The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining
560
The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining
560Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226406893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2017 |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The First Era 1790 to 1835
The Restaurant, the Coffeehouse, and the Oyster Cellar
"Julien" (Jean Baptiste Gilbert Payplat) 1753–1805
Boston
The legendary originator of the restaurant in the United States, Julien arrived in Boston in the late summer of 1786 as steward to M. de Letombe, the Consul of France for the Eastern States. In July 1793 Julien left Letombe's service and on July 10 established a hotel named the Restorator opposite the Quaker Meeting House on Leverett Street in Boston. Conceiving his hotel in terms of the accommodations found in European spas, where guests imbibed healing waters and renovated themselves in the baths, he styled the Restorator as "a Resort, where the infirm in health, the convalescent, and those whose attention to studious business occasions a lassitude of nature; can obtain the most suitable nourishment." The other model for his restorator was the new Parisian style of eating house, in which chefs displaced from aristocrat households by the French Revolution supplied the desires and needs of the public à la carte. Julien declared that "Excellent Wines and Cordials, good Soups, and Broths, Pastry, in all its delicious variety, Alamode Beef, Bacon, Poultry, and, generally, all other refreshing viands, will be kept in due preparation: And a Bill of Fare will be constantly for exhibition; from which each visitor may command whatever may best suit his appetite."
The excellence of his dishes, the seriousness of his claims concerning healthfulness, his wines, and his refined manners immediately made his eating house a favorite resort of Boston's literati and young businessmen. He became a town celebrity, portrayed in prose on multiple occasions, admired for making something so worthwhile when he arrived in America "with little or nothing to support himself" except his talent and industry. A portrait describes him: "His person is very graceful and his hair toupeed. In conversation he is affable, accommodating and polite; his voice is pleasing, and sonorous; he still, however, retains his provincial dialect, and the same sign over his door which indicated the place of his former residence. Julien may be called the Prince of Soups."
His soups were famous. Invariably, Julien commended them for their curative and nutritive power. Julien would "procure every luxury" a customer wished, but with a soup would provide the requisites of life. When flu came to Massachusetts in November 1793, Julien advertised "Soup of Barley, particularly salutary for those who are afflicted with the present prevalent Influenza." His brown soup, a beef consommé, became his signature. He made a clear turtle soup — "efficacious in remedying the numerous diseases incident to the Spring" — on the same model: "The Soup made of Turtle, like the Brown Soup of Mr. Julien's, will be free from ingredients, and with but a small quantity of spice. Good lean Beef, Veal and Fowls with the Turtle-flesh are the basis." Julien prepared two sorts of turtle soups: land turtle soup and green turtle soup. The former Julien commended for its "efficacy in purifying the blood," citing Samuel Auguste Tissot and Comte George-Louis LeClerc de Buffon.
In June 1794, John Magner advertised the three-story building occupied by Julien for sale. The Boston Restorator moved in midsummer to the Thomas Clements House on the corner of Milk Street and Dalton's Lane, a site agreeable because of its access to "fresh air." This is the building illustrated above. At this juncture, Julien came to the notice of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who was touring America while in exile from the French Revolution. Brillat-Savarin taught Julien to cook a cheese omelet (oeufs brouillés au frommage). It proved popular and Julien sent Brillat-Savarin the carcasses of two roebucks in recompense when the latter settled in New York.
Julien's success inspired imitators. The Messrs. Dorival and Deguise opened their restorator at Oliver's Dock, near the Exchange. It offered its own "rich and well seasoned Brown, and other Soupes" to restore health to invalids. The partnership did not last six months. Isaac Deguise opened a "new" restorator that failed within two months of opening. John L. Dorival opened a boardinghouse in a building at the bottom of the Mall, offering "a great variety of pies." By summer of 1798, it too had failed. The Parisian cook M. Le Rebour opened the Shakespear Hotel and Restorator on Water Street in 1797, promising soups, pasty, and cookery of every description that is "in the American, English or Paris style." Note that there was no medical framing of the fare. He was obliged to move almost immediately to the vicinity of the Boston Theatre. He soon realized Bostonian conscience required luxury to be lashed to hygiene, so he began advertising his own "nourishing, restoring Soup" so that "the generous epicure, the strengthening convalescent, and the fainting valetudinarian, may constantly find gratification, confirmation and salvation." The Disciples of Epicurus, however, preferred their old champion, Julien, and Le Rebour was forced to remove to Salem in 1800.
