I was looking through my collection of restaurant menus, when I spotted the Cow Shed and remembered that I had always wondered about that name. Was there really once a genuine cow shed in the middle of Detroit that it was commemorating? [Above, 1935 menu cover]
I discovered that it was a night club that had opened in 1933 in an unoccupied building that had long housed a fire station. No cows. So I wondered why the proprietors didn’t choose a name associated with that rather than calling it the Cow Shed, a name I find odd and not that appealing. [Above: 1930s postcard]
But I never found the answer to that question.
Along with dinners, the club offered entertainment with music by the Cow Shed Rascals and other bands, floor shows, and singing waiters. Patrons could spend the entire night dancing if they so desired. [Above: 1938 advertisement]
It also served dinners. Its menu was lengthy, filled with many dinner choices such as Broiled Spring Chicken with fries, salad, rolls and butter for 75c, or Sirloin Steak with the same accompaniments for 60c. Most full dinners cost from a dollar to $1.50, and also included Whitefish, Leg of Veal, Frog Legs, Scallops, and Pork Chops. Guests who weren’t very hungry could choose from a long list of sandwiches.
It had a few bumps in its history.
About a year after the club opened, two men and a woman threw a stench bomb from the Shed’s balcony, sending 100 patrons fleeing. The manager was at a loss to explain it, claiming the club had no labor troubles. This was at the same time that Chicago, for instance, experienced many such incidents, with restaurant and club owners always saying they had no idea what it could be about. In reality, as they knew, it was a threat to make them force their employees to join (fake) labor unions run by mobsters who pocketed the dues.
The Cow Shed was sometimes in trouble for serving people who had already swallowed way too much booze. It also had other problems with the law. Despite stating on the back of one of their menus that “We Positively Do Not Permit Cross Table Dancing at Any Time,” in 1938 the club was fined for exactly that.
Cross-table dancing is an infraction that I had not heard of before, and I have not been able to find it in force anywhere but Detroit. It referred to single women asking men to dance, with the assumption that they were sex workers looking for customers.
Police also spotted the club’s manager directing the cigarette “girl” to sit next to a man at the bar. And they noted that about 80% of the women at the club were without escorts. The club was fined for cross-table dancing several times. It chose to pay a fine rather than have its license suspended for 10 days.
“Known from Coast to Coast”? Not so sure about that. The Cow Shed closed in 1941 and the building was torn down.
Were 19th century European visitors to the United States inclined to be super critical about the food they ate in restaurants and hotels? It’s hard to know the answer, but they were often negative. An example was a woman from Scotland who grew so used to bad food that she was surprised to find a good breakfast in La Junta, Colorado, in the 1880s. She bonded with the proprietor, a German who had been trained in Paris, agreeing that Americans were mainly interested in quantity, not quality. [Note: old images were impossible to find, so I have used a variety of some I have collected over time, all from the latter 20th century.]
Delmonico’s in New York was, of course, a glowing exception. Outside of New York, however, the Delmonico name lost its majesty. A typical example was the Delmonico restaurant in Walla Walla WA. The local newspaper advised the new owner to change the name, noting that it had been eagerly adopted “by so many inferior restaurants and hotels about the country.”
Most Boston restaurants were judged bad. A Boston paper declared in the 1890s that “in no city of the same size are there such inferior restaurants, so little tavern life, and so little appreciation of good cookery . . .”
Widespread criticism continued into the 20th century when keeping fresh food in cold storage for extended periods was targeted as a major culprit, added to the fact that Americans didn’t know how to order in a restaurant and bolted down their food.
In a 1920s essay, food writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell viewed cafeterias and the automats as proof that Americans cared little for food. The automat was perfect for those who didn’t want to waste time eating, she declared, “since after you put your money in the slot, the sandwich or salad, the coffee or chocolate that comes out may be swallowed as you stand – not one fraction of a second lost in a hunt for a seat.” She judged that “The man who first wrote ‘Eats’ above his restaurant door spoke the truth better than he knew, in one word pointing out to us the depths to which we have sunk.”
