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gastronomica: the journ a l o f fo o d a n d culture, vo l.9, n o .4 , p p .32 –4 2 , is s n 1 5 29-3 262. © 2009 by t h e regent s of t h e univ ersit y of cal if ornia. al l righ t s reserv ed. pl ease direct al l requests for permission to

photocopy or reproduce a rticle co n te n t thro ug h the un ive rs ity o f ca lifornia press’s righ t s and perm issions web sit e, h t t p://www.ucpressjournal s.com /reprint inf o.asp. doi: 10.15 25 /gf c.2009.9.4.32.

on stark class divisions on board obscures other, potentially valuable, interpretations. Careful examination reveals that the increasingly competitive steamship industry was in fact forced to loosen—not tighten—existing class structures in order to stay financially afloat. The rise of a mass consumer culture in the United States and Great Britain meant that businesses on all scales had to pay attention to potential buyers regardless of their social class. As profit became criti- cal, a steamship company’s survival hinged in part on its ability to understand consumer psychology and respond to the passengers’ sense of their own needs and identity. The food served on the Titanic is a case in point.

A consumer-based business model first manifested itself on the northern Atlantic route in the late 1800s, when steamships moved among ports such as Southampton, Hamburg, Halifax, and New York, delivering mail, emi- grants, visitors, and pleasure seekers. The White Star Line’s Titanic was part of a new generation of American-owned steamships designed to offer unsurpassed service and accommodations for all classes of passengers, not only the rich. By means of this consumer-based strategy the company aimed to crush its remaining competitors on the North Atlantic route, in particular the venerable British- owned Cunard Steamship Company. Toward that end food on the Titanic played an important role. Meals for third-class passengers were designed to make them feel their economic potential as new American citizens, not their limitations. Second-class passengers, in turn, dined on food that reaffirmed their collective values and achievements as well as their own financial potential. The treatment first- class passengers received was calculated to entice them to travel on White Star ships and to celebrate an alliance joining American capital to the panache and romance of Britain’s landed gentry and aristocracy. The three different dinners served to the various classes of passengers the night the Titanic went down reveal a rich, nuanced story about the intersections of class, nationalism, and mass consumer- ism on the eve of World War i.

The 1958 film version of Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember has a memorable scene in which the Titanic’s captain, Edward J. Smith, joins first-class passengers for Sunday luncheon at a table loaded with the accoutrements of wealth: crystal, silver, china, champagne, and, of course, luxurious food. Viewers are captivated by Captain Smith’s small talk and the passengers’ genteel elegance. Stewards are hovering nearby as Captain Smith is handed the all- important note warning of ice ahead. Meanwhile, out of camera range are the third-class passengers. As they surge forth from the ship’s bowels when the Titanic begins to sink, viewers react with pity and horror at the realization of their marginalization and terrible fate.

The film’s messages about class do not need to be made explicit. Ever since the story of the Titanic became known, journalists have depicted the ship as a social microcosm displaying the same class barriers that divided and defined European society at the time, particularly in Great Britain. For instance, only two weeks after the Titanic sank, the Irish journalist Filson Young described the ship as a floating town “with miles of streets and hundreds of separate houses and buildings in it.” He continued:

Imagine her to be split in half from bow to stern so that you could look,

as one looks at a hive. You would find a microcosm of civilized society

with the rulers on top, surrounded by the rich and the luxurious, enjoy-

ing the best of everything. A ways down, you would find the servants

and parasites…Up above are the people who rest and enjoy; down

below the people who sweat and suffer.1

As the general public absorbed the significance of the grim survival statistics, the image of the steamship’s class barriers was cemented; after all, only 38 percent of third-class passengers survived, compared to more than 60 percent of the first-class and more than 40 percent of the second.2

Few Titanic studies have complicated this master nar- rative. Most authors start from the assumption that the rich were highly privileged over the poor. However, this fixation

investigations | andrea broomfield

The Night the Good Ship Went Down Three Fateful Dinners Aboard the Titanic

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deliveries, and military missions over those of paying pas- sengers is significant, since it represented a new direction in steamship travel and compelled other companies to raise their own standards. Cunard, in particular, had to take note. When Samuel Cunard founded the line in 1840 and secured the British Royal Mail contract, his concern had been with safe delivery of the mails and passengers, not with luxury.6 Cunard captains often came from the Royal Navy, and so the company’s service “retained residues of military abruptness and austerity.”7 Regardless of Cunard’s success at maintaining safety and speed records, passengers craved comfort and diversion. White Star executives saw an opportunity to make passengers’ comfort the priority.

