A flâneur especially, gliding along the arcades of the network, takes the utmost of delight in repairing to one of the fine restaurants for the taking of a small snack and the enjoyment of the scenes. What will it be today? The Lamb Stew à la Parisienne at the Hotel Manhattan (cost: $0.60) could be interesting. Or perhaps there is just time to skip over to Saint Petersburg for some Petits Poulets à la Finaneiese? No I should think none of these. My tastes take me off to Bremen to join Norddeutcher Lloyd aboard the Kaiser Friedrich. The Leg of Venison, Sauce à la Poivrade and Rissoles à l’Italienne accompanied by Strauss’ “Tausend und eine Nacht” sounds just about right to fit the moment’s mood.
Miss Frank E Buttolph’s legacy truly does grace those epicurean cybernauts who wish to move from place to place, smelling the tables of the past. Her collection of over 9,000 menus from the years 1880-1910 have been published in an online database by the New York Public Library (constituting the largest collection of historical menus in the world). So comprehensive was the collection that an author profiling Miss Buttolph for a 1906 edition of the New York Times magazine wrote:
Miss Buttolph is making history for the year 2000 which, should our present carnivorous natures by that time merge into a diet of mild and milky, will hold this generation up as an example of brute force that should annihilate all our virtues and leave us in the eyes of our descendants a race of horror and greed, a pack of flesh-eating outcasts remarkable only for our gastronomic endurance. (((wow, if only the NYT still wrote sentences like that))) [1906 New York Times Profile of Miss Buttolph PDF]
Quite I should think to the shame of the head librarian at the NYPL, many of the menus are stamped with inventory markings. This doubtlessly would have offended the late Buttolph who was “a tiny, unostentatious, literary looking person whose bugaboo is a possible spot upon one of her precious menus. On one of them that had been used by the late King Christian in his palace at Denmark was a coffee stain, and it was only after insisting that it had value because it was a stain of royal coffee that Miss Buttolph could be appeased.”
There are many an interesting tale within these menus, each a bit of ephemera constructed without a touch of regard for any future beyond the meal. See a few notable examples below, and beware that hours may be at stake should you fall too deeply into this particular database.
Hotel Manhattan, 1900
Dinner held at St. Petersburg, 1900
Dinner held by Norddeutcher Lloyd at Kaiser Friedrich at Sea, 1899 — Menu in German and English, Concert Program
Dinner held by Maharaja of Baroda at Makarpura Palace, Baroda, India, 1897
Amazing blog, amazing post. The comment by the nyt writer strikes me with an air of disturbing uncanny; for indeed, how our diet has changed! How many would regard the happiest diner as the most repulsive of beings! The menu from the Hotel Manhattan, my favorite for its pure banality, is astounding. And, I surely want to join the Maharaja! What a woman, this Miss Frank E Buttolph, must have been to collect and shepard these menus! What a palette! Keep sailing brave cybernaut, I will follow in your wake and dive into the depths of the database. Thanks for the direction.