A Wonderful Machine

New York City, 
1890s 

When eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asked her father in 1897 whether Santa Claus really existed, he suggested she write to The Sun, one of New York’s prominent newspapers.  The editorial response, which included the famous line “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” became part of American folklore. More conservative than The Times and The Herald Tribune, The Sun reflected the preoccupations of upper-class society, often marveling at the inner-workings and outward manifestations of wealth during the Gilded Age. For example, in October 1894, the paper interviewed Chef Charles Ranhofer at Delmonico’s, calling the luxury restaurant “a wonderful machine.” Almost every night during the social season, there was a large dinner in the third-floor banquet room of its Madison Square location, where course after course arrived promptly from the basement kitchen. The article, illustrated below with four menus from the period, describes the organizational efficiency of a fine dining establishment at the fin de siècle.1

Up the Yangzi River

U.S.S. Helena, 
1906 

The chronology of holiday menus from the U.S.S. Wilmington begs the question as to what the sailors in the Asiatic Squadron ate on normal days in the early twentieth century. For that, we turn to a menu from her sister ship, the U.S.S. Helena, on December 2, 1906, while anchored off Hankow some 602 nautical miles up the Yangzi River. This Sunday dinner for the chief petty officers features delicacies like roast venison and roast pheasant. For dessert, there is the ubiquitous peach pie, presumably made with the local fruit for which this region of China is known. Indeed, it seems that they ate very well, confirmed by a note at the bottom which reads: “This is a fair sample of our usual dinner.” (The CPO cook, J. J. Pinkerton, was reputedly the best chef on the Helena, outclassing those who prepared meals for the crew and the officers.) 

Showing the Flag

U.S.S. Wilmington, 
1906-1918

Caught in a storm off the coast of Luzon on the night of December 20, 1915, the U.S.S. Wilmington rolled 61 degrees, dangerously close to the point where she would capsize. Having narrowly survived the worst roll in her forty-eight years of service, the naval vessel arrived in Manila the next day, safely completing the three-day passage from Hong Kong. The light-draft gunboat was part of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, charged with defending the Philippines and with upholding the Open Door Policy in China. Typhoons posed one of the greatest threats to the American warships as they sailed from port to port, establishing an authoritative presence in the region by “showing the flag.” Twenty-three holiday menus from the Wilmington reveal the rituals and rhythm of this naval patrol in the early twentieth century.

The Life & Times of Antonio Sivori (Part IV)

New York City, 
1869-1881 

Antonio Savori achieved some degree of notoriety during his lifetime. He was perhaps best known for the charity balls he catered at the Academy of Music. Located on East 14th Street at Irving Place, this theater was was situated only one block off Union Square, the center of New York’s social life until the early 1880s. Featuring a lavish white and gold interior illuminated by thousands of gaslights, the venue was used for operas, concerts, and even high society balls by removing the 4,000 crimson-velvet seats to create a large dance floor.

The Life & Times of Antonio Sivori (Part III)

New York City, 
1869-1881 

Despite the onslaught of a severe depression, Antonio Sivori got a job in early 1874 as the steward of the Union Square Hotel. The area near the park had by then become largely commercial. In 1870, the jeweler and stationer Tiffany & Co. moved to 15th Street from its old location at Broadway and Broome Street. It was also around this time that the Union Square Hotel and its adjoining theater opened on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 15th Street, occupying the site where one of the finest boarding houses in the city once stood. 

The Life & Times of Antonio Sivori (Part II)

New York City, 
1869-1881 

By June 1872, Antonio Sivori was the proprietor of St. Mark’s Restaurant at 27th Street and Broadway, situated inside the newly-completed Stevens House. Designed by the country’s leading architect, Richard Morris Hunt, the mansard-capped building was the first apartment complex of its kind. The eight-story structure occupied the entire south side of 27th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and yet it contained only eighteen luxury suites.1 Then thirty-nine years old, Sivori appears to have operated this restaurant for only about one year. Well-educated and fluent in six languages, he should have been able to work well with members of high society, but for some reason, he kept moving from job to job throughout his career, sometimes working at places you might least suspect.2

The Life and Times of Antonio Sivori (Part I)

New York City, 
1869-1881 

One morning last spring, while combing through a box of old menus, I stumbled across a lost chapter of American culinary history. There had been only a brief opportunity to examine the tattered contents of this box before purchasing it, and I was now sorting through the hodge-podge of papers more carefully, hoping to find a hidden gem, when it suddenly occurred to me that forty-five of the menus from New York might somehow be related to each other. As I separated these from the others, and arranged them in chronological order from 1869 to 1881, an intriguing narrative began to take shape, for it appeared they had once belonged to a hotel steward named Antonio Sivori. No longer remembered, Sivori was well-known in his day, catering some of the city’s most important social events.1, 2

Wedding Banquet of Irene and Solomon R. Guggenheim

New York City, 
1895 

Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited with creating the first abstract painting, perhaps as early as 1910. Thirteen years later, he painted Composition 8, a large canvas with interacting circles, triangles, and linear elements that he considered the high point of his postwar work.1 Mining magnate Solomon Guggenheim and his wife Irene purchased Composition 8 from the artist at his studio in Dessau, Germany in the spring of 1929, and hung it in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, the first of more than 150 works by Kandinsky to enter their collection. The avant-garde painter and these important patrons, all born in the 1860s, came from the same generation and would later say that their interest in art was sparked by an event in 1895. For the Guggenheims, the artistic journey began shortly after their marriage in April of that year. A menu from their wedding banquet suggests that it was a conventional, upper-class affair of the fin de siècle, the closing phase of the nineteenth century when art was running out of new things to say, and the seeds of a more daring expression had not yet taken root. 

King Kalākaua of Hawaii

 New Bedford & Honolulu,
 1875 

For those of us who live on the Mainland, the words “king,” “palatial residence,” and “Hawaii” are likely to conjure up images of Elvis, Graceland, and the movie Blue Hawaii, before recalling that Hawaii once had a royal family. One of the kingdom’s last monarchs was David Kalākaua who ascended the throne in 1874. Kalākaua entered the history books again that year when he became the first foreign head of state to visit the United States. While the purpose of his trip was to sign a treaty of reciprocity, assuring Hawaii a duty-free market for its sugar and other goods, he used the opportunity to visit people and places in America that had had a long relationship with his country. Two menus dating from this period, one from a dinner with old contacts in the whaling industry, the other from a luncheon after he returned to Hawaii, reveal interesting details of his goodwill visit and daily life at home. 

Christmas, 1864

Philadelphia 

On Christmas Day in 1864, a special dinner was served to the 4,500 Union soldiers housed at Satterlee General Hospital, then the largest army hospital in the country. Satterlee was located in Philadelphia between 40th and 44th Streets, near Baltimore Avenue, in a sparsely-developed area about a half mile west of the Schuylkill River. The sprawling 15-acre facility comprised rows of wood-frame wards and hundreds of tents, as well as a library, a reading room, and a printing shop that probably produced this menu card with an illustration of the hospital on the back. The holiday dinner shown below was provided by Dr. and Mrs. Milton Egbert, whose farm in northwestern Pennsylvania was luckily situated in the center of the nation’s first oil-producing region. In 1859, the early wells yielded only a few thousand barrels, but oil production quickly grew during the Civil War, making the Egberts immensely wealthy. At the time, it was said that no parcel of land in the United States of equal size had yielded a larger financial return than their farm on Oil Creek.