FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

The Menu From the Last Lunch on the Titanic Is Up for Grabs

Would you care for a spot of cockie leekie? Perhaps some potted shrimps or soused herrings? One New York-based auction house is selling a luncheon menu taken from the Titanic by one of the survivors.

Would you care for a spot of cockie leekie? Perhaps some potted shrimps or soused herrings?

That is exactly what the first-class passengers ate during their penultimate dining experience on the Titanic—a luncheon that was held on the doomed ship a little over 103 years ago.

It turns out that a passenger who survived the tragic sinking of one of the most magnificent passenger ships ever built, which—of course—was also the subject of one of the most lucrative films ever made, managed to preserve a menu from the lunch that was served on the ship on April 14, 1912. And that menu is now being put up for auction on September 30 in New York City.

Advertisement

Lion Heart Autographs, the online auction house handling the sale, is hoping to fetch up to $70,000 for the crumpled and aging menu. "It's a fascinating story," David Lowenherz, the owner of New York-based Lion Heart Autographs, told The Independent. "These [menus] are very rare and very desirable."

The ship hit an iceberg at 11:40 PM on the night of April 14 and sank in the early morning of April 15. So this is the last lunch that Jack and Rose had together… wait, no, only Rose would have eaten there because it was first-class. Third-class gruel for Jack.

The passengers dined on grilled mutton chops, roast beef, and veal and ham pie. A buffet offered such old-world standards as "salmon mayonnaise" and "round of spiced beef." The cheese board offered eight selections. Twenty-four hours later, only around 700 of the ship's 2,220-plus passengers and crew would survive.

Some of them did so by jumping aboard lifeboats. One of the fortunate was the intriguingly named Abraham Lincoln Salomon, who had dined with Isaac Gerald Frauenthal at the fateful luncheon. Among the few possessions Salomon saved was the menu that is about to be auctioned, signed on the back by Frauenthal, evidently as a memento of the meal.

Sure, it was great to be one of the survivors, but the lifeboat was not without controversy. The press quickly glommed onto rumors that one of the first-class survivors on the lifeboat—an aristocratic Scot named Lord Cosmo Duff-Gordon—had bribed seven crewmembers to quickly row the boat away from the sinking Titanic rather than rescue others. The lifeboat was dubbed the "money boat" or "millionaires' boat," and its occupants were later reviled by the public.

Advertisement

Along with the menu, Mr. Salomon also saved a ticket from one of the Titanic's opulent Turkish baths.

A later investigation by officials found that the rumored bribery on the "money boat" did not in fact deter the crew from attempting to rescue other people—but that others might have been saved if the boat had turned around. Duff-Gordon complained that his reputation "was ruined."

Lion Heart Autographs says the seller of the last-luncheon menu is "the son of a man who was given the items by a direct descendant of one of the survivors of lifeboat."

News of the sale of the lunch menu comes as Titanic buffs mark the 30th anniversary of the wreckage's discovery at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in 1985. That discovery was what made the 1997 James Cameron film—which used actual footage from the wreck—possible.

Who wouldn't want to eat like a pair of old time, star-crossed lovers? Consommé Olga, anyone?