The Golden Age of Mobile Gastronomy

When the Contented Passenger, dined to repletion on The King's Dinner aboard the altogether remarkable Panama Limited of the Illinois Central Railroad between Chicago and New Orleans, pushes back his liqueur glass that has lately contained Cointreau, dips his fingers in warm, lemon-scented water in a silver finger bowl upon a candlelit table and lights up a post-prandial Don Diego to relax in well-upholstered gustatory comfort, he will be among the last residual legatees to one of the noblest of American inheritances: a good dinner on the steamcars. There are only a prideful handful of trains now in operation where this pleasant practice can be enjoyed with all its old-time amenities intact, where once throughout the length and breadth of the land men gloried and drank deep aboard trains of ineffable splendor. But it is an inheritance honestly come by, for once, in a period known to students of surface transport as the belle époque of overland travel, the best food in America was served aboard the name trains of the land. This is not an idle phrase or glittering generality; it can be attested to by the record and the sworn testimony of living men and women and, furthermore, it obtained when such temples of gastronomy as the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Antlers in Colorado Springs and the Palace in San Francisco were in fullest culinary flower to supply competition. For perhaps three splendid decades, Americans ate better on the cars than they did anywhere else. Qualitatively and quantitatively, they put away a superb assortment of comestibles, gorgeously confected, lovingly served and generally regarded as the finest achievement of the industry that was for the better part of the 19th Century the preoccupation of the American people.

The King's Dinner on the Panama Limited, while unique in its ample components and majesty of dimension, is by no means the whole dining-car story today. A knowing traveler who has the good judgment to eschew the plastic swill-pail devisings of the airlines can do very well, indeed, aboard the New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, the Great Northern's Empire Builder or any of the Fred Harvey diners of the far-reaching Santa Fe. Also well spoken of are the Northern Pacific's North Coast Limited, the Baltimore & Ohio's Capitol Limited and the Florida streamliners of the Seaboard Air Line. These happy few, however, are but a token survival where once hundreds of trains rolled gloriously on their occasions in the aroma of terrapin Maryland and broiling antelope steaks, where the wine cards were of bed-sheet size and dinner was an event. Partly the decline of errant gastronomy is attributable to the patrons who ride the cars as well as to the carriers that maintain them. Once there were men to match the menus, men to whom six courses was an acceptable snack if, as on the Baltimore & Ohio's Royal Blue trains to Washington, the dollar dinner embraced both lobster newburg and porterhouse steak.

Let us glance in admiring retrospect at a sagacious traveler of the year 1895 aboard the Southern Pacific's truly resplendent Sunset Limited as it crosses the Texas vastness at the breakfast hour. In today's calorie-conscious wasteland of gastronomy, it would be a rare and perhaps suspect passenger who would ask to be served three manhattan cocktails at eight in the morning; but at the time of which we write, it was a commonplace practice, noted in belles-lettres by Mark Twain and assiduously observed by him. No sissified fruit juices were included in the breakfast menus of that abundant age, although our voyager might well have a large plate of fresh Arkansas strawberries floating in double-thick cream before getting to work on an order of sweetbreads financière, a mushroom omelet, broiled sage-fed prairie chicken and a stack of little thin hot cakes, all served to the accompaniment of a bottle of what was usually at that time listed as "breakfast wine" and turned out to be Mumm's Cordon Rouge, at just three dollars the bottle. All the carriers listed wines suitable for breakfast, with champagne and Rhine wine predominating.

In the closing decades of the last century, our hero was encountered on all name trains, and his luncheon and dinner conduct was of a piece with his breakfast requirements. He did himself proud in the diner three times a day; and if he was a regular patron of the road or perhaps a consequential shipper, financier or Senator, the steward had no hesitation about telegraphing ahead for a dozen or so fresh Maine lobsters or a ten-pound fillet of buffalo. Let us attend our well-heeled and knowing traveler, not upon any such preliminary skirmish as had been represented by the slender breakfast mentioned above but on an occasion of gustatory moment; that is to say, dinner, a meal of dimensions on which both the management and the ultimate consumer were prepared to spare no pains.

