How were you meant to order off this kind of 19th century menu?

Cafe Society
1

One of my favorite idle activities when I’m sitting up late at night is to browse menus for restaurants I’ll probably never go to. Whether it’s because it’s in a city I’ll never visit or because it doesn’t exist anymore, I just like seeing what the options are and imagining the experience and what I’d order.

Occasionally this brings me to looking at some truly old menus, such as this one from Delmonico’s of New York from 1899, which has had me rather intrigued and perplexed for some time.

Menus of this era look very different than modern menus, and I don’t just mean in terms of the products available (I doubt there’s any restaurant in NYC today that includes pigeon, terrapin, and dandelion salad on the menu.) On a modern menu I’d expect a category for appetizers, a category for soups/salads, a listing of various main courses which may or may not include sides, a list of sides that can be ordered a la cate, a category for desserts, and a list of beverages. Here, almost everything appears to be a la carte, and the categories are quite different - there’s “Soups”, “Side Dishes”, “Fish”, “Ready”, “Entrees”, “Roast”, “Cold” (which includes a sub-category for salads), “Vegetables”, “Entrements”, and “Dessert”, which is itself divided into “Fancy Creams”, “Creams”, “Water Ices”, “Sorbets”, preserved fruits, “Fresh Fruit”, and “Cheese”, with shellfish and coffee listed outside these categories at the top and bottom of the menu.

How were you supposed to order from a menu like this? Were you meant to order one course from each category, or were you meant to, say, skip the “entree” if you ordered a “roast” or a “ready” (and what differentiates those categories from each other anyway?) Were there categories you were meant to order more than one from - would you be expected to order a sweet dessert and cheese, for example, or cold meat and a salad, or more than one “side dish”, which appears to be a nebulous and ill-defined category that includes things that ought to be lumped in with fish, cold, and vegetables? What differentiates an entrement from a dessert, since they both appear to be sweets served after the main meal?

These are all things I will desperately need to know in case I ever find myself in New York in 1899 with ten dollars in my pocket, a desire to make it rain at the finest establishment in town, and a hankering for vol-au-vent financiere, strained chicken gombo, and Garcia salad (which I have no idea what it is but I assume it’s coated in mayonnaise,) and some assorted and fancy cakes.

2

I have zero true knowledge here so this is all WAG-ing, but I would surmise that you were supposed to order one from each category - a soup, a salad, an entree, a dessert, etc. - to make it a properly-coursed meal.

3

Most of the things on the menu are meant to be traps to waylay unsophisticated diners. The way restaurants showed high class back then was to offer everything imaginable but the way diners showed high class was to pick the few things on the menu that had enough volume to be fresh and tasty.

This Youtuber did an entire video on 19th century menus:

4

That’s not quite the impression I got from the video. The menu then acted as long wine lists do today–as an opportunity to show “sophistication” by choosing the right one. But that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying quality of the item. Pretty much anything on the wine list of a decent restaurant will be good, and the typical consumer would be hard-pressed to discern much of a difference between most of them (even experts have a hard time in blind wine tasting). So the label/year/vintage/price is mostly a way for people to demonstrate apparent sophistication rather than any real ability to tell good from bad. Also, a way to flaunt wealth by getting artificially high-priced bottles.

The same may well have been true of these menus. It doesn’t really matter if the food is especially good as long as everyone plays along with the sophistication game.

Incidentally, the video shows (for a few seconds, at 10:50) the same menu from above (Delmonico’s).

5

The difference is wine doesn’t go bad. If you read books on high class society from before the 1950s in the US, people are obsessed with not just mentioning a restaurant but what they ordered at a restaurant. If you go to Delmonico’s, for example, you should order the Delmonico Steak. Oysters Rockerfeller at the Rockerfeller Hotel obviously. And even today, if you go to Keen’s Steakhouse in New York, you should obviously order the Mutton Chop and not a beefsteak. Balthazar is for Steak Frites and Oysters, Minetta Tavern is for the Burger etc. etc.

New York is about the only city left in the country that still has this old school style restaurant where only a few things on the menu are good and people blame you if you pick the wrong one but it was the dominant form of high class restaurant back in the day.

