Pfaff’s

New York City, 
1866 

The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse 
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway…                

—Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman went to Pfaff’s almost every night between 1858 and 1862 when working on the early editions of Leaves of Grass.2 He occasionally read one of his latest poems to the writers and artists who regularly assembled in this underground beer hall. The free-spirited and unconventional group was brought together by Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press and a champion of Whitman’s work. Other habitués included actor Edwin Booth, painter Elihu Vedder, psychedelic drug pioneer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, cartoonist Thomas Nast, and humorist Artemus Ward, now regarded as America’s first stand-up comedian. And since Pfaff’s was one of the few saloons that welcomed women, Clapp’s coterie was diverse for its time. Writer Ada Clare was a charter member of this artistic clique as was Adah Isaacs Menken whose “naked lady” routine made her the highest earning actress of the era. Given the importance of Pfaff’s, I was thrilled when a menu recently came to light. My first impression was how different it looked from those that previously catered to the city’s literati. This was truly a German menu, reflecting the arrival of new attitudes and foods from Europe. Interestingly, it marked a pivotal moment in our creative past. 

A Guest of Honor

New York City, 
1901 

Booker T. Washington signed the cover of this menu from a dinner held in his honor at the Aldine Association, a New York club, in January 1901. The autograph adds a personal touch to this keepsake from what must have been an inspiring event. The dinner was hosted by The Outlook, a weekly magazine that had recently published a series of autobiographical essays by Washington. By the time of this occasion, the essays had been reworked into book form and were about to be published as Up from Slavery. In this autobiography, the renowned educator recounts his experiences as a child born into slavery during the Civil War, the challenges he faced in pursuing an education, and his efforts to establish vocational schools. Although the book enjoyed commercial success, subsequent events would soon reveal that its release had done little to ease the enduring racial prejudices held by many whites in the South.

A Vermont Breakfast Party

New York City,
1949 

The Limited Editions Club awarded its fifth gold metal at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in November 1949. According to the rules, the award was given to an American author of a book published during the last five years that the judges believed “most likely to attain the stature of a classic.” The previous two winners were Ernest Hemingway for “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1941 and E. B. White for “One Man’s Meat” in 1944. While the eight-page booklet from the presentation ceremony in 1949 does not reveal who won that year, it does contain an interesting menu from a talented writer in his own right. 

Echoes of the Jazz Age

 1919-1929 

“The Jazz Age is over,” declared novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1931, nine years after he coined the phrase. The prosperous era began in about November 1918, when the First World War ended, and continued unabated until the stock market crashed in October 1929.1 This period of cultural transformation marked the birth of modern America. Everyday life was broadly transformed by automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, radio programs, and household electricity. However, the arrival of modernity also sparked a powerful backlash. The conservative counterassault manifested itself in the anti-radical hysteria of the Red Scare, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the ratification of National Prohibition, the passage of stricter immigration quotas, and the rise of Fundamentalism. Fifty menus reveal facets of this vast, complicated story. Some of them recall forgotten events; others provide unwitting evidence of societal issues that are with us to this day. 

Suprême of Shark

New York City, 
1884 

This comic illustration appeared on a menu from a dinner held by the Ichthyophagous Club in 1884.1 Active in New York from 1880 to 1887, this social group of prominent men dined once a year on unpopular types of seafood in order to “overcome prejudice directed towards many kinds of fish, which are rarely eaten, because their excellence is unknown.”2 The club comprised ichthyologists, who worked in the branch of zoology dealing with fishes, as well as naturalists, philanthropists, and gourmets. In fact, the seal in the cartoon is holding a bottle of Cordon Rouge champagne.

A Spectacle of Horror

New York City, 
1904 

It was a bright, cloudless morning on June 15, 1904 when a sidewheel passenger steamboat named the General Slocum caught fire on the East River. Ten minutes earlier, it had departed from Lower Manhattan on an end-of-school-year trip to a picnic ground on the Long Island shore. As the steamboat passed East 97th Street, puffs of smoke started rising through the wooden floorboards. Rotten fire hoses thwarted attempts to put out the blaze; the lifeboats were tied up and inaccessible; and the life preservers were defective and of no use. One newspaper reported, it was “a spectacle of horror beyond words to express—a great vessel all in flames, sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city, while her helpless, screaming hundreds were roasted alive or swallowed up in waves.” Almost all of the estimated 1,021 people who died were immigrant mothers and small children, hundreds of whom were never found. A rare menu from the General Slocum is dated the day after the disaster, one of the worst in American history.

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. 

The Halcyon Days of San Quentin

Marin County, California
1928-1940

One of the most intriguing things about old menus from San Quentin State Prison is that they were saved as mementos. The legendary prison, situated on the north side of San Francisco Bay, was established to hold miscreants during the Gold Rush. Over the years, it has grown large enough to warrant two ZIP codes—one for inmates (94974) and one for Point San Quentin Village (94964), an adjacent community originally built to house the prison’s employees and their families. The menus mostly come from the period between 1928, shortly after the East Block opened (now described as a crumbling, leaky maze) and 1940. A dozen menus and related ephemera take us back to this bygone era when the guards enjoyed the gustatory pleasures of the table.

Wiltons Revisited

London, 
2005 

In the previous post, a menu from Wiltons in 2001 was shown with reflections by journalist R. W. Apple, Jr. who ranked this upper-class restaurant in London as one of his all-time favorites. Apple believed that some of its finest seafood dishes were those “least messed around with…perfectly simple, simply perfect and entirely sufficient.” He also felt that this venerable establishment served the best English food in England. Certainly, the traditional cuisine, the elegantly-subdued décor, and the female staff uniforms (evocative of a Victorian nanny) all blend together into a harmonious whole, reflecting the epitome of what many of us regard as Englishness. However, back in 2005, if you passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen, you may have heard French being spoken. The dinner menu below from September of that year is signed by then executive chef Jérôme Ponchelle.

Wiltons

London, 
2001 

While cleaning out the attic this weekend, I came across a box of forgotten newspaper  clippings. One of the articles appeared in the New York Times in October 2006. It was written by R. W. Apple, Jr., an associate editor who died earlier that month. Known to friends and colleagues as “Johnny,” the celebrated gourmet recounted his ten favorite restaurants during many years of travel. Reading the piece as if for the first time, I was delighted to see a place that would also be on my short list—Wiltons in London. Excerpts from the article and a menu from the period are shown below.