‘A Moment of Pleasant Indecision’

In the summer of 1957 a young woman named Shirley Kubik got a job attending to passengers on Trans World Airlines. After the company determined that she met its strict physical and lifestyle requirements—clear skin, aged twenty to twenty-seven, between 100 and 135 pounds, between five-foot-two and five-foot-eight, good vision, unwed—she was outfitted with a pillbox hat designed by Oleg Cassini, who would later become synonymous with Jackie Kennedy’s headwear. “Lucky Girl,” proclaimed a TWA pamphlet outlining the job and its stringent rules. “She’s won her wings as a TWA hostess!” 

Kubik, who had to resign in October 1958 because she got married, was among the early generations of women who worked this new job, then commonly called “air hostess.” Often former nurses, they took care of the passengers who got sick, loaded luggage, ensured that seats were properly bolted, and, of course, served food.

The complicated, festive, painstakingly orchestrated meals they served feature heavily in a charming new exhibition now on view in a dining room–sized gallery at the New York Historical (recently renamed from New-York Historical Society). Curated by Nina Nazionale, “Dining in Transit” gathers a range of memorabilia—menus, cookbooks, brochures—documenting the food that travelers enjoyed on the ships, planes, and trains of the early-to-mid-twentieth century and the labor of the workers who provided it. The show pays frank attention to the financial incentives that motivated the operators of ocean liners, railroads, and airlines to treat their customers so hospitably, cannily predicting that they could use oysters, beef Wellington, kale salad, and martinis to edge out the competition. It revels in the nostalgic glamour of these luxury meals even as it alludes to the patterns of exclusion and exploitation that made them possible. The prevailing racial, economic, and gender hierarchies of the first half of the twentieth century were, the show makes clear, on full display in transit dining rooms and kitchens—an argument that gets all the stronger as the focus turns from international ocean liners to domestic enterprises like TWA.

“Dining in Transit” opens with the transatlantic ocean liner: lush illustrations of ships adorn beautifully inscribed menu books, which included offerings like—to name a few dishes from the RMS Campania menu of August 27, 1905—Russian caviar, green turtle, roast lamb, roast duckling, frog’s legs, and baked York ham. The food was extravagant, but the major liners were also in the business of what we might today call immersive brand experiences. The Hamburg-American Line collaborated with the Ritz Carlton London to open an upscale on-board restaurant, The Carlton, on the SS Amerika in 1905, and then developed a similar restaurant on the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria the next year. The liner hired the celebrated chef Auguste Escoffier, fresh off publishing Le Guide Culinaire, to run the kitchens. Escoffier—effectively the dean of French cooking at the time and, as Paul Levy has written in these pages, “still the secular patron saint of most professional chefs”—was presumably an expensive hire.

“Few restaurants in the whole world, at sea or ashore, can surpass the Queen Elizabeth’s main dining salon,” boasts a peppy voiceover in an archival promotional clip that cuts between close-ups of lobster and shots of gowned women and their natty dining companions on one of England’s premiere liners. “A moment of pleasant indecision awaits you as the hors d’oeuvres table is brought,” the voice continues over footage of a waiter wheeling a cart up to a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a string of diamonds. The French liner SS Normandie, for its part, welcomed travelers into a mirrored dining room meant to echo the hall of mirrors at Versailles; the show includes a photograph of the dozens of white-hatted chefs it employed.

These ocean liners were not exactly leisure cruises, but operators still tried to sell the idea that the journey was part of the vacation experience, Nazionale told me. Operators from France, Germany, and England used the dining rooms to showcase their national cuisines, although French dining—the height of sophistication at the time—was available on many ships. The SS Bremen, according to an October 18, 1929, menu, offered its second-class travelers Frankfurt sausages and sauerkraut, alongside a braised haunch of beef flamande and steak tartare.

