FOOD ON THE MOVE

The dining saloon of a Pullman car on the Great Northern Railway, from The Graphic, November 1879.

FOOD ON THE MOVE

DINING ON THE LEGENDARY
RAILWAY JOURNEYS OF THE WORLD

EDITED BY SHARON HUDGINS

REAKTION BOOKS

In memory of Lawrence M. Weldon, fireman on the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad, who instilled in me a lifelong love of trains

and

To Tom Hudgins, my travelling companion by rail, on steam trains to ‘bullet trains’, across four continents

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London N1 7UX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2019

Copyright © The Authors 2019

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements match the printed edition of this book.

Printed in China

by 1010 Printing International Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 9781789140187

FOREWORD

You could say that Sharon Hudgins and I met in the dining car. No, not in the way that Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint meet in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest. We crossed paths in a more mundane setting, on the printed page. Both of us have devoted much of our creative energy to exploring and reporting on railway travel and dining car experiences, including the culinary practices (both common and unique) that we have encountered on trains, the delights and disappointments that we and other passengers have enjoyed or endured, and the recipes for dishes served on railway journeys. That longtime interest in ‘what’s going on in the kitchen’ lends realism and credibility to the story presented here – and makes it well worth reading.

This book is a fascinating compendium of first-hand accounts of railway dining on an international scale, presented by an experienced cast of travel writers, cultural commentators and scholars, all of them rail fans. After all, ‘taking a meal in the cars’ occurs on every continent (except Antarctica), everywhere intercity trains run. The practice has progressed from consuming roadkill along the tracks, to vendors peddling food to passengers on board trains and at station stops, to scheduled twenty-minute ‘refreshment stops’ at pre-arranged sites, to the award-winning cuisine prepared and served on long-distance trains and luxury excursions. All of these various practices – except serving roadkill – continue today.

As editor of this book, Sharon Hudgins has brought a combination of experiences and perspectives to the task of assembling these accounts by eight different authors. The result is an informative and entertaining look at the ways in which railways and their passengers meet at the table to satisfy a basic human need – food – often in challenging circumstances. After reading this book, if you should travel on any of these railway routes yourself, you will know what to expect. But if you are only an armchair traveller, you can still experience the trip vicariously. And in either case, you can go into your own kitchen and recreate numerous railway dining experiences by preparing the recipes included in this book.

What, you might ask, is so different about railway dining? Consider the setting: a long, narrow dining room provided for by a team of chefs working, in most cases, in a shorter, narrower kitchen. In that environment, between one hundred and three hundred meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) must be prepared and served in three three-hour periods every day – and while the entire environment is moving, too. All the ingredients must be on hand in adequate quantities. The chef cannot send a waiter next door, or off to the market, if the kitchen runs out of an ingredient. Unlike land-based eateries that have an established clientele with known dining preferences, the dining car has to serve children, business people, retirees, farmers, city dwellers, holiday-makers, and the occasional biker, cowboy or newlywed couple. I once shared a table at breakfast on Amtrak’s Empire Builder with a motion picture studio executive, a young woman fleeing an abusive husband, and a man on his way home after serving five years in prison, who recoiled in horror when the service attendant mentioned ‘turkey bacon’. ‘That’s all they served us in prison,’ he explained, ‘turkey bacon or turkey sausage.’

Railways long ago devised several ways to address these challenges. Kitchens are designed to accommodate an assembly-line approach to plating meals. For safety, floors are covered with perforated mats to reduce the likelihood of a slippery surface. Cooking surfaces are equipped with railings to prevent pans from spilling their contents if the train should rock, and cabinets are equipped with racks or safety latches for the same reason. Recipes consist of common, easily obtained ingredients that can, if absolutely necessary, be procured at station stops. There are few preparation steps in the recipes, and for convenience ingredients are often pre-mixed at the railway’s commissary before being loaded onto the train. For example, the commercial baking mixture now known as Bisquick – a combination of flour, shortening, baking powder and salt – was first developed decades ago in the Dining Car Department of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the United States.

With this as the common background of all railway dining, the chapters of this book cover the gamut of culinary experiences, from historical to contemporary, from special, luxury excursions to standard, regularly scheduled railway journeys. The Blue Train and Pride of Africa in South Africa, the Orient Express and Flying Scotsman in Europe and the Santa Fe Super Chief in the United States all stand alongside workaday long-distance trains on Canada’s VIA Rail, Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway, Japan’s Shinkansen (‘Bullet Train’) lines and India’s Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Yet all these trains address the challenges common to food service on long-distance trains everywhere: providing memorable speciality dishes, employing regional ingredients and techniques, and meeting the individual passengers’ dining expectations.

The international focus of this book infuses it with wonderfully varied content, offering interesting details for the rail fan (historical vignettes, operational challenges, equipment details); entertainment for the armchair traveller (visual splendours, diverse routes and encounters with fellow passengers); and delights for the gourmet (menu details, meal descriptions and a selection of authentic yet easy to prepare recipes for the foods served on those trains or sold at station stops).

In addition, this book reminds us of both the differences and similarities in railway dining experiences around the world. We encounter Cheer-Up Huts at stations in Australia and envision Ghan passengers hunting wild game during long layovers in the Outback, or being provisioned by fly-overs that drop food to passengers when the train is delayed. We find that entire books are devoted to the stories behind the station lunch counters that serve boxed takeaway meals for travellers on Japan’s ‘Bullet Train’. And we encounter the influences that India’s caste system has not only on the food consumed by railway passengers but on the company one can keep while eating. But we are reminded, too, of the universal pleasures of railway travel and dining – the companionship of fellow passengers; the panoramic and constantly changing scenery; the memorable cuisine – with basic dishes often prepared with a twist, and the celebration of regional cooking; and the excitement and anticipation that accompanies the daily call to the dining car.

James D. Porterfield

Director of the Center for Railway Tourism, Davis & Elkins College, West Virginia

The Flying Scotsman crossing the Royal Border Bridge, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 2016.

Advertising poster for the French Wagons-Lits company’s Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée, by Jean Raoul Chaurand-Naurac, 1927.

INTRODUCTION

SHARON HUDGINS

All aboard for a delicious ride on nine legendary railway journeys on five continents! Dine with us on the longest passenger railway in the world. Eat in your seat on the fastest train on the planet. And snack on spicy samosas on one of the shortest, slowest and highest railway lines on earth.

Discover haute cuisine served in the elegant dining cars of the Orient Express, American steak and eggs on the Santa Fe Super Chief, and home-cooked Russian regional foods along the Trans-Siberian tracks. Eat your way across Canada’s vast interior and Australia’s dusty Outback. Grab an infamous ‘British Rail sandwich’ to munch on the Flying Scotsman. And sip South African wines in a Blue Train lounge car while viewing spectacular scenery through windows of glass subtly fused with gold dust.

A trip by train can mean different things to different people, from a hobo hitching a ride on a boxcar to a king travelling in his own private railway carriage. From a worker in a dark, oily locomotive yard in India, surrounded by the smell of burning coal, to a traveller waiting in a shiny-clean, brightly lit Shinkansen station in Japan. From soldiers being transported to the front line of a war to prisoners on their way to doom. From a harried daily commuter on a local train to a perfumed lady wrapped in furs, furtively slipping into a handsome stranger’s cabin as their train rolls through the Balkans. For many people, a railway journey also has an element of romance, of adventure, whether it’s a young man leaving home on his first train ride or a dowager empress travelling in high style with her entourage. But whatever their situation in life, whatever the circumstances of their journey, railway passengers need to eat.

