by Anna Fixsen
Before farm-to-table restaurants, there were train-to-table restaurants; before Emeril, there was Fred. Fred Harvey, (1835-1901) founded America's first restaurant empire, a chain that revolutionized the way in which people thought about food and dining. But it's been largely forgotten. Now author Stephen Fried is working to assemble an online cookbook of the restaurants' original recipes.
Fried discovered Harvey on a trip to the Grand Canyon in 1993 and quickly became a "Fred Head." He compiled years of research into a Harvey biography, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, and is currently compiling an online recipe collection called the Harvey Girls Cookbook Project. Fried and his team have posted hundreds of recipes that haven't been followed in more than 80 years as a sort of living Americana cookbook, in the hopes that chefs and the culinarily curious will test the recipes.
Harvey's restaurants strung along the Santa Fe railroad like beads on a necklace, starting in Kansas and eventually stretching west to California and north to Chicago. Harvey employed some of the best European-trained chefs around, and a pretty staff of waitresses, known as the Harvey Girls, served food to weary travelers. The chain became wildly popular and the family-run restaurants enjoyed a multi-decade heyday from the late 1870s until World War II.
At Harvey restaurants, fast food met slow food. The brevity of the train stops meant that the eats had to be made fast; cooks cranked out gourmet meals in minutes. Menus featured eccentric mixes spanning the gastronomic spectrum from haute cuisine to classic diner food, democratizing mealtime. Even the creators of the atomic bomb--Robert Oppenheimer and other members of the Manhattan Project--enjoyed celebratory Fred Harvey food after successful test detonations.
But throughout his research, Fried had a mystery on his hands: In spite of the vastness and success of the restaurant chain, the actual recipes were few and far between. What began as a brief appendix of recipes in the back of Fried's book grew into a full-blown quest to find more recipes.
Epicurious: How did you discover Fred Harvey?
Stephen Fried: Right at the rim of the Grand Canyon are these old hotels built 100 years ago. They were built by the Santa Fe railroad for Fred Harvey, and they decided they were going to make the Grand Canyon into a tourist site. I didn't know any of this. I just went into the hotel just thinking "How the hell did anybody build a hotel at the lip of the Grand Canyon?"
And when you go into the main lobby of the hotel there is a portrait of Fred Harvey. It was like we were supposed to know who he was, but of course we had never heard of him or knew anything about him.
Epicurious: What were train restaurants like before Fred Harvey?
SF: The way they would feed people in the West was to have eating houses on train lines; basically each railroad station would have a restaurant in it. Every 100 miles they would stop and the passengers would eat. These restaurants were a nightmare. They were locally run and the people who ran them knew they would never see you again. So they deliberately treated the people really badly. They ripped them off; the food was awful, you would take one bite and they would literally scrape it off and give it to the next customer.
Epicurious: What made the Harvey restaurants different?
SF: The Fred Harvey Company went from owning three restaurants in their early days to owning like, 60. It became the first centralized, national chain of anything in America, and the idea was that the food would be better because it was one big company.
These were originally not cities; they were little towns. Suddenly towns that had no restaurant at all (and were getting dried food) were getting fresh food off the railroad. The truth is, restaurants got fresher food than a lot of restaurants do today. It was the freshest thing that was possible in the country then. There was no rare meat in the West at that time, no one ate meat that hadn't been cured because it wasn't safe. These [Harvey] restaurants would literally serve fresh oysters. They would bring oysters from the East and you could eat them in Winslow, Arizona or Las Vegas, New Mexico. They would bring fresh produce from California and meat from Chicago or Kansas City. These places were considered miraculous...unlike today, where we all expect a chain restaurant to have all of the same food. [The Harvey chain] assumed you were going to be going across the country with them. The menus were different in different places, so you could eat different things.
Epicurious: Because your journey would be so long, you wouldn't want to be eating the same entree at every stop.
SF: The food was all over the place because these were classically trained chefs that knew how to make regional food and Americana food, so it would be not uncommon on these menus to get a couple of dishes that were classic French right out of Escoffier. You might get classic, what we now think of as regional American food, Mexican dishes. Prairie chicken or other things they would serve in the Midwest. So a menu wouldn't be all Americana food or all food French food, it would be a little bit of everything.
Epicurious: What was the atmosphere of the restaurant like?
SF: Typically, restaurants were for rich people, but Fred Harvey restaurants had to be for everyone on the train.
Each restaurant had a main dining room with wood-paneled walls, crystal from Europe, the finest silver from England--all the stuff you would fine at a high-end dining room. Even if you were a cowboy, they made you wear a jacket.
Next to that that was a lunchroom, the progenitor of we would think of today as a diner. There was a counter with stools and then you would order some of the same food a la carte.
Then there was, like, Starbucks: there was takeout coffee. Freshly brewed coffee was a big thing in the West. At a Fred Harvey place, they actually threw it out every four hours...all of these things we think are really modern, they were doing 100 years ago.
