Vintage American Holiday Menus
This past Thanksgiving, I started digging through my pile of vintage cookbooks for old holiday menus. I wanted to get an idea of what was popular, and see how much Thanksgiving has changed.
It used to be very popular for cookbooks to have a menu section, especially in huge tomes like the Joy of Cooking or the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. The idea was to share with the housewife what would be appropriate to serve for a particular kind of meal, so you’ll see menus for luncheons, brunches, casual dinners, formal dinners, etc.
This was the easiest place for me to start my search for holiday menus.
My biggest take-away from historical holiday menus was OYSTERS. Not only did every menu contain oysters in some format, but NONE of those formats were simply Oysters on the Half Shell, which is by far the most popular way to eat oysters these days.
As to their lack of holiday popularity, price certainly is a factor: oysters are far more expensive today than they used to be. Oyster prices remained cheap and mostly flat from 1850 through the 1950s, at which point the price began to rapidly inflate.
As far as why we predominantly serve them raw instead of cooked, I only have guesses. For how many excellent oyster recipes there are out there, it’s shocking how rarely they surface on restaurant menus these days. Let me know if you’ve seen Oysters Rockerfeller out there; I’m ready and I want it.
Once I ran out of cookbooks to peruse, I turned to another favorite resource of mine, the Los Angeles Public Library Menu Database. This database is a treasure.
You’ll notice everything is still OYSTERS OYSTERS OYSTERS.
My favorite and the most mouth-watering menu from the Los Angeles database is a 1906 menu from the Hollenbeck Hotel. Including such formidably modern doozies like “Monk’s Beard Salad” (monk’s beard is a noodly-looking herb from Italy which tastes similar to samphire), it starts it’s Christmas attack with something familiar: oysters (of course) but this time, they serve the oysters on the shell.
Don’t miss the hickory nut ice cream. What!
Seeing hickory and monk’s beard on a 1906 fine dining menu is a first for me, and a bit of a surprise. I would expect to see ingredients like that on a 1930s, depression-era home cookbook, which advises how to find cheap ingredients out in the wild, but not on an elevated, hotel holiday menu. While in 2019 our current haute cuisine mindset treasures the ingredients a chef found on the forest floor that morning, my belief is that in 1906 that would not have been the case. Foraging for hickory nuts was more much commonplace, and hadn’t picked up it’s exotic flair, yet.
And in case you’re wondering what “celery en branch” means, it means exactly what you think it means, unfortunately. It’s just a branch of celery. Nothing to see here, folks. But I was able to find some stuff on “Pin Money Pickles”.
“Pin Money” was an old term from the 19th and early 20th century of a small sum of money that a woman would either earn selling smallwares, or could be an allowance from her husband. Allegedly in 1868, a woman named Ellen G. Thompson Kidd started selling pickles at the Virginia State Fair, won multiple blue ribbons, and then began building her pickle empire.
They became a popular holiday side, and would find themselves next to large roasts. While this is my first time hearing of Pin Money Pickles, I’m very experienced with eating pickles alongside holiday meats. That tradition has definitely translated into our time.