June 16, 2011 · 7:28 pm

Anatomy of a restaurateur: Harriet Moody

It’s a good bet that there have not been many women, or men, who have opened their first restaurant at age 68 – and, furthermore, made a success of it.

Harriet Tilden (Brainard) Moody [pictured below at about age 20] was exceptional in many ways. She built a culinary reputation long before she opened Le Petit Gourmet in 1920 in Chicago’s Italian Court at 615 North Michigan Boulevard. She had been one of the city’s premier caterers since 1890 when she founded the Home Delicacies Association. Despite her status as a divorcée, she managed to stay afloat in Chicago society, catering teas for charitable affairs and remaining a member in good standing of elite clubs such as the Fortnightly, the Twentieth Century, and the Chicago College Club. Working with her friend Bertha (Mrs. Potter) Palmer, she was one of the “lady managers” of the Chicago World’s Fair.

When her father, a once-wealthy cattle shipper, died in 1886, the recently divorced Harriet was forced to put her Cornell degree to work to support herself and her mother. She took a job teaching high school English but found she needed more income. Although she had never cooked, she deployed her refined tastes to produce dainty salads and baked goods of the sort appreciated by women of the upper classes. She supplied delicate dishes to Marshall Field’s department store tea room, to dining cars in trains departing from Chicago, and to fashionable private clients. Rising at 4:00 a.m. she spent several hours before she left for the classroom each morning supervising the Home Delicacies crew which numbered about 50 by 1899.

She became so successful that she not only supported her mother’s household, but also bought a second house where she lived and ran the catering business on the top floor until transferring it to larger quarters. She also owned a Greenwich Village townhouse on Waverly Place and a summer place, the historic William Cullen Bryant homestead in Cummington MA.

Harriet married poet William Vaughn Moody in 1909 and after his death the following year began to befriend other poets, often putting them up at her places in Chicago, New York, and Cummington, sometimes for months-long stays. At Le Petit Gourmet in the 1920s she organized poetry nights at which Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many others, read their work.

In 1911 Harriet established a branch of the Home Delicacies Association in London. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who as former manager of Marshall Field’s had jump-started her catering business in Chicago by ordering gingerbread and chicken salad from her, now asked for dishes for Selfridge’s, his department store which opened that year in London.

Seven years after establishing Le Petit Gourmet, Harriet and a woman partner opened another Chicago restaurant, Au Grand Gourmet, in a modern setting on the ground floor of a new building at 180 East Delaware. But her luck changed and in 1929 financial exigency required her to sell out. She attempted to recoup her losses a couple of years later with the publication of Mrs. William Vaughn Moody’s Cookbook.

Le Petit Gourmet, known simply as Le Petit, survived for decades under various owners, most notably Grace Pebbles, who also ran similar restaurants in Oak Park, Miami, Denver, and Hollywood. The Italian Court, constructed from 1919-1926 as a complex of shops and apartments for artists, was razed in 1968 to make way for an office building.

© Jan Whitaker, 2011

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June 6, 2011 · 2:17 pm

Basic fare: salad

To paint a complete portrait of the restaurant’s history, the iconic image of Man Carving a Roast should be accompanied by Man Mixing a Salad. For in haute restaurant-ology it is Man, not Woman, who rules the salad bowl.

In the 19th century wealthy men who styled themselves epicures often impressed their dining companions by rising from the table and mixing the salad. In the 20th century the custom passed into the hands of headwaiters at chi chi venues.

The tradition can be traced to peripatetic Frenchmen who wandered around Europe solemnly ministering to urban dinner parties with the contents of their small yet sacred chests of salad ingredients which included flavored vinegars, soy, caviar, truffles, anchovies, and other delectables.

In the 18th century sallad (spelled in the British manner) referred to a mixture of greens and herbs, possibly radishes, dressed with vinegar and oil and perhaps a raw egg. It could also mean chopped cabbage, known in the early 19th century as “cold” slaw. How many taverns, coffee houses, and other early eating places served salads is unknown but the number was probably very small and their salad days limited to springtime.

Although some green salads appeared on 19th century menus, the word salad more often referred to cold chopped meat or fish dressed with mayonnaise. Lobster and chicken were favorites. Combination salads and fruit salads did not come into popularity until the 20th century, largely due no doubt to the lower price of greens, vegetables, and imported bananas and pineapples.