Though Julien made it known that gambling was not permitted in his establishment, and that nutrition was the raison d'être of his restorator, the ability to prepare delicious fare attracted men of appetite. In 1803 the Boston Commercial Gazette published a mock epic, "Battle of the Bucks," describing a visitation by a band of boastful bachelors to the Restorator:
Julien, now doz'd, when Ten the Old-South struck,
The most interesting moment in the verse is the reverent silence when the bucks consumed their food.
Julien's eminence in the world of letters can be judged by the adoption of "The Restorator" as the title of a column of cultural commentary in the New England Palladium in 1801. "In imitation of Mr. Julien, I mean to open a house of public entertainment, where every intellectual epicure may be gratified with his favourite dish."
In October 1797, Julien married Hannah Horne of Boston. The couple lived in the Restorator, with Hannah managing the house's books.
After the turn of the century, a challenger for culinary supremacy emerged in Boston in the person of Othello Pollard, an African American caterer. As a contemporary observed, these two giants treated each other with respect free of jealousy. The supremacy of Julien in soups was acknowledged, while Pollard's precedence in creams won common consent. "Each seemed conscious of his own greatness, and exalted above the feeling of envy."
In 1805 Julien died, and the Restorator came into the hands of Hannah, who ran it for a decade before selling it to Frederick Rouillard. When Rouillard took over, he paid homage to its creator, Julien: "This long established house is well known throughout the country. Its celebrity was first acquired by the original proprietor, whose obliging disposition and gentlemanly deportment, united with a thorough knowledge of the art, we may almost say science of cookery, brought to his house, a constant and overflowing bevy of bon vivants, as well as invalids." Since 1816, Julien has been perpetually remembered as the originator of one of the fundamental institutions of American gastronomy, the restaurant.
Othello Pollard 1765?–182?
Boston; Cambridge; Halifax
"The politest man in Boston" — "a polished piece of ebony" — an unrivaled creator of creams and cheesecakes — a master of ceremonies at parties, meetings, and funerals — a wit — an entrepreneur — the foremost champion of elegant living in a city haunted by its ancestral Puritanism: Othello Pollard's culinary career was brief but brilliant, spanning approximately from 1796 to 1806. It was almost briefer. On a frigid January night in 1803, fire broke out in Daniel Bowen's Columbian Museum on Common Street in Boston. A wooden edifice, the building ignited instantaneously and spread to the William Doyle House on one side, used as a boardinghouse by the widow Pollard, and on the other side, her son Othello Pollard's refectory and store. Both burned to the ground, and the residents barely escaped with their lives. "This fire commenced by the falling of a light upon the bed in which the wax figure of Desdemona was placed. The flames immediately communicated to the curtains and spread so rapidly that those who were present (four persons) could not stop their progress." Another commentator explained that some country folk jostled the lit taper that a wax statue of Shakespeare's Othello held, making it fall upon the wax effigy of Shakespeare's tragic heroine. Town officials estimated the total loss at $50,000. Othello came close to ruining Othello.
The fire forced Pollard to leave off retail sales to embrace wholeheartedly his true calling as chef and restaurateur. He moved across the river to Cambridge, since he had catered Harvard College class events since 1800, and opened his Classic Hotel or Attic Bower at the north side of the Common, two doors north of Packard's Tavern.
In chusing an appellation for his Hotel, he has endeavoured to attract the notice of Gentlemen of elegant leisure, or of delicate health; and he trusts he shall, in pursuance of his motto, be enabled to combine in his social retreat, all the invitations which the politest palate may require, with all wit-inspiring ingredients of intellectual festivity. A mere bon vivant is a sad dull dog, and a mere philosopher a sad wise one. Blend the two characters, and you follow the receipt to make a Gentleman.
One of Harvard's litterateurs supplied a prose portrait of this African American caterer and wit. "His countenance is dark and penetrating; his eye quick and animated; his nose retreating; his hair short behind, and in point of stature he is somewhat less than the emperor of the Gauls. His manner is extremely engaging, his language correct, and harmonious." He was styled a genius and "the erratic comet of cookery." His forte was pastry and confections. His winter cheesecakes were famous; and he became a familiar figure on Boston's streets in summer, wheeling a vehicle dispensing ices.
