Wisconsin Historical Society
These days, many people endorse Meatless Monday, which encourages diners to give up meat one day a week to improve their health and the environment. It’s often thought Meatless Monday became popular only recently, when the concept was endorsed by “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” author Michael Pollan during an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
But going meatless one day a week for the greater good is not a new idea. It became popular during World War I, says Julia Wong, who oversees the Wisconsin Historical Society’s menu collection. Back then, the Government Food Administration created “Meatless Tuesday,” encouraging people to conserve beef and pork for the troops.
Restaurants complied with this governmental request too, including Milwaukee’s Gargoyle Cafe and Restaurant. A menu in the collection shows the cafe’s “Meatless Tuesday” fare: vegetarian dishes like potato dumpling with red cabbage and stuffed noodle roulade polonaise.
That’s just one example of how menus can be an important piece of social history.
The rise and fall of various foods can be tracked by looking at menus. Turtle soup was a common offering in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but has all but disappeared from our diets.
Wisconsin Historical Society
Other food trends, like the local take on the farm-to-table movement, are documented in the menu collection. In Madison the emphasis on locally sourced ingredients was pioneered by Odessa Piper of L’Etoile, who started naming the farms and farmers who provided the food for dishes on her menus. Many menus for L’Etoile special dinners over the years are included in the collection.
There are hundreds of menus in the collection, most of them from Wisconsin. About 30% are available for perusal through an online image gallery.
The collection includes menus from long-gone Madison institutions including the lunch counters at the Rennebohm Drug Stores and the original Ovens of Brittany. There is also a hand-penned 1974 menu from Ella’s Deli, then on State Street.
Wong received her M.A. from the UW-Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies in 2009. She grew up in Minneapolis in a restaurant family; her father also opened a grocery store, a noodle manufacturing company and a bean sprout growing operation. “I remember helping out on Saturdays in the store my parents operated [near] the University of Minnesota campus,” Wong says. “One of my jobs was weighing out bags of dried black mushrooms.”
Wisconsin Historical Society
After Wong began working at the historical society developing other image galleries, she came across the menu collection in the visual materials stacks. She found the graphic elements on many of the menus appealing, and “the actual menu listings were intriguing,” she says. “What was ‘moulded egg in gargoyle sauce’?” she wondered.
“I suppose my family background also played a part.”
Wong would like to put together an exhibition of historic menus. She’s also currently working on further digitizing the menu collection and improving the ways that users can access the material so that there would be a better view of individual pages (currently there is no way to zoom in to read smaller print) and that menus would be text-searchable — say for a particular ingredient or dish name. “We hope this expands the possibilities for research into various aspects of food history for a wider audience,” says Wong. In the meantime, users can visit the archives reading room in the historical society building at 816 State St. and request collection materials for viewing in person.
