We’ve previously seen empress menus featuring William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and John Constable. To this artist series we can add today’s menu honoring Oliver Goldsmith, an eighteenth-century Irish writer whose play, She Stoops to Conquer, is still often performed today. The cover drawing of Goldsmith is based on a portrait by Joshua Reynolds.

Click image to download an 912-KB PDF of this menu.

This dinner menu was used on the Empress of England, Canadian Pacific’s newest ocean liner in 1959. The menu offered two kinds of fish, either beef a l’Anglais, apple fritters, baked ham, roast turkey, cold lamb, and home made brawn, which is apparently made from a boar’s head and is known in the U.S. as head cheese. The left side of the menu suggests that passengers pick one of these as the entrée, plus an hors d’Oeuvres, soup, vegetable, potatoes, and–for a bit of indulgence–two desserts before ending the meal with fresh fruits.