American Food

Norman Rockwell, "Boy in Dining Car," 1946. (Source)

James D. Porterfield' book Dining by Rail: The History and Recipes of America's Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine brings to life what it must have been like to travel by train during the 100 years or so of the glory days of rail travel. His focus: the evolution of the dining car, and all the ingenuity that went into its technology, particularly the role of the Pullman company in inventing and leasing the cars to the major rail lines. The extraordinary hard work done by the chefs, cooks, porters, and other RR employees also has a major role in this history.

Dining cars were especially notable on the Western routes of the great train companies. Railroad management made a commitment to ensuring high quality of meals, impeccable service by uniformed waiters, and the luxury of elegant tableware and linens in their well-appointed dining cars. Such amenities were a key factor in competition for passengers on the various railway lines with common destinations. I learned -- to my amazement -- that meal service was always provided at a loss to the rail line; for $1 that a passenger paid the railroads would spend as much as $1.85 (though mostly not quite that much). 

The cost of labor was the main factor in the expenses of a dining car. Porterfield provides a very interesting study of the men -- and rarely women -- who prepared, served, cleaned, planned, and ordered the provisions. All cooking, all bread-baking, and all washing-up was done on the moving train, in very close quarters, with the cooks subject to the extreme heat of the tiny dining-car kitchens. Unlike in restaurants, every employee had several duties including all types of cooking, dishwashing, sorting linens, polishing silverware, and other work in the kitchen or dining room.

Because of a variety of circumstances, the majority of these workers were Black. The fact that they had good, long-term jobs had a role in Black American history; however, that's not my subject for today.

As I read both the historic part of Dining by Rail and also the cookbook part of the book, I felt more and more that these foods, these recipes, these experiences embody the answer to the repeatedly asked question: 

What is American Food?

If any cuisine was ever AMERICAN, this is it: American ingredients made for primarily American travelers. The dining cars obtained their major supplies from the endpoints of their routes -- cities like Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, and cities on the West Coast, as well as some purchases along the way. Rail lines on the east coast, the south, and Canada were handled similarly. Fresh fish and game, as well as fresh produce and meat, played a central part in railway cuisine. Each regional railroad company (and there were many) had its own special style and recipes, as did individual chefs on some of the lines, often reflecting the dishes of the region.

"In an age when caloric intake was not a consideration, a typical dinner menu might offer sirloin, tenderloin, porterhouse, or venison steak, prairie chicken, snipe, quail, golden plover, blue-winged teal, woodcock, broiled pigeon, mallard, widgeon, canvasback or domestic duck, wild turkey, veal, mutton, chicken, roast pork, sixteen relishes, eleven clam and oyster dishes, five fish dishes, fifteen kinds of bread, as well as many soups." (p. 148)

Dining car menus were extraordinarily long, with many choices of appetizers, entrees, desserts, wines, and breakfast specials. Porterfield offers a number of recipes for one particular breakfast favorite: French toast. He includes the French toast of the Northern Pacific line, where the cooks first made a special bread for the French toast. Also, the French toast recipe from the Soo Line, from the Pennsylvania Railroad, and from the Union Pacific. Most famous was that of the Santa Fe Railway, as perfected by Fred Harvey chefs in 1918. They all sound delicious, and despite the term "French," they are very definitely American. When you read about the dining car breakfasts, you can clearly see how the now-popular menu of the modern diner descends from railway cuisine.

As I read through the recipes in the book, I recognized the American style of food that is relatively simple, though influenced by techniques from haute cuisine in France and New York. Restaurant dining wasn't as common a pastime in the mid-19th century when restaurant cars were first introduced, so the menus had to please sophisticated customers and also those who had no familiarity with the ordering procedure and service of the dining car. Further, space was often limited, so the luxury of eating slowly and having time between courses was not available -- at times, there many people waiting a turn at the table. In fact, customers would fill out an order form at their seats in the train in advance of their arrival, so that the kitchen could have their meals ready to serve as soon as they were seated at their table. This all worked because of the high number of very skilled personnel who staffed the dining cars.