My own track to editing this book was laid long ago – a ribbon of steel that started in Texas and ultimately ran all the way to Siberia. I grew up as a ‘daughter of the railroads’ in Denison, a small Texas town near the Oklahoma border. Denison holds a special place in American railroad history. In 1869 the East and West coasts of the United States were connected by the country’s first transcontinental railway tracks when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Point, Utah. Three years later, the first passenger train to enter Texas from the north pulled in to the station at Denison. And the following year, 1873, the entire United States was finally connected by rail when the tracks of the Houston & Texas Central met those of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (M-K-T, or the ‘Katy’) at the tiny town of Denison, linking America’s Gulf Coast in the south with the shores of the Great Lakes in the north.

Many decades later, when I was born, my father was working as a fireman on the M-K-T, shovelling coal on the last steam engines on that line. His grandfather had been a conductor on the Katy in Oklahoma, and other men in our family worked on the railroads at various times in their lives. The railroad was the lifeblood of my hometown, and I was surrounded by railroaders from the start.

When I was just six weeks old, my mother took me by train several hundred miles north to meet my grandparents in Iowa for the first time. And in 1949, when I was still very young, our whole family travelled by train from Denison to see the Chicago Railroad Fair, a trip I remember only from my father’s 8mm movies of the historic steam locomotives, new diesels and modern dining cars on display there, and the colourful ‘Wheels a-Rolling’ pageant – complete with cowboys, Indians and real trains – that celebrated the role of railroads in the development of America.

My first real railroad memory from childhood was lying awake late at night with the bedroom window open, waiting to hear the whistle of my father’s train at the last street crossing before his big steam locomotive pulled in at the red-brick station in our town. Only then, when I knew that my father had returned home safely, could I finally fall asleep.

Those early experiences instilled in me a lifelong love of trains. When I was still a young girl, our family travelled by rail to Union Station in Washington, DC, to visit the Capitol and the White House, and we took the Santa Fe Super Chief to Los Angeles to see Disneyland. As a teenager I rode through Texas and Oklahoma many times on the Texas Special. During summers off from college, when I worked as a government intern in the nation’s capital, I hopped the train on weekends to Philadelphia, New York City and small towns nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. And when I left Texas to attend graduate school in Michigan, I didn’t fly there by plane like most students did: I rode the train from Fort Worth to Chicago to Detroit, on some of the last long-distance passenger cars, now worn-out and shabby, still operating at that time.

All that early rail travel was possible because our entire family could ride free of charge on the trains, using passes issued to railway employees. But we could never afford to eat in the dining cars or pay for a berth in a sleeping carriage, both of which I dreamed of doing someday. Like most working-class people, we carried food with us from home and slept sitting up in our seats in the coach cars on overnight trips. I considered it a real treat when I was occasionally allowed to buy a ham sandwich and a bottle of Coca-Cola from the steward in a starched white jacket who came through the carriages selling snacks. Never mind that those costly sandwiches consisted of a very thin slice of ham and a limp leaf of lettuce inserted between two pieces of sparsely buttered Wonder Bread. To me, just the fact of buying food on the train was exotic.

Only once did I experience the luxury of eating in an American dining car. Mindful of my budget, I ordered the least expensive item on the menu. And I still remember the look and taste of that club sandwich with its three slices of toasted bread spread with mayonnaise, stacked high with bacon, lettuce, tomato and turkey, sliced into four elegant triangles and served on a heavy white porcelain plate with a few potato chips on the side.

The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express arriving in Bucharest, 2012.

As an adult, I went on to ride the rails all over the world. On my first trip to Europe, I travelled around Great Britain for two weeks on a BritRail Pass, taking the Flying Scotsman from London to Edinburgh, then another train to the end of the line at Thurso on Scotland’s far north coast. Using a Eurail Pass, I saw the Continent – from Amsterdam to Paris to Geneva to Rome – from the windows of first-class carriages. I sampled my first French food at a table covered with a clean white cloth and set with stemmed wine glasses in a streamlined carriage of a Trans Europ Express (TEE) headed to Paris; shared salami sandwiches and a bottle of wine in the cabin of an Italian family travelling from Genoa to Florence; and drank beer with German students who came aboard in Munich. I bought takeaway foods from vendors on the railway platforms and at little stalls near the stations. I lingered over coffee and pastries at station cafés while waiting for the next train out of town. Travelling alone in Europe for three months, without any reservations or even an itinerary, I would just look at the departure schedules posted in the stations, consult my map and hop on board.

The Australian train The Ghan at Alice Springs, Northern Territory, 2008.

Later, during the many years I lived abroad, I often commuted to work on local trains in Europe and Asia; travelled longer distances on the high-speed Intercity-Express (ICE) in Germany, the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) in France and the Shinkansen (‘Bullet Train’) in Japan; sped through the Channel Tunnel on the Eurostar between London and Paris; and once took an overnight train from Cairo to Luxor in a Victorian-era sleeping car that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Queen Victoria’s time. Finally, in the 1990s, my childhood dream of riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway came true – the journey of a lifetime for anyone who loves trains.

I tasted the foods of four continents on those trains, in dining cars and at station restaurants, from licensed pushcart vendors inside the carriages, and from freelance platform vendors along the tracks. So I was delighted when I had the opportunity to edit this book about the culinary aspects of travel on some of the world’s most famous railway journeys, and to write the chapter about the Trans-Siberian Railway myself.

All the authors in this book have ridden on the trains they write about or have first-hand knowledge of them in other ways. Adam Balic, a food historian in Scotland, first saw the ‘Flying Scotsman’ locomotive at a steam railway exhibition in Australia in 1988, and he later visited the famous locomotive in England, at its permanent home as a ‘working museum exhibit’ of the National Railway Museum in York. Arjan den Boer, a railway design historian in the Netherlands, travelled from Paris to Istanbul in 2012 on the original route of the Simplon Orient Express, to reconstruct the 1950 journey of LIFE magazine photographer Jack Birns on that train. Culinary historian Diana Noyce traversed the length of Australia from north to south on The Ghan, a railway whose official emblem honours the Central Asian camel drivers who opened up transport into Australia’s interior in the nineteenth century. Journalist Judy Corser crossed Canada from east to west on the modern version of the original ‘nation-building’ transcontinental Canadian railways. Merry White, a university professor and a specialist in Japanese food and culture, has raced across Japan many times on the bullet-nose Shinkansen. Karl Zimmermann, a railway author and journalist, first rode the refurbished Santa Fe Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago in 1969, and its successor, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, nine more times between 1985 and 2015. In 1977 and 2000, Zimmermann saw South Africa through the windows of its luxury Blue Train, and rode on the deluxe private train Pride of Africa, too. Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, a university professor, social historian and self-described ‘train fanatic’, grew up riding trains in India, starting with her first rail journey between Delhi and Calcutta when she was eight months old. And I have travelled many times on Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway, in all types of carriages, from ‘hard class’ to luxury-level, logging nearly 70,000 km (43,500 mi.) on that legendary line.

