Every hobby has its passionate standouts, those aficionados respected and acknowledged by others in the know.
At the top of his particular field is Wilmington’s Henry Voigt, who curates one of the most prominent collections of American menus, spanning well over 150 years of vibrant dining history.
Food writers, historians, academics and journalists call on Voigt, thanks to his fascination with menus from the past and what they can tell us.
Last spring, Voigt’s collection garnered broader attention when it appeared in a public exhibition at the Grolier Club, a venerable society of book lovers in Manhattan. The display prompted pieces about Voigt in publications like The New Yorker (“The Menu Maven Whom Lincoln Collectors Hate”) and Atlas Obscura’s Gastro Obscura (“A Peek Inside America’s Most Dazzling Menu Collection”). In years past, he’s been featured in Gastronomica and has even authored a long-running blog, “The American Menu.”
While diners at the hotels, restaurants and private suppers for which Voigt has menus were no doubt focused on the food, Voigt is a connoisseur of the papers that lay by their plates. Journalists often ask him how many menus he owns (10,000 or so), but Voigt is after quality, not amassment.
His earliest menu is from the 1840s. “That was when menus first came into general use in the United States,” he says.
The phenomenon grew with hotels, which were expanding along with the railroads and offered room and board in the same package, Voigt explains. Present-day menus also catch his eye, but “like folk art, it’s hard to know what will become a classic.”
Voigt has always been interested in food, culture and history, especially their everyday aspects. “That is not as well documented in our culture.”
Menus were, to paraphrase the musical, in the room where it happened. Voigt owns a menu from Lincoln’s second inaugural ball that is one of only a few known to exist. Other vintage pieces from famous meals and establishments are bordered by elaborate artwork and decorative ribbons and printed in ornate script. Some show remnants of use, like coffee stains.
Voigt believes menus are mirrors of society that reflect changing class tastes, along with new cuisines and customs brought by immigrants. “It’s a huge part of our social history…how food is expressed in culture,” he says.
This enthusiast can pull more historical tidbits out of these sheets of paper than most, and he has a keen eye for suggestive detail. In one article for Gastronomica, Voigt focused on a menu from an 1889 banquet at Delmonico’s in New York (“the most important restaurant in America,” he notes). The Gilded Age feast, hosted by William Waldorf Astor, one of the country’s richest men, fed New York’s most eminent, who had gathered for a meeting on how to snag the World’s Fair for the city.
Looking over the menu, Voigt realized, “It was wrong. Everything was wrong. Wealthy diners of the time would have insisted on canvasback duck, a delicacy shipped from Havre de Grace, Maryland, along the Chesapeake Bay,” he points out. The ducks fed on wild celery in the shallow water, which gave them a unique taste much in demand among gourmet chefs. But this particular dinner served duck with a “cheap imitation”: celery mayonnaise.
This nagged at Voigt, launching him into an investigation that took him to places like a waterfowl decoy museum in Havre de Grace, where “they looked at me like some raving idiot,” he says.
Voigt finally got his answer in an 1890 Pennsylvania game and fish report, which noted flooding the year before on the Susquehanna River. The ducks, finding their wild celery washed out, flew on to the Carolinas, where enterprising hunters shipped them back to Havre de Grace to pass off as the local option.
“You’re dealing with French chefs,” Voigt notes. “They know the difference. And they took them off the menu that year.”
He had his answer, and his readers saw a menu through Voigt’s eyes, a fascinating slice of life from another time.