Shown to his table, commanding a fine view of plains and mountains through its broad picture window, our man of the world spreads the skirts of his gray traveling frock coat across the brocaded chair, negotiates some extra slack in the gold Albert watch chain across his waistcoat, smooths his constabulary mustaches with sweeping assurance and picks up the menu, which approximates in size the vast linen napkin he has just unfurled and whose typography is a miracle of the printer's expertise. In the beginning, there will be an assortment of shellfish, preferably oysters--lynnhavens or cotuits in the East, Olympias on the West Coast. At evening in the heartland of the continent on the granger roads such as the Burlington, Alton and Union Pacific, there will be a profusion of fresh seafood. Ask not how its freshness is assured in an age innocent of scientific refrigeration. There will be fresh mountain trout on General William Jackson Palmer's Denver & Rio Grande, lobster new-burg on the effulgent Baltimore & Ohio and Primrose Lake whitefish on the Santa Fe rolling westward out of Chicago.

There will be soup. It was an age when dinner presupposed a full tureen of substantial potage: mulligatawny, mock turtle, clam chowder, lobster bisque or Philadelphia pepper pot. Ignoring, for the moment, the cold dishes that usually included pressed beef, corned beef, aspic of salmon and sliced pork, our passenger of the period will have at a variety of game and entrees that today's Colony Restaurant in New York or Jack & Charlie's "21" would be hard put to match: all the conventional steaks--excepting only the minute cut, which hadn't been invented--chops and roast beef and chicken, supplemented by diamondback terrapin, ruddy duck, tame duck, potted pigeon with mush-rooms, game pâté en gelée, broiled quail on toast, venison ragout, capon with egg sauce and saddle of Colorado mutton with capers. For dessert there was Neapolitan ice cream, sultana roll, Champagne jelly, Malaga grapes, California pears, Edam cheese and fresh figs.

Anybody with an eye to free-loading in the Eighties and Nineties would have been well advised to travel on Christmas Day, when almost all carriers with any pretensions to magnificence made a practice of running up a Christmas dinner on the house, some of which compared favorably with such renowned yuletide collations as those furnished forth at Parker's Hotel in School Street, Boston,and at Potter Palmer's eye-popping caravansary in Chicago. The Chicago & North Western at the time was a Vanderbilt road, and the free Christmas dinner recorded aboard The North Western Limited for 1896 suggested the grand manner of its owning family. It was also very American, though with overtones of Charles Dickens. Aside from the conventional oysters in stew, on the half shell and broiled with bacon, the menu included roast young bear, bear's paws en gelée, Maryland coon with Mephisto sauce, broiled roe deer, mallard duck, roast Christmas goose, leg of elk, buffalo steak, sweetbreads financière, grilled prairie hen, Vermont turkey, terrapin stew and an unthinkable luxury that rated listing as a separate course: fresh hothouse asparagus, with drawn butter, on toast. After all this, the obvious dessert was English plum pudding in flaming brandy sauce; but if anybody were still hungry, there were mince, apple and peach pies baked on board, rum pudding, cabinet pudding and candied ginger.

The splendor that characterized American railroad travel in the period beginning roughly in the 1880s and continuing down to the time of the 1914 War had its inspiration directly and unequivocally in the "floating palaces" of the Mississippi river traffic, whose passengers had by now been absorbed almost in their entirety by the steamcars. Aboard the ante-bellum river packets, American travelers had encountered their first heady experience with public luxury. After the Civil War and until the closing decades of the century, these magnificent steamers, awash with Gothic trim, rich furnishings, crystal chandeliers, plate-glass mirrors, Turkish carpets, potted palms and, above all, an explicit ostentation of eating and drinking, had established new standards of deluxe travel. "As beautiful as a steamboat" has survived in the language as a tribute to their hold on the public imagination and, as much of the traffic came to be diverted to the railroads in the 1870s, so did many of the more voluptuous amenities of luxury and convenience.

