In a research office in the upper reaches of the New York Public Library’s main building, the rare books curator, the culinary collections librarian and the manager of a peculiar new project called NYPL Labs are throwing digitized pasta against the wall to see if it sticks.
The project, dubbed What’s New on the Menu, launched in April with the intended goal of transcribing all the dishes and prices on the 9,000 previously scanned menus in the library’s collection. In 10 days, a team of Internet volunteers that now numbers about 35,000 had transcribed 100,000 dishes. By August, half a million dishes had been transcribed, and now the plan is to scan and transcribe the 30,000 menus that remain.
It’s hard to imagine a concrete use for something like this. But then NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow began noodling around with it, typing in “Heineken” just to see where it was available and how much it cost.
“I wonder if it was even available in the early 1900s?” mused Rebecca Federman, the library’s electronic resources coordinator and culinary collections librarian.
Turns out it was. Passengers aboard Holland America Line’s RMS Rotterdam in 1898 could quaff a glass for a nickel, a pint for a dime and a quart for a mere 15 cents. The beer also shows up on a 1955 menu at Cavanagh’s, an Irish-American institution at 260 W. 23rd St. where diners could knock back a bottle of “Heineken’s” for 70 cents.
“There’s also been a big search for Philadelphia squab,” said Vershbow, who became intrigued by the dish he’d never heard of, “and now, if you type it into Google, our listing for it is in fifth place!”
He dug down a bit into the site and found 110 menus in the collection with the fowl, including an April 9, 1900 appearance at the Claremont Hotel. A little more research revealed that the dish got a recent revival from Michelle Obama as part of a welcome dinner at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.
“When I’m on it, I track desserts: Pies. Ice cream. Cheeses. You find words like ‘farinaceous,’ once used to describe anything from oatmeal to pasta, and see that nobody uses it anymore,” said Federman. “You can watch the rise and fall of the popularity of Sanka.”
Federman has used the system to investigate tutti frutti ice cream and seek out recipes for Siberian punch. Vershbow found the latter on the menu at New York’s Savoy hotel in 1900, and in 52 other menus. The top hit is from Hathi Trust’s digital library, 1910’s “The Federation Cook Book: A Collection of Tested Recipes, Contributed by The Colored Women of the State of California.” Bartenders looking for signature cocktails would do well to spend an evening or two dabbling around on the site.
While the collection is currently New York City-centric, as the data expand, the project could grow from a region-based tool to something able to spot trends and tell big-picture stories. Federman hopes to join forces with institutions like the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the Los Angeles Public Library and Cornell University, all in various stages of their own menu digitization projects, to grow the project’s depth and potential.
“These collections contain massive data sets that are locked in pixelated form,” said Vershbow. “Google can do mass digitization, but we can go deep with specializations like these that are dark areas on the web.”
Overlay the restaurant locations over historical maps of the city, the latter being considered as an upcoming NYPL Labs project, and the combined effort shows increasingly accurate layers of the city’s history. A new “strike zone” graphic lists where items appear on menus — oysters, for example, tend to be displayed on top, coffee on the bottom.
“Menus have an immediate purpose, then they change and people discard them. But if you have a large number of them, you start to build a composite,” said rare books curator Michael Inman. “Not everything is on the menus. We’re building the wings while we’re flying the plane with this project, but the information gets you in the ballpark very quickly.”
The Food Network’s research librarian, Jonathan Milder, is excited about the project. Milder’s one of those behind-the-scenes types whose job entails everything from taking a bird’s-eye view of food industry trends to helping supply Alton Brown with well-informed banter to keep “Iron Chefs” episodes moving.
“The library has one of the world’s best menu collections, but their rare menus functioned as artifacts. As a curator of a collection like that, the library functions as a museum,” he said. But now, “they’re converting artifacts into free and open data. They’re turning the artifacts into primary sources and deputizing the public as citizen librarians.”
Milder said that what these citizen librarians are digging up — like forgotten methods of preparing sustainable fishes such as pike and perch — could inspire chefs of today.
By capturing something inherently ephemeral like menus that change with the seasons, the chef’s whims or the demands of the customer, the program not only shows the value of specified research, but paints a bigger picture of the value of digitization. It bumps library stock up at a time when many have begun to think of libraries as warehouses where out-of-towners can get on the Internet and locals can borrow DVDs.
With the NYPL project, Milder sees the future in the past and immediately thinks of the current revival of historic food by leading-edge chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz and José Andrés.
“The menu project sets the stage for future exploration of lost and forgotten culinary histories. These chefs are revealing bits of culinary history that are as new to us today as their molecular gastronomy work. I don’t think the timing of the chefs’ work and the library project is coincidence. I think it’s zeitgeist.”
