Here’s an artifact from Portland’s culinary past, a banquet menu for an 1888 dinner of the local association of drugstore owners. 8 courses which included oysters, beef tenderloin, baked pike, lobster and saddle of venison.
The menu is from the collections at Rabelais Books in Biddeford.
Wasn’t the Preble House the hotel Charles Dickens stayed in, and hated? The food certainly looks like it was good….
Mark,
Yes, according to a Press Herald article, the person in the room next to him was coughing “two or three in the morning until five or six” and so he got a bad night’s sleep.
Rumor has it that the Tutti Frutti ice cream at The Preble House is out of this world.
The story is well recounted by Philo Calhoun in the Colby Quarterly. Perhaps the lack of strong drink was an issue, although Boz had some laudanum which helped.
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1720&context=cq