Here are two more menus from the transportation history series that we haven’t seen before. The first shows an 18th-century man-of-war ship. It was used on the Empress of Canada in August, 1965.

Click image to view and download a 1.4-MB PDF of this menu from the University of British Columbia Chung collection.

The menu still offers an 11- or 12-course meal, but the number of items in each course has been greatly reduced. The 1962 and 1963 menus took both inside pages to list these items. This one needs only one, with the other one offering a dinner suggestion and and suggested wines. There are four appetizers instead of 10, two entrées instead of three, and so forth. There is also no sorbet between entrées for cleansing the palette; passengers would have to drink water or wine to do that. Continue reading →

This menu clearly has the same theme of historic transportation devices as the ones shown in the past several days, but it is a breakfast card instead of a dinner folder. The penny-farthing or high-wheeler bicycle was briefly popular before the modern safety bicycle, whose wheels are usually the same size and chain driven. Since then, the image of the penny-farthing, with its disproportionately large front wheel, has become the epitome of obsolete transportation.

Click image to download a 259-KB PDF of this menu.

For breakfast, passengers had a choice of 12 different fruits, four juices, and five fruit compotes. Then there were two soups, ten cereals, two kinds of fish, and a variety of eggs and meats. Buckwheat cakes (with or without raisins), waffles, French toast, nine kinds of bread or toast, four pastries, and coffee, tea, cold or hot chocolate, or “yogourt” round out the menu. This menu was dated August 20; passengers to Quebec would disembark that day, while passengers to Montreal remained on board for one more night.

We’ve seen this menu cover before but I’m presenting it again because this one is from the same voyage of the Empress of Canada as yesterday’s menu. This one is dated August 17, which would have been the fourth night out from Liverpool.

Click image to download a 517-KB PDF of this menu.

The menu is structured the same as yesterdays, with each course named, but of course many of the items are different. Yesterday’s fish were halibut and plaice; this one’s are brill and scallops. Yesterday’s entrées were veal Milanaise, stuffed tomatoes, and apple fritters; today’s are veal Marengo, omelettes, and banana fritters. The releve is roast turkey on both menus, but that’s probably because these meals were three days apart; something other than turkey would have been offered on at least some of the other days.

We’ve previously seen Canadian Pacific Empress menus from 1957 celebrating British artists such as Shakespeare, John Constable, and Robert Burns. Here are another menu in the same series that was collected by Vancouver Canadian Pacific fan Wallace Chung.

Click image to view and download a PDF of this menu from the University of British Columbia Chung collection.

The 1961 menu presents 18th-century writer and dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson was well-known in his time as the author of books and articles about politics, travel, and poets such as Shakespeare, he is best known today for his 1755 dictionary, which may be the most influential in English history. Continue reading →