Aromatic menus

Menus are one of my favourite things to read because they are full of smells and clues about how best to combine scents or olfactory families.

Can you smell with your imagination? It is hard, but if you can do it well science says you are more likely to have better olfactory ability when actual scent molecules are present.

For smells of lunches past I love to spend time on the What's on the Menu section at the new York Public Library website, imagining the aromas wafting around a New York of old Hollywood but now mostly gone.

This site is great fun if you search for very post-2010 food like chia seeds, kale and quinoa because they are never on these menus. This came up in a search for gluten-free but there's nothing gluten-free on the menu. They are probably serving gluten as a feature dish in fact. In 1901 traveling by train was not what it is now and you ate steak and other very fine things.

This menu from the collection has sarsaparilla though and I remembered that it is really good for you so I’m adding it to my daily diet. Interestingly the drink in America called Sarsaparilla doesn’t/didn’t contain sarsaparilla it had Sassafras, now banned in the US because it’s a precursor to MDMA. Don’t say I’m not full of fascinating facts

Can't recall what I searched to find this menu but in 1946 the New York hospital was serving pretty much the same thing as hospitals serve now. Was interested in the catsup, which google tells me is tomato sauce before it became ketchup and has international influence. I like the sound of the Eastern version that has lots of things to boost immunity like shallots, vinegar, white wine, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg, pepper, and lemon peel. Yum. Read more about tomato sauce here.

Because I love this collection of old menus so much I did a little redesign of a few of their menus, using the content from the New York Public Library website.

There is a lot of interest in scenting history at the moment because of the renewed interest in olfaction delivered by covid's stealing our ability to smell anything at all, and because historians say that the senses can give us additional information that helps us understand history better.

History is scentless because it was written by men about men. There are exceptions, like Oscar Wilde, who mentions scent more than any other writer I’ve read. Women were generally only allowed to record recipes and gardens and as it happens that’s where a lot of scent is so looking at menus is the best place for building your olfactory brain and it is also a feminist thing to do, depending on the establishment in question.