Duncan Hines criticized the nation’s restaurant mercilessly in the 1940s. He felt it was more dangerous to eat your way across the country than to drive across it. He admitted that he “would like to be food dictator of the U.S.A. just long enough to padlock two thirds of the places that call themselves cafes or restaurants.” He was expressing a common view of the food available to highway travelers, as also expressed in a 1951 Life magazine article which concluded that “In whatever region he is traveling, the American tourist soon finds that good simple American cooking is an elusive myth.”
But it wasn’t as though the dining public was necessarily going to fare better in cities. Occasionally restaurant reviewers revealed how unenthusiastic they were about a restaurant, without exactly trashing it. In a review a San Antonio oyster restaurant’s food, decor, and service were branded in turn as okay, inoffensive, and not exciting or depressing. The conclusion was that “You can pay a lot more for a lot less, and that’s the most exciting news of this review.”
In 1968 a columnist summed up restaurants of that time by agreeing with an experienced professional that mediocre restaurant food had become the norm. As examples he mentioned ‘The drive-in eatery, the Ma-and-Pa hash-house, the roadside ‘Stop-and-Eat’ wagon, the Main Street ‘Greasy Spoon.’ Hamburger. Ham-and-eggs. Canned fruit salad. Buns and coffee, and suggested diners might as well just “Take what they put before you. Slather it with ketchup. Eat and hurry on.’
By the 1980s, chain restaurants had become omnipresent across the nation. Two Chicago Tribune critics ranked 15 chains. They agreed that overall the quality of food in them was “mediocre.” The bottom five, which included the Ground Round (fatty, flavorless, and overcooked beef), Howard Johnson’s (rubbery clams, over-breaded shrimp, too much fried food), the International House of Pancakes (nothing-special crepes, old toppings, tough steak, plain lettuce salads), Shakey’s (substandard pizza, starchy buffet), and Wag’s (withered salad greens, chili tasting like canned), came in for heavy criticism.
However much patrons might complain about food (or service) in a restaurant, they tended to make their peace and accept less than perfection at restaurants that they frequently patronized. They kept their criticisms to themselves – even though restaurateurs say they would have preferred to hear them.
In 1993 columnist Kevin Cowherd described a fantasy eruption of anger that might occur after taking a bite of bad food in a restaurant: “. . . it’s so awful that you spit the food into your hand and fling it angrily at the ceiling and then stand up, backhand all the silverware and glasses off your table and scream . . .” He admits he never threw a fit like this but says, “Just once I want to react to lousy restaurant food with a major, king-hell tantrum that shakes the walls and peels the paint and makes everyone around me cringe.”
The Marston family ruled their restaurant kingdom in Boston for a very long time, just short of 80 years. It all began modestly. Seafaring Russell Marston, the family’s patriarch, was the first. He went to sea at age 14, and after 17 years in which he ended up with his own ship, he docked and became a restaurant operator.
Restaurant is a rather glorified term for his first venture on land. He and his former ship’s cook took over a place on the Baltimore Packet Pier in Boston in 1847. It was tiny, seating only twenty [pictured above]. Nonetheless it was popular and in 1850 they built a new place on the pier, describing it as “beautiful, spacious and commodious.” They named it the Mercantile Dining Saloon. [1851 Advertisement with misspelled name of Marston’s partner] Perhaps it also proved to be too small, because in 1853 they moved and “thoroughly renovated” a new place at 13 Brattle Street.
In 1854 Marston and his cook Sampson moved again, to a new Brattle Street location, number 27. In their pre-opening announcements they stressed that it would be “conducted in the neat and efficient manner which has characterized our Establishments.” Of course, it makes perfect sense that two former seamen would be neat and efficient.
Meanwhile in the 1850s Russell had become a member of the Committee of Vigilance, an abolitionist organization that stood up against the Fugitive Slave Law which required officials in free states to arrest runaway slaves and return them to the South. His opposition to racism and slavery was dramatically on display at the new Brattle street place. On one occasion in 1856, after a white customer strongly objected to the presence of a Black patron in the restaurant, Marston yelled at him in no uncertain terms, then steered the complainer to the street and told him never to return. Not surprisingly the restaurant was popular with civil rights activists, including women suffragists Lydia Marie Child and Lucy Stone.
