Here are a couple of menus whose cover pictures we’ve seen before. First is one showing golfers at the 14th tee, which is on a peninsula in Lac Beauvert. Previously we’ve seen a 1954 lunch menu with this photo; this one is from 1951.

Click image to download a 765-KB PDF of this menu contributed by Brian Leiteritz.

While the 1954 menu offered a choice of eight different entrées, this one has nine. Both of them offered jumbo whitefish, cold salmon, chicken sandwich, and lettuce & asparagus salad, while the other four items were different. Continue reading →

In about 1949, some dunderhead at CN replaced the beautiful photographs that graced many of the railroad’s dining car menus with a boring geometric design and an interior theme of “meals on wheels.” I previously called a 1949 breakfast menu “the most-boring dining car menu cover of the post-war era,” but today’s is even more boring because it replaced the deep green of the 1949 edition with a gray that is so light that the boring geometric design is barely visible.

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this menu.

Inside, the a la carte menu comes with a table d’hôte insert that offered meals for $1.35, $1.75, or $2.00 (multiply by about 10 to get today’s U.S. dollars). The $1.35 meal is just a salad with bread, one side dish, and beverage. The $1.75 entry is a full meal but the only entrée is fish. For $2.00, diners had a choice of trout, omelet, beef ribs, or cold meats. The $2.00 dinner also came with soup and dessert while the $1.75 one gave a choice between the two.

This is part of the same menu series as yesterday’s Rocky Mountains menu. The CN menu series page also shows menu covers for British Columbia, western Canada, Ontario, and the Maritimes, so I speculated that there must be one in the series for Quebec. Thanks to Brian Leiteritz, now only the Maritimes menu is missing.

Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this menu.

The menu calls Quebec “the land of contrasts,” and it would have to be. As the largest of Canada’s provinces, it is almost as big as Alaska and well over twice as big as Texas. Unfortunately, the artist who painted these covers is unnamed. Inside is a standard a la carte menu dated 1948.

Here’s a Jasper Lodge menu we haven’t seen before. It shows a golfer taking a second or third shot to the green. Jasper’s golf course was designed by Stanley Thompson, who designed a total of 178 golf courses, mostly in Canada but also the U.S. and three other countries. His most notable courses were probably those in Canadian national parks.

Click image to download a 545-KB PDF of this menu.

Jasper’s sprawling golf course is rated one of the top five — some say top three — in Canada, partly because each fairway gives a different view of the mountains and/or Lac Beauvert. Fairmont has recently restored Jasper’s golf course to its initial layout as designed by Thompson. Based on that layout, the fairway in the menu’s photo is for the 18th hole, which is a par 4. Continue reading →