In 1880 J. Pierpont Morgan sailed on White Star’s Germanic and was so impressed with the ship’s service, especially its dinners, that he determined to sail exclusively on White Star vessels from then on.8 By 1904 Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, or imm, had not only acquired White Star and several smaller American and British shipping companies but had forced a merger with two of Cunard’s most heated rivals, Norddeutscher Lloyd

But first, some background. In 1867 Englishman Thomas Henry Ismay, with financial backing from Gustav Schwabe, bought up the foundering White Star Shipping Company. To make the company profitable Ismay decided to model it on an older American shipping company, the Collins Line, which over the course of its short life had been hugely successful for the excellence of its cuisine, service, and space, at least for cabin-class passengers.3 With Collins’s business plan in mind Ismay and Schwabe hired Edward J. Harland to design White Star’s new fleet. Considered the greatest naval architect and shipbuilder of the nineteenth century, Harland, whose shipyard would build the Titanic several years later, wanted to create steamships that took into account “how the oceangoing experience would feel to a typical passenger.”4

Positioning itself as Cunard’s chief competitor, White Star invoked the American spirit and boldness for which the Collins Line had stood. Its success in this regard was lauded in 1876 by the Nautical Magazine of London, which concluded that White Star “has been essentially one of spirit and ‘go’…reminding us somewhat of the bold and original commercial spirit of the Americans.”5 Collins’s, and then White Star’s, movement away from rigid mari- time traditions that privileged the needs of sailors, cargo

Above: The Titanic. © ulster folk and transport museum (national museums northern ireland)

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highlighting the layout of the dining saloon. Rather than being located forward or aft where the ship’s jerks were pronounced, the Titanic promised third-class passengers meals served “amidships on the middle deck” in an area

“consisting of two saloons extending from ship’s side to ship’s side, well lighted with sidelights, and all finished enamel white…The position of this apartment—i.e., in the centre of the ship—illustrates the wonderful strides made in pas- senger comfort in modern times.”12 The visual appeal of the third-class dining saloon set it apart, particularly the room’s natural lighting. While white enamel paint might seem sterile and cold today, in the early 1900s both the color and material represented cleanliness and purity—the opposite of the usual steerage quarters. Throughout the 1910s middle- class women’s magazines, including American Cookery, featured articles suggesting that kitchens and bathrooms be finished in white enamel to emphasize a clean and modern home.13 Given the filth and claustrophobic spaces that emigrants traditionally feared on board, the Titanic’s move toward natural lighting and white enamel was smart. The high standards it set for third-class meals were even smarter.

Third-Class Dinner Menu, April 14, 1912

Rice Soup

Roast Beef, Brown Gravy

Sweet Corn

Boiled Potatoes

Plum Pudding, Sweet Sauce

Cabin Biscuits

Fresh Bread

Fruit

Several satirical stanzas from an early nineteenth- century Lancashire folk song, Gorton Town, describe how industrialization influenced many laborers’ livelihoods and hence their diets:

When I left home some years ago,

Th’ old folks had lots o’ trade;

Some right good jobs came tumbling in,

And every one well paid.

We’d good roast-beef and pudding,

And ale some decent swigs;

Egad! they liv’d like fighting-cocks,

And got as fat as pigs.

But now, egad! ther’s none such things;

Poor folks have empty tripes;

and Hamburg-Amerika, leaving Cunard one of the few holdouts against the imm. If anything, imm’s acquisition of White Star made it easier for this formerly British company to champion comfort and luxury, because Morgan had a seemingly endless bankroll. As one contemporary writer noted, White Star had “the honour of having [installed] electric bells, providing separate chairs in the saloon, instead of using the old-fashioned, uncomfortable high- backed forms, which were thought good enough for the ocean voyager [and] supplying third-class passengers with bedding, eating and drinking utensils.”9 When Lord James Pirrie, managing partner at Harland & Wolff, and J. Bruce Ismay, White Star’s managing director (and son of the late Thomas Henry Ismay), met in 1907 to strategize how White Star could trump Cunard’s gorgeous new Lusitania, they envisioned three new ships—the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Gigantic—that would offer passengers service so luxurious that they would not want their journey to end.

In her memoir Titanic survivor and steward Violet Jessop recalled that not only was she nervous about sailing on the North Atlantic, she was also anxious about the White Star passengers, who “expected all the service the company could serve, and got it.”10 Although the Titanic would be promoted as the largest and most spectacular ship afloat, it would in reality become the most tangible mani- festation of J.P. Morgan’s plan to assert American interests abroad and ultimately swallow up Cunard. Although the Titanic sank in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, losing roughly 60 percent of its third-class passengers, White Star’s business philosophy nevertheless triumphed. By the mid-twentieth century, attention to service and passenger needs was the dominant mode for cruise-ship operations; it continues today.

“Urged by a Variety of Motives, Here They Came”: The Third-Class Passengers

White Star was less concerned about the comfort of its third-class passengers on the southern Naples to New York route than on its northern Southampton to New York route, where it faced stiff competition in attracting emi- grants from western and northern Europe. In 1910, during u.s. Congressional hearings, vice-president P.A.S. Franklin of the imm pointed out: “I do not think it is quite appreci- ated how anxious the steamship companies are to give their third-class passengers every possible accommodation and every possible comfort that they can. Otherwise they would lose their trade.”11 The Titanic offered a range of options for overseas passage, with ads directed at third-class passengers

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The passengers might also have seen the menu as an indication that the United States would offer a radically dif- ferent social contract. While thousands of new Americans suffered from long hours in sweatshops, mines, and steel mills, many nonetheless discovered that they could afford enough to eat despite the terrible conditions they endured. In letters home many emigrants expressed astonishment over this fact, and their news spurred immigration to America’s shores. As food historian Hasia Diner has pointed out, the phrase “American as apple pie” is grounded in the United States’ promise that in exchange for labor no American will go hungry. Americans came to expect that citizenship and hard work equated a “piece of the pie.”17 White Star played on this American dream and strategically determined how many social boundaries it could afford to break down in order to increase the Titanic’s overall popularity. Though the company’s decision to treat passengers as consumers did not ensure the ship’s survival, this strategy endured.

