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New York City,
1906
This manuscript account book bearing a typed label reading “Property of Mr. Oscar” recently came to market. The 300-page volume is written in the hand of Oscar Tschirky, the famed maître ďhôtel at the Waldorf-Astoria. It contains the particulars of private events at the hotel from mid-December 1905 to mid-May 1906, including the date, organization, number of guests, bill of fare, and cost. The manner in which the name is expressed on the cover and its worn condition indicates the culinary staff may have referred to it as part of their daily routine. My first step in processing this wealth of social information was simply to compare the entries for two dinners with menus already in the collection.
Oakland,
ca. 1880
Novelist Gertrude Stein returned to the United States in 1934 after a 30-year absence. While crisscrossing the country on a speaking tour, the celebrated Parisian expatriate visited Oakland to see the farm she grew up on and the house where she once lived. After learning that her childhood home had been razed and the farmland developed, Stein famously wrote “there is no there there.” The significant places in California that helped define her no longer existed. The Stein family had moved to Oakland in 1880, when she was six, and lived for the first year at the Tubbs Hotel. Situated just east of Lake Merritt, the 200-room hostelry had some prominent guests in its day.1 Former president Ulysses S. Grant and his wife dined there in 1879 while on the final leg of their trip around the world. And author Robert Louis Stevenson stayed at the Tubbs Hotel from March to April 1880, the same year the Stein family was in residence. Nevertheless, a table d’hôte menu from the period reveals that it was a middling establishment where the meals were basically the same as those at other hotels in its class. Indeed, there was “no there” in the dining rooms of American hotels where the standardized cuisine reflected few regional influences.
Paris,
ca. 1928
Willis Morgan was among the several hundred thousand African-American soldiers sent to France during the First World War. Born in Marshall, Texas in 1877, Morgan worked as a chef in railroad dining cars and Harvey House restaurants prior to becoming a mess sergeant in the U.S. Army. He served in the Philippines, on the Mexico border, and finally on the Western Front. After the Armistice, Morgan settled in Paris as part of the small but steady stream of black Americans attracted by wartime memories of French racial tolerance. He opened the Chicago Inn at 31 Avenue Bourdonnais in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Later renamed the Chicago-Texas Inn, the restaurant was a popular tourist destination in the Jazz Age. A scarce menu from the late 1920s reveals the down-home American cuisine at this welcoming restaurant where Morgan’s French-born wife worked the cash register while their pet cat looked on from his favorite spot nearby.
Paris,
1878-1923
French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir portrayed a waitress from one of several Parisian restaurants established by a butcher named Pierre Louis Duval who began by using meat scraps to make broths.1 The Établissements Duval were commonly referred to as the “Bouillons Duval,” or “Établissements de Bouillon,” in reference to this signature dish. Founded in 1854, the business expanded to about a dozen locations by the end of the following decade. The chain almost exclusively employed women servers who wore black dresses, half hidden by aprons and snow-white bibs, and caps.2 The Baedeker guidebook (1881) advised travelers that Duval offered a limited and affordable menu to customers who were “waited on by women, soberly garbed, and not unlike sisters of charity.” In much the same vein, a journalist from the New York Times wrote that the “neat, nun-like uniforms” reminded him of what the cooks wore in the kitchen of the House of Commons.3,4 Nevertheless, “Renoir imparted to his comely model an unaffected grace,” notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art on its gallery label. Three menus recall these low-cost restaurants that were renowned for their waitresses.
Steamer James Montgomery
ca. 1858
Steamboats played a major role in transporting passengers and freight on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. By the 1830s, it was common to see more than 150 steamboats at the St. Louis levee at one time. The James Montgomery was one such paddle steamer. Built in 1856 at New Albany, Indiana (on the Ohio River opposite Louisville), this wood-hull, side-wheel steamboat was 270 feet long and powered by six boilers. A menu from about 1858 shows that large breakfasts were among the joys of being a cabin passenger on this antebellum riverboat.
Christmas,
1878-1882
The United States entered an era of rapid growth in 1878 following a deep depression. Over the next five years, Kansas became the first state to outlaw all alcoholic beverages, the opening salvo of a heartland backlash that would eventually culminate in a nationwide constitutional ban. Thomas Edison patented the light bulb; John D. Rockefeller set up the Standard Oil Trust; and a railroad building boom significantly increased the miles of track, transforming a myriad of lines into a grand transportation network. It was the dawn of the Gilded Age. The middle and upper classes expanded once again, allowing more people than ever to dine outside the home on the holidays when the hotels pulled out all the stops. Twelve Christmas menus from the years 1878 to 1882 provide a snapshot of the newly-prosperous country.
Kunming, China
Christmas 1943
The eastern end of the Himalayan Mountains was called “The Hump” by pilots who flew transport aircraft between India and China during the Second World War. The military airlift over the treacherous Himalayas supplied the Allies in China, including advance units of the U.S. Army. The missions were dangerous. In addition to the notable absence of airfields, there were no reliable navigation charts or radio aids and the weather was often bad. The logistical challenge of operating this aerial pipeline is reflected by a non-traditional dinner at Army headquarters in Kunming, China on Christmas in 1943. Undoubtedly, the most appreciated item was a beverage not shown on the menu.
