MORE MENUS I LOVED OR WOULD HAVE

The guests must have enjoyed this menu as rumors of war and inevitable shortages swept through London.

Plovers are a “wading bird” (think sandpiper) and their eggs were on every expensive menu at this time. As they were later when I was a child in London but never ate them, opting for smoked salmon as my sole allowance of expensive choices. Turtle soup I always had until it very soon (and fortunately) disappeared as massively unsustainable.

Then my favorite devilled white bait followed by sweetbreads (with the Mouton 1905). The asparagus I would have had after the soup, much to the astonishment then of the dining room staff who were all about de rigeur.

Virgin Sauce (Sauce Vierge)

Find the recipe in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and it is one I served at Chez Panisse for the Gertrude Stein Dinner in 1974.

Butter and lemon juice whisked together over hot water and when fully amalgamated, plain whipped cream folded in.

Heaven.

On both the Queens (Elizabeth and Mary) as a child, I knew the servers well because I had smoked salmon at every meal (including breakfast) even when not on the printed menu. Here, the to me inexplicable, starts of tomato juice, nuts, and “table celery.” Never knew what they were for when salmon, sturgeon, and caviar were available.

Definitely the poussin with cepes, the “Fresh Green Peas,” and the Savarin aux Fruits. I was never much one for the always present Savouries, but they included melted cheese toasts, I would be tempted.

More Cunard, but this one thirteen years to the day before I was born, my father (large signature along the right side) with the President of the United States. And the then ubiquitous half raw grapefruit with a Maraschino cherry in the center. Weird. Then and now. But the pheasant and Nesselrode Pudding (chestnuts, candied fruits, meringue, whipped cream, and cherries on top) very acceptable. Except for the cherry again. Acceptable to me only when retrieved from my parents’ Manhattans.

My mother and sister on the way back from Mexico City where they lived. Those nuts, celery and olives again, but also caviar. “Mock Turtle” pointless, since only the same gelatinous (veal) texture and no green turtle.

I would have liked the Guava Jelly with some Roquefort Cheese.

We stopped in the then Ceylon on our way from Sydney to Genoa on the S.S. Australia and had dinner at the Mount Lavinia (see the hotel swarming with English officers in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai).

And that damned grapefruit again.

Nothing notable about the menu for the head of Soviet Russian, with the usual tomato juice and half grapefruit, except that it was on a train that was definitely beyond Amtrak.

But the Omelet au Confiture. What, Mrs. Krushchev wanted to know, is what is jam doing in an omelet? She drank tea with jam, but eggs?

It caused a bit of a scandal since the Russians hinted that such barbarism might just as well be bombed as not.

1983 menu was for the managers of our Santa Fe Bar & Grill after we had rescued it for a year and made some money. That bought the wines and caviar. The menu shows how closely the chefs had listened to all my stories of menus and what should be on them. And had been for me.

This is a menu from Speedo 690 (the address of the Speedo Carburetor shop on San Francisco’s Van Ness avenue and around the corner from Stars) that we opened a year before the earthquake. The one that closed it.

The theme of Speedo was all the tropical places and beaches I had lived in or on. Sydney’s Bondi, Ceylon, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, and the wild beaches of Tangier

It turned out that Ben Mann, one of the servers at Stars, could paint. I commissioned him to do a series of menu covers, this one for desserts.

The list of after or instead of dessert wines was one of my most favorite creations.

Especially for instead of.

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