“God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right with the World”: The Titanic’s Second Class

Cunard ships gave second-class passengers their own “ship” at the stern; the rest of the vessel was inaccessible to them. White Star’s Titanic and Olympic introduced a different configuration. Second-class Titanic passengers occupied almost all of the E deck, while second-class public rooms were located aft of first class. This setup reflected White Star’s less class-conscious attitudes.18 The Titanic exemplified White Star’s belief that financial profit and reputation were enhanced by encouraging social mobility rather than by maintaining the status quo. Except for the nobility and landed gentry, Europeans were accustomed to thinking and acting according to society’s (and hence their own) sense of their limitations. When traveling, people expected the ser- vice to reflect their social class and were conditioned not to expect more. Second-class ship passengers took for granted that they would have more space, finer food, and better sleeping accommodations than those beneath them (liter- ally), yet they did not expect to be treated the same as those above. Significantly, the Titanic challenged this entrenched way of thinking by offering second-class passengers ameni- ties that until then had been exclusive to first class.

In key respects second-class passengers resembled those in third. Many were either emigrants or first-generation Americans returning home after visiting family in Europe. What set them apart from those in third class were race, nationality (most second-class passengers were English—not Irish, Scandinavian, or Serbian), and occupation. While

There’s no roast-beef to stuff their hides,

It’s Poor Law soup and swipes.

Poor law reforms in Great Britain in the early 1800s resulted in grim workhouses that haunted the lives of over 75 percent of the population. However, the idyllic past evoked in Gorton Town, when workers’ tables were set with roast beef and pudding, actually materialized for the seven- hundred-plus third-class passengers who embarked on the Titanic. As they filed in for their noonday dinner on Sunday, April 14, they were greeted with the succulent smell of roast beef, the heavy scent of spices from steamed plum puddings, and the aroma of freshly baked bread. Long, white-clothed tables had fruit bowls and bread baskets arrayed along their length; white-jacketed stewards served the meal. By 1912 most passengers would have expected enough food to eat en route, but many must have been astonished by the novelty of being served by someone other than family members.14 As late as 1905 third-class passengers on the Norddeutscher Kaiser Wilhelm ii were served from “huge kettles,” from which cooks ladled the food into “dinner pails provided by the steamship company.” Meat was included in soups and stews, but the crowding of miserable people into a small area to receive their family’s dinner ration made the experience of eating on board the ship unsavory and humiliating.15

It was different on the Titanic. A meal served in sepa- rate, distinct courses was no doubt a novelty for many of the third-class passengers. Rice soup, which merely introduced the meal, was now differently marked; had it been the sole course, it would have carried a much different connota- tion, since soup was considered poorhouse fare (unlike for the gentler classes, for whom it was a standard first course). Even by 1913, when the British workhouse system had been reformed from the days of Oliver Twist, soup still signified shame and failure. The Titanic made a shrewd decision to serve third-class passengers a multicourse dinner that would make them feel good about themselves instead of making them “feel their place.”

The most important parts of this dinner were the roast beef and plum pudding, two highly symbolic foods. A roast beef dinner would have evoked an overwhelmingly positive response from most passengers, given that beef represented the food of the prosperous; poor people were able to eat it once or twice a year at most. Plum pudding was associ- ated with holidays and celebrations well into the twentieth century. So crucial was the pudding at Christmas that poor Englishwomen would join pudding clubs, setting aside spare pence as often as possible to ensure that there would be enough money to buy the necessary ingredients.16

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year-old Ruth Becker, traveling with her mother, brother, and sister, recalled for young readers of St. Nicholas Magazine that the dining saloon was “beautiful, with the new linen and silver.”19 Whereas second-class dining saloons on competing ships were smaller and thus more cramped (implying that one gets precisely what one pays for), the Titanic’s saloon seated up to 394 diners at a time and stretched the entire width of the ship.20 As John Maxtone-Graham has pointed out, “adequate elbowroom was and still is the primary characteristic of ‘first-class’ accommodation of any kind.” The Titanic’s second-class

the majority of third-class passengers were laborers, most second-class men were salaried employees, such as teach- ers, missionaries, ministers, clerks, engineers, solicitors, and apothecaries. Many women in second class were travel- ing to the United States to meet up with their husbands or intendeds. As a group these passengers might best be understood as the bourgeoisie whose values represented the Anglo-American societal ideal. The purpose of the second- class dinner, from the setting to the number of courses to the food, was to celebrate the passengers’ social values while nonetheless exceeding their expectations.