In early 1805, Pollard moved from Cambridge to his New Coffee-House on Congress Street. He lasted there for perhaps four months. The last public mention of Pollard dates from December 1805 when S. Bradford announced the sale of the Brick Building on Congress Street occupied by Othello Pollard. Whether his finances failed or his health, we do not know. In 1824, a Boston antiquarian, recalling Pollard, remarked that "in a short time Othello's occupation was gone, and both he, and his fair Desdemona, with it." Because Pollard's widow, Essame, died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in early March 1828 at age sixty-three, it is likely that he removed to Canada, where a robust population of New England loyalist expatriates lived.
Pollard lived and worked in Philadelphia prior to coming to Boston. He appeared on the membership rolls of Philadelphia's African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794, the first African American congregation in the United States. Sometime between 1794 and 1798, he moved to Boston. In a biographical sketch of Pollard contained in Peregrine's 1834 "Memoirs of a Sensitive Man about Town," details of his background emerge: He had been principal cook and head waiter in one of the first families of Boston — one that stood at the very head of the elite — the most noble of the Bay state nobility — the most aristocratic of the Essex aristocracy — the most consequential of the metropolitan patricians. [The family in question may have been that of merchant Samuel Pickering Gardner.] Othello was a polite, well-educated and shrewd negro, having laid up a sufficient proportion of his wages and perquisites to become a large stockholder in the Mechanics' bank. As a waiter he was unrivalled in civility: and, by the advice and assistance of several of his master's friends, backed by the warm recommendation of the gentleman himself, he was now the principal of a first-rate refectory, near the spot where the late Haymarket theatre once stood.
Sometime during this period of family service in the 1790s, romance entered Pollard's life, and on December 22, 1799, Reverend William Walter of Boston officiated in the marriage of Pollard and Eupha Brown.
Pollard operated as a kind of major domo for civic events, something on the order of Robert Bogle, the Philadelphian master of ceremonies at funerals, wedding receptions, and association picnics. Pollard was recalled by long-lived Bostonians for printing and distributing invitations to funerals and fetes. "I have heard it stated of Othello, that, having in hand two bundles of invitations, one for a fandango, of some sort, and the other for a funeral, and being in an evil condition, he made sad work in the delivery." Like Bogle, he was considered the politest man in the city, famous for his dandyism and fastidiousness. He was all about show, and his attraction to museums and exhibitions led to side ventures and to the restaurant business, including, in 1802, the displaying of the first leopard shown in North America, imported from Bengal, at his place next to the museum.
We know roughly seven years of his life and work in detail. In that time, he appears a legendary creature, a self-educated black savant who promises to instruct the undergraduates of Harvard about the finer things of life.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
During the period of his culinary eminence, only Julien, the proprietor of the Restorator, stood as a rival. "The cake of Othello is much sweet than that of Mr. Julien, but his soup has not the better savour." Such discriminations graced the pages of the city gazettes in the columns that the town wits penned. Genius often requires another brilliant spirit with whom to contend in order to advance the bounds of creativity. So it was in early Boston.
Stephen Simonet fl. 1791–1803
Paris; Philadelphia
A Parisian-trained pastry cook and chef, Stephen Simonet was the founder of restaurant culture in Philadelphia. He and his brother, confectioner and distiller J. C. Simonet, arrived in Philadelphia in 1791 during the political tumults in France. Settling in the vicinity of New Market near Fourth, he opened a shop selling "ham pies, fowl, and game of all kinds; pies at a quarter and half dollars, cakes at different prices, first courses and dainty dishes; he also makes little French pies when desired, hot pies, veal pies." The offerings indicated a classical culinary training — roasting, stewing, the creation of pastry for savory dishes as well as sweet, and the assembly of entrées. The "dishes and dessert" formula proved successful, and he quickly expanded to processing foods that could be kept on sea voyages. He was a master of conserving cooked meats in fat or jelly. He specified that he had entire "beef and geese legs in daube, particularly fit for exportation over the sea." He also made Italian macaroni on premises. For much of 1794 and 1795, he produced food from his residence at 245 South Second Street, New Market. His wife ran a millinery shop out of the same building.
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