The project, dubbed What’s New on the Menu, launched in April with the intended goal of transcribing all the dishes and prices on the 9,000 previously scanned menus in the library’s collection. In 10 days, a team of Internet volunteers that now numbers about 35,000 had transcribed 100,000 dishes. By August, half a million dishes had been transcribed, and now the plan is to scan and transcribe the 30,000 menus that remain.
It’s hard to imagine a concrete use for something like this. But then NYPL Labs manager Ben Vershbow began noodling around with it, typing in “Heineken” just to see where it was available and how much it cost.
“I wonder if it was even available in the early 1900s?” mused Rebecca Federman, the library’s electronic resources coordinator and culinary collections librarian.
Turns out it was. Passengers aboard Holland America Line’s RMS Rotterdam in 1898 could quaff a glass for a nickel, a pint for a dime and a quart for a mere 15 cents. The beer also shows up on a 1955 menu at Cavanagh’s, an Irish-American institution at 260 W. 23rd St. where diners could knock back a bottle of “Heineken’s” for 70 cents.
“There’s also been a big search for Philadelphia squab,” said Vershbow, who became intrigued by the dish he’d never heard of, “and now, if you type it into Google, our listing for it is in fifth place!”
He dug down a bit into the site and found 110 menus in the collection with the fowl, including an April 9, 1900 appearance at the Claremont Hotel. A little more research revealed that the dish got a recent revival from Michelle Obama as part of a welcome dinner at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.
“When I’m on it, I track desserts: Pies. Ice cream. Cheeses. You find words like ‘farinaceous,’ once used to describe anything from oatmeal to pasta, and see that nobody uses it anymore,” said Federman. “You can watch the rise and fall of the popularity of Sanka.”
Federman has used the system to investigate tutti frutti ice cream and seek out recipes for Siberian punch. Vershbow found the latter on the menu at New York’s Savoy hotel in 1900, and in 52 other menus. The top hit is from Hathi Trust’s digital library, 1910’s “The Federation Cook Book: A Collection of Tested Recipes, Contributed by The Colored Women of the State of California.” Bartenders looking for signature cocktails would do well to spend an evening or two dabbling around on the site.
While the collection is currently New York City-centric, as the data expand, the project could grow from a region-based tool to something able to spot trends and tell big-picture stories. Federman hopes to join forces with institutions like the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the Los Angeles Public Library and Cornell University, all in various stages of their own menu digitization projects, to grow the project’s depth and potential.
“These collections contain massive data sets that are locked in pixelated form,” said Vershbow. “Google can do mass digitization, but we can go deep with specializations like these that are dark areas on the web.”
Overlay the restaurant locations over historical maps of the city, the latter being considered as an upcoming NYPL Labs project, and the combined effort shows increasingly accurate layers of the city’s history. A new “strike zone” graphic lists where items appear on menus — oysters, for example, tend to be displayed on top, coffee on the bottom.
“Menus have an immediate purpose, then they change and people discard them. But if you have a large number of them, you start to build a composite,” said rare books curator Michael Inman. “Not everything is on the menus. We’re building the wings while we’re flying the plane with this project, but the information gets you in the ballpark very quickly.”
The Food Network’s research librarian, Jonathan Milder, is excited about the project. Milder’s one of those behind-the-scenes types whose job entails everything from taking a bird’s-eye view of food industry trends to helping supply Alton Brown with well-informed banter to keep “Iron Chefs” episodes moving.
“The library has one of the world’s best menu collections, but their rare menus functioned as artifacts. As a curator of a collection like that, the library functions as a museum,” he said. But now, “they’re converting artifacts into free and open data. They’re turning the artifacts into primary sources and deputizing the public as citizen librarians.”
Milder said that what these citizen librarians are digging up — like forgotten methods of preparing sustainable fishes such as pike and perch — could inspire chefs of today.
By capturing something inherently ephemeral like menus that change with the seasons, the chef’s whims or the demands of the customer, the program not only shows the value of specified research, but paints a bigger picture of the value of digitization. It bumps library stock up at a time when many have begun to think of libraries as warehouses where out-of-towners can get on the Internet and locals can borrow DVDs.
With the NYPL project, Milder sees the future in the past and immediately thinks of the current revival of historic food by leading-edge chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Grant Achatz and José Andrés.
“The menu project sets the stage for future exploration of lost and forgotten culinary histories. These chefs are revealing bits of culinary history that are as new to us today as their molecular gastronomy work. I don’t think the timing of the chefs’ work and the library project is coincidence. I think it’s zeitgeist.”