Many railway journeys have been called ‘legendary’, and to include all of them would require a book at least twice this length. The nine journeys featured here were selected for their geographic diversity, their uniqueness (length, speed, elevation), their fame beyond the tracks (in art, literature, music and film), their importance in a nation’s development, the food cultures they represent, and often a combination of these.

Taken together, the chapters in this book constitute a veritable feast of food on the move – from the eight-hour Darjeeling Himalayan run as a spicy, palate-tempting starter, to the Canadian Pacific’s 7,000-km (4,350-mi.) trip as a hearty soup course, to the week-long Trans-Siberian journey as a filling main dish and the three-day ride on the Orient Express as a richly satisfying dessert. But this is not just a contemporary account of dining on the legendary railways of the world. Each chapter also traces the history of those trains, with a focus on the foods available to passengers at different times in the past, sometimes as far back as the early days of train travel in the nineteenth century. The authors also consider how geography, politics, economics, social class, travellers’ expectations and even religion have influenced the foods served to railway passengers on, and off, those trains for nearly 150 years.

And who knows – given the way our world is rapidly changing, in the future we all might be gliding along on magnetic-levitation trains with robots cooking, plating and serving food to the passengers. All aboard for the ride!

Note on Recipes

All the recipes in this book were provided by the individual authors, who tested and tasted the dishes in their own kitchens. The recipes are written using standard metric measurements, with American measurements in parentheses. The abbreviations ‘tsp’ (teaspoon) and ‘tbsp’ (tablespoon) refer to spoons holding approximately 5 ml and 15 ml, respectively. Although most of the world measures dry ingredients by weight in grams and kilograms, American cooks measure both liquid and dry ingredients in cups and fractions of cups. An American cup holds 8 U.S. fluid ounces (approximately 240 ml). Oven temperatures and baking times are for standard ovens, not fan (convection) ovens.

Tunnel on the Circumbaikal Loop of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The Flying Scotsman leaving King’s Cross Station in London on its first non-stop run to Edinburgh, 1928.

1   SANDWICHES, SAVOURIES AND STRAWBERRY FIZZ: DINING AT SPEED ON THE FLYING SCOTSMAN

ADAM BALIC

The ‘Flying Scotsman’ is the name of Britain’s best-known and well-loved railway locomotive, as well as the entire Flying Scotsman train running on the route between London and Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The ‘Flying Scotsman’ steam locomotive was the first in the United Kingdom to be clocked at 100 miles (160 km) per hour, earning it an enduring place in the country’s railway history. In 2004, more than forty years after it had been withdrawn from service, it was purchased for the nation by the National Railway Museum in York, England, largely with money donated by the public. And in 2016, after a restoration costing £4.2 million, the ‘Flying Scotsman’ steam locomotive ran from London’s King’s Cross station to York railway station, watched by thousands of people along the route.

The origin of the Flying Scotsman rail service is rooted in the mid-nineteenth century, when several railway companies began operating a number of highly competitive train services, known as Scotch Expresses, on both east- and west-coast routes between London and the main cities of Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh. On the east coast many small independent railway companies created different sections of the East Coast Main Line linking London and Edinburgh. But a process of mergers and acquisitions soon led to the formation of three main companies, the North British Railway, North Eastern Railway and Great Northern Railway, along that route. In 1860 those companies collaborated to establish the East Coast Joint Stock company, with a shared fleet of passenger carriages.

From this collaboration came the first Special Scotch Express, which began running in 1862 with simultaneous departures at 10 a.m. from King’s Cross station in London and Waverley station in Edinburgh. By the 1870s, the colloquial name for the Special Scotch Express train had become the Flying Scotchman or Flying Scotsman.

The Railways Act of 1921 grouped all of Britain’s existing railways into the ‘Big Four’ two years later, with the joint stock company that operated the Special Scotch Express train becoming part of the newly formed London and North Eastern Railway. And in 1923 a new steam-powered locomotive, numbered 1472, rolled out of the Doncaster Works railway plant in England. In 1924, highly aware of public relations, the London & North Eastern Railway officially gave the Flying Scotsman name to both the locomotive (now renumbered 4472) and the entire train when the locomotive was displayed at the British Empire Exhibition in England that year. And on 1 May 1928, the Flying Scotsman train made the first non-stop journey from London to Edinburgh, the longest non-stop scheduled service in the world at that time.

The ‘Flying Scotsman’ locomotive itself went on to set a world record in 1934, becoming the first locomotive to be officially clocked at 100 miles per hour. Those record-breaking achievements, as well as the publicity generated by the railway company, ensured that the Flying Scotsman became and remains to this day the most famous train in the United Kingdom, a train whose name is also recognized by railway enthusiasts all over the world.

While the Flying Scotsman was to become known as the epitome of comfort and luxury in train travel in Great Britain, it took several decades for high-standard rail travel to arrive in the United Kingdom. Like many low-cost airline travellers today, early passengers on the Special Scotch Express train in the nineteenth century did not have great expectations of comfort or luxury. The speed of the journey was the prime consideration, because even after much improvement of roads and coach design, travel by horse-drawn carriage between London and Edinburgh took several days. There were no dining facilities on the Special Scotch Express and no corridors (hallways) in the railway carriages. Travellers entered their compartments directly from the station platform through a door that opened on to the individual passenger compartments. Initial travel time by train was ten and a half hours, reduced to eight and a half hours by 1890, including a twenty-minute lunch break at York station. Although this was a large improvement over travel time by horse-drawn coaches, it was not an especially comfortable experience. And for the first thirty years of the service, travellers’ food choices were limited to whatever they brought on board the train themselves or purchased at the brief refreshment stop in York. Since toilet facilities were also lacking on trains during that period, those early travellers might also have been more preoccupied with making a quick dash to the toilet than with the dubious merits of the railway station food.

Food was supplied at most main stopping points, either by refreshment trolleys on the station platform or ‘refreshment rooms’ inside the station itself. Items offered by refreshment trolleys were by necessity those that could be quickly consumed: hot and cold drinks, cakes, fresh fruit and sandwiches. The refreshment rooms offered a more substantial range of food: a typical set-price menu consisted of soup, a fish course, grilled or roasted meat, dessert and cheese. However, consuming this amount of food in such a short amount of time was obviously challenging and not without its dangers. Several decades after the York refreshment stop had ended, people still recalled that:

The lunch was provided in the refreshment room on the platform and in the early days the soup was served so hot that when the cry, ‘Take your seats’ came, many passengers had to dash back to the train, having obtained nothing save a few spoonfuls of soup and a burnt tongue. Experienced travellers always passed the soup and got on with as much of the other courses as possible.¹

These refreshments were mainly supplied by the railway companies, and while the food at York station was described by a writer at the time as ‘worthy of the highest praise’,² railway station food in general soon gained a bad reputation, with particular scorn reserved for the railway sandwich. Even by the 1860s, several years before the Special Scotch Express trains were launched, the ‘railway sandwich’ comedic trope was already firmly established in Britain, and it continued to be an item of derision during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Comments included, in 1884: ‘The existence of the railway sandwich and its spread throughout the country has long been a source of terror to the people and of anxiety to the medical fraternity.’³ And in 1890,

A Disclaimer. A well-known firm of refreshment contractors write us, giving an emphatic denial to the report which has been freely circulated during that last few days, as to their having accepted a contract for repaving the Strand with their well-known railway sandwiches.⁴

The nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope offered his own vivid description of the offending sandwich:

We are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that: by the unreadiness of our army, by the unfitness of our navy, by the irrationality of our laws, by the immobility of our prejudices, and what not; but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich, that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot.⁵

So it was not surprising that many passengers opted for purchasing a lunch basket to take on the train instead of buying a sub-standard railway sandwich.

