A blog about food, history, data visualization, and more
The Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library shows what people were eating in restaurants decades ago through its collection of tens of thousands of menus, most from the early 20th century. Let’s take a look at three seasonal menus and a creative menu for bankers.
I don’t like celery, so it might have been a defense mechanism when I started noticing it on menu after menu from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As I looked through the Buttolph Collection of Menus for food conservation messages on World War I-era menus, it seemed that nearly every menu included celery as a […]
Reports about seasonal food from the farmers market are common today: for example, KCRW’s Good Food has a weekly farmers market report, the San Francisco Chronicle covers seasonal produce in the Sunday Food and Home section, there are apps about seasonal produce for your phone, and guides printed on paper. I have been following these reports for a […]
The Buttolph Collection of Menus at the New York Public Library has grabbed my attention and I’m wondering if I should start a new blog called “Menu Masala.” A food history nerd could spend a lot of time looking for menus with compelling art, analyzing the how contents have changed over time, searching for special […]
Reducing food consumption on the homefront was a major initiative of the U.S. government during the First World War, even before U.S. troops were fighting “Over There.” The U.S. Food Administration (run by future president Herbert Hoover) spearheaded the effort with promotional posters, outreach to restaurants, public education efforts, encouragement of gardens, and more. Some […]
On January 6, 2016, the New York Public Library announced that it was expanding access to more than 180,000 public domain images through improved interfaces and tools (e.g., APIs, metadata). I started looking through the collection and found some amazing items (so far, dozens of images reviewed and 20 “keepers” for further review). Now and […]
Updated, May 2016: 1) The mystery of the “ice cream, bisque of black bread a la Delmonico” is solved in my post about rye bread ice cream! 2) I found the original menu in the NY Public Library archive and comment on it in this post about the whale meat luncheon menu. If you follow […]