He presided over Virginia's great political barbeques for the last half
of the nineteenth century, taught the young Prince of Wales to crave
mint juleps in 1859, catered to Virginia's mountain spas, and fed two
generations of Richmond epicures with terrapin and turkey.
This fascinating culinarian is John Dabney (1821-1900), who was born a
slave, but later built an enterprising catering business. Dabney is just
one of 175 influential cooks and restaurateurs profiled by David S.
Shields in The Culinarians, a beautifully produced encyclopedic
history of the rise of professional cooking in America from the early
republic to Prohibition.
Shields's concise biographies include the legendary Julien, founder in
1793 of America's first restaurant, Boston's Restorator; and Louis Diat
and Oscar of the Waldorf, the men most responsible for keeping the ideal
of fine dining alive between the World Wars. Though many of the
gastronomic pioneers gathered here are less well known, their diverse
influence on American dining should not be overlooked--plus, their
stories are truly entertaining. We meet an African American oyster
dealer who became the Congressional caterer, and, thus, a powerful
broker of political patronage; a French chef who was a culinary savant
of vegetables and drove the rise of California cuisine in the 1870s; and
a rotund Philadelphia confectioner who prevailed in a culinary contest
with a rival in New York by staging what many believed to be the
greatest American meal of the nineteenth century. He later grew wealthy
selling ice cream to the masses. Shields also introduces us to a French
chef who brought haute cuisine to wealthy prospectors and a black
restaurateur who hosted a reconciliation dinner for black and white
citizens at the close of the Civil War in Charleston.
Altogether, Culinarians is a delightful compendium of
charcuterie-makers, pastry-pipers, caterers, railroad chefs, and cooking
school matrons--not to mention drunks, temperance converts, and
gangsters--who all had a hand in creating the first age of American fine
dining and its legacy of conviviality and innovation that continues
today.