The Titanic’s second-class dining saloon was unprec- edented in its size and tastefulness. The burnished oak paneling, electric spotlighting, alcoves, and numerous large portholes must have delighted the passengers. Thirteen-

Above: Menu for the celebration dinner held in the Grand Central Hotel, Belfast, following the launch of the Titanic. From Stephen Cameron, Titanic: Belfast’s Own (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997). courtesy of stephen cameron

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◆ ◆ ◆

Plum Pudding with Sweet Sauce

Wine Jelly

Coconut Sandwich

American Ice Cream

◆ ◆ ◆

Nuts, Assorted Fresh Fruit

Cheese, Biscuits

Coffee

Many writers parrot the refrain that the second-class dinners aboard the Titanic rivaled first-class food on other steamship lines, but that was not exactly the case. Extremely stiff competition meant that as early as 1904 Cunard, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Old Dominion, and other repu- table lines were offering second-class passengers the same number of courses as White Star, and the number of meat dishes on their menus was comparable. But the Titanic stood out for several reasons. By adding small, seemingly expensive touches to its hearty, rather pedestrian fare, and by creating more descriptive menus, the ship cleverly made its second-class dinners appear richer and more sophisti- cated than the competition’s. Whereas Cunard often started a second-class dinner with the ubiquitous Scotch Broth (aboard the rms Carminia, November 18, 1906) or Kidney Soup (aboard the rms Umbria, February 14, 1910), Titanic second-class passengers might begin their dinner with the same labor-intensive consommé to which first-class passen- gers were treated.23 Since the Titanic was designed with a single galley to serve both the first and second classes, many dishes were based on the same broths and sauces, ensuring high-quality food for second class.

The second-class Titanic menu also reveals White Star’s commitment to improving its own earlier dining standards. Before the Olympic and Titanic were launched, White Star ships served second-class passengers plain, uncomplicated fare. For example, on August 7, 1900, aboard the rms Majestic, second-class passengers sat down to a straightforward menu of Pea Soup; Fresh Fish, Parsley Sauce; and a choice of Ox Tail Jardiniere, Roast Beef, or Boiled Fowl in Bacon and Cream Sauce.24 The prosaic language of this menu gave way to the Titanic’s more evoca- tive descriptions. After sipping consommé with a tapioca garnish (tapioca cooked thick with egg yolks, seasoned, and then cut into tiny shapes), diners could enjoy the perfor- mance of their meal as stewards carried in Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce.

Even if second-class passengers could have traveled first class, many would have been uncomfortable with, even

dining saloon was designed to make passengers feel wealthy, even if they were of modest means.21

The atmospheric wood blends and electric spotlight- ing created a sense of security and warmth. For this saloon the ship’s designers did not have to emphasize cleanliness and sanitation by means of a white enamel finish. Tables were swathed in white linen and set with sparkling silver and etched glass decanters. Everything exuded respectable but not ostentatious good taste. According to Kate Buss, an Englishwoman traveling to San Diego to join her fiancé, the “huge bunches of grapes which topped the fruit baskets on every table were thrilling.”22

The Titanic’s decision to have both second- and first- class passengers serenaded by the White Star Orchestra, along with its decision to seat them at the same time for dinner (seven-thirty), would also have appealed to second- class passengers’ sensibilities. The Titanic maintained British dining customs, which meant that dinnertime gen- erally depended on one’s class. Servants and laborers ate dinner at midday (the time when the Titanic third-class din- ner was served), while most upper- and middle-class people had luncheon at noon and an evening dinner.

The dinner was served à la russe, a style in which courses are served separately and sequentially. Most first-class pas- sengers would have taken this style of service for granted, but it likely flattered the second-class passengers’ sense of decorum. In Britain and the United States wealthy people had adopted service à la russe by the mid-1800s, following the fashion of European courts. But because it required footmen and extensive serving utensils, service à la russe was not feasible for those on limited budgets, and even most wealthy families used the less formal, less labor-intensive service à la française for all but the most important dinner parties. The Titanic’s service of its second-class dinner made the passengers feel rich, optimistic about their futures, and convinced that they had chosen the right steamship company.

Second-Class Dinner Menu, April 14, 1912

◆ ◆ ◆

Consommé with Tapioca

◆ ◆ ◆

Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce

Curried Chicken and Rice

Lamb with Mint Sauce

Roast Turkey with Cranberry Sauce

Turnip Puree

Green Peas

Boiled Rice

Boiled and Roast Potatoes

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First-Class Dinner Menu, April 14, 1912

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Hors D’oeuvre Variés, Oysters

