20 Vintage American Foods You Rarely See On Menus Today

Passenger pigeons flew overhead in such numbers that market hunters loaded them up by the barrel for delivery to city restaurants and taverns, which roasted them whole or baked them into pies. After decades of brutal slaughter and habitat loss, the species disappeared entirely. On September 1, 1914, the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. The species was gone, and so was the dish.

Diamondback terrapins, turtles indigenous to America’s coastal salt marshes, were slowly cooked into a succulent stew of butter, egg yolks, cream and dark sherry in the kitchens of hotels and restaurants well into the 1800s. Even President Abraham Lincoln served the dish at his second inaugural ball in 1865. But too much hunting led to a dwindling population of wild turtles, and a 1920 law that prohibited alcohol robbed the recipe of its signature cooking sherry. By the 1920s, terrapin stew had been banished from American dining rooms.

Welsh rarebit doesn’t contain rabbit. The name was a joke in 18th-century Britain, and the recipe has always been melted sharp cheddar, ale, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce poured on toast. It was served in American diners, taverns, and train dining cars from the 1880s to the 1950s. But after World War II, when cooks were looking for quicker options, the grilled cheese sandwich replaced it.

In diners and railroad lunch counters from the 1880s to the 1940s, calf’s brains fried with eggs was a common and economical breakfast, not a delicacy. The brains were first soaked in cold water and salt, then blanched and sliced. Cooks then fried them in butter with whole eggs for a nutritious meal rich in protein and soft to eat. The American aversion to organ meats developed in the 1950s, and the brains vanished from menus.

Charles Ranhofer, the chef of Delmonico’s restaurant, concocted a mixture of lobster cooked with butter, cream, egg yolks, cognac, and sherry in 1876 for a visiting sea captain named Ben Wenberg. He named the dish Lobster Wenberg after him. Mr. Wenberg soon started trouble at the restaurant, so Mr. Delmonico, the restaurant’s owner, had him struck from the menu and the name changed by anagram to Newberg. A rise in prices and a subsequent preference for simpler grilled shellfish eventually consigned it to the history books as well.

At Keen’s English Chop House in New York, 19th-century diners ordered thick-cut mutton chops from sheep more than two years old, valued for their strong, gamey taste and rich marbling, and mutton was the cut of choice at chophouses across America. It wasn’t until the rise of the 20th-century meat-packing industry that diners stopped eating it, preferring the mild taste of tender, grain-fed beef and the soft, sweet flesh of baby lamb.

Actual turtle soup was prohibitively expensive, so 19th-century cooks concocted a more affordable substitute by boiling calf’s heads, brains, and trotters until they turned gelatinous, then flavored the broth with sherry, lemon juice, and chopped hard-boiled eggs. In no version of Mock Turtle Soup were there actual turtles. Instead, cow’s offal played the role of turtle meat. Campbell’s manufactured the canned soup for many years before discontinuing it sometime before 1960, when American tastes began shifting away from organs.

Before refrigeration and modern methods of farming, it was difficult to grow celery without making it bitter, and it was a paid-for course in steakhouses and hotels. The stalks were kept cool on beds of crushed ice, arranged standing up in footed glass vases, accompanied by small bowls of salt. It was a show of wealth, not an attempt at weight-loss. Mass farming in the 1920s and 1930s made celery abundant and available year-round, and the paid celery course fell out of fashion.

Chicken à la King originated in the late 1800s as a fancy hotel dish, with New York’s Delmonico’s and two other big hotels claiming the honor, and no one coming out a clear victor. Made of poached chicken, mushrooms, green peppers, and pimientos cooked in a sherry-flavored cream sauce, and served on pastry shells or toast, Chicken à la King was popular on hundreds of restaurant menus from about 1910 through 1960. The canned and frozen versions that emerged in the 1950s hurt its reputation, and the dish disappeared from the menus of more refined restaurants.

Long before tomato juice became a conventional pre-dinner drink, steakhouses and seafood joints offered up the Clam Juice Cocktail. As far back as 1895, it appeared in a bartender’s handbook. Kitchens would strain the clam liquor, flavor it with lemon juice, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, and horseradish, and pour it ice-cold into a stemmed glass as an appetizer before a steak or seafood meal. Diners, however, had long since replaced it with fruit cups and tomato juice by the middle of the last century.

