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NLA News - home April 2006 Volume XVI Number 7

Food for Thought

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The menu of 25 August 1843, for the Astor House Ladies’ Ordinary, is the earliest dated New York City menu in the Buttolph Collection, General Research Division
Reproduced from the article ‘The Prime of Miss Buttolph: Notes Toward a Menu History of New York City’ in vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 1998 of Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (New York, NY: The Library, c.1992– )

Russell Doust examines restaurant menus in the National Library’s collection of ephemera

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Cover of Advice to a Young Lady in the Colonies (Collingwood, Vic.: Greenhouse Publications, 1979)

Recently when I was glancing through Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, I came across an article by Alison Riley called ‘The Prime of Miss Buttolph: Notes Toward a Menu History of New York City’. Miss Buttolph deserves to be remembered for her fascination with restaurant menus. From the turn of the century until her death in 1924 she collected about 26000 menus, mainly by writing and asking for them. She inquired whether the New York Public Library ‘would preserve some then current menus’, and the director agreed. Riley is careful to point out, ‘It won’t do to exaggerate the scholarly importance of these engaging ephemera as autobiographical or historical evidence’, but I personally disagree. The building blocks of cultural history are not only the great stone monuments, the written accounts of explorers or discoverers, and the records of debate and disagreement. Just as we need to know what people wore in earlier times, so too do we need to know how they lived, what they ate, and what were the social occasions—and not only for the rich and great, but also for more ordinary mortals. However, we can take some note of Riley’s conclusion that ‘there is more to these pretty and inviting objects than the aesthetic or gastronomic story. The trivial details of that everyday act, public dining in New York, illuminate larger themes, flattering and unflattering, in our city’s past’.

To have all these pieces of evidence for New York is fine, of course, but what about Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra even? Does the National Library of Australia have a collection of restaurant menus that rivals  that of Miss Buttolph? The answer, as it turns out, is both yes and no. There is no formed collection of a similar magnitude, whether associated with an individual or not, but there is a wealth of menus collected over the years and accessible through the Library catalogue under the term ‘ephemera’. I set out to look at these menus. I was not interested in the published ‘how to do it books’—like Advice to a Young Lady in the Colonies, which was probably intended for the young Australian housewife of good family but little experience, Mrs Maria King Macarthur, born in 1793. What I wanted was the evidence of food actually cooked, and presumably eaten, in a restaurant or café, or on some celebratory occasion.

I soon found that the evidence was there in abundance in the form of original menu cards, photocopies and photographs. I have to confess that one of my favourites is a photograph of a blackboard menu from Daly Waters in the Northern Territory: ‘Steak samiges $1.20, Te and koffy 30c ... We don’t serve women—bring your own.’ But perhaps this is hardly typical.

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Raymond de Berquelle Blackboard Menu, Daly Waters, Northern Territory, 1979
gelatin silver photograph;
27.3 x 37.4 cm
Raymond de Berquelle Collection
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an24913057

I turned my attention to the 21 boxes of ephemera where I found menus from various eating establishments—hotels, motels, department stores, cafes and restaurants. The London Stores Café at 56–58 Elizabeth Street, Sydney had ‘Lamb Chops 2/-, Filet Mignon 2/6’ or, for those with a little more money, ‘Porterhouse Steak, Chateaubriand, or T.Bone Steak (2 persons, 20 mins., 6/-)’. Beverages were tea, coffee, soft drinks and milkshakes. There was no wine or beer. We do not know the date, but it can be inferred from the prices; my guess would be the 1930s.

We do know the date of the Christmas menu at the Coogee Bay Hotel in Sydney. It is 1962, and we also know the names of the eight diners who all signed the menu: two Cookes, three Yaxleys, one Thompson and two Gerhigs. What we do not know, alas, is what they paid for ‘Roast Sucking [sic] Pig, Roast Sirloin of Beef, Roast Seasoned Veal, Roast Spring Chicken and York Ham, Roast Seasoned Duckling, Steamed Chicken with Asparagus Sauce’ and, of course, ‘Roast Turkey and Cranberry Sauce’. Wine connoisseurs will be relieved to know that at the Coogee Bay Hotel, as well as a few imported wines (Veuve Cliquot 1949, Chianti Ruffino, Nuets [sic] St. George 1950) and some perfectly respectable Australian wines, there were also the good old standbys—Hamilton’s Moselle, Leo Burings Rhinegold, and ales and lager.

