9 minute read
Preserving the Ingredients of Boston's Culinary History
by DR. MICHELLE TOLINI FINAMORE
Michelle Tolini Finamore is a fashion and design historian, author and curator, and exhibition and programming consultant.
In 1935, a festive dinner was held at Boston’s Copley Plaza to celebrate renowned baseball player and Red Sox Manager Joe Cronin. For the evening, Chef de Cuisine Carlo Tolini devised a menu that included a martini cocktail, mock turtle soup English style, filet mignon au Madère, olivette potatoes, new peas au beurre, and a fresh strawberry bombe for dessert. The elaborate multicourse meal was standard fare for special occasions at one of the fanciest hotels in town. The whimsical menu, printed locally by the Washington Press on Dover Street, was in the shape of a baseball and featured a separate paper baseball bat with the “batting order” for the evening’s speakers.
This menu is part of a culinary archive that resided for decades in Carlo’s son Romeo’s basement in Quincy, Massachusetts. The collection of menus, photographs, and culinary organization ephemera interweaves narratives related to Italian immigration, French gastronomy, and the history of Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel, which hosted famous meals and culinary expositions throughout the twentieth century. The Tolini Family Culinary Archive was recently donated to Historic New England’s Library and Archives.
The contents of Romeo’s cellar stretched across four generations of Italian family chefs and was literally crammed with almost a century’s worth of culinary memorabilia. The walls were covered with framed black and white photographs of towering and fantastical creations crafted by family members for culinary competitions between the 1930s and 1970s. Drawers held large collections of chocolate and ice cream molds and countless menus from the Epicurean Club of Boston and Les Amis d’Escoffier Society gatherings. It appears that Carlo saved almost every menu from his thirty-five years as chef at the Copley Plaza, both the everyday service as well as the special occasion meals such as the Red Sox dinner. Reading through the menus is a trip through food history with dishes that range from nineteenth-century holdovers like terrapin soup and green turtle Amontillado to the more familiar lobster salad and baked halibut steak.
The story of the archive begins with Carlo Tolini, a seventeen-year-old immigrant who came to America in 1904 from Cardana di Besozzo in northern Italy. Carlo settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and married Ida Gazzola in 1913. Although trained as a bricklayer, Carlo found his calling in the culinary world, initially working at the Dreyfus Hotel in Boston and then at the Copley Plaza, where he trained as the assistant to chef de cuisine, Jean Jeton. Carlo eventually took over as head chef and his tenure at the Copley Plaza profoundly affected the lives of his sons, grandsons, and great-grandson. As is typical of immigrant families (and at a time when professional culinary education was not the norm), Carlo’s sons Romeo and Elio started their chef training with their father at the Copley Plaza. Romeo’s son Edward went on to study at Newbury College, and he and his wife, Susanna Harwell, headed the Watertown, Massachusetts, French restaurant Le Bocage for nine years; his son Mark still works in the food industry. This culinary lineage also impacted the rest of the extended family, many of whom are passionate cooks, and who have fond memories of Romeo’s elaborate multicourse meals created for the holiday gatherings in his and his wife, Eva’s, Quincy home.
Menus
The vast menu collection ranges from the 1920s through the 1980s and documents graphic design history, captures seminal moments in local and global history, and traces gastronomic trends. On a local level, the archive includes New England-oriented menus for dinners commemorating events such as Harvard/Yale football games and dinners attended by the long-serving Boston mayor and Massachusetts governor James Michael Curley, whose name appears on countless programs. On a national level, one of the earliest menus in the collection is from the 1927/28 New Year’s celebration at the Copley Plaza, which noted guests would enjoy “dancing until midnight” but, in the midst of Prohibition, requested that they “refrain from violating the 18th amendment.”
World War II’s food restrictions had a marked impact, even in such a high-end hotel, with menus typically including notes regarding the butter shortage as well as specifying that the amount of butter fat could not exceed nineteen percent. All hotels in Boston stopped serving butter after 11 a.m. on weekdays and noon on the weekends and no rationed meats were served on Friday and Sunday. The Copley Plaza kitchen also made it clear that they did not tolerate “any dealings with the black market.”
