On April 26, 1957, someone left Montreal on a seven-day trip to England on the Empress of France. After staying in England for about 20 days, they returned on the Empress of Scotland, arriving in Montreal on May 31. Along the way, they collected well over a dozen lunch and dinner menus from Canadian Pacific steamship service.
Click image to download a 786-KB PDF of this menu.
We’ve already seen the covers of most of those menus and I’ll be presenting them in groups of two and three over the next few days. But I’m showing this one, dated May 2, out of order because it is one I have never seen before. The cover image looks a little like a painting but I’m pretty sure it is a photo, which means it was probably taken by Nicholas Morant, a “special photographer” for Canadian Pacific who took more than 12,000 images of its trains.
While Morant’s work can be found on many CP postcards, booklets, menus, and other items, I’ve never seen this particular image before. Someone has posted a high-resolution version of this image in black-and-white and a close-up view shows that the observation car is Riding Mountain Park while the sleeping car ahead of it is the Chateau Bienville. The photograph was taken near Banff.
The back cover of the menu makes the outrageous claim that Canadian Pacific surveyors managed to find a “water-level route between Calgary and Vancouver,” reasoning that since the rail line followed rivers all the way that it was at “water level” even though the rails had to rise more than a mile above Vancouver to reach Kicking Horse Pass. By this definition pretty much every rail line that didn’t have a summit tunnel would be a water-level route. If Canadian Pacific truly followed a water-level route, it wouldn’t have the incredible scenery that made it so attractive to passengers.
I once held out hope that images on steamship menus such as this one were also used on dining car menus, but that doesn’t always appear to be the case. Some were used on hotel, dining car, and steamship menus; some were apparently used on hotel and steamship menus; while others I’ve found only on steamship menus. This may be in the latter group.
As is typical of steamship menus, this one potentially offers an eight-course meal or perhaps more depending on how you count. It opens with juice, then an hors d’oeuvre, followed by soup, fish, entrée with vegetables or cold buffet, salad, and dessert, ending with cheese and crackers and including coffee or tea.
The left side of the menu helpfully offers two “suggested luncheons,” each of which are just six courses as they don’t include the juice or hors d’oeuvre. The full menu on the right includes well over 50 enticing items plus some I don’t find so enticing such as honeycomb tripe Creole and jellied ox tongue.