Victorian and early twentieth-century rail travellers of course had the option of packing and bringing on board their own lunch baskets, but many chose to purchase a ready-packed version. Passengers could order wickerwork lunch baskets at the station, and many hotels also supplied their guests with lunch baskets on request. However, the common practice was to order a lunch basket from the guard (conductor) on the train. The empty baskets were later returned by the railway company to their point of origin by trains travelling in the opposite direction. For travellers on the Flying Scotsman, the availability of lunch baskets thus eliminated the inconvenience of the rushed refreshment stop at York.

Although the contents of the railway lunch basket were not exactly gourmet, they did provide much-needed nourishment during the long train journey. A late nineteenth-century advertisement from the Midland Railway Company offered both cold and hot luncheon baskets at several stations, packed with meats, cold salad or hot vegetables, bread, butter, cheese, and a half-bottle of burgundy, claret or stout, or bottled water. It went on to say that ‘Passengers who wish to be supplied with luncheon should give notice to the guard of the train they are travelling by, who will, when necessary, telegraph (free of charge) for it to be in readiness at the point required.’⁶

One of the many oddities of British rail travel during the first half of the twentieth century was the presence of first- and third-class carriages, but not second class. This unusual situation evolved from the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, which aimed to provide a minimum standard for rail passenger travel and to ensure services at a price affordable to poorer people. But the net effect was that the standard of third class was gradually upgraded from the 1870s onwards, until second class was abolished in the first decade of the twentieth century. These changes in train layout and carriage design were accompanied by a reduction in travel time, with the consequence that the level of comfort afforded to, and expected by, travellers on the Special Scotch Express (the early Flying Scotsman) train increased throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

East Coast Joint Stock North first-class restaurant car interior, operated by North Eastern Railway (NER), 1909.

Taking inspiration from American railroads in that era, British railway companies had gradually been including dining cars on their own trains from the late 1870s onwards. But it was not until 1892 that a dining car was provided for first-class passengers on the Flying Scotsman. By the end of the nineteenth century, the first-class dining car on the Flying Scotsman had seating for eighteen passengers, and the third-class dining car could accommodate 42.⁷ And on 1 August 1900, the company running the London to Edinburgh trains discontinued the lunch stop at York, since all the trains now had carriages with corridors and interconnecting walkways that allowed free movement of passengers through the train as well as access to dining cars and on-board toilets. Luxury and convenience had finally come to the Flying Scotsman.

Lunch being served in the first-class restaurant car of the Flying Scotsman, 1928.

When the Flying Scotsman made its record-breaking non-stop run from London to Edinburgh in 1928, it was promoted as a ‘hotel on wheels’. A new first-class dining car was introduced that featured carpeting and Louis XVI-style dining chairs. And to celebrate the new non-stop train service, Harry Craddock, the bartender at the Savoy Hotel’s American bar in London, even developed a special Flying Scotchman cocktail. Perhaps in response to this publicity, the railroad added a cocktail bar to the train in 1932, as well as a ladies’ ‘retiring room’.

Boiled Cod with Egg Sauce

A dish popular for centuries, boiled cod with egg sauce was described as ‘extremely luscious and palatable’ by an eighteenth-century traveller to Scotland, where it is known as ‘Cabbie-claw’ (probably from the Dutch term for cod, kabeljauw). This dish was ideal for railway catering in the early twentieth century, since cod was plentiful and cheap, and both the cod and the egg sauce could be prepared in advance, then reheated, allowing the train chefs time to make more delicate dishes, such as grilled lemon sole, to order.

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) whole fresh cod fillet

2 tsp salt

55 g (4 tbsp) butter

2 tbsp plain flour

480 ml (2 cups) whole milk

4 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped (divided use)

Salt and black pepper

2 sprigs of parsley, finely chopped, for garnish

Place the cod fillet flat in a large dish and season on each side with salt. Set in a cool place for 1 hour. (Salting improves the flavour and texture of the cod.) While the cod is resting, make the egg sauce by melting the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon until the mixture bubbles gently. Continue stirring for 2 more minutes, then add 120 ml (½ cup) of milk. Stir until well blended, and add half the remaining milk, stirring until no lumps remain. Pour in the remaining milk and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer 10 minutes longer. Remove the saucepan from the heat and add three chopped eggs to the sauce. Taste, add salt and pepper as needed, cover, and keep warm over very low heat while you cook the cod.

Rinse the salt off the cod and place the fish in a saucepan or fish poacher large enough to accommodate the whole fillet. Add just enough lightly salted water to cover the fish. Bring the water to a boil, immediately reduce the heat, and simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Carefully remove the cod to a serving dish, cover with the egg sauce, and garnish with the remaining finely chopped egg and parsley. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 to 6

A meal on the Flying Scotsman was no longer a choice between a luncheon basket and the dubious merits of a railway sandwich. In posters designed by famous graphic artists during the 1930s, the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) emphasized the excellent food, drinks and service that passengers could now expect in the train’s restaurant carriages. Typical posters promoted the delicious meals that chefs prepared on the train.

To provide this perfection in dining, the Flying Scotsman had an ultra-modern, all-electric kitchen car. Not only was this electric kitchen cleaner than earlier, gasfuelled kitchens but it reduced the risk of train fires. Hundreds of meals were served from one kitchen on the Flying Scotsman, with the electric current supplied by two axle-driven dynamos when the train was moving and batteries when the train was at rest. Such was the novelty and fame of the Flying Scotsman that its new cocktail bar and electric kitchen interior were frequently depicted in drawings and photographs and described in print publications during the 1920s and ’30s. In the modern kitchens on the dining cars, the meals were prepared by a limited number of staff, much to the admiration of journalists who reported on this modern miracle in train catering:

Poster designed by Austin Cooper for the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) to advertise the excellent service passengers could expect from LNER waiters, 1933.

Flying Scotchman

This cocktail was created by bartender Harry Craddock at the Savoy Hotel’s American bar in London to celebrate the first non-stop Flying Scotsman train service from London to Edinburgh in 1928.

60 ml (2 oz) blended Scotch whisky

60 ml (2 oz) sweet vermouth (such as Cocchi Vermouth di Torino)

1½ tsp simple syrup (sugar syrup)

1 tsp Angostura bitters

Slice of lemon, for garnish

Pour the liquid ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, shake well, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Serve with a twist of lemon.

