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From the Dining Car by James D Porterfield The recipes & stories behind today's
From the Dining Car by James D Porterfield The recipes & stories behind todays greatest rail dining experiences
Hard Cover With dust jacket
Copyright 2004
289 pages indexed.
Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
North America's Private Luxury Trains 7
American Orient Express 8
"The China Man" 20
Montana Rockies Rail Tours 23
The International Experience: The Royal Scotsman 26
Princess Tours's Midnight Sun Express 28
Capturing a Cuisine: The Marlboro Unlimited 33
Rocky Mountaineer 37
On the Light Side of Rail Dining 41
Royal Canadian Pacific 42
Libation I 50
Private VarnishPrivate Chefs 51
Georgia 300 55
Breakfast on the Georgia 300 60
Belle Vista 63
Caritas 68
Chapel Hill 71
A Pullman Private Car Chef Serves Up Good Things to Eat 75
I. Pinckney Henderson 78
Northern Sky 83
Famous Writers On Rail Dining 89
Palmetto State 92
Scottish Thistle 98
Railroad Art: Tex Wilson's "Workin' on the Railroad" 103
The Survivor 104
Tamalpais 107
Libation II 113
Virginia City 113
Everyone's Favorites 118
Dinner Trains 125
Cafe Lafayette Dinner Train 126
The Making of a Dinner Train: Rebuilding the Granite Eagle 13
The Grand Traverse Dinner Train 134
Great Smoky Mountains Railroad 138
Michigan Star Clipper Dinner Train 142
Mt. Hood Dinner Train 148
Libation III 150
Hobo Stew 153
My Old Kentucky Dinner Train 155
In Bourbon Country 158
Napa Valley Wine Train 160
Newport Dinner Train 165
RailCruise America 169
Scenic Rail Dining 175
Shasta Sunset Dinner Train 179
Spirit of Washington Dinner Train 186
The Passenger Railroads 193
Amtrak 194
"And the Winner is . . ." 196
Dining on the "Old Reliable" 199
Amcuisine: Amtrak Intercity Trains 205
Amtrak How To 213
Amcuisine, Coast Starlight-Style 214
How Many Servings?: The Largest Recipe 218
A Model Menu for Travelers 218
Acela Express 220
VIA Rail Canada 226
Plan B: Chef Ron Woods's Open-Faced Sandwich 233
Great Southern Railway 234
From the Business Car 238
A BNSF Business Dinner: A Class I Corporate Dining Room 239
Christmas Dinner on the Union Pacific 241
Montana Rail Link 244
Contemporary Interpretations 250
Quad/Graphics Quad/Cuisine 254
Lamar Gilbert, Sr., and the Amtrak 10001 260
Appendix 1: Sources for Further Information 261
Appendix 2: Sources for Specialty Food Items 263
Appendix 3: Recipe Index by Course 265
Index 271
First Edition
This book is a love song. Its composition began twelve years ago with the publication of my first cookbook, Dining by Rail: The History and Recipes from America's Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine, which is a social history with recipes. Working on that book rekindled in me two dormant passions: great trains and good food. Pursuing those passions to research that book, I discovered a number of vibrant contemporary spinoffs on the rail-dining theme. Train stations were being restored for use as restaurants. Dining cars had been converted into dinner trains. Old train cars had been modernized and put to use by private owners. Whole train sets were being converted into privately operated luxury trains. And connecting me to all of this, Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, whose long-distance trains-with dining cars-run all over the contiguous United States. It turns out, I was happily reminded, there are still hundreds of chefs hard at work conjuring fine meals for passengers in all kinds of railroad settings across North America-indeed, on trains running throughout the world.
Because of the uniqueness of their workplace, these chefs have special knowledge that is valuable for those of us who like cook at home, even for those who don't like to but have to cook. Consider this, for example. For a period in the 1990s, Amtrak sent its dining car chefs and food specialists to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, to receive refresher training and to compete for recognition of their creations before a panel of judges. The CIA chef-in-charge, Anton Flory, cited the difficulties a railroad chef faces, noting that they not only work in a confined space, but in one that is moving; that they must work quickly because their "dining room" has to serve several hundred people at each meal in a series of seatings that occur over a short period of time; and that, because their patrons range from sophisticated gourmands to fussy children and fast-food mavens, their dishes have to compare favorably with those of chefs at fine hotels, resorts, and restaurants, and with those of hurried line cooks, even with those in a fast-food chain.
Further, a railroad chef needs to use fool-proof planning in order to have everything needed at hand, or be adept with last-minute substitutions in a pinch. As Joe Begia, director for the now defunct Texan Dinner Train, once quipped, "Unlike a chef at a restaurant, who can send someone to the store, or to a nearby establishment to borrow something missing, you can't just run out for another head of lettuce." If you forget it, or run out of it, you are going to have to get creative.
