So the original menu “tells us about who they were and the idea of luxury” in 1912, she said.
The waiters served passengers from silver platters. By some accounts, the main galley, which prepared the meals for first- and second-class passengers, had a bakery, a butcher shop and storage space for wine, beer and oysters. There were also storage bins for coal to heat the ovens. And the staff, like so much else about the Titanic, was epic. More than 100 cooks worked in the galleys, along with a dozen pastry chefs and five butchers.
For many passengers, dining was about fashion as much as about food. “Jewels flashed from the gowns of the women,” one survivor, May Futrelle, recalled. “How fondly they wore their latest Parisian gowns.” The evening “was the first time that most of them had the opportunity to display their newly acquired finery,” she told a newspaper two weeks after the disaster.
Hoffman said that it was up to Simmons to work out the ingredients for tonight’s meal. “We had heard somewhere that the menu existed because it was in the pockets of a few of the survivors — they took the menus with them” when they left the dining room, he said. “But the recipes didn’t exist. Historians have not been able to find them.”
Simmons said she wanted to appeal to 21st-century palates. “They don’t need to hire me if they want to recreate it exactly as if was, and do we all want to eat it exactly as it was?” she said. “Tastes change, evolve, and things are served a certain way at a certain time because that was the style of cooking.”
And the “Nearer, My God, to Thee” drink? It is a modern take on the peaches in chartreuse jelly from 1912. Marisa Capasso, Aramark’s general manager at the science center, who devised it, described it as a sweet concoction with green chartreuse, peach schnapps, maraschino liqueur and fresh lime juice.