Made In America - Bill Bryson [123]
As the nineteenth century progressed, diet evolved into two camps – the few who ate well and the many who did not – and class antagonisms were not long in emerging. The patrician New Yorker Martin Van Buren was ousted from the Presidency in 1840 in large part because one of his Whig opponents made a celebrated speech attacking Van Buren for serving such delicate and unmanly fare in the White House as strawberries, cauliflower and celery. (Van Buren gained a sort of vicarious revenge when at the subsequent inauguration the crusty William Henry Harrison refused to don an overcoat, contracted pneumonia and with alarming haste expired; his tenure as President was just thirty days, much of that spent unconscious.)
Gradually even poorer Americans became acquainted with a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, though the linguistic evidence shows that they weren’t always quite sure what to make of them. For the potato alone, the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles records such arresting nineteenth-century concoctions as potato custard, potato chowder, potato pone, potato pudding and even potato coffee. We can assume that most of these were consumed in a spirit of either experimentation or desperation and that most didn’t survive long in the native diet.
Only a relative handful of new foods entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century, among them pretzel (1824), pumpernickel (1839), liverwurst (1869), tutti-frutti (1876) and spaghetti (1880). What changed was the way Americans ate. In particular they began to eat out. Before the 1820s, dining out was an activity reserved almost exclusively for travellers. Though it was possible to eat in hotels and taverns, there were no places dedicated to the public consumption of food for the mere pleasure of it, nor any word to describe them. Then in 1827 a new word and concept entered American English from France: restaurant.
It was in that year that two Swiss-born brothers, Giovanni and Pietro Del-Monico, opened a coffee and pastry shop in the Battery district of New York City. The enterprise was sufficiently successful that in 1831 they invited their nephew Lorenzo to join them. Though just nineteen and with no experience in catering, Lorenzo was born to culinary greatness. He did none of the cooking, but he did buy the food, and made a point of arriving before dawn at the city’s main markets to acquire the best and freshest provisions, a practice now routine but at the time unheard-of. He transformed the Del-Monicos’ pastry shop into America’s premier restaurant (actually a series of restaurants: Delmonico’s moved frequently and sometimes operated under as many as four roofs at once), bringing a dimension of elegance to American dining that it had theretofore lacked. Under the new, unhyphenated name Delmonico’s, the restaurant introduced Americans to many unfamiliar dishes, ranging from artichokes and mayonnaise (named originally for the Minorcan port Mahón)9 to fricasseed calf’s head, and invented several as well, notably lobster Newburg, which began life as lobster à la Wenburg. It was so called in honour of an esteemed client, Ben Wenburg, until he disgraced himself through some unseemly (but intriguingly unspecified) altercation on the premises, and the dish was abruptly anagrammatized. A similar transformation happened with another Delmonico’s creation, chicken à la Keene, named for one Foxhall Keene, which became over time (for reasons that appear to have gone unnoted) chicken à la king.
Inspired by Delmonico’s example, restaurants sprouted all over. By the 1870s New York City alone had over five thousand restaurants, many of them, like La Maison Dorée, Louis Sherry’s and Lüchows, of a standard comparable to the finest restaurants of Europe. With the new restaurants came new dishes, like Waldorf salad and eggs Benedict, both created at the Waldorf-Astoria in the 1890s. The latter