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. 

Cafeteria America

Havana, 
ca. 1955 

During a recent visit to Havana, I hailed a taxi (a 1958 Ford) and rumbled over to the Plaza de Armas to look for some old menus. Every day dozens of private booksellers set up their stalls in this leafy square, selling used books, ephemera, and souvenir photographs taken in famous nightclubs like the Tropicana during its heyday. Some of the books date back to the nineteenth century. One such rarity that caught my eye was a finely-bound volume containing copies of Frank’s Illustrated Weekly for the month of July 1870. As tempting as it was, I decided to forgo this treasure and stay focused on my mission to find historical evidence of Cuban influence on the food customs of the United States, or conversely, the spread of American culture abroad. And as luck would have it, I soon discovered a menu from the Cafeteria America. Coming from the period just before the revolution in 1959, it illustrated the simple pleasures of everyday life once enjoyed by the middle- and upper-classes in Cuba.

Wrong Way Corrigan

Los Angeles, 
1938

On a foggy morning in July 1938, a 31-year-old aircraft mechanic named Douglass Corrigan took off in a jerry-built plane from an airfield in Brooklyn. Disappearing into the haze, he carried with him some chocolate, two boxes of fig bars, one quart of water, and a U.S. map marked with a flight plan to California. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Dublin. Since he had repeatedly been denied permission to fly across the Atlantic, Corrigan told the authorities in Ireland that he left New York the previous day heading for the West Coast, but somehow “got mixed up in the clouds and must have flown the wrong way.” He theorized that the low-light conditions might have caused him to misread the compass. That was his story and he stuck to it. 

Broiled Eels & Wild Hare

Thanksgiving, 
1852 

Thanksgiving was once regarded as “a Yankee holiday.” In the eighteenth century, the clergy in New England used it as an opportunity to rail against the British, and after that issue was resolved, they turned their attention to slavery. The autumnal celebration gained in popularity during the nineteenth century, as New Englanders migrated to other parts of the country. Two menus from Thanksgiving in 1852 stir the imagination, taking us back to a distant time and place. One is a rare survivor from a ship on the high seas. Proclaiming the special day in large script, it stands in marked contrast to a menu from a hotel in Connecticut, where curiously, the reference to Thanksgiving is much less obvious. 

The Nativist Printer

Washington, D.C.
1846 

President James K. Polk was the last of the Jacksonians to sit in the White House. Nicknamed “Little Hickory,” Polk was committed to the concept of Manifest Destiny, using his Democratic majority in the Senate and House of Representatives to rapidly expand the country across the continent. In January 1846, marking the beginning of the first full year of his one-term presidency, the House voted to stop sharing the Oregon Territory with the United Kingdom. Five months later, a treaty was signed in Washington, setting the western border with Canada.1 In May, the United States declared war on Mexico, and although this conflict lasted two years, the annexation of California began almost immediately. During this combative year, some territorial issues were easily resolved, such as when Iowa was admitted as the 29th state or, in another Act of Congress, part of the District of Columbia was returned to Virginia. Fearing that the slave trade in the District would soon be outlawed, Alexandrians petitioned Congress for the land south of the Potomac River. After the retrocession of the thirty-one square miles ceded by Virginia in 1791, the nation’s capital was no longer ten miles square; all that remained was the territory originally donated by Maryland.2, 3

Grand Banquet at Delmonico's

New York City
1880 

In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean, Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banquets as being particularly memorable.1 One of these dinners had been held fourteen years earlier for Count Ferdinand de Lessep, the French entrepreneur who built the Suez Canal. Eager to replicate his engineering feat, De Lesseps came to New York in March 1880 to raise money for a sea-level canal that would cut across the Isthmus of Panama. As was customary, a banquet was held in his honor. However, as far as the French-born chef and his brigade were concerned, their famed countryman was more than just another special guest. To them, he was a hero of the age. Observing a palpable excitement in the air during dinner, the reporter from the New York Times wryly noted that “the nationality of the distinguished guest of the evening had had something to do with the zeal of the cooks, confectioners, and waiters.”2 

Epigram of Lamb, à la De Free

Topeka, Kansas
1883 

Ephemera often contains unwitting historical evidence. A case in point is provided by a small menu from the Copeland Hotel in Topeka, Kansas in 1883, the same year Emma Lazarus captured the welcoming spirit of America in her famous poem that included the  line: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...” Although a dish on the menu alludes to this ideal, the railroad timetable on the back reveals the harsh realities of a time when masses of dispossessed people were migrating throughout the United States.