Getting Misplaced within the World’s Largest Stack of Menus
After a lunch of mulligatawny soup and roast mutton on a wintry New 12 months’s Day in 1900, Miss Frank E. Buttolph struck upon a novel thought. “I ended within the Columbia Restaurant for lunch and thought it is perhaps attention-grabbing to file a invoice of fare on the library,” Buttolph wrote in a letter dated February 14, noting the restaurant that was positioned in Manhattan’s Union Sq.. “Every week later the thought occurred, why not protect others?” Buttolph — whose given title was Frances however who most popular to be addressed as Frank — was already an avid collector of postcards with photos of lighthouses. Preserving menus suited her penchant for accumulating distinctive and colourful ephemera.
Quickly after, the idiosyncratic Buttolph petitioned the New York Public Library’s director, John Shaw Billings, to enlist the library’s assist with compiling menus from around the globe that she would accumulate on its behalf. Regardless of Buttolph’s notoriously prickly disposition (her tirades towards whistling and untidy desks have been legendary), the library agreed to award her a voluntary place as menu archivist.
Inside months, she’d filed tons of of menus on the Astor Library, one of many authentic New York Public Library (NYPL) branches, positioned on Lafayette Road within the constructing the Public Theater now inhabits. (The theater named its upstairs restaurant and bar “The Library” as an homage to its previous.) Although Buttolph would later purchase menus that predated 1900, she archived hundreds of paperwork within the first yr alone, together with a hand-crafted Valentine’s Day dinner menu from the Alcazar Resort in St. Augustine, Florida, that features a ten-part classical music program carried out by an in-house orchestra and a French-inspired invoice of fare that includes dishes like boiled beef à la Flamande, bluefish au gratin with duxelles, and salmi of duck à la cavour.
Frank E. Buttolph
The library supplied Buttolph no funds and no wage. However she saved accumulating, even inserting commercials in restaurant commerce and resort magazines to solicit menus from readers, stressing that their situation should be immaculate. Buttolph may solely lure donors with the satisfaction of contributing to a historic archive, however she continued to obtain menus from admirers throughout the nation and abroad, together with one from a London banquet celebrating King Edward VII’s coronation in 1902.
An illustrated feature within the New York Occasions on June 3, 1906, anointed her assortment the “most attention-grabbing array of menus on this planet.” (By then, she’d amassed 14,500 menus.) Buttolph is described as “a tiny, unostentatious, literary-looking girl.” She wasn’t a foodie, at the very least not in at present’s phrases. “She frankly avers that she doesn’t care two pins for the meals lists on her menus,” the Occasions wrote, “however their historic curiosity means all the things.” Within the early days, curious library customers may entry the gathering, however solely below Buttolph’s strict supervision. She saved cautious watch over her treasured menus to make sure that their situation would by no means be compromised.
By 1924, when Buttolph died of pneumonia at age 80, her assortment had grown to an astonishing 25,000 menus, most of them assembled at her personal expense. Every one was emblazoned with an official oval blue stamp signifying the yr it was archived between 1900 and 1923, probably utilized by Buttolph herself.
A menu from 1932 that incorporates one of many earliest references to sushi within the assortment.
At present, the library’s assortment has grown to over 40,000 menus. In keeping with the New York Public Library’s web site, about two-thirds of the menus are American, greater than half come from New York eating places, and most date from between 1890 and 1910, acquired through the prime of Buttolph’s archival work. The bodily paperwork stay in temperature-controlled stacks beneath the library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Constructing on East forty second Road and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Particular person items will be requisitioned by way of NYPL’s uncommon books division, although customers can even now browse a lot of the catalog online. In 2011, the library launched an initiative referred to as “What’s on the Menu?,” a crowdsourced effort to digitize the gathering by recruiting volunteers to manually enter metadata that will make the menus extra searchable by their contents. Within the many years because the program began, nearly your entire assortment of menus has been cataloged by style, place, title, and yr, spanning from 1843 to 2008. Since then, the digital menu archive has averaged nearly a million web page views yearly.
