The Red Lobster and the Red Flag

I've always loved this menu for the Lobster Oyster and Chop House. It reminds me of the lobster image on this Soviet children's book featured on a wonderful McGill University library project. The menu, with its reds and pinks and quirky illustration, is a bit more playful than the children's book, with its ominous looking crustaceans and block lettering. But capturing the lobster from above, claws open, climbing up the page, grabs my attention on both.

The inside of the Lobster Oyster and Chop House is equally fantastic:

What's on the Menu?

This past Monday evening, the New York Public Library launched What's on the Menu?, a web site which invites the public to transcribe our digitized historical menus. 

It all started about a year ago, when my beloved former colleague Amy Azzarito*,  NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow, and I were thinking of new and interesting projects for the culinary collection. Having worked with the menu collection for a few years, I had begun noticing an increasing number of researchers coming in to research specific dishes. Although nearly 10,000 menus in the collection had been digitized, we didn't have an efficient way to search their content. At first we considered, optical character recognition (OCR) software to transcribe the menus, but quickly realized that the menus weren't optimal OCR candidates, due to being hand-written, being mimeographed, using funky fonts, etc.

Then Amy had the brilliant idea to open the digitized menus to the crowd, and invite our hungry public to help us transcribe them.  A year of talking, meeting, and pow-wowing -- with fellow NYPL'ers  Michael Lascarides, Kris Kelly, and Michael Inman -- followed, but it happened! WOTM launched last week.

We're five days in, still fixing and tweaking and planning out our next steps, but so far, so tasty!

Big thanks to everyone at the Library who has helped make this happen, and to the site visitors helping us create a robust catalog of dishes.

I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!


*Amy is now full-time at Design*Sponge

Tabla's Unleavened Bread Bar

Danny Meyer's beloved Tabla closed a few months ago after twelve years in business. And although I wish the Library had more Tabla menus than the small handful from 2007, I am pleased that one of them includes Chef Floyd Cardoz's Unleavened Bread Bar menu, created for Passover week. 

I'm not sure when restaurants began to offer meals catering to the Passover crowd; most kosher restaurants close for the duration of the holiday because a thorough cleaning of any leavened bread product (biur chametz) is a serious chore, and add to that the requirement to use different pots, pans, plates, etc. and you've got a lot of work on your hands, especially for a restaurant.

Non-kosher restaurants don't have those restrictions, so they can offer seders and Passover meals to anyone interested.  In New York this year, there are quite a few seders taking place: Savoy in SoHo, Capsouto Freres in Tribeca, JoeDoe in the East Village, Sammy's Roumanian on the Lower East Side, and Julian Medina's Toloache, Yerba Buena, and Yerba Buena Perry.  And Joan Nathan writes about others joining the trend in the Times this week.

I'll be contacting the above restaurants to add their menus to our Passover collection, and if anyone is attending a seder, or simply dining, at a Passover-friendly restaurant this week, please let me know.

Doing the Dishes: Paul Freedman on 19th Century American Dining

Paul Freedman, a medieval history professor at Yale, has been not-so-secretly flirting with food history for a few years now. First there was the James Beard-nominated Food: A History of Taste which he edited in 2007. Next came Out of the East (2008), a fascinating (and very readable) history of the medieval spice trade.  And now Freedman has focused his attention on American food history by fastidiously documenting every dish found on thousands of early and mid-19th century hotel menus  (Fifth Avenue Hotel, the American Hotel and others), to understand what people -- at these tonier establishments where menus were printed daily -- were eating when they ate out. Among the surprising results: lots of macaroni.

The fruits of his labor have been published in the March, 2011 issues of both Gastronomica (short version) and the New England Quarterly (long version), and Paul has generously agreed to answer some questions about his latest project for Cooked Books.