I like to collect menus from different periods as they reflect an important aspect of how people have lived since they started to dine out in modern times. Fashions in food change like fashions in clothing and the food consumed at any one time says a lot about culture, wealth, taste (in both senses of the word) and technology.
In Blog 16 I detailed a menu for a large public meal served in Birmingham in 1896 and now, below, I include the menus for the past three years of the Shakespeare Birthday lunch held in neighbouring Stratford-upon-Avon since the 1990s to commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth (and death). A lot has changed about those menus in the past 120 years. I depict all three for 2017, 2018 and 2019 for consideration and comparison. They may or may not be as sumptuous or extravagant as the meal served in 1896 and it is not even easy to decide which menu from whichever era one would prefer to be offered. But it is fun to see what has and has not changed in that period regardless of how drastically different England is now - in all sorts of ways - compared with 1896.
The first menu depicted here is that of the 2017 lunch. The principal guest speaker who had been awarded the 2017 Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award (an international award given to someone for their ‘outstanding achievement in extending the appreciation and enjoyment of the works of William Shakespeare and in the general advancement of Shakespearean knowledge and understanding’) was the actor Sir Anthony Sher who had lately played King Lear and Falstaff at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. The menu offered the following dishes:-
Starter - Gravalax of salmon with artichoke and citrus salad with a caper dressing OR Brie and caramelised purple onion tartlet with balsamic caramelised fig with watercress and herb
Main - Honey and lemon marinated chicken supreme with leek and mustard mash, fine beans, glazed carrots with tarragon sauce OR Asparagus, spring onion and tarragon risotto with wild rocket and aged balsamic
Dessert - Chocolate salted caramel torte with caramel ice cream.
The 2018 lunch was marked by the presenting of the Pragnall Award to the remarkable and splendid actress Jane Lapotaire. The menu featured:-
Starter - Smoked salmon and trout rillette with pickled fennel, orange and saffron mayonnaise OR Goats cheese and tomato tart
Main - Roadted rump Pfizer’s local lamb, crushed potato, spiced aubergine, fine beans, roasted carrots and olive jus OR Roasted vegetable Wellington, spinach and wild mushroom cream
Dessert - Baked vanilla cheesecake, blueberry compote and raspberry wafer OR Fresh fruit salad.
And so to the 2019 lunch and menu. The Pragnell award winner was not, this time, a thespian but a distinguished Polish Shakespearean academic and founder of the theatre in Gdańsk. The dishes served were little changed over the three years that the lunch had been held at the Crowne Plaza and continued to show what a limited choice of ingredients can be offered now with so many dishes being unservable for a variety of reasons. With over 400 diners the chef is faced with an almost insurmountable wall of reasons as to why a certain dish can not be served. I was seated at a table made up almost entirely of old people some of whom must have lived through the post-war period of rationing if not through wartime rationing itself. You would think that those times of being glad to eat whatever was offered would have steeled their bodies for any food that might have been on the menu. But no, anything but. There were 3 or 4 out of the eight people sitting at my table who could not eat something or other that was being served and the hapless waiting staff were faced with several
instances of what could or could not be tolerated on the diners’ plates. Plates were being brought to the table and taken away again and returned with different items on them only to find they had to be removed again because something still was not quite right. It was like sitting at a table with a collection of finicky eight year olds.
Anyway, for the record the food choices were:-
Starter - Salmon gravidlax - cured salmon, dill and brandy seasoned with salt and sugar OR Mediterranean stuffed mushroom - Mushroom stuffed with Provençale vegetables with a Mediterranean herb crust.
Main - Corn fed chicken - with Dauphinoise potato, forest mushrooms and red wine jus OR
Courgette canneloni - Courgette containing puy lentils, pomodorino and vine cherry tomato (no pasta in sight, this is what may have been called in the past, rather less elegantly, ‘stuffed courgette’
Dessert - Chocolate truffle torte - with orange Anglaise and poached berries (the custard was a mere smear on the plate and more of it was needed badly) OR Fresh fruit salad.
The chicken breast was of reasonable proportion but not particularly exciting - sometimes it is possible to raise the roof with a delicious chicken but just how easy that is when one is catering for 400 guests is a question I’m glad I don’t have to answer. It’s all very well admiring those star chefs who appear on television and whose names we know and who are serving covers of 40 to 80 (if
they’re lucky) per meal but it seems to me that the real heroes are those who serve meals to hundreds of incredibly fussy diners at a banquet such as this. Well done to them if they make such meals edible let alone pleasurable.
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