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The choice to exhibit the menus
of these two particular restaurants was due to the striking similarities
of the two institutions, despite a separation of roughly one hundred
years. The Palace Hotel and Chez Panisse share a common origin
in the French culinary tradition. Each restaurant is considered
one of the most influential and prominent of its era. Each restaurant
gained a reputation for its celebratory dinners in honor of presidents,
artists, statesman, writers, and friends. And each has uniquely
interpreted this tradition in their own time and place, creating
and defining cuisine to suit the tastes of Californians. The juxtaposition
of these two collections of menus highlights the change in dining,
cooking, and celebrating that has occurred over the past one hundred
years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It is important to make clear these menus reference
a certain economic level of society. The lower classes did not share
in the wealth that has made possible the excesses of both the Victorian
Era and our own time. The menus from these celebratory occasions
represent the idea of the elite “grand meal.” Such meals
were not common, but were meant to mark special occasions or honor
prominent people. Consequently every aspect of the meal, from the
style of cuisine, the setting of the table, and the artwork of the
menu, marked the occasion as unordinary.
Menus tell us many things besides what is for dinner.
The types of foods served, their description, and the manner in
which they are served indicate:
The menus from the Palace Hotel reflect the opulent
tradition of grand hotel dining and cooking of the late nineteenth
century. This style of dining and cooking was popular due to the
assumption that French high cuisine indicated sophistication and
refinement. The menus from the Palace years indicate a cuisine focusing
primarily on meat and fish, with vegetables and fruits playing supporting
roles. This style of cuisine relied heavily on sauces, and relied
heavily on great amounts of butter, cream, and eggs to enrich an
already rich style of cooking. Presented in a proscribed sequence,
courses were often composed of multiple dishes, creating a symphony
of flavors, textures, and temperatures.
The menus also hint at the great
amount of labor and time needed to produce a highly manipulated
cuisine in a craft still defined by medieval technology. Legions
of cooks, waiters, porters, butchers, dishwashers, and apprentices
labored in hot, humid, close kitchens for long hours to prepare
an elite cuisine for an elite audience.
The concept of a great meal was
tremendously altered throughout the nineteenth century and into
the twentieth century. From menus listing twenty or thirty courses
and a dozen wines, a simplifying and refining force began to pare
down the number of courses and their arrangement. This alteration
of the traditional customs of a “grand meal” reflects
a similar change that was taking place in the domestic life of the
United States.
For most people industrialization
and technology greatly altered the relationship between the work
place and the home. Traditional customs of dining and eating were
greatly affected. This revolution in the everyday changed not only
how and what we eat but where, at what time, and with whom we eat.
Slow, time-consuming meals were deemed extravagant and old-fashioned.
Our sensibilities toward the table began to change in response to
the changing values and priorities of an industrialized world. This
movement toward greater simplification of menus, preparation, ingredients,
and the service of grand meals continued through the both World
Wars and into the present.
The cuisine of Chez Panisse is
also a cuisine of sophistication and refinement. However, Chez Panisse
has a fundamentally different approach from the grand hotel cuisine
of the 19th century. Whereas the Palace Hotel was engaged in an
international cuisine having little to do with everyday eating or
cooking, Chez Panisse takes its inspiration from the more domestic,
regional country cooking of France and Southern Europe. This is
a tradition of accessible, at hand ingredients from the farm, fields,
and orchards. Attention is given to the seasonality of food, reminding
the diner of our connections and dependence on the soil for sustenance.
Preparations are spare, allowing the integrity of the ingredients
to remain the focus.
In the same way that clothing styles, games,
and home furnishings tell us about the activity of past eras, menus
also present a picture of life in a certain time and place. They
are an essential document in not only serving as the memory of a
meal, but also as a record into the societal standards and daily
practices of the past.
*All menus are from the collections
of the North Baker Research Library of the California Historical
Society or The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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