5,000 restaurant menus from 1880-1920, and the ham sandwich cost 25 cents

A menu of history, priced in cents

The Pudding's piece, titled A History of Menus is a Menu of History, scrolls through roughly 5,000 American restaurant menus from 1880 to 1920. The source is the New York Public Library's Buttolph Collection — and the reason it's usable as data at all is the unglamorous part: every dish and price was transcribed and checked by hand by volunteers at menus.nypl.org. The story uses that labeled corpus to trace what diners ordered across four decades, item by item.

The first jolt is the pricing. Everything is denominated in cents, not dollars, which trips up a modern eye scanning for the decimal point. The structure of the menus, though, is eerily familiar: categories, courses, and a layout that would not look out of place today.

What sat at the top of the page

The thread turned into a close reading of what these menus reveal about everyday life a century ago. The first surprise was sticker shock in reverse.

"I see everything is CENTS! I was like what on earth who is paying $250 for a ham sandwich???" — a reader who misread the currency

What sat at the top of these menus also reads as foreign now.

"Interesting that many of them lead with clams or oysters … to have them listed so frequently and prominently is completely foreign to me." — daemonologist, a reader cataloguing the patterns

Two dishes drew the sharpest curiosity, and the answers were literal. One reader who'd researched the question explained why a humble vegetable was treated as luxury:

"Celery was at one time difficult to cultivate, growing only in select marshlands. In the absence of refrigeration it was also difficult to transport to city diners, so was considered a delicacy." — pcrh, who had looked into celery's menu history

That status came with its own tableware — purpose-made celery vases to display the stalks. And the recurring "green turtle soup" was not a color or a style:

"I assumed this was a reference to a flavor or style…but nope, it's just green turtle meat." — xbryanx, who works with science and technology in a museum

A museum worker and a forensic researcher both went hunting for the underlying archive rather than the visualization — a tell that the labeled dataset, not the scroll, is the real artifact here. The piece is a window dressing on a years-long volunteer transcription effort; the menus survive as data only because thousands of people typed them in, one celery line at a time.