History, one menu at a time

What did the first-class passengers eat on the Titanic’s last night? What was served while the peace of 1919 was being argued over in Paris? The Forgotten Menu starts from moments like these and asks what was on the table.

Menus are some of history’s most honest witnesses. They were printed for the evening and thrown away the next morning, so the ones that survive show what people actually ate, in what order, and who got which dishes. We read them beside the cookbooks of the same years and turn what we find into recipes you can cook today.

What you’ll find here

Each article tells the story of one event and what was eaten at it, answering the question first and letting the period sources speak. Each one comes with three to five recipes, in the order they were served: the dish as it was printed on the menu, the period recipe quoted as printed where one survives (and our reconstruction, with its sources named, where none does), and a version for today’s kitchen, with quantities you can scale for two or for a dinner party.

How we work

Everything starts from period sources: menu cards, household cookbooks and professional kitchen manuals. Quotes and quantities are checked against the page scans, and documented fact is kept apart from legend in a short box on every article. Each recipe says how close it is to the event itself: the kitchen’s own recipe, a recipe from a cookbook of the same years, one printed a generation or more later, or a reconstruction from what was written about the dish.

Each piece keeps a research record: the books and menus consulted, with printed and scan page numbers, every quote as printed, and how each period measure was converted. A second reader who did not write the piece checks it against those scans before it is published. Books still under copyright are described and adapted, never reprinted. Period illustrations are scans from the sources themselves, credited in each caption; pictures made for the site are captioned with what they show and carry no source credit. When we find an error, we fix the page.

Recipes follow the same rules. Each one names the book and page it comes from and says which quantities and substitutions are our own choice. Where a page describes how a dish tastes, it goes by what the period writers said and what the ingredients do.

The full method, from the menu to your kitchen, is onhow we research.

Old prices stay as printed, with a rough present-day equivalent beside them. Each currency is converted by its own country’s official measure: the Bank of England’s inflation figures for British money, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index for American money, and the national statistics office or central bank elsewhere.

Family

The Forgotten Menu is a sister site of TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), which adapts vintage recipes for today’s kitchen, and ofForgotten Drink (opens in a new tab), which asks what people actually drank. Spotted a mistake or know a menu we should read?Write to us; corrections are always welcome.