OLD MENU CARDS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 108, 3 November 1937, Page 26

OLD MENU CARDS

A FASCINATING STUDY

Old menu cards make a fascinating study and often tell more effectively than perhaps is possible in any other way the great changes that take place in social custom, states an exchange. King, Edward VII, it is well known, did much to curtail the ponderous Victorian dinners which at one time were of prodigious length and really took almost the whole evening to serve. Here is a menu served more than 60 years ago, when King Edward dined with the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, now disbanded. This menu, which had been preserved by Surgeon-Major J. Lindsey Curtis, had been carefully compiled after the ■ Colonel had received a hint as to the favourite dishes of the Royal visitor, who was then, of course, the Prince of Wales. The old menu, which is given below, was of six courses, quite a moderate one for those days:—

Potages: Celery. Mock -turtle. Poissons: Teal salmi with truffles. Entrees: Mutton cutlets. Soubise sauce.

Releves: Roast sirloin of beef. Roast ribs of beef. Roast saddle ofjmutton. Boiled cold round of beef. Boiled chicken and tongue.

Rots: Roast black partridges. Roast quails. Asparagus. Entremets: Jelly and ice pudding.

This menu took one hour to serve from to finish. The shorter dinner movement has been carried far since those days. A dinner of not more than four courses is by no means unusual at Buckingham Palace, the actual dishes being chosen from the rather longer full menu of the day.

This selection is one of the housewifely duties which it is the Queen's pleasute to undertake.