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LAST DINNER ON THE TITANIC Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner By Rick Archbold & BY SAM SIFTON it's been 85 years since the shoddily built British liner Titanic took its maiden voyage and sank in the north Atlantic, drowning nabobs and scrub immigrants alike. But the years have been kind to its memory -- not to mention those who've invested in it. The next few months will see the release of a big-money Hollywood treatment about the ship; the opening of an eponymous Broadway show (the New York tabloids have lately been running stories about the musical's difficulties -- the set won't sink properly); the rerelease of an NBC miniseries starring George C. Scott; the debut of three TV documentaries; and a summer plan to raise a portion of the hull. Oh, and just this month, the publication of "Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner." Of course the Titanic wasn't a very great liner, now was she? But good Lord -- at least before you went into the water and as long as you weren't in the third-class dining room eating cabin biscuits, gruel and coffee for supper -- the grub was superb. As Rich Archbold (a cheery writer with a grim bent; he also wrote "Hindenburg: An Illustrated History") estimates in his opening essay, "There were as many staff as passengers in first and second class and ... the majority of these were involved in preparing or serving food." Quite a bit of food, actually: The fifth course of the final dinner in the Titanic's first-class dining room was a choice of lamb, roast duckling or sirloin of beef; the seventh was roast squab on wilted watercress, and four more courses followed that, including foie gras in the ninth slot and chocolate éclairs for dessert. And then, before a watery death, cigars and port. It's all a little creepy, frankly. Hyperion has, as it generally does, put together a handsome book, and I very much enjoyed looking at the prints and ephemera collected to illustrate the pages, particularly the photographs of cooks in the kitchens, and the odd found menu or meal ticket. But Archbold's text grows more twee by the page ("Unfortunately," he writes in a chapter about the Ritz restaurant on the bridge deck, "none of the surviving passengers who ate there on the last evening tucked a copy of the menu into the pocket of a dinner jacket, so we can only surmise what the bill of fare included"), and when he gets to the appendix chapter, "Hosting a Titanic Dinner," it falls deeply into something that might be, in another context (a recipe book about Sharon Tate's final meal, say) necrolatry. "To make your re-creation of the last dinner on the Titanic complete," Archbold advises, "you and your guests may wish to assume the roles of some of the famous and not-so-famous diners." Ah, yes: Mrs. Pauline Gibson ("We know little of this shadowy figure ... beyond her first name and the fact that she was married to a Mr. Leonard Gibson") -- that's me! Archbold's co-author, Dana McCauley, has done some fascinating historical work here, though, and her knowledge of both Edwardian cuisine and its adaptation to modern kitchens will serve one well if the recipes printed throughout the second half of the text appeal. And some of them do, in the most nostalgic of ways. Among others, there's a rich-as-Croesus filet mignon number, with foie gras and truffle; a nice second-class dinner of baked haddock with "sharp" sauce; and a third-class tea plate of beef ragout with potatoes and pickles. But this notion that the Titanic was a symbol of "an Edwardian age steaming unwittingly toward oblivion" -- as social historian Walter Lord puts it in his foreword and the book tries mightily to prove -- is slightly more dishonest than pure nostalgia. It was an act of God, after all, that put the Titanic down. As the sinking of the Lusitania three years later reminds, it was World War I that really killed Edwardianism, left it deep at the bottom of the Irish Sea.
Sam Sifton is senior editor of NYPress. Recipe for Filets Mignons Lili P R E V I O U S R E V I E W S "Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies" reviewed by Christine Muhlke (04/02/97)
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