In addition to the everyday menus and special holiday meals, business gatherings and banquets regularly occurred at the Copley Plaza, including the Jeweler’s Association, the Hotel Association, and a special seventieth anniversary meeting of the New England Shoe and Leather Association. In 1939, more than 150 attendees representing shoe manufacturers, tanning and leather companies, and machinery companies enjoyed pineapple surprise, puree St. Germain, filet of lemon sole, and mignardises (bitesized desserts). Many of the menus were specially designed to reflect the gathering; this one is modest in size but has a faux animal hide cover. Not surprisingly, the vast number of shoe-related businesses in attendance were Massachusetts firms, with Haverhill especially well-represented, and the listing provides a snapshot of the industry at that moment in time.
Not all the gatherings, however, served fancy French meals, nor were they all sober affairs. The Boston Hotel Association’s 1930s circus-themed meetings included homestyle food such as fish stew, kidney pie, ice cream, hot dogs, hamburgers, lemonade, peanuts, and popcorn. For the 1939 “Big Top” meeting, the hotel group hired equestrians, aerialists, ground tumblers, and clowns from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to entertain the crowd.
Culinary Competitions
Ephemera and photographs related to the culinary organizations to which all the family members belonged make up a large part of the archive. The Epicurean Club of Boston and Vicinity, incorporated in 1894, is the oldest professional chef organization in the country. Carlo was a board member of the Epicurean Club as well as a charter member of Les Amis d’Escoffier. The Epicurean Club held its grander affairs at the Copley Plaza, but its smaller gatherings took place all over the city, including at the Harvard Club, the MIT Club, Parker House, and in the North End’s Polcari’s and The European, where the club members dined on pizza and tripe.
The club’s annual culinary expositions were an important part of their mission and the meetings featured elaborate feasts as well as competitions that allowed members to show off their culinary prowess and their artistic skill. Carlo, Elio, and Romeo always participated in these competitions and were often the creators of prizewinning entries. In 1935, Carlo was awarded a first prize for a display called La Tonnelle des Roses. Typically, the work was titled in French, and the rose arbor with wax flowers was suspended over an equally ornate display of tallow bowls in the shape of stylized artichokes, surmounted by (edible) towers of artfully arranged langoustines, crayfish, asparagus, and other foodstuffs. All of the dishes were shiny with the requisite aspic covering. The creation was described in one newspaper as “A Triumph in Culinary Art” that was “so magnificently carried out one would almost believe Mother Nature was the originator, not the chef at the Copley Plaza.”
These displays entailed months of preparation time, and Romeo involved all of his sons, including Charles, Richard, and Edward. All three have vivid memories of the vast amount of work required to get ready for the competitions and even after months of preparation, holding all-nighters before the event. Looking at the photographs of these submissions, it is clear they were labors of love. The sculptural and architectural (and inedible) tallow centerpieces were constructed with one-of-a-kind plaster of Paris molds created and sometimes carved by Romeo, and the intricate surface decoration consisted of delicately sliced and artfully arranged truffles and elegant chocolate and olive oil tracery. Many of these displays featured New England subjects and landmarks, including the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial and the Bunker Hill Monument. There is one intriguing photograph of a sugar “painting” of the now defunct NECCO candy factory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Romeo’s father, Carlo, was a twenty-time award winner at the Culinary Arts Salon in Boston, and in 1963, Romeo was awarded first prize for the sixth time. Edward was the recipient of numerous awards, as well, once for a striking display featuring an impressive three-foot-tall sugar model of his Coast Guard training ship Eagle when he was still in the service. The grand displays were on the wane by the late 1960s. Much like the terrapin and turtle dealers that appeared in Epicurean Club program books in the early twentieth century, the tallow distributors start to disappear at the same time.
The competition displays were meant to last only a few days, after which time they would start to melt and smell, even with the addition of peppermint oil to offset the stench.
Other cultural and social changes are represented in the archive, notably the increased participation of women in the culinary world. In 1959, a movement was afoot to form a women’s chapter of Les Amis d’Escoffier. Romeo, as secretary of the Boston group, sent numerous letters in the early 1960s to the New York headquarters advocating for this change. The New York director wrote that they were “happy Boston has taken such an initiative” and Les Dames des Ami d’Escoffier, the first professional women’s association of chefs, was eventually officially sanctioned and continues to exist today.
The photographs in the Tolini Family Culinary Archive capture a passing moment in culinary history, just as the countless menus document one fleeting meal. But they were preserved, and obviously valued, by these chefs. With Historic New England’s acquisition of the archive, what was once ephemeral will now enter into the historic record.