◆ ◆ ◆

Consommé Olga, Cream of Barley

◆ ◆ ◆

Salmon, Mousseline Sauce, Cucumber

◆ ◆ ◆

Filet Mignons Lili

Sauté of Chicken Lyonnaise

Vegetable Marrow Farci

◆ ◆ ◆

Lamb, Mint Sauce

Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce

Sirloin of Beef, Chateau Potatoes

Green Peas, Creamed Carrots

Boiled Rice

Parmentier & Boiled New Potatoes

◆ ◆ ◆

Punch Romaine

◆ ◆ ◆

Roast Squab

Cold Asparagus Vinaigrette

Pate de Foie Gras, Celery

◆ ◆ ◆

Waldorf Pudding

Peaches in Chartreuse Jelly

Chocolate & Vanilla Éclairs

French Ice Cream

◆ ◆ ◆

Coffee, Liqueurs

While this first-class dinner menu might appear opu- lent and excessive, it is actually surprisingly restrained in the number and order of courses and its choice of dishes. Rather than trying to surpass Cunard, White Star merely matched its main competitor when it came to first-class meals. To date, no evidence exists of any culinary strategy that Titanic’s chef, Charles Proctor, might have devised to please the first class. However, the conservative nature of the Sunday dinner menu stands out, because in all other areas the Titanic proudly surpassed its competitors’ first- class offerings and amenities: it had the most space, Turkish baths and a swimming pool, and two electric elevators. Why, then, was the first-class dinner relatively unspectacu- lar? Although the ship’s overall opulence was attractive to American and British first-class passengers, Chef Proctor and his staff apparently worried that if first-class din- ners were richer and more excessive than those offered

repelled by, the luxury, frivolity, and decadence that they associated with first class. The meal they were served cele- brated a middle-class view of the world: it stood for comfort, security, predictability, thankfulness, even the importance of family (the Titanic allowed children to be seated with their parents in the second-class dining saloon—a luxury that competing lines did not, apparently, offer). The sub- stantial cuts of meat to which they sat down were associated with middle-class values of hard work and devotion and the resultant prosperity. Publications ranging from Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management to the American magazine Good Housekeeping usually suggested roast lamb, mutton, turkey, beef, or ham for the Sunday dinner main course, because leftovers could be used throughout the week. In this way economy and prosperity united. The Titanic’s second-class dinner, served in the gracious dining room, with an appealing menu and elegant touches like consommé, signaled not just the raw economic worth of the passengers; it aimed to reflect their own confidence and suggest their potential for success.

“Be British”: The Titanic’s First Class

In the film A Night to Remember Ulster-born engineer Thomas Andrews advises a young couple on how best to abandon ship. The scene unfolds in the Titanic’s first- class lounge in front of a painting, The Approach to the New World, depicting the New York harbor and Statue of Liberty. In assessing the rise of British and American ten- sions during the Titanic’s construction, Neil Campbell, Jude Davies, and George McKay point to that scene:

“Quintessentially an American dreamscape of hopes and possibilities, its juxtaposition here with the constructor of the foundering ship foregrounds the message of American futures as the British Empire fades away with its sinking ship.”25 Did the food served on board the Titanic in any way downplay or mitigate those tensions? Although the United States was in financial and military ascendance in 1912, the British Empire’s glory and the allure of its aristo- cratic heritage had hardly faded away. White Star attempted to market the Titanic as the most desirable, most coveted name in transatlantic travel. To secure that reputation the ship would need two kinds of wealthy customers: American capitalists, who would add regular infusions of cash; and British gentry, who would add an aura of old- world heritage and exclusivity. The first-class dining saloon and its food were used to attract and retain the patronage of both.

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restrained good taste, in which French haute cuisine was interpreted in English fashion.

To understand how conventional the Titanic’s first- class dinner menu was, it is helpful to place it alongside a menu from Cunard’s rms Etruria, a steamship at the height of its popularity when J.P. Morgan created the imm. Etruria’s dinner menu for Sunday, June 30, 1906, suggests what “Britishness” came to mean in the wake of Morgan’s failed bid for Cunard. The Etruria dinner began with an hors d’oeuvre of Pâté de foie gras, Olives Farcie [sic], and Lyon Sausage; the Titanic offered oysters as well as Hors D’oeuvre Variés, an assortment of ancho- vies, radishes, olives, and pickled herring. Including the hors d’oeuvre as part of the dinner service before the soup course had become fashionable in England in the 1890s. In Mrs. A.B. Marshall’s Cook Book, published in 1895 by one of England’s foremost culinary authorities, the author explained that the course was gaining popularity for private dinner parties and was considered de rigueur as a prelude to soup at public gatherings.31

On most ships first-class dinners included a choice of clear or thick soup for the second course, an increasingly outmoded fashion for private dinner parties, but one that, Mrs. Marshall noted, “could still be comfortably applied” for larger, more festive meals.32 Certainly the choice between two soups would not have raised passengers’ eye- brows, while a single option might have made the service seem stingy. Titanic passengers were offered Consommé Olga or Cream of Barley; Eturia passengers chose between Consommé Princess and Potage Purre [sic] Le Grand.

