From about 1953 through at least 1961, Canadian Pacific issued several series of menus for its first-class empress passengers. One of the first, if not the first, was one featuring color illustrations of British royal palaces, usually with a servant or other commoner in the foreground. We’ve already seen ones with Balmoral Castle, Holyrood House, and Windsor Castle.

Click image to view and download a 1.9-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.

Today we have a 1953 dinner menu with Sandringham House, a gigantic mansion built on a 20,000-acre estate in Norfolk, England. The palace has been used as a vacation residence for the royal family for several generations. King George VI, Queen Elizabeth’s father, was both born and died there. The house is surrounded by 60 acres of carefully tended gardens, as illustrated by the gardener on the cover of this menu.

Click image to view and download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu from the Chung collection.

This menu features Buckingham Palace with a member of the royal guard in the foreground. Buckingham may be the most famous of the royal residences, and at 830,000 square feet it is probably much larger than Sandringham though not on as many acres. This menu was used on the same voyage of the Empress of Australia as the previous menu, but on the following evening.