In 1904, Mrs. John E. Cook, a home cook, won third place in a Knox Gelatin recipe contest for her Perfection Salad, taking home a $100 sewing machine thanks to the judges, including cookbook author Fannie Farmer. The salad held bits of shredded cabbage, celery, green peppers, pimientos, and sliced stuffed olives suspended in tart unflavored gelatin and served on lettuce with mayonnaise. It was a popular dish at hotels and church suppers for years until savory gelatin salads went out of fashion.

Tomato Aspic appeared on hotel and tearoom menus from the 1920s to the 1950s, but as a salad rather than a dessert. Kitchens jiggled up canned tomato juice with gelatin, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and celery salt, perhaps also mixing in chopped celery, olives, or seafood. Served on a bed of lettuce with a dollop of mayonnaise, it was an appetizer or a salad. But in midcentury America, the appetite for savory salads set in jelly waned, and Tomato Aspic was gone.

A clarified beef or veal broth flavored with tomato juice and tarragon, consommé madrilène was served on ocean liners and in fancy hotel restaurants between the 1910s and the 1950s. The use of egg whites clarified the broth, and its natural gelatin content made it set as a soft jelly when chilled. It was served cold in double-handled cups accompanied by slices of lemon. Consommé madrilène provided some relief to guests in dining rooms without air conditioning, but it faded from popularity.

Calf’s liver and bacon were on the dinner menus at American diners and family restaurants from the 1920s to the 1950s. The sweet taste of onions and the crisp, salty bacon offset the strong iron taste of the liver. In mid-century America, liver was promoted as a relatively inexpensive source of iron and vitamins. It didn’t help. After the Second World War, postwar consumers began preferring the mild flavors of pre-cut steaks and chops over organ meats.

In the 1930s, when the Great Depression made for lean times, Creamed Eggs on Toast was served in lunch counters as a way to get a meal out of next to nothing. Hard-boiled eggs were chopped up and stirred into a basic sauce made with butter, flour, and milk, then spooned over buttered toast or biscuits. It didn’t require any meat, only the humblest ingredients, dairy and eggs, and it stayed on diner menus into the 1950s, when faster fried egg sandwiches replaced it.

American diners, hotels, and even railway dining cars like the Santa Fe Super Chief served the Jelly Omelette at least from 1849 through the 1950s. They would whip eggs with a little sugar and butter, fry the eggs until fluffy, add grape, currant, or strawberry jam, fold it over, and dust with powdered sugar. The Jelly Omelette was sweet and savory all on one plate, without apology. When menus in mid-century began to separate their sweet pancakes from their savory eggs, the Jelly Omelette had nowhere to go.

Between the 1890s and the 1950s, restaurants such as New York’s 21 Club offered sturgeon caviar on thin slices of bread spread with butter and topped with a squeeze of lemon, chopped hard-boiled egg yolk, and sweet onion. The sandwich was served as unpretentious bar food, not a rare treat to be eaten by the spoonful. After sturgeon became overfished, caviar prices skyrocketed, and restaurants stopped serving the fish in sandwiches, instead offering it in bite-sized portions without any bread.

Recipe No. 251 in the U.S. Army’s 1910 cooking manual described dried, salted beef that had been reconstituted with a thick white sauce of butter, flour, milk, and black pepper, poured over toasted bread. The soldiers called it S.O.S. After World Wars I and II, returning veterans introduced S.O.S. to the civilian population, where it quickly became a classic at diners and lunch counters through the middle of the century. Eventually, lighter breakfast choices took its place.

In 1814, French chef Jean-Athanase Rateau developed a frozen chestnut-purée confection with candied fruit, raisins, whipped cream, and rum for the Russian diplomat Count Karl Robert Nesselrode. Over a century later, New York baker Hortense Spier adapted it into Nesselrode Pie, a chestnut-rum filling topped with shaved chocolate. It became something of a holiday phenomenon at New York steakhouses and diners in the 1940s and ’50s until the amount of work required to make that chestnut purée rendered it too expensive to keep making.

In fancy hotel restaurants such as The Drake and the Sherry-Netherland in New York, waiters used to wheel out carts and prepare Steak Diane at the table, frying medallions of beef tenderloin in butter and flambéing them with cognac or brandy before adding a mixture of shallots, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, and cream. There was nothing distasteful about Steak Diane. The high-end restaurants just didn’t want to do this sort of hands-on, laborious tableside work anymore.

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