For the cookbook part of Dining by Rail, Porterfield chose among thousands of recipes that survived in the archives of the railroad lines and in published books or articles. Obviously, he only included foods that were available to modern cooks: for example, he offers no recipes for antelope steaks! No recipes for cooking birds that can now be seen only by birdwatchers -- like prairie chickens, a once-common game bird that's now only found in a very few locations (how I would love to see one)! But I digress; the variety in the choice of recipes in this book is amazing, as are the recipe titles, which reflect both American regional cooking and influence from abroad.

Favorites included dishes that remain just as popular today, like many ways to make apple pie. There are recipes for pumpkin pie, stuffed ducks and other roasts, a variety of gravies, donuts, chicken pie and other meat pies; tourtieres, a Canadian pork pie served on the Canadian railways; baked or fried ham, fried chicken,  deviled crabmeat, classic salads, special versions of the stuffed baked potato, cinnamon buns, potato rolls, and many more. For example, I'm intrigued that Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific fudge was special to the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific railroad. 

Recipes often had regional or ethnic names that would be recognizable to the dining car customers, such as "Creole," "Mexican style," "Irish lamb stew," "Wisconsin," "Illinois," "Curried Chicken Colombo," "Puget Sound Clam Chowder," "Chesapeake Bay Oysters," and "Indian Pudding." These all had a pretty specific meaning in American cuisine in the golden age of railroad dining!

Recipes with an exotic flare often used a foreign place-name to signal a particular ingredient. "Hawaiian" as you would expect, usually means the dish contains pineapple. "Arabian Peach Salad" contained dates. The ethnic confusion of "Terrine of Ragout à la Deutsch" may have had a specific meaning that I don't recognize, all I know is that it was beef, veal kidneys, green peppers, onions, and mushrooms in brown sauce. There were dishes labeled "Bretagne," "Venetian," "Normandie," "Spanish," "Pourtagaise [sic]," "Romanoff," "Athens," "Parisienne," "Hungarian," "Hong-Kong style," "Roman dressing," the "Cuban Sandwich," and more -- but as far as I can see from the lists of ingredients and cooking methods, the influence of all these far-away places was small, and the actual foods would have tasted familiarly American.

The more I read the recipes, the more I became convinced that this is a menu of truly American food, made according to the best recipes and techniques that our country still has to offer. The skill of the chefs and cooks, who often spent many years working for the same railway company, was legendary -- and deserved to be legendary. Indeed, I'm sure that railroad cuisine and the romance of the dining car left its mark on American food ways.

An early dining car kitchen. (Source)

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Railroad memories are profound and inspiring, especially many people's memories of eating in the dining car -- or by now, impressions left by older family members or friends who described such meals. Collectors of dining car menus, flatware, silver, and china are numerous. Actually, people were collecting this stuff during the glory days: in fact, one railroad printed especially attractive menus that the diners could take home, in  hopes of distracting them from stealing the silverware! (p. 189)

Besides the cuisine, the railroad dining car established new concepts of eating in a hurry. Time constraints on a train resulted because too many passengers wanted to eat in the dining car at each meal. Train timetables and scheduling demands meant there was always time pressure. In response to these requirements, the rail dining cars, café cars with less extensive offerings, and station lunch counters were the first "fast food" or "quick lunch" outlets in American history. The techniques of preparing a large number of meals quickly in a crowded space was worked out by rail employees with the technology developed by Pullman.  

As I've mentioned, the still-popular diner with its speedy service and traditional menu is the descendant of railway dining cars: the original diners. There were various other unexpected innovations due to the dining car and its personnel. For one example, a railroad chef in charge of baking developed a method of pre-blending flour, shortening, and other ingredients before mealtime rush in order to serve hot biscuits to order at lunch or dinner. A General Mills employee observed this preparation technique, and he then developed the product Bisquick: the first such commercial mix, introduced in 1931. (p. 142)

When Amtrak took over the passenger lines in the 1970s, fine dining was phased out and replaced by disgusting packaged food, a trend that was getting worse in 1993 when Porterfield published Dining by Rail. By now, Amtrak has a long and tedious history! For several years, there have been no dining cars whatsoever; however, this year, 2022, has seen the reintroduction of dining cars on several long-distance Amtrak trains in the West, and two lines in the East. They plan to offer high-end dining car service, especially for first-class passengers; I have seen no reviews of how it's going. For details see: "Updated Dining Options on Amtrak Long-Distance and Acela Trains."