The Titanic entrée consisted of three choices, all rich and vibrant in flavor: Filet Mignons Lili,33 Sauté of Chicken Lyonnaise, and Vegetable Marrow Farci. The Etruria fea- tured two equally rich and flavorful entrées: Grenadines de Veau Nivernaise and Soft Shell Crabs, Americaine. All of these entrées championed French food and culinary technique. During the Napoleonic Wars the British gentry had often resisted what they derisively called “French messes,” much preferring to showcase the superior quality of British meats by roasting them plainly and serving them unadorned. In the early 1800s an entrée like Filet Mignons Lili might have struck English diners as deceitful in its masking of the beef in an elaborate sauce. Although by 1912 the English eas- ily accommodated French methods and cuisine, they still reserved their beloved joints for the removes—the heart of the meal. Mrs. Marshall, ever the arbiter of taste, explains:

“It is a common English idea of a dinner that it should con- sist of fish, flesh, and fowl.” She goes onto say that while the French, following Brillat-Savarin, recommend that the

by Cunard, the English gentry would accuse the ship of American vulgarity and gaucheness—and “go Cunard.” As a result White Star offered its first-class passengers menus that included the same number of courses as Cunard (ten to eleven), and both companies featured a distinctly British interpretation of French cuisine. The quality, cost, and quantity of the meals were also roughly the same.

J.P. Morgan was aware that his acquisition of White Star and losing bid for Cunard exacerbated nationalist tensions and heightened Cunard’s sense of itself as a dis- tinctly British company. Alarmed by the thought of the great British asset Cunard passing into American hands, as White Star had done, the British government came to the company’s rescue with substantial subsidies to ensure that it would remain robust enough to withstand imm’s aggres- sive overtures. Lord Inverclyde passionately told Cunard shareholders in 1902 that “under no circumstances shall the management of the company be in the hands of, or the shares or the vessels of the company held by, other than British subjects.”26

The imm responded to British fears of American financial aggression and increasing control of the North Atlantic passenger trade in a number of ways. First, it employed the rhetoric of Anglo-American (or, in the par- lance of the day, the more racially charged Anglo-Saxon) alliance and unity. At the Titanic’s ceremonial launch from Belfast, the assistant secretary for Harland & Wolff’s Shipyard, Saxon J. Payne, declared that the Titanic and the Olympic “were pre-eminent examples of the vitality and the progressive instincts of the Anglo-Saxon race.”27 Second, White Star camouflaged its American ownership. It flew the Union Jack, employed a British captain and officer corps, and agreed that in the event of war the White Star fleet would be turned over to the British navy. Finally, the Titanic’s first-class dining saloon and menus reflected White Star’s commitment to make this ship

“more Cunard than Cunard.” Promotional brochures informed prospective first-class

passengers that they would take their meals in a gorgeous room done in a style “peculiarly English,” reminiscent of “early Jacobean times.”28 The dining saloon chairs were decorated with English roses or Scottish thistles to comple- ment the Jacobean theme,29 and journalist Sir Philip Gibbs noted that “‘English gentlemen might sit in rooms pan- eled and adorned like those of Haddon Hall.’”30 Even as the “peculiarly English” decor aimed to make the British feel at home in a country manor, it made Americans feel gentrified, part of an elite English social network. The first-class dinner menu complemented the décor in its

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mace for the white sauce. The bland flavor, soft texture, and uniform color (white turnips, white cauliflower, white sauce) were what most passengers would have expected.

Lamb with Mint Sauce and peas; Duckling with Apple Sauce (again with peas); Sirloin of Beef with potatoes: these were Britain’s favorite removes and had been for centuries. No dish carried as many patriotic connotations as “Ye Roast Beef of Olde England,” and the sirloin was the most cov- eted cut of all. First- and second-class passengers aboard the Titanic were even called to their meals by a bugler playing

“The Roast Beef of Old England.” The Titanic’s first-class meal did vary from that of sec-

ond class in its number of courses (hors d’ oeuvre, entrée, entremets, punch) and in the choices within each course. However, the quality of the food was largely the same for both classes, with the chef calculating that even though their ticket price was higher, first-class British and American passengers were likely to be more comfortable with the

“fish, flesh, fowl” tradition than they were with a variety of expensive and overly elaborate French dishes.

“progression of dishes at a dinner should be from the more substantial to those of a lighter and delicate nature…the public verdict [in England] seems to be opposed to that opinion, for with few exceptions, at the present day the service is to lead up to the joint in the order of soup, fish, entrées, joint.”34 In fact, the Titanic dinner menu “veered perilously close to the meat, potato, and vegetable main dish of a more middle-class dinner.”35

Notably, both the first- and second-class menus for April 14, 1912, featured Lamb with Mint Sauce. The other two first-class removes, Roast Duckling with Apple Sauce and Sirloin of Beef with Chateau Potatoes, also fell squarely within British culinary conventions. The removes for the Etruria’s first-class dinner were identical to the Titanic’s except for the substitution of gosling for duckling. Various forms of potatoes appear on both ships’ first-class menus, as does the option for rice. The vegetable selection, presented in English rather than French, was also similar: the Etruria offered mashed turnips and boiled cauliflower with white sauce; the Titanic, boiled peas and creamed carrots.

