a Mediterranean or Levantine flavour – olives, raisins and
almonds, pistachio jelly and Italian meringue.2 However, for this particular
dinner, the main courses were decidedly British – ‘Saddle of Mutton’ and
pheasants – and the desserts seemingly French: ‘Ice Soufflé’, ‘Parisian
Jelly’, ‘Charlotte à la Russe’, ‘Apricots Meringués’. Only the graphics
allude to the world beyond Europe.
 Indeed, the bold and discomfiting graphics surely suggested an
alternative interpretation of this bohemian club’s declared namesake, the
eighteenth-century poet and sometime dramatist Richard Savage, who was
convicted of murder and died a pauper. A profligate, one might say, Savage
is best known from the biography written about him by Samuel Johnson.
The club was inaugurated in 1857, and a letter sent to invite prospective
members to join explained innocuously enough that it would include
‘gentlemen connected with literature and the fine arts, and warmly
interested in the promotion of Christian knowledge’.3 While the menu,
which folds into a pyramidal (perhaps tepee-like?) shape, evokes the
different aspects of a menu’s function – serving as a record of the dishes
served and the key officers present as well as a decorative, three-
dimensional memento. The menu, however, may well be disturbing to many
belated readers given the bold graphics depicting Indigenous figures in
stereotypical, visual shorthand, which have little or nothing to do with the
poetry of John Savage himself.
House Savage Club Dinner, G. S. Jealous in the Chair, 1889, print menu.
 Another Savage Club menu, this one from the previous year, 1890,
includes startling visuals, this time accompanied by the declaration ‘You
may smoke!’ The artist was Herbert Johnson, an American cartoonist.4 Such
racist and exoticist menus for Savage Club dinners were phased out of
circulation by the later years of the decade. What we must remember,
though, is that these early 1890s menus were created at the height of British
colonial expansion.

Fork in the Rout(ine), Oxford Food Symposium Young Chefs, 2023, menu
card.

I include the Savage Club menus because I believe they provide us

with examples of just how far we have journeyed in both our understanding
of the dangers inherent in tobacco and in our recognition of the role our
forebears played in unfairly and wrongly subjugating Indigenous peoples.
While we cannot undo the past, and although there is still an immense
amount of work to be done in providing restitution for past wrongs and in
redefining our relationships with Indigenous peoples across the globe, I
believe that, today, we are committed to pursuing a better path.

Fork in the Rout(ine), Oxford Food Symposium Young Chefs, 2023, menu
card.

In marked contrast, I share with you a much more recent menu. I was
fortunate enough to enjoy both the menu itself and the fare it presented at
first hand; it was designed by an international group of young chefs for the
last meal of the 2023 Oxford Food Symposium on food rules and ritual.
Like the pyramid-shaped Savage Club menu, it, too, was deliberately
created to be a memento. In contrast to the 1891 teepee-shaped menu for
the Savage Club dinner, with its squarely European offerings, this one is
remarkably varied, showcasing cuisines from around the world – from
Lithuania to South Africa to South Korea. And rather than depicting these
cuisines from a distance, in this menu we hear the voices of young chefs’
embodied knowledge. An extraordinarily beautiful vegetarian menu, it
features the ceramics of Jinok Kim-Eicken on the cover, the menu itself
designed by Jake Tilson. The lunch was titled ‘Fork in the Rout(ine)’ and
included an explicit statement about how the four young chefs saw their
cooking practice as contributing to a sustainable future. And the meal was
indeed delicious, nourishment for both body and soul. From South African
rosé wine to the dazzling deep pink of the cold, marinated soup of kefir and
beetroot and the spicy tomato kimchi, the meal offered surprises for eyes
and tastebuds alike. The menu’s afterlife as a memento of the occasion
invites us to watch closely as the stars of these talented young chefs
continue to rise. It also reminds us of the ways we can gain fulfilment from
challenging ourselves to make our meals meaningful in myriad ways and, at
the end of the day, of just how much menus can and do matter. After all,
menus remind us of past tastes and traditions, inspiring to innovate in ways
that forge and shape new ones.
Cold marinated soup of kefir and beetroot from the 2023 Oxford Food
Symposium.
OceanofPDF.com
 REFERENCES

Introduction: Where Can Menus Take Us?

1 Lake of the Woods Milling Company, La Cuisinière Five Roses
(Montreal, 1915), p. 489. Founded in 1888, Five Roses was a Canadian
flour brand. It was sold in 2007, but its iconic sign still dominates
Montreal’s skyline.
2 Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (New
York, 2014), p. 9.
3 Jean-Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in
France (Berkeley, CA, 2007), pp. 3, 76–7.
4 Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern
Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2020), p. 2.
5 See ‘Kids’ Sci-Fi Afternoon Tea’, www.ampersandhotel.com, accessed 6
May 2024.
6 ‘Chapter 11 Petition Is Filed by Sambo’s’, New York Times,
www.nytimes.com, 28 November 1981.
7 ‘History of Sambo’s Restaurant’, www.atomicredhead.com, 26 February
2018.
8 Phil McCausland, ‘Sambo’s, Which Once Had 1,100 Restaurants,
Changes Name amid National George Floyd Protests’, www.nbcnews.com,
6 June 2020.
9 Jim Heimann, Steven Heller and John Mariani, eds, Menu Design in
America: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design,
1850–1985 (Cologne, 2011), pp. 185–90, 429.
10 Jan Whitaker, ‘Name Trouble: Aunt Jemima’s’, www.restaurant-
ingthroughhistory.com, 28 June 2020; Jan Whitaker, ‘Black Waiters in
White Restaurants’, www.restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com, 11 September
2022.
11 Nadra Nittle, ‘Why Did It Take So Long for Food Companies to
Rebrand Their Racist Products?’, www.civileats.com, 25 May 2021.
12 Lily Cho, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada
(Toronto, 2010), p. 86.
13 Maria Godoy, ‘Lo Mein Loophole: How U.S. Immigration Law Fueled a
Chinese Restaurant Boom’, www.npr.org, 22 February 2016.
14 Cho, Eating Chinese, p. 86; Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant, pp.
8, 184–5.
15 Phoebe Thomas, ‘Sainte-Barbe, the Beginning of Christmas in
Provence’, www.loumessugo.com, 3 December 2021.

Chapter One: Feasts for the Eyes

1 See ‘Oilles’, www.cnrtl.fr, accessed 3 August 2023.
2 Cora Michael, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)’,
www.metmuseum.org, May 2010.
3 Ibid.
4 Alan Curtis Birnholz, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’, www.britannica.com,
20 November 2021.
5 Ibid.
6 John David Ike, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Disability and Art in Fin-de-
Siècle Paris’, Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation, www.jhrehab.org, 2
May 2017.
7 Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting,
1860s–1900s (Lebanon, NH, 2014), p. 43.
8 Ibid., p. 58.
9 Birnholz, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’.
10 Michael, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’; Stuart Hallifax, ‘Will Owen’s Old
London Town’, www.greatwarlondon.wordpress.com, 9 January 2015.
11 Ibid.; George Stewart, ‘Union-Castle Line, 1900 to 1977’,
www.rhodesianstudycircle.org.uk, 20 July 2019.
12 Albert Robida, Le vingtième siècle (Paris, 1883), p. 78.
13 My thanks to Max Campbell, Wine Director at Joe Beef, Montreal, for
these insights. Correspondence with the author, 21 June 2023.
14 Ibid.
15 See ‘Refrigeration and Refrigerators’, www.energy.gov, accessed 3
August 2023.
16 ‘New Realism: A Poetic Recycling of Reality’,
https://mediation.centrepompidou.fr, April 2005.
17 ‘Our Team’, MenuEngineers.com, www.menuengineers.com, 13 May
2021.
18 Paul J. McVety, B. J. Ware and C. L. Ware, Fundamentals of Menu
Planning, 3rd edn (Hoboken, NJ, 2009), p. 140.
19 Albin G. Seaberg, Menu Design: Merchandising and Marketing, 4th edn
(New York, 1991), p. 23.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 24.
22 McVety, Ware and Ware, Fundamentals of Menu Planning, p. 149.
23 Erik Gregersen, ‘QR Code’, www.britannica.com, 31 October 2023.
24 My thanks to Masako Ishii for these insights. Correspondence with the
author, 17 June 2023.