Motel menus are particularly well represented. The 19th Hole Restaurant and Motel at Eden on the New South Wales South Coast had an imposing menu in French: ‘Coquille Saint Jacques Eden, Brochette de Crevettes, Mignonettes de Boeuf Rosmaris.’ The Central City Motel in Wickham Terrace, Brisbane offered ‘A Cheery Good Morning!’ with three breakfasts: ‘The Lightning Style for those folk in a hurry or a quick but satisfying start to the day’, ‘Continental, light but nourishing—c’est si bon!’, and ‘The New World—have fun, don’t spare the calories’. Closer to home, the Canberra International Motor Inn gave the discerning diner ‘Frogs legs in puff pastry, Snails with garlic, Faisan a la Grand-Mer’ (pheasant with bacon, potatoes, champignons and bread croutons). Regrettably, like so many of the other menus it is undated, but since the pheasant, the most expensive main course on the menu, was $13.80, we know that the date was after the introduction of decimal currency in 1966. We certainly do not know where they got the pheasant!

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Coogee Bay Hotel: A Merry Christmas
Ephemera Collectio

Railway food is well represented by menus from some of Australia’s famous trains—the Southern Aurora, the Queenslander, the Spirit of Progress, the Indian Pacific, as well as the Golden Jubilee Commemorative Dinner on 26 October 1967 which served invited guests on board the train a five- or six-course meal. There are menus from the Atlantic liners—Cunard, Orient Line, P & O Cruises. There are also menus for special occasions such as St Andrew’s Day: in 1962 Melbourne Scots ate ‘Haggis wi’ Athol Brose’, as they did in days before and days to come. In 1930, a dinner for visiting university women’s hockey teams in Adelaide gave the diners ‘Tomato Soup, Roast Beef and Horse Radish Sauce or Roast Pork and Apple Sauce, Vegetables, Plum Pudding, Fruit Salad’ followed, interestingly as in a 19th-century spread, by ‘Oyster Patties’.

I could not open every box, let alone examine every menu, but I did see enough to begin to note some changes. The most obvious was naturally a steady increase in price, although the lack of dates on most items makes comparisons difficult. A menu dated ‘1977’ from Barters Café in Wagga Wagga shows that a full bottle of ‘Moet et [the menu has ‘and’] Chandon Champagne’ was $23.50. Those were the days! And if your pocket did not run to French champagne you could compromise on Leo Buring’s Sparkling Rhinegold at $3.20. Most main courses on that menu were four dollars. However, on the current menu at the National Library’s Bookplate cafe, Moet is $110 per bottle with main courses under $15. Do the sums and you will find that the price relationship is about the same: the prices themselves, adjusted for inflation, have not changed much.

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Transcontinental Railway menu 1917
Ephemera Collection
Trunk Line Call’ Indian cricket team dinner menu 1948
Ephemera Collection

So has anything else changed? What do these menus tell us, apart from relative prices? I think there are four main lessons. First, the ingredients. The basic ones remain—meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, fruit, pastries, bread—but they have been supplemented by others, in particular those from Asia.

Second, the methods of cooking. I found on a 1930s menu from Manton’s department store in Melbourne: ‘boiled leg of mutton’, not very common in 2006 (except in restaurants in Italy where it is a part of Bollito Misto). On the other hand, ‘wok tossed’ is now commonplace, long simmered French stocks and sauces have lost their place in all but the most haute of cuisines, and simply prepared ‘nursery food’ became all the rage in the 1990s.

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‘Trunk Line Call’
Indian cricket team dinner
menu 1948
Ephemera Collection

Third, the presentation. None of the menus I saw in the National Library were quite so modern as to have a ‘stack’ of fish, fowl or flesh piled so high on the underlying vegetables as to daunt the diner. The exception is a stack of pancakes which seems to have been around much longer. And fourth, the names of dishes. The French names are not entirely gone, but there has certainly been a move towards plain English, and if the French name is still appropriate it often carries an English explanation. For instance, a 2004 menu from Boffins Restaurant at University House at the Australian National University properly uses the French term ‘Ragout of Seafood’ since English cooking has no exact equivalent, but explains that it is a dish made up of ‘scallops, mussels, prawns, crab and Tasmanian salmon, cooked in a green sambal sauce [an Indonesian term] and finished in coconut cream’. Some things change, some do not. Today’s society is diverse and does not divide easily into classes, so the menus preserved in the National Library do not necessarily tell us what the upper or the lower classes ate, and certainly do not illuminate the diet of the chronically poor. However, they are interesting in that they demonstrate what diners expect when they ‘eat out’, and also perhaps what chefs think will appeal. In the long run, of course, not much has really changed. The names, appearance, methods of cooking and presentation have, but it is all still food. Not what you get at home, but what you expect when you ‘go out’ for a special occasion.

RUSSELL DOUST is a former state librarian of New South Wales, a former deputy director of the National Trust in New South Wales, an historian of 19th-century New South Wales, and a food lover who likes to ‘eat out’

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