If you have the least interest in social history, railroad history, or American cuisine, Dining by Rail is a good read! It was first published in 1993, republished in 1998, and is still in print, which shows its staying power as a good history book.

Review © 2022 mae sander

The Blue Train, The Orient Express, and Other Night Trains in Paris

The first chapter of Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper by Andrew Martin (published 2017) is titled "The Blue Train," and it's all about Paris trains, Paris railroad stations, old disused railroad tracks visible in odd bits of Paris parks, and how all this has changed over the long history of the railroad. Later chapters also include voyages beginning in Paris, and descriptions of a variety of other European cities and their stations.

When it came to the trains themselves, the author's focus is on night trains -- especially sleeping cars. He writes:

"An article on the Lonely Planet website once described Paris as ‘the omphalos’ of sleeper trains, which was just the right word I thought (once I’d looked it up), and part of the attraction of the sleepers for me is that they start from my favourite city." (p. 26).

Somehow I did know that omphalos means belly button. And I learned as well that it referred specifically to "the navel of the world," a particular stone at the Temple of Delphi in Ancient Greece. But that's a digression, though it does fit with today as Wordy Wednesday.

Paris is always the center of something, isn't it!

Martin is especially interested in a particular train company, the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et du Tourisme, which owned a number of particularly famous and often luxurious sleeping cars. Wagons-Lits were in use by French and other Continental railroad lines on many renowned train lines including the Orient Express. They dominated the sleeping car business from the late 19th century until around the 1980s.

These iconic trains were featured in many cultural works. "The first novel to exploit the racy reputation of the Orient Express was The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, published in 1925." (p. 152). Much  more lastingly famous novels and films followed, with authors like Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie, and even a ballet titled "Le Train Bleu" in 1924, "performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with music by Darius Milhaud, story by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Coco Chanel and curtain by Pablo Picasso." (p. 38). In the chapter on the Orient Express, Martin points out that the Gare de l’Est “is the setting, for example, of both Murder on the Orient Express and From Russia with Love.” (p. 133).

Paintings of railroad-related subjects in Paris is another of Martin's interests. I found the descriptions of some of the paintings especially intriguing, so I looked them up. Here are some of the works along with Martin's comments:

Manet, The Railroad.

Martin writes: "The Pont de L’Europe has often been a vantage point for painters. In 1873 Édouard Manet painted The Railway, the composition showing a woman and a small girl in front of some severe black railings. Beyond the railings is large-scale modernity – the bridge, the tracks into St Lazare, the new flats overlooking those tracks – but all is confused by a cloud of steam. The little girl is interested in the scene, but the woman has turned her back on it, apparently in despair." (p. 28).

Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l'Europe.

Martin writes: "Zola himself made Gare St Lazare the centrepiece of his novel, La Bête humaine. This is a hysterical tale of sex and violence, symbolised by the pounding of the engines between St Lazare and Le Havre, with which all the characters are connected." The cover of one edition of this novel is the painting "Le Pont de l'Europe" by Caillebotte, he points out. "There is a strolling flâneur, perhaps a depiction of Caillebotte himself. He is possibly eyeing up the man looking down on the station. The woman walking alongside the flâneur has been interpreted as a prostitute. It’s unlikely that both interpretations could be true. A dog is heading purposefully over the bridge in the opposite direction, and doubtless it, too, is going off to have sex."  (p. 29).

Claude Monet, The Gare St-Lazare

Martin writes: "In the late 1870s Claude Monet painted images of the same bridge and station. Both he and Manet followed Zola’s injunction to ‘find the poetry of stations as their fathers found that of forests and rivers’. But locomotives generated scenes that had something in common with forests and rivers: a fluid, organic element, arising from the play of light in the shifting steam." (pp. 28-29).

Besides discussing trains in film, literature and art, Martin describes quite a few of his own railroad experiences. In 2015-2016 he tried to travel on the few sleeper cars that still remained in service, especially a memorable night where the voyage was cancelled and he ended up sleeping on the train while it was parked in the station in Paris. I had never thought much about the Paris railroad stations, other than the re-purposed Gare D'Orsay, now a splendid museum, and the Gare de Lyon where my purse was once snatched. As he begins each over-night journey, Martin describes the current state and the history of these stations: "The Parisian stations were polished and set like so many jewels by Baron Haussmann, architect-protégé of that great rail enthusiast, Napoleon III. (p. 193).

