28. attend a Chautauqua

Cooking with Fred Harvey

Fred Harvey, represented this week by Dr. William Worley, established restaurants, hotels, and dining cars along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail lines, beginning in 1876. At that time, there was no good food available for railroad passengers west of Chicago. Most of us these days probably associate Harvey with the Judy Garland movie, The Harvey Girls. I'll be hearing more about that later this week.

Our lunchtime program today was about The Harvey House Cookbook. Actually, when Fred Harvey was alive, there was no cookbook. He hired the best chefs around, in one case luring the chef from the Palmer House in Chicago to a tiny town on the railroad in Kansas. With the second generation of Harveys, some of the recipes became more standard throughout the company. Dr. Worley read some recipes from The Harvey House Cookbook, compiled about a decade ago from recipes originally published in a railroad newsletter and a Harvey House magazine.

Many of the recipes had fancy names, most of which I'm sure I didn't spell correctly in my notes:

• beef rissoles


• breaded veal cutlet zegaray, which included 2T of chopped tongue as an ingredient


• chicken masielle, a recipe considered so special at the Kansas City Union Station's Westport Room that a gong was rung every time it was ordered


• spaghetti en casiati, which included cooked cockscomb, primarily for its food coloring attribute

The jellied chicken recipe included this piece of helpful advice: "there is a cup full of stiff gel in a pair of chicken feet."

Many of the restaurants and hotels were in the Southwest United States, so some Harvey establishments served traditional dishes like huevos rancheros and sopapillas.

During the golden age of passenger railroad travel, Fred Harvey was synonymous with good food and good service. The establishments served a wide variety of food, local specialties as well as basic popular items like roast beef and fried chicken.