Chapter Two: Menus as Mementos

1 ‘Greetings from the Smithsonian: A Postcard History’,
www.siarchives.si.edu, 7 March 2011.
2 ‘Mohonk History’, www.mohonk.com, accessed 5 July 2023.
3 James D. Porterfield, Dining by Rail: The History and Recipes of
America’s Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine (New York, 1993), p. 189.
4 Clint Roswell and Marcia Cramer, ‘Hail Eleanor! Mark 100th Birthday of
Mrs. FDR’, Daily News (New York), 12 October 1984.
5 ‘Historical Highlights’, www.explorers.org, accessed 9 December 2023.
6 The Explorers Club, ‘1987 Explorers Club Annual Dinner: Exotics’,
1987, Explorers Club Annual Dinners Archive, NYU Special Collections.
7 Hunter Cabot, ‘The Significance of Serving Deep-Fried Tarantulas’,
www.medium.com, 18 June 2021.
8 Dmitri Gheorgheni, ‘The Thirteen Club: Debunkers or Mythmakers?’,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition, www.h2g2.com, 30
October 2015.
9 Mary McKee, ‘Defying Superstitions – London’s Thirteen Club’,
www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, 13 January 2017.
10 Sadie Stein, ‘Morituri te Salutamus’, www.theparisreview.org, 13 March
2015.
11 Siobhan O’Shea, ‘The Thirteen Club – What Did a Jolly Gentlemen’s
Club Have to Do with Friday 13th?’, The Practical Mythologist,
www.medium.com, 13 April 2018.
12 ‘Thirteen Club at Dinner: Prince Pandian Hampered by River Craft in
His Efforts to Speak – A Trial by Jury’, New York Times, 14 June 1899.
13 McKee, ‘Defying Superstitions – London’s Thirteen Club’.
14 Jonathan Barrett and Jill Gralow, ‘Australian Anti-Aircraft Gunner
Recounts World War Two Bombing of Darwin’, www.reuters.com, 12
August 2020.
15 Rebecca Federman, ‘When Menus Talk: The Bernard Fread Menu
Collection’, in Food and Communication: Proceedings of the Oxford
Symposium on Food 2015, ed. Mark McWilliams (Oxford, 2016), p. 160.
16 Ibid., p. 162.
17 ‘Menu – SS Kamo Maru, NYK Line, Dinner, 26 Feb 1939’,
https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au, accessed 4 July 2023.
18 Celia Pullen, ‘Post World War II British Migration to Australia’,
https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au, accessed 4 July 2023.
19 ‘Prison Meals’, Abashiri Prison Museum, www.kangoku.jp, accessed 17
May 2022.
20 Michelle Mason, ‘Contested Sites of an Enduring Colonial Past’, in
Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan:
Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State (New York, 2012),
p. 160.
21 Albert ‘Ru-Al’ Jones, Our Last Meals?: San Quentin Death Row Cook
Book (San Quentin, CA, 2015), p. 6.
22 Ibid., p. 5.
23 Timothy Hicks, ‘Nearly 15,000 Meals Per Day Served at San Quentin
with a Special Touch’, www.sanquentinnews.com, 16 March 2020.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Timothy Hicks, ‘Vegan Meals Could Be an Option’,
www.sanquentinnews.com, 8 August 2018.
27 Lizette Alvarez, ‘You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love a Kosher Prison
Meal’, New York Times, www.nytimes.com, 21 January 2014.
28 Henry Voigt, ‘The Halcyon Days of San Quentin’,
www.theamericanmenu.com, 22 November 2016.
29 Quoted in Cara de Silva, ed., In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the
Women of Terezín (Lanham, MD, 2006), pp. XXVIII–XXIX. Also quoted in Layla
Eplett, ‘Remembrance and Resistance through the Recipes of the
Theresienstadt Ghetto’, Scientific American Blog Network,
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com, 18 December 2016.
30 De Silva, In Memory’s Kitchen, pp. XXVII–XXIX. Cernyak-Spatz wrote a
memoir that may include more details; Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, Joel
Shatzky and Anita Wyman, Protective Custody: Prisoner 34042 (Cortland,
NY, 2005).
31 Rohini Chaki, ‘The Extraordinary “Cookbooks” Left Behind by
Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims’, Atlas Obscura,
www.atlasobscura.com, 5 June 2019; ‘Icarus Films: Mina’s Recipe Book’,
www.icarusfilms.com, accessed 13 November 2021.
32 Halstead Clotworthy Fowler and Dorothy Wagner, Recipes out of Bilibid
(New York, 1946).
33 Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, ‘Cookbooks as Resources for Social
History’, in Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association
Companion to Food History, ed. Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin and Ken
Albala (Berkeley, CA, 2014), p. 285.
34 Fowler and Wagner, Recipes out of Bilibid, p. IX.
35 Ibid., p. VIII.
36 Ibid., pp. 73–4.
37 Ibid., p. 47.
38 Ibid., pp. 48–9.
39 Hongda Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of
My Years in China’s Gulag (New York, 1994).
40 Ibid., p. 96.
41 Ibid., p. 95.

Chapter Three: Cultural Encounters

1 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of
French Cuisine (Chicago, IL, 2006), p. 17.
2 Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (New
York, 2014), p. 184.
3 Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child, Mastering the Art of
French Cooking (New York, 1961); Sean J. S. Chen, trans., The Way of
Eating: Yuan Mei’s Manual of Gastronomy (Great Barrington, MA, 2019).
4 See ‘Sagamité’, https://vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca.
5 See ‘Picoune salée’, www.laparlure.com.
6 Eric C. Rath, Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity (London, 2016),
p. 10.
7 See ibid. and also Rath and Stephanie Assmann, eds, Japanese Foodways,
Past and Present (Chicago, IL, 2010).
8 ‘Pavilion to Tell Story of Africa’, Christian Science Monitor, 15 April
1964, p. B6.
9 ‘Messageries Maritimes’, www.histarmar.com.ar, accessed 12 July 2023;
‘Le Senegal’, www.messageries-maritimes.org, accessed 12 July 2023.
10 Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Art in America, LXXI/5 (1983),
pp. 118–31.
11 Jurafsky, The Language of Food, p. 19.
12 Ibid.
13 Leah Freeman-Haskin, ‘Jamaica Accepts Motto “Out of Many, One
People”’, www.travelnoire.com, 3 April 2019.
14 Selena Hoy, ‘A Short History of Menus in Japan’,
www.appetitepress.com, 31 August 2021.
15 Katie Rawson and Elliott Shore, Dining Out: A Global History of
Restaurants (London, 2019), p. 89.
16 Samuel King, ‘Consuming the Orient at the 1876 Centennial
Exhibition’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, CXLII/3
(2018), p. 390.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 391.
19 Ross G. Forman, ‘“Nothing Corresponding to It in China”: Asian Food
at London’s International Health Exhibition, 1884’, Food, Culture and
Society, XXIV/2 (2021), pp. 202–26.
20 Bruce Makoto Arnold, Tanfer Emin Tunç and Raymond Douglas Chong,
eds, Chop Suey and Sushi from Sea to Shining Sea: Chinese and Japanese
Restaurants in the United States (Fayetteville, AR, 2018), p. 20.
21 Ibid.
22 Sue Cheung, Chinglish (London, 2019).
23 Ibid., p. 59.
24 Ibid., pp. 71–86.
25 Ibid., p. 262.
26 Justine Sterling, ‘The Many Origin Stories of Chop Suey’, Food and
Wine, www.foodandwine.com, 6 September 2022.
27 Dave Roos, ‘7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World’,
www.history.com, 3 September 2019; ‘History of Printing’,
https://en.wikipedia.org, accessed 7 March 2023; Dennis Duncan, Index, A
History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the
Digital Age, 2nd edn (New York, 2023); Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book:
The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, 1st edn (New York, 1990); Richard
T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain: A General History from Its Beginnings
to the Present Day (Oxford, 1978); Graham Spence Hudson, The Design
and Printing of Ephemera in Britain and America, 1720–1920 (London,
2008); ‘China’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. S. Eliot and
J. Rose (Malden, MA, 2019), pp. 104–5.
28 Jeremy Norman, ‘The Diamond Sutra, the Earliest Surviving Dated
Complete Printed Book’, www.historyofinformation.com, 6 April 2022.
29 Nicholas Kiefer, ‘Economics and the Origin of the Restaurant’, Cornell
Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, XLIII/4 (1 August 2002), p.
58.
30 Rawson and Shore, Dining Out, p. 10.
31 Ibid., p. 24.
32 Dave Roos, ‘When Did People Start Eating in Restaurants?’,
www.history.com, 18 May 2020; Rawson and Shore, Dining Out, p. 24.
33 Stephen H. West, ‘The Interpretation of a Dream: The Sources,
Evaluation, and Influence of the “Dongjing Meng Hua Lu”’, T’oung Pao,
LXXI (1985), p. 85.
34 Thomas Prasch, ‘Eating the World: London in 1851’, Victorian
Literature and Culture, XXXVI/2 (2008), pp. 587–602.
35 Rosemary Raza, In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India,
1740–1857 (New Delhi, 2007), pp. 93–4. See also Colleen Taylor Sen,
Curry (London, 2009).
36 David Burton, The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in
India (London, 1994), p. 75.
37 Elizabeth Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and
the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, Journal of Modern History,
LXXX/4 (2008), pp. 865–901.
38 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London, 1883), p. 27.
39 ‘Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech’, www.theguardian.com,
19 April 2001.
40 Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”’, p. 879; Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A
Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, illustrated edn (Oxford, 2007), p. 2.
41 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), pp.
33–40.
42 Personal correspondence, 22 June 2023.
43 Eleanor Aldridge, ‘20 Baffling Menu Mistakes from around the World’,
www.roughguides.com, 1 April 2020.
44 Allen Watkin, ‘Chinglish 1’, www.flickr.com, 28 December 2009.
45 Viktorija Gabulaitė, ‘80 of the Funniest Menu Translation Fails Ever’,
www.boredpanda.com, 16 September 2015.