As they were placed in service, the more mature devisings of George Mortimer Pullman, Webster Wagner and the other carbuilders of the age came to be known as "Palace Cars"--and they were just that. Diners, sleeping cars and public lounges rejoiced in richly ornate woodwork, the craftsmanship of Black Forest artisans in the famous "Marquetry Room" at the Pullman shops. Stained glass appeared in clerestory and window Gothic; and there were plush, velour and cut-velvet upholstered arm-chairs, berths and divans. Bevel-edged French mirrors reflected the images of well-fed and self-satisfied patrons. Diffident females aboard the parlor cars languished amid thickets of palms and rubber plants. Name trains were staffed with valets, manicurists, lady's maids, librarians and barbers in addition to the conventional train crews and dining-room waiters and chefs.

Even the uniforms of train crews assumed overtones of the grandiose. Conductors aboard the Wagner sleeping cars that gave Pullman a run for his money until 1899 wore white-kid gloves and blue greatcoats with shoulder capes lined in scarlet. All conductors of importance wore beautifully cut tail coats (blue in winter, pearl-gray in summer) and sported boutonnieres. Everything about railroad travel bespoke style and the ostentations of class distinction peculiar to a democracy. Going first-class became a preoccupation of the American people, and the trains they rode reflected their pleasure and pride in rich devisings and luxuries theretofore available only in the private homes of the very well to do. Occupants of the coaches forward were prevented by locked compartments from intruding on their betters in Pullman.

The most glittering showcase for railroad style was the dining car. Here the carbuilders' expertise reached new heights of rococo splendor in the form of mahogany paneling, rare inlaid marquetry and fluted columns from Honduras, elaborate and costly lighting fixtures, rich table linen and napery and silver services from Shreve in San Francisco and Tiffany in New York. The classic standard of comparison was Delmonico's, and the holy name of this resort of fashion was evoked with ample justification in the way travelers dined as they rolled over mountain and prairie.

Generally speaking, the greatest concentration of deluxe was on the transcontinental runs where, until the faster limiteds of the 1920s and 1930s, passengers between Chicago and California lived aboard the cars for three days and nights. It was a trip comparable with, and of but little less duration than, an Atlantic crossing via Cunard or White Star, and its amenities were almost as grand.

Throughout the Nineties, the almost universal standard of culinary excellence in the United States was represented by the dollar dinner on the marvelously ornate and comfortably upholstered dining cars of the great carriers of the land. Whether one rode between New York and Washington on the Baltimore & Ohio's Royal Blue trains or to California on the Santa Fe's crack California Limited, a silver dollar got the best of everything, and a two-bit tip to the dexterous and amiable waiter established the donor as a magnifico.

Not only did the dollar dinner run, east of the Mississippi, to Maine lobster, terrapin Maryland, soft-shell crabs and (continued on page 197) Mobile Gastronomy (continued from page 128) Lake Superior whitefish, and beyond Omaha to antelope steaks and sage-fed quail; but six or seven courses ending with individual baked Alaska and imported Stilton was the accepted dimension of hospitality. Second and third helpings were encouraged; and if there was something your heart desired that wasn't on the menu--say, venison cutlets or jack-rabbit pie--the management would be delighted to run it up for you. No extra charge: Just think well of the Burlington, the Soo or the Atlantic Coast Line, as the case might be. It was a pleasure.

When Henry Morrison Flagler, late in the Eighties, discovered Florida and commenced building the Florida East Coast Railway to serve the eye-popping resort hotels that rose along the Atlantic littoral at Jacksonville, Palatka, Palm Beach and, eventually, Miami, gastronomy in transit reached new heights that would have gratified Brillat-Savarin. With better than $200,000,000 in the hard gold currency of the times deriving from Standard Oil almost literally burning a hole in the pocket of his striped cashmere trousers, Flagler conceived the notion of evolving a playground for the American people that would relegate Monte Carlo and the French Riviera to the estate of fleabag carnivals. One of his caprices was that a guest in one of the Flagler hotels in Florida was as good as in his suite when he stepped aboard the cars in New York or Boston. To further the illusion, passengers on the through Pullmans found themselves skirmishing happily with fresh giant cracked crab while traversing the Jersey meadows and acquiring a taste for broiled pompano with hot mustard sauce before they reached Washington.

