In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean, Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banquets as being particularly memorable.1 One of these dinners had been held fourteen years earlier for Count Ferdinand de Lessep, the French entrepreneur who built the Suez Canal. Eager to replicate his engineering feat, De Lesseps came to New York in March 1880 to raise money for a sea-level canal that would cut across the Isthmus of Panama. As was customary, a banquet was held in his honor. However, as far as the French-born chef and his brigade were concerned, their famed countryman was more than just another special guest. To them, he was a hero of the age. Observing a palpable excitement in the air during dinner, the reporter from the New York Times wryly noted that “the nationality of the distinguished guest of the evening had had something to do with the zeal of the cooks, confectioners, and waiters.”2
On New Years Day of that year, De Lessep symbolically began work on the canal by digging the first shovel of sand and dumping it into a Champagne box. Transoceanic waterways were regarded as essential to expanding free trade, and this was reflected by De Lesseps’ family motto Aperire Terram Gentibus, meaning “To Open the World to all People.” This motto, which was adopted by the Compagnie de Suez, appeared on the menu, as well as the admission ticket shown above. Although the United States liked the idea of free trade in theory (and in practice when it favored the country), the prospect of a French canal in the Western Hemisphere caused consternation in Washington. Remembering that it had only been a decade since Napoleon III tried to make Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian the emperor of Mexico, President Rutherford B. Hayes was suspicious of this project, bluntly declaring that “a canal across any part of the Isthmus is either a canal under American control, or no canal.”
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