The earliest known menu was discovered by archaeologist Sir William Cristal in 1922 when he was excavating the pyramid that contained the tomb of a then unidentified Egyptian prince. Carved in hieroglyphics on stone tablets, the menu was for the meal that was presented to celebrate the birth of the Prince's twin sons. According to the menu, there were two first courses - garlic in sour cream and barley soup, and one intermediate course - salmon that had been brought by boat from the Tigris river. The main course consisted of roast pig and goats' cheese and this was followed by honey cakes, fresh dates and pomegranates. All in all, a rather modest meal considering that one of these twins was to later become Ramses III, probably the most powerful and famous of all Egyptian Pharoahs.

The menu that was discovered was not one that had been given to the guests at the dinner. Like nearly all menus until the 19th century, this was meant as a working list, instructions to the kitchen staff about what dishes to prepare and in what order they were to be served at a given meal. Such menus, or lists of instructions were commonly used in royal households well into the 15th century, and a Florentine humanist and philosopher, Bartolomeo Sacchi, write a classic treatise showing how menus should be constructed. Sacchi suggested that meals be introduced with light, delicate dishes such as salads, raw vegetables dressed with olive oil and vinegar, cooked vegetables, fruits, eggs and, in keeping with the tastes of his time, a course of sweet candies or cakes. Sacchi wrote that "these should be followed with soups, the purpose of which are to ready the palate for boiled and roast meats", and that the meal should close with cheeses and more sweets.

By the end of the Renaissance, such menus had become fuller, and it was not uncommon to find diners served in as many as twelve separate courses, each consisting of several dishes. One 18th century menu prepared by an anonymous chef for the King of Piedmont listed eight courses, each consisting of at least six different dishes. In addition to eight soups, fourteen roasts and twelve salads, the menu listed sixteen different desserts. The oddest part of all this is that diners were given no choice in what they were served. Every diner was expected to sample at least a little bit of every dish put on the table.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, most public eating places were inns, places where overnight guests or others who dropped in could have a meal. No matter how plain or fancy these places were, the contents of the meals to be served were deter- mined by the proprietor or the kitchen staff, and every diner was given exactly the same thing to eat. If there were menus in such establishments, they were hung over the working stations in the kitchen and were solely for the purpose of the cooks. In most such inns, not even the waiters knew what the dinner would consist of until they were given the various dishes to bring to the table. It is true, however, that by the middle of the seventeenth century, waiters in better French, English and Italian inns and hotels were told what dishes would be served, and it was the responsibility of one of the waiters to memorize this list and announce loudly to all of the assembled guests just what was waiting for them. Not even the famed Tour d'Argent, which was established in 1582 gave its guests any options in what they ate until the restaurant was nearly two hundred years old.

The first true "bills of fare" as we now know them originated in France towards the end of the 18th century, when owners of inns and the first true restaurants decided that diners should have the right to choose the dishes that most pleased them. Called "escriteau", chefs at prestigious restaurants adopted the habit of placing large posters near the entrance of their restaurants, and on these were written the names, and sometimes descriptions, of the dishes provided by the establishment. English visitors to France liked the idea so much that before long, every pub in London had a chalk-board upon which the pub owner would list his daily offer- ings. The French in turn, liked this English adaptation and most Parisian restaurants began to use chalk boards for the same purpose.

The tradition of giving guests individual menus only started in the 19th century, when it became popular for kings, princes and other members of royal families to dine in restaurants such as Cafe Hardy, Cafe de Foy, Magny, Laperouse and the Cafe Anglais. By 1850 it was considered essential that important guests be given their own menus. The most famous of these is probably from the meal served on June 7, 1867 at the Cafe Anglais. The diners were Czar Aledxander II, the future Czar Alexander III and the King of Prussia and the meal has come to be known as "The Dinner of the Three Emperors".

Soups
Imperatrice
Frontanges

Intermediate Courses
Souffle a la Reine
Sole fillets a la Venitienne
Turbot Steaks au Gratin
Saddle of Mutton with Breton Puree

Entrees
Chickens a la Portugaise
Hot quail Pate
Lobster a la Parisienne
Champagne Sorbet

Roasts
Duck a la Rouennaise
Canapes of Young Wild Birds

Final Courses
Eggplant a l'Espagnole
Asparagus Cassolettes
Princesse Bombe Glacee

The wines served were Madeira, Return from India, 1846; Sherry, 1821; Chateau Yquem 1847; Chambertin 1846; Chateau Margaux, 1847; Chateau-Latour 1847; and Chateau Lafite, 1848. The bill for the meal came to 1,200 Francs. In today's terms that would be $12,950 for dinner for three.

Although bistros and many brasseries continue their habit of writing the menu, by then known as "carte" on chalkboards, individual menus finally became a regular part of dining out. During the last half of the 19th century, many restaurants outdid each other in trying to make their menus artistic and elaborate. The Tour d'Argent inaugurated its first menu in 1868, and it was twenty two pages long, some pages being devoted to a single dish while at Laperousse the menu was only six pages long but was embossed with gold and bound in silver. Great artists did not consider it beneath their dignity to illustrate such menus and menus decorated by Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir, Matisse and Gauguin have now become highly prized collectors items. Sometimes the artists would receive payment for their work, but more often they would accept meals in return. Renoir prepared menus for his favorite restaurants and it is said that after the age of 35 he never again paid for restaurant bill. Toulouse-Lautrec, a respected gourmet, agreed to sketch menus for those restaurants to which he was invited to dine "on the house".

