I know that food handling procedures in 1890’s NYC were probably pretty gross.
But I have no idea about the cleanliness of an upscale NYC restaurant in 1890.
Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla, also George Westinghouse dined there…so the food was probably very good.
Also, by 1890, the railroads were sufficiently advanced that you could get fresh vegetables in from Florida or California.
Was food poisoning (due to spolied food) a common problem in the 1890’s?
Or would a restaurant like Delmonicos score pretty well, by today’s standards?
I would assume a top-tier restaurant would be mostly fine, in terms of freshness of ingredients and cleanliness of prep.
I would be more worried about middle-tier and street food :eek: vendors.
I don’t know that I’d worry overmuch about anything. People needed to eat back then just as much as they do now, and it’s not like people were falling over dead from food poisoning all the time. Sure, there probably was some, but there’s some now as well.
In general, I’d almost suspect that it’d be a little bit less prevalent, as people were pretty much forced to eat meat fairly close to the slaughter. There was none of this “kill tons & tons of cows, grind 'em all up, and send 'em all over the world” kinda stuff that goes on now that also makes it easy for one bad batch of meat to poison hundreds or thousands of pounds.
Vegetables also were cooked more frequently than served raw, and that takes away much of the danger. Raw salads weren’t unheard of, but they weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today, either.
Of course, this is all just WAG from my memories of various food history books I’ve read, but overall, if I find myself in Delmonico’s circa 1890, I’d dig in.
Athena, it’s clearly been a while since you read “The Jungle.” LOL!
The modern obsession with uncooked beef and veggies was unheard of back then. Folks would have eaten foods that were taken from scary packages and rinsed in scary water, then placed in scary pots, and* then cooked*. The plates and utensils and the drinking water would have been the most dangerous I would think.
Also, people back then would have had a much stronger immune system as far as food and water contaminants go. they woudl have been facing this all their lives. Like modern tourists getting sick overseas, we would be at far greater risk than the locals.
Oh, I’m not saying that there wasn’t bad stuff going on - I got interrupted in the middle of writing my post. I meant to say pretty much what you said - you cook the shit out of stuff and almost everything is safe.
- No one ate fresh vegetables or fruit back then unless they lived on a farm. If vegetables were served, canned vegetables were available.
- By the 1890s, commercial refrigeration was available for meats. The first refrigerator railroad car was developed fifty years earlier. You could get fresh meat from the midwest that was no older than meat sold today (remember – beef is aged; they could do that in the railroad car).
- There were other ways of preserving food. Oysters were shipped all over the country in barrels. Delmonico’s, of course, would use fresh oysters – an extremely popular food in New York City – harvested from Long Island Sound and kept on ice (ice making had been developed in the 1850s).
- Our current ideas of food handling err on the side of caution by a wide margin. You can prepare food perfectly safely even if you don’t follow the current practice.
Delmonico’s features prominently in Caleb Carr’s excellent period mystery novel The Alienist, by the way. Sounded pretty elegant and yummy.
One of the protagonists in East of Eden loses everything trying to pioneer shipping California veggies back east packed in ice. They didn’t make it. Great book and great movie.
George Orwell describes working in an upscale Parisian restaurant in Down and Out in Paris and London. It’s pretty harrowing - one thing I recall in particular was having to fight through the rats nesting in the bread box to get to the dinner rolls.
What? There were plenty of fruit and vegetable markets in cities. Canned vegetables were expensive in comparison.
Of course many more people did live on farms, too.
Plenty of veggies in this famous photograph of Mulberry Street, Manhattan, ca. 1900.
Albert Finney’s Time and Again, which is largely set in New York City circa 1880, notes that there were still farms within city limits at the time.
I’ve wondered the reverse: if an 1890’s person ate a Big Mac meal or even a meal at a nice restaurant how would it affect him? Same basic foods of course but with a lot more preservatives and hormones and the like- I wonder if he could tell a difference.
I grew up on a farm where the old ladies did what would today be called 'organic farming- manure and no pesticides and the like. If you’ve ever eaten bonafide small farm cooking where vegetables and meat alike were alive earlier that week if not earlier that day it’s a very different taste. I won’t romanticize it- it’s not “man I didn’t know food could be this good!” good (well, a few things- strawberries and some kinds of beans) but it has a slightly different taste due to the lack of chemicals. The meat is also much smaller- you don’t realize what hormones do until you compare a free range chicken leg to one bought at most supermarkets.
Can you describe how oysters were prepared for shipping cross country in the 1950-1880 period? Ice wouldn’t do it.
Jack Finney. Great, great book.
Rich people were a lot fatter back then, maybe proof that the swells ate safer food, not just more of it.
I wonder how long oysters would live in a barrel of water.
Certainly they wouldn’t live on the trip from NYC to SF in 1850-1860.
:smack: Dur. I even googled the title to make sure I got the author right…
That wouldn’t be necessary; presumably those in San Francisco ate local oysters.