Illustration from Night Trains: "A Wagons-Lits dining car, as burnished
to perfection for the Venice Simplon Orient Express. Note the lamp shades,
interestingly suggestive of French knickers." (p. 248).

There definitely was lots of luxury back in the real rail travel days! This tradition eroded as the trains became less and less desirable. The dining cars on these French-managed trains were of course legendary for their food, their atmosphere, and their decor. The author contrasts the former opulence with the pathetic food service he experienced on the twenty-first century trains he traveled on. He wrote:

"The head of the restaurant car was the maître d’hôtel, and crammed inside the kitchen was a brigade de cuisine, with a chef de cuisine in charge (a man often destined, in the first half of the twentieth century, to be headhunted by one of the better European hotels). He supervised an under-chef, a saucier and a plongeur, or washer-up. There would also be a couple of serveurs, or waiters." (pp. 15-16). 

"Dinner on the original journey was served an hour and a half after departure – at 8pm. The restaurant car incorporated a gentlemen’s smoking salon with all the European newspapers, and there was further expensive marquetry, with scrollwork, cornices and gilded metal flowers protruding, and ‘rather garish’... paintings. The lighting was by gigantic –yet mellow –gas chandeliers. The meal involved nine courses: soup, lobster, oysters, caviar, fish, game, cakes, sorbets and cheeses." (p. 142).

Sleeping cars on trains starting in Paris went out of service for many reasons. The Orient Express lines became unworkable after World War II when the Iron Curtain, specifically in Bulgaria, cut off some of the routes. After that, air travel made long international overnight train voyages unappealing. Finally, the very fast trains that enable travel from Paris to French cities in only a few hours left almost nobody wanting to take any overnight trains. The end!

I wanted to share these Paris train stories with "Paris in July," a blogging event going on this month.

Note: images of artworks are from Wikipedia and the website of the British Museum.

To Travel by Train

"There may be no better method of job creation ever invented than a railroad."
(from Train by Tom Zoellner, Kindle Locations 1026-1027).

The railroad, invented in England, was a major development of the industrial revolution, specifically invented to carry coal from the mines, but soon put to many other purposes. At first sight, humans found trains with their huge engines unnatural and often terrifying. They had never seen such a source of steam and fire, and they had never experienced such incredible speeds -- over 10 miles an hour to begin, and becoming faster and faster.

In Tom Zoellner's book Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World-from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief the early reactions are described in a quote from the historian Thomas Carlyle, who never forgot his first rail journey:

"'To whirl through the confused darkness, on those steam wings, was one of the strongest experiences I have experienced,' he wrote. 'Out of one vehicle into another, snorting, roaring we flew: the likest thing to a Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle.'  

"These metaphors were dramatic, but they were correct in naming the railroad as an essentially chthonic machine, born underground. The primary fuel for its engine, the most important cargo, its entire economic reason for being— all of these critical elements were a direct result of the velvety rock that lay in shallow deposits under the soil of northern England." (Kindle Locations 379-383). 

"Chthonic" is a vivid and obscure word that refers to Greek gods or other spirits or demons that inhabit the underworld. Zoellner often choses such words to portray the effect of trains on a variety of countries and cultures. Railroads, as he documents them, have become important factors in these countries' economy, their landscapes, the creation of their cities, the transport of goods, their access to a varied diet, and the movement of people.

Zoellner talks about the 19th century railroad barons who made huge fortunes and then maybe lost them, but whose successes shrank the continents. He also talks about modern developments of bullet trains, and modern neglect of some of the once great passenger lines such as Amtrak and English rail lines. He discusses some of the famous palatial railroad stations and what's become of them. With great insights, I think, he discusses the force of the railroad as a way to create employment and contribute to economic well-being. Of freight trains he writes: "a central truth about the railroad: there remains no better mechanism for hauling heavy commodities." (Kindle Locations 3948-3949).

