| The social history of the table is little documented. Where it is, there is evidence of considerable change. The last 150 years (for which the menu provides a fairly detailed record) have seen changes in dining habits almost from one generation to another. Prior to the 18oo's the image of the menu is hazy. But with the emergence of the restaurant and hotel, evidence of changing fashions in eating becomes evident. |
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The Victorians could smile at outlandish items of documented Norman meals (boar's head, swan, mallard, teals roasted, pasties of pork, etc.), but it must be said that their own menus may contain items hardly less curious today. In Cassell's Etiquette of Good Society (1886), a list of recommended middle-class dinner-party menus includes the following: stewed pigeons with cherries, salmi of larks, quenelles of rabbit, quails, ragout of sweetbreads, plovers' eggs, ramekins, curried ox-palates, oyster patties, snipe, iced asparagus, and strawberry water. In marked contrast, and no less redolent, are items of the same period in village dinners and other such functions. Here cowheel pie, marrow pudding, pigeon pie, negus, and grog are common entries. |
| In both Britain and America there has been a clear-cut division between the concept of native or 'home' cooking and the cuisine of the continent of Europe, a distinction clearly reflected in the content and terminology of the hotel and restaurant menu and, in later years, that of the private dinner party. Only in the 1950’s did a trend emerge in British hotels and restaurants to add English translations (and sometimes extensive descriptions) to French menu listings. In American menus,
French has appeared only rarely. With the rise of tourism,
menus in many parts of Europe have become multilingual.
Menus appear in a wide range of style and formats. For major restaurants and hotels, ship's dining rooms, and for special dinners and banquets, they are generally overprinted on preprinted blanks. |
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For ceremonial occasions (Buckingham Palace, Guildhall, Mercer's and Mansion House dinners, etc.) menus have been printed on silk, with fringing, tassels, and other embellishments, including embossing. In the heyday of the CHROMO (c.1860-1910) large numbers of full-colour pictorial designs appeared. Printed for the most part in Germany, these bore no title (and were thus marketable internationally) and featured flowers, girls, and other decorative elements as title-pieces to the blank area of the design. Many were also embossed and pierced in a more or less intricate frame treatment; in many cases this made them unsuitable for overprinting, which meant that they were completed by hand. |
| Restaurant and hotel menus are of special value for the historian of food as, in addition to documenting changing fashions in cuisine, they provide direct information on price levels. Menus may encapsulate not only dinners and diners but their designers. Menus designed by Alphonse Mucha, Charles Dana Gibson, H.M. Bateman and Edward Ardizone, are of particular interest, as are those produced for the Double Crown Club in Britain (which, since the club's foundation in 1924, have been designed and printed by members of the club). However, as we show here, it wasn't always the famous who designed exceptional menucards destined to become collectables. 'Special-occasion menus', often bearing the signatures of those present, also hold the interest of many collectors'. |
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