According to British tastes and fashion, the seasoning would have been limited to salt and pepper and perhaps

Above: The first-class Café Parisien on the B Deck of the Titanic. © ulster folk and transport museum (national museums northern ireland)

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Among the multitude of changes that occurred in the steamship industry following the Titanic disaster was the gradual elimination of third-class or “steerage.” By the 1950s, when airlines largely replaced ocean liners and cruise ships became common, companies were loath to adopt the archaic standards of class segregation that had characterized early twentieth-century society. For a time Cunard and other cruise-ship companies promoted “tourist class” as a cheap way for study-abroad students and young families to visit foreign countries, but even that system ultimately gave way to today’s greater egalitarianism. Although major cruise lines offer the wealthiest passengers the best rooms and amenities, they encourage an atmosphere on board in which all passengers are pampered, especially when it comes to matters of the palate. Rather than adhere to a rigid class hierarchy, ships now help passengers forget the socio- economic barriers that are still felt on land. Rather than compel people to “feel their place,” cruise ships encourage them to “see their potential,” offering them cooking demon- strations and meals by such celebrity chefs as Jacques Pépin and Daniel Boulud—a concept that the White Star Line helped to pioneer over a century ago, in its then-novel phi- losophy of attentiveness to the consumer.g

notes

The research in this paper was made possible in part with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities “Landmarks in American History” workshop. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the neh. I wish to thank Rebecca B. Hill, Head Librarian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, for her generosity in helping me access numerous primary documents from the Hayes cookery collection. I also wish to thank Gastronomica’s editor, Darra Goldstein, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive advice on revising this article. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the advice and encouragement I received from many subscribers of the Association for the Study of Food & Society listserv: Andrew Coe, Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer, Michael McGuckin, Anne Mendelson, Jan Whitaker, and Derik Moore. Thanks especially to Vincent Miller.

1. Filson Young, “A Sea Birth,” Saturday Review, 27 April 1912, 520; Titanic (London: Grant Richards, 1912), 48–49.

2. Rod Green, Building the Titanic: An Epic Tale of the Creation of History’s Most Famous Ocean Liner (Chappaqua, ny: Reader’s Digest, 2005), 246.

3. In the early days of steamship travel passengers were usually divided into just two classes, cabin and steerage, a term later replaced by “third class.” The Collins Line went bankrupt in 1859 after the Arctic sank in 1854 in what was billed at the time as the worst shipwreck of the nineteenth century, and then sixteen months later, when Collins’s Pacific literally disappeared after it left Liverpool for New York on January 23, 1856. Edward Knight Collins eventually conceded that the ship had been lost. See Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 229. An 1859 London Times editorial presented Collins’s demise through a nationalist lens, concluding that the shipwrecks were the result of American hubris, stupid- ity, and greed. See “America Is Weeping for Her Steamers,” London Times, 18 May 1859, 8.

4. Fox, Transatlantic, 132–137.

5. Ibid., 241.

6. Ibid., 87.

The wealthiest passengers had access to a privately run à la carte restaurant, casually called “The Ritz” by those familiar with the Ritz-Carlton restaurants on the Hamburg Amerika Line’s newest steamships. Both the à la carte restaurant and the Titanic’s Café Parisien, where first-class passengers could take afternoon tea along with light sandwiches and pastries, were operated by the well- known London restaurateur Luigi Gatti, who had previously managed Oddenino’s Imperial Restaurant, near Piccadilly Square. As in the most fashionable restaurants of the time, the Titanic’s à la carte restaurant did not have just one set dinner menu. Patrons would often devise the courses and foods for their meals in consultation with the maître d’hôtel. It took more than money to make a dinner at such restaurants enjoyable, however. Diners had to be confident of their abilities in French and be able to conceptualize a menu that followed the protocols of cuisine classique. Passengers who chose this restaurant were very much like those who populate Edith Wharton’s novels. Their cultural currency was French; their lives, and residences, followed the social seasons in Paris, Vienna, and London, with sum- mers in Newport, Rhode Island or the French Rivera, and trips to ski resorts in Grindelwald and spas in Baden Baden. However, the majority of Titanic first-class passengers were not wealthy enough to afford the high prices of Gatti’s restaurant; for them, eating dinner in the largest floating dining saloon on the ocean was luxury enough.

Despite months of advertising, the biggest ship of all time was traveling to New York with approximately one thousand people below full capacity.36 The Titanic could accommodate 550 first-class passengers but had only around 325 on board. Of these, the majority were Americans—not British—returning to the States after the European social season.37 It would appear that the British gentry were not only aware that White Star ships were owned by an American trust but that many had made the patriotic choice to travel with Cunard.

Since the Titanic disaster hundreds of investigations, retrospectives, memoirs, films, and books have sought to place blame, generally finding the culprits to be hubris, carelessness, godlessness, and too much trust in technology. But it is also worthwhile to recognize that American enter- prise and attention to consumer demand—the Titanic’s hallmarks—ultimately won out over tragedy. The third-class passengers were, of course, at a huge disadvantage as they struggled to reach the deck and possible rescue. Nevertheless, the spirit of potential and optimism that the Titanic instilled in both third- and second-class passengers during their brief voyage is also an important legacy to consider.

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21. John Maxtone-Graham, The Only Way to Cross: The Golden Era of the Great Atlantic Liners (London: Collier Books, 1978), 48.

22. Quoted in Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley, Last Dinner on the Titanic (Toronto: Madison Press, 1997), 105.

