By Ellen Gilbert

Photos Courtesy of New York Public Library

If they are not already familiar with it, foodies, chefs, historians, sociologists, graphic artists and many others are likely to be enchanted when they find out about the New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection.

The tens-of-thousands of documents, mostly from the mid-19th century through the present, are housed at the library’s main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. New York City is represented most prominently, but the collection is international in scope. It includes elaborate cartes du jours and wine lists from famous old restaurants like Delmonico’s; lists of meals available to 19th century riders of particular stage coach lines (departure and arrival times included); lavish menus from ocean liners, as well as more homely news of local church suppers.

Since most of the menus have dates on them, the collection is largely in chronological order. It is a treasure trove of information, not to mention great fun. “Ever wonder how the Hotel Astor served their Virginia ham in February, 1933?” asked WNYC talk show host Leonard Lopate last fall when he featured a segment on the project with NYPL’s Collections Strategy Librarian Rebecca Federman and its Digital Library and Labs Director, Benjamin Vershbow.

ACCESSIBILITY

The fact that the collection is systematically being digitized and transcribed makes it even more remarkable. Simply put, this means that anyone, anywhere, at any time can access images and information culled from the menus, with details about what people ate, where and when they ate it, and how much it cost.

Prior to digitization and transcription, librarians had begun to observe the different ways in which on-site visitors were using the collection, reported Vershbow. It became evident, he said, that the menus do not just represent “a series of artifacts.” Users’ interest in changing trends, locations, prices, and other details suggested that it wasn’t enough to just photograph and digitize images; people wanted content, but sometimes florid, faded handwritten lettering or idiosyncratic typography and layouts made it difficult to extract details mechanically.

Thus was born “What’s on the Menu?” NYPL’s first foray into crowdsourcing, enlisting the public's help in transcribing the actual contents of the menus (see menus.nypl.org). Anyone who’s game (er, perhaps we should say “willing”) can sign on to help transcribe the menus dish by dish giving “historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.” Thousands have already participated in what has become one of the most successful documented library crowdsourcing projects. At this writing 1,324,518 dishes have been transcribed from 17,512 menus.

VERSATILITY

“The food listed is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time,” reported Federman. What she described as “middle class dining” appears on menus from diners and luncheonettes “offering a much better sense of what people were actually eating” than what they aspired to eat. Things that people ate at home, like sardines or “half a grapefruit,” were once more available than they are today, and puddings (“cabinet,” tapioca, and rice, in particular) enjoyed greater popularity. Evolving interest in ethnic cuisines can be traced: Chinese restaurants are well-represented as are French and German cuisines. Italian influences came later. Menus from Mexican restaurants are scant, Federman noted, inadvertently suggesting, perhaps, a future focus for contributors of new material.

Prohibition had an obvious impact on liquor consumption and the Depression and World War II accounted for campaigns for “meatless Mondays” and “wheatless Wednesdays.” In those days, of course, “wheatless” was not about being gluten-free and, in contrast to today’s menus, there is nary a calorie count, and “sourcing” information was definitely not an area of concern. Kale was, perhaps surprisingly, available by 1900. Even when the lingo is different, equivalents can be guessed at: “mayonnaise of chicken” was presumably chicken salad, and “beef tea” was likely to mean broth, Federman told Lopate.

DIGGING IN

“Part of the joy of being a contributor to the project is perusing artifacts that tell a story of another era,” noted a New York Times account of the project. “Each menu is like a snapshot of a specific time and place; it's fun to wonder what ‘cold pineapple cream might have been like at Mangler's in Chicago, IL at the turn of the century, or to see that dandelion was in vogue in the D&H Dining Car Service in May of 1900.”

Participants contributing to “What’s on the Menu?” are good at signing on new recruits to help out, and finding additional items of potential interest for the collection. An occupational hazard of the work is, apparently, its hunger-inducing potential. One contributor reportedly wanted to face the problem head-on by hosting a transcription party where guests would bring laptops, do their transcriptions, and eat dishes from the menus. Yesteryear prices make volunteers wistful. “If I could go back to 1900 with like $20, I could eat like a king!” tweeted one.

“For people who love food, typing up the contents of an old menu is a weird thrill,” Mr. Vershbow said. “I think people jump at an opportunity to commune with the past.” In addition to new transcriptions, the website is regularly updated to reflect current events. To celebrate Will and Kate’s fall visit to New York City, for example, old QE2 menus were featured.

MISS BUTTOLPH

The NYPL menu collection owes its beginnings to one Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), whom the library describes as “a somewhat mysterious and passionate figure, whose mission in life was to collect menus.” In 1899, Buttolph, a library volunteer, offered her existing collection to the NYPL and expressed her willingness to continue to collect menus on the library’s behalf. Then-Library Director John Shaw Billings is credited with accepting both offers. (Billings’s achievements went way beyond this gesture; in addition to being a librarian he was a surgeon who, after the Civil War, organized the Library and Museum of the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army and other army records into what is now the National Library of Medicine.)

Buttolph’s “principal method of acquisition was to write to every restaurant she could think of, soliciting menus,” notes one account. “When letters failed, she often marched into a restaurant and pleaded her case in person.” She also placed advertisements in trade publications like The Caterer and The Hotel Gazette. Her efforts on behalf of the menu collection were described no less than three times between 1904 and 1909 in The New York Times; one piece noted that “she frankly avers that she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything.” By the time of her death in 1924, Buttolph had added more than 25,000 menus to the collection.

THE NEXT COURSE?

Federman hopes to take the newly amassed data in new directions. “I'd like to explore dishes that have remained popular over time, but also talk about dishes that never see the light of day today,” she told one interviewer. Future efforts may also involve “manual semantic enhancements” necessary to tie dishes like “clear green turtle” and “tomato aux croutons” together as soups. “We also might explore different categories (of restaurant or of dish) for browsing and searching, and perhaps eventually geographic and price-based exploration tools,” said Vershbow. “In other words, we're just getting started.”

Already, though, the collection has made an impact. “This archive has become tremendously important as there is nothing nearly as large, nor anything that has so much from the mid-nineteenth century when restaurants were first established in the U.S.,” enthused Yale University professor Paul Freedman. “How people socialized, what they ate, how things change over time and the actual experience of people living in the United States in the past 170 years can be made vividly alive with these materials.” In 2011 the project won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History.

Using the materials will be, for those used to jumping through proverbial hoops to obtain permissions, pleasantly uncomplicated: there are no known copyright restrictions on the material and all that anyone using the material is asked to do is credit The New York Public Library as a source.