Vintage Menus (20%)
Chose a year between 1900 and 1925, the place is Boston, and you intend to open a new downtown restaurant.
- For starters, your financial backers have asked you to make a sample dinner menu, which embodies your vision for the restaurant.
- The menu should include the name you intend to give your establishment, as well as a full range of assorted dishes: no less than a dozen entrees as well as several sides and desserts.
- Your financiers, who know very little about restaurants, have also requested that you provide a detailed description of each item on the menu, a list of its key ingredients, origins, and taste.
- In addition to your menu, include a two-page report explaining your business plan. Explain your menu. What sort of diners do you expect to attract? What culinary influences are you borrowing?
Be creative, maybe even artistic here, but in any event recognize that aesthetics and ambiance are key elements of any plan.
- See ECLearn assignment for further information.
- Menus - Digital Collections - New York Public LibraryIncludes The Buttolph collection of menus.
See also What's on the menu? and a search of "Boston" for this site.
Potential Resources - In addition to using to those on the home page to find articles and books
Restaurant Republic: The Rise of Public Dining in Boston by
Before the 1820s, the vast majority of Americans ate only at home. As the nation began to urbanize and industrialize, home and work became increasingly divided, resulting in new forms of commercial dining. In this fascinating book, Kelly Erby explores the evolution of such eating alternatives in Boston during the nineteenth century. Why Boston? Its more modest assortment of restaurants, its less impressive--but still significant--expansion in commerce and population, and its growing diversity made it more typical of the nation's other urban centers than New York. Restaurants, clearly segmented along class, gender, race, ethnic, and other lines, helped Bostonians become more comfortable with deepening social stratification in their city and young republic even as the experience of eating out contributed to an emerging public consumer culture. Restaurant Republic sheds light on how commercial dining both reflected and helped shape growing fragmentation along lines of race, class, and gender--from the elite Tremont House, which served fashionable French cuisine, to such plebeian and ethnic venues as oyster saloons and Chinese chop suey houses. The epilogue takes us to the opening, in 1929 near Boston, of the nation's first Howard Johnson's and that restaurant's establishment as a franchise in the next decade. The result is a compelling story that continues to shape America.
ISBN: 9780816691319Publication Date: 2016-09-01
Turning the Tables : Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 by
In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the twentieth century, even the best restaurants dished up ethnic and American foods to middle-class urbanites spending a night on the town. In Turning the Tables, Andrew Haley examines the transformation of American public dining at the start of the twentieth century and argues that the birth of the modern American restaurant helped establish the middle class as the arbiter of American culture. Early twentieth-century battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, ethnic restaurants, unescorted women, tipping, and servantless restaurants pitted the middle class against the elite. United by their shared preferences for simpler meals and English-language menus, middle-class diners defied established conventions and successfully pressured restaurateurs to embrace cosmopolitan ideas of dining that reflected the preferences and desires of middle-class patrons. Drawing on culinary magazines, menus, restaurant journals, and newspaper accounts, including many that have never before been examined by historians, Haley traces material changes to restaurants at the turn of the century that demonstrate that the clash between the upper class and the middle class over American consumer culture shaped the "tang and feel" of life in the twentieth century.
ISBN: 9781469609805Publication Date: 2013-08-01
- Boston Globe Archive (1872-1987)Courtesy of the BPL. Requires a BPL e-card.
Sign up for one at https://www.bpl.org/ecard/ - Global Boston (Boston College)See Eras of Migration and Ethnic Groups.
- Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth"Digital Commonwealth is a Web portal and fee-based repository service for online cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives."
- Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 (Open Collections Program, Harvard University Library)Digitized historical materials and image resources exploring immigration to the United States between 1789 and 1930. Materials selected from Harvard University's library, museum, and archive collections.
- Prices and Wages by Decade: 1900sUniversity of Missouri
- CanvaCreate a free account and access many templates for menus.
Comparative Paper and Presentation on two recipes from different eras (20%)
Compare two recipes, which you can pick from any two ethnic cookbooks, but from different eras. You could even get a great-grandma recipe, if you have a scrap of paper or any kind of written text/proof of its existence and compare it with one in a cookbook. You can compare among different ethnic groups (across ethnicity, over time) or basing the analysis on a single ingredient with different usages. Be creative!
You will use at least 5 secondary sources to contextualize the time period of the two recipes/cookbooks. The recipes and cookbooks do not count as sources.
- See ECLearn assignment for further information.