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Milwaukee,
1885
This menu comes from the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee on January 28, 1885. As it happens, writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens was then staying at the Plankinton. Widely known by his pen name Mark Twain, he was on a reading tour with Southern author George W. Cable who marveled at Twain’s talent as a standup comedian. In a letter to his wife Louise the next day, Cable wrote, “Mark...has worked & worked incessantly on these programs until he has effected in all of them—there are 3—a gradual growth of both interest & humor so that the audience never has to find anything less, but always more, entertaining than what precedes it. He says, ‘I don’t want them to get tired out laughing before we get to the end.’ The result is we have always a steady crescendo ending in a double climax….his careful, untiring, incessant labors are an education.” The menu, which contains a reference to the two authors, takes us back to that day in 1885.
Iowa, Wisconsin & Maine
1855-1858
Menus, which are marketing tools as much as anything, are best taken with a grain of salt. It can be particularly difficult to identify exaggerated claims on old menus far removed in time and place. In the mid-nineteenth century, a large assortment of roasts and boiled meats regularly appeared on table d’hote menus at hotels, where most public dining rooms were then situated. It seems unlikely that all of these items were available on a daily basis, especially at modest hotels in small towns. Four menus provide insights on how we might interpret such documents from the antebellum period.
New York,
1860
Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Edward, traveled through the United States on a diplomatic tour in the fall of 1860, only weeks before the presidential election that would spark the Civil War. Crossing over from Canada on September 20, the prince and his retinue of British peers visited Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Washington. They dined with President Buchanan at the White House, slipped down to Richmond for a brief look, and resumed their journey northward to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The trip ended at Portland, Maine. The future king, then a month short of his nineteenth birthday, was a welcome distraction from the nation’s political woes. He was enthusiastically feted at each stop, although nowhere more than in New York where the bustling newspapers whipped up a frenzy of excitement. His meals in the Empire State were prepared under the direction of some of the best chefs, hoteliers, and restaurateurs in the country. Five menus from this leg of the trip reveal American hospitality at its finest in the waning days of the antebellum period.
Atlanta, Georgia
1888
Thomas Frazier was the headwaiter at many fine hotels and resorts in the late nineteenth century. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1852, he was well known and much admired. I first became aware of him from a menu from the Kimball House in Atlanta in 1888. Even though he was an African American working in the post-Reconstruction South, snippets about him occasionally appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, indicating he was something of a local celebrity. One notice informed the readers, “Thomas H. Frazier, who enjoys the distinction of being the best headwaiter at any southern hotel, is off from the Kimball on vacation, and is in Florida visiting the various noted hotels of that state.” On another occasion, the newspaper noted that he received a silver cup on his birthday. Frazier was lavishly praised for his handling of the arrangements at the hotel for President Grover Cleveland’s visit to Atlanta in 1887. These reports confirm the evidence on the menu, leaving little doubt that Frazier was held in high esteem.
New York City,
1912-1915
Reisenweber’s played an important role in American popular culture during the second decade of the last century. Today, it is mostly remembered as the place where jazz was introduced to a wider audience in 1917. However, Reisenweber’s already made history five years earlier when the dance craze took New York by storm. It was the first restaurant to provide its patrons with space to dance and kept the party going through a steady stream of promotions. The energy and spirit of this early period of rapid social change is conveyed in an audio slideshow showing over ninety invitations, admission tickets, advertising cards, special notices, beverage lists and menus from 1912 to 1915. Although this chronology of ephemera primarily reflects the main location on Eighth Avenue at Columbus Circle, some pieces come from the properties it managed on Coney Island—the Brighton Beach Casino and the Shelburne Hotel—and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, which it catered. Even at the Follies, the theater-goers tangoed and turkey-trotted before and after performances and during intermission.
St. Paul, Minnesota
1888
A group of gentlemen held a dinner at a private club in St. Paul, Minnesota in January 1888 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime executive order issued by President Lincoln which freed the slaves in the Confederacy. In addition to the bill of fare and list of toasts, the menu featured a remarkable seating chart. In addition to the participants, it included the names of leaders who were there in spirit, being remembered for the role they played in the struggle for freedom.
Budapest,
1914
The departure of the steamship on September 12, 1914 was a memorable sight, as 126 American Red Cross nurses stood in their white caps and gray uniforms along the rails where the sea wind blew open their red-lined capes, creating a line of scarlet on the side of the vessel. World War I had erupted a little over a month earlier and now they, along with 30 surgeons and boxes of medical equipment, were sailing from New York on what was called a “mercy mission.” Striving to stay neutral, the United States deployed the American Red Cross to provide medical aid to both sides of the conflict in Europe. Once on board, they were organized into units that would establish military hospitals in seven locations—Paignton, England; Pau, France; Kiev, Russia; Kosel and Gleiwitz, Germany; Vienna, Austria; and Budapest, Hungary.2 A battered menu bears witness to this largely-forgotten expedition that embodied a humanitarian ideal which was ahead of its time.
