What follows are “Useful Directions to Epicures,” published in the (New York) Weekly Museum. The publication’s motto was: “Here Justice with her balance sits, and weighs impartially the deeds of men.” (The word “Museum” was sometimes used to mean a publication. Another example was the Farmers’ Museum, a New Hampshire newspaper of the early 1800s.)
At the time of publication New York city had a population of about 100,000. The war of 1812 had just ended. Most residents of the city were merchants, grocers, or tradesmen such as shoemakers, cabinetmakers, or carpenters. Eating places included boarding houses, small hotels, victualling houses, and taverns.
– Make it a rule to be early in your attendance: every epicure will allow that it is better to wait a little for dinner, than to have the dinner spoiled waiting for him.
– Carefully inspect the bill of fare that you may know what is coming, and be able to place yourself accordingly.
– Seat yourself directly opposite your favourite dish; in that case you will be able to help yourself to the nice cuts.
– Help yourself plentifully at first, as it is a thousand to one whether you have a chance of a second plateful, and there may be some present who understand the joint as well as yourself.
– Watch the eye of him who wishes to hob or nob, and ask him to drink a glass of wine with you. You may get drunk otherwise, but not so expeditiously and politely.
– If you wish to be very witty at the expence of any of the company, attack him after the second bottle, ten to one but he forgets it all before morning, or if not, you can plead that you had too much wine in your head.
My interpretation
The advice, clearly critical of common practices, is addressed to men, some of whom may have been renting bedrooms in the same building. This explains why the writer might see a dinner companion again the next morning.
The word “epicure” is probably meant to be humorous.
The “bill of fare” was likely a single sheet of paper on which the day’s or week’s meals were hand written.
At this time in history, everyone sat at communal tables for meals and helped themselves from shared platters and bowls. They would heap their plates high and the last person might not get the best pieces, or much at all.
It’s clear that meat dishes, referred to as “nice cuts” and “the joint,” were the most highly prized foods. The narrator – along with the others — would almost certainly try to sit as close to them as possible, even if that meant arriving early and waiting for the food to arrive.
The reference to the difficulty of getting a second helping reflects the customary greediness of patrons — and that would include the advice giver.
There was quite a drinking problem in early America, and getting drunk was a frequent occurrence.
It seems pretty certain that restaurants of the 19th century were far less sanitary than they are today, and that employee hygiene, though still a factor now, was far worse. There were few mechanical dishwashers, no electrical refrigeration, and little understanding of the dangers of foodborne illnesses.
It wasn’t until the 1880s that science threw a spotlight on the subject and the concept of “ptomaine poisoning” developed, identified as alkaline substances formed during animal decomposition. The term ptomaine continued in use in the popular media even into the late 1970s, despite being scientifically questioned for decades and totally discredited by the 1930s. Scientific authorities pointed out that although ptomaines were real, meat would need to be in such an advanced state of decomposition at that point that no human, no animal, would touch it.
Soon after the ptomaine theory of illness was introduced in the 1880s, newspapers began reporting on its victims, many of them restaurant goers. For example, in 1899 the San Francisco Chronicle produced a story about a man who experienced cramps, vomiting, headache, and dizziness two hours after eating ham in a restaurant. A doctor said he had suffered ptomaine poisoning.
Given the documented history of food adulteration, it’s certainly believable that bad meat was often knowingly served in cheap restaurants. Some patrons believed they had been served decomposing meat that was smothered in sauce to hide it. Americans were generally averse to sauces, and whether it was due to fear of poisoning or the sense they were “foreign” is a good question. Probably both.
Eggs also fell under suspicion. Advice given to women shoppers by Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 1896 seems wise. It observed that “One hears of more sick results from salads than any other dish.” Salad at that time did not typically refer to vegetable salad but rather to chicken or other meat salads dressed with mayonnaise. In these cases it was likely that eggs used in mayonnaise caused Salmonellosis. The article recommended ordering “something hot, and better still if it is cooked for you,” which was reasonable advice.
