Culinary Grace, Under Pressure
I have examined numerous wartime tasting menus of the Wine and Food Society of New York. Once the war was afoot the Society’s events did not table German or Italian wines but French wine might still be featured.
After France was fully occupied in the fall of 1940 French wines also faded in the programs.
The events were generally held at fashionable New York hotels. The Waldorf-Astoria was favoured, into the 1970s certainly.
The wine list that appears below is from a December 31, 1942 New Year’s Eve supper at the Waldorf. Musical accompaniment was also provided. This was not however a Wine and Food Society event. It is interesting to contrast this evening with events the Society held during wartime.
The full menu can be read here, in the archives of The Culinary Institute of America, accessible from the Hudson River Valley Heritage website.
The dinner was held, not in the Grand Ballroom, where Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians serenaded New Year’s celebrants for years but in the Waldorf Lounge. It was later called the Bull and Bear, a bar and steak restaurant.
The menu is rather spare, and basic in layout save for the striking cover (above).
Such late-evening dining was a second evening meal for many. Hotels may have had the practise to offer, for these events, a less-than-elaborate meal, even perhaps before the war, with the menu styled accordingly.
Yet, note the Champagne list: luxurious and heavily French. A total of 22 Champagnes and 10 domestic sparklers were offered. America had been in the war for one year by this time.
The champagnes are weighted to vintage bottlings. The domestic sparklers hailed from different parts of the country, including New Jersey. The Garden State’s Renault winery, which is still going strong, supplied one of these wines.
The cover art work conveys traditional Waldorf elegance via the coiffed society figure, yet she toasts, and looks up to, a man in uniform. He might have been in the armed services, but possibly was a hospitality employee: doorman, bellman, chauffeur. The image is consistent with a policeman as well, or indeed all these blended.
We can view the art as a manifest democratic gesture at a time of international upheaval, one meant to reinforce national solidarity.
Still the menu, especially the French wines, shows that a degree of civilized, even luxurious living carried on, probably to a greater degree than in other nations.
I attribute this to the fact that the U.S. was comparatively wealthy: if it could drink wine of the type traditional on New Year’s, it would. As well, most of the mainland was vouchsafed from serious Axis depredation, unlike the case for Britain.
Wine writer Michael Broadbent has written, see at 427, that despite good Champagne being available in London just after the war, especially the 1945-1947 vintages, such wines had a hard go of it. The reason was: plenty of prewar stock to use up first.
Evidently, quality pre-war Champers in London was not exhausted – whether from being hoarded or failing to fetch the prices asked, it’s hard to know why, or if the same applied in New York. The French wines offered at the Waldorf at the end of 1942 fetched about double the domestic bubbly price, certainly.
The eschewing of Axis country wine by the New York Wine and Food Society between 1940-1945 was, in the end, probably a policy of that group. What it did, by a sidewind, was to give members a chance to drink wine from non-traditional regions such as South America, and lesser known U.S. wine regions.
Putting it a different way, had the war never happened, perhaps domestic wine would not be held in the esteem it is today. In some small way, the tabling at wartime Society events of California and other American wines had to increase respect for, and interest in these wines after the war.
As the old adage has it, necessity is the mother of invention. The advent of war vectored America on a different, or at least multiple wine directions, with implications for wine habits, and producers, that are evident to this day.
Note re images: the original 1942 menu, linked in the text from the Culinary Institute of America, is the source for the three images above. All intellectual property in the menu belongs solely to the lawful owner or authorized user, as applicable. Images are used for educational and historical purposes. All feedback welcomed.