We’ve seen these menu covers before, but they came with the breakfast menus presented here yesterday so I’m showing them here since the interiors are different. Like yesterday’s menus, these were used during wartime, so they provide a contrast with CN’s Alaska steamship menus during peacetime.

Click image to download a 506-KB PDF of this menu.

The first difference is that the peacetime menus generally had a music programme on the left side of the menu, but these (and other wartime menus we’ve seen here previously) do not. Apparently, many of the musicians who played on board CN steamships before the war had been called up to service. In place of a musical programme, these menus printed a notice that due to “government regulation” CN had discontinued afternoon teas and night suppers aboard its steamships.

Click image to download a 515-KB PDF of this menu.

The menus also have a more limited selection of foods than, say, a 1948 summer menu. The 1948 menu offered seven appetizers; this one has five. The 1948 menu listed six entrées, including prime ribs of beef; this one has five including veal but no steak or prime ribs. The 1948 menu had a choice of two vegetables; this one has unspecified “fresh vegetables in season” (but what was in season in February?). Finally, in addition to sweet and savory desserts, the 1948 menu offered “walnuts in shell,” “dainty dates,” and “imperial mints,” all of which were missing from these February 1945 menus.

Click image to download a 541-KB PDF of this menu.

These three menus are dated February 14, 17, and 18, 1945, and were probably all used on the same voyage. While not quite as generous as the post-war menus, they do offer plenty of variety. While the appetizers were the same every day, the fish courses, entrées, and at least some of the desserts were not.