Auction house Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd. recently sold a rate first class menu from RSM Titanic. The menu, dated April 11, 1912, three days before its sinking, reached a price of £84,000 (around $102,000).
This isn’t the first menu from Titanic that went up for auction, but it is currently the only one in existence with this specific date. It gives an insight into the dinner options that the first-class passengers had on the first day of their sail.
The meals included oysters, spring lamb in mint sauce, Mallard duck in Port Wine sauce, and desserts like Victoria pudding and French ice cream.
“Having spoken to the leading collectors of Titanic memorabilia globally and consulted with numerous museums with Titanic collections, we can find no other surviving examples of a first-class April 11 dinner menu, “auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told BBC.
The menu was discovered among the personal possessions of a Canadian historian based in Nova Scotia, where some of the Titanic victims were buried. After the historian passed in 2017, his family found the item inside a photo album dated back to the 1960s. It remains unknown how the menu ended up in his possession.
The auction organized by Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd. had several other items from Titanic, including a pocket watch from one of the deceased passengers, which sold for £97,000 (around $118,700), and a deck blanket, which fetched £96,000 (around $117,500).