Some of the most elaborate menus are for such ceremonial dinners and are clearly intended to outlive the occasion and become treasured souvenirs. At the turn of the century, however, Jim explains that design began to be more influenced by various art movements, making way for Art Nouveau and later modernism to take centre stage. Jim Heimann's new book on Menu Design in Europe is a mouthwatering feast for the eyes, featuring hundreds of European menus from the early 19th century to the end of the millennium. The text, which is replicated in English, French and German, takes a broad brush to ‘culinary history’, informing readers that ‘chefs were newly liberated from their ties to aristocratic families via the French Revolution and began preparing meals for private diners. Many famous establishments are represented as well: Le Grand Vefour, La Tour d'Argent, Les Frères Troisgros in France.

Currently he is cofounder and cochair of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

In the case of the tangible menu, the ability to produce a simplified menu sheet that allows immediate pricing of item changes via the computer has eliminated the need of traditional graphics or offset printer. Am anderen Ende des Designspektrums bildet die Speisekarte des Restaurants Lasserre aus der Mitte des Jahrhunderts surrealistische Einfachheit ab. The structure of the menu as a sequence of courses was both cause and consequence of the gradual disappearance through the 19th century of ‘French service’, in which all the dishes were presented simultaneously, and the rise of ‘Russian service’, which presented a meal in stages.

This is true only up to a point in the case of the example he is describing, an elegant sky-blue double-page from La Tour d’Argent in the 1950s, where outlines of fish platters, vegetable tureens and a coffee cup suggest the nature of the dishes they enclose. The 1891 menu from Paris’s Le Grand Vefour, with its intricate die-cut design, evokes a bustling Belle Epoque bistro, while the 1932 menu from London’s Royal Palace Hotel transports you to the bar at a spirited, Jazz Age nightspot. Edward VII, nickname ‘Tum Tum’, was a regular and enthusiastic guest of honour at these elaborate feasts. One sign of better and more cosmopolitan food is the gradual dwindling of menu French over time, though it lingers on in the socially aspirational world of rotary clubs, livery companies and Oxford colleges, giving birth to such chimeras as ‘dim sum de légumes avec daikon et gingembre confit’.Menu Design in Europe is a mouthwatering feast for the eyes, featuring hundreds of European menus from the early 19th century to the end of the millennium. On the opposite side of the design spectrum, the menu for the mid-century Lasserre restaurant expresses a surrealistic simplicity.

A cultural anthropologist, historian, and an avid collector, he has authored numerous titles on architecture, pop culture, and the history of Los Angeles and Hollywood, including TASCHEN’s Surfing, Los Angeles. As physical items, menus seem to have taken permanent form only in the mid-19th century, replacing the handwritten list. French was the international language of food for centuries and features on menus from Spain to Scandinavia, though nowhere so much or so persistently as in Britain, where it signals a cringing sense of inferiority and the fond hope that anything described as ‘à la’ something else will sound sophisticated. Authored by Steven Heller, co-founder and co-chair of the MFA Design programme at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and edited by Jim Heimann, the executive editor of Taschen America, this publication is a “culinary and graphic travelogue through Europe”.Knowing which knives and forks to use, how to manipulate a lobster pick, avoid spaghetti whiplash and not to drink from the finger bowl are among the skills required in more formal settings, but there is always etiquette. This civilised ‘in-between’, often a sorbet, was intended to ‘cleanse the palate’ after the main course and to prepare the digestive system for the onslaught of the grand finale.

So, although one cannot sit in La Tour D’Argent in 1952 and sample its famous duck dish Le Caneton Tour d’Argent, we can surely imagine what it was like when looking at the waterfowl-themed illustration displaying the night’s offerings. Heimann’s menus illustrate both extremes and with the dawn of the 20th century they move beyond banqueting halls and restaurants to include the bills of fare from liners, trains and, in their early and glamorous days, airlines.There are of course two kinds of menu, though Heimann makes no distinction between them: the restaurant or hotel menu that offers you a choice of meal for which you pay, and the set menu for a formal meal that announces like a theatre programme what you will be given. Heimann is not a snob about them: he includes a 1976 table-mat menu from a McDonald’s in Switzerland, suggesting, with mild passive aggression, that the popularity of American fast food demonstrates the challenge it poses to the ‘culinary superiority of the Continent’. Rosemary Hill refers to the gradual disappearance in the 19th century of ‘French service’ – all dishes set on the table at once – and its replacement by the serving of courses in stages, or ‘Russian service’ ( LRB, 17 November).