23. “Burning of the Volturno: An Extraordinary October 1913 Marine Tragedy,” at ca.geocities.com/[email protected]/volturno57.html. Accessed June 2009.

24. “rms Majestic, Second Saloon menu, August 7, 1900,” Buttolph Collection, Digital Archives, New York Public Library. digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/ dgkeysearchdetail.cfm?trg=1&strucID=274315&imageID=468590&total=14&num =0&word=white%20star%20menus&s=1&notword=&d=&c=&f=&k=0&lWord= &lField=&sScope=&sLevel=&sLabel=&imgs=20&pos=4&e=r.

25. Neil Campbell, Jude Davies, and George McKay, Issues in Americanisation and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 98–99.

26. “Report of the Commissioner of Navigation, 30 Sept. 1902” in Annual Report of the Commissioner of Navigation for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30 (Washington: Government Printing Office: 1902), 409; for excellent analysis of these nationalist tensions in a political and military context see also Michael Davie, Titanic: The Death and Life of a Legend (New York: Knopf, 1987).

27. “Launch of the Titanic,” Belfast Newsletter, 1 June 1911. See Titanic Times: Belfast at the Time of the Titanic, at www.irelandseye.com/titanic/index.htm, June 7, 2009. Accessed June 2009.

28. “First-Class Dining Saloon,” White Star Line Promotion; “Titanic: Built in Belfast.”

29. Daniel Allen Butler, Unsinkable: The Full Story of the rms Titanic (Mechanicsburg, pa: Stackpole Books, 1998), 18.

30. Sir Philip Gibbs, The Deathless Story of the Titanic, quoted in Davie, Titanic, 21.

31. Agnes Marshall, Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, revised edition (London: Marshall’s School of Cookery, 1895), 475. The rough equivalent in the United States to Agnes Marshall was Lida Seely, who was equally exhaustive in her American approach to service à la russe. See Mrs. Seely’s Cook Book: A Manual of French and American Cookery (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 52.

32. Marshall, Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, 478.

33. According to Escoffier, for Filet Mignons Lili tournedos of beef are fried in butter, set on a crust of pommes de terre Anna, topped with a slice of foie gras, and finished with a slice of truffle. The dish is served with a “reduced and well- buttered Périgueux sauce.” See G.A. Escoffier, A Guide to Modern Cookery, Part ii (Fournier Press reprint, 2008), 340.

34. Marshall, Mrs. A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, 481.

35. Archbold and McCauley, Last Dinner on the Titanic, 69.

36. Stephen J. Spignesi, The Complete Titanic: From the Ship’s Earliest Blueprints to the Epic Film (Secaucus, nj: Carol Publishing Group, 1998), 122.

37. Davie, Titanic, 48–49.

7. Ibid., 123.

8. Ibid., 282.

9. Edward Keble Chatterton, Steamships and Their Story (London: Cassell & Co., 1910), 300.

10. Violet Jessop, with John Maxtone-Graham, Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannnic Disasters (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Sheridan House, 2004), 89.

11. William P. Dillingham, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Immigration Legislation 5 December 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 415.

12. “Third-Class Dining Saloon,” White Star Line Promotion. “Titanic: Built in Belfast.” Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, at www.titanicinbelfast.com/ welcome.aspx. Accessed March 2009.

13. See, for example, Charles Alma Byers, “A Pretty Bungalow Amid Charming Surroundings” American Cookery, August-September 1915, 99–101.

14. Again testifying before the United States Congress on steerage passenger space and conditions, V.P. Franklin of the imm stressed that the plan of having

“women and children sit down and having a steward bring them three meals a day and supper at night is something [emigrant passengers] have never heard of.” See Dillingham, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 426.

15. Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1905), 36.

16. Both the Olympic and Titanic served meat for all third-class meals, with breakfast choices including herring, sausages, Irish stew, tripe with onions, or liver and bacon. Dinner offered the most substantial cuts, including corned beef and cabbage, boiled mutton with caper sauce, cold beef and pickle, roast beef and brown gravy, and roast pork with apple sauce. Tea, which in third-class counted as a light evening meal, again included meat: curried mutton and rice, roast mutton, cod fish cakes, and rabbit pie.

17. Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16.

18. As Stephen Burgess writes, “It was a reluctantly tolerated game among the second-class younger set on the Titanic to make dinner-jacketed forays to the First-Class lounge or Café Parisian.” See Burgess, Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War (New York: McGraw- Hill Professional, 2005), 144–145.

19. Ruth Becker, “Letter to Editor,” St. Nicholas Magazine 41 (1914): 573.

20. The Titanic’s most famous competitor, the Cunard Line’s Lusitania, had a second-class dining saloon that accommodated 258 passengers at a sitting and was “quite a pleasant space to enjoy,” despite the fact that extra Corinthian columns had to be hastily constructed after the ship’s pre-maiden voyage “to conceal stiffening stanchions”; unfortunately, the columns “cut right through the fixed lines of tables” in the saloon. Although quite beautiful, decorated in Georgian style with white-painted walls, the room lacked the natural lighting and the spaciousness of the Titanic’s second-class saloon. See J. Kent Layton, Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography of the Ship of Splendor (Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu, 2007), 18.

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