The heart of the book, however, is Zoellner's love of passenger trains. In each chapter he concentrates on his own personal journey on a train line of his choice. He weaves his experiences with the history and economic development of the rails in that country. In the UK Zoellner went by train from the north of Scotland to the farthest south he could. In the USA he traveled by the Acela from New York to Washington, DC, and then on Amtrak all the way to Los Angeles. In China he took the incredible rail line to Tibet. In India he experienced the national railway's filth; he witnessed its vast commitment to using human labor and not automation. In the Peruvian Andes he rode on the steepest train tracks on earth. Zoellner attempted the famous train ride from European Russia to the end of the trans-Siberian railway; however, his voyage was interrupted when a potentially rabid dog bit him and he rushed home for preventative treatment. All fascinating.

Zoellner's descriptions make his experiences vivid. He says little about the food (on Amtrak, he recommends the dining cars not for the cuisine, which he finds "reliably mediocre," but as a place to find people to talk to; in other countries, it's worse). But his descriptions of the aromas, odors, smells, and stinks of trains throughout the world are very revealing! Here are a few of his descriptions, including olfactory ones, to give you a sense of this enjoyable book:

"The Northeast Regional train to Washington lay idling like a silver python. I stepped onto it and immediately smelled the unmistakable fragrance of Amtrak: blue toilet fluid, old socks, a lacing of diesel fuel." (Kindle Locations 1720-1721).

"The Southwest Chief was called for a 3: 00 P.M. departure, and I went out onto the platform to board it. ... a lower berth, which smelled of the usual blend of diesel and bleach." (Kindle Locations 2322-2318). 

"Practically every rail journey from Moscow through Siberia starts from Yaroslavl station, a handsome hulk built in 1904 and designed to look like a Russian Orthodox convent. ... The bunks were coated in vinyl and padded with approximately two micrometers of stuffing. .... Though the train was not yet moving, a strong odor of coal smoke and human body pervaded the carriage." (Kindle Locations 3005-3015). 

"Laziness and dissipation are inevitable on the Trans-Siberian.... I had grown used to the smell of sour feet and onions and had done as almost everyone else was doing by the way of meals— that is to say, avoiding the dining car. Instead I bought cartons of sodium-soaked ramen noodles from the babushkas who gathered by the tracks." (Kindle Locations 3140-3146). 

"Riding through the Tibetan plateau inside a train compartment feels like cheating. ... All a traveler needs to do these days is gaze out the window at the unfolding subarctic plain where he never belonged but nevertheless has a kind of unlikely intercourse. ... A woman in a hooded garment was bending over to pick up a disk of yak dung which is used as everyday household fuel. I smelled some in a fireplace later, and it burns as clean and odorless as balsa wood." (Kindle Locations 3773-3784). 

"We soon came to the town of La Oroya [Peru], which is one of the filthiest places I have ever seen. The cliffs surrounding the town have been wiped clean of all vegetation and sport a bizarre white coating that looks as if ten billion tons of bird guano or cake frosting had been dropped on them and slowly oozed downward. This is the remnant of the sulfuric-acid clouds from a nearby smelter. ... A waiter came out to the back porch to serve cups of tea brewed from coca leaves, and it numbed the inside of my mouth. The air smelled of wet grass and fresh metal, and as we climbed, the sky became a weird pastiche of angled sun and clouds and snow." (Kindle Locations 3998-4018).

Thinking about train rides... 

A childhood memory: St. Louis Union Station with the Milles Fountain.
Image from Wikipedia.

In my own life, I've had a few memorable train trips. Zoellner inspired me to think about trains I have known.

In St. Louis, I was introduced to trains as a child, specifically by my first train trip which was 8 minutes long. We went from the Wabash Station at the west edge of the city to the big, downtown Union Station, an introduction thought up by a friend of my father. She accompanied me and my sister on this exciting first trip while my father dropped us off at the Wabash Station and then drove downtown to pick us up. Also, I remember the beauty of the sculpture by Carl Milles which still stands in front of the station, though it's now mainly used for other purposes.

Snacks on the train, California, 2014.

In the last several years, I've been lucky to make some interesting train trips. One was from Warsaw to Krakow and back the same day -- a very long day! On a different trip to Europe, I traveled by TGV (the French bullet train) from Paris to Avignon, on to Arles, and then back to Paris. In 2014 I enjoyed a beautiful train ride beside the Pacific Ocean from Santa Barbara to Delmar near San Diego and back. I also had a tormented night on a very late train from Germany to Paris, where our reserved seats were taken by other passengers. I don't think I'd have the patience or the nerve to do the ambitious train travel that Zoellner did, but I loved reading about it.