Russell’s brother George was also involved in running the Brattle street place, but in 1866 Russell became the sole proprietor. He began to enlarge, and spread into neighboring Brattle Street buildings, eventually simultaneously occupying three in a row. [Above” 1881 drawing of the Brattle Street Marston enterprise] A few years later his son Howard became his business partner. By 1881 the restaurant at 23 Brattle held 250. To mark the spot, a stately Howard municipal clock inscribed with the Marston name stood in front of the restaurants on Brattle street. [shown below]
There were said to be 500 restaurants in Boston by 1885. But according to King’s Handbook for visitors to the city, other than those in hotels – and Marston’s – they were of no interest.
Popular menu items at Marston’s restaurants included corned beef hash and green corn, i.e., corn picked early. Shirley Marston, grandson of Russell, opened a cafeteria in 1926 which featured green corn in season. He emphasized in a 1926 interview that his cafeteria was the only place he knew of where “corn picked before sunrise is served the same day.” [Shown above: 1911 ad; Below: 1906 wagon that brought the green corn from the Marston farm]
In 1893 the Marstons opened restaurants on Hanover Street, where 309 workers served 4,000 patrons a day. Expansion continued in the early 1900s, with branches on Washington and Summer streets. With the death of Russell Marston, Howard took the leading role. In 1910 he opened a lunch place on Devonshire.
But nothing lasts forever. The Marston kingdom began to crumble in 1918 when the Washington location was closed, with a dismal advertisement that said all fixtures had to be sold by a given date “regardless of price.” Then, Howard Marston died in 1924. The remaining locations carried on for a few years, but in 1926 the family sold all its stock to a syndicate of local men who kept the Marston name. The new owners were not successful in keeping them open for more than a few years. On February 25, 1928 the Globe ran a story with the headline “Marston Restaurants Pass Into History with Closing Tonight,” noting that many of the workers at the Brattle-Hanover Street location had been there for over 30 years. [Above: Ca. 1920s cover and interior page of a small advertising notebook that gives no hint that the “empire” is about to fall.]
During the growth of Harlem as an entertainment district, known mainly for its jazz and night clubs of the 1920s and early 1930s, the Black-occupied part of New York City, with a population nearing 200,000, was also home to a number of tea rooms.
Unlike the night clubs, many of which had White owners, the tea rooms were owned and run almost exclusively by Black residents of Harlem. Also differing from the White-owned clubs — which did not admit Blacks — tea room patrons were in all likelihood predominantly Black. Of the tea rooms for which I could determine the proprietor, several were male.
A number of tea rooms were located near what was known as “strivers’ row” where well designed row houses on tree-lined streets housed wealthier, often more educated, Black residents.
Tea rooms were also part of the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s in which Black men and women joined the ranks of accomplished American artists and writers.
The tearoom named Odds and Ends was the earliest I found. It was in business in Harlem at least by November, 1920. It would appear that its owner and cook, Mrs. Benjamin Price, aka Susie Price, hosted debutantes and distinguished visitors from other states. One year after its opening it announced it would host Wednesday afternoon Teas and Dinner Dances, with music by Prof. Harding’s Orchestra. Among the patrons the following year was White author Gertrude Sanborn, a lunch guest of the editors of the newspaper Negro World. She was in Harlem to gather research for a book she was writing about racial passing called “Veiled Aristocrats,” published in 1924.
Harlem tea rooms differed from tea rooms around the U.S. in keeping long hours. In 1921 Odds and Ends advertised that it served lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and after-theater supper, closing at midnight. Many Harlem tea rooms served breakfast, which was unusual. This may have been a way of attracting White patrons ending their night of revelry.
Another early tea room was the White Peacock, planned as a friendly haven for Harlem’s writers and artists by proprietor Douglas O. Howe. Howe was said to be a member of Harlem’s “smart set.” With an orange and black color scheme, the tea room’s walls were painted by local artists in summer 1922, with one mural depicting a white peacock. There was a library with writing materials, books, and periodicals. Hours were to be from 11 a.m. until 2 a.m., serving tea, coffee, and light lunches. In the spirit of equality, women were to be allowed to smoke.
