Tag Archives: Food history

August 4, 2025

Massachusetts Menus

By daseger

I had a more substantive post planned for this week but I took a little detour and so here I am with menus. I started to write about my experience as a tour guide at the Phillips House of Historic New England, as I’m in my second year and I thought it was time for some reflection. But in doing so, I became fixated on a moment during my tour (well during all of my colleagues’ tours, I’m sure, as it’s definitely a great device) when I show our guests a menu from July 1919 in order to interpret both the dining room and one of the ways in which the household worked. Everyone loves this menu: adults, children, southerners, northerners, midwesterners, westerners, visitors from other countries, Salem residents. There is one particular item on this menu that captures everyone’s attention without exception: Orange Fairy Fluff!

So I thought that before I delved into my reflective post about what I have learned as a tour guide, I should discover the origins of Orange Fairy Fluff, and this took me down a road of restaurant history marked by menus. And then I went down my own memory lane of menus, and so here we are with menus from storied Massachusetts restaurants. The restaurant most closely associated with Orange Fairy Fluff is the famous Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, the birth place of chocolate chip cookies. I think the timing is a bit off, however, as the menu above is from 1919 and the Toll House didn’t open until the 1930s, but an earlier (1916) Sunkist cookbook published a recipe before the Toll House owner Ruth Wakefield’s popular “Tried and True” cookbook. The Toll House menu is a perfect example of the “mid-century Colonial” aesthetic I’m so fond of, as are those of its competitors in the 1940s and 1950s.

I’ve been to, or driven by, all of these restaurants, with the exception of the Adams House in Marblehead. I just like its menu and “shore dinners” evokes the restaurant of Salem Willows. I never went to the Towne Lyne House in Lynnfield, but it was a “landmark” on the drive along Route One to and from Boston from Maine, along with “The Ship” restaurant on the other side of the road. All menus above from the Culinary Institute of America’s Menu Collection.

I have very warm memories of Filene’s, in truth the Basement more than the restaurants, but I do like the map menu below—although it doesn’t have Salem on it! Seeing the House of the Seven Gables front and center on the 1940s menu mollified me a bit, as did a menu for St. Clairs Restaurant from Historic New England’s collections which also features the Gables prominently on the cover. I also have childhood and teenage memories of meals at Locke-Ober, the Union Oyster House, and Cafe Marliave in Boston—and the Parker House, of course. The last time I went there—maybe just before Covid?—-it was looking a bit dowdy so I was pleased to hear that it’s going through a big refresh this year. (I wonder if they will keep the worst portrait ever of Nathaniel Hawthorne?)

The CIA collection has a few menus from Salem restaurants, including one from the famous Moustakis “palace of sweets” on Essex Street.When I look at this menu, I think that Salem could use an ice cream parlor today, especially one which offered up Moxie floats (!!!) and College ices (???), but I am also aware that Moustakis was no mere ice cream parlor. A half-century after its founding, it functioned as important gathering place for Salem businessmen according to the 1956 sociological study Community Organization: Action and Inaction by Hunter Floyd:

Other prestige groups observed during the process of study now may be briefly mentioned. There is no athletic club in Salem, nor any downtown men’s club that can serve as a luncheon meeting place. There is, however, a loose tradition that has grown up for various businessmen to eat in a restaurant owned by a Greek named Moustakis. At a rear table of the restaurant, six or eight men can be seated comfortably at a time. During the lunch hour there is a tendency for some of the well-known merchants on “The Street,” as Essex or the main street is called, to gather at this table. As the lunch hour proceeds, professional men, lawyers, accountants, real estate men, and finally bankers may join the group or take the places of men who have finished eating. There is a shifting pattern of membership of this group, but through habit on the part of members, the key pattern is relatively stable. Not all men, by any means, who represent the commercial and professional interests of the community eat at Moustakis’. The restaurant is, however, recognized as a place where gossip is exchanged and an eye is kept on important happenings. Other restaurants serve a similar function, of course, but none are quite as well known as the Moustakis’ “clearing house.”

Menus from the Culinary Institute of America’s Menu Collection and Historic New England’s Collections Access.

And finally, menus from two very different Salem restaurants: the House of the Seven Gables Tea Room (squash pie!) and China Sails, which is still with us, in its original location on Loring Avenue near Vinnin Square. These China Sails menus look like they date from a bit later, and only the Salem location survives (though I don’t think Dave Wong is still in the picture).

