by Richard Foss
The most daring and unusual innovation in the marketing of inflight meals came from an airline that had previously served almost nothing. Northwest had a history going back to 1926, but before the war had operated a fleet of Lockheed Electras and other aircraft without galleys. During the war Northwest pilots gained considerable experience flying the North Pacific, and in 1947 the airline whose longest route had been from Chicago to Seattle started flying to Hawaii, and was also awarded a route to Tokyo and onward to Manila. They bought Stratocruisers and DC-4s, painted the tails their signature bright red, and started calling the carrier Northwest Orient.
Service on those overseas flights was apparently conventional, though Asian-style meals were loaded for flights beyond Tokyo. It was another story in the United States, where Northwest decided to promote their Asian service by decorating their aircraft with Japanese motifs. This was a daring decision less than ten years after the end of the war with Japan, when animosity toward the former enemies was still fresh in some people’s minds. Nevertheless Northwest went whole-hog with the concept, calling the lower-level cocktail lounges aboard their Stratocruisers the Fujiyama Room, with a live bonsai tree by the access staircase. For passengers on flights from Minneapolis to Portland this must have been the height of exotica, a taste of the larger world to enliven a business trip or holiday jaunt.
The experience was detailed in a book called Fujiyama Trays and Oshibori Towels by former Northwest stewardess Ann Kerr, who served aboard these aircraft. In one passage she quotes Northwest’s food service manager Al Cariveau describing the centerpiece of Northwest’s service at that time, a luxuriant platter of canapés called the Fujiyama Tray.
In the center of the large colorful tray was a pineapple cut flat on the bottom. The following items were skewered onto the pineapple with Asian type picks—shrimp, cheese, ham, cherry tomatoes, and various types of fruit cut into squares. Tray decorations included small wooden Asian dolls and other oriental trinkets, parasols and ribbons.21
As is obvious to anyone who knows Japanese food, this wasn’t it—this arrangement has more in common with the pu-pu platters served in tiki bars, minus the flaming spareribs. Dinners that followed these appetizers were more conventional, though more opulent than served aboard most other carriers. Anne Kerr remembered meals consisting of
chilled lobster tidbits mignonette with rye wafers; then consommé Regale and Terrace salad bowl. The main course was served from a heated serving cart: choice prime beef . . . or on Fridays beef or African lobster tail; potatoes duchesse, long cut green beans and onion rings, pumpernickel bread and oven fresh rolls with creamery butter. Wines served with a dinner included Vino Orvieto Orlando; Pommard cruise (sic) burgundy; and Imperator champagne, dry. Soon to roll down the aisle was a dessert tray featuring your choice of French pastries, cheesecake, or cheese variants and wafers. After dessert the cart rolled again—carrying silver decanters of B&B, Drambuie and crème de menthe. Mints Diane and the ever-present Marlboro cigarettes completed the service.22
Though the subtleties of traditional Japanese food may have eluded their chefs and passengers, Northwest’s slogan at this time was direct and to the point: “You Dine The Best When You Fly Northwest.”
This menu from United Airlines in the 1950s shows the Stratocruiser’s layout, with the galley in the center and a lower-deck “Hawaiian Lounge.” There was no attempt to serve Hawaiian-themed food or beverages.
Image from author’s collection
Other carriers preferred to reflect American regional cuisine; Memphis-based Chicago & Southern Airlines called their aircraft “Dixie Liners” and boasted in 1950 that on their flights to New Orleans they served “cuisine influenced by the best traditions of famed Southern chefs.” In an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, food and beverage director J. W. Meyer said that their most popular dishes included Creole salad remoulade, Mardi Gras onion consommé, black bottom pie, and a dish that modern diners would connect with the food crazes of the era more than Southern traditions, “plantation frozen tomato salad.”23 Meyer provided the recipe for these items in that article, and you will find it and others at the back of this book.
Every carrier that served meals created themes that were carried through in the design of their china and glassware and the color schemes of napkins and tablecloths. Long-lasting brands were created at this time—American Airlines Flagship flights and United Airlines Red Carpet service both debuted in the early 1950s and remained those airlines’ trademarks for decades.24 These themed services and others like them showed that airlines both domestically and internationally were trying to differentiate their services and create brand identifications as never before. They continued doing so as a new generation of aircraft brought improved technologies to both cooking and flying. The jet age was dawning, and with it an era of fast mass transit in the sky.
chapter 11
Airline Food in Popular Culture
The combined efforts of airlines to woo the tourist market and the regulations that forced carriers to lower their fares had the desired effect: people who had never flown before took to the air as passengers, and in the process tried airline food for the first time. If we are to believe most published reports, they did not like it. Having had no experience with the era when inflight food was not available at all, or was limited to cold picnic lunches, they measured their meals against dining experiences on the ground. Not surprisingly, it was found wanting.