Was the White Peacock a success? I wish I knew. As is true of many of the tea rooms – and Harlem jazz clubs too — how long it stayed in business is unknown. I could find no further trace of it.
Odds and End’s Susie Price moved on in 1927, running the Venetian Tea Room with Iolanthe Sidney (full name: Iolanthe E. Storrs-Sidney). Iolanthe, a graduate of Talladega College who was socially active and well known in Harlem, took the role of hostess while Susie did the cooking. The tea room, known for its green and black decor, offered breakfast, lunch, and dinner, staying open all night with a la carte service. It became immensely popular very quickly. It was closed by October 1930 when a classified ad appeared offering “Complete Tea Room or Restaurant Equipment.”
A 1927 story about Flo’s tea room seemed to suggest that it wasn’t necessarily tea that patrons were sipping out of cups. But, at the same time Flo’s was also a gathering place for “society,” for Democratic party events, and for members of service organizations such as the Urban League and the American Legion.
Another development in 1927 was the creation of the Dark Tower Tea Club, as part of the Walker Studio created in a town house by the daughter of Mme. C. J. Walker who became rich with her Black cosmetics business. Her daughter and business successor, A’Lelia Walker, carved out a tea room as part of the Studio. In line with the Studio’s emphasis on the arts, the tea room was highly decorative, with a red, green, and black color scheme and ebony furniture decorated with red. After beginning as a free service to Studio members, it began charging for tea. Still in business in November 1929 and in February 1930, it advertised on the earlier date that it was “serving dinner daily” and had music and dancing.
It is somewhat difficult to know what to make of the elite Park View tea room that overlooked Bradhurst Park in northern Harlem. This is because of the coy wording of “Lady Nicotine” who wrote a column called “Between Puffs” for the Tattler. In a 1927 column she described the area as “most fashionable” and seemed to gush over the Park View’s “ample room for dancing.” She then said it was “poetic enough, if you get what I mean, to offer to its clientele caviar, anchovies, and stuffed truffles,” adding that “when you have followed one of its dinners . . . you have consumed well over your one quart.” Not sure I get what she means, but it could be interpreted as saying that alcoholic beverages were plentiful there.
The Livingstone College Tea Room was probably designed to attract alumnae of the college of that time located in the South. The advertisement is from 1929.
It seems there were two tea rooms named “Rosebud.” One [advertisement shown above] was run by Carrie Elmore, stayed open all night, and offered “Hot Steaming Dinners in Roasted Meats and Fowls” and “Delicious Coffee served with pure Cream.” The other, at 413 Lenox Avenue, was operated by Mrs. Lucille Pitts. A 1932 blurb said its decor was “a marvel of the decorators’ art . . . skillfully disguised to resemble a bower of roses” and serving chicken a la Maryland, corn fritters and “every known variety of sea food. It was open all night, serving “predawn breakfast.”
In addition to the White Peacock, tea rooms owned or at least managed by men included The Marguerite, The Flamingo, and Ellerbe’s. When the Marguerite opened in 1927 it drew lines of people waiting to enter, perhaps to enjoy its chicken and waffles, a menu item that was ubiquitous in Harlem. The Marguerite was run by Edward Ellerbe and G. Truesdale. Later Ellerbe opened a tea room under his own name, but by 1932 that tea room seemed to have a new male proprietor.
The Flamingo Tea Room, described as “swanky’ and ‘beautiful’ opened on 7th Avenue in summer of 1931 under the direction of Pete Johnson, said to be an experienced restaurateur. It was an unpromising time, not long after the stock market crash that resulted in the closure of many clubs in Harlem.
Other 1930s openings included the Caswell Tea Room and the Theresa Tea Room, both of which opened in 1932 with women proprietors promising home-cooked food.
But the 1930s were a turbulent time in Harlem as elsewhere. Rioting in 1935 caused the closure of many clubs and probably the tea rooms too. In retrospect they seem highly ephemeral businesses that nonetheless helped build New York City’s Black community for a time.