...The first Fred Harvey restaurant was founded in 1876 in Topeka and that was the West, where you arrived on horseback and someone could walk into your restaurant and shoot you. The West was still pretty wild. They had lots of robberies. Then, gradually, the West got civilized, and the company expanded.
Epicurious: How many dishes were typically on the Harvey menu?
SF: In the 1880s, the menus were smaller because the restaurants were smaller. A typical menu in the very early days, you might have nine or 10 entrees with the same number of appetizers and desserts. They were not smorgasbord menus, they were kind of like Noah's Ark: two of everything.
Epicurious: What was the quintessential Fred Harvey meal?
SF: Originally, what the company was best known for were steaks. Fresh meat in the West was really unusual. So they had steak and eggs; fresh eggs, fresh meat that had just come from California. Each of the cities had their own famous dishes. Things that I love: these little orange Harvey Girl pancakes that have orange zest in them; it's kinda like the way Cher cooked in the movie Mermaids.
Epicurious: The cuisine seems pretty progressive, considering the incorporation of regional, ethnic food, next to French stuff.
SF: That was the kind of people they were. The West was an interesting melting pot. There were Mexican people, Native American people, and immigrants from Europe. The Harvey Company would embrace that. Fred Harvey was British; his number one guy was a Jewish guy from England. They employed women; they did art business with Native Americans. The country was just starting to figure out multiculturalism was a good thing. The Harvey Company was one of the first companies to have African American employees, female employees, and female executives. It was a very unusual company. That's reflective of the West.
Epicurious: It's almost like fusion cuisine before fusion cuisine.
SF: I've been referring to this as bi-continental cuisine; there was no real American food. They had to bring the cuisine of the continent--from Europe-- to America. Some of it became real fusion...Konrad Allgaier was the chef at La Fonda [a hotel in Santa Fe]. He became known as the original fusion chef of the Southwest. He did a lot of crossover cuisines between German, Mexican, New Mexican and French. He was making enchiladas, guacamole, and eventually some of the things crossed over. Their first goal was to be able to have a restaurant where you could go in and try different kinds of food. Imagine going to a place that had great diner food, great French food and great Mexican food.
Epicurious: How did you go from writing the book from deciding to archive the recipes?
SF: We kept saying, "Where are the recipes?" We found lots of menus and there were some Harvey recipes that were around, but not enough considering they had been in the business for so long. So we started looking for recipes.
There were a handful of little pamphlets that the company put out over the years and explanations of who the chefs were, so those were fun. But right before the book was coming out, somebody gave me an entire recipe book that had been given to them by a train car chef from Texas. It was like a piles of papers sent from the main Fred Harvey office. Some of them are full recipes written out, some are just in paragraph form. Some are like plating instructions. And some are like little Fred Harvey pep talks because they had a rule for everything. There were instructions on how to train your employees.
Epicurious: Was it a bound book?
SF: It was a pile of Xeroxes. But it was the complete book this chef had compiled over the years. They would send stuff out in piecemeal. You would keep it in the volume. Cross-reference with things like Escoffier; some of the sauces they weren't designing from scratch but they were using the traditional recipe. Some of the sauces were just using the traditional recipe. These things would have everything from recipes for Alligator pears--what they called avocados--to a version of pressed duck. Then we found another cookbook someone else had. And we decided to make an appendix in the book, and said "Wouldn't it be fun to have 50 recipes in the book?" We combined the ones we had found and the ones we found in this book....
[On the book tour] we found an archive, this really cool archive in Arizona that had been mislabeled that we hadn't even seen. It was every menu from 1930 at the El Tovar, which is the main Harvey hotel at the Grand Canyon. A whole year in the life of what was a very significant hotel in America at this time--all of the recipes. We said, "Let's do something with this."...
These recipes can be incredibly simple, or incredibly ridiculous. Some recipes you read it and go "I want to eat that right now." Some things you read and say "I would never eat that in a millions years." A lot of the frog legs recipes have a bit of a squeamish factor...People ate a lot more lard back then...
Epicurious: Why did you make the recipes available online?
SF: The idea was to post the recipes and see what happens. If anybody cooks something and shows us what happened even if they cook it exactly or do something differently with it, that's fine. We want it to be a living, Americana cookbook.
Epicurious: Are you still searching for more Harvey recipes?
SF: So here's what we have been doing: we are putting recipes up on our Tumblr, we are looking for people for try them and we are also looking for restaurants to try them.
Epicurious: Where does the Harvey chain stand in the history of American food?
SF: These chefs are the first foodie heroes in America; any foodie heroes since then, it's all cool, but I hope that people understand that the foodie heroes were the chefs at the big hotels: all these chefs who worked for the Fred Harvey company.
This time marked the beginning our own food heritage, the beginning of Americans making sense of where national food is going to be in their lives.
