The Erie Lackawana Dining Car Preservation Society has a unique task, to "preserve the passenger and dining car experience on the Erie Lackawanna and its predecessors through the purchase and restoration of Erie Lackawanna passenger and dining equipment."

But what about dining car menus and recipes? Has there ever been or is there an organized, formal effort to collect this type of information, which I assume would have been nearly tailor made by each respective railroad company?

Just a curiousity after stumbling upon a New York Central menu and recalling my dad's fondness for a "New York Central Style Chicken Sandwhich."

KL

In addition to the actual dining cars the ELDCPS has about 100 different Erie, Lackawanna and Erie Lackawanna dining car menus in our collection. We have a decent collection of menus from railroads around the country (including a Nickel Plate menu - they are fairly hard to find). We sometimes have them on display during events that we do.

We have a number of mimeographed EL recipes and serving instructions that we put into a small recipe book that we sell. We have a few Erie and DL&W recipes and dining car rule books. The rules books are a lot of fun - an Erie book from 1940 has instructions of how to handle notes intercepted between unescorted women and men!

We are always looking to accept additional menus, recipes and rulebooks as donations to our collection. As Kelly points out they are a fascinating history unto themselves.

On a national level I believe that Jim Porterfield maintains an extensive collection of recipes from most of the railroads in this country that operated dining cars.

By the way we also maintain a collection of china patterns, silver, flatware, linens and uniforms as well. There is a lot of history that influenced modern restaurant practice - from Bisquick to standardized menus to kitchen design the railroad dining car set the standards.

I don't know about "organized, formal", but there are collectors of "dining car recipe manuals" that were issued to their cooks by the various roads. See discussion under this heading at http://www.portlandfood.org, for example. Several of the road historical/technical societies have published compendia of dining car recipes, the C&O HS being one of them.

I think it would be useful to establish a national archive of these manuals for research and reference purposes at a properly-funded library.

Take a look at Rule #14 out of an Erie 1940 dining car manual:

If you go to Amazon.com and type in "dining car" and search the books selection you will find a number of books have been published over the years about dinning car including some that contain recipes.