Dish of the Day: Decadence

Food historian Dr Annie Gray notes that “most high-end restaurants gave their menus in French, but by the 1930s some were starting to use English or, as here, a gently Frenchified version thereof.” 

While the more general trend for embracing French cuisine in the 1900s is present and correct, the dessert of Pears Dame Blanch(e) is misspelt, Dr Gray notes, indicating that the chefs were hired a little closer to home, despite the restaurant’s lofty ambitions of being continental. Dame Blanche was a popular serve of vanilla ice cream topped with melted chocolate and whipped cream that was seen scooped into chi-chi sundae glasses and thought to have been very avant-garde by restaurant-goers of the day (keeping in mind that freezers in people’s homes were not yet commonplace). 

“Hotel meals were very popular as it was often cheaper than trying to do the same kind of thing in-house, especially if a household had a fairly plain cook, and it meant less clearing up. All middle-class households still had servants, but they were harder to retain, and many now lived out, so they were getting more difficult to control,” Dr Gray continues. 

For the older generation of the 1920s and ’30s, stepping into a restaurant of this scale was still charged with a sense of wonder, while the younger crowd were already beginning to treat it as an everyday indulgence. As Dr Gray puts it, “Restaurants really only got going at the end of the 19th century, so they were still something of a novelty for many of the older generation, while the younger crew took them for granted.” A century on, that balance between spectacle and familiarity remains – dining here still feels like an event, but one that manages to wrap its grandeur in warmth and timeless appeal.

Dr Annie Gray is food historian and author, whose latest work is called The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street.