Chapter Four: Menus for Children and for the Children We Once
Were
1 Kerryn Higgs, ‘How the World Embraced Consumerism’, www.bbc.com,
20 January 2021.
2 Françoise Hache-Bissette, ‘Quand je serai grand(e), je serai gastronome:
Le livre pour enfants comme outil de transmission des savoirs culinaires’,
Revue de la BNF, I/49 (2015), pp. 32–7. The title translates as ‘when I grow
up, I will be a gourmet.’
3 More information on these images can be found in Chapter Six, ‘Riddle
Me This: Menus That Intrigue’.
4 Alison Laitner and Cathie Paton, ‘Schools and Education in Birmingham
in WW1’, www.historypin.org, 11 April 2017.
5 ‘The Golden Age of American Railroading’, Iowa University Libraries,
exhibition June-August 1989, www.lib.uiowa.edu, accessed 11 May 2024.
6 Thomas Clark Shedd and Geoffrey Freeman Allen, ‘Railroad History’,
www.britannica.com, 16 December 2022; ‘Four Special Spikes’,
www.nps.gov, 16 June 2023; Daniel Francis, ‘The Last Spike’,
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca, 23 January 2017.
7 Bill Lockhart et al., ‘Horlick’s Malted Milk’, www.sha.org, accessed 3
August 2023.
8 Jan Whitaker, ‘Children’s Menus’, www.restaurant-
ingthroughhistory.com, 22 April 2018.
9 See ‘Frederick and Nelson’, www.thedepartmentstoremuseum.org,
accessed 3 August 2023.
10 See ‘Soda History’, www.teamsterslocal812.com, accessed 3 August
2023.
11 Muriel Draaisma, ‘Fine Dining Restaurants Should Have Right to Ban
Young Children, Writer and Mother Says’, www.cbc.ca, 10 April 2017.
12 See, for example, ‘Anthology Menu Volume One’,
www.thefatduck.co.uk, accessed 11 May 2024.
13 Pascal Cariss, ‘The Fat Duck’, www.thefatduck.co.uk, accessed 3
August 2023.
14 Blumenthal, ‘Like a Kid in a Sweetshop’, the neighbourhood. See the
video and Blumenthal’s explanation of ways literary classics can inspire
menus at www.the-neighbourhood.com/work/projects/like-a-kid-in-a-
sweetshop, accessed 12 May 2024.
15 Heston Blumenthal Team, post at
www.facebook.com/HestonBlumenthalTeam, accessed 11 May 2024.

Chapter Five: Health on the Menu

1 Alan W. Cuthbert and Floyd E. Bloom, ‘Anesthetic’,
www.britannica.com, 23 October 2023.
2 ‘The Pure Food and Drug Act’, U.S. Capitol Visitor Center,
www.visitthecapitol.gov, accessed 12 July 2023.
3 Becky Little, ‘When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push
Smoking’, www.history.com, 13 September 2018.
4 ‘Reflections: Smoke ’em If You Got ’em’, www.armyhistory.org,
accessed 12 July 2023.
5 G. D. Smith, S. A. Ströbele and M. Egger, ‘Smoking and Health
Promotion in Nazi Germany’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health, LXVIII/3 (1994), pp. 220–23.
6 Wayne Hall, ‘The 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and
Health’, Addiction, CXVII (2022), pp. 3170–75.
7 Aurelia Foster, ‘What Is the UK Smoking Ban, How Will It Work and
When Will It Start?’, www.bbc.com/news/health, 23 April 2024.
8 ‘Did Coca-Cola Ever Contain Cocaine?’, www.justthinktwice.gov,
accessed 12 July 2023.
9 Claudia Geib, ‘The Weird (and Wired) Truth behind What’s Really in
Coca-Cola’, www.eater.com, 2 March 2023.
10 ‘Coca-Cola’s Cocaine Connection Is Worth Billions’,
www.nationalpost.com, 12 April 2023.
11 ‘Hemo’, www.jotis.org, accessed 12 July 2023.
12 ‘Stories from Ancient China: Yi Yin, Great Prime Minister of the Shang
Dynasty’, www.clearharmony.net, 20 July 2012.
13 Melanie Byrd Hollar and John P. Dunn, eds, Cooking through History: A
Worldwide Encyclopedia of Food with Menus and Recipes (Santa Barbara,
CA, 2021), p. 56.
14 Ana San Gabriel, Kumiko Ninomiya and Hisayuki Uneyama, ‘The Role
of the Japanese Traditional Diet in Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Patterns
around the World’, Nutrients, X/2 (2018), p. 173.
15 ‘Washoku, Traditional Dietary Cultures of the Japanese, Notably for the
Celebration of New Year’, www.unesco.org, accessed 12 July 2023.
16 Gabriel, Ninomiya and Uneyama, ‘The Role of the Japanese Traditional
Diet’, p. 173.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Dan Buettner, ‘This Japanese 80% Diet Rule Can Help You Live a
Longer Life, Says Longevity Researcher’, www.cnbc.com, 10 November
2020.
20 Eric C. Rath, Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity (London,
2016), p. 73.
21 Natasha Frost, ‘How a Special Diet Kept the Knights Templar Fighting
Fit’, www.atlasobscura.com, 8 May 2018.
22 Ibid.
23 Johnincornwall, ‘Templar Recipes’, www.historum.com, 9 January
2015.
24 Brian Johnston, ‘The World’s First Vegetarian Restaurant – It’s in
Switzerland of Course’, www.internationaltraveller.com, 12 October 2022.
25 Henry Voigt, ‘Om Shanti Los Angeles, 1971’,
www.theamericanmenu.com, 1 April 2021.
26 Emma Orlow, ‘Eleven Madison Park’s Vegan-Only Restaurant Has a
Secret Meat Room for the Rich’, Eater New York, https://ny.eater.com, 29
September 2021.
27 Hollar and Dunn, eds, Cooking through History, p. 56.
28 Ibid., p. 123.
29 Ibid., pp. 130–31.
30 Ibid.
31 Rob Preece, Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought
(Vancouver, 2008), p. 268.
32 ‘USA: 19th Century, Bronson Alcott, 1799–1888’, www.ivu.org, accessed
12 July 2023.
33 Alexander Gordon, ‘Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–
1900/Cowherd, William’, www.wikisource.org, accessed 12 July 2023.
34 ‘Vegetarian Dining Rooms’, Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian
Messenger, XI/145 (January 1884), p. 94.
35 Alice Ross, ‘Health and Diet in 19th-Century America: A Food
Historian’s Point of View’, Historical Archaeology, XXVII/2 (1993), p. 44.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 J. Wayne Lazar, ‘American Neurophysiology and Two Nineteenth-
Century American Physiological Societies’, Journal of the History of the
Neurosciences, XXVI/2 (2017), p. 10.
39 Ibid.
40 Jenna Weissman Joselit, ‘When Vegetarians Were Rare’,
www.forward.com, 3 August 2007.
41 Sarah Lohman, ‘History Dish Mondays: Protose’,
www.fourpoundsflour.com, 22 February 2009.
42 Ellen Terrell, ‘The Battle Creek Diet System: A Pamphlet and Birth of
the Fake Meat Industry’, www.loc.gov, 19 February 2020.
43 ‘John Harvey Kellogg’, www.wikipedia.org, accessed 10 May 2024.
44 ‘James Caleb Jackson’, www.wikipedia.org, accessed 10 May 2024.
45 Ibid.
46 Franklin S. Grace, ‘Teaching the Public How to Eat’, American
Restaurant Magazine, X (1927), p. 60.