I’ve been exploring my postcard and ephemera collection and picking out favorites to see what I can find out about them. Judging from the geographical identification on this card – indicated by highway numbers and miles from towns, it clearly was a roadside enterprise catering to car and truck traffic on Route 20 in Indiana.
What I didn’t know is how very popular it was, not just with truckers and long distance drivers but with people living in the vicinity. Memories of it has inspired filmed interviews with former patrons who hung out there in their teens.
Bob’s initially opened in 1927, with a smaller building and was enlarged as shown above in 1932. In addition to getting business from traffic on Route 20, it also served as a stop for buses, with 10 to 15 stopping there daily. With the addition, the restaurant could host 150 patrons.
It belonged to by Robert Wiley and his wife Adah who worked there as a waitress. In 1933 it was totally destroyed by fire.
The Wileys and some relatives who lived with them were lucky to escape, although Adah was seriously injured. The Bob’s sign perched precariously on top of the central peak fell on Bob, but he was not badly hurt.
The Wileys were eager to replace the building quickly because it was on Route 20 where traffic was then headed toward Chicago’s World’s Fair. It soon reopened in a new building, shown above on a matchcover.
At some point tourist cabins were erected on land behind the restaurant. They were for travelers, but also housed restaurant waitresses.
With the new building in operation, the business continued to grow, But World War II presented new obstacles, namely difficulty in finding staff and a full range of food. At its busiest the restaurant had a staff of 40 but was down to 9 when it closed for the duration of the war. The South Bend newspaper declared it had been “one of the best-known highway restaurants and tourist camps in the middle west.”
When the restaurant closed Robert Wiley became a La Porte county deputy sheriff. Adah died in 1946. He remarried and reopened the restaurant in April 1946.
The highway set the tone for the restaurant in a number of ways. Obviously it brought travelers of all kinds, including some criminals on the run, and a jewel thieves who pulled off a daring heist in the parking lot. But stranger still — to me at least — was putting venison on the menu after a deer was killed on the highway.
A few years back I published a post called “tableside theater” that looked at cooking performances at guests’ tables in restaurants. This sort of dining room drama occurred mainly in restaurants that wanted to give a sense of luxury that justified a higher price than the meal might otherwise command. [Above: Hotel Bismarck, Chicago]
Another aspect of restaurant theater, usually less dramatic, but also certain to draw attention and oohs and aahs from patrons was the use of carts for ready-to-eat food, usually desserts.
The trend toward tableside food preparation and dessert carts came along mainly after World War II. It is not hard to imagine how restaurant goers then might have longed for normalcy and entertainment.
The 1950s is seen as the pinnacle decade of rolling carts of all kinds as well as tableside flambéing. Although carts with ready-to-eat desserts were likely to be found in a wider assortment of restaurants than those that provided tableside preparation, they too delighted guests. And the carts also enabled restaurants to boost demand for desserts. As the back of the postcard shown here notes, “Actual figures show customers buy more high profit desserts when Continental Carts are used to move them.” [The plastic cover of the cart shown above is not very elegant, but it was a practical way of keeping desserts from drying out.]
In Cleveland OH, the Taylor department store, inspired by New York and Europe, introduced rolling carts with salads, cold entrees, and desserts in 1950, in a space that had earlier been a cafeteria. Dessert carts were often used in department store restaurants. Chicago’s Marshall Field’s was not far behind, nor was the restaurant in Oakland CA’s airport. Pastry carts were also used at the Arnoldton, the restaurant in Trenton NJ’s Arnold Constable store.
In some restaurants the dessert carts held a variety of after-dinner items including some that are unfamiliar to me. Jimmie Shiavo’s in Madison WI, which had cheese and relish carts in addition to dessert carts, offered desserts such as Italian cookies, a fresh fruit bowl, roasted pumpkin or sunflower seeds, mints, candied fruit, roasted ceci (chickpeas seasoned with spices) and “St. John’s bread” (carob bean pods). St. John’s bread turned up again at Club El Bianco in Chicago, where carts contained olives, St. John’s bread, cheese, peppers, fruits, and nuts, though whether they were all intended as desserts and grouped on the same cart is unclear.