Rebecca Federman, the assistant director for the Middle for Analysis within the Humanities, and her staff at NYPL preserve the gathering and assist customers mine the stacks for insights into many years of America’s quickly altering eating developments. She got interested within the Buttolph assortment whereas she was in library faculty after attending an NYPL exhibition referred to as “New York Eats Out,” curated by the previous New York Occasions restaurant critic William Grimes in 2002. She was fascinated by how these historic artifacts might be used to assist piece collectively the evolution of the American restaurant. “It transports you again in time,” Federman says. “You’ve most likely heard of a few of these locations. Your dad and mom and grandparents could have eaten there.”
The NYPL isn’t actively buying new menus, nevertheless it does often settle for restaurant-related ephemera, together with 158 containers crammed with archival papers and private results belonging to the late Joe Baum, the enduring founding father of the restaurant Home windows on the World, that have been donated posthumously. Federman recurrently fields inquiries from researchers, lecturers, and cooks who want help navigating the gathering just about or bodily. “Cooks which have are available in are typically thinking about taking a look at menus for inspiration,” Federman says, “to see what older menus and older eating places did, and the way they’ll rethink their menu to replicate at present’s panorama as a nod to the previous.”
Le Pavillon
Joris Larigaldie, the culinary director for José Andrés’s new eating places that not too long ago opened on the Ritz-Carlton NoMad resort, contacted Federman in early 2022 to assist deepen his understanding of New York Metropolis’s wealthy culinary historical past. With Federman’s assist, he found Ritz-Carlton menus from the Buttolph assortment on-line that dated back to 1913, learning years’s value of them to encourage new recipes for the menu at Nubeluz, the resort’s Artwork Deco-inspired rooftop bar and restaurant.
Larigaldie was significantly thinking about standard dishes from turn-of-the-century New York, and he was stunned to seek out many acquainted names in his analysis. “You understand that among the classics have been classics for a really very long time,” says Larigaldie. One dish he discovered repeatedly on menus from the Nineteen Twenties was the Mont Blanc — a dessert of thinly piped chestnut puree that appears like vermicelli swirled over a spherical meringue base and dotted with whipped cream to resemble the snow-capped French Alps. At Nubeluz, Larigaldie created a contemporary, ethereal tackle the Mont Blanc, which he serves as a miniature candy cone topped with swirls of lemon and chamomile cream.
“Researching menus is sort of a puzzle,” Federman says. “You must use completely different items with the intention to get a fuller image.” In a 2012 exhibition referred to as “Lunch Hour NYC,” Federman and culinary historian Laura Shapiro unearthed a Japanese menu from 1932 that contained the earliest reference to sushi they might discover in New York Metropolis. Whereas the menu at Yoshino-ya, positioned close to Rockefeller Middle, featured sashimi, shrimp tempura, eel with tare, and different Japanese delicacies, it additionally included a prix-fixe sukiyaki dinner that appears geared towards Westerners, with accoutrements you wouldn’t count on to see on a Japanese menu, like olives and celery hearts.
Federman consulted the library’s reverse phone listing to seek out the restaurant’s handle and realized that it was solely open for a yr, on a block of West forty seventh Road occupied by companies that catered to predominantly Japanese clientele. “What’s good about having the menus right here on the library is that we’ve these different sources to attract from to know the larger story,” she says.
Paul Freedman, a professor of medieval historical past at Yale and the writer of Ten Eating places That Modified America, credit the Buttolph assortment with spurring his curiosity in restaurant historical past. Whereas doing analysis on the NYPL for his guide, he found certain volumes from the Fifth Avenue Resort that included over 5,000 menus that modified every day from 1859 to 1881. He and a devoted staff of researchers and college students combed by way of the menus one by one, logging each dish to determine the most well-liked objects over a twenty-year interval. “You would see what folks thought-about to be high-end delicacies within the nineteenth century, which consisted of issues that individuals not eat after they’re prosperous, like pigs’ toes, canvasback geese, and terrapin,” Freedman says.
Freedman consulted different menu archives from across the nation, however the Buttolph assortment, by far the biggest, supplied a wealth of menus that helped him slim his checklist of probably the most influential American eating places. These included some Buttolph originals, like menus from New York Metropolis’s oldest restaurant, Delmonico’s, and others that have been acquired later from locations just like the 4 Seasons, Le Pavillon, Mamma Leone’s, and the Mandarin.