Makes 1 cocktail

In this tiny, marvellous kitchen one chef and one assistant, with the help of a cheery car conductor and attendants and several just as cheery waiters . . . served this luncheon to eighty passengers in an hour and a half: Potage Albion, Boiled Cod and Parsley Sauce, Roast Leg of Mutton and Jelly or Pressed Beef, York Ham, Chicken and Ham. Mixed Salad. Potatoes, Beans, Peas, Marrow. Sultana Pudding or Stewed Plums and Custard. Cheese. Biscuits. Coffee.⁸

But owing to the space limitations of the kitchens on many trains, meals were also pre-prepared at major railway stations and reheated on board the train, in much the same way as modern airline food is prepared. Producing tonnes of high-quality food every day to supply dozens of trains required the organization of suppliers, kitchen staff, chefs and porters. At King’s Cross station in London, this bustling world of railway catering was concealed from the view of railway travellers, with kitchens and storerooms located below ground. In the rare instances when this hidden world of train catering was revealed to the public, their sense of awe at the spectacle was palpable:

[The] kitchens and store rooms are a hidden wonder of the large station, and it was not until he had shown me around them that I realised what a vast quantity of food and drink is consumed on the northern expresses. I descended to these underground kitchens just as the ‘Flying Scotsman’ was being furnished with food before its departure . . . men were pushing or pulling trolleys loaded high with hampers, crates, baskets of bread and piles of crockery. Chefs were running around giving last-minute directions and hurrying up operations in order that everything may be safely packed away on the train several minutes before it draws out of the station. Soup is taken on board, ready heated in large stone jars covered with wicker baskets, dozens of gallons at a time on busy days. Sixty pounds of fish is taken on, and there is a greater quantity of meat . . . Passengers consume on an average a hundredweight [50 kg/112 lb] of beef alone. Then there is sixteen pounds of bacon and thirty pounds of chicken. Vegetables add a little weight to the load, a hundredweight and a half of potatoes and dozens of pounds of sundry greens, onion and tomatoes . . . The last, but not the least important, item is the sweets. It is generally reckoned that two hundred and fifty portions will be required, and a variety is taken on board, and although some may fancy one thing and some another, at the journey’s end there is very little left over . . . Hard by the meat store is the cold room. Here is a sight to make a hungry man feel really famished. Beautifully browned ducks and chickens line many a shelf, all ready to go on a train and be heated up to be served.⁹

Sampling a fashionable drink in the Flying Scotsman’s ultra-modern cocktail bar, 1938.

A chef prepares an enormous batch of Christmas puddings in the kitchens at King’s Cross station, December 1932. Dozens of prepared puddings can be seen in the background.

Christmas dinner on the Flying Scotsman, 1931.

In addition to the restaurant cars that provided substantial multi-course meals with both à la carte menus and fixed-price menus with more limited selections, buffet cars were also added, which offered light meals, snacks and other refreshments. A buffet menu from the 1930s lists lobster or prawn salad, egg mayonnaise (egg salad), boiled ham, cold roast beef, ox tongue, galantine of chicken, pressed beef (corned beef), veal and ham pie, pork pies, and sardines or baked beans on toast, in addition to sandwiches. Drinks included cocktails (bottled), wine, beer, tea, coffee and Bovril (a concentrated beef extract that can be diluted with hot water to make a drink).

Honey Sponge Pudding

Steamed puddings, one of the great glories of British cooking, were ideal for railway catering because they could be prepared in advance and reheated to order. Since sugar was rationed during the Second World War, un-rationed honey was a popular substitute in railway kitchens. This modern recipe calls for twice the amount of sugar suggested by the wartime Ministry of Food and uses fresh, not dried, egg.

130 g (⅓ cup) aromatic honey (such as Scottish heather honey)

Zest of 1 lemon, finely grated

100 g (7 tbsp) unsalted butter, softened

100 g (½ cup) caster (superfine) sugar

3 eggs

125 g (1 cup) self-raising flour

Double (heavy) cream, to serve

Butter a 1-litre (1-qt) ceramic pudding basin. Spoon 2 tbsp of honey into it and stir in the lemon zest. Whisk the remaining honey together with the butter, sugar, eggs and flour until well blended into a smooth batter. Pour this batter on top of the honey in the pudding basin. Cover tightly with aluminium foil buttered on the underside, and secure with a string tied around the outer rim.

Place the basin in a large saucepan and pour in enough boiling water to come halfway up the side of the basin. Bring the water to a simmer, cover the pan, and adjust the heat to maintain the simmer. Cook the pudding for 1½ hours, replacing hot water as necessary to keep it halfway up the basin. Do not let it boil dry!

Carefully take the pudding basin out of the saucepan and remove the foil. Place a rimmed serving dish upside down on top of the pudding basin and invert the pudding onto the dish. Remove the bowl and serve the pudding with cream on the side.

Serves 4 to 6

A beautifully set dining table in an LNER restaurant car, c. 1930.

The Flying Scotsman’s food service during the 1930s consisted of three catering cars: one carriage containing the kitchen facilities, flanked by the first- and third-class restaurant cars. Lunch menus in this period offered a four-course option for three shillings and sixpence, or a two-course meal for two shillings and sixpence. The two-course meal had a choice of fish or meat, followed by dessert or cheese with biscuits and butter. The four-course meal included soup, an egg or fish course, and a meat main dish served with vegetables, followed by a choice of dessert or cheese with biscuits (crackers) and butter. Coffee was four pence extra. Diners could choose between egg dishes, such as ‘Egg Plat Cream’ (oeufs sur le plat), and fish, such as grilled lemon sole with tartare sauce or boiled cod with egg sauce. Main dishes were roast mutton with redcurrant jelly, braised steak with onion sauce, or cold pickled pork and pickled cabbage, accompanied by baked or mashed potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and peas. Desserts included steamed date pudding, charlotte russe and fruit salad. In addition to this set luncheon menu, there was a much more extensive à la carte menu, which included soups, sandwiches, a grill selection, a cold buffet selection, savouries (small, piquant dishes) such as Scotch woodcock, sardines on toast or Welsh rarebit, and a selection of ice creams for dessert. The wine lists were equally substantial. A first-class dining car wine list from 1936 offered a wide range of Bordeaux and burgundy red wines and six different champagnes, as well as liqueurs, spirits, beers and one kind of cider.¹⁰ These choices of exceptional foods and wines were all served by impeccably attired and mannered waiters, fulfilling the promise of the railway’s advertising posters. This period between the two world wars represented the finest years of train catering in Britain.

Breakfast and the morning paper in the first-class dining car on the Flying Scotsman, 1938.

However, while the Flying Scotsman and other catering services on the London & North East Railway were generous by any standards, they were not profitable. This lack of profitability was not due to overly lavish catering but the result of a number of different factors. Revenues of the railway companies suffered because of the increasing loss of freight and passengers to road transport after the First World War. But during that same period, although train catering did not pay its way, the company did not actually expect it to. It considered the purpose of catering to be just that: to cater to the passengers, not make a profit from them (although they might have been trying to provide top-notch service to attract passengers and hence make a profit from the volume of rail travellers).

The chef of the Flying Scotsman admires his equipment in the all-electric kitchen car, 1939.