That dessert carts sell more desserts than would otherwise be the case seems to derive from their visual presentation, which is more powerful than a menu description. So it seems strange to me that carts would have items such as seeds, nuts, cheese, or other items such as those at Jimmie Shiavo’s since their appeal is not based on their looks. [The 1947 comic strip above suggests that sometimes carts were for display rather than serving.]
Tableside food presentation did not end in the 1950s, but continued through the 1960s and into the 1990s, though I have the impression it was fading by the late 1980s.
An example of a restaurant that eliminated tableside drama in the 1980s was The Buckingham Inn of Lima OH. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and much of the 1980s it specialized in luxury symbolism. Despite also operating an adjoining place called the Peanut Barrel that offered beer, pizza, and sing-alongs, it appeared to be an old English Inn adorned with knights’ armor and deadly weapons such as a truncheon and a lance. Steaks were the popular fare, but a pastry cart offered chocolate, lemon, and cocoanut cakes three inches high.
In 1986, as the Buckingham Inn’s owner made plans to replace the inn with a more casual family-style restaurant on the site, the pastry cart was auctioned along with the crystal chandeliers.
There are few Americans who wouldn’t recognize that the insulated carrying case shown here is for pizza delivery.
Of course, pizza is easier to deliver than an entire meal. Yet I just read a story in the New York Times that claimed currently, “Almost three of every four restaurant orders weren’t eaten in a restaurant . . .” And it reported that a National Restaurant Association survey from last year found that half of American adults ordered restaurant deliveries at least once a week.
The numbers of delivered meals may have grown, but the custom is far from new in this country.
Take a look at “They delivered,” a post I wrote a few years ago. You may be surprised.
It’s snowing outside, a perfect day to look through my collection of restaurant images. This is one of my best photos and I’ve always wondered about the place’s history.
The man in the foreground is almost certainly Mr. Hart. He proudly stands next to his new car, a 1940 Hudson, while his employees — possibly his wife and son — smile in the background.
The restaurant’s history turned out to be difficult to research, but I did learn that both restaurants were in Los Angeles, and that No. 2 was at 203 W. Manchester Blvd. and No. 1 was on S. Vermont.
Neither location seemed to to be around for long. Already by January of 1941, Chicken House No. 1 was advertising for someone who would take a half interest in the business. Perhaps the entire restaurant sold quickly, because in May of 1941 it had a new address and was advertising “dancing & cocktails.” The October 1941 advertisement shown after the photo gives little hint that No. 1 had gone to auction already and that No. 2 had been offered for sale in April of 1941.
The for sale advertisement for No. 2 that was run in April claimed rather surprisingly that the restaurant seated 90 people and had a banquet room plus living quarters. The advertisement said it was being sold because the owner was ill.
But I discovered — with the help of followers of the El Segundo Facebook group, in particular Mark Shoemaker — that the Hart father and son continued to operate a third Chicken House into the 1950s. it was located at 615 Sepulveda Blvd., where the family lived together. Note that by the time the matchbook shown here in part was produced the price had tripled.
It’s unclear how long the Sepulveda Blvd. restaurant continued in business.
From time to time I become the lucky recipient of donated restaurant images. The most recent one is shown above, a charming small photo of a drive-in where the sign looks almost as large as the building.
The question was, where was it? It took quite a bit of sleuthing to find the answer, with searches of on-line resource by both the donor and me.
Luckily for me, the donor also became a researcher and helped nail down the location of the SIP-n-NIP in the photo.
Turns out that Sip-n-Nip was quite a popular name, sometimes with dashes, sometimes with apostrophes, or both. There was a SIP-‘N’-Nip in Tampa FL and a Sip-‘n-Nip in Baton Rouge LA, and St. Petersburg FL, not to mention similarly named drive-ins in Great Bend KS, Rayville LA, Delhi LA, Detroit MI, and Riverside CA. No doubt there were others. Plus, the name is still in use.
