Food history calendar
The food history year
A meal for every month: the days on which a famous dinner was served, a feast was kept or a food law came in. Each date links to the story of what was on the table and the recipes to cook for it.
January
- Prohibition takes effect across the United StatesThe dry years’ party food: cheese on toast, waffles, cookies, sundaes
- The Paris Peace Conference opensTwo days later the French Senate gave Wilson lunch: bass, Pauillac lamb, artichokes
- Burns Night: Robert Burns’s birthdayBefore the menu was fixed: a haggis and a sheep’s head in 1801, cock-a-leekie at the 1859 centenary
February
- At Yale, Horace Fletcher starts four days of the Varsity Crew’s exercisesHis whole diet that week: a prepared cereal, milk and maple sugar, eleven cents a day
- Ash Wednesday: Lent beginsHerring, the fish of the fast days, and the war that threatened the Dutch catch
March
- Lincoln’s second inaugural ballOrnamental pyramids, a dozen cakes and tarts, charlottes and six ice creams
- International Women’s DayThe Suffrage Cook Book of 1915, sold in Pittsburgh for the vote
April
- The Richmond Bread RiotHow a Richmond receipt book of 1863 told its kitchens to make do
- Soyer’s soup kitchen opens in DublinBeef, vegetables, flour and barley, served in timed batches
- The last dinner aboard the TitanicThe first-class card, from consommé Olga to peaches in Chartreuse jelly
- Dickens’s farewell press dinner at Delmonico’sOysters, asparagus cream à la Dumas and timbales à la Dickens
June
- The Treaty of Versailles is signedNo menu survives from the signing; the peacemakers’ lunch in January does
November
- The first bonfires for the king’s escape from the Gunpowder PlotParkin and treacle toffee, which joined the night some two centuries later
- The Armistice ends the fighting on the Western FrontAmerica’s wheatless days, which wound down after the Armistice
- The Ismailia ball for the opening of the Suez CanalA fish named for two seas, English roast beef, Suez shrimps and Russian salad
- Princess Elizabeth’s wedding breakfast at Buckingham PalaceFilet de Sole Mountbatten, partridge en casserole and an iced bombe named for the bride
- Thanksgiving Day in the United StatesThe one letter on the 1621 Plymouth feast names wildfowl and five deer
December
- The first Nobel Prize banquet, StockholmBrill in the Norman style, fillet of beef and roast hazel grouse
- The Boston Tea PartyWhat the colonies’ cookbooks set on the tea table: wigs, biscuits and cakes
- A Christmas Carol is publishedThe Cratchits’ goose with sage and onion, apple sauce and a flaming pudding
- The Christmas truce begins on the Western FrontCigarettes, rum, cake and plum puddings crossed no man’s land
- Bishop Swinfield keeps Christmas at PrestburyBeef, pork, a boar, partridges, geese and venison after a fish Eve
- The last New Year’s Eve before ProhibitionThe saloon’s free lunch and a midnight supper, under a wartime ban already in force