Does any of this sound familiar? Small kitchen, short on time, work with what's on hand, make something good. It reminds me of my own kitchen, and the kitchens of just about everyone I know, at dinnertime.
That my increasing knowledge of contemporary rail dining and the challenges of rail chefs would result in another cookbook, however, grew unintentionally out of the fickle nature of the writer's life. When I undertook writing Dining by Rail, I saw it as one book in a planned eclectic writing career. My next book was to have been a history of the oil fields of Pennsylvania. However, while promoting Dining by Rail, I was asked to do a feature on the winners of Amtrak's then-new "Chef of the Year" competition, and to give the subject an historical perspective (which in turn led to a long-term quarterly "Foodstyles" column for the in-room magazine of a major international chain of hotels). My next assignment was a rail dining column in Rail fan Sr Railroad, which has so far yielded more than 150 columns and features about all aspects of rail dining. Work on these pieces, and on the "Annual Guide to Dinner Trains" that now appears in the magazine each June, has provided me entrinto the corporate offices, kitchens and commissaries, and trains and equipment of dozens of railroads, museums and historic sites, private cars, dinner trains, freight railroads, and luxury trains in North America and beyond.
Memories abound. Spending a crisp fall evening in New Hampshire's White Mountain National Forest on board the Cafe Lafayette Dinner Train. Conversing with a chef who is slicing fresh zucchini in the galley of Amtrak's Coast Starlight, the Pacific Ocean's beach flashing by outside the window. Watching the sun set on Narragansett Bay from the Newport Dinner Train in Rhode Island. Getting a guided tour of the private car Belle Vista's new state-of-the-art kitchen by the chef who designed it, to include all the childproofing the owner insisted on. Gliding through Glacier National Park en route to Seattle in June-the month of the longest days-over dinner on Amtrak's Empire Builder. Taking in reminders of America's industrial might from the observation platform of the private car Georgia 300 while departing Baltimore, Maryland. Enjoying an improvised curried chicken dinner named in honor of my presence that evening-"Chicken a la Jimmy"-on Amtrak's Southwest Chief to Los Angeles. Three days of spectacularly varied scenery and frequent conversations with a team of skilled chefs on VIA's Canadian on a run from Toronto to Vancouver. Speeding along the Mississippi River on a BNSF business car train-a route the railroad's predecessor line, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, once touted in its advertising as "300 miles where Mother Nature Smiles"-on a run rail fans call "rare mileage" because it no longer sees passenger trains, two of the railroad's CIA-trained chefs swapping stories about life and work.
Nice work if you can get it!
The work also revealed that while technique has changed (for example, today there is greater reliance on seasonings than on fats for flavor) and the technology has changed (today's dining car kitchens are powered by electricity, not fueled by coal) since the era covered in Dining by Rail-which ended in the early 1950s-the skills, attitudes, and work ethic required of the men and women who cook in dining cars today are pretty much the same as they were in that earlier era. Further, the similarity of the working conditions these men and women encounter to those you and I encounter remain: We want to make and serve delicious foods despite fast-paced and time-stressed circumstances, despite the decidedly unrestaurant-like constraints our kitchen equipment and layout imposes, and despite the fact that we shop in grocery stores-and then only on occasion-instead of having a variety of vendors deliver fresh or unique ingredients to our door several times a day.
It was to capture and share this relevant work of today's railroad chefs, to showcase their methods and wonderful foods, and to motivate or inspire others to try cooking by demonstrating what is truly possible, that I began to collect recipes everywhere I went. If in reading my book and trying the recipes, you are encouraged to try a dinner train for a special event, to take an excursion on a private car or train for one of your vacations, or to take the train when you travel, so much the better.
Or if you, like me, find yourself longing for a return to truly relaxing travel that offers great scenery, affable companionship, and good food as part of the trip. There is no better way to travel than by train.
To create fine dining on a train requires concentration on four factors. The first is FLAVOR. That is, on the selection of ingredients, often unique to a region or a history, and on the combining of textures. Second, FOCUS, by which I mean the selection of appropriate technique, most notably for a railroad chef the reduction of preparation steps, but also the ability to work in steps to finish items just prior to serving them. Third, ORGANIZATION, including good planning and careful shopping to keep supplies on hand. Finally, CREATIVITY, or as Max Sanoguet, Jr., an Amtrak chef who was using champagne to make stuffing one evening on Amtrak's Chicago-Los Angeles Southwest Chief, put it, "being a chemist." These are the culinary principles you'll find throughout the recipes in From the Dining Car.
All the recipes in this book are cooked and served on moving trains, which fall into five categories:
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