The American Menu: January 2017

Monday, January 23, 2017

O Sweet Grows the Orange

Boston,
1852 & 1859

The Burns Club of Boston once held banquet on January 25 each year to commemorate the birth of Robert Burns. When the birthday fell on a Sunday, they celebrated the following day, as shown by this menu from the Stackpole House in 1852, two years after the club was established.

Welcome

Menus are minor, transient documents that tell us how people have eaten outside the home over time. Examine one and be transported back to the everyday life of the past - whether to a lavish banquet in the Gilded Age or a food-relief eatery during the Great Depression. They aid our cultural memory by providing historical evidence, not only of what people were eating, but what else they were doing and with whom they were doing it; and what they valued.

In the United States, menus came into general use in the 1840s when hotels and restaurants began to replace the old inns and taverns that served a limited choice of domestic-style meals. Dining among strangers in quasi-public spaces became a new and novel kind of entertainment in which the menu played a central role, offering diners choice and anticipation for the first time. Menus suddenly appeared in all types of venues and forms of transportation.

Menus reflect the aspirations and ideals of society. They are also an art form that aims to please. While most were intended for short-term use and never meant to be saved, some were finely-crafted souvenirs made by leading stationers. Even when kept as personal mementos, however, menus were frequently discarded by later generations for whom they had no special meaning. As with other types of ephemera, part of their appeal lies within the notion of their improbable survival.

Deciphering the story behind a particular menu often requires great sleuth-work. That’s what I'll be undertaking on this blog.

The American Menu

Monday, January 23, 2017

O Sweet Grows the Orange

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