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A History of Menus is a Menu of History

What America's oldest surviving restaurant menus reveal about class, gender, and technology

A History of Menus is a Menu of History

The Pudding built an interactive data visualization around the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection — tens of thousands of menus gathered starting in 1900 by collector Frank E. Buttolph — and reads them as artifacts rather than food lists. Layout, pricing, and who’s addressed on the cover track larger shifts: who was expected to dine out, who paid, and how printing technology changed what a menu could say. History, one course at a time.

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