I have not given you a steamship menu for some time, so
today we are aboard the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. vessel S.S. Mongolia. It is May 5, 1908, and we are en route from San
Francisco to the Far East. The ship carried 350 first-class passengers, 68
second class passengers, and 1,300 more travelled in steerage. Today’s menu
does not specify the class for which the meal was intended – but it was
certainly not for the poorer sort of person accommodated in the crowded depths
of the steerage level of the ship.
Tuesday, May
5th, 1908
-
DINNER
--
Caviare
Toast Ripe Olives
--
SOUP
Rice Tomato Consomme
--
FISH
Baked Fish,
Brown Butter Sauce
--
ENTREES
Larded Filet
of Beef
Stuffed Bell
Peppers
Squab
Chicken on Toast
Brandy Punch
--
Roasts
Roast Ribs
of Beef and Horseradish
Roast Lamb,
Mint Sauce
--
Boiled Fowl
with Ox Tongues
Vegetables
Roast
Potatoes Mashed Potatoes
Fried Egg
Plant Wax Beans
--
Macaroni au
Gratin
--
Puddings & Pastry
Sponge
Pudding, Raspberry Sauce
Pumpkin Pie Floating Island
Banbury Cakea
Crackers Cheese
Fruits Coffee
I had not
difficulty deciding on which of the menu items to focus on today. The presence
of Banbury Cake on a formal dinner menu is a little unusual – or it would certainly
seem so to any English passengers on this American vessel, as it would more
usually appear at afternoon tea in England. The cake is essentially a simple pastry
stuffed with currants . It is a specialty of the town of Banbury in
Oxfordshire, England, and has been made there since at least the sixteenth
century.
The earliest
known recipe for a Banbury Cake is from Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1615.)
To make a very good Banbury Cake, take 4 pounds of Currants, and
wash and picke them very cleane, and drie them in a cloth: then take three
egges and put away one yelke and beate them, and straine them with good barme,
[yeast] putting thereto Cloves, Mace, Cinamon and Nutmegges; then take a pinte
of creame, and as much mornings milke and set it on the fire till the cold bee
taken away: then take flower and put in good store of cold butter and suger,
then put in your egges, barme and meale and work them all together an houre or
more: then save a part of the past, and the rest break in peeces and work in
your Currants: which done, mould your Cake of what quantity you please; And
then with that Past which hath not any Currants cover it very thinne both
underneath and aloft. And so bake it according to the bignesse.
P.S. The very
similar Eccles Cake appeared on another shipboard menu in a previous post HERE.
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