Cobb's Bill-of-Fare — Themes and Context

A Menu as Structure

The book’s title is literal: each section is a course. “Vittles” covers food, “Music” sound, “Art” visual culture, and “Sport” games. This framework allows Cobb to shift between topics while maintaining a consistent, conversational tone. The menu metaphor is not just decorative; it shapes the pacing. Each essay opens with a personal anecdote or a pointed observation, then expands into a series of comic examples. In “Vittles,” the narrator’s quest for “regular food” leads to a rant against fancy restaurants and a nostalgic look at holiday feasts. The structure mimics a meal: appetizer, main course, palate cleanser, dessert. Cobb uses this to control the reader’s attention, varying the density of jokes and the length of paragraphs.

Recurring Images of the Past

Cobb repeatedly contrasts the present with a remembered past, often the 1880s or 1890s. In “Art,” he describes a time when furniture was “new—the newer the better,” and antiques were for the poor. He evokes the smell of varnish and the feel of “creaky shoes” at the World’s Fair. These sensory details—sticky furniture, sore feet, tears from exhaustion—ground his humor in physical experience. The past is not idealized; it is raw and provincial. Cobb admits that taste was “crude and raw,” yet he defends it. The recurring image of the “Old Master” painting that looks like a “liver pad” ties together his skepticism of high art and his preference for the familiar, like the picture of Custer’s Last Stand.

Movement Between Scenes

Cobb’s essays move rapidly from one setting to another, often within a single paragraph. In “Vittles,” he jumps from a fancy restaurant to a quick lunch counter, then to a childhood holiday table. In “Art,” he shifts from a parlor funeral to the Art Building in Chicago. These transitions are abrupt but purposeful: they create a sense of abundance and variety, like a menu. The movement also highlights contrasts—between the expensive and the cheap, the new and the old, the genuine and the fake. Cobb uses these shifts to expose hypocrisy. For example, he notes that the same people who now worship antiques once preferred golden oak. The rapid scene changes mirror the restless, satirical energy of the prose.

The Voice of the Narrator

Cobb’s narrator is a knowing, slightly world-weary observer who speaks directly to the reader. He uses colloquialisms (“doggone ’em!”) and self-deprecating asides. In “Vittles,” he admits to having “tried it all” from “alphabet soup to animal crackers.” This voice is consistent across sections, creating a unified persona. The narrator is not an expert but a fellow traveler, someone who has been fooled by fancy food and art but now sees through them. He is nostalgic but not sentimental; he mocks his own past tastes. The humor comes from exaggeration and concrete detail, not abstraction. The voice is the book’s strongest structural element, holding together the disparate topics.

Cobb’s Bill-of-Fare rewards readers who enjoy period humor and social satire. The essays are best approached as a sequence, letting the menu structure guide the reading. Pay attention to the recurring contrasts between past and present, and the way Cobb uses specific, often absurd, examples to make his points. The illustrations by Peter Newell and James Preston add another layer of visual comedy. This is not a book for those seeking plot or character development, but for those who appreciate a sharp, nostalgic, and irreverent voice.

Years at this desk have taught me how a book can hold a whole table of appetites — Cobb’s savory pages, so full of laughter and local warmth. There is a quieter meal, though, in Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address — Reading Companion, where the same earnest, weary humor of a plain man meets the country’s hungriest hour. Both speak of feeding a people, one with jokes, the other with hope.