Sarah Olive investigates menu collecting and what this tells us about social history and the ritual of shared meals
My project at the National Library of Australia involved studying the way in which menus operate as a link between food and the emotions, the tangible and the intangible. During my six weeks at the Library I viewed over 1000 items, a fraction of the menus to be found in the shelves, boxes and files of the Library’s collections, sourced from such diverse areas as ephemera, manuscripts and pictures. There is no single, central area dedicated to the collection of all the Library’s menus. Rather, groups of, or even individual, menus can be hunted down using the Library’s catalogue. The benefit of having the menus dispersed throughout the Library is that they are situated within a broader context. For example, in the Ephemera Collection menus of varying ages are grouped into categories such as department store menus, while in the Manuscript Collection the menus of a famous individual sit cheek to cheek with invitations and opera programs. Much of my time was spent sifting through menus which have graced the hands of Australian notables from Deakin to the Don, with venues ranging from Government House to roadhouse. However dissimilar in situation or location, the disparate collectors are united by the menus they preserved. Whoever we are, wherever we are, we all need to eat. But, as far as I know, the urge to collect menus is not numbered among the functions of living organisms. The question of why we save menus, long after our meal has been digested, leads me to consider the relationship we have with these bits of paper and card: if they do not feed our stomachs, do they feed our souls? From Easter eggs with their origins in pagan celebrations to periods of religious fasting, from celebrity chef Nigella Lawson’s concept of worshipping the body with ‘Temple Food’ to the anorexic’s ruthless pursuit of perfection, the emotional life of humans has been, and continues to be, inextricably intertwined with food. Virginia Woolf described the relationship between the food we consume and our emotions when she asserted in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well’. Surely, as accessories to eating, menus share in the deep connection between food and the emotions that goes beyond mere feelings of hunger or satiation. For those still sceptical of such a relationship, I can only argue that if meals were devoid of emotional investment, there would be no menus among the Library’s collections.
The affective quality of the meal was exploited, for instance, by Trans Australia Airlines (TAA) when it created a menu for the flight of service personnel from Perth to Canberra for the Commonwealth Golden Jubilee in 1951. The menu was written in the style of a dinner ration list with items such as ‘Roast Potatoes (not dehydrated)’, ‘Ice Cream (G.I. Issue)’ and reminders such as ‘rinse tubs at end of aircraft’. The effect was to contrast contemporary luxury with the recalled hardship of wartime dining. In this way, the menu acted as a porthole through which ex-personnel were transported to the past, the physical journey of the flight corresponding to an emotional trip down memory lane. The imaginary Christmas menus created by prisoners of war at Changi and Kranji prison camps are another instance of the centrality of the emotional context to the meaning of a menu. These bills of fare would be incomprehensible if presented to guests as real Christmas menus, with their strange assortment of everyday, elegant and tropical fare: meat and veg pie, blancmange and guava. Despite being in purpose imaginary, the menu is surprisingly restrained and realistic. There are a few dainty, sugary dishes, such as jam tarts, which are incongruous with the harsh conditions of the camps. At the other end of the scale, there are comforting staples including meat and veg pie. This type of food would usually not appear on a grand menu, so perhaps including them in this context acted as a belated apology for having taken them for granted in the past. These items and the stylish art deco illustrations of one menu seem to hark back to former happy memories of lavish carefree meals, simultaneously encapsulating the hope of tasting them again in the future. In this dual role of reminiscence and hope, the menu functions as a typical wish list, tempered, however, by some of the other menu items such as guava, pineapple and rice, and by the sketched palm trees, which firmly tie the prisoners’ memories and dreams to the tropical surroundings of their incarceration. Through such a reading, the menus emerge as creative ‘coping’ mechanisms which represent, and attempt to reconcile, a disparity of experiences and emotions. The theming of menus to suit the occasion creates a strong emotional bond between the food served and the people consuming it, as well as serving a practical purpose. The cohesion of the meal and event is reliant on the effective deployment of symbolism, metaphor and metonym. For example, the menu from ‘Sammy Lee’s Show Room’ provides clients with the opportunity to feast their eyes and their stomachs. The hearty steak dishes listed inside are the metonymic flesh of the showgirls splashed across the cover image. Both connote the stereotypical masculine desire for a pound of flesh. The Menzies Hotel’s Bastille Day Dinner menu of 1938, bound with a tricolour ribbon and rosette, offered such French delicacies as Frivolities Moscovite, Pamplemousse et Paw Paw Cocktail au Marasquin and Poussin Truffle à la Perigourdine, to be washed down with Chateau Margaux and Veuve Cliquot: a possibly overly sumptuous meal for a celebration of an uprising by the starved proletariat. In the above examples, the menus and the dishes they enumerate attempt (and sometimes fail) to harmonise with the emotion of the event.
