In 1899, the New York Public Library received a query from a Miss Frank E. Buttolph, who wanted to know if it would add restaurant menus to its growing collections.
The answer was yes, and Miss Buttolph, then 49, began spending 25 years visiting restaurants in the city and writing hoteliers and other correspondents abroad, eventually amassing more than 25,000.
They have periodically been dusted off and put on display, providing visitors with a view of the changing tastes and spending habits of everyone from Park Avenue power brokers to South Street stevedores.
Now, those menus, and thousands of others in collections around the country, are being sifted by oceanographers seeking hints of changes in fish and shellfish populations and popularity before good records were kept. "A menu was a piece of ephemera, it wasn't meant to be saved, but thankfully some people collected them," said Glenn A. Jones, an oceanographer at the Galveston campus of Texas A&M University and a leader of the research.
Only by knowing how bountiful the ocean was can one determine the potential for restoring important marine fisheries, he said. Before fisheries agencies routinely collected data on landings and prices, he added, there was not a lot of information to go on. Menus also are one of the only tools for tracking shifting consumer demand for various species.
Dr. Jones presented initial findings last week at a meeting of marine biologists in Kolding, Denmark, that are part of an international project, the Census of Marine Life, which is an effort to create a detailed picture of past and current stocks of marine species by 2010 (https://www.coml.org/).
On menus, seafood types were seen to come and go as various species grew in popularity, were fished out and were then replaced by something else.
New England and New York menus showed how Atlantic halibut was replaced by cod, which was replaced by haddock, which was followed by the mix of juvenile haddock and cod called by the market name scrod.
Dr. Jones said he first examined the 400 boxes of menus in the New York library's Buttolph collection three years ago. Hundreds of them provide precise snapshots of species and price.
Altogether, 200,000 menus have been uncovered in the research, mainly in New England, the New York collection and San Francisco. About 10,000 show prices and dates.
Such menus provide an indirect measure of scarcity when the price is adjusted for inflation, Dr. Jones said. They also show the resilience of species.
For example, oysters have been a steady resource. In New York and Massachusetts, their price held constant from the 1850's through the 1950's at 50 cents to $1 apiece in 2004 dollars. The price doubled in the next decade but then held steady for 40 years.
Abalone, the mango-size Pacific Ocean mollusks with tender scalloplike flesh, has an entirely different history. They were once so abundant in California that old photographs show shell heaps rising to the rooflines of fishermen's shacks.
The delicacy started appearing on San Francisco menus in the 1920's, and the price of an entree stayed steady through the 1930's at about the equivalent of $7 in 2004 dollars.
Since the 1950's, Dr. Jones said, the price of abalone has shot up at 7 to 10 times the rate of inflation. Abalone served in the city now comes from places as far away as Australia.