What may have limited the overall incidence of foodborne illness in the 19th century was simply that then fewer people ate in restaurants, most restaurants were small and served few meals, and food production was smaller in scale and more localized so that the reach of contaminated food was reduced. Of course, since symptoms of foodborne illnesses don’t show up until between 10 hours to days later, it was unlikely then, as now, that most were identified or reported as such.
The association of sickness with restaurants began to play on the public’s imagination in the early 20th century. In summer 1908 a lunchroom waiter offered his thoughts: “If you must eat meat [in] this hot weather, select anything but hash or a Brunswick stew. If you insist on a finger bowl, have the man who serves you fill it in your presence. If you drink water at meals, make a private arrangement with your waiter. And if you must have buttered toast with your breakfast, don’t read this story.”
No doubt the waiter’s warnings were correct. A 1929 article in Restaurant Management magazine claimed that 25 years earlier few restaurants could have met modern sanitary regulations. The author said that most used lard cans for cooking, had no dishwashing machines and kitchens full of flies. Most also saved scraps from customers’ plates, left them sitting out for hours, and served them a second time – which explains why customers were suspicious of hash and stews.
As of 1925 the biggest known outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S., with the most fatalities, resulted from typhoid-infected oysters from polluted Long Island waters. The problem was not uncommon in the early 20th century, and caused a drop in oyster consumption. Yet in 1925 outbreaks sickened more than 1,500 people in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C., with 150 deaths. There is no report of how many of those afflicted ate the oysters in restaurants, but it’s likely most did.
Generally, tracing reported cases to their source has always been quite difficult and most are not reported at all. Victims often think they have the mythical “24-hour flu.” Or they might attribute their distress to the last meal they ate in a restaurant when the source could well have been something consumed days earlier. In the case of Campylobacter, it has been estimated that as many as 2M people are afflicted each year (though not solely from restaurant meals), leading to more than 10,000 hospitalizations. Salmonella may afflict somewhat fewer people but causes more hospitalizations and deaths. [Above: 1989 cartoon still using the term “ptomaine”]
If restaurants seem to loom large in food poisoning history, that is at least partly explained by the greater ease in identifying cases when there is an outbreak where a group of people have eaten the same thing.
In more recent decades restaurant outbreaks have received quite a bit of public attention. And, although restaurants are cleaner and more careful than in the past, food perils have not gone away. In fact pathogens recognized after 1990 such as E. coli O157:H7, Listeria, and Campylobacter are some of the most dangerous. And it is not just protein food that is risky, but also fresh produce that has been contaminated by exposure to infected animals or water.
Norovirus is the most common variety of foodborne illness, and is found in fruits and vegetables and oysters. Its symptoms are flu-like, and, unlike bacterial agents, its spread is aided by transmission from infected persons, particularly in close environments such as cruise ships.
As news of outbreaks goes, it tends to focus on chain restaurants such as McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Sizzler, Burger King, and others. Often that is less an indicator of their bad practices than it is a result of a massive industrial food processing system they are part of, marked by risky methods of raising animals, long distance transport, and other profitable economies of scale.
In the case of one large supplier, Hudson Foods, outbreaks resulted in a 1997 recall of 25M lbs. of beef patties possibly contaminated with E. coli. As a result as many as a fourth of Burger Kings nationwide had no burgers to sell for up to two days. After Listeria was discovered in its turkey deli meats, processor Pilgrims Pride set a new record in 2002 by recalling 27.4M lbs. of its products that had been distributed to restaurants, food stores, and school cafeterias.
And yet it wasn’t just large suppliers and distributors that were to blame. Outbreaks of E. coli and Salmonella in Chipotle outlets across the county in 2015 were not believed to be linked to large-scale suppliers but to the company’s mission of sourcing fresh food from small, local farmers.
Despite today’s threats, however, it’s probably as safe to eat in restaurants as it is at home.
It’s likely that the term square meal originated in the restaurant culture of the California Gold Rush.