Middle-class travelers weren’t left out. Ships offered cheaper tickets to less well-off passengers in what some began in 1920 to call “tourist third class.” This, too, was a canny rebranding: the same quarters, previously called “steerage,” had for many years been used primarily by immigrants. Immigration quotas opened up space for vacationers, and a new tier was born. The food in third class flirted with fine dining, too. A November 1929 tourist-third-class menu from the RMS Cameronia, illustrated with an elegant drawing of birds, lists Windsor canapés, consommé Claremont, dressed green kale, veal cutlets, Oxford pudding, “French pastry,” and “American ice cream.”

Like other menus in the exhibition, it lists no prices. All the food was included in the cost of the ticket, so the liners didn’t make money off the swish meals directly—but the extravagance went a long way toward justifying the bill. That price was steep: the lower-end tickets at the time cost about $2,000 in today’s dollars; more luxe accommodations, Nazionale told me, would have cost closer to $15,000 for a one-way trip. The meals were, in effect, loss leaders for an industry that in the coming decades would start losing its dominance to air travel.

By the late nineteenth century, a domestic answer to the international glamour of the liner ship had arrived in the form of the transnational railroad. The Pullman Palace Car Company, which provided train cars to the major railroads, introduced a dining car in 1868. All the food was prepared onboard; even fresh pie crusts, Nazionale noted, were cooked in the small dining car kitchens. The menus highlighted regional specialties. One produced by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1932 offered Chesapeake Bay clams and shad roe, as well as fixed-price meals with sirloin steak for $1.75 (about $40 today). Operators did whatever they could to promote their dining reputations: the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, for example, sold its bottled dressing to the public and produced souvenir cocktail tumblers. History rippled through menu copy: the Pennsylvania Railroad started to include lines about wartime rations and manpower shortages.

Traveling by train was cheaper than by ship, and the meals were less ritualized. But the dining cars could still be sites of elegance and excitement. At the New York Historical a screen between display cases plays the moment in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) when, as the Hudson River speeds by outside a train window, Cary Grant sips a martini and flirts outrageously with a young Eva Marie Saint, who tells him coyly that she slipped the waiter five dollars to seat them together.

Black passengers were excluded from these luxuries. In general they had to wait to be served until after the white passengers had eaten; sometimes they were served only the white passengers’ leftovers, which they had to take back to a segregated car. The workers on Pullman cars were largely Black men compelled into servility. In the years after the Civil War, as George M. Pullman was building his company and hiring porters for the trains’ signature sleeping cars, he was known to recruit formerly enslaved men who had worked inside plantation houses, where they would have been trained in deferential service to white people.

The Pullman Company’s literature emphasized this dynamic. One pamphlet on display includes an illustration of a Black man bowing to two seated white men in a dining car. An exacting Pullman instruction manual uses photographic examples to instruct employees on standard service: one spread shows waiters demonstrating the proper way to hold drinks and towels. Porters were paid by the mile, getting their wages once they hit 11,000 each month. They regularly put in more than seventy hours a week, relying on tips to supplement their low pay. In 1915 Pullman employees were making less than $30 a month—about $960 today. It wasn’t until 1925, when the workers unionized into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, that the job started to become a pathway to the middle class.

The one object borrowed from outside the institution, on loan from New York University, is one of the first American cookbooks by a Black chef, Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus (1911). Born into slavery in Tennessee in 1857, Rufus Estes started working as a chef for Pullman in 1883. In the book’s introductory “Sketch of My Life” he recounts his years attending to such notables as President Grover Cleveland, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and Princess Eulalie of Spain; later he took charge of a railroad president’s private car, then went on to work as a chef with subsidiaries of the US Steel Corporation in Chicago. Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus is dense with recipes for meats, sauces, salads, drinks, and desserts. “This cake is to be eaten warm with butter,” Estes writes in a page on tea cakes. One shouldn’t slice it, he warns, “but cut through the crust with a sharp knife and break apart.”

An act of Congress in 1930 incentivized airplanes to start ferrying commercial travelers, and soon TWA, American, and United Airlines were jetting Americans around the country. Early planes were slow, bumpy, pricey, and strange; in the hopes of making flights more comfortable, carriers started to offer food, and, shortly thereafter, to hire attractive young women to serve it. (For the brief period before teams of women were brought on to perform such women’s work, male copilots were responsible for passing out picnic baskets of cold fried chicken.) In the spring of 1930 Boeing Air Transport, which later became part of United, hired eight former nurses to take care of the thirteen passengers on a flight from San Francisco to Chicago, sending them on a twenty-hour trip that made thirteen stops.

