Sunday, December 18, 2011.
Mexican Barbecue Shrimp. Ocean Of Queso. Fred Harvey.
I awakened feeling okay, but my nerves were still on edge from last night's episode. I felt much better still after my afternoon nap. It's amazing what that twenty minutes of sleep can do.
Mary Leigh finished her exams two days ago, but she didn't arrive home until today. Too many parties going on. She complains about not having enough friends, but she has twice as active a social life as Mary Ann and I put together did at her age.
And, as it turned out, after we had lunch at La Carreta, she turned around and went back to Tulane. She has a lot of ceramic work to bring home, she says. La Carreta is for her what Antoine's is to me.
I took a chance on a dish and won. Diabla shrimp, to make a long story short, is New Orleans barbecue shrimp with a Mexican touch. Which, oddly, makes it less peppery than the Manale's version. I almost never order shrimp as an entree, but I'm glad I did this once. Big, ideally cooked, good light red sauce. Avocados on this side, Mexican-style rice on that side.
The amount of queso we consume every time we come here is sinfully excessive. The culprit is Mary Ann. Today she not only ordered a small order after we put away a big one, but took the queso that came (inappropriately, I'd say) with my shrimp. On the other hand, it cannot be said that I didn't eat my share of the stuff.
A few months ago Mary Ann took an interest in a book she found in my car. Appetite For America is about Fred Harvey, a restaurateur and hotelier of the 1800s whose effect on the history of the western United States was as strong as his fame was modest. Harvey was in railroading in the early decades of that industry. After the Civil War he allied himself with the Santa Fe, and grew along with it as it crossed the country along more or less the same route that became Route 66. Harvey built hotels and restaurants along the railroad--a critical resource, since dining cars were not yet established, and few towns were on the long, long route.
Harvey probably could have thrown barely edible food at his captive clientele. But he didn't. His standards were as high as those of the best restaurants in the country, at a time when the restaurant business was also in its infancy. His Harvey Houses brought civilization to the West not just through its food, but its employees, too. Harvey hired young women more respectable than typically found in frontier towns. The "Harvey Girls" had a way of marrying within a year or two after they arrived. This was part of Fred Harvey's plan. The stability of the families begun by former Harvey Girls caused all his towns to grow.
Mary Ann is, in a way, a Harvey Girl. She worked at the El Tovar Hotel in the Grand Canyon when she was just out of college. The El Tovar was the flagship of the Fred Harvey organization in those days. (It would still be had not Fred Harvey been absorbed by a conglomerate.) That's what piqued her interest in the book, which she found fascinating. I think it may be the first book we have both read at the same time at any time in our marriage.
I hate the title, but I like the book. Fred Harvey's influence on the American restaurant business is substantial. And anything with a lot of trains in the story interests me.
It's over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
