They were a far cry from the Cosmo-fueled gatherings of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, but a century and a half ago, women regularly got together at midday to gossip and catch up over lengthy restaurant meals. A menu dated Friday, August 25, 1843, shows the options on offer at that afternoon’s “Ladies’ Ordinary”—a venue where only women could dine in what was considered a comfortable and socially acceptable atmosphere. (This menu is viewable at the New York Public Library, thanks to a Miss Frank E. Buttolph, who between 1900 and 1924 acquired the vast majority of the 30,000 menus currently on file there. At the time, libraries and collectors looked down on menus as insignificant ephemera, but Buttolph thought otherwise. So considerable was her zeal, in fact, that when her initial written inquiries to an eatery went unanswered, she would regularly march over and demand that the staff hand over the menu in person.)
Organized in a way typical of hotel menus in the mid- to late-nineteenth century—with courses arranged by manner of preparation (boiled dishes before roasts, for example)—the Ladies’ Ordinary menu is in fact anything but ladylike. Certain categories do provide a limited number of lighter options (if you were in the mood for soup, for example, let’s hope you fancied clam, and if fish was your thing, you’d better well have liked “Cod with Oyster Sauce”), but taken in total, the meal packed a serious punch. The “Boiled” section features a wide-ranging array of dishes, including Tongue, Turkey, and Oysters; Jole (aka Jowl) with Cabbage; and Mutton with Caper Sauce. For “Side Dishes” (what we’d call entrées) you could choose from “Kidnies Sauté with Fine Herbs;” two more varieties of mutton (stewed or sautéed); Ducks with Olives; and unspecified small birds “Italian Style.” That was if you opted not to go with the “Calf’s Head with Brain Sauce.” Next come the vegetables, then the roasts (pork, lamb, beef, chicken, and goose); the Game (“snipe”); the pastries (Blackberry Pie, Cream Pie, meringues, broiled almonds); and, finally, the Desserts, among them hickory nuts, dried fruit, and Peach Ice. Not a fitness diet, but nourishing.
In fact, the Ladies’ Ordinary menu is essentially the same as what was offered in the men’s restaurants of the time. A copy of the Gentlemen’s Ordinary menu of the Astor House from September 9, 1841 features some of the same dishes that appeared at the Ladies’ restaurant two years later: Calf’s Head (here marinated and fried), Kidneys with Fines Herbes, and Duck with Olives. At the American Hotel, where the Ladies’ Ordinary appears to have closed in October 1848, men and women were thereafter served in what had been the Gentlemen’s Ordinary, and by the middle of the century, separate-sex dining facilities in public spaces virtually ceased to exist. Of course, that was also before it had occurred to anybody to mix vodka with cranberry juice, Triple Sec, and lime juice.
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