Chapter Six: Riddle Me This: Menus That Intrigue

1 See Emma Orlow, ‘Eleven Madison Park’s Vegan-Only Restaurant Has a
Secret Meat Room for the Rich’, Eater New York, https://ny.eater.com, 29
September 2021.
2 ‘Dinner Menu’, www.brennansneworleans.com/menus/dinner, accessed
10 May 2024. See also ‘brennansnola and chefsgreatestplates’,
www.instagram.com/reel/C5kJRU-Ojiq.
3 ‘Arts and Culture’, Publick Register; or, The Weekly Magazine, 10
January 1741, p. 10.
4 ‘Types of Food in Eighteenth Century England’,
https://websites.umich.edu, accessed 5 July 2023.
5 India Mandelkern, ‘The King’s Feast’, Homo Gastronomicus,
www.homogastronomicus.blogspot.com, 9 May 2011. Note there is a typo
in the manuscript number for the British Library that Mandelkern cites: it is
15916, and not 15956.
6 ‘George II of England: Humorous Bill of Fare for His Dinner on
Christmas Day: 1755’, British Library, London, MS 15916, fol. 38,
https://searcharchives.bl.uk, accessed 11 August 2023.
7 Ibid.
8 ‘Terminology: What Is Sewing Carbage? (Or Cabbage, or Garbage)’,
www.thedreamstress.com, 24 January 2015.
9 John Murray, Quarterly Review, CXIX (1866), p. 126.
10 Laurence Grove, ‘La Caricature comme pilier du premier comic du
monde: Glasgow Looking Glass (1825)’, in L’Image railleuse: La satire
visuelle du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, ed. Laurent Baridon, Frédérique
Desbuissons and Dominic Hardy (Paris, 2019), pp. 247–63.
11 Murray, Quarterly Review, p. 126.
12 Ithaca Daily Journal (Ithaca, NY), 28 September 1898.
13 Ibid.
14 Lewiston Evening Journal (Lewiston, ME), 21 January 1893.
15 ‘The Curious Cocktails and Drinks by Design of the Mad Hatter
Oxford’, www.themadhatteroxford.com, October 2019.
16 ‘Speakeasy London: 23 Coolest Secret Bars You Need to Try’,
www.squaremeal.co.uk, 15 February 2022.
17 Phil Vettel, ‘Alinea Presents a Series of Puzzles to Mark 15th
Anniversary’, Chicago Tribune, www.chicagotribune.com, 4 May 2020.
18 ‘Pilcrow Bar’, www.pilcrow.bar, accessed 31 May 2023.
19 Jean-Louis Flandrin, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in
France (Berkeley, CA, 2007), p. 7.
20 Ibid., p. 94.
21 Cathy K. Kaufman, ‘Structuring the Meal: The Revolution of Service à
La Russe’, in The Meal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food
and Cookery, 2001, ed. Harlan Walker (Sheffield, 2002), p. 124.
22 Ann Bermingham, ‘Food Masquerade’, Gastronomica, X/2 (2010), p. 10.
23 Ibid., p. 10.
24 Ibid.
25 Bermingham, ‘Food Masquerade’, p. 11.
26 William Edward Mead, The English Medieval Feast (London, 2020), p.
255.
27 Ibid., pp. 191–2.
28 Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the
Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, IL, and London, 1993) p. 112.
29 Ibid.
30 Larry Holzwarth, ‘Here Are 10 Things You Should Know before Hosting
a Medieval Feast’, www.historycollection.com, 14 April 2018.
31 Personal interview with Ian Jones, 14 April 2023.
32 Max Campbell, email to the author, 15 July 2023.
33 Anne Ewbank, ‘During an 1870 Siege, Trapped Parisians Dined on Rat,
Cat, and Elephant’, www.atlasobscura.com, 10 April 2017.
34 Alistair Horne, The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871 (Phoenix,
AZ, and London, 2004), p. 47.
35 Henry William Gegg Markheim, Inside Paris during the Siege, e-book
(London, 1871), p. 39; ibid., p. 40.
36 Robert Lowry Sibbet, The Siege of Paris, e-book (Harrisburg, PA, 1892),
p. 249.
37 Rebecca L. Spang, ‘“And They Ate the Zoo”: Relating Gastronomic
Exoticism in the Siege of Paris’, Modern Language Notes, CVII/4 (1992), pp.
756, 757.
38 Ibid., p. 757.
39 Spang, ‘Ingestion’.
40 Ibid.
41 Preston Hartwick, ‘Cricket Flour: Protein Count, Nutrients, Taste, and
Recipes’, www.healthline.com, 21 December 2017.
42 Arnold Van Huis, ‘Insects as Food in Sub-Saharan Africa’, International
Journal of Tropical Insect Science, XXIII/3 (2003), p. 175.
43 Most Catholics only fast during Lent, but some fast every Friday. See
Mary Claire Lagroue, ‘Why Isn’t Fish Considered Meat during Lent?’,
www.allrecipes.com, 13 December 2021.
44 Ibid.
45 Rena K. Quinton and Michele Ciccazzo, ‘Influences on Eastern
Orthodox Christian Fasting Beliefs and Practices’, Ecology of Food and
Nutrition, XLVI/5–6 (2007), p. 471.
46 Ibid.
47 James LaForest, ‘“Muskrat French”: Origins of a Culture, a Language,
and a People’, Michigan Historical Review, XL/2 (2014), pp. 87–100.
48 László Bartosiewicz, Alexandra Gyetvai and Hans-Christian
Küchelmann, ‘The Beast in the Feast’, in Bestial Mirrors: Using Animals in
Reconstructing Identities in Medieval Europe, ed. Aleksander Pluskowski
(Vienna, 2010), p. 91.
49 Ibid., p. 93.
50 Max Campbell, email to the author, 15 July 2023.
51 Zoe Bowker, ‘Copenhagen’s Alchemist 2.0: Does It Have the Midas
Touch?’, www.theluxeologist.com, 24 July 2021.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Conversation between Brigitte Witt and the author, 19 November 2021.
55 Ibid.
56 Stanley L. Jones, The Presidential Election of 1896 (Madison, WI, 1964),
p. 299.
57 William J. Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896
(Chicago, IL, 1896), p. 206.
58 Diana Bruno, Lexique français-anglais de la cuisine et de la restauration
(Montreal, 2019), p. 251.
59 Shashank Bengali, ‘On the Ground: The Spirit Houses of Bangkok Keep
Watch over a Frenetic Modern Thai City’, www.latimes.com, 18 April
2019, section ‘World and Nation’.
60 Patrick Winn, ‘In Thailand, Blood Sacrifice Is Out. Strawberry Fanta Is
In’, www.theworld.org, 6 April 2017.
61 Bengali, ‘On the Ground’.
62 Winn, ‘In Thailand, Blood Sacrifice Is Out. Strawberry Fanta Is In’.
63 Ibid.
64 Per Meistrup, ‘Spirit House by Road’, https://commons.wikimedia.org,
12 November 2016.
65 Winn, ‘In Thailand, Blood Sacrifice Is Out. Strawberry Fanta Is In’.
66 Ibid.

