We live in an era of celebrity chefs: colorful characters, often tattooed, who preside over legendary kitchens in food-conscious cities and who concoct startling new recipes involving exotic ingredients and high-tech processes. The men who go BAM! and the women who tout EVOO are household names. It was not always so. Half a century ago,…
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A century ago, towns and cities were often characterized by their hotels. In Oregon, Portland had the Portland (for the elite, Queen Anne-style), the Benson (for lumber baron dignity), the Multnomah (for civic pride and boosterism). In Bend, there was Pilot Butte Inn (sportsmens’ HQ); in Salem, the Chemeketa/Willamette/Marion (legislators’ HQ); and there was a…
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Here we have a menu for a meal at the famed Portland Hotel in 1904. What meal is it? Why, it’s A Tiffin! How very raj! Starting from the British slang term “tiffing,” for taking a drink, in the early nineteenth century it morphed into tiffin, to describe, in British India, a light lunch. It…
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Recipe booklet, 1909 I rather like prunes. However, I rarely eat them. As a child, I occasionally encountered pitted prunes stuffed with a nut and rolled in powdered sugar, and those were pretty appealing. Oh, wait a minute—those were dates, not prunes. A century ago, prunes were a great big crop in the Santa Clara…
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Over Labor Day weekend, I once again I found myself in Astoria aboard a cruise vessel, the American Spirit, once again as a guest speaker. This was a special themed cruise, a fact I discovered two days before I boarded the ship, and the theme was “Food and Wine.” For that reason, we had a…
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My aunt Mable (not Mabel!) was born in 1913 in an Oregon logging camp. She married my dad’s older brother Gaylord, and they lived in various places in western Oregon over the years: the now-vanished town of Signal, North Albany, Goshen, Albany, Springfield. Mable was the last survivor of my dad’s generation, living long enough…
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Graphically, it’s not a very impressive menu, but it caught my eye. That was because the typography suggested that the menu was printed earlier than the seller’s estimate of the 1920s. Oregon restaurant menus prior to the 1930s are pretty scarce, so I looked inside: what’s to eat? The variety of offerings, as well as…
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Baker City, population 9,828 in the 2010 census, has never been awfully populous, but it has long been a stopover city for travelers, salesmen, and fortune seekers. There are and have been some noteworthy hotels, such as the Geiser Grand (1889), the Antlers (1900), and the Art Deco Hotel Baker (1929). All three are still…
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This is a rather unnerving postcard. It was mailed from Marshfield (now Coos Bay), Oregon, on December 24, 1905, to Miss Annie Edie in Tillamook, Oregon. There is no message, and it is unsigned. Annie Edie may be the sister of Charlotte, who married B. C. Lamb, a prominent Tillamook businessman; there is a collection…
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Back in the 1930s, the Russians were coming! At the time, Portland and Oregon had rather few immigrants beyond those from China, Scandinavia and Germany, and the food and restaurant scene was a bit short on ethnic variety. But there were some examples, such as the Samovar Russian Cafe that Paul E. Bulkin ran on…
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