Then as now, flight attendants were responsible for a broad range of duties, from food service to safety. A stewardess training video from 1949 shows a pert young woman being chastised for holding a tray filled with porcelain the wrong way, then being advised on the proper technique. “Much, much better, Miss Drake,” a male voiceover booms. Then, when it comes time to serve: “Remember your deep knee bends and teeterboard exercises, and use them in the aisle.” As a jaunty New York Times article from 1936—headlined “Air Hostess Finds Life Adventurous”—explained, “Travel by air seems to make everybody hungry, so meal time is a gala occasion.” The reporter describes a meal service that typically included sandwiches, soups, salads, and chops and fried chicken “kept hot in a container.” In 1930 the women were making $125 a month for a hundred hours of work. Only in the late 1950s did Mohawk Airlines hire the country’s first Black flight attendant, Ruth Carol Taylor. 

By the end of World War II flights were getting cheaper and reaching higher altitudes, with less need for frequent fuel breaks. After a few years of sandwiches and salads, by the late 1930s a menu from American Airlines was offering filet mignon, hot Parker House rolls, and petits fours. By the 1940s United Airlines was hiring Swiss chefs, who soon became part of the airline experience: a TWA notecard from early in the decade features an illustration of the pilot, hostess, and chef. “It is the pleasure of TWA’s personnel,” it reads, “to add to your pleasure when you fly the Route of the Stratoliners.”

An aggressively charming set of holiday menus shows the care and sense of play that airlines were putting into special-occasion meal plans: a United Airlines Halloween menu from 1944, illustrated with a flinching black cat and a pumpkin, offers brown bread and orange muffins, harvest fruit salad with brandy, deep dish pumpkin pie, “evil eye salad,” and jelly beans. A St. Patrick’s Day menu featured all-green foods; a Valentine’s Day menu listed both “❤️s of celery” and “❤️s of salad.”

Even regular days could be the occasion for a menu prepared with great effort. On a 1950s United Airlines breakfast menu, the offerings appear beside a rooster in a chef’s toque who holds a tray of steaming coffee, juice, chilled melon, scrambled eggs with link sausage, and a sweet roll. “This menu prepared in United Airlines Flight Kitchen at Los Angeles, Max Burkhardt, Chef,” a note specifies. The menus were meant to be taken home, appreciated as souvenirs.

About two years ago, Nazionale told me, as preparations for the show were underway, someone happened to reach out to the New York Historical to share that her mother, Shirley Kubik, had been an air hostess with TWA and that she had some items to donate. The objects on display from her time with the airline become a case study for the labor the show foregrounds. In addition to her air hostess hat, one of Kubik’s employee evaluations is on display: on September 3, 1957, a few months into her job, she flew on a Martin 202 to Saint Louis. The copilot evaluated her performance at duties such as giving “deplaning passengers the impression that [she] really enjoyed having them aboard.” (She got a “Yes.”) So thoroughly were flight attendants expected to make passengers feel liked and appreciated that it was to describe their jobs in particular that the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor.”

After Jimmy Carter’s Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 permitted airlines to set their own fares, they started putting less of a priority on wooing and retaining customers with whimsical meals. In the decades that followed they instead competed increasingly hard on price, cutting costs wherever they could. For a time they served notoriously bad meals—“what’s the deal with airplane food?”—but after September 11 major carriers stopped meal service entirely on most domestic flights.

Now a smaller field of consolidated airlines focuses on “debundling” and maximizing shareholder returns. In the decades-long slump toward less festive—though more affordable and safer—air travel,  food was an early sacrifice: industry legend holds that, in the 1980s, an airline CEO saved $40,000 a year by removing a single olive from each salad. First the olive went, then the whole salad. Now we are lucky to get a Biscoff.