During the 1920s and 1930s the blue plate lunch and dinner thrived. The first blue plate special reference I have found is in 1915. A railway running between Bradenton FL and Washington D.C., the Seaboard Air Line Railway, announced that year that they would begin offering a daily special of either meat or fish served on one plate with two vegetables.
The simplicity of the meal, with fewer food items on fewer pieces of china, turned out to be highly congruent with suggested government cutbacks that arrived with World War I urging restaurants to conserve on all aspects of their operations.
After the war the blue plate special continued to be popular because it was a workable compromise between the needs of a fast-paced urban society and the legions of consumers accustomed to eating a meat-and-potatoes “dinner” at noon. Though resembling a home-style dinner, the blue plate meal was lighter and faster to serve up than its predecessors. Consisting of less food, it required less time for digestion and kept office workers from getting that “siesta” feeling in the afternoon.
Its billing as “home cooking” communicated that it was not ethnic cuisine as were meals in table d’hote restaurants run by immigrant Americans. Beef and gravy, pork chops, ham, mashed or fried potatoes, carrots, and green beans were typical on blue plates. [June 1, 1930, special at the Merry Eating Luncheonette, Springfield MA]
In previous eras a “regular dinner” or table d’hote restaurant meal would have arrived parceled out on many plates, saucers, and side dishes. Cutting down both on china and dishwashing as well as server time, the blue plate dinner or lunch was usually offered as an economy meal typically costing about 35 to 50 cents, a moderate price in the post-WWI inflationary economy. Blue plate specials were attractive to restaurants because they permitted them to make use of a good buy or get rid of food stocks on the verge of going bad. The tradeoff was that often the diner had little choice regarding the meal’s composition.
Since the meals’ components were cooked prior to lunch and dinner rushes and kept warm on steam tables, they could be served quickly, saving time for patrons and increasing turnover for the establishment. Of course steam tables took their toll. That one-plate specials were not always the finest is suggested by a 1930 guidebook which commends The Alps restaurant in NYC by noting that their blue plate dinners “are more than mere collections of edibles, served en masse.”
One-plate meals continued into the 1940s and after WWII but the term “blue plate” was beginning to sound old-fashioned and was used mainly in smaller towns. Stodgy one-plate meals became material for humorists. In 1952 columnist Hal Boyle lampooned the blue plate luncheon “engulfed in gravy,” characterizing it as an “all-America culinary nightmare.” “I take it to the hotel I am staying at and use it instead of soap for a shower,” he wrote. “I rub it on my head as a shampoo.”
© Jan Whitaker, 2008, revised 2015
It's great to hear from readers and I take time to answer queries. I can't always find what you are looking for, but I do appreciate getting thank yous no matter what the outcome.
Restaurant-ing through history 
Since in most outfits meat(s) are a menu staple, “vegetarian” restaurants being the obvious exception, I wonder how the “Meatless Tuesdays” and/or wartime rationing was dealt with, or at least advertised, by American or other restaurants. What little I know of is that even well-to-do patrons at “high class joints” had to bring their ration books with them, and a steak dinner, IF you could get one (I suppose a “victory steak” might have been something we’d see nowadays in a “Banquet” frozen dinner), might not only cost 3X to 5X in dollars as it had before the war, but also a disproportionately high amount of “points”. I can well imagine that conspicuous consumption was highly discouraged, with likely well-off patrons dining in private rooms or cordoned-off tables, else scorn from associates, employees, and neighbors would ensue…”Don’t you KNOW there’s a WAR on?”
Yes, you are undoubtedly right that eating a steak would not go over well with others.
A friend sent me this link about a former exhibit entitled “Blue Plate Specials” Trenton’s Restaurant China” hosted by two NJ museums and the Potteries of Trenton Society. Have no idea what year this exhibit took place but some interesting info posted on the site. http://www.potteriesoftrentonsociety.org/events/blue.html
The Blue Plate continues to exist. I have posts about them at two places: Dupar’s Blue Plate, which I ate from is pictured here: (in Hollywood California) http://hollywoodrounder.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-sundays-in-hollywood.html and at George Mitchell’s Artist’s and Writer’s Cafe which is in Chicago, Illinois. Their website is down or maintenance as I type this, March 2, 2015, but the archive.org captures the old webpages: https://web.archive.org/web/20030624121634/http://artists-cafe.com/
A good idea !!…..bringing back articles that newer readers have missed…..keep up the very good work …………
“table d’hote restaurants run by immigrant Americans”–in this context, european-american immigrants?
Yes, European-Americans who served French, Italian, or German food. Of course over time many European-American restaurant proprietors began to offer what were generally perceived as American dishes.