One need not go to France or Austria for a humiliating contrast. In
one of his books of travel Charles Dudley Warner declared that after
leaving Philadelphia the tourist "will not find one good meal decently
served" until he reaches Mexico. In a southwestern railway restaurant
a miner once said to me he had not eaten such an abominable meal in
all the years he had spent in the wilderness. To tell the unvarnished
truth, he used a stronger word than abominable. One of the details I
remember was that the tough steak had apparently been fried in the
drippings from a tallow candle.
In the same part of the country a great change has been brought about
by the culinary and executive genius of one man--Fred Harvey. He came
to this country from England--score one for England!--when he was a boy
of fourteen, with two pounds in his pocket. He got a job on a railway.
There were no dining cars in those days and although in England he had
not lived the life of a gourmet he was amazed by the wretchedness of
the eating houses with their canned meats and vegetables, rancid bacon,
oilclothed tables without napkins and incompetent service. Convinced
that good eating-houses would advertise the railway and attract
travel, he ventured to say so to the manager of the Santa Fé Railway,
who, fortunately, not only approved the suggestion but gave him the
opportunity to show what he could do. One historian relates that the
manager "threw his arms around the youthful promoter and wept with
joy." He had just dined at a railway station!
It was in the year 1876 that Harvey opened his first eating-house in
Topeka. It made a sensation. Others soon were built along the line of
the road from the Middle West to the Pacific Coast until, in 1912,
there were a dozen large hotels, sixty-five railway restaurants and
sixty dining-cars under the same management.
[Illustration: FRED HARVEY]
That Harvey was a born epicure is evident from the fact that when he
opened the Montezuma Hotel in 1882, he would not allow, as the Kansas
City "Star" tells us, any canned goods to go on the table. He sent
a man to Guaymas and Hermosillo in Old Mexico to get fruit, green
vegetables, shell fish and other kinds of food. A contract was made
with the chief of a tribe of Yaqui Indians to supply the hostelry
with green turtles and sea celery. These turtles, which were secured
for $1.50 each, weighed two hundred pounds and were full of eggs. Mr.
Harvey selected a little pool near the hotel where he fattened the
turtles. A feature of the bill of fare every day was genuine green
turtle soup and turtle steak. The sea celery used is a spicy weed which
makes a fine salad.
Naturally, such delicacies could not be served at the ordinary railway
restaurants; yet these, too, had their pleasant surprises, and were
unspeakably superior to what the travelers had been obliged to put
up with in pre-Harvey days. On ordering tea, for example, you would
get a separate little Japanese pot with the steaming infusion freshly
made for you. This was as far as Harvey could go in these places in
carrying out the perfect host's maxim that every diner should feel as
if the meal he eats had been specially prepared for him. But there were
other details that betrayed special intelligence and thought. Thus, in
stopping one day for supper in one of the Harvey restaurants in the
sizzling Arizona desert, I was delighted to find the table loaded down
with the sour things that one craves on hot days--diverse vegetable and
meat salads.
One of the amusing details in connection with the Harvey organization
was that it became known as a marriage agency, because the neat and
well-trained waitresses got married one after another, some of them to
wealthy ranchmen.
Of greater importance was the fact that the Harvey eating-houses served
as schools to all the Southwest, bringing about a general reform.
The rival railway systems, naturally, could not persevere in their
barbarian ways.
Fred Harvey is no more, but his influence survives and his name is one
to conjure with throughout the Pacific slope.
In the East, also, one comes across a good meal now and then in a
dining-car or a railroad station. There is one, says Edward Hungerford,
up in the northern part of New York State that has never yielded its
supremacy to any circuit-riding café on wheels. When a certain high
officer of the busy road that spreads itself apart at that junction
goes up there, he orders the cook of his private car to shut up the
kitchen. "Do you suppose that I would pass by that town," he says, "and
the best square meal in the whole State?"
Those things, alas, are exceptional. Taken the country through, railway
restaurants and diners are to this day even worse than the average
hotels and boarding houses. Flavorless, unappetizing meats, insipid
vegetables, doughy pies and soggy cakes are the rule at our eating
places everywhere.
The most astonishing thing about this is that the average American
enjoys a good meal, if he can get it, not a bit less than the average
European, as I have observed hundreds of times in our own best eating
houses and in foreign hotels and restaurants during ten trips to
Europe. And that the capacity to enjoy a civilized meal is inherent
not only in those who can cross the ocean and pay for Parisian
dainties, but in the humblest tiller of the soil or railway employee,
was amusingly made manifest to me many years ago in the wild and
woolly West. I was brought up in the village of Aurora, Oregon, which
was inhabited chiefly by members of a German colony, who differed
in no-wise from millions of poor but honest men and women in the
Fatherland. One of the most precious things they had brought from the
old country was the skill to cook a savory meal--a meal that one could
enjoy to the full without feeling the pangs of dyspeptic remorse for
hours afterwards.
The Aurora hotel soon became far-famed; and when the first railway
was built from San Francisco to Portland, the astute makers of the
time-table somehow managed it so that most of the trains stopped at
Aurora, though it is but twenty-eight miles from the terminal, Portland.
Nor was that all. The popularity of the Aurora cookery suggested the
idea that it might be profitable to erect a restaurant tent in Salem
during the annual State Fair. The result was astonishing. All the
other eating-places were soon completely deserted; the Aurora tent had
to be enlarged, and there was such a mad rush for seats at the tables
that in a few days nearly every man and woman and boy and girl in the
village had been drafted to serve as cooks or waiters.
It was plain German _bourgeois_ cooking; but the sausages were made
of honest pork and the hams had the appetizing flavor which the
old-fashioned smokehouse gives them; the bread was soft yet baked
thoroughly, the butter was fresh and fragrant and the pancakes melted
in the mouth. As for the supreme effort of Aurora cookery--noodle soup
made with the boiled chicken (_not_ cold-storage chicken) served in the
plate--the mere memory of it makes my mouth water, four decades after
eating it.
In justice to Portland, which in those days was in a benighted
condition fully warranting the action of the railway men in making
Aurora their culinary terminus, let me hasten to add that at present,
with its Chinook salmon and Columbia River smelt, its hard-shell crabs
and razor clams, its delicious Willamette crawfish--rivaling the best
French _écrevisses_--its fragrant mammoth strawberries, its juicy
cherries, and its world-famed Hood River apples, it is hardly second to
San Francisco as a gastronomic center. In Oregon, as in Washington and
California, the epicure fares particularly well because the luxuries of
life are as cheap as the staples and quite as abundant, if not more so.