Most of the single men that were drawn to California then were temporary dwellers dependent on restaurants and hotels for their meals, so it is not surprising that “square meal” would first be applied to meals served in restaurants.
One of the earliest uses of the phrase I’ve found was in an advertisement for the What Cheer House in Marysville CA in 1858. The What Cheer said it offered three square meals a day for a moderate charge.
The term evidently was not known in the East. Most of the news about life in California was delivered by newspaper correspondents who wrote long stories about their experiences. One of those was J. Ross Browne, a frequent contributor to Harper’s magazine, who wrote in 1863 about a small shanty eatery called “The Howling Wilderness Saloon” that offered “a good square meal” for fifty cents. Browne explained that a square meal “is not, as may be supposed, a meal placed upon the table in the form of a solid cubic block; but a substantial repast of pork and beans, onions, cabbage, and other articles of sustenance that will serve to fill up the corners of a miner’s stomach.” [Above advertisement, California, 1861]
Other writers also felt it was necessary to explain to faraway readers what square meal meant. In the mid-1860s the term was often included in lists of colorful and unfamiliar Western slang such as shebang, grub, and muk-a-muk, plus sayings such as You bet, or Bet your bottom dollar.
By the end of the Civil War, the term had begun to spread across the country. A Union soldier from Wisconsin referred in summer of 1865 to enjoying his first square meal since joining the regiment. The reporter asked what he meant by that and he answered, “Four cups of coffee, all the ham I can eat, with bread, butter, pies, cakes, pickles and cheese . . .”
A few years later a restaurant in Memphis TN celebrated the opening of a new eating saloon where “A ‘square meal’ is served up smoking hot for fifty cents.”
What is most revealing about the slang term – suggesting what the mainstream American idea of a good meal was – is what did NOT qualify as a square meal.
For many diners, a meal in a Chinese restaurant did not qualify. Samuel Bowles, publisher of the esteemed Springfield (MA) Republican, who wrote of his travels to the West in 1865, explained that a square meal was “the common term for a first rate one.” He described a Chinese dinner he attended in San Francisco where the “the universal odor and flavor soon destroyed all appetite.” He was rescued from the situation by the chief of police who took him to an American restaurant where he enjoyed mutton chops, squab, fried potatoes, and a bottle of champagne.
Another New England paper ratified Bowles’ disdain for a Chinese dinner, stating, “An American generally has to go and get a ‘square meal’ after thus dining.” A possible reason for the rejection of Chinese food may lie in an editorial in 1872 in the New York Evening Post that referred to a political campaign amounting to a “dish of hotch-potch, instead of a square meal of honest viands.” In other words, people wanted chunks of meat [i.e., viands], not bits of food mixed together.
It was also clear that a square meal was not the same thing as a lunch. Back in 1858 the What Cheer House advised that in addition to three squares a day, regular diners there might also get “a lunch between meals, if they can keep on the right side of the Cook.” A lunch was regarded then almost as a snack. Boston’s Lindall “Dining & Lunch Rooms” had three departments, one “for the ‘regular square meals,’ one an oyster counter, and one “devoted to hot lunches of smaller orders of almost every dish.”
Guests from abroad were not always pleased with the squareness of American meals. The Londoner Walter Scott wrote in Our American Cousins (1883) about struggling with square meals in hotels where typically an enormous number of dishes of food were served, not in courses but all at once. As a waiter told another visitor, “What people want here is a good square meal; they are not particular about what they eat, if only they have a lot of things placed in front of them.” This style of service reportedly led to huge amounts of dumped food floating in the NY harbor.
In the 20th century some people began to mourn the loss of the good old pre-modern square meal – which was increasingly seen as the opposite of “fancy food.” A street reporter in Chicago in 1924 asked a woman whether she preferred home cooking to what was served in a “high class” restaurant and she answered that she preferred a good square meal with “fewer fancy frills.”
I think her answer would still resonate today, and I’d guess that many would say a diner was the best place to get a square meal.
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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 