19 Comments | tags: Boston, Culinary Institute of America, ephemera, Essex Street, Food and drink, Food history, Historic New England, House of the Seven Gables, New England, Parker House | posted in Culture, New England

April 11, 2023

What the Judge Ate

By daseger

And drank. Today I have a new source (to me anyway) for food history: the diary of a Colonial judge who rode the circuit, keeping accounts of his tavern food and drink along the way. I’ve been immersed in Salem diaries for the past few weeks, preparing a talk I’ve giving for Salem Ancestry Days and the Pickering House on April 23. I’ve got diaries from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, and Judge Benjamin Lynde Sr.’s is one of the earliest. He’s an early transatlantic man: born in Salem in 1666, he was sent to England by his parents in his teens for an education. I don’t know if the law was the plan, but he ended up reading it at the Middle Temple in London, and when he returned to Masssachusetts he became the first judge in the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature with formal legal training. He became chief justice in 1729 and his son and namesake succeeded him later in the century, serving as one of the justices in the Boston Massacre trial. I think Benjamin Lynde Jr. lived in more interesting times but I find Benjamin Lynde Sr. more interesting!

Two very different views of Judge Lynde: by the Pollard Limner, c. 1730 (Peabody Essex Museum) and John Smibert, c. 1731 (Huntingdon Library).

Given his legal training and experience, you would think that Judge Lynde would analyze some of his trials in his diary but that is not the case: very few legal concepts are discussed, although the occasional execution is referencd. He is more forthcoming about his travels and his tavern accounts, and he is tireless, riding the circuit from York, Maine (my hometown—then part of Massachusetts province), to Plymouth and Springfield. He rides out to the Cape, and sails out to Nantucket for a session. When he returns home to Salem for a spell he immediately goes out to his farm at Castle Hill and works the fields. He is hale and hearty and on the job into his seventies. Can we attribute this to his diet? Well, I don’t think so, but here it is.

Breakfast: frequent “chocolate breakfasts” but sometimes the Judge liked heartier fare: cheese and bread, fowl, lobster in the summer! But you can’t underestimate the colonial consumption of chocolate, it was food, drink, stimulant, even medicine all in one. The most popular transatlantic recipe called for the chocolate (sold in brick form and ground or shaved) to be mixed with sugar, long pepper, cloves, aniseed, almonds and other nuts, and some sort of flower water, “the hotter it is drunke, the better it is.” On those days which were not commenced with a Chocolate Breakfast, he went for ale, particularly sage ale, and a few times he referenced “superior wine” in the morning. No mention of coffee; tea pops up once or twice.

Lunch: is never referenced by the Judge. It’s more of a nineteenth and twentieth century concept, although I have found references to it in the 18th: one English author admits that he “clapp’d a good Lunch of Bread into my Pocket” in 1707. But Judge Lynde was busy, or on the road. Maybe he did have something in his pocket, but he doesn’t tell us—or his diary. When he stops in the middle of the day, he would have more ale, cider, the occasional “lime punch” and some plum cake, sometimes with cheese, sometimes without.

Dinner: a regular range from simple to substantive. There are quite a few “milk suppers” and also those of “three eggs” but he also orders up large dinners: lamb, mutton, turkey, fowls, bread with cheese and “isle butter,” lobster. Sometimes he is very detailed: he enjoyed a dinner of “fine chowdered cod” on one occasion, on another he dined on “puff apple pie and cheese with a bottle of ale, an ear of corn, and sugar brandy dram.” He ate “minced veal” and “neats tongues,” beef tongues which were seasoned and dried to preserve them and used in a variety of recipes (I included one below). He really liked sauces for his fish, and his lobster, and plum cake, any time and anywhere. Gingerbread and apple tarts are also referenced, and all sorts of beverages: madeira, madeira, and more madeira, “green Fyal wine,” cherry and brandy drams, strong beer, cider, different ales, flips, “Florence” flasks (I’m not sure of what this is: general “Florence” was a reference to olive oil at this time, but this seems to be something he is drinking), various punches, and “sangaree,” a form of sangria. And rum of course. Judge Lynde’s detailed tavern accounts are clearly intended for his compensation by the provincial authorities, but when he is at home the only commodities he records purchasing are gallons of rum and madeira, plum cakes, and “bread with cider for the poor.” Presumably someone else was keeping his household accounts.

Francis Symonds advertised the “first” chocolate mill in Salem in 1771 (Essex Gazette, 17 December 1771) so I’m not sure where the Judge got his supply when he was at home earlier in the century; a recipe for Neats Tongue and Udders Alamode for a late 17th century cookbook at the Folger Library; the Lynde family tankard, Sothebys.

Thanks to my friend Alicia Diozzi for the title! She envisioned the Judge’s meals as an Instagram account.