Even some people who should have known better were highly critical. The eminent historian Bernard DeVoto wrote a famous account of long-distance flying for Harper’s Magazine in 1952. He wrote lyrically about the joys of surveying rivers and farmland from above, but was more a curmudgeon when it came to his meals. Among his comments were,
The airlines will hear no complaint from me if they go back to the box lunch they used to serve, and served well. They ran an excellent lunch counter then; they run a poor restaurant now. I have seldom even had a mediocre meal at it; most are definitely bad. Chair-bound for hours, I would rather trade the counterfeit banquet for a sandwich and a cocktail.1
Other commentators were even less complimentary, and in the late 1950s a comedian named Alan King started making airline food a feature in his routines. He usually began these monologues with the line, “Don’t get me started about airline food,” and then, though nobody had asked him to expand on the topic, he would continue with a litany of high-speed jokes and complaints. His favorite target was Eastern Airlines, and after one particularly savage appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the late 1950s the president of the airline threatened him with a lawsuit.2 It was a measure of the popularity of air travel that King’s routine was considered funny by a broad audience; a decade before, when few people had flown except elite business travelers, these references would have been obscure as jokes about playing polo or yachting.
Among the many cartoons that bashed airline food was this “Mother Goose and Grimm” comic by Mike Peters from October 2001. It suggested that lack of flavor might have been a problem for longer than expected.
Cartoonist Group
In subsequent years jokes about airline food became staples of the comics in Playboy, The New Yorker, and other publications. The topic was even featured in a Broadway musical, the 1964 Steven Sondheim and Richard Rodgers flop “Do I Hear a Waltz?” That play included a song called “What Do We Do? We Fly.” The plot involved a lonely American tourist who has a brief affair with an Italian merchant. The other tourists have a number in which they complain about the horrors of air travel, and the verse on food goes:
I hate most of all the chow.
To know what is what
Is difficult, but
I think I’ve discovered how.
The shiny stuff is tomatoes,
The salad lies in a group.
The curly stuff is potatoes.
The stuff that moves is soup.
Anything that’s brown is meat.
Anything that’s gray—don’t eat!
But what do we do? We fly. Why?
What do we do? We fly!3
Airline meals continued to be vilified; Joan Rivers got a laugh with “The average airplane is sixteen years old, and so is the average airplane meal.”4 On a more elevated plane, the British food guide author and critic Egon Ronay called airline food “premeditated gastronomic murder”5 in the 1960s.
The steady stream of invective continued despite two decades in which the standard rose by any objective measure; it has continued into the twenty-first century and an era in which most flights don’t actually feature meal service. Ellen DeGeneres is one of the modern comics who has joined the pile-in:
It’s horrible food, but we get so excited when we see that cart coming down the aisle . . . it’s the tiniest food I’ve ever seen in my life, but it’s all relative—you look out the window and then back at your tray and say, It’s the size of that house down there! I can’t eat all that! . . . Anything you get, chicken, steak, has grill marks on it, like we actually believe there’s a grill in the front of the plane.6
It seems safe to say that the modern comedians who are mining this particular vein of comedy probably don’t realize that there was a time when steaks were indeed cooked in flight, and there are few survivors from the flying boat era who are still alive to correct them.
chapter 12
Jet Age Mass Transit and Luxury Competition (1958–1966)
Though it was obvious halfway through World War II that jet aircraft could fly far faster than anything with propellers, a variety of technical difficulties kept them from being widely used as passenger aircraft for over a decade. The first passenger jet to be available, the De Havilland Comet, went into service in 1952 with BOAC and Air France, offering passengers hot and cold meals from a full galley and the option of relaxing in an onboard bar. It could carry as many as 44 passengers at 460 miles per hour with very little vibration and was hailed as the future of aviation. After only two years in service, three instances of aircraft disintegrating in flight caused them to be grounded. The Comet was completely redesigned and a new generation entered service in September of 1958, but that new model was overshadowed by another aircraft that debuted less than a month later. This was the Boeing 707, which could carry 179 passengers at 570 miles per hour. Douglas had their similarly sized and slightly faster DC-8 in the air less than a year later, and it was those two aircraft that became the world leaders in commercial aviation.
The introduction of these big jets changed the aviation world and had huge repercussions for meal service. With flights almost twice as fast as previous aircraft and passenger numbers almost twice as large, the onboard crew were faced with a challenge—serve more meals in less time, follow up with beverages, clean up afterward, and keep smiling all the way through the process. For airlines that operated short flights like those between Los Angeles and San Francisco, even beverage service became difficult. Richard Ensign, the director of inflight services for Western Airlines, conducted a study just after that airline got its first jets. He found that excluding the time for takeoff, reaching altitude, descending, and landing, the average period of level flight for Western’s routes was fifty minutes. This meant that if meal service started as soon as it was practical, there was less than thirty seconds per passenger. Ensign found that emptying and storing the glassware took more time than anything else, so in 1958 he tried using plastic glasses and snack trays for the airline’s signature service. The disposable plastic cups cost two cents each—less than the cost of buying real glassware and sanitizing it after each use—and it saved over ten minutes on every flight.1
Western’s “Fiesta Service” to Mexico in the late 1950s had nothing resembling Mexican food, but was famous for a lavish dessert cart. This postcard is from 1956.
