The English dinner menu

About this document

Four pages, printed as the English half of a pair. The Czech edition of the same card survives too, which is the useful part: the two can be read against each other.

Four pages, archived on 22 June 2006 — the oldest menu in the archive.

Only the headings and the Bohemian list are reliably legible in the capture. The rest is left out rather than reconstructed.

Printed as a pair

This is the English half of a two-language set. A Czech edition of the same card survives from the same period and is transcribed separately, which is the genuinely useful thing about both of them: the two can be read against each other, and where they differ the difference is a decision somebody made rather than an accident.

Printing two editions rather than one bilingual card costs twice as much and takes twice as long to update. A restaurant only does it when neither language is a translation of the other in the minds of its guests, which in a Cicero dining room in 2006 is a plausible description of the room.

What gets lost in the crossing

Svíčková appears here as marinated beef under sour cream gravy, and on the fuller menu as pickled beef. Neither is right. The marinade is aromatic rather than sour, built on root vegetables, allspice and bay, and the sauce is strained smooth and finished with cream. Pickled beef describes something else entirely, and it is the kind of translation that gets chosen because it is short enough to fit the line.

Koprová becomes boiled beef in dill gravy, which is accurate and still undersells it, because the dish is named for the sauce and not for the meat. Kuře na paprice becomes chicken paprika, which loses the fact that the Czech dish is a cream sauce and the Hungarian one it is named after usually is not.

The largest casualty is the dumpling. Houskový knedlík and bramborový knedlík are different foods made by different methods and eaten with different things, and English gives both of them the single word dumpling, which in American usage more often means a small boiled ball of dough. Every English Klas menu carries that flattening, and it is why the side choice on the card looks like a formality when in a Czech household it is the actual question.

The oldest document here

Recorded in June 2006, this is the earliest of the surviving files. It matters mainly as a baseline. The Bohemian core visible on it is the same core that is still on the card in 2015, unchanged in composition across nine years, while everything printed around it contracts.

What is legible and what is not

The Bohemian section that does read is worth setting against the later cards. Roast loin of pork, roast duckling, svíčková, koprová, goulash, breaded pork tenderloin, chicken paprika and roast chicken: eight dishes in 2006, and the same eight, in the same order, on the last card recorded nine years later. Whatever else the kitchen changed, it did not touch that block.

One further thing the pair makes visible is which way the translating went. The Czech card names dishes by their sauces and the English card names them by their meat, and that is the order a kitchen uses when it is writing for people who already know the food and then writing again for people who do not. Neither version reads like a translation of the other, which is the point of printing two.

Four pages exist in the capture and only the headings and the Bohemian list read reliably. The rest is left out. Reconstructing the missing sections from the 2003 menu would produce a plausible document and a false one, since a menu that sits in a dining room for years is reprinted with changes nobody records.

All six menus