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Los Angeles,
1938
On a foggy morning in July 1938, an aircraft mechanic named Douglass Corrigan took off in a jerry-built plane from an airfield in Brooklyn. Disappearing into the haze, he carried with him two boxes of fig bars, some chocolate bars, and a quart of water, along with a U.S. map marked with a flight plan to California. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Dublin, Ireland. Repeatedly denied permission to fly across the Atlantic, he told the authorities that he left New York the previous day, heading for the West Coast, but “got mixed up in the clouds and must have flown the wrong way,” explaining that the low-light conditions caused him to misread the compass. That was his story and he stuck to it. Hailed in the press as “Wrong Way” Corrigan, the 31-year-old aviator captured the imagination of a Depression-weary public, becoming a national celebrity overnight. Even President Roosevelt got into the act, saying that he never doubted for a minute the likeable Texan’s implausible explanation of the daring feat.
Thanksgiving,
1852
Thanksgiving was once regarded as “a Yankee holiday.” In the eighteenth century, the clergy in New England used it as an opportunity to rail against the British, and after that issue was resolved, they turned their attention to slavery. The autumnal celebration gained in popularity during the nineteenth century, as New Englanders migrated to other parts of the country. Two menus from Thanksgiving in 1852 stir the imagination, taking us back to a distant time and place. One is a rare survivor from a ship on the high seas. Proclaiming the special day in large script, it stands in marked contrast to a menu from a hotel in Connecticut, where curiously, the reference to Thanksgiving is much less obvious.
Washington, D.C.
1846
President James K. Polk was the last of the Jacksonians to sit in the White House. Nicknamed “Little Hickory,” Polk was committed to the concept of Manifest Destiny, using his Democratic majority in the Senate and House of Representatives to rapidly expand the country across the continent. In January 1846, the beginning of the first full year of his one-term presidency, the House voted to stop sharing the Oregon Territory with the United Kingdom. Five months later, a treaty was signed in Washington, setting the border with Canada.1 In May, the United States declared war on Mexico and, although this conflict lasted two years, the annexation of California began almost immediately. Some territorial issues were more easily resolved that year, such as when Iowa was admitted as the 29th state in the Union or, in another Act of Congress, part of the District of Columbia was returned to Virginia. Fearing that the slave trade in the District would soon be outlawed, Alexandrians petitioned Congress for the land south of the Potomac River, comprising all thirty-one square miles ceded by Virginia in 1791.2, 3 After the retrocession, the nation’s capital was no longer ten miles square. All that remained was the territory originally donated by Maryland.
New York City
1880
In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean, Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banquets as being particularly memorable.1 One of these dinners had been held fourteen years earlier for Count Ferdinand de Lessep, the French entrepreneur who built the Suez Canal. Eager to replicate his engineering feat, De Lesseps came to New York in March 1880 to raise money for a sea-level canal that would cut across the Isthmus of Panama. As was customary, a banquet was held in his honor. However, as far as the French-born chef and his brigade were concerned, their famed countryman was more than just another special guest. To them, he was a hero of the age. Observing a palpable excitement in the air during dinner, the reporter from the New York Times wryly noted that “the nationality of the distinguished guest of the evening had had something to do with the zeal of the cooks, confectioners, and waiters.”2
Topeka, Kansas
1883
One of the more interesting aspects of ephemera is that it provides unwitting historical evidence. This is well illustrated by a small menu from the Copeland Hotel in Topeka, Kansas in 1883, the same year that Emma Lazarus captured the nation’s welcoming spirit in a poem—“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...” Although there is a dish on the menu that alludes to this American ideal, the railroad timetable on the back reflects the harsh realities of a time when there were masses of dispossessed people migrating throughout the country.
Beverly Hills,
1948
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| Sitting Pretty (1948) |
With his attitude of thinly-veiled disdain, actor Clifton Webb was “a blast of asexual sophistication during Hollywood’s testosterone-fueled postwar epoch,” according to Turner Classics. It could also be said that he was an integral part of the social scene. Although Webb was often cast as a family man, he lived in Beverley Hills with his mother Maybelle, an uninhibited Auntie-Mame type. Together they threw some of the most memorable parties in Tinseltown. One such affair was held on July 1, 1948, a few months after the release of the film Sitting Pretty, a comedy for which Webb would receive his second Oscar nomination. Although the dishes at this dinner party appear ordinary by today’s standards, the guest list is exciting to read, representing a “Who’s Who” of the movie industry at the middle point of its golden age.
Boston
Few menus from the early 1840s have survived. Dating to a time when people seldom ate outside the home, they were rarely seen even then. Hotels and restaurants were in their infancy, slowly emerging as an expression of American ideals of mobility, democracy, and civil society. This is evidenced by two menus from Boston in the summer of 1842, showing a certain degree of uniformity in the foods consumed by the middle- and working-classes of the Jacksonian Era.
