Rick Nichols: We're in the menus

I can handle it, I tell myself. It's not a menu-hoarding habit.

It's more like collecting, even though no order seems to ever get imposed on the collection, rendering its use as an archive, well, pretty frustrating.

One day, of course, the things will be sorted and filed - one from Senka's, a luncheonette now closed on West Girard, scribbled with a note: "Peppery, delicious bean soup with bacon."

There's another one for a fund-raising dinner put together by chef Fritz Blank for the Philadelphia Singers. Fritz jotted a handwritten note on it urging me to come - for sausage and biscuits with Sawmill Gravy, turnip greens with smoked turkey tails, "road-killed potatoes," and watermelon-rind pickles.

I'd forgotten about that particular menu, and it saddened me to unearth it: I never got to that dinner.

And so on - menus noting for the first time "fire-roasted oysters with ginger threads and wasabi butter" (offered by Tom Douglas, the Seattle chef visiting town for the Book & the Cook); and for a beer dinner at Fork to highlight Victory Brewing Co., zucchini enchiladas with Greystone goat cheese from Chester County, and shreds of stringy beef with adobo and jicama salsa.

They are threads of memory and revelation, most of them from the last decade or so, marking the first time I'd encountered "troll-caught Alaskan King salmon," and for that matter, "fire-roasted oysters," "road-killed potatoes" (were they the inspiration for smashed potatoes?), and a beer, destined for cult-hood, called HopDevil Ale, a triumph of Victory Brewing.

Somewhere I've got one for a private dinner party at an estate in Radnor done in patient calligraphy: The dessert wine, as I recall (and it's around here somewhere), was from the cellars of Czar Nicholas.

And here's another, obtained on my recent rounds, noting the terrapin entree at the Union League club - in 1898. (This is another use for my menus, tracking the rise and fall of the species: The green sea turtle was once the toast of colonial Philadelphia, the city's taste for them so lusty that they became preciously rare, bringing on the terrapin, the marsh-dweller plentiful along Delaware Bay. Years later, with the marshes stripped of terrapin, the city turned to the bottom of the turtle kingdom - the mean snapper, soon to be the star of its own soup (and the denizen of snapper prison camps, farmed for sustainability).

A certain uneasy stasis had been achieved with my menu collection. Menus stuffed in folders. Stuffed in file cabinets. Piled in drawers. Until a few weeks ago.

That's when a gentleman involved in menu design and printing said he was downsizing and was about to toss out his menus. Would I like him to drop them off? It was either that or the curb.

Of course, I said. Which was how I got a call at work from my wife asking why there were four massive boxes of menus - hundreds of the musty things - piled on our front porch.

I have only dipped a toe in so far. There is an age-spotted menu card from 1911 for the fare on the rooftop of the Bellevue-Stratford on Broad Street. It wasn't unusual that it listed oysters, one of the hardiest perennials in Philadelphia, their recent resurgence led by a particularly firm and lightly salty oyster being farmed in the higher-salinity waters off Cape May.

It is called the Cape May Salt. And sure enough, that was the very oyster listed on the 1911 menu: "Cape May Salt."

I haven't delved deeply yet into the next layers of the boxes, ready to speak silently like the rings of trees.

They'll tell only a smidgen of the story - the oldest tales of how we once ate - buried in the bones in privy pits, and printed on faded tomato-can labels, and in cookbooks tracing the transoceanic migration of cookery styles and, eventually, the delicate wonder that is the Vietnamese spring roll.

But they have their say: At the end of the 1950s, I see Shoyer's was offering celery-roasted Long Island duckling and rhubarb meringue pie.

And that in the '60s, the near-extinction of the city's once-prevalent German eateries had yet to claim the Schwarzwald Inn ("Schnitzel à la Holstein Natural, Takes 15 minutes"), Schoellhammer's Brewery Tavern (Pig's Knuckle and sauerkraut), and others.

You still encounter, 20 years ago, listings for egg creams (with Fox's U-bet chocolate syrup at Hesch's), and pepper hash with the Select Fried Oysters (at Beck's on the Boulevard).

I've barely skimmed the '80s and '90s. But I suspect there's a renaissance in the offing, and that the choices, even with some oldies left behind, are about to get a whole lot better.

And that my heap of menus, God save me, is about to spiral out of control.