by temporallobe 11 hours ago
As a foodie, I love this. In many respects, menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish years but it looks like a “Boiled” category was common early on, which I assume was because boiled foods were popular and/or easy for restaurants to make in bulk.
Boiled would have included braised -- but there were meats that you grilled, because they were young and tender, and meats that you "boiled" to break down the collagen because they were mature and tough. Nowadays we rarely consume animals of that age, but then they often did so for economic reasons.
> menus don’t seem to have drastically changed over the past 175ish
After looking at a dozen of the ones from the Boston area I have to say that my sampling disagrees with yours.
Turtle, Sweetbreads, Venison, Mutton are all things that would get a foodie OUT to eat today and seem to have been much more common then.
Also much of what I am seeing as "boiled" is going to range from "poached" (salmon) to "braised" (some of the tougher organ meats). Stumbling across a "boiled" chicken, served with rice and cucumbers in an 1800's menu made me jump to "Hainanese chicken rice". That preparation seems exotic to the modern American style but might not be as alien 100 years ago (Flavoring aside).
Presumably eating in a place that had printed menu was a middle/upper class thing which would be a pretty small proportion of the population.
So it’s probably not exactly fair comparing with more casual modern restaurants.
> printed menu was a middle/upper class
Distinctly and many of the menu's I looked at were from private events.
But mutton was fairly common then and has fallen out of fashion in the US.
Venison went from "common" (1800) to rare (by 1900 we at all of them). Early restrictions on hunting were around deer.
The same with Turtle soup and mock turtle soup. Interestingly the mock version was made with calf's head. Apparently this was a texture thing (Im guessing high gelatin content in the head).
The interface into the data is, well, shameful. It would be nice if one could pull up hotel menus (rather than private events) by year. From browsing Boston menus it was interesting to see the early ones (for dining not event) be limited and the later ones (1907) look more like a cheese cake factory or diner (a bit of everything). Im guessing this has to do with the availability of industiral refrigeration (made not harvested ice) coming into use.
One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.
If you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.
*food
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