"The Moving Toyshop"

Today's reading: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, first published in 1946. I find this book very funny, almost a send-up of the more conventional British detective novels such as those by Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. It's also a kind of send-up of books about pompous academics: the setting is Oxford and the amateur detectives are a literature don, Gervase Fen, and a poet named Cadogan. Not quite as funny as a Bertie Wooster novel... but close. And furthermore, it is actually suspenseful.

Beyond the humor about people and situations, the plot of this tale is so improbable that even the characters in the story comment on it:

"'I don't think this is going to work,' Mr Beavis remarked with some apprehension.

"'It will work,' Fen responded confidently, 'because no one expects this sort of trick outside a book.'" (p. 147)

The novel takes place in a single day, beginning with the poet's negotiation for an advance from his publisher in London because he needs a vacation, and continuing as he takes a train to Oxford for this needed break. His train trip is interrupted because there are no further trains from a station almost to Oxford. Thus he has to hitchhike with a strangely literate truck driver (who gets back into the story later, quite improbably). As he walks toward the center of town, he randomly enters a toyshop whose door is standing open, and he witnesses the result of a murder. 

Thus the tale begins. Cadogan enlists Gervase Fen, Oxford literary don, to help find the culprit. They engage in a rather madcap rush to understand both the disappearance of the murder victim and the disappearance of the toyshop where the murder took place, and to find the guilty perps. And indeed, the day of crazy risks and chases on foot, by bicycle, in Fen's own sports car, in a stolen car, in the previously mentioned truck, and even by punt on the river, is wrapped up by the following evening. What classical unity!

I often notice how a detective story can be punctuated by stops for meals -- such pacing helps to ground the detectives in a kind of real world. With each meal, we see how time is passing. Descriptions of food and eating places can reveal insights about the character of the detectives. Meal times in The Moving Toyshop come off in a somewhat off-beat way. Fen and Cadogan come close to eating at least a couple of times, but instead keep chasing after and confronting a larger and larger collection of bizarre and eccentric suspects.

First they miss lunch in an Oxford dining hall thanks to being briefly kidnapped by a couple of mysterious thugs involved in the crime cover-up. After an escape from this peril, they reach Fen's Oxford chambers:

"Fen, who had been arranging about tea for them all with an elderly, mirthless individual who proved to be his scout, returned to the room, unlocked a drawer in his untidy desk, and took out a small automatic pistol. For a moment conversation was still: something of the implication of that act was borne in on everyone present. 

"'I'm sorry I shall have to desert you,' he said, 'But this interview really won't wait....' 

"Curiosity, and the desire for tea, were conducting a mimic battle in Cadogan's brain; curiosity emerged triumphant. 'I'm coming too,' he announced." (p. 113)

Another failed chance to eat! Finally, they do manage to have a bit of food later that afternoon:

"Cadogan had finished the buttered scones and was eating a piece of angel-cake. 'The Episode of the Guzzling Bard,' said Fen as he lit a cigarette." (p. 128) 

And just as he finishes eating, one of the possible witnesses they have been seeking turns up in the very same café! The pursuit of suspects and discovery of more and more surprises continues until the improbable wrap-up. Read it and chortle!

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who wrote scripts and film scores for quite a few non-detective films, and also an entire series about Gervase Fen. He is quite obscure compared to the still-popular authors of the Golden Age of crime fiction before World War II. Still, his books, especially this one, make it onto various lists of "best detective novels." Though Agatha Christie's work, for example, continues to be turned into film on a regular basis, I can find only one such treatment of The Moving Toyshop, a TV show aired in 1964, listed on IMDB -- but with no available way to watch it. 

Note: Authors of Crispin's era whose detectives stopped to eat while detecting include Christie, Sayers, Georges Simenon, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, and many others. Detective stories throughout the 20th century continued to feature meals in one form or another.  I've written about this often! In much more recent "cozy" mysteries, this trope has been forced into something different, which I don't admire nearly as much. 

Update on Traditional and Cultural Native American Food

From Mother Jones: Chef Sean Sherman 

Last week, I wrote about a presentation titled "The People of the Three Fires" about American Indian traditional foods (those consumed before contact with Europeans) and cultural foods (those now in the repertoire because they are familiar from Reservation days).

