Menus from the Lotos Club in New York City

ABSTRACT

Several hundred menus from the Lotos Club have been preserved from the period 1870 to the present. They are from so-called “State Dinners” honoring important people. They show in unusual detail and over a considerable period of time the changing tastes in cuisine, from adherence to French haute cuisine standards to the current fashions such as local and seasonal. It is useful to look at the food served at institutions such as clubs because while slow to change (and often proud of their sometimes-odd culinary traditions), they reflect the shifts in American taste focused in a way that restaurants, which serve a more varied clientele, do not.

KEYWORDS:

• American cuisine
• private clubs
• New York City
• Menus
• Testimonial Dinners

Notes

1. The food of London clubs has been considered in Black, A Room of His Own, 33–42; Eimerl, “London Clubland,” 14–15, 31–36. Particular attention has been given to the great Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, who reached the height of his fame as chef at the Reform Club from 1839 to 1850, Cowen, Relish; Brandon, The People’s Chef.

2. Club sandwich: “Eccentric Celebrations.” All newspaper citations are from the database “America’s Historical Newspapers.” Crab Louis: Siemering, “Seafood on the American Menus.” 275.

3. The Zodiac and Weda. two private dining clubs in New York, kept records of their several meals each year, from 1868 to 1928 for Zodiac and 1886–1955 for Weda. For the Zodiac, Records of the Zodiac, 1868–1916; Records of the Zodiac: Second Volume; Freedman, Harding, and Voigt, “Menus of the Zodiac Club,” 93–108. For the Weda Club, The Weda Club, and records of their dinners in the library of the New York Historical Society, Weda Papers, Dinner Scrapbooks I – V.

4. Elderkin, A Brief History of the Lotos Club, 7–10.

5. Curtis, Lotus-Eating, published in 1852, became an American classic. It consists of lyrical descriptions of summer idylls in Eastern locales such as the Catskill Mountains, Lake George and Newport.

6. Johnson and Moskin, The Members of the Lotos Club, 13.

7. Black, A Room of His Own, 88–146; Milne-Smith, London Clubland, 109–65. The club as an exclusively male space replaced the eighteenth-century salon, presided over by women, Thevoz, The Secret Life, 55–64; Siraud, “Du salon féminin au Gentlemen’s club.”

8. Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 19.

9. Darwin, British Clubs, 13.

10. A mystery story by Dorothy Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, turns on the delay in discovering that an elderly fixture of the Bellona had died in his usual chair and the consequent difficulty of determining the time of death. This is an enduring topic. In a review of a book about the Travellers Club, A. N. Wilson recalls that a member sitting at the long table in the Coffee Room (as the dining room there is called), died suddenly but quietly, a fact noticed only when the Stilton was passed around at the end of the meal, Wilson, “Home of Victorian Ghosts,” 12.

11. The New York Herald, June 17, 1870, 3; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1870, 3; The Commercial Advertise September 25, 1871, 3 (noting that the majority of the members are newspapermen).

12. Brougham and Elderkin, Lotos Leaves.

13. Among the very few old examples are Lotos Club Archive, menus, June 1895; February 1896; July 1896; March 1897 or 1898; September 1897 or 1898 and (possibly) December 1899. Unless otherwise indicated, the menus discussed are from this collection. Elderkin, A Brief History, is largely taken up with accounts of dinners given in honor of various dignitaries of the Club’s first twenty-five years, but nothing is said about the food.

14. The Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), October 30, 1872, 4.

15. Elderkin, A Brief History, 13, 29. Elderkin considers Kingsley to have been the first distinguished guest to receive a formal dinner, but in fact seven mostly English visitors in 1872–1873 also were honored by elaborate meals, Johnson and Moskin, Art at the Table, p. 204.

16. The first use of the term “State Dinner” was in honor of Warren R. Austin, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, on September 26, 1951.

17. Johnson and Moskin, Art at the Table.

18. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 194–211.

19. Ranhofer, The Epicurean, 4.

20. On the Maryland Club and its food, see Brugger, The Maryland Club, 343–90.

21. Shields, Southern Provisions, 93–94, 364.

22. Shields, The Culinarians, 267, 286.

23. Ibid., 322.

24. “Lotos Club Cooks Locked Up,” 2.

25. “Cutting Off a Cat’s Tail,” 6; “Tabby and the Cook,” 11. Duvernoy may have assumed the cat was merely a stray, but, according to the Herald, it was a pet Maltese belonging to the neighboring Davis Collamore Company, a porcelain importer, which brought charges. Truth also reported Duvernoy’s defense that the cat attacked him, rendering it in what is supposed to be a French accent (“Ze cat spring to my face … ”), Truth, May 11, 1883, 3. Apparently, at the same time a pet cat named Dick lived at the club and his nine lives were chronicled by Noah Brooks, the historian and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, according to an article circulated in various newspapers such as the St. Alban’s Daily Messenger, September 26, 1884, 3.

26. “How to Make a Play,” 2 (the inspiration and process being likened to cooking pancakes).

27. The Members of the Lotos Club, 18.

28. Freedman, “The Rhetoric of American Restaurant Menus,” 129–36.

29. Haley, Turning the Tables.

30. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 10–22, 60–85; Haley, Turning the Tables, 19–42,118–44.

31. Beahrs, Mark Twain’s Feast, 150.

32. Ibid., 176.

33. New York Historical Society Library, Weda Club Papers, Dinner Scrapbook vol. IV (1929–1946).

34. Philadelphia Club Library, announcements from 1950–1955.

35. Pacific Union Club Library, menus, December 13, 1958.

36. Brugger, The Maryland Club, 382.

37. Our thanks to Adam Plechter, Manager of the Wilmington Club in Delaware for this information.

38. Ranhofer, The Epicurean, 2.

39. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 117.

40. Cosmos Club Archive, Food Service and Menus. We are grateful to the Club Archivist Lindsay Dupertius, for finding and showing us these menus.

41. Lotos Leaf [the Club newsletter], Summer 1975, 9.

42. Lotos Leaf, Summer 1974, 10–11.

43. Conversation with John McGrath, April 18, 2022.

44. Hollanda, The Chef’s Jacket.

45. Jurafsky, The Language of Food, 7–20.

46. Conversation with J. Roger Friedman, April 8, 2022.

47. Gerald Ford told an interviewer that eating as well as sleeping was “a waste of time.” His unvarying lunch was cottage cheese with sliced onion or quartered tomato, sprinkled with A1 Sauce, followed by butter-pecan ice cream for dessert, Hess and Hess, The Taste of America, 9.

48. Conversation with John McGrath, April 18, 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Freedman

Paul Freedman is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale where he has taught since 1997. Before that he was at Vanderbilt University. His teaching and research over many years has concentrated on the history of the Middle Ages (particularly in Catalonia). The history of food and cuisine is a relatively recent interest. In 2007 Freedman edited Food: The History of Taste, translated into ten languages. He is the author of Ten Restaurants that Changed America, (2016), American Cuisine and How It Got This Way, (2019) and has recently published a short book for Yale University Press entitled Why Food Matters.

Nancy Johnson

Nancy Johnson has been the archivist at the Lotos Club since 1998. With historian J. Robert Moskin, she is the author of Art at the Table: The Lotos Club State Dinner Tradition (2020), which looks at the honorees and artistic aspects of the menus discussed in this article. She is the co-author of The Members of the Lotos Club, 1870-2007, and writes a monthly column for the Club newsletter about varied aspects of Lotos history.