When Scott Alves Barton was an adjunct professor of meals research at NYU between 2010 and 2021, he sought out the menu assortment for clues about eating habits through the Harlem Renaissance, particularly exploring the affect of West Indian and African delicacies on iconic eating places and jazz golf equipment like Minton’s. “The Black-owned ones had stuff you wouldn’t see served as a lot at present, like hog maws and chitlins, extra selection cuts,” says Barton. “The white-owned eating places had extra continental dishes, and the vogue or stylish dish on the time was chop suey in locations just like the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom, the place Black folks carried out however couldn’t eat in.”
Whereas the gathering was restricted in its breadth of menus associated to the African American diaspora, Barton realized that the library’s archives contained volumes of the Green Book—Victor Hugo Inexperienced’s information to assist Black motorists safely discover eating places and lodging whereas touring—relationship again to 1937. The Inexperienced Books contained troves of helpful knowledge about what kind of eating places have been standard amongst Black vacationers on the time. In early editions of the information, readers would see commercials for largely Black-owned companies, like Harlem on the Hudson, a restaurant and lounge in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, that served Creole meals, and Rodgers Eating Room in New Rochelle, New York, which proudly boasted “The Finest Southern Fried Rooster.”
After I visited the Brooke Russell Astor Studying Room for Uncommon Books within the Schwarzman Constructing in late October, Federman and her colleagues assembled a file of menus for me to look at that included one of many oldest conventional restaurant menus within the assortment, an 1843 lunch menu from the Astor Home labeled “Ladies’ Ordinary.” (In keeping with Federman, girls have been typically introduced with completely different menus than males throughout this period.) It additionally included an immaculate menu folder from a French pop-up referred to as The Restaurant Française that opened in Queens through the 1939 New York World’s Honest that was acquired after Buttolph’s loss of life.
The broad mahogany desks contained in the studying room are surrounded by vintage books ensconced in glass home windows. The multilevel shelving reaches towards the excessive ceiling with brass railings and ledges that present employees entry to hundreds of vintage tomes. Many of the books appear to be they haven’t been touched by human arms for many years. Guests are forbidden from photographing the house itself, solely pictures of the requisitioned paperwork are permitted.
Le Restaurant Français from 1940.
You may really feel the burden of historical past when dealing with these historic artifacts—the oldest and most delicate are sheathed in protecting Mylar. If a menu is stained, it makes you surprise the place the stains got here from. What did the unique possessor of the menu order? I imagined New York Metropolis’s hungry denizens having fun with unfamiliar dishes like “pig’s knuckle in jelly” or “calf’s head with mind sauce.” You may end up questioning what “frostfish” is when taking a look at a Waldorf-Astoria menu from 1901, whether or not the Beluga caviar for $1.50 appeared costly (trace: it’s $52.59 in at present’s {dollars}, adjusted for inflation), or how the restaurant managed to have 9 completely different species of recreation birds on the menu. When you’re curious what Chinese language meals in America was like in 1904, the gathering has answers.
Within the waning years of her life, Buttolph had variations with the library’s management. She was dismissed from her voluntary function in 1923, a yr earlier than her loss of life on February 27, 1924. In her final official letter to the library, she wrote, “For a few years my library work has been the one factor I needed to stay for. It was my coronary heart, my soul, my life. All the time earlier than me was the imaginative and prescient of scholars of historical past who would say ‘thanks’ to my title and reminiscence.” Her reclusive nature leaves many particulars of her life a thriller. Federman believes that Buttolph’s dedication to the menu assortment was probably motivated by her need for acceptance throughout the library neighborhood, which she desperately beloved, versus an affinity for eating places or meals.
Buttolph herself probably by no means envisioned eating places changing into so central to American standard tradition, as they’re in New York Metropolis significantly, however her intuition to chronicle their rise was prescient. Together with her menus in my arms, it grew to become simpler to know the obsession. Menus present a window into historical past, an important connection to our foodways. Whilst QR code expertise threatens to render printed menus out of date, it occurred to me that nothing can substitute the feel and poetry of a bodily menu. Regardless of how a lot eating places have modified within the century since Miss Buttolph lived, the common-or-garden menu has endured—because the diner’s first impression, an announcement of the chef’s intentions, and a love letter to the urge for food.