To meet this competition, the Seaboard Air Line, which also wanted in on the rich Florida pickings, was forced to go to equal or greater lengths of culinary hospitality, and vacationists bound for Florida took to booking passage on the carrier that promised the most ravishing gala of gastronomy en route. Dining-car crews in those days moved with the seasons, signing on the Florida runs in December and January, using their seniority to be assigned to Aiken and Pinehurst in early spring, and landing the Bar Harbor trains in summer. Stewards and waiters alike knew the customers personally; and the customers, knowing that they might be assigned the same waiter half a dozen times in the course of the social year, tipped accordingly. It was a happy relationship.

The author of this vignette was, in the middle 1920s, accompanying his father, a Boston banker of formidable dimensions, to Palm Beach aboard the Orange Blossom Special on the Seaboard when, during the service of dinner, the courtly, white-haired dining-car steward stopped at our table and remarked deferentially: "Mr. Beebe, I'll wager you can't tell me what you were doing just forty years ago tonight."

My father allowed that he couldn't without making an issue of it.

"You were being married in the Vendome Hotel in Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and I was serving the lobster aspic at the reception."

That sort of thing was good for $20 in gold, any time.

The reason, of course, that food on the diners in their golden age was, as noted above, the best food being served in the United States was that it was provided with little or no attention to the economics of its service. The idea of undertaking to so much as break even, let alone turn a profit on their dining cars, would have shocked the railroad managements of the time almost inexpressibly. Their diners were the carriers' finest and most universally admired showcases, on the theory that the railroad that most elegantly sluiced and gentled its passengers was more likely than not to be expeditious and reliable in the conduct of the freight transport from which its revenues derived. A captain of industry who favorably recalled the fillet of red snapper en papillote encountered en route to New Orleans on the Louisville & Nashville and the obsequious solicitude of the waiter at breakfast the next morning could order his freight shipped via the L. & N. The railroad that provided the finest dollar dinner could expect the approval and favor of the frock-coated coal barons and ironmasters along its right of way.

It was a scheme of things in which cost accounting had no part and would have evoked shouts of mirth if it had been suggested. The fixed rule, until the mid-Twenties on the dining cars of the New York Central, was that no steward was expected to turn in more than four bits earned on every dollar he cost the company, and this ratio was more liberally interpreted aboard such crack flyers as The Twentieth Century Limited and the Southwestern Limited. In the halcyon times before the 1914 War, standard practice aboard The Century allotted one pound of creamery butter per passenger for the two meals served en route between Chicago and NewYork, an allowance that would suggest that butter was used not only at table and in cooking but in the journal boxes as well. Not only did The Century's butter come in ample quantities, but it carried with it a cachet of social elegance, since it was provided from the manorial Lake Champlain dairy farm of Dr. William Seward Webb, a Vanderbilt son-in-law who sold his surplus cream and vegetables to the family enterprise. It was almost like eating at table with a Vanderbilt.

Extensive menus and liberal larders were by no means limited to the standard-gauge main-line name trains in the golden age of which we sing. General William Jackson Palmer's narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande Western, a pioneer three-foot gauge through the Rockies between Denver and Salt Lake, afforded a breakfast menu listing 50 separate items, including: strawberries and cream, 20 cents; Southdown mutton chops, 40 cents; extra sirloin steak for two, $1; eggs and omelets in all styles, 20 cents; broiled mushrooms on toast, 40 cents; and fresh calves' liver and bacon, 40 cents. The Rio Grande pioneered the service of fresh Rocky Mountain trout, which later was to become standard on all railroads serving Colorado. The resources and variety of food that could be stored aboard the diminutive diners as they rolled through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and over the Wasatch was apparently limitless, and dinner entrees alone came to 28 separate meat dishes, including fresh chucker partridge, venison stew, antelope steak, Mexican quail, prairie chicken, blue-winged teal, buffalo chops and all the conventional steaks, chops, barnyard poultry and other domestic matters.

