Veronica Hinke
Appearances
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
It was supposed to make people feel a sense of warmth and coziness as well as elegance. There would have been flowers on the tables, lots and lots of beautiful, plump, fluffy roses. You would be watching your P's and Q's in here very carefully because everything about the way this space is laid out and designed, it's a very discreet space and it demands respect.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
The dinner went for hours. There were hors d'oeuvres and oysters, probably oysters with a mignette sauce, a nice light sauce made with shallots and a nice little bit of crushed back pepper. consomme olga, cream of barley soup, there was salmon with mousseline sauce, and that was just to start.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
There were things on this menu that really revealed the incredible decadence even further than what we knew before this menu was discovered. There were tornadoes of beef a la Victoria. There was cream of asparagus soup and squab a la Goddard. Mallard duck with port wine sauce. And the desserts are really interesting too.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
Victoria pudding, which is very similar to like a regular plum pudding, but Victoria pudding is a little bit different. It's topped with a nice, big, fluffy meringue. There were apricots bordelou, which was almost like a tart, and then petites mocha, which was probably petit fours or small little cakes of a mocha-flavored cake.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
And then there was something that we see again and again on first-class menus, in the Titanic menus, French ice cream. French ice cream is made with eggs, whereas American is not.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
He was a really ambitious young man, like so many of the people who were aboard the Titanic. He told his friends and family, if I can do this in two crossings on the Titanic, meaning across the Atlantic Ocean and back again, which unfortunately in his case did not happen, he said that he could get a job in any of the finest hotels in London. So he was a really ambitious, interesting young man.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
He was in charge of all of the different ice creams and the ice, ice that would have gone into the cocktails and all the different things that would have needed ice.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
The Bronx was created at the Waldorf Astoria. It's an orange juice-based drink with gin. If you like a mimosa, which is champagne and orange juice, this is a little drier, of course. It still has orange juice in it, but it doesn't have the bubbles and the sweetness. One of the things so special about the Titanic now is that it's a time capsule.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
There were many cocktails that were popular around that time that literally got lost with prohibition. Drinks like the Bronx and the Clover Club, they literally lost their hold and became forgotten.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
One of the bartenders at the time, he had been to the Bronx Zoo, or so he explained. When he was making this new cocktail, he thought of the animals he had seen, and he thought, I'm going to call it the Bronx because I was just at the Bronx Zoo, and the animals there reminded me of how people can behave when they've had too much to drink.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
but don't think it was necessarily a bunch of people getting drunk. I think there was a lot of consumption, but I never have come across anything that implies that there was any debauchery or anything out of hand.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
The Syrian passengers, I would imagine, very likely brought with them things like tabbouleh, which is a very traditional meal for them and probably some breads they would have brought that they were familiar with. So I think they probably would have brought a few things with them to start the voyage off with something they're familiar with.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
Before the Titanic sailed, people in third class on a ship would have had to bring their own meals. And not just for one day, but for many days. Enough food so that if the journey got delayed because of whatever, weather, you know, mechanical delay, coal strike, whatever it might be, they'd have enough to eat. And they'd have enough for their family to eat too.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
So if you can imagine packing all that food. But they had to because there were not dining opportunities for third class prior to Titanic.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
3. Into the Atlantic…
At the bottom of the menu, it was spelled out very clearly, any complaint respecting of the food supplied, want of attention, or incivility should be at once reported to the purser or chief steward. For purposes of identification, each steward wears a numbered badge on the arm.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
This staircase adds to the theater of what the Titanic truly was. It was a place for people to go and to meet their friends or make new friends. As you were dressing up in your cabin, you'd be thinking about, how am I going to look on the grand staircase tonight? And it was just a really special gathering place.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And we see that in the details throughout the staircase, the cherub statues, the scrolling stair rail and the beautiful ornate design of it. And then very subtle, but yet thoughtful floor design. where you see a square pattern repeated throughout.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
And again, screed windows that aren't just like a porthole, a round porthole that you'd expect to see on a ship, but they are arched windows that let the light in. Those were the things that made the Titanic special.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
The Titanic was a ship of firsts in many ways, and one of them was the Alucard restaurant. It was a much smaller area, but it still had a lot of the same types of features as the first-class dining saloon, a little more floral. This was a more feminine room, pink throughout.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
1. The Biggest Ship in the World
lamps with little shades around them, mirrors on the walls to give the same type of Versailles type of impression to make that French influence throughout.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
For first class, for example, you had a swimming pool, indoor swimming pool, which was new for ships. That hadn't been around before. You had the gym, you had squash courts, you had all sorts of leisure facilities.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
Life on board Titanic for those few days seems to have been like a big party, definitely for the first class passengers. They were all sizing each other up to begin with. A lot of them were coming back from business trips from London back to New York. So there was a kind of pecking order even amongst the first classes as to who was the most important there. There was a lot of networking going on.
Titanic: Ship of Dreams
4. Iceberg Dead Ahead
You know, to not even have had a lifeboat drill was just crazy. Today, we just wouldn't tolerate that. Even if you're on a cross-channel ferry, you want to know where your muster station is and what the rules are for when things go wrong.