The tradition of giving individual menus to all clients became universally accepted in France only during the 1920s. Oddly enough, once French restaurants started giving guests such menus, the custom caught on everywhere, seemingly at the same time. On September 30, 1927, Fred Harvey's Restaurant in Chicago's Union Railroad Station listed a fixed price menu that in addition to the choice of fried fish in tomato sauce, a small steak with fried onions or fresh shrimps with noodles also included mashed potatoes, cauliflower in cream sauce, rolls, peach pudding with fruit sauce, ice cream and coffee, tea or milk. The cost for such a meal was 70 cents. On the same day, The Bull and Boar Pub in Cambridge offered choices of chicken consomme or vegetable soup; kidney pie or steak and fried eggs, both of which were served with bacon, fried tomatoes, mashed potatoes and string beans; apple cake or plum pudding; rolls, butter, six kinds of jam and coffee or tea for 40 pence. Not to be outdone, Demel's Conditoria in Vienna gave their guests a menu that offered them chicken consomme or tomato aspic; Viener schnitzel, Cordon Bleu or Pork Chops, all served with mashed potatoes, sauerkraut and boiled carrots. The price of 60 pfennings also included a free choice of any of the cakes being sold that day at this world famous establishment.

As to out-and-out oddities, the longest menu in the world was probably that of the Airport Diner in Newark, New Jersey, which daily listed over fifty appetizers, forty soups, three hundred sandwiches, two hundred salads, four hundred main courses, eighty different vegetables and two hundred desserts. The shortest was surely the blank sheet of velum paper presented to Lord and Lady Halifax by their chef on the day he resigned, and the most ex- pensive was the discovered in the tomb of Pharoah Ramses' father. The meal itself may not have cost much, but the hieroglyphic tablets, now on permanent exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, are valued at 27 million dollars. ???????

To Trigger the Appetite

Fernand Point may have been the dean of chefs but he was also a consummate businessman. Point observed that "every menu has three purposes: to please the eye, to trigger the appetite and to let people know how much of their money they are about to spend". The most important function "is that of pleasing the eye and the other senses", said Point, "for if the menu is not appealing, the people will lose their appetites and their desire to part with their money".

Alas, but many restaurateurs have forgotten Point's advice, and some of the menus one sees these days are so offensive or silly that no one could possibly take food seriously. The menu of a restaurant that I recently visited in the State of Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C., describes one of their dishes as follows:

Finest Fresh River Trout Fillets, gently sauteed in breadcrumbs to a golden brown, with fresh garden peas simmered in butter, light and crisp French-fried potatoes, and a lemon wedge

This is not the only example of silliness that can be found. The six page menu of a supposedly prestigious French-Italian recipe contains twenty-two spelling errors. On the special summer menu of another prestigious French restaurant, the name of the restaurant was spelled incorrectly; and the name of a well known Chinese restaurant is spelled in four different ways on their menu. The worst example of carelessness I have found was in the menu of a cafe on Tel Aviv's Basel Street. Res taurateurs who print menus like these cannot possibly hope that their clients will take them seriously.

Avoiding The Most Common Menu Mistakes:

1. Menus can simply name or actually describe the dishes offered. Whichever method has been selected, menu listings should be clear, concise and honest. Flowery and exaggerated language makes people angry. It also causes them to lose respect for a restaurant.

2. If the menu describes dishes, be sure the descriptions are accurate. If they are not, many people will return their dishes to the kitchen. If the menu does not describe the dishes offered be sure that waiters and waitresses can provide a basic description of how the dish is made and what it contains.

3. There is no reason why a menu should be full of spelling and grammatical errors. The language of the country in which the restaurants reside should be checked carefully and the translations, whether into English, French or any other language should be checked by at least one person who is knowledgeable about food and is a native speaker of that language. Those who rely only on "friends" to check their translations are making a serious error. Friends have good intentions but also make mistakes. Because printing menus is an expensive operation, restaurateurs should spend just a bit more to have them checked by professionals.

4. Regardless of whether clients receive a one page xeroxed menu or an expensive leather bound tome, they are entitled to expect a menu that is spotlessly clean. Food spots and torn or crushed pages on the menu make clients wonder whether your kitchen is as dirty as the menu they have received. When menus have become dirty or otherwise unattractive, they should be thrown away.

5. In restaurants that list their daily offerings on a chalkboard it is perfectly legitimate to cross out one of the dishes when it has been sold out. Restaurants that have a printed menu do not have this privilege, and it gives a very bad impression when items have been crossed out with a pen or magic marker. If you have run out of a specific dish on a certain day, the waiter should state this when he presents the menu. If certain dishes have been eliminated permanently from the menu, the menus should be reprinted. Little pieces of white paper pasted over the names of dishes that "used to exist" make a restaurant look silly.

6. Menus must clearly show whether service and/or VAT are included in the prices. Customers who discover only when they receive their bill that their meal is going to cost 28% - 35% more than the menu prices are going to be angry people. Angry people do not return. Nor do they recommend restaurants to their friends.

7. Some restaurants how have menus that are 12 - 14 pages long and that list two hundred or more "specialties". It is true that the number of items included on a menu should be determined by the style and type of restaurant. It is also true, however, that only simpleminded and naive customers will be foolish enough to think that any dish on such a menu will be really excellent.

© Daniel Rogov