OP: Fellows' Menu Maker

The Hotel Monthly Press, Chicago, 1910. Hardcover. Very Good Minus.

Charles Fellows (1866–1921) was an enterprising writer, known for his Culinary Handbook (1904) and A Selection of Dishes and the Chef’s Reminder (1909). Fellows’ Menu Maker then appeared in 1910 and was an immediate success. 

Presented in two parts, the first portion of Fellows’ lays out months of menus with breakfast, lunch, café specials, dinner, and evening café specials for each day. 
The second section (separately paginated and printed on different stock) is a rollicking miscellany of menus and strategies for dozens of different events as actually executed by particular hotels or restaurants: a New Year dinner at the Hotel Robidoux in St. Joseph, Missouri; a Mandarin banquet at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco; dining car menus; banquet billing procedures by the Hotel Baltimore; a bill of fare for a self-service lunch room in Detroit’s Majestic Building; and a sit-down banquet for eight hundred people in Springfield, Illinois, accomplished by the Richelieu Catering Company; just to name a few.

Overall, a sprawling collection of menu ideas, food service nitty gritty, and a record of dozens of events. Some of the additional material emphasizes planning and design, some focuses on costs, some demonstrates the way a kitchen briefs its waitstaff on the day’s offerings—all of it a compelling document of food and culture with a certain amount of contemporary application. 

This copy, a hardcover published without dust jacket, is in Very Good Minus condition.The burnt orange cloth binding is lightly frayed and discolored, though the binding is strong and the interior clean. It bears only the copyright date of 1910; there are no other edition remarks, which was typical of the publisher, Hotel Monthly Press.