Conclusion: What Menus Can Do

1 ‘History of Advertising: No 127: The Holborn Restaurant’,
www.campaignlive.co.uk, 2 April 2015.
2 Ibid.
3 ‘About the Club’, www.savageclub.com, accessed 28 July 2023.
4 Aaron Watson, The Savage Club: A Medley of History, Anecdote, and
Reminiscence [1907], e-book (London, 2022), p. 279.

OceanofPDF.com
 FURTHER READING

Alejandro, Reynaldo, Classic Menu Design: From the Collection of the

New York Public Library (Glen Cove, NY, 1988)
Bonnefoy, Françoise, Restaurant Spoerri: Maison fondée en 1963, 1, Place
de la Concorde, Paris 75008 (Paris, 2002)
Bruno, Diana, Lexique français-anglais de la cuisine et de la restauration
(Montreal, 2019)
Carter, Rob, Ben Day and Philip B. Meggs, eds, Typographic Design: Form
and Communication (New York, 1985)
Chevallier, Jim, A History of the Food of Paris: From Roast Mammoth to
Steak Frites (Lanham, MD, 2018) Clarkson, Janet, Menus from History:
Historic Meals and Recipes for Every Day of the Year (Santa Barbara, CA,
2009), vol. I
Cwiertka, Katarzyna Joanna, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and
National Identity (London, 2006)
Décarie-Bourassa, Babette, Food and Drink in History (Penticton, British
Columbia, 2003)
Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in
France, English-language edn (Berkeley, CA, 2007)
Franklin, Vincent, and Alex Johnson, Menus That Made History: Over
2,000 Years of Menus from Ancient Egyptian Food for the Afterlife to Elvis
Presley’s Wedding Breakfast (London, 2019)
Freedman, Paul, Ten Restaurants That Changed America (New York, 2018)
Heimann, Jim, May I Take Your Order? American Menu Design, 1920–
1960 (San Francisco, CA, 1998)
––, Steven Heller and Marc S. Selvaggio, Menu Design in Europe: A Visual
and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1800–2000 (Cologne,
2022)
––, Steven Heller and John Mariani, eds, Menu Design in America: A Visual
and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1850–1985 (Cologne,
2011)
Hieatt, Constance B., and Sharon Butler, eds, Curye on Inglysch: English
Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including the Forme of
Cury) (London and New York, 1985)
Hudgins, Sharon, Food on the Move: Dining on the Legendary Railway
Journeys of the World (London, 2019)
Hui, Ann, Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from
Canada’s Chinese Restaurants (Madeira Park, British Columbia, 2019)
Lambert, Julie Anne, Vintage Advertising: An A to Z (Oxford, 2020)
––, and Michael Twyman, The Art of Advertising (Oxford, 2020)
Lander, Nicholas, On the Menu: The World’s Favourite Piece of Paper
(London, 2020)
––, The Art of the Restaurateur (London and New York, 2012)
Lane, John, A Taste of the Past (Newton Abbot, 2004)
McVety, Paul J., Bradley J. Ware and Claudette Lévesque Ware,
Fundamentals of Menu Planning, 3rd edn (Hoboken, NJ, 2009)
Marleau, Eve, The Menu: Memorable Meals from Escoffier at the Ritz to a
Suffragettes’ Victory Dinner to the First Meal on the Moon (London, 2019)
Mei, Yuan, Sean Jy-Shyang Chen and Nicole Mones, The Way of Eating:
Yuan Meí’s Manual of Gastronomy (Great Barrington, MA, 2019)
Mordacq, Philippe, ed., Le Menu: Une histoire illustrée de 1751 à nos jours
(Paris, 1989)
Muller-Hehn, Anita, Le Menu: Guide de rédaction orthographique et
gastronomique (Montréal, 2000)
O’Connell, Libby Haight, The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100
Bites (Naperville, IL, 2014)
Pearlman, Alison, May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of
Persuasion (Chicago, IL, 2018)
Pilcher, Jeffrey M., The Oxford Handbook of Food History (Oxford, 2012)
Rath, Eric C., Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA,
2010)
––, and Stephanie Assmann, Japanese Foodways, Past and Present
(Urbana, IL, 2010)
Rawson, Katie, and Elliott Shore, Dining Out: A Global History of
Restaurants (London, 2019)
Rickards, Maurice, et al., The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the
Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and
Historian (New York, 2000)
Seaberg, Albin G., Menu Design: Merchandising and Marketing, 4th edn
(New York, 1991)
Sitwell, William, The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out, First
Diversion books edn (New York, 2020)
Smith, Jake, Eating with Emperors: 150 Years of Dining with Emperors,
Kings, Queens – and the Occasional Maharajah (Carlton, Vic., 2009)
Spang, Rebecca L., The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern
Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000)
Sun, Qinqin, et al., A Foodie’s Guide to Chinese Cuisine (New York, 2010)
Tsuji, Kaichi, Kaiseki: Zen Tastes in Japanese Cooking, 1st edn (Kyoto and
Palo Alto, CA, 1972)
Vogler, Pen, Dinner with Dickens: Recipes Inspired by the Life and Work of
Charles Dickens (London, 2017)
––, Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain (London, 2021)
Voigt, Henry, A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus,
1841–1941. From the Collection of Henry Voigt (New York, 2023)
Walker, Harlan, ed., Feasting and Fasting; Proceedings: Oxford Symposium
on Food and Cookery, 1990 (London, 1991)
––, The Meal: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery,
2001 (Sheffield, 2002)
Weaver, William Woys, Culinary Ephemera: An Illustrated History, vol. XXX
(Berkeley, CA, 2010)
Wong, Cecily, et al., Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide, 1st edn
(New York, 2021)