Perhaps, to the contemporary awareness, the most incredible amenity of mountain travel in the Nineties was the club car Animas Forks of the Silverton Northern Railway, which kept Mumm's Extra Dry and White Seal champagne iced and available at $2.50 a bottle, and sparkling burgundy at $1.25 the full bottle. The Silverton Northern was 18 miles long. It also maintained a sleeper. Or let us briefly give our attention to the sumptuously printed wine list for the year 1893 aboard the equally sumptuously appointed New England Limited, running on a crack schedule between Boston and New York over the joining rails of the New Haven and the New York & New England Railroads. The Limited, locally known as "The White Train" because its cars were painted in cream and gold and even the coal in its tender was sprayed with whitewash before each run, catered to the carriage trade of Beacon Street, and the moguls of State Street, and its groceries and wines were recruited from the ancestral firm of S. S. Pierce, which had provided the better things for Boston's dinner tables since the days of the China trade. There were four champagnes listed: G. H. Mumm, Pommery & Greno, Perrier-Jouët and Moët & Chandon. Each sold for $3.50 the full bottle. The white wines included Brandenberg Fréres' Latour Blanche 1874 and the Bordeaux was headed by Chateau, Laroze 1878, also $3.50, and there followed a foot-long list of spirits, mineral waters and liqueurs, including Lawrence's Medford Rum, the holy sacrament of New England and the proof spirits on which the triangle trade from time immemorial had been founded. For true connoisseurs, there was an 1842 cognac that retailed for two bits the pony glass, which would suggest that getting stiff en route was a positive economy. The dollar dinner included broiled live Maine lobster and beef Wellington. In keeping with its name, The White Train varied the universal practice else where of having colored dining-car crews and carried an all-white staff, not for reasons of prejudice but to establish continuity and match the over-all decor.

Perhaps the most radiantly effulgent name train ever placed in service was actually called the De-Luxe, and rolled once a week between Chicago and Los Angeles during the winter tourist seasons from 1911 until 1917, when its glories were abated by wartime restrictions. All-Pullman, all-bedroom, with brass beds instead of berths, its sailing list strictly limited to 60 paying guests, the De-Luxe also commanded a surcharge of $25 in honest-to-goodness money, perhaps the equivalent of four or five times as much today. Its Fred Harvey dining cars incorporated the first primeval resources of air conditioning, and dinner service was comparable with that of New York's lordly Ritz Carlton, which opened the same year, although passengers refrained from dressing formally for the evening, as was the custom of the time on the Blue Train between Paris and Monte Carlo.

By 1911 the dollar dinner, which for so long had been the standard of quality from the Baltimore & Ohio's Royal Blue trains to the Southern Pacific's Sunset Limited, was only a fragrant memory. It had been done to death when, at the time of its inaugural in 1902, The Twentieth Century Limited had priced its dinner at a staggering $1.50 as one of the most triumphant status symbols of its time. Meals on the De-Luxe were strictly à la carte and included such items as fresh beluga caviar sur socle, $1.25; baked shad and roe aux fines herbes, 60 cents; larded tenderloin of beef, Montebello, 90 cents; roast capon, chestnut dressing, 75 cents; quails in aspic, $1; imported roquefort and stilton cheese, 25 cents.

Although railroad history abounds with direct and unequivocal competition between rival carriers seeking passenger patronage over identical and closely parallel runs, none has ever been so evenly matched as that between two candy trains of the two most powerful railroad systems in the East, the Pennsylvania's Broadway Limited and the New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, perhaps the most famous train America has ever known. Running between New York and Chicago, service on these two matchless varnish runs was inaugurated on the same day at the same hour in June 1902, and for well over six decades the least detail of improvement in operation, equipment or schedule in one was met instantly and unhesitatingly by the opposition. If The Century cut 30 minutes from its running time, the new schedule was met the same day by the competition. If the Broadway commenced giving passengers two morning papers to read with breakfast, The Century slipped a third, The Wall Street Journal, in ahead of the bacon and eggs. The day in 1939 when The Century discarded its last open sleeping section in favor of all-room equipment, The Broadway did the same. Down the years the two trains raced neck and neck, sometimes quite literally on the speedway where their rights of way run parallel around the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

But nowhere in the conduct of these two fine luxury runs has rivalry been keener than in their dining cars. When, early in the game, The Century raised the price of its dollar dinner and started serving the dairy products of the Vanderbilt in-law, the Pennsylvania began wheeling hot tables of fresh bread and exotic rolls up to its patrons, a dramatic innovation 60-odd years ago. The Century, many years ago, inaugurated two table specialties that have been the hallmark of its gastronomy ever since: a particularly succulent variety of watermelon pickle and a special entree of lobster newburg. You may be sure that if, when traveling to Chicago on The Road of the Future, your dinner companion commands the latter of these, he is a traveler of experience and long standing.