A former train-catering field manager described how he was present during the dressing down of another catering manager, who was heavily criticized not for the quality of the food or the service provided, but for committing the unpardonable sin of allowing his train’s catering service to make a yearly profit!¹¹ With hindsight, although the quality of the dining experience on these services was attractive to passengers, this cycle of increasing loss of revenue – while at the same time maintaining the highest standards of rail travel (including food service) for passengers – could not possibly last. However, while the railway companies and the government made continued attempts to address the falling revenues of the railways, it was the outbreak of the Second World War that finally resulted in large organizational changes in the structure of British railways and put a decisive end to the golden, if unprofitable, age of railway dining in Britain.

Scotch Woodcock

This nineteenth-century dish belongs to a category of piquant small dishes known as ‘savouries’, served as the last course of a British formal meal. Savouries were popular with train travellers during the interwar period because they were a more casual course over which diners could easily converse after their focus on the more formal part of the meal.

8 salted anchovy fillets (preserved in olive oil)

115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, softened, plus 55 g (2 oz) unsalted butter

1 tsp curry powder

480 ml (2 cups) vegetable oil

170 g (6 oz) tiny dried anchovies (available in Asian food shops)

Pinch of ground cayenne pepper

6 slices good-quality white bread, each 1.5 cm (½ in.) thick

4 eggs

2 tbsp double (heavy) cream

Salt and black pepper

Make an anchovy butter by blending the anchovy fillets, 115 g softened butter and curry powder together in a food processor to a uniform, creamy paste.

Make the garnish by heating the oil to 190°C (375°F) in a small saucepan. Carefully add the dried anchovies and fry for a few seconds until crisp. Remove them from the oil and drain on a paper towel, then dust with cayenne pepper.

Trim the crusts off the bread and cut into twenty 4-cm (1½-in.) rounds using a pastry (cookie) cutter. Lightly beat the eggs and stir them together with the 55 g butter and the cream in a small saucepan over low heat, until thickened and scrambled. Add salt and pepper to taste. Remove from the heat. Cover and keep warm in the saucepan.

Heat the grill (oven broiler) to 190°C (375°F, or medium heat). Spread the bread rounds with the anchovy butter and place on a tray under the grill. (Freeze any leftover anchovy butter for future use.) Remove them when the bread is browned (about 1 to 2 minutes) and the anchovy butter has melted into the toast. Top each toast generously with scrambled eggs and garnish with the fried anchovies.

Makes 20 small toasts

Passenger ready to board the Flying Scotsman at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, 1938.

When the war began in September 1939, railways in Britain came under government control. Train catering continued for one week after the outbreak of the war – then restaurant cars were gradually withdrawn from service, until the Railway Executive (the government office in charge of the railways) announced that passengers should not expect any restaurant cars after 5 April 1944.¹² During the war very little was invested in the railways and only essential maintenance work was carried out. As a result, by the end of the war both railway infrastructure and rolling stock had become severely degraded. And it soon became apparent that the rail network could not be maintained by the now effectively bankrupt private railway companies, which had been under government control since the start of the war.

The rationing of food in Britain during and after the war also created problems for railway catering. In 1940 bacon, butter and sugar were rationed, and by 1943 meat, tea, jam, biscuits (cookies), cheese, eggs, lard, milk, and canned and dried fruit were added to the list of rationed items. However, even during the war the ‘service before profit’ attitude of railway catering survived in the railway hotel and railway service menus of the London & North Eastern Railway. At the Royal Station Hotel in York, the menu for the retirement luncheon for James Rowan, Esq. in 1941 offered multiple options for a five-course meal. The soup course (two choices) was followed by ‘Spaghettis Napolitaine’, a fish course of cod steak meunière or fillet of whiting Dieppoise, and a main course of either roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding or stewed tripe paysanne, served with potatoes (baked, boiled or mashed), spring cabbage and creamed parsnips. Dessert was a choice of rice pudding, damson tart, honey sponge pudding or orange jelly (gelatin dessert), followed by coffee.¹³ Another London & North Eastern Railway menu of 1941, from the Royal Station Hotel in Edinburgh, lists a meal of hors d’oeuvres, thick American soup, duchesse of mushrooms, roast goose, chipped potatoes and French beans, followed by gâteau amandine and cheese straws.¹⁴

These rare surviving menus give us a clear idea of the type of foods being served at the London & North Eastern Railway hotels and by its railway services, such as the Flying Scotsman, during the late interwar and early Second World War period. These multi-course menus, with their combination of classic French dishes and emphasis on fish, roast and pudding (dessert) courses, appear Edwardian in style, even if several decades removed from that pre-First World War era. British railway food remained generous, but, like the railways, it was stagnating.

The temporary government control of the railway companies during the Second World War continued with the nationalization of the railways, which occurred under the Transport Act of 1947. British Railways (later known as British Rail), formed by the nationalization of the ‘Big Four’ private railway companies in 1948, became the operator of most of the rail transport in Britain. In the immediate period after nationalization, much was left the same as it had been before, but the hotels owned by the railway companies and their food service operations on the trains came under the control of the British Transport Commission Railway Executive, and in 1948 under direct control of the British Transport Commission’s Hotels Executive.

The Hotels Executive acquired control of 55 hotels and 400 station refreshment rooms that needed substantial repair and upgrading if a profit was to be realized. Unfortunately, the financial position of the nationalized British Railways was generally poor, operating at a loss by 1955. Plans were drawn up to reduce inefficiencies in order to halt the financial losses. While ‘service before profit’ had been a feature of the pre-war railways, ‘service with profit’ was the aim of the new organization. For railway catering that meant reducing or eliminating much of the old-style silver service that characterized the premium dining experience of train passengers before the war. It also meant the closure of railway station refreshment rooms and the removal of restaurant cars from train services. Rather than providing full-service restaurant dining, many trains now offered only light meals and refreshments.

At the same time, British Railways also attempted to improve the image of the modernized railway catering from the late 1940s to the 1960s. But, judging from the comments about railway catering made in 1960 by Raymond Postgate, founder of the Good Food Guide, those efforts were largely unsuccessful:

Ever since anyone now living can remember railway catering has been a symbol of everything monstrous in gastronomy. The dirty teacups in the station buffets, the slatternly waitresses, the tasteless food, and the triangular slices of curling bread with a thin slice of luncheon sausage between them, called The Railway Sandwich, all have been the most visible and enraging evidences of the ineptness of the decaying railway companies ever since their heyday was past.¹⁵

The British Rail sandwich had again become a national joke. In a broader sense, however, while the sandwich had become a symbol of the overall decline in British railway catering, the general public also understood that the ridicule was not just a complaint about railway catering standards, as would have been the case in the nineteenth century, but instead a lament for the perceived decline of Great Britain in general.

