This menu was used at a 1947 conference of the National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier, Vermont. The illustration shows an obviously staged and heavily colorized photo of an Indian and a Royal Canadian Mountie and their horses, with the Indian submissively dismounted while the Mountie disdainfully looks away.

Click image to download a 224-KB PDF of this menu.

The National Life Insurance Company must have been especially cheap as this menu offers absolutely no options: one appetizer, one soup, one entrée, one style of potato, one mix of vegetables, no salad, one dessert, and one beverage. Tea wasn’t even offered as an alternative to coffee, though I suspect someone who really wanted it could probably have gotten it at no extra charge. The dessert, African puff glace, was probably similar to what New Orleanians call beignets, or puff pastries, and the glace was probably a sweet sauce. Continue reading →

Today’s menu is dated August 22, the day after yesterday’s lunch menu. The colorized photograph shows one of the McLaughlin-Buicks that the lodge owned to give people tours of the park. McLaughlin Motors was a Canadian automobile manufacturer that merged into General Motors in 1918.

Click image to download a 256-KB PDF of this menu.

After writing that yesterday’s lunch menu had a greater variety of soups and entrées (3 and 7 vs. 2 and 6) than the dinner menu from the day before, today’s dinner menu has three soups and seven entrées. The entrées included sole chicken a la king; lamb casserole; broiled ham; broccoli and fried egg; beef tenderloin; and cold lamb and turkey. The orange meringue pie and arctic roll desserts sound especially tempting.

On August 21, the day after yesterday’s menu, whoever collected these menus must have enjoyed lunch from this card. The photograph, which appears to be colorized, features an unlikely scene of Indians standing by their horses and a teepee high in the Rocky Mountains. I can imagine the Blackfeet hunting in that area, but I can’t see them dragging a teepee along with them.

Click image to download a 245-KB PDF of this menu.

As seems to have been usual for the lodge, the lunch menu offered a greater selection of entrées than the dinner. This one includes bacon and eggs; halibut; hamburg steak; lamb stew; roast ham; chicken salad; and cold salmon. These came with an appetizer, a choice of three soups (compared with two on the dinner menu), veggies and potatoes, a choice of five desserts (same number as the dinner menu), and beverage.

Most of the previous Jasper Lodge menus we have seen have been cards, but this one is a folder. As the cover shows, the menu was used at conference of the Sun Life insurance company, so it may be that lodge management used folders for conferences and conventions and cards for ordinary people. The image on the front cover appears to be a colorized version of a black-and-white photo.

Click image to download an 471-KB PDF of this menu.

Sun Life must have been doing well despite the Depression. In 1933, it completed construction of a new, 26-story headquarters building that at the time had the most square feet of floor space of building in the British Empire. Continue reading →