OceanofPDF.com
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks must go to McGill University and to Colleen Cook, then the
Trenholme Dean of Libraries, who provided moral and material support to
enable me to keep research moving forward while I held a senior
managerial role in the library. Colleen, your well-timed words of
encouragement were game-changing. Thanks to McGill for the invaluable
privilege of a full-year’s sabbatical leave as of September 2022.
At Reaktion, my thanks to Michael Leaman whose succinct and candid
guidance nudged the book along at key moments; to Alex Ciobanu for
timely responses on many image-related questions and for constructing the
intricate Photo Acknowledgements; and to Managing Editor Martha Jay and
her eagle-eyed copy-editor Ann Kay.
A group of research assistants diligently helped me source menus,
secure permissions for their reproduction and think through different ways
to write about them. My thanks to graduate students Tara Flannagan, Adam
Hill and Vidumini Morugama; also to undergraduate students Han Nguyen,
Josie Quigley, Savannah Sguigna and David Xio. My special appreciation
for the remarkably valuable work of the research team leads who became
my thought partners and colleagues in this project: first Leehu Sigler, who
helped me conceive of the shape and early direction of the book; next
Kristen Howard, who devised organizational structures for a project with so
many moving parts; and finally Ronny Litvack-Katzman, without whose
varied skillsets and grace under pressure the book’s first submission would
never have made it to Reaktion on time.
Kathleen Holden deserves a paragraph to herself. A colleague of
extraordinary erudition and eloquence, not to mention patience, Kathleen
offered to read through the whole manuscript – yes, in its entirety, twice – at
times when we were needing to wrestle the beast into shape. The
manuscript is much the richer for her generosity and fine ear for tone.
Tastes and Traditions has been improved by dedicated and talented
librarians at McGill who contributed research time and expertise:
digitization director Greg Houston; Jacquelyn Sundberg; Lonnie Weatherby
(who solved multiple conundrums for me in a superlibrarian sort of way);
also Christopher Lyons, Jennifer Garland, Wendy Owens, Michelle
MacLeod, Katie Lai and Dave Greene. At other libraries, I am indebted to
Liz Ridolfo, Andrew Stewart, Tanis Franco and Paul Armstrong (Fisher and
University of Toronto), Rebecca Federman, Kyle Triplett, Mary Jones and
Laverne Clark (New York Public Library), Arlene Shaner (New York
Academy of Medicine), Charlotte Priddle and Malia Guyer-Stevens (NYU
Special Collections). Thanks also to Lacey Flint (Archivist and Curator of
Research Collections of the Explorers Club), Suzanne Lopez (California
State University, Fresno), Nicole Semenchuk (the Culinary Institute of
America’s Conrad Hilton Library) and Nicola Hellmann of the University
of Miami Collections. Also Ludo Wurfbain, CEO at Sports Afield, and Donné
Nixon of Unique Vacations (Canada) Inc. At the Bodleian in Oxford, Julie-
Anne Lambert directed me to particular treasures of the remarkable John
Johnson Collection.
Private collectors were generous in sharing with me not only their
menus, but their insights. I enjoyed our conversations tremendously. Henry
Voigt’s analysis of American social history through the medium of menus is
both impressive and largely openly accessible to readers thanks to his
extensive blog series. Jake Smith, an Australian collector who specializes in
menus for royalty, is the author of the very handsome tome Eating with
Emperors. Menus he makes available on the web are helpfully accompanied
by transcriptions and annotation.
In writing Tastes and Traditions, I often stumbled across ‘wicked’
problems, as they say. Perhaps a reference to a particular dish that was
unfamiliar to me, a menu described only in Japanese for which the subtle
connotations were beyond me. This is where friends and colleagues came to
my rescue: Shelley Boyd, Diana Bruno, Victoria Dickenson, Naomi
Duguid, Jane Everett, Masako Ishii, Fiona Lucas, Felicity Pope, Carolyn
Tillie and Amy Trubek. Max Campbell, Joe Beef’s Wine Director, proved to
be an enthusiastic and astute interlocutor, able to interpret the stories that
wine choices can tell. Piotr Gibas and Eric Rath very generously gave me
pointers at various stages in this project. A group of my McGill colleagues
gave much-needed encouragement and feedback: thanks especially to Katie,
Robert and Xander.
When seeking permissions to reproduce menus, we came across some
very helpful creators, restaurateurs and family members. My appreciation to
Skullmapping, originator of the innovative ‘Le Petit Chef’ concept; Calvin
Fong, son of Fong Wan; Ted Shen, whose late uncle Howard Low
illustrated the Shanghai Royal menu; and to co-owners and chefs at Shalom
Japan in NYC, Aaron Israel and Sawako Okochi. Also to Benedetta Giuliani
and Cass Gardiner; Gail Fread, whose father annotated a remarkable
collection of menus that depict the New York City everyday dining scene in
the mid-twentieth century; and Rachel Chasin, who granted permission for
use of original illustrations on behalf of the Alfred and Elizabeth Bendiner
Foundation. My thanks too to Joyce Sarao of the Good Earth, and to Éric
Bieunais of Lola Rosa in Montreal.
Sections of this book have benefited from my earlier publications.
These include an article on food riddling practices co-authored with Leehu
Sigler and published as ‘Riddling Menus, a History’ in Petits Propos
Culinaires (2021); a discussion of ‘Chop Suey Cuisine’ in Canadian
Literary Fare, a book I co-authored with Shelley Boyd (2023); and
commentary on Anglo-Indian cuisine in a chapter of Women, Environment
and Networks of Empire, edited by Anna Winterbottom, Victoria
Dickenson, Ben Cartwright and Lauren Williams (2023).
A final debt is owed to my husband and our four boys, who have
resigned themselves to the way I ponder and write about food narratives
rather than spend more time honing practical skills in our home kitchen.
Then again, it has prompted them to become excellent cooks!

OceanofPDF.com
 PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources
of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of
artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity:

Abashiri Prison Museum, Hokkaido: p. 69; courtesy Alchemist,

Copenhagen, photos Søren Gammelmark: p. 159; Art Institute of Chicago:
pp. 29 (above; Charles F. Glore Collection), 29 (right; Carter H. Harrison
Fund); Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP): pp. 8 (below
right), 9, 49, 50; Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art,
Paris (Jacques Doucet Collections): pp. 28, 30 (left); Bibliothèque
municipale de Dijon: p. 154; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
(Estampes et Photographie): pp. 7, 102; Bloomsbury Food Library, London:
pp. 25 (right), 26, 27, 30 (right), 57, 82 (left and right): © Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford (The John Johnston Collection): pp. 101,
135, 136 (above), 161, 166, 167; © The British Library Board, London: p.
126; Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, photos © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY: pp. 24, 25 (below); The Culinary Institute of America, Conrad
N. Hilton Library, Hyde Park, NY: pp. 53 and 55 (Smiley Family Menu
Collection), 85 (Lois Westfall Menu Collection), 92 and 93 (Bruce P. Jeffer
Menu Collection), 99 (Lois Hallowell and Walter John Kelly Menu
Collection), 106 (Lois Westfall Menu Collection), 109 (Chapman S. Root
Menu Collection), 110 and 111 (Verona Bennetto Menu Collection), 116
(Original Menu Collection), 128 (Bruce P. Jeffer Menu Collection), 130
(Lois Westfall Menu Collection), 134 (George Stamos Menu Collection),
156 and 157 (Arno Schmidt Menu Collection); The Culinary Institute of
America, Conrad N. Hilton Library, Hyde Park, NY (George Lang Menu
Collection): pp. 10, 11, 34, 80, 81, 95, 114, 132, 133; Fales Library and
Special Collections, New York University: pp. 121 and 123 (Dr Paul Meyer
Collection), 158 (The Explorers Club Research Collection); Flickr: pp. 42
(photo Wei-Te Wong, CC BY-SA 2.0), 86 (photo Momo Wong (kudumomo), CC
BY 2.0), 91 (photo Simon Harriyott, CC BY 2.0); Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
and Museum, Hyde Park, NY: pp. 58 (photo U.S. National Archives), 59
(photo U.S. National Park Service); Fresno State Library, California State
University (Donald G. Larson Collection): p. 74; photo Cass Gardiner: p.
170; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: p. 38 (left); photo Benedetta
Giuliani: p. 44; Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE (Album of
Bellanca Manufacturing company): p. 77; Hennepin County Library,
Minnetonka, MN: p. 138; courtesy Bruce B. Hermann, Grenadier Auctions:
pp. 18, 19; Historic England Archive: p. 20; from Illustrated Catalogue of
the Chinese Collection of Exhibits for the International Health Exhibition
(London, 1884), photo University of California Libraries: p. 87; Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC: pp. 37
(Landauer Collection of Aeronautical Prints and Drawings), 119; courtesy
Lola Rosa, Montreal: p. 137; Los Angeles Public Library: pp. 17 (Security
Pacific National Bank Photo Collection), 105 (Valley Times Collection);
McGill University Libraries, Montreal, Rare Books and Special
Collections: pp. 32, 33, 75 (© Government of Canada, reproduced with the
permission of Library and Archives Canada 2023), 144, 145, 146; Musée du
Petit Palais, Paris (MS L. Dut. 456, fol. 86V), photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY: p. 148; Museums Victoria, Melbourne: pp. 63 (Military
Memorabilia Collection, CC BY 4.0), 66, 67; The National Archives,
London/Mary Evans Picture Library: p. 104; National Library of Australia,
Canberra (Papers of Sir Edmund Barton): p. 96; New York Academy of
Medicine Library: p. 98; New-York Historical Society (Arnold Shircliffe
Dining Menu Collection): p. 8 (above left); The New York Public Library
(The Bernard Fread Menu Collection): pp. 64, 65; The New York Public
Library (The Buttolph Collection of Menus): pp. 21, 31, 35, 36, 60, 62, 79,
108, 129, 131; The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL: p. 78; Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Cod. Ser. n. 2644, fol. 74v): p. 125; courtesy
Oxford Food Symposium on Food and Cookery, reproduced with
permission of Jake Tilson Studio and Jinok Kim-Eicken: pp. 168, 169;
courtesy Le Petit Chef by Skullmapping and Victoria Marriott Inner
Harbour, Atlific Hotels: p. 150 (above and below); from the private Royal
Menu Collection of © Jake Smith: p. 153; Seattle Public Schools Archives,
WA (Bagley Elementary School Photograph Collection): p. 103; © Daniel
Spoerri/Prolitteris Zurich/CARCC Ottawa 2024: pp. 38 (right; photo Swiss
National Library, Prints and Drawings Department, Daniel Spoerri archive),
39 (photo Archiv der Avantgarden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden),
41 (photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images); Thomas Fisher Rare
Book Library, University of Toronto: pp. 54, 83, 120 (The Mary Williamson
Menu Collection), 136 (below; The Mary Williamson Menu Collection);
Toronto Public Library (Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books): p.
107; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC (Stern
and Pächter family papers): p. 71; University of Leeds Library, Special
Collections: p. 143; University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Special
Collections (Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records): pp. 52, 97;
University of Nevada Libraries, Las Vegas, Special Collections and
Archives (Bohn-Bettoni Menu Collection): pp. 14, 56; University of
Toronto Scarborough Library, Archives and Special Collections (Harley J.
Spiller Collection): pp. 47, 51 (above; reproduced with permission of the
author’s family), 88 (above; reproduced with permission of Calvin Fong),
88 (below), 90; University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, Special
Collections: pp. 51 (below), 112, 113; courtesy Henry Voigt: pp. 127, 160;
Wellcome Collection, London: p. 15; Wikimedia Commons: p. 162 (photo
Per Meistrup, CC BY-SA 4.0); William Andrews Clark Memorial Library,
University of California, Los Angeles: p. 141.

