Getting Lost in the World’s Largest Stack of Menus

After a lunch of mulligatawny soup and roast mutton on a wintry New Year’s Day in 1900, Miss Frank E. Soon after, the idiosyncratic Buttolph petitioned the New York Public Library’s director, John Shaw Billings, to enlist the library’s help with compiling menus from around the world that she would collect on its behalf.

Buttolph could only lure donors with the satisfaction of contributing to a historic archive, but she continued to receive menus from admirers across the country and overseas, including one from a London banquet celebrating King Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. By 1924, when Buttolph died of pneumonia at age 80, her collection had grown to an astonishing 25,000 menus, most of them assembled at her own expense.

A menu from 1932 that contains one of the earliest references to sushi in the collection. Going to the New York Public Library’s website, about two-thirds of the menus are American, more than half come from New York restaurants. Most date from between 1890 and 1910, acquired during the prime of Buttolph’s archival work.

In 2011, the library launched an initiative called “ What’s on the Menu? , ” a crowdsourced effort to digitize the collection by recruiting volunteers to manually enter metadata that would make the menus more searchable by their contents. In the decades since the program began, close to the entire collection of menus has been cataloged by genre, place, name, and year, spanning from 1843 to 2008.

She became interested in the Buttolph collection while she was in library school after attending an NYPL exhibition called “New York Eats Out,” curated by the former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes in 2002. Your parents and grandparents may have eaten there.” The NYPL isn’t actively acquiring new menus, but it does occasionally accept restaurant-related ephemera, including 158 boxes filled with archival papers and personal effects belonging to the late Joe Baum , the iconic founder of the restaurant Windows on the World, that were donated posthumously.

With Federman’s help, he discovered Ritz-Carlton menus from the Buttolph collection online that dated back to 1913 , studying years’s worth of them to inspire new recipes for the menu at Nubeluz, the hotel’s Art Deco-inspired rooftop bar and restaurant. Larigaldie was particularly interested in popular dishes from turn-of-the-century New York, and he was surprised to find many familiar names in his research. “You realize that some of the classics have been classics for a very long time,” states Larigaldie. One dish he found repeatedly on menus from the 1920s was the Mont Blanc — a dessert of thinly piped chestnut puree that looks like vermicelli swirled over a round meringue base and dotted with whipped cream to resemble the snow-capped French Alps.

Federman consulted the library’s reverse telephone directory to find the restaurant’s address. Learned that it was only open for a year, on a block of West 47th Street occupied by businesses that catered to predominantly Japanese clientele. “What’s nice about having the menus here at the library is that we have these other resources to draw from to understand the bigger story,” she explains. Paul Freedman, a professor of medieval history at Yale and the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America , credits the Buttolph collection with spurring his interest in restaurant history.

While doing work at the NYPL for his book, he discovered bound volumes from the Fifth Avenue Hotel that included over 5,000 menus that changed daily from 1859 to 1881. He and a dedicated team of researchers and students combed through the menus one at a time, logging every dish to ascertain the most popular items over a twenty-year period. “You could see what people considered to be high-end cuisine in the 19th century, which consisted of things that people no longer eat when they’re affluent, like pigs’ feet, canvasback ducks, and terrapin,” Freedman states.

If you’re curious what Chinese food in America was like in 1904, the collection has answers . In the waning years of her life, Buttolph had differences with the library’s leadership.

In her last official letter to the library, she wrote, “For many years my library work has been the only thing I had to live for. Federman believes that Buttolph’s commitment to the menu collection was likely motivated by her desire for acceptance within the library community, which she desperately loved, as opposed to an affinity for restaurants or food.