A Glass of Fresh Cream? This Must Be A Menu From the Forties : Collectibles: Restaurant trade group catalogues food trends, price hikes and history a la carte.

“Time ticks on since 1931 at the Tick Tock Toluca” said the menu from the North Hollywood, Calif., restaurant, circa 1947. Time also ticks on at Chicago’s Pump Room, which listed shrimp cocktail on its menu in 1938 for 50 cents. (In April at the Pump Room it was going for $9.50.)

But time doesn’t change some things, like the all-American burger, albeit for 10 cents at Boxman’s restaurant in Bloomington, Ind., 1930:

“Boxman’s special hamburger grilled, with a slice of tomato, chopped olive, lettuce and mayonnaise . . . a hamburger all dressed up and very popular.”

These and other homilies, food trends, inflationary information and historical tidbits are part of the National Restaurant Assn.’s menu collection, tucked in a back room in the library of the trade group’s headquarters in Washington.

While not the oldest or the largest of such anthologies, NRA’s collection consists of several hundred menus dating from the ‘30s to the ‘70s. There are also about 3,000 from the last decade, gathered from the association’s annual menu contest.

The older part of the collection came from a variety of sources, but largely as a donation by one woman about whom NRA knows little. Thus, it is not only a cache of brittle paper and plastic covers that have lost their gloss, but the leisure history of the mystery woman who made the donation.

Menu margins are scribbled with enthusiastic notes: At the Penn-Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh in 1960, she wrote “delirious” next to the spare ribs Creole. In 1962, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, she ate in the Tonga Room “with Dal Brown. Everything was wonderful, had so much fun. A panic. Loved it.” (Dal ordered the barbecued sparerib plate; she had the mushroom chicken, listed under “special Tonga dishes.”)

The period these menus represents was short and not so long ago. Nonetheless, a lot has changed. Menus have evolved from simple lists of black type on white paper to catchy, colorful texts. There was not much detail or description of dishes then. Menu items were likely to be listed as “fried rabbit” or “smothered chicken, country gravy,” as at the Tick Tock Toluca.

The menu “started out as a bill of fare and became more and more a marketing tool,” said David Romm, assistant professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, where he teaches a class called “The Restaurant in Society.”

In the 1930s restaurants didn’t mean as much, Romm said. They “moved into center stage” during the 1960s, and so the menu became a means of capturing customers from the competition, he added.

What’s more, many of the items on menus of the ‘30s and ‘40s are unseen nowadays. Entree choices then were fleshed out by game dishes, frogs’ legs and organ meats. Society, after all, was far more agrarian, and nothing from the farm was wasted. Americans were “eating everything in the pig except the oink,” said Linda Smith, manager of library and information services at NRA. Head cheese was common at nice restaurants, she added.

Sandwiches on the 1940 menu from Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department-store restaurant, the Narcissus Fountain Room, were typical: sweetbread salad roll, 65 cents; minced tongue and horseradish, 25 cents; hot chicken giblet with pickle, 35 cents.

There was also much more attention to sexy, slinky cocktails like pink ladies. “All those drinks that Grace Kelly used to order in the movies,” said Claire Regan, NRA’s nutritionist.

Many dishes were offered fried, and whole glasses of fresh cream appeared as a beverage choice. At Chicago’s Persian Dining Room in 1945, where the only Persian items on the menu were “our very special Persian omelette” and “our Persian chicken salad,” the “health vegetable plate” came with Swedish meatballs.

As a war measure to “make the nation strong,” Regan said, in 1941 the federal government required that all bread and rolls be enriched with B vitamins and iron. Thus, Marshall Field’s English Room offered “vitamin-B rolls.”

Other signs of the war were reflected on menus in the ‘40s. Many noted that the prices were at or below ceiling prices set by the Office of Price Administration, and that a record of the ceiling prices was available for inspection. OPA was established by the federal government in 1942 to set rationing and price and rent controls for the wartime economy.

One restaurant, the New York-based White Turkey, made reference on its menu that it had temporarily closed its Danbury, Conn., branch until the ban on pleasure travel was lifted.

While the men dined on K rations, the vegetable of choice on mainland menus was lima beans, the dessert of the decade was kadota figs and the drink was Ovaltine.

In the ‘50s, game and organ meats were replaced with the ubiquitous half a fried chicken. The vegetable of choice became garden peas, the salad was an iceberg wedge with thousand island dressing and the misguided high-fat “diet plate” of a hamburger patty, scoop of cottage cheese and peach half started appearing often.

Figs were replaced by Jell-O with whipped cream, water ice or sherbet, even at some of the more elegant restaurants. French dining rooms were likely to be named things like “The House of Crepes Suzette,” serving cherries jubilee and peach flambe.

Then, in the 1960s, Jell-O took a side role to cheesecake and “French pastry.” French restaurant menus were large and cumbersome with fancy scroll, and everything was either au gratin, au jus or had an accent aigu. (Le Manoir, location unknown to NRA, served what it called a “minute steak grillee.”) Les escargots were invariably followed by “snails” in parentheses.

Glossy photographs of food started appearing on menus, like the ones at Mack Eplen’s Restaurant, otherwise known in Abilene, Texas, as the House of Hospitality. You didn’t have to visualize; you could see exactly what an order of sirloin butt steak with a salad, baked potato, hot rolls, iceberg lettuce and tomato slice would look like.

There’s only one word for what appeared on menus in the next decade. “All you need to know about the ‘70s,” said Smith, is “quiche.” Everything else was turned into teriyaki. Cheeseburgers shed their orange American slabs in favor of Monterey Jack or blue cheese.

Menus treated food as fun. The Twin Falls (Idaho) Chew-Chew restaurant menu was shaped like a train. The Fogcutter’s Restaurant (St. Petersburg, Fla.) menu was shaped like a barrel. Menus were fashioned after newspapers with cartoon drawings of pies, burgers and quiches. Words were purposely spelled incorrectly: kaiser klub.

Some of the homilies that appeared on older menus may never be rivaled.

At Chancellor’s Restaurant in Waynesboro, Miss., in 1950, the proprietor offered this bit of culinary advice to describe the eatery’s reason for serving what it called “left hams”:

“When a hog scratches his right side, he does a Charleston with his right foot. That develops muscles. When he scratches his left side, he does a gentle shimmy against a tree or post. Therefore, right hams are far more muscular and less tender than those from the left side of the same hog.”

Other restaurants sounded genuinely sincere in their efforts to please. The fountain dessert was king in Bloomington, Ind., in 1930, so Boxman’s made the following menu offer:

“We respectfully suggest that you try your skill in making up a Dessert Special. Perhaps you have wondered many times just what it would taste like if so-and-so and so-and-so were put together in a dish. Our Fountain Dispenser will get a great thrill and be delighted to make up this special dish for you. Just give your service girl your formula!”