Lilliputian Quantities: An Early Tasting Menu

Wellesley, 1879

The cover of this 1879 menu from the Hotel Wellesley looks straightforward, except that there was no place called Wellesley, Massachusetts at the time. The small town located fifteen miles outside Boston was still named Needham.1 Having made a fortune in sewing machines, hotelier William Emerson Baker had previously tried to split away and establish a town named Hygeria, a “hygienic village” where he wanted to conduct scientific work on sanitary food production. When his proposal was rejected, he simply adopted the name “Wellesley” as the name of his hotel and its location.

Mixed Icons

U.S. Military Bases
Occupied Japan, 1949-1955

  
Showing Santa Claus flying through a Japanese gate toward Mount Fuji, this cover illustration on a U.S. military menu in 1949 represented a new style of graphic design, one that showed traditional holiday images in the same pictorial space with the iconic symbols of Japan. This exuberant scene stood in stark contrast with the deep despair that had been prevalent in Japan during the years immediately following World War II. By the end of 1945, more than 350,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in the country, supervising almost every aspect of civilian life. Sometimes called the “Confusion Era” in Japanese art history, this chaotic period was also disorienting for the Americans who lived there during the Occupation. However, the situation had improved considerably four years later, when this Christmas menu appeared at the Tachikawa Air Base.