There were also Nip-n-Sips all over the country, but when Nip came first that usually meant it was a bar or liquor store.
Drive-in movies were popping up about the same time that the Sip-n-Nip eateries came along. The two went together, as families and teens with cars topped off movie nights with a hamburger and milkshake.
Eventually it became clear that the location shown in the small photo was Dearborn MI, on the corner of Telegraph and Sheridan roads. It was opened in the mid-1940s by brothers Stanley and Theodore Romanuk. [Above: another view of the drive-in, possibly later]
The Romanuk family also ran a cocktail lounge called the Blue Castle.
According to a presentation of the Dearborn Historical Museum, the Dearborn SIP-n-NIP was very popular with school children who stopped there on their way home from school. In the evening families came by for a casual dinner. As the evening wore on it became a gathering place for teens. [Above: Another view, possibly during a vintage car show?]
The Sip-n-Nip closed around 1960, with the widening of Telegraph Road.
That same year, in July, a waitress was accidentally killed at a Sip-n-Nip in Lincoln Park MI. The proprietor of the second Sip-n-Nip on 2031 Dix was Theordore Romanuk. I was not able to discover when that Sip-n-Nip opened or how long it stayed in business.
Today, going back at least to the 1950s, box stew has meant a slow-cooked beef stew. But in the 19th century and into the start of the 20th, it meant an oyster stew that featured what were referred to as box oysters. [Above: Bill of fare from a Washington, D.C. dining saloon in 1869]
They were also referred to as “Fulton Market box oysters”, indicating that they were highly identified with New York city. “Box” oysters referred to the large saddle rock oysters found in the East River before it became hopelessly polluted. [Above: Saddle rock oyster]
Oysters were tremendously popular in Eastern cities in the 18th century, yet although there were oyster stews available in eating places so far I haven’t found mention of box stews until the 19th century. [Above: Bill of Fare from New Haven CT in 1873]
Box oyster stew was so well known in the 19th century that the term “box stew” was also used to refer to an uncomfortable state of mind. Today we might say an agitated person is “in a stew” but in 1864, in a Brooklyn Eagle news story, a committee of politicians was reported to be in “a ‘box stew’ for about an hour.”
But for those who ordered a box stew in an oyster cellar, it was a soothing dish. In an 1873 novel, the main character imagined himself having a “double box-stew of splendid East River, unlimited coolslaa (coleslaw?), and bread and butter, and a glass of creamy ale . . .”
Demonstrating the popularity of oyster, An advertisement in Port Jervis NY in 1870 from Kidd’s Oyster Bay, featured many oyster dishes in addition to Box Stew. They were Boston Stew, Dry Stew, Plain Stew, Cream Stew, Milk Stew, and Saddle Rock Stew. Having determined in other stories that Box Stew was made with Saddle Rock oysters, I am at a loss to explain how Kidd’s differentiated between box stew and saddle rock stew.
Chef and cookbook author Jessup Whitehead in 1883 noted that restaurants priced box stew at about 60 cents, describing it as “a stew of a dozen of the very largest oysters just taken out of the shells, with only a spoonful of milk and quite as much of the best butter. The oysters are dished upon a small square of buttered toast in a bowl and the rich milk and butter poured around.” He observed it was “uncommonly good eating.”
By 1905, according to a Washington, D.C. news story, box stew was then only to be found in “old-fashioned restaurants which can provide it in perfection.” [Above: Advertisement, Trenton NJ, 1901]
As sewage contaminated oyster beds along the East coast, one writer noted that it was reasonably safe to order a box stew because, unlike other oyster dishes, it was made from “oysters freshly opened for immediate cooking.”
And then box stews disappeared. Or did they? Convinced that box stew was a dish of olden days I was quite surprised to discover a restaurant called the Atlantis Oyster House in Deptford NJ advertising it in 1984!
It's great to hear from readers and I take time to answer queries. I can't always find what you are looking for, but I do appreciate getting thank yous no matter what the outcome.
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It's great to hear from readers and I take time to answer queries. I can't always find what you are looking for, but I do appreciate getting thank yous no matter what the outcome.
Restaurant-ing through history 