Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?

New York City
1884

Two national political conventions were held in Chicago during the summer of 1884. In June, the Republicans nominated Senator James Blaine of Maine, and a month later, the Democrats picked Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. During the campaign, this hotel trade card predicted that New York would be the swing state in the election. As things turned out, the election was so close that it was decided by two events in the last week of the contest. In fact, one could argue that if Blaine had eaten a “regular dinner,” such as the one advertised below for 25 cents, instead of attending a lavish banquet at Delmonico’s, he might have been elected as the 22nd president of the United States.

Lilliputian Quantities: An Early Tasting Menu

Wellesley, 
1879

The cover of this 1879 menu from the Wellesley Hotel looks straightforward, except that the small town located a few miles outside Boston was not yet officially named Wellesley; it was still called Needham.1  After making a fortune in sewing machines, William Emerson Baker had first tried to establish a “hygienic village” named Hygeria, where he would conduct scientific work on sanitary food production. When his proposal was rejected, he simply adopted “Wellesley” as the name of his resort hotel and its location.

Mixed Icons

Occupied Japan, 
1949-1955

  
This cover illustration, showing Santa Claus flying through a Japanese gate toward Mount Fuji, represented a new style of graphic design. It appeared on a Christmas menu at the U.S. Tachikawa Air Base in Occupied Japan in 1949. What was different about it was that it showed Western 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 Japan, 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 participated in the Occupation. However, by the time this Christmas menu appeared, the situation had improved considerably.

Fat Man

Hanford, Washington
1944

Hanford Engineer Works (1944)

Soon after a woman sold me an old Christmas menu online, she wrote to let me know something about it. Her father had been a machinist who rode the rails looking for work in the 1930s. He eventually landed a job at the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State, where he worked for the Manhattan Project during World War II. In 1944, he enclosed this holiday bill of fare in a letter to his family in Chicago as a way of reassuring them that he was okay. There was a hand-written notation on the back of the menu that summarized its story. It read “atom bomb job.”

Cheeseburger Diplomacy

Camp David, Maryland
2007

President George W. Bush was anxious to form a good relationship with the newly-chosen British Prime Minister Gordon Brown when he came to United States in July 2007. Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair, whom one of the backbenchers in Parliament unkindly characterized as “George Bush’s poodle,” had been a good friend and ally and would be sorely missed. Looking back at what previous administrations did in similar situations, the president decided to host a casual cookout.

Bavarian Strawberry Pudding

New York City, 
1935

In her memoir This Time Together, comedienne Carol Burnett reminisces about the summer of 1959, when the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress was enjoying a healthy run. “A few of us in the cast decided to splurge on Saturday night after the show and treat ourselves to a sundae at the most expensive ice cream parlor in New York City: Rumpelmayer’s, in the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South,” she recalls. “I was flush with the excitement of being in a hit stage show and raking in $80 a week to boot. I could afford a Rumpelmayer’s treat.1

“Rumpelmayer’s was a pretty posh ice cream parlor. You could spot familiar faces there anytime after the bows had been taken and the lights had dimmed on Broadway for the night. Some folks went to nightclubs and bars, but those who had a sweet tooth and who also wanted to be seen went to Rumpelmayer’s. I remember having peeked in a few months earlier and spotting Marlene Dietrich in a gorgeous gray pantsuit at the counter, elegantly digging a long-handled spoon into a whipped cream goodie.”

Survival of the Fittest

New York City, 
1882

Influential Americans of the Gilded Age were comforted by philosopher Herbert Spencer’s ideas which adapted the theory of evolution to human society. Considered one of the most intelligent men of his generation, Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” a concept more related to laissez-faire capitalism than Charles Darwin’s system of biological natural selection. On November 9, 1882, two hundred distinguished gentlemen gathered at Delmonico’s in New York to honor the British philosopher before he departed for England, thereby ending his three-month visit to the United States.1 And while Spencer dreaded having to attend this banquet—he was an insomniac who became irritable and grumpy when something threatened to encroach on his privacy—the other participants were excited about an evening that promised to touch on the burning issues of the Victorian era, such as “intelligent design, the proper role of government, America’s place in the world, and God’s existence.”2 Ironically, the menu shown below unwittingly evokes the theme of this dinner. 

The Grub of 1859

Denver, 
1881

When the Society of Colorado Pioneers gathered for its first reunion in 1881 at the Windsor Hotel in Denver, the menu featured “grub.” Even so, the venue was first-class. Amidst its labyrinth of public rooms, the new 300-room Windsor boasted a Western Union office, a barber shop, and a tobacconist, along with several bars and restaurants. It was the largest and most luxurious hotel between the Palmer House in Chicago and The Palace in San Francisco.

Hot-House Tomatoes

New York City, 
1897
 

The Café Au Bon Goût on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 30th Street features an enormous buffet that is open 24/7. If you step inside and look straight up, you will see the beautifully molded ceiling that once graced the dining room of the Holland House, one of grandest hotels in New York during the 1890s. Modeled after a celebrated mansion in London, the ten-story building (which now contains offices) was built in the Italian Renaissance style, using white limestone from Indiana. Seven photographs and a menu tell its story.

Corny

Iowa, New York & Connecticut, 
1886-1888

Two corn cobs were walking along, and the first cob noticed that they were being followed by another cob. The first cob whispered to the second, “Don’t look now, but I think we are being followed by a stalker.” This was the type of corny joke that made the rounds at the corn-themed suppers that became popular in the late 1880s.1

Church suppers were commonplace occurrences during the nineteenth century, both as social gatherings and a way for women's groups to raise money. Around 1886, church groups across the country began to use corn as a theme for their suppers. The short-lived fad seemingly came out of nowhere—it was not confined to the Corn Belt in the Midwest nor related to the harvest season.