A new article and podcast, published yesterday in Mother Jones, adds quite a bit to the discussion of traditional food at that presentation. "You Can Get Any Food You Want in America—Except This: Meet the chef trying to revive his ancestors' delicious and healthy vittles," by Maddie Oatman contains details of the efforts of Chef Sean Sherman.

Sherman, according to the article, is attempting "to construct this 'un-modernist cuisine,' as he calls it." His sources for the foods and recipes are "historical documents, cookbooks, foraging manuals, first-person accounts, and even archeological texts."

The article also includes a brief, informative summary of native food history:

"In 1864, the US government forced the Navajos and Mescolero Apaches off their land in Arizona and onto a reservation in remote New Mexico, dragging them on what was soon known as 'the Long Walk.' Stranded on inhospitable desert, the tribes couldn't farm, and were sent canned goods and rations of white flour, sugar, and lard to eat. Frybread emerged as a survival food. As Native American writer and activist Suzan Shown Harjo once put it, 'Frybread was a gift of Western Civilization from the days when Native people were removed from buffalo, elk, deer, salmon, turkey, corn, beans, squash, acorns, wild rice, and other real food.'"

The podcast included an interview with Sherman. To begin, he talked about his rather idyllic childhood on a South Dakota Lakota Reservation, his great-grandparents' homestead on the Badlands, and other memories. His food memories include big family gatherings at his grandparents' ranch (8-10,000 acres) where women cooked familiar festive foods. Kids participated in lots of activities like harvesting "prairie turnips," choke cherries (which his grandmother cooked into sauce), and more.

Choke cherries are among the most delicious food in his experience, he related later in the podcast. They are small and dark black-purple, a bit tannic when just off the tree, but with a unique flavor when cooked down. In old days they were dried into patties for later use. Now in his new traditional cuisine, he slow-cooks them, strains out the pits, and makes an "awesome" syrup. This can make tea or sorbet or be used in other preparations.

Traditional soups and other foods that were cooked at these events echoed traditional foods, but putting things together from these memories is challenging. "Food systems" have been wiped away, and a lot of government canned goods like canned salmon, government cheese, and more became the common foodstuffs. Because his grandparents had a ranch, his own family also had wild game not available to many of the families.

Sherman grew up with frybread, and later bannock (a similar thing) which were thought to be Native American but really were the result of having to eat government food beginning more than a century ago. Since it was the only thing to eat many winters, in a couple of generations that was the food people associated with their grandmothers' kitchens.

The menu development Sherman is doing now includes trying to build "plates" that represent native foods of single regions, researching what he can, consulting every cookbook he can find, and trying to escape from fusion cooking with some traditional ingredients. He's trying to find the food and medicinal values from foraging books, historical and archaeological texts -- trying to piece back together "a shattered pot" that is how he sees native cuisine.

He's already been working on this effort in his food truck, using corn and sumac, turkey, soy-free foods, and more. He makes a cedar and maple tea (not soft drinks), wild-rice salads -- unpretentious indigenous foods. There are efforts to restore old food processing techniques like sun-drying or smoking. He emphasizes trying to keep it simple, like using maple syrup, fruit and berries as sweeteners and other recipes with indigenous foods.

A broad vision encompasses a new restaurant under development, funded by Kickstarter. And beyond that: he hopes there will be more restaurants in other areas, showcasing the local native cuisines. Longer term, he hopes to participate in revitalizing the culture, offering new foods and new meanings to foods, and working with various activist groups who are trying to preserve resources.

For more, I also looked up a recent story in Saveur by David Treuer which describes the food to come from the developing restaurant:

"Sherman’s more straightforward notion of indigenous comfort food includes dishes like smoked turkey soup with burnt sage, bison slow-cooked in spruce boughs, and a sunflower and hazelnut crisp. Using modern combinations and ancient ingredients and methods, he’s after something simultaneously old, and yet new."

From Saveur: the Native American Food Truck discussed in the two articles.

The New York Times also published an article and slide-show about Sherman last month, and many other articles also appear in a google search.

Long, Long Day

Red-eye flight from Detroit to Paris last night.
Delta's snacks now have cute sayings on them.
In the bag: still the same old mini pretzels & peanuts.

On international flights, they still serve a hot meal.
It tasted better than it looks here!

