Elephant consommé? Roasted bear ribs? Wolf haunch? If any of these sound appetizing, you can find them all in a new book about menus throughout history.
As author Nathalie Cooke, Artsci’82, describes them, menus are “ephemera – random pieces of paper that really didn’t expect to be collected, especially if they were not for royalty or official banquets.”
But the professor of literature at McGill University also knows readers and academics alike will look at these historical menus and see that they contain lots of information worth examining. “They’re definitely not something that belongs in the rubbish bin,” Prof. Cooke says.
To preserve some of that historical ephemera, she wrote and recently published a book titled Tastes and Traditions: An Illustrated Journey Through Menu History (Reaktion Books, London, U.K.). The elephant, bear, and wolf, among other rare Parisian creatures, come up in one particularly interesting menu in the lavishly illustrated book. It documents a Christmas dinner from 1870 during the siege of Paris when some elites ended up “eating the zoo,” as Prof. Cooke puts it.
“It’s interesting that the idiom of French cuisine is still at play, even in that menu of dire times,” she says. “So, there’s still consommé, but it’s not beef consommé – it’s elephant. And the traditional civet dish is kangaroo, not rabbit or deer. And you ask yourself, ‘Why kangaroo?’ and then you realize it’s because it’s also an animal that hops.”
As a literature professor, Prof. Cooke is interested in genre and the lives of everyday people. Menus are just another genre – one that has received very little close scholarly scrutiny, she says, adding that her book is about interpreting the stories that menus tell. “This book allowed me to use my toolbox for literary interpretation and bring that to menus.”
Prof. Cooke has been interested in culinary history for 25 years.
“My training is to look at women’s life stories, so I started with stories in fiction, and then I turned my attention to non-fiction, especially stories told in their own words, and then I cottoned on to the fact that moments of really pivotal societal change were being described by women in intimate and detailed terms,” she says. “There are dramatic cultural and social shifts that are documented closely in cookbooks, if you pay attention.”
You can see, for example, the disappearance of certain foods, such as fish when stocks were low. Overfishing of turtles led to mock turtle soup. The First World War heralded many more “mock” foods and technological innovations – think of Knox-brand gelatin.
When her publisher asked her to consider writing a book about menus, she realized these everyday items fall somewhere between documentary evidence and flights of the imagination. Her book features 190 menu images for which she had a “fleet of research assistants” searching. She says they did their utmost to locate the copyright and provide information on how future researchers can find them.
Prof. Cooke started looking at rare material, something that has remained a constant in her career, while at Queen’s, where – as the first person in her family to go to university – she received her first degree in Canadian studies.