The type of restaurant that did most to advance the green salad as a basic component of the American diet was the table d’hôte, a small French or Italian restaurant serving a fixed-price meal of about five courses. In 1844, patrons at the Café Tortoni in NYC enjoyed dinners of soup, stew-like entrees, roast meat, salads “mixed a la des Jardins,” and desserts. Head lettuce was rare, so typical salads featured romaine, chicory, dandelions, or field greens. Salad lovers particularly lauded Italian restaurants for their salads, both in the 19th and 20th centuries (despite the common appellation “Wop salad” ca. 1940-1970). In 1909 a patron wrote that Italian restaurant salads “are almost always good, and the dressing, made from red wine vinegar, is usually delicious. The mixed salad, in spring includes tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, celery, sometimes spinach and usually chives. Beet tops are also served as salad.”

In the New England countryside, on the other hand, salads were rare – and unsatisfactory. As a patron in a hotel dining room noted in 1881, “If by any chance there is lettuce on the table – for this happens rarely – and you manifest a desire to eat of it, the waiter puts before you the vinegar cruet and the sugar bowl. If you want to make a fool of yourself, call for salad oil. It will take some time to explain your meaning, and when you have done so the attendant will sneeringly inform her companions that ‘That feller eats grease on his lettis.’”

Although some thought salads were gaining popularity in the 1890s as sedentary city dwellers woke up to the wisdom of lighter fare, hotel cook Jessup Whitehead remarked in 1901 that “salads are not among the common popular dishes, and the average public seldom seems to think of them.” Many cooks had no idea how to prepare them, he added.

Salads became feminized in the 1920s. Perhaps it was the popularity of fruit salads in tea rooms, or the increasing use of flavored gelatin salads, but some male gourmets denounced women for preferring “comic salads” chosen for eye appeal rather than taste. Indeed there were some bizarre ones such as the Candlestick (illustrated), and others with names such as Clara Barton, Bon Ton, Butterfly, and Martini. Even a female tea room proprietor had to admit that “Atrocities have been committed in the name of salad.”

In the mid-20th century the tossed salad smothered under a layer of thick dressing became the standard start of a regulation meat and potatoes restaurant dinner. The high incidence of mediocre salads led syndicated columnist Inez Robb to launch a one-woman campaign in the 1960s against the two-pronged “red menace” to restaurant salads: chopped red cabbage and sludgy red-orange “French” dressing. Relief was on the way, for in the 1970s field greens returned, and ingredients rarely (but sometimes) found in salads of previous decades, such as olive oil, radicchio, and arugula came into wider use.

© Jan Whitaker, 2011

See also: salad bars, caesar salad

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May 31, 2011 · 4:23 pm

Image gallery: tally ho

A persistent theme in 20th-century restaurants, found mainly in names and signs – and thankfully now over – was the coach and four theme. Obviously it is only one of a host of old-time symbols that restaurants have borrowed over the past 100 years. Others include spinning wheels, grist mills, and, oddly enough, brothels, all suggestive of simpler times when things were made by hand and gender roles were clear cut. The names and signs also acted as practical signifiers indicating to prospective patrons that they could expect standard American food to dominate the menu.

Both World War I and World War II stimulated this theme, possibly because Americans were looking for comfort and reassurance. Tea rooms of the First World War era were among the first and the worst offenders when it came to invoking a stable and secure pseudo-past. (When they were in New England, you think, Well, they have a right.  Yeah, maybe.) An even stronger wave of nostalgia washed through the nation’s restaurants after the Second World War, replacing the brash modernism of the 1930s with colonial motifs for coffee shops and cafeterias. Never mind that the actual mode of transportation was bringing smog and sprawl to cities nor that convenience food had overtaken restaurant kitchens whose cooks could no more have cooked from scratch at a fireplace than their patrons could have hitched a buggy.

[Left] One of James Beard‘s favorite restaurants was Greenwich Village’s Coach House. It differed from most of its namesakes in having innovative cuisine. [Right] Another Coach House, in Atlanta.

Another Coast House, in Atlanta.

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