Even as late as 1997, after British Rail became completely privatized, an article in The Independent used the British Rail sandwich as a metaphor for the current economic and political state of the United Kingdom, writing that:

As we became more aware of Britain’s relative decline, the sandwich stood as a symbol of our second-rateness. The British Rail sandwich, curling at the corners, became a national myth, although no one can quite remember eating one. It stood as an indictment of statist, bureaucratic corporations.¹⁶

Given the poor reputation of the British Rail sandwich, it was perhaps understandable that efforts were made to improve its image and, by extension, the reputation of railway catering in general. In 1971 British Rail produced a set of detailed, step-by-step directions for its staff about the correct way to make even the simple railway sandwich. The ingredients varied, but included cheddar cheese or tomato (28 g/1 oz per half sandwich), chicken or turkey (19 g/⅔ oz per sandwich) and boiled egg (half an egg per half sandwich). Exact instructions were also given for the dimensions of the bread slices and the number of slices per loaf.¹⁷ Train travellers were no longer passengers, but ‘customers’ instead, and while British Rail’s desire to improve the standard of railway catering by producing a readily identifiable, uniformly made sandwich is understandable, it was far removed from the company’s earlier sentiment of ‘regard for our passengers’ eupeptic welfare’.

Although its status as a premium service reduced the impacts of the post-war changes in railway catering, the Flying Scotsman was not entirely immune to them. An early change was the addition of new combination buffet-lounge car on the service in 1948. This buffet-lounge car had a bar 6.7 m (22 ft) long, with bar stools, whereas earlier buffet cars had sets of small tables each with two chairs. The new long bar design, while allowing more customers to be served at any one time, did not foster the casual intimacy of the earlier buffet car design, which had made those buffets popular with businessmen, who could conduct negotiations over a relatively modestly priced, but still well-made, meal. Perhaps that is why the newly designed buffet cars were soon transferred to the Flying Scotsman’s non-stop relief service (an extra train provided during periods of high demand, such as holiday periods), the Capitals Limited train and its successor, The Elizabethan, on the London to Edinburgh route.

Under British Railways, Flying Scotsman menus in the early 1960s offered a reduced-choice, although still excellent quality, fixed menu in comparison to the more extensive à la carte and table d’hôte menus when the train was privately owned. A Flying Scotsman luncheon menu of this period offered tomato juice or Scotch broth, followed by fried fillets of sole with tartare sauce or roast lamb with mint sauce. The final course was a choice between pineapple creole or cheese, salad, biscuits (crackers) and butter. While still offering a premium railway dining experience, these menus did not have the great choice of the earlier era, nor was the emphasis placed on the French origin of the dishes offered. This change in railway dining reflected not only a desire of British Railways to save money, but a broader change in British dining habits. There was a growing recognition and acceptance of the quality of traditional British food and a reduced emphasis on automatically equating the French culinary tradition with high-end dining.

In 1963 British Rail announced that the famous ‘Flying Scotsman’ steam locomotive No. 4472 would be retired from service and sold for scrap. Fortunately, it was instead purchased by the first of several subsequent private owners, who used it on railway tours along various lines in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. Finally, in 2004, the venerable steam engine was bought by the National Railway Museum in York, and in 2006 began undergoing a decade-long restoration.

Meanwhile, during the British Rail era from the mid-1960s to mid-1990s, the Flying Scotsman train service between London and Edinburgh continued to exist under that name, although no longer as a non-stop express train. But vestiges of the older elegance in food service still remained. An American woman recalled her experience of travelling from London to Edinburgh in 1969 on the express passenger train still called the Flying Scotsman (although it was no longer pulled by the famous locomotive):

I remember riding first class on British Rail across England and Scotland . . . when smartly uniformed stewards served tea in your private train compartment, first spreading a starched white cloth on the little table under the window, then pouring the hot brown brew from a silver-plated teapot into a porcelain cup (with milk added first or last depending on where you stand on that contentious issue). A small plate of sweet biscuits (cookies, in American English) always accompanied the tea. What a civilized way to spend a morning or afternoon, sipping tea, nibbling on biscuits, and watching the British countryside roll by outside the window.¹⁸

After the privatization of Britain’s railway system between 1994 and 1997, the Flying Scotsman name was maintained in one form or another into the twenty-first century. In 2011, the ‘Flying Scotsman’ brand was relaunched by the rail operator East Coast as ‘part of our policy of bringing back train names and restoring pride, passion and even a touch of glamour and romance back to the East Coast railway’.¹⁹ Although the Flying Scotsman was now a high-speed rail service taking only four hours between destinations, it ran only in one direction, from Edinburgh to London. In 2015 a Stagecoach–Virgin joint venture company, Inter City Railways Limited Virgin Trains (under the name Virgin Trains East Coast), took over the east coast route franchise. The Edinburgh to London Flying Scotsman train was retained, and to publicize it a modern electric-powered locomotive was named the ‘Flying Scotsman’, keeping the name of the train and its association with glamour and style, even though the locomotive was of a different type and colour from the original.

Restaurant car of the British Railway-era Flying Scotsman, 1962.

Finally, in 2016 thousands of people turned out to watch the original, newly restored ‘Flying Scotsman’ steam locomotive No. 4472 take to the rails for the first time in more than a decade. As part of various Flying Scotsman train ‘experiences’ being held in 2016, it was now also possible to dine in the restored 1950s-era Pullman-style dining cars. In some cases the train remained stationary, but in others the passengers could dine while travelling on the East Lancashire Railway heritage line, in carriages hauled by the famous ‘Flying Scotsman’ locomotive.

The ‘Flying Scotsman’ locomotive at the Doncaster Works Open Day, 2003, on the 150th anniversary of the plant works.

Virgin Trains East Coast Flying Scotsman, with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and VTEC MD David Horne, 2015.

A sample menu for one of those dining experiences offered a four-course meal consisting of ‘Strawberry Fizz and Reception’; wild Alaskan king potted crab with lemongrass; creamy roasted sweet potato and tomatillo bisque with coriander-and-cream drizzle; slow-roasted rack of lamb on a bed of garlic-and-rosemary creamed potatoes, with saffron rice, autumn root vegetables and marchand de vin sauce; and an ‘Assiette of Sharing Desserts’, followed by tea or coffee with after-dinner mints.²⁰

Although many of the ingredients are modern and international in origin, the structure of the meal is not very different from the menus of the ‘golden age’ of railway dining during the interwar period. The difference is that now people eat in the Flying Scotsman’s dining cars as an experience and end in itself, rather than dining on the Flying Scotsman as part of a train journey to somewhere else. Today’s Flying Scotsman ‘experience’ is far removed from the original purpose of transporting people between the capital cities of England and Scotland. While this can be seen as a diminishment and trivialization of a once great train service, at least there is no evidence of a railway sandwich in sight.

Jules Chéret, first Orient Express poster, 1888.

2   OF FRENCH CHAMPAGNE AND TURKISH COFFEE: FEASTING AND FASTING ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

ARJAN DEN BOER

‘Orient Express’: those two words evoke romantic images of glamour, mystery and intrigue. Commonly referred to as ‘the king of trains, the train of kings’, the Orient Express in its heyday was the conveyance of choice for European royalty, nobility, wealthy travellers, high-ranking diplomats and shady spies. The train inspired the creation of dozens of books, movies, television programmes and later even video games, making the Orient Express, in popular culture, the most famous train in the world.

But the Orient Express was actually not a single train. It was an extensive long-distance railway service that operated several sets of railway carriages. Over the course of time different branches coexisted, bearing either the Orient Express name or variants such as the Simplon Orient Express. These trains ran on several routes that connected Paris with Eastern Europe and Constantinople (Istanbul), Europe’s so-called ‘gateway to the Middle East’.

