A few years ago, McGill English professor Nathalie Cooke, a food historian, was rummaging through the contents of an old British mansion’s kitchen drawer. The rummaging actually took place at McGill – the aged manuscripts in that drawer had been purchased by the McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections unit for their historic properties.
As Cooke examined the documents, she came across a table setting schema with odd phrases.
“Pride reversed in a pye”? “The divine part of a man boiled”?
“When I was showing them to a visiting scholar, she said, ‘you know, those aren’t [just] foods, they’re riddles!’”
Aha: humble pie and stewed sole! And a reference to “Crooked Sarah” must mean Sal-awry –
Celery, get it?
Intrigued, Cooke turned to McGill’s vast access to digital subscriptions to rifle through historical newspapers, discovering what’s called an “enigmatic bill of fare” in the U.K. and “conundrum socials” in North America. These dinner parties listed “sorrowful apples” (pineapples) or glasses of “counterfeit agony” (sham-pain) on their punny menus.
Cooke’s new book Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History covers a lot of historical terrain, exploring how menus have evolved over time and how they have been tailored for very different groups of diners.
Menus “are important because they tell us what people ate or experienced at a particular moment in place and time,” says Cooke. Menus also offer information that might be absent in other historical sources.
“People’s journals and diaries have lots of biases,” says Cooke. “If they’re recording what they ate for dinner, chances are they’re saying it was either healthier or more virtuous than it really was.”
Menus don’t just demonstrate what meals were on offer in certain years, they also shine a light on an era’s “foodways” – a term that encompasses the economic, cultural and historical factors at play in the preparation and consumption of food. “I was trying to tell stories about menus that people wouldn’t know or see right at first glance,” says Cooke.
Beautifully illustrated with many examples of unique and unusual menus, Tastes and Traditions offers a feast for the eyes while providing something chewy for the mind. Focusing mostly on Europe and North America, Cooke discusses menus that were created for a wide range of diners – including children, prisoners, hospital patients and guests at 18th century royal dinners in France.
There are examples of menus from late 19th century sci-fi books, from steamship and train trips, from weddings and bar mitzvahs.
If Cooke had to choose just one historical menu to mount in her own kitchen, it would be one illustrated by Adolphe Beaufrère for the literary society Les Cents Bibliophiles, showing a seated woman putting on a stocking. Beaufrère wasn’t the only prominent artist to contribute to the illustrated menus that appeared in Paris in the early 20th century, we learn. Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso were among the other artists to do the same.
We see menus from social clubs, like the Explorers Club that in 1987 offered Calcutta sea snake and freeze-dried astronaut ice cream on its menu. We also learn about the members of the Thirteen Club in late 1800s New York, who met on the 13th of every month, entering the room under a ladder, and seated 13 to each table. Spilled salt? They’d let it lie.
A chapter on health shows how root beer and Coca-Cola were listed as nutritious drinks at one luncheonette, while illustrations of cigarettes often appeared prominently in past menus. Still, Cooke says, “I was expecting we would see a huge discrepancy between notions of health in previous centuries and the notions of health in our current moment. It really surprised me how consistent the fundamental principles of healthy eating are.”
Though her students might think of their vegan or vegetarian food preferences as innovative, the 14 vegetarian restaurants listed in London in 1884 shows otherwise. Even the Knights Templar, a French Roman Catholic military order in the 12th century, mostly ate vegetables.
Historical menus can also be poignant – even horrifying. Cooke examines souvenir menus signed by soldiers who would soon join the fighting in the Second World War. And the 1870 Siege of Paris saw street food take on a disturbing new meaning. People ate cats, dogs and, very reluctantly, beloved zoo animals. By the 99th day of the siege, Christmas, the restaurant Voisin tried to cheer up well-heeled locals by presenting fare like “chat flanqué de rats” paired with 40-year-old Burgundy.
World fairs have played an important role in introducing new audiences to unfamiliar foods. Cooke includes a menu from La Toundra at Montreal’s Expo 67. “La Toundra’s is brilliant because it’s not just bilingual, but has [Indigenous] languages as well,” she says. “[The menu] was saying that our history is not just French and English, we have a history that goes back long before.”
Cooke is currently looking at Montreal menus and hopes that people will come forward with some perhaps pilfered treasures stashed in their own drawers to add to the existing McGill collection that played an important role in the research for her book. “If you have menus at home, absolutely think about contributing them!”