OceanofPDF.com
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations

Abashiri Prison (Japan) 68,

prison meal 69
‘Aenigmatical Bill of Fare, An’ (print menu) 143
Alchemist (Copenhagen) 155–8, 159
African Pavilion (New York) 79–81
menus 80, 81
Albert, Prince Consort 73
Alcott, Andrus 127
Alcott House (Surrey) 126
Alda’s Ristorante (New York) 63, (menu) 65
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 36, 117
Alinea (Chicago) 147–8
Alpha (London) 126
Ambassador Hotel (Atlantic City) 31
Ampersand Hotel (London) 9, 11
angels, food for 161–3
Anglo-Indian cuisine 91, 94
‘Anigmatical Bill of Fare’ (handwritten manuscript) 141
Art Nouveau 26
Artful Dodger 31
Ashford Castle (County Galway) 115
Atwater, Wilbur Olin 131–2
Australian Wireless Air Gunners (WAGS) dinner 61–2, (menu) 63

Babette’s Feast (film) 13

Bar Mitzvah menu see Lesse, Lawrence James
Battle Creek Sanitarium 128–9, (breakfast menu) 130
Baudelaire, Charles 25
Beaufrère, Adolphe
 Les Bas (menu) 26
Diner d’été (menu) 27
beaver 155
Berkshire Inn (Great Barrington, MA) (menu) 53
Bilibid POW camp (Manila) 70
bill of fare 12
Birnholz, Alan 27
Bitter Winds 71
Blue Ribbon Spa (Chicago) 98, (drink list cover) 99
Bombay duck 94
bouillon 9
Bouillon Chartier (Paris) 8, 9
Bovril 135
Brain de Sainte-Marie, A Souper, Château de Choisy (handwritten menu) 24
Brain de Sainte-Marie, Souper de Louis XV (handwritten menu) 25
Brandès, Mary, Bébé cordon bleu, 3e édition (illustrated print booklet) 102
Brennan’s Restaurant (New Orleans) 141
Breton, André 40
Bromose Tablets 129, 165
Brooklyn Physical Culture Society 127
(First Annual Banquet Menu) 127
buttermilk 17
Buttolph, Miss Frank E. 48

Café Anglais (Paris) 14

Caillou, mon 57–8
Campbell, Max 151–2, 155
Canadian National Railways 105 (menu for little folk) 107
Canadian Pacific Dining Car (menu) 136
caricatures 144–6
Carls-Rite, Hotel (Toronto) 54, 55
Carlton (Hotel) Restaurant (London) 56, 58, (menu) 57
Carroll, Lewis 36, 117
Caruso’s (North Carolina) 115
Cave, Tyler, Le Petit Chef (photographs of video projection) bouillabaise,
caprese salad 150
Centennial International Exhibition (Philadelphia) 87
Cents Bibliophiles, Les 25–6, (menus) 25, 26, 27
Chad’s Café (formerly Sambo’s) 11
Charles Best’s restaurant (Billingsgate Market, London) 15–16, 16
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 117
Château de Choisy 23, 95, (handwritten menus) 24, 25
Cheung, Sue 89
chicken tikka masala 93
children’s menus 106–9, 112–14, 116
Chinese Recipe Booklet 90
chop suey cuisine 12, 87, 89–90, 94
cigarettes see smoking
Coca-Cola 16, 120–121, 139, (print advertisement) 122, 123
cocaine 120–21
cold marinated soup of kefir and beetroot (photograph) 171
Colony Room, The, in the Arawak Hotel (Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica) (menu)
83, 84–5
Congo, Le Paquebot (menu) 82, 84
Congress Hotel (Chicago) (daily tea menu) 36, 133, (room service menu)
134
Constitution of Akbar 125–6
conundrum menus 146–7
Coronation Souvenir Menu 56 56
Crystal Palace (London) 101, (annotated menu) 101
cuisine 73
curry 35, 79, 91, 93

Dahl, Roald 117

Delaw, Georges, Le pot-au-feu, fantaisie culinaire (print image) 102
Dickens, Charles 8, 31, 73
disguised foods 149

Edward VII, king of England 56–8

Egremont Inn (South Egremont, MA) 53, (menu) 53, 55
Eleven Madison Park (New York) 125, 141
Elizabeth, queen of England (wife of George VI) 58, 59
emoji menus 45
Enigmatic Bills of Fare 142–4
entremets
petits 23
sucrés 95–7, (menu) 96
Escoffier, Auguste 26, 56–8, (menu) 57
Explorers Club 61, (menu) 158
Expo 67 (Montreal) 74–6

fan menu (Special Chinese Luncheon aboard MS Tijluwah) 47, 47

Fanta 163
fasting 154–5
Fat Duck (Bray, Berkshire) 115–17
Fichot, Charles, Café Restaurant des Frères Provençaux (Paris) 7
Fong Wan’s Club Shanghai (San Francisco) (menu) 88, 89
food scarcity 153
see also Siege of Paris
Fores, S. W. 145
Fread, Bernard 63–5, 85
Frederick & Nelson Department Store (Seattle) 110–11, (Jack-in-the-box
menu) 112
French service or service à la française 7, 148–9
Frères Provençaux, Café Restaurant des (Paris) 7
Frisco Railroad 108, 110, (menu) 109
Funk, Casimir 131

Gaggan (Bangkok) (emoji menu) 44, 45

George II, king of England 143–4
George VI, king of England 58, 59
George Washington Chemists (New York) (print menu) 123
Glen’s Hik’ry Inn (Oklahoma City) 113, 115, (colouring menu) 114
Good Dinners Dress’d by W. Heath and Served by Thos. McLean at His
Hotel in the Haymarket 144–6, (title page) 144, (hand-coloured
interior illustration) 145
Good Earth (Edina, Minnesota) (menu) 138, 139
Graham, Sylvester 126, 129
granose 129
Great Exhibition 1851 (London) 73
Great Indian Peninsula Railway 55, (menu) 55
Greaves, James Pierrepont 126
Gridiron Club (Washington) 159–60, The Winning Hand (menu cards) 160

Hacker, Raymonde (print menu) 154

Hains, Raymond 40
Harrison, Norman Kingsley, St Bartholomew’s Hospital 20
Heath, William 102, (book cover) 144, (hand-coloured illustration) 145
Heimann, Jim 11
H.E.L.P. vegetarian restaurant (Los Angeles) 125
Heritage Coffee Shop (New York) (dinner menu) 132, 133
Heston Blumenthal’s Anthology Menus 115–17
Hindoostane Coffee House (Westminster) (commemorative plaque) 91, 93
Hitching Post Inn (Cheyenne, Wyoming) 115, (follow-the-dots menu) 116
Hitl vegetarian restaurant (Zurich) 125
Holborn Restaurant (London) 166
Horlick’s Malted Milk 108
hot dogs 58, 165
Hotel Excelsior (Naples) 97, (menu) 98

