In 1910, a Chicago publisher called the Hotel Monthly Press issued a working manual by Charles Fellows titled The Menu Maker: Suggestions for Selecting and Arranging Menus for Hotels and Restaurants. It is not a history. It is a tool for stewards, headwaiters, and chefs, and its index is the most useful thing in it for anyone trying to understand what the American Plan was. The index lists, in sequence: “Breakfast, American Plan,” “Luncheon, American Plan,” “Dinner, American Plan,” then “Luncheon, European Plan,” “Dinner, European Plan.” Two formats, side by side, in one book. No argument between them is recorded on those pages. What the manual records is a difference in how a bill of fare is built.
That distinction matters because the American Plan is often described as a pricing scheme — your room came with meals — and then treated as a historical curiosity or a marketing gimmick. The 1910 manual shows something more concrete. The plan was a menu format, and a menu format is a labor document. It tells you how many dishes a kitchen was expected to produce, how often the card changed, and who absorbed the cost of variety.
The American Plan card as a labor document
Fellows prints a full American Plan breakfast card for Sunday, March 1. The card is organized by category: fruit, cereals, eggs, hot meats, specials, potatoes, hot breads, coffee and tea. Under cereals alone the card lists Pillsbury’s Vitos, Shredded Wheat Biscuit, Cream of Wheat, Apitezo, oatmeal, boiled rice, Pettijohn’s Breakfast Food, Force, puffed rice, toasted corn flakes, Zest, Malta Vita, and Grape Nuts. Under eggs: boiled, fried, scrambled, poached or shirred, au gratin, à la Creole, au beurre noir, and omelettes plain, ham, parsley, jelly, or Spanish. Under hot meats: ham or bacon, calf’s liver and bacon, veal cutlet, pork, mutton, veal or lamb chops, tenderloin steak, sirloin steak, rump steak, with garnitures. Then a “special” column of starred dishes that the manual says are “changed from meal to meal.”
Read as a menu, that is a list of choices. Read as a labor document, it is a schedule. A kitchen producing that card needed a steward to order against it, a chef to assign it, and a brigade to execute it before the dining room opened. The manual’s own note on the starred dishes — changed from meal to meal — is the part that matters most. Variety on an American Plan card was not a one-time flourish. It was a recurring obligation, and the labor behind it recurred with it.
Fellows does not describe the wages, hours, or working conditions of the people who produced these cards. That silence is itself part of the record. The manual is written for the people who designed the work, not the people who did it.
What the European Plan cards show
In the same manual, the European Plan luncheon and dinner cards print a price beside each dish. Rockaways, half-dozen, 35 cents. Broiled live lobster, chili sauce, $1.10 or 60 cents. Mashed potatoes, 15 cents. Pot of coffee for one, 15 cents; for two, 25 cents. The American Plan cards in the same book carry no per-dish prices at all.
That is the visible difference between the two formats as Fellows presents them: one card prices the dish, the other does not. It is a format difference, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not prove. It does not prove that hotels were at war over the two plans. It does not prove that American Plan guests ate better or worse than European Plan guests. It shows that a menu maker working in 1910 had to be able to build both kinds of card, and that the two kinds required different accounting at the point of service.
For a modern reader, the analogy is formal rather than historical: a fixed-price breakfast and an à la carte menu still differ in where the price appears and who carries the risk of the guest’s choices. The 1910 cards are a clean teaching example of that difference, nothing more.
The tipping question, and the limits of the index
The manual’s index also lists “A Dissertation on The Bill of Fare Maker vs. The Waiter and the Tipping System,” at page 57. That line is the only part of the dissertation retrieved for this piece. It is enough to establish that Fellows’ book treated the relationship between menu design, waiters, and tipping as a subject worth a chapter. It is not enough to say what the chapter argues. Anyone citing Fellows on tipping should read page 57 first.
What the index line does suggest, cautiously, is that the American Plan was understood by at least one trade publisher as a labor-relations question and not only a pricing question. A card without printed prices changes the waiter’s role: the guest is not choosing against a visible number, and the transaction between guest and server is structured differently. Whether Fellows thought that improved or worsened the waiter’s position is a question the index cannot answer.
A later portrait: the Cheshire House, 1933
Twenty-three years after Fellows’ manual, The New Yorker published a portrait of the Cheshire House in Keene, New Hampshire, in its issue of February 11, 1933. The piece describes a country hotel where the bill of fare carried no prices. The narrator, having forgotten to ask at the desk, reports: “As it turned out, you just eat—for two dollars.”
That is a surviving American Plan practice, described by a visitor. It is one hotel, in one year, in one region. It is not evidence of a national trend, and it should not be used as such. But it is useful for a different reason: it shows what the American Plan looked like at the point of service, and it shows who appears in the record when a writer describes that point of service.
The waitress in the piece is asked how long she has worked there and is “noncommittal.” She is asked how much dinner costs and says she doesn’t know. The narrator suspects she does know and is minding her own business. Either way, the person carrying the plate is not the person who holds the price. The piece also notes “the aged Negro bellboys who sit on a bench in the lobby,” and, on a tour of the kitchens, “a bent and aged party in an apron” cutting up masses of liver for cats. These are asides. They are also the only labor the document records in any detail.
What the documents support, and what they do not
The evidence assembled here supports a modest argument. The American Plan, as it appears in a 1910 trade manual, was a menu format with a recurring labor obligation: a daily-changing card, no printed prices, and a kitchen organized to produce variety on schedule. The European Plan, in the same manual, was a format with printed prices per dish. The two coexisted in one working book. A 1933 magazine portrait shows one American-plan hotel still operating on the no-prices convention, with its labor visible mainly in passing.
The evidence does not support a story about hotels fighting over the two plans. No retrieved source documents such a conflict. It does not support claims about the plan’s rise, decline, or market share. It does not support a summary of Fellows’ tipping chapter. And it does not support treating the Cheshire House as typical of American hotels nationally in 1933.
What it does support is a method. When a menu card carries no prices, the historian’s question should shift from what the guest paid to who produced the card and under what arrangement. The 1910 manual answers the first half of that question in detail and leaves the second half blank. The 1933 portrait fills in a little of the second half, in asides, about a waitress, some bellboys, and a person cutting liver. That imbalance — the menu fully documented, the labor barely — is the most honest thing the sources have to say about the American Plan.
Questions readers ask
Was the American Plan the same as full board? In the sources here, the American Plan appears as a menu format in which the bill of fare carries no per-dish prices. The 1933 Cheshire House portrait describes a flat two-dollar dinner with no prices on the card. The retrieved documents do not support a broader definition covering every meal arrangement at every hotel.
Did hotels stop using the American Plan because of competition with the European Plan? Nothing in the retrieved sources documents that. The 1910 manual treats both as formats a menu maker might need. The 1933 portrait shows one hotel still using the no-prices convention. A claim about why the plan declined would need dated ledgers, contracts, or trade-association proceedings that are not in this evidence set.
Where can I read the primary documents? Fellows’ Menu Maker (Hotel Monthly Press, 1910) is available in full text through the Internet Archive, catalog record cu31924000500433. The Cheshire House portrait appeared in The New Yorker on February 11, 1933.
What would settle the open questions? A dated hotel ledger or payroll record showing American Plan labor arrangements; a price board or contract from a specific hotel showing how the plan was priced in practice; and the full text of Fellows’ page 57 on the bill of fare maker, the waiter, and tipping. Until those are in hand, the argument stays where the documents put it: a menu format, a labor obligation, and a record that names the work mainly in asides.