In 1957, or possibly earlier, Canadian Pacific began featuring British artists on the covers of its Atlantic steamship menus. We previously seen a menu portraying Robert Burns. Today’s menu features William Shakespeare and Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of the famous actor and the person to whom is attributed numerous plays and poems (I’m an Oxfordian myself).

Click image to download a 601-KB PDF of this menu.

This menu was used on the Empress of England on June 12, 1957. This was the second evening out from Montreal on the steamship’s six-day voyage to Liverpool. After leaving Montreal at 12:03 pm the day before, the ship entered the Atlantic Ocean in the morning of the twelfth, where it experienced overcast skies, fresh breezes, rough seas, and moderate swells. (This information is taken from the menu that I’ll post tomorrow.)

According to a hotel management web site, a “classical French menu” might have 13 or even 17 courses. This menu appears to be based on the 13-course menu, which (according to the hotel web site) includes hors d’oeuvre, soup, eggs/pastas, fish, entrée, joint, sorbet, roast, vegetables, sweets, savory, fruit, and coffee. Americans usually think of the entrée as the main course, but in traditional French cooking the entrée (French for entrance) is the course before the main course, which would be the relevé or joint, which was a larger portion than the entrée.

All of these courses are on this Empress menu except eggs/pastas and sorbet (though they are on other Empress menus); instead, the menu has potatoes and a salad. Although hungry passengers could eat a thirteen-course meal if they wanted, a dinner suggest on page 2 cuts it down to eight courses, two of which were desserts. In addition, I suspect the roast, vegetables, and potatoes were served together rather than as three separate courses. One reason for such drawn-out meals was to help relieve the boredom of several days on the open ocean with few sightings of land.