Savoring a Bygone Splendor: The Maritime Menu

This is a story of love, the high seas and food. Our unlikely heroine is Norma Beazley, who is decidedly unromantic and unsentimental about most things but noticeably softens when she talks about her husband, our equally unlikely hero, Herbert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/dinin ... .html?_r=0

Lovely story. Makes me wonder what happened to the menus my grandmother once had, from her voyages on the Cunard ships. (She went to Europe every other year, and always went by ship.) She even had a special menu from a crossing that was by invitation only, for regular customers of Cunard. I can vouch for the comments about the stunning number of options. Really amazing.

Thanks for posting this, Dave148.

Cynthia wrote:Lovely story. Makes me wonder what happened to the menus my grandmother once had, from her voyages on the Cunard ships. (She went to Europe every other year, and always went by ship.) She even had a special menu from a crossing that was by invitation only, for regular customers of Cunard. I can vouch for the comments about the stunning number of options. Really amazing.

Thanks for posting this, Dave148.

Thanks for sharing this...I've sent it to my Mom who will be out of the country when the print version appears on Wednesday. She spent part of her childhood in post-WW2 Morocco, in an era when ship travel was de rigueur. Every year or two they'd head back to the States for vacation, always by ship. I don't know every ship & route they traveled, but I've heard a lot of stories about her experiences traveling back in those days. Having also spent part of my childhood overseas, I'm fascinated by the idea that two weeks of your "long leave" might be spent simply going back and forth. (I recently found a menu for a flight I took from Singapore to Dhahran in the mid-1980s. Ha! Remember the days when coach passengers got menus on international flights?

chgoeditor wrote:Thanks for sharing this...I've sent it to my Mom who will be out of the country when the print version appears on Wednesday. She spent part of her childhood in post-WW2 Morocco, in an era when ship travel was de rigueur. Every year or two they'd head back to the States for vacation, always by ship. I don't know every ship & route they traveled, but I've heard a lot of stories about her experiences traveling back in those days. Having also spent part of my childhood overseas, I'm fascinated by the idea that two weeks of your "long leave" might be spent simply going back and forth. (I recently found a menu for a flight I took from Singapore to Dhahran in the mid-1980s. Ha! Remember the days when coach passengers got menus on international flights?

Absolutely remember -- and still have a few of those airline menus. They even had them in coach at one point -- and even on longer domestic flights. (And, thinking of another thread on this site, about a Tiki bar, I can remember when United had Trader Vic creating menus for flights to the West Coast and Hawaii.) Fun memories. How flying has changed. (Though that's not all negative. I can remember cigars being allowed and no separate smoking section. That was nasty.)

And for a couple of years, Continental had a club area, where you could play cards or get a snack or drink, but the FAA outlawed it, because it gave Continental an "unfair advantage" over other airlines. Sigh.