On this day in 1907, Cunard's new Lusitania left Liverpool for New York on her maiden voyage, the largest passenger ship in the world until her running mate Mauretania was finished three months later. Everyone looks at the columns and the dome. I go downstairs and look for the ovens.

A ship that size is a town that has to feed itself with no shops, and the printed menus of the period are a primary source if you read them as a working document rather than a boast. Every roast, every roll, every dish of soup implies a room behind it: cold rooms and ice rooms holding meat and butter and milk for a crossing of several days, larders and pantries, and a bakery running through the night so bread arrives warm at breakfast for hundreds of people at once. Liners of that era commonly carried live poultry aboard as well, which is a tidy solution to refrigeration and a noisy one to sleep near.

Then the part no menu records: carrying it. The dining saloon in the photograph below has swivel chairs anchored in place and a balustrade around the well, because the floor moves. A steward crossing that room with soup on the Atlantic in September is doing something with his knees and his wrists that takes a season to learn. Whatever else the Blue Riband measured that year, somebody kept the plates level the whole way.