A Menu for Christmas

Holiday Eating 1880-1961

Dec 17, 2023

As most of us settle into a season of intense festivities and eating—whether you just celebrated the eight days of Hanukkah, are frequenting holiday parties, or are planning your Christmas or Kwanzaa—I thought it would be interesting to share some historic menus of holiday meals long past. Almost all are American and all are for Christmas, revealing more so the quick rise in importance in American life that Hanukkah and Kwanzaa have had versus a collecting oversight by archives (though that is a definite possibility as well)—according to the Jewish Museum of Maryland, it was not until the 1940s that Jewish cookbooks began to discuss Hanukkah/Chanukah and list out specific recipes or menus for it. Though I searched, I was unable to find any Hanukkah menus from any of the great Jewish delis, restaurants and resorts that were so prevalent in mid-century New York, both in the city and up in the Catskills.

“Menus are minor, transient documents that tell us how people have eaten out over time. They transport us back to the everyday life of the past—whether to a lavish banquet in the Gilded Age or a food-relief eatery during the Great Depression. They aid our cultural memory by providing unwitting evidence, not only of what people were eating, but what else they were doing and with whom they were doing it; who they wanted to be; and what they valued.” - Henry Voigt

These menus, spanning from 1880 to 1961, provide a view into the cuisine and customs of an ever-changing country and world. You’ll find the menus laden with wild game—braised leg of squirrel, anyone?—as well as copious heavy dishes and a preponderance of celery (my least favourite food), balanced with local specialties and items still loved today. As the quote above from renowned menu collector Henry Voigt states, menus “aid our cultural memory by providing unwitting evidence, not only of what people were eating, but what else they were doing and with whom they were doing it; who they wanted to be; and what they valued.” Here we see what people valued and how they wanted to be seen at the most special time of the year—the feasts they were eager to take part in, the scale of the celebrations they thought necessary. Even on a ship or train (as seen in some of the menus below), the performance of Christmas feasting was of vital importance.

I previously wrote about an exhibition of Voigt’s collection at the Grolier Club, "A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941,” so this newsletter can be seen as a holiday-specific companion to that one. After collecting together over a hundred menus, I chose these to provide a wide array of different food types as well as typographic and illustrative styles. Some of the archives only provided photos of the covers and not the actual menus; I’ve included a few where the design was beautiful or interesting (such as the menu from a Women’s Army Corps training camp). Perhaps you’ll be inspired by a font or a drawing or perhaps by a dish or the sequence of a menu—or possibly these will be simply an interesting historical reference.

Christmas Dinner at Sheridan House, Bismarck, Dakota Territory, 1880

Henry Voigt Menu Collection

Christmas Dinner at the Louisville Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky, 1881

Henry Voigt Menu Collection

Christmas Dinner at the Hotel Metropole, Fargo, North Dakota, 1898

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

Christmas Dinner at the New Century Hotel, Union, South Carolina, 1899

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

Christmas Dinner at the Griswald House, Detroit, Michigan, 1900

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

Christmas Dinner at Central Hotel, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1900

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

Christmas Dinner at the Battery Park Hotel, Asheville, North Carolina, 1900

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

In the Buttolph collection, there are many c. 1900 Christmas menus with similar illustrations of gay, fashionably dressed women on the frontispieces of the booklets. Other than the text, there is nothing to signal that these are holiday menus, perhaps signaling that the booklet covers were mass-produced and embossed later by each restaurant or hotel.

Christmas Dinner at Russell House, Detroit, Michigan, 1900

New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection of Menus

Christmas Dinner at Murray’s, New York City, New York, 1911

Culinary Institute of America Menu Collection

Murray’s was known for its fantastical interior (see below), oddly not reflected in the design of this menu. For more on Murray’s, read my article on “Theme Restaurants & the Orientalist Fantasies of Henry Erkins.”