Throughout history, meals have been regarded as a means of achieving some level of communion with our fellow diners. For Peter Farb and George Armelagos, authors of Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (1980), sharing food is a ‘primary way of initiating and maintaining human relationships’, reminding us that the word ‘companion’ originates from ‘French and Latin words that mean “one who eats bread with another”’. The concept of a shared meal as both metaphor for, and means of, fellowship explains the popularity of commemorative meals with sports teams. These meals create the opportunity for warring sides to come together, to toast the victorious team and to celebrate outstanding individual performances.
Meals are also used to mark periods of transition in people’s lives, from intimate birthday dinners to menus for events of national and historical significance, such as Royal Military College Duntroon’s Farewell Dinner in November 1940, held to mark the departure of armed forces personnel for the Second World War. Victor Beatty was the waiter in charge of private dining at the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne. His collection of menus demonstrates the way in which a standard menu could be adapted to meet the demands of diverse clients, and events from breakfasts ‘on the occasion of the first Solemn Pontifical Mass of the Right Reverend RD Hayes DD, Bishop of Rockhampton’ to ‘bon voyage’ dinners for young men about to commence their world tour. A more unusual celebratory menu is visible in a photograph by Frank Hurley of the Christmas dinner held for Douglas Mawson and his men on board the Discovery in 1930. The menu is held up to the camera by Mawson (on the right) and the ship’s name and image are discernible. The menu links the men strongly to their present situation while the concept of Christmas dinner, with all its connotations of warmth, food and family could be supposed to evoke for the men images and emotions of past festivities and absent loved ones. In the unusual context of this meal, the menu, alongside the party hats, festive balloons and champagne, exudes a sense of civilisation and familiarity despite the wildness and desolation of its Antarctic surroundings. For many of the party, including Mawson and Hurley, this Christmas dinner, in the relatively comfortable surroundings of the ship, would have contrasted strongly with the hardships of Christmas meals on their 1912 land-bound expedition to the South Magnetic Pole. Whereas Mawson had organised the 1930 trip to include presents from Woodlands School and wine from Yalumba, menus from earlier expeditions were a matter of spare rations scraped together. In 1912, Hurley, acting as chef, doggedly maintained traditional form, concocting a menu of five courses to include a plum pudding made from three biscuits, Glaxo, sugar, seven raisins and three drops of methylated spirits, which he mixed with snow and boiled in a sock. Surprisingly, Hurley writes romantically of the ‘savoury steam’ it produced, claiming, ‘I never new [sic] a happier or more jolly Christmas’. Hurley’s enjoyment of this unappetising Christmas meal is perhaps evidence of the pre-eminence of the emotional context over the actual, physical experience of consumption. It would certainly seem that the more extreme the conditions, the more Mawson and his fellow explorers were determined to cling to custom in creating a Christmas menu. In this way, the explorers’ preservation of western culinary ideals in adverse conditions can be interpreted as a colonial-style, psychological victory over their hostile surroundings. In the immediacy of a meal, diners experience the ephemeral event through a series of physical sensations: the sight and touch of the menu, the taste of the food, the sounds of table talk, clinking glasses and background music. In this sense, they are able to embody the event. In the aftermath, diners are left only with the memories of fleeting sensations and the concrete evidence of the menu. Keeping the menu of a meal renders intangible experiences—marriages, victories, birthdays—tangible and preserves them in physical form for posterity. In my time sifting through the Library’s many examples, I reached the conclusion that menus operate, just like photographs, films, or like libraries themselves, to feed the human obsession with recording and immortalising our experiences. SARAH OLIVE is currently working as the Project/Research Officer for the Flinders International Students’ Association |
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