By Dory Adler

Good food is a passion for many people. There are networks devoted to the joy of food and the numerous cuisines to savor. Restaurants of every stripe abound.

What’s on the menu is one thing. But the actual menu boasts an artistry all its own.

That’s the premise behind the upcoming show, A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941, at Manhattan’s Grolier Club April 26-July 29.

The novel exhibition features 227 menus that document the first 100 years of dining out in the United States — from fancy hotels to a Mississippi riverboat. The menus reflect both the dining habits of Americans and the rise of the middle class. Menus became commonplace in the 1840s, when dining in public became popular, replacing the earlier role of taverns where meal choices were limited.

A notable entry are menus from Taylor’s Saloon (ca. 1861-1862), one of the first public venues where women could dine without an accompanying male. The 28-page bill of fare had 19 sections — as well as ads for Barnum’s Museum and Tiffany’s. (Tiffany’s also created menus decorated with silk ribbons and watercolor scenes.)

Curator Henry Voigt said menus “aid our cultural memory by providing historical evidence. Not only of what people were eating, but what else they were doing, with whom they were doing it, and what they valued.

“Examine one and be transported back to the everyday life of the past—whether to a lavish banquet in the Gilded Age or a food-relief eatery during the Great Depression,” he added.

Voigt has also included a menu from President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural ball (March 6, 1865), which featured a huge cake in the shape of the Capitol Building, as well as one from Mark Twain’s 70th birthday party at Delmonico’s in 1905. That menu is illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches depicting the famed writer at various stages of his career.

The Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus, a resource for food writers, restaurant critics and culinary historians, contains more than 10,000 items.

The Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles in the graphic arts, founded in 1884.

If You Go

Grolier Club , 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY
Admission is free.