Image from author’s collection
Ensign also came up with ways to motivate passengers to eat faster, eliminating any foods that had to be cut with a knife and introducing small foods that required little chewing, like precut club sandwiches and deviled eggs. His ideas were copied by other carriers, and this kind of service became the norm for commuter flights.
Innovations in loading and unloading meals on the aircraft came along with speeding the inflight service. This was necessary because there was a much higher volume of food to be transferred during what was often planned as a brief stop. This was a complex issue, because in this era aircraft did not pull up to a terminal to load and unload passengers, baggage, and cargo—at some airports forklifts were used for meal loading, and at others everything was carried up and down stairs to the tarmac. Both Dobbs and Marriott have been given credit for the invention and first use of hydraulic scissor lift trucks to load meals aboard aircraft, and I have been unable to determine which was first.2
Image provided by Marriott Corporation
These speeded things up immensely because instead of all supplies being loaded from the kitchen to a truck or van, driven to the airport, and unloaded to be transferred to the aircraft, everything was accomplished with the same vehicle. Specialized meal trolleys were developed that were loaded at the catering kitchen and could be stowed directly into a refrigerated compartment aboard the aircraft without unloading, as well as others with electric units that could be plugged in both during the transfer and aboard the aircraft.3 The process was faster and subjected the food trays to less vibration and jolts, so fewer meals were damaged in transit. A dining service checklist from United Airlines during the time when they were making the transition from piston aircraft to jets shows how much easier it was for the cabin crew to keep track of things using the new system—there are fourteen items to inventory on the older equipment, six on the jets.4
Until the invention of the hydraulic lift catering truck, aircraft had to be loaded by hand from vans like those on the left, regardless of the weather. The lift truck simplified catering, as shown in the picture on the right from the early 1960s.
Image provided by Marriott Corporation
The need to invest in this equipment in order to service the new aircraft led to a rapid consolidation in flight catering in the United States, as local airport restaurants and independent caterers could not compete with major companies. In 1957 Don Magarell of United Airlines employed over 750 chefs and catering workers at fifteen flight kitchens, a huge jump from the four facilities they had owned ten years before, and the staff almost doubled in the next decade. Airports around America were remodeled, developments that were paid for by including retail space in the design so the rents would be an ongoing income stream. Restaurants were also included in airports, many of which used the facilities of flight kitchens, but making recipes that were suited for a good experience on the ground. As a result, airports in the United States became money-making enterprises, while they were regarded as a cost of doing business everywhere else in the world.5
Serving different food in airport restaurants and in the air must have come more naturally to flight caterers because they were already learning to cope with making meals to more than one standard. In the United States most airlines had run coach services on entire flights at off-peak hours, but with the introduction of jets carrying twice as many passengers this was impractical. It was decided to reconfigure part of the aircraft with extra legroom and serve better meals there while having the lower-fare service on the opposite side of a curtain.6 The new jets had at least three galleys, and in the new configuration the first-class meals were loaded into one galley, coach meals in the others. Flight crews had to get used to maintaining inventories of different qualities of meals, and of course the ones in first class were both more varied and involved a higher standard of individualized service.
The explosion of economy seats brought many more passengers but also meant that the airlines aggressively st
arted differentiating their product to encourage business travelers not to use the cheaper service. Typical of these were ads for Delta’s Royal Class Service in 1958, which showed stewardesses fawning over passengers with the text
Not two, but three alert stewardesses assure you of every attention in the brief span of a Delta Royal Service Flight. So linger over your luncheon or dinner with its complimentary champagne and choice of entree (tenderloin steak to order, Rock Cornish hen or seafood on appropriate days). There’s also music by Muzak, fast baggage handling, and beverage service for the discerning passengers who specify these luxurious flights.7
Rock Cornish game hen was a fad food of the era; actually an immature crossbreed of a Malayan fighting cock and a Plymouth chicken first bred in Connecticut in the 1950s, the tiny birds were tailor-made for inflight service. A whole bird was a single portion and made a pretty presentation; Inflight Catering Management noted that “Idle Wild farms’ development of the oven-ready stuffed Rock Cornish game hen brought product consistency and a gourmet quality to the use of poultry products for inflight meals.”8
National Airlines, based in Miami, also advertised in 1963 that they served the little hens in first class along with stuffed baked potatoes and “fancy French pastry” and boasted that they would rotate meals “for variety’s sake” even though their other entrées of filet mignon and baked chicken were popular.9 In the same article, sales manager Paul Bell announced “Cloud Dining” service in coach, making the promise that “no meals would be duplicated both eastbound and westbound, or northbound and southbound, and the schedule would be changed once a month,” so that passengers would be guaranteed variety. Three choices were guaranteed even in coach, a high standard for the era.
So many US airlines named their first-class service some variation of the names regal or imperial that it might be suspected that Americans had a lingering fondness for monarchy. This ad ran in 1959.
