Reading the old menu

Both texts are newly written practice sources about invented people, places or projects.

Text One: An original account of an invented local-menu collection.

The collection's oldest menu carried a long list of dishes and no date. A pencilled year on the back had been added by an unknown hand. The volunteer catalogue kept that year as an annotation, not an established date of printing.

Several visitors wanted to know what people had actually eaten. The menu showed what the restaurant had offered, but not which dishes were ordered or available on every evening. A separate bill provided one small record of a purchase. It could be connected with the menu's language without being treated as a summary of every customer's meal.

The display also showed the paper's shape and stains. A neat transcription made the words easier to read, but removed the folded corner and the mark beside one price. The curator displayed both, explaining what the transcription supplied and what remained visible only in the object or photograph.

Text Two: An original report about a different fictional food-history exhibition.

Students selected menus, advertisements and receipts from a made-up restaurant archive. They were asked to distinguish an offer, a promotional claim and evidence of a particular purchase. The three sources could support one another, but they did not answer identical questions.

For unclear words, the students preserved a small image beside their proposed transcription. They marked uncertainty instead of silently completing a damaged line. A printed price was copied accurately without claiming that it explained what the whole meal cost, since extras could appear on a separate bill.

The final captions named the source and the limits of the inference. The exhibition showed how eating had been presented and recorded, not an exact account of every meal. Visitors could compare the physical pages with the written explanations and see where the students had made a cautious connection rather than recovered a complete story.

Synthesise what you learn from both texts about what old menus and related records can reveal, and what they cannot establish.