WWI Dinner Calendar
“The Business of Their Lives, That Is To Dine” -Young
That line is printed on the cover of a 1916 dinner calendar that I acquired last weekend. I drove down to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, the town where I was born, to visit Farley Toothman. A former judge, Farley is many things to many people in that town, including landlord, historic home restorer, bus driver, and purveyor of ice cream at Farley’s Hotel. He invited me into his home and pressed some of his ephemeral treasures into my hands, including this: The Dinner Calendar for 1916, authored by Fannie Merritt Farmer.
It is a wall calendar that assigns a complete multi-course dinner menu to every day of the year, with full recipes printed right on the page in small precise type. My copy is complete, with all twelve months intact, still bound with its original hanging cord. A calendar designed to be torn apart and thrown away somehow survived one hundred and ten years whole!
Fannie Farmer died in January 1915, so this calendar arrived in households after her death. Her lasting contribution to American cooking was the adoption of standardized measurements and the insistence that cooking could be taught and replicated. This calendar carries that philosophy into daily life. The woman it was made for occupied a specific, now largely vanished, social position: not wealthy enough to employ a full kitchen staff, but managing a household that aspired to a certain standard of table.
The menus are not simple, by any means. The first month of the year required something I’ve not seen before: a festive Pop Corn Garnish. January 6th, a Thursday, calls for Bisque of Oysters, Pork Steaks, Mashed Sweet Potatoes, and Apple Tapioca with Cream. A June Saturday brings Coffee Ice Cream made by scalding milk with ground coffee and freezing it with three pints of crushed ice and rock salt.
Someone planned ahead, consulted this calendar, and set the table accordingly. The index alone spans two full pages, full of dishes with proper names specific to that culinary moment in history. Hot Finnan Haddie Canapés. Baked Rockingham Halibut. Deerfoot Potatoes. Shapleigh Timbales. I think about the woman who used this calendar, who saved and shopped and cooked every month and never tore a single page away. Maybe she understood, even then, that the year passing was worth keeping.
Or maybe she just never got around to making the Pop Corn Garnish. Either way, I am glad the calendar found its way from her hands to Farley Toothman’s, and finally to mine.