In the golden noontide of railroad travel, there were dining-car stewards of more than parochial celebrity, whose fame as ambassadors for their carriers was quite literally world-wide. Memory at once evokes the image of courtly and venerable Dan Healy, a maître d'hôtel aboard the Milwaukee Railroad's Pioneer Limited, who numbered presidents and cabinet members among his first-name friends and who, after his death, enjoyed immortality in the form of a splendid dining car that bore his name. There was also the legendary Wild Bill Kurthy of the Southern Pacific, who at various times rode with The Overland Limited and the well-remembered Forty Niner, and who rose to a pinnacle of celebrity when he ran the diner on one section of the City of San Francisco during the 1941 War. Kurthy was a man of violent aspect and almost continual incandescence. He fired every member of his dining-car crew personally, publicly and with a Ciceronian peroration at least once on every run, a bravura performance usually conducted at the height of the dinner hour. His crews stayed with him for years. He also bullied the passengers and the management that employed him. During the years when there was supposed to be a shortage of such restricted items as steaks, chops, butter, cream and imported cognac for cooking, all these items were available and in outsize quantities aboard Kurthy's section of the City. He was popularly reported so to cow the commissary at the train's loading terminals that the entire allowance of meat for the railroad system went aboard his diner.

Be that as it may, the City's diners ran knee-deep in red points. Timid elderly ladies who wanted tea and toast found themselves confronted with 18 ounces of porterhouse floating in melted butter and commanded to eat it and like it. A request for a single three-minute egg would be met with a double broiled Minden mutton chop flanked by a baked potato awash with sour cream and chives. Ordinary lamb chops arrived festooned with necklaces of Deerfoot sausages, and flaming desserts (mark you, this was still wartime) came to the tables of Kurthy's favored passengers in the guise of the burning of Rome, with the best Hennessy and shouted encouragement from Kurthy not to waste a smidge.

At bedtime, Kurthy's passengers, fed to repletion and numb with good living, could expect the arrival of a grinning waiter with a tray foot high in rare-roast-beef sandwiches and glasses of half-and-half cream as a late snack. "Please eat them. The wild man will fire me sure if you don't!" was the accompanying message. Inevitably, news of such plenty circulated fast and personages of importance were at pains to ride the train to which Kurthy's diner was assigned. To the personal knowledge of this writer, Eugene Meyer, the Washington publisher, Senator David Ignatius Walsh of Massachusetts and Paul Smith, ex-publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, all at various times spurned other accommodations to ride this favored run. At the War's end, Kurthy is reported to have retired and set himself up as a restaurant proprietor outside San Francisco. Operating on the same economic basis as he had conducted his diners, he was shortly bankrupted.

Today, save for the handful of survivors named above, dining on the cars has lost its onetime splendor, its ample portions and the names of wonder who were its patrons. An American aphorism to the effect that "real railroading begins west of Chicago" meant, in practical fact, that the best dining-car food was available on the long-haul Western trains. It may be that this is still true. As support, let there be placed in evidence the fresh Colorado Rocky Mountain trout that, served as the Rio Grande's Prospector rolls down the escarpment of the Shining Mountain into the Denver yards, is still a wonder and glory of the region. The charcoal-broiled whitefish on the Santa Fe's Super Chief the first night out of Dearborn Station is all that it ever could have been in the days of the fabled De-Luxe. And if business takes you to St. Louis, spurn the Wright brothers' folly and ride the Norfolk & Western's Banner Blue through the golden heartland of daylight Illinois. A recent merger hasn't affected the chicken-pot pie on the diner. It's good enough, with a couple of well-chilled martinis, to create the illusion that happy times have come again along the high iron of the land. Perhaps, in truth, they have.