The tea room craze came to Portland just as prohibition appeared on the horizon. A tea room was a place for women—not exclusively, but most especially—to socialize over a hot beverage and a light meal. Tea rooms were a fixture of downtown city life through the 1920s and into the 1930s. They were fond of…
Read more
This post is an edited version of a talk given June 24, 2014, at McMenamin’s Edgefield, Troutdale, for the Oregon Encyclopedia, titled Your Grandmother’s Cook Book: A Century of Oregon Eating, 1880 – 1980. A number of images and recipes have been omitted. Dora Engeman Half a century ago, when she was in her 90th year with…
Read more
The OE History Night at Edgefield Your Grandmother’s Cookbook: A Century of Oregon Eating, 1880-1980 Presented by Richard H. Engeman Tuesday, June 24, 2014 6:30 p.m., doors open at 5:30 p.m. McMenamins Edgefield Power Station Theater 2126 SW Halsey St., Troutdale Free and open to the public – Arrive early for seating. First Come, First…
Read more
This is reunion week at my alma mater, Reed College. In a previous blog I posted a short piece on two Reed-related publications that now fall into the realm of local historical foodways documents: Jay F. Rosenberg’s The Impoverished Students’ Book of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery (1965) and The Essential Ingredient (1973), compiled by Reedies…
Read more
Tremont Place leaflet, 1891 Real estate subdivisions… for the developer, platting a subdivision is a chance to put the family name on the map, perhaps with the streets named for the children and their pets … or perhaps something more fanciful is evoked. As the Oregonian noted on July 17, 1890, a number of tracts in what…
Read more
San Francisco’s Mid-Winter Fair, 1894 There’s a connection between what Oregonians once ate and what Californians ate. Throughout the nineteenth century, Oregon’s closest commercial connections were with California, and it was common for wealthier Oregonians to go shopping in San Francisco, and to winter in Santa Barbara or Pasadena. IXL canned tamales The Dalles,…
Read more
Rare enough to find a view of a small town restaurant; rarer yet to find one depicting staff and customers. This photograph was taken about 1914 in Waldport, Oregon, by Frederick F. Sasman of Newport. Fred was an inexperienced photographer, hence the shot directly at the mirror, the profusion of reflected images in other mirrors,…
Read more
’Way back in 2010, I wrote about the State Café in the railroad town of Huntington, Oregon, in a posting called Oysters on the Snake. There I promised to write more later about oysters. And, some time soon, I will do that. Meanwhile, I want to say a bit more about the State Café, which…
Read more
Harvey Kurtzman first spotted the image on a postcard pinned to the office bulletin board of Ballantine Books editor Bernard Shir-Cliff. “It was a face that didn’t have a care in the world, except mischief,” recalled Kurtzman. –Wikipedia entry for Alfred E. Neuman The postcard shown here was produced by the Western Stationery Company, which appears…
Read more
The coastal town of Yachats, famously pronounced YAH-hots, is a resort locale today, smack on Highway 101, three hours’ driving time from Portland. But a century ago, getting to Yachats took an all-day trip on two trains, then a steam launch, an overnight stay, a jaunt by stage and two ferries, and finally either a…
Read more