A Shipboard Dinner, 1907.

For the remainder of the week, I would like you to go cruising with me. I thought we would travel vicariously during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.

Our first voyage is aboard the Cunard ship R.M.S ‘Carmania.’ It is one hundred and five years ago to the day. We are on the last day or so of a trip from New York to Liverpool. We sit down to a reassuringly plain English dinner.

Cunard Line

R.M.S ‘Carmania’, Thursday, November 7, 1907.

MENU

Consomme Brunoise

Cod Fish, Oyster Sauce

Curried Veal and Rice

Roast Turkey, Sauce Espagnole

Ox Tongue, Spinach

Roast Leg of Mutton, Onion Sauce

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Boiled Rice

Dressed Cabbage                     Boiled Potatoes

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Semolina Pudding

Plum Tart                     Orange Jelly

Fancy Pastry

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Ice Cream                    Dessert

Cheese             Crackers          Coffee

It is interesting that the old usage of the word ‘dessert’ persists on this menu. Today we would view the puddings and pastries as the dessert, but once upon a time the word referred to a final course of nuts, dried fruit and other sweetmeats. Before they were the ‘dessert’ these little treats were the ‘banquetting stuff’ – and the ‘banquet’ was the final course of a meal. 

Milk puddings have a special place in the English psyche. The English have never grown out of their love of nursery puddings – or at least, they had still not grown out of it well into the twenty-first century.  

Semolina Pudding.

Take from one quart of milk enough to mix with one ounce of arrow-root, boil the remainder, and pour on the arrow-root, sprinkle and stir in three ounces of semolina, three tea-spoonfuls of sugar, one table-spoonful of orange-flower water; let this be cold, and then add two eggs well beaten and stirred in; butter the dish, and put a small piece on the top. Bake it one hour in a moderate oven.

The Practical Cook, English and Foreign, by J. Bregion and A. Miller (1845)