Ike, John David 27

IKEA 111
insects, consumption of 153–4
International Health Exhibition (London) 87, Chinese Restaurant (menu) 87
Ishii Garden Restaurant (Honolulu) (menu) 85, 85–6
Ivar’s Acres of Clams (Seattle) 113, (diver’s mask menu) 113

Jamaica Pavilion (Montreal) 76, (drinks menu) 77

Japanese cuisine 77–8, 122, 123–4
Japanese Pavilion (World’s Columbian Exhibition Chicago) 76–8, (print
advertisement for Japanese Tea House) 78
Johnson, Herbert, You May Smoke! (print menu with sketch) 167
Johnson, John (de Monins) 48
Jurafsky, Dan 8, 73, 84

kaiseki 86
Kamakura Maru, SS 33, 35–6, (menu) 35
Kamo Maru, SS 65, 67, (menu) 66, 67
Kan’s (San Francisco) (menu) 11, 12
Keen’s Pipe Club and Chop House (New York) 119, (print menu and
membership card) 121
Kellogg, John Harvey 128–9
Kim-Eicken, Jinok (ceramics) 169
Knights Templar 124–5
kokuminshoku 124
Krausmann’s Lorraine Grill 120

Lee, Dan Wayne, Kan’s Restaurant (colour menu) 11

Lesser, Lawrence James, 59, 61 (event order and menu) 62
Lola Rosa (Montreal) 137–9, (menu) 137
Low, Howard Shanghai Royal (illustrated menu) 51
Louis XV, king of France 21, 25
lunchroom scene with menu (Seattle) (photo) 103, 104
luxury (train) travel 1955 (photo) 105
Lyons & Co. Ltd, J. 134 (London) (menus) 135, 136

McLean, Thomas 144

Macy’s, The Restaurant at (New York) 110, (menus) 110, 111
Mammy’s Shanty (Atlanta) (menu) 10, 11
Mei, Yuan 73
Melba, Nellie 26
Memory’s Kitchen, In 69–70
menu, definition 7, 12
menu French 8–9, 148
menu engineering 43
Moosewood Restaurant (Ithaca, NY) 125
Mother Goose’s Pantry (Pasadena, CA) 16, 17, 18, 19
Moulin de Pont-Aven, Le (Paris) 48–9, 49, 50
muskrat 155

Napoleon I 13
Necessitous Children 103–4, (menu for London County Council) 104
New Haven Railroad 107–8, (menu) 108
New Realism 40
New York Hospital 21
New York World’s Fair 73–4, (print advertisement) 74
Nittle, Nadra 11–12

Oilles 21
Old Chapel Royal Boys, Association of 160–61, (deckchair-shaped menu)
161
Olde Egremont Tavern (South Egremont, MA) 53, (menu) 53, 55
Opper, Frederick Burr, Look Before You Eat (lithograph) 119
orientalism 82, 84, 87
Owen, Will 30–31, RMS Armadale Castle (menu) 30
Oyado Kiyomizuya Noboribetsu (Hokkaido, Japan), photograph of kaiseki
meal 86

Pächter, Wilhelmina (Mina) 69–70, Gesundheits Kuchen or healthcake

(menu) 71
Pan American World Airways 50, (menu) 52, 53, Presidential Special
(menu) 97
peacock, roasted (illumination) 148
Pêches Melba 26
Petit Chef, Le see Cave, Tyler
Piccadilly Club (Montreal) 31, 32, (menu) 33
Picnic at Hyde Park (menu) 58
postcard menus 53–5
Post, Charles W. 129
Postum 55, 129
poularde Edouard VII 58
poulet Marengo 13
Picasso, Pablo 13
plum pudding 8, 35
Pratt, Mary Louise 94
protose 128–9
puppuccino 141
Pure Food and Drug Act 119

QR codes 43, 45

rail travel 104–10, (various menus) 136–7

Rapp, Greg 43
Rath, Eric 78, 124
Ratner’s Restaurant (New York) 128
Rawson, Katie, and Elliott Shore 90
Recipes out of Bilibid 70–71
Relevé (or Remove, course of the meal) 23
Renault, Émile Auguste (Malo-Renault) 25–6
Diner 26
Restany, Pierre 40
Restaurant de la Galerie J. (Paris) (announcement) 38, (menu) 39, 40
Restaurant Spoerri (Düsseldorf) 40–41, (snare photo) 41
riddle menus see enigmatic bills of fare
riddles 142, 147–8
Ritz, César 58
Robida, Albert, from Le Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000 (hand-coloured
lithograph) 37, Compagnie nouvelle d’alimentation 38, 38–9
Roosevelts and the Royals at Hyde Park (photograph) 59
root beer 16
Russian service or service à la russe 7, 149

Sainte-Barbe 13, 14
Sambo’s see Chad’s Café 11
San Quentin (San Francisco) 68
Savage Club 166–9, (pyramid-shaped menus) 166, (dinner menus) 167
Second Baptist Church (print conundrum menu) 146
Sénégal, Le Paquebot 81–2, (print menu) 82, 84
Shalom Japan (Brooklyn) 94–5, (menu) 95
Shanghai Royal Restaurant (New York City) 49, 51
Schildkraut, Sadie 128
Siege of Paris 151–3, (menu) 152, 153
Siegel Cooper Company (Chicago) (luncheon menu) 131
Simpson’s celebrated two-shilling fish dinner 15
Smith, Jake 152, (handwritten menu, Versailles) 153
smoking 167
banned 125, 126
cigar 134
cigarette 16, 119–20, 134, 165
pipe 119, (pipe club advertisement) 121
soda pop 16, 113, 163, 165
Sole Marguery 25
Space Needle Restaurant (Seattle) 50, 51
Spang, Rebecca 9, 153
spirit houses (Thailand) 162–3, (photograph) 162
Spoerri, Daniel 40–43
‘723 Cooking Utensils’ 40
Aktion Rest (Tableau Piège) 41
Tableaux pièges (snare pictures) 43
Sports Afield Club (New York) 155, (print menus) 156, 157
Steak Diane 141
see also Brennan’s
Sweet Caporal Cigarettes 119, (menu advertisement) 120
Sydney Town Hall, typographical error in dinner menu 95, (dinner menu)
96

Terezin 69–70
Thackeray, William Makepeace 91, 93
Thirteen Club 61, (signed menu) 62
Tilson, Jake, Fork in the Rout(ine), Oxford Food Symposium Young Chefs,
2023 (menu card) 168, 169
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 13, 26–9
Le crocodile (menu) 29
La Modeste (menu) 30
Programme pour le Théâtre-Libre pour L’argent (poster) 28
Le Suisse (menu) 29
Toundra Restaurant, La (Montreal) 74–6, (menu) 75
Tree Houses Restaurant (New York) (menus) 80, 81
Trois Frères Provençaux, Les (Paris) 8
Turino Pizza (New York) 63, (menu) 64
turtle soup 84, 94, 159–60
mock 36

USSR Pavilion (New York) 78–9, (menu) 79

Veeraswamy’s Restaurant (London) 93–4 (menus) 92–3

Vegetarian Society, of Britain 126
vegetarianism 125–30
Virol 134
vitamins 131, 133, 137
void (course of the meal) 149, 151
Voigt, Henry 69, 125
Voisin, Restaurant (Paris) 151–2
Voyageurs d’hier (French Line Steamers) 31, 33, 34

Wako Pork Chop (Tokyo) 42, 45

wartime food policies 124, 135
washoku 122
wedding souvenir menu (Delmonico’s New York) 59, (menu) 60
Whitaker, Jan 11–12
Wilson, Margaret Barclay 48
window displays 45
Windsor Hotel (Montreal) (breakfast menu) 129
Witt, Brigitte 157–8
World Wars
First 25, 103–4, 147
Second 58, 61–3, 65, 69–70, 79, 110
Wu, Hongda ‘Harry’ 71

Yin, Yi, prime minister of the Shang Dynasty of Imperial China 122
Yorkshire pudding 8

Zola, Émile 25
zoo animals 107, 152, 165

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