6

Not even the sloppy steaks?

Well, that answers my question as to why there’s a tomato and onion salad on the menu at Peter Luger.

7

it was pretty much order as much as you wanted from the top down and it come out as a “coursed” meal

if you reserved a banquet room there was an option for a “chefs choice” banquet where you just stated how many courses you desired and Ranhoffer just sent out the best of what he could make until you called for dessert supposedly the biggest meal was a 45-course meal for the entire cast of an opera that was paid for and attended by by the patrons of the met opera house (aka the robber barons) …in fact Delmonico’s plays a big part in a novel called “the alienist” which goes into very researched details on how it worked

8

I’ve ordered from menus of that general style. Maybe i didn’t show my high class in doing so, but i never found it especially difficult. Pick foods that together make a meal you want to eat. Order those. Wait for food to arrive, and consume it. No, don’t get a “ready” and a “roast”, unless you want two big main course servings.

9

I need to reread that. It has my favorite ending that more books need to incorporate:

…and then Teddy Roosevelt showed up and beat the crap out of everyone.

10

I don’t have an answer to your question, but just in case you haven’t already discovered it, the LA Public Library has an excellent online menu collection. I’ve spent hours browsing it.

11

The New York Public Library also has an extensive collection of menus.

12

Delmonico’s gets a mention in Horatio Alger’s “Ragged Dick”:

“Neither the coffee nor the steak were as good as can be bought at Delmonico’s; but then it is very doubtful whether, in the present state of his wardrobe, Dick would have been received at that aristocratic restaurant, even if his means had admitted of paying the high prices there charged.”

Speaking of which, if you were transported back to 1899, intent on spending for a high-class restaurant meal, I doubt you’d be physically capable of eating $10 worth of food at one sitting.*

*Mrs. J. says she remembers getting a lobster roll back in the day for 90 cents.
**There was an old gag in which a comedian was bemoaning the high price of deli food. “I remember when you couldn’t even carry five dollars worth of corned beef!”

13

Thanks for that. At the time I was menu-surfing (it’s been a while!) the LAPL collection was better, though I don’t remember if it was because they had more menus or because they were better organized or had a better search function. However, the LAPL collection has a bit more of a focus on west coast restaurants, though they do have menus from all over including shipboard.

14

Back then, “entree” was what we’d think of today as “appetizer.” It was the ‘entrance’ to the main course.

I wonder if “ready” is meant to be the “releve” course. It’s in the right spot.

The menu is probably for a service à la russe, which in 1899 would have been a newer way to eat.

15

I don’t think that menu is all that different from modern menus - I’m not sure what “ready” means and as best as I can tell an “entrement” is a type of dessert , but I’ve seen plenty of modern menus that doe not simply list “main courses/entrees” but divides the list of main courses into separate sections for steaks, chicken, seafood, fish, pasta, “surf ‘n’ turf”, sandwiches, burgers, etc. depending on the type of restaurant. . Same thing for " Dessert" - it’s not at all uncommon to see “ice cream” or “sorbet” listed as sort of a sub-heading under dessert with a list of the available flavors.

If you saw a menu today with the main courses divided up into “chicken”, “fish” , “steak” “pasta” and so on , you wouldn’t be expected to order one from each and I think the same was true of “ready” , “roast” and “entree” . I’ve heard that in the past, formal dinners had a fish course and a roast - but I’ve only heard that description in regard to formal dinners, not restaurant meals or even ordinary meals at home.

16

That may well be true, but there is also an ongoing distinction between “entrée” as used in North America, versus its continuing use to mean “appetizer” or “starter” in Britain and much of the rest of the English-speaking world.

17

Today, sure. Not in a fancy restaurant in 1899 in a cosmopolitan city.

18

I would have thought that but the half-chicken seems to be too much food for an appetizer.

19

Same with several of the other items. Entree on that menu is clearly the same as it is in American dining today. Lamb cutlets, tournados of beef. Those are main courses.

20

I’m skeptical of this idea that the menus contained “traps” to identify the rubes. (Although the idea of menus that offer a ridiculous selection sort of continues today with diners, where you can get anything from a club sandwich to a surf and turf dinner.)