Unfortunately, we had a 6 hour wait for the train from Charles deGaulle Airport to our first stop: Avignon. Earlier trains were all full, as was ours. Very tiresome. The TGV train ride was beautiful. We are now checked into a very appealing hotel near the old center, and will soon start actual tourism with dinner in a nearby restaurant.

Meanwhile, the above photos are all I've really had to eat this weekend!

Hotel is on the ground floor...

... seems quite nice.

The Ringling Brothers Circus Museum, Sarasota

At the Circus Museum is a miniature model of the entire process of setting up and presenting the circus. Above: the trains. 

Mini-people arriving in their cars.

Preparing a meal for the circus people. Lots of other miniature scenes
show the life of circus people, where they relaxed, practiced, etc.

The dining room for the thousands of circus people.

Frozen custard for the circus goers.

Under the Big Top... a few of the miniature exhibits are able to be in motion.

In the actual circus museum: many costumes and models of performers, including these clown shoes.

The circus museum and miniature model of the huge tents and circus grounds are just amazing.

Way Out West

The La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe New Mexico, the splendid accommodations at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the Union Station in St. Louis, and the coffee shop in the Petrified Forest National Monument (now a museum -- see photo above) all have impressed me greatly at the various times in my life when I've experienced them. I just read a book that puts them all together: they were originally designed and developed by Fred Harvey. Author Stephen Fried's Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West -- One Meal at a Time is a good read. It successfully combines the biography of the man Fred Harvey (1835-1901), the historic development of the American west, and the history of the once-famous hospitality company, also named Fred Harvey, that he founded and that continued for decades under the management of his family after his death.

I knew two basic things about Fred Harvey before I read the book. First, I was aware that there were many restaurants and hotels by that name at some time in the past, which turns out to have been the era of development of tourism along the route of the Santa Fe railroad. Second, I understood that Fred Harvey Indian stores had traded for some of the highest quality rugs, pottery, and other artifacts, and had encouraged the Indians to develop their craft traditions.

Here are several additional interesting things I learned about the man and his company:

Harvey began by creating a chain of restaurants along the rail lines, where travelers could buy reliable meals without being cheated. He continued by improving the food and service in a number of ways, and by working with Pullman to develop dining cars when train technology made it possible to walk from car to car, and made the interiors of the trains more pleasant. His endeavor included many measures to ensure consistent quality, making Fred Harvey the first restaurant chain and a model for some that followed.

At the end of his life, Harvey and his sons began to expand into tourist hotels, and particularly to create the still-amazing hotels and tourist facilities at the Grand Canyon, the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, and a few other spectacular places. They also took over all concessions at central rail terminals such as the Union Station in St.Louis that I remember. After the Depression, the only profitable part of the company was at the Grand Canyon, and the rest slowly shut down.

The Harvey company was ahead of its time in hiring women. The wait staff of the restaurants from quite early-on was entirely female, in jobs that had previously been mainly for men. These waitresses received intense training and promised to remain in service for a certain time (after which they often married the men on the frontier where they worked). Known as "Harvey Girls," they wore super-clean white aprons, and upheld the high standards set by Fred Harvey.

Women were hired not only as waitresses, but also in other roles unusual for that era. Mary Colter (1869-1958) was the chief architect and designer of the truly innovative buildings and interiors for the restaurants, gift shops, and tourist hotels for the chain. Beginning in 1902 she was the main visionary in developing what now seems to be a classic southwest style of architecture. Ironically, though, the women in the family were shut out of management by one inflexible member of the Harvey male line.

Finally, in 1946, the Fred Harvey heirs cooperated with the making of "The Harvey Girls," a Judy Garland movie about the early days of the chain. The movie was extremely popular (the book notes that it made more money in its initial year than the Santa Fe railroad, which was sliding into oblivion by then). The best-known song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," won an Academy Award. Like many films, this one cemented the collective memory of an era that was just about finished. I admit that I had not heard of the movie, though I do know the song.

I loved the book. Its appendix includes recipes from published Fred Harvey cookbooks and from surviving manuscripts used by the cooks in the restaurants, many of whom were brought over from Europe to innovate combinations of classic recipes with southwest cuisine -- especially at the La Fonda in Santa Fe. (In other words, the Coyote Cafe wasn't the first to put Santa Fe on the culinary map.) I may try some of them!