During the two ‘golden ages’ of the Orient Express – the Belle Époque before the First World War, and later the period between the two world wars – the trains were renowned for the elegant ambience and high-quality cuisine of their dining cars. Apart from serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, the dining cars also doubled as lounge cars. They were the social centre of the train, where well-dressed passengers engaged in multilingual conversations over tables covered with damask cloths, set with porcelain, crystal and silverware, and attractively lighted by table lamps.

On 4 October 1883, the first official Express d’Orient train (soon called the Orient Express) left Paris from the festively decorated Gare de l’Est. Seventy-five metres (250 ft) long, the train was composed of a locomotive, two sleeping cars, a mail car, a baggage car and a dining car. The guests invited on that inaugural journey included government officials, diplomats, journalists, and railway executives from France, Austria-Hungary, Romania and the Ottoman Empire. Among them was the author and journalist Henri Opper de Blowitz, the Paris correspondent for the London Times. Blowitz later described the dining car on the train as it sat in the station before that special trip:

In the front of the train the dining car, with its frivolous curtains up, throws a special lustre over the whole scene. Large gas cylinders illuminate a veritable banquet hall. The bright-white tablecloths and napkins, artistically and coquettishly folded by the sommeliers, the glittering glasses, the ruby red and topaz white wine, the crystal-clear water decanters and the silver capsules of the champagne bottles – they blind the eyes of the public both inside and outside, and contradict the sorrow of parting that can be read from people’s faces.¹

First Orient Express and its dining car, by Louis Poyet, L’Illustration, 1884.

The host of that official journey was Georges Nagelmackers, founder of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens, the Wagons-Lits sleeping and dining car company (similar to the Pullman railroad car company in the United States). The son of a wealthy Belgian banker, Nagelmackers had been sent to the United States fifteen years earlier by his father, supposedly to get over an unrequited love. Travelling in America on trains with Pullman sleeping cars, the young Nagelmackers saw a good business opportunity for the European railway market, since the fragmented railway systems of the Continent did not have long-distance overnight trains. So in 1876 Nagelmackers created the company that was soon to acquire a near-monopoly on European sleeping cars and dining cars, which drastically changed rail travel in Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards.

One year before the first Orient Express, a Wagons-Lits test train had run between Paris and Vienna. This Train Éclair de Luxe (Lightning Luxury Train) got its name from its average speed of 48 km/h (30 mph), reaching Vienna in 27 hours, more than six hours faster than conventional trains of that time.² The Wagons-Lits company’s first dining car to include a kitchen was also part of that train, with a menu offering oysters, turbot with spinach sauce, chicken with mushrooms, game in aspic, chocolate cream and a dessert buffet.³ With the success of this trial train, Nagelmackers was then able to persuade railway companies from France to Romania to collaborate in running a luxury train that would go beyond Vienna: the Orient Express.

Although the Orient Express had actually started operating on 5 June 1883, it was the official inaugural journey in October 1883 that was so well documented by the writers and journalists on board, who all emphasized that the new service ‘made the world smaller’. They also praised the train’s comfort. For example, Blowitz touted the brand-new sleeping cars with two-axle bogies ‘that ran so smoothly that one could shave at a speed of 80 km/h [50 mph]’.⁴ In his travel report De Pontoise à Stamboul (From Pontoise to Istanbul), the French author and journalist Edmond About was the first to call the Orient Express a hôtellerie roulante – a rolling hotel.

The dining car and excellent cuisine were also praised by the French writer Georges Boyer in the newspaper Le Figaro:

A dining car furnished with Maroquin tapestries, Cordoba leather and Genoa velvet, made up of a spacious dining room, a smoking room and library, a boudoir for the ladies, a pantry, and a kitchen where a chef of the first order works. This genius of a man – my appreciative stomach does not know how to find a more apt epithet for him – has prepared us dishes of an exquisite taste, varying his menus by following the countries which we crossed, and serving us, after the dishes which one eats at the Café Anglais [in Paris], Danube sterlets, fresh Romanian caviar and Turkish pilaf, while the sommelier, following his inspiration, pours us the most famous vintages of the Moselle, the Rhine, of Hungary and Romania.⁵

First Orient Express dining car interior, by A. Tilly, L’Illustration, 1884.

Orient Express passing the Little Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, c. 1895.

Serving local foods and wines in each country the Orient Express traversed would become a Wagons-Lits trademark. The menus changed daily but always concluded with fruit and cheese. During the 1880s, since there were no electric refrigerators on those early dining cars, fresh foods were supplied at various stops along the route, along with ice to keep the foods cool. For the French reporter A. Laplaiche of La Nature magazine, however, it was not so much the food itself but the backdrop that made dining a great experience: ‘You can dine at your ease, without any haste, while seeing the scenery unfold rapidly. The decor of the walls of the dining room is changed every moment, so to speak.’⁶

During its first years, the eastern terminus of the Orient Express was 62 km (39 mi.) south of the Romanian capital of Bucharest, in the town of Giurgiu on the left bank of the Danube river. The journey onward to Constantinople had to be continued by alternate means. A ferry took the passengers across the river to Bulgaria, where a local train was waiting to take them on to the Black Sea port of Varna. That long, uncomfortable ride made a stop for lunch because there was no dining car on the train. According to About,

We have lunch at the Scheytandjik station (in Turkish: Little Devil). We are served partridges that the great devil himself wouldn’t be able to cut, washed down with a local wine that even the devil would resist. But as it is a quarter past one and we almost die of starvation, we devour a simple roasted goose, Turkish pastry and a compote of peaches and almonds bathed in a syrup that strongly smells of roses. That’s bad, you’d think. Well no!⁷

At Varna the last leg of the journey continued on a steamship, which took the passengers overnight on the Black Sea and through the Bosphorus. Some 82 hours after leaving Paris, they reached their final destination: the illustrious Ottoman capital of Constantinople. Compared to travelling from France via the Mediterranean Sea or the Danube, the time saved was phenomenal.

Orient Express near Constantinople, postcard, c. 1900.

It was another five years before East and West were connected by direct rail. Railway construction in the Balkans was delayed due to the changed political situation. Originally the Vienna–Constantinople railway was planned to run through Bosnia, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. After the Ottomans lost Bosnia to Austria, it was decided that a new line would be constructed through Serbia and Bulgaria. Finally, in August 1888, the first train from Paris arrived in Constantinople. The direct connection was fourteen hours faster than the Black Sea route – taking only 68 hours to cover 3,000 km (1,865 mi.). The opening of the new Constantinople railway station in 1890, Sirkeci station, marked the beginning of the first golden age of the Orient Express.

Saloon and dining room of a luxury train, anonymous illustration from L’Illustration, 1899.

Meanwhile, the Wagons-Lits company had established a whole network of luxury train services throughout Europe. These included the Calais-Méditerranée Express, Rome Express, Ostend-Vienna Express, Nord Express and, beginning in 1900, a luxury train service in Russia called the Trans-Siberian Express. All these trains had sleeping cars, dining cars and service the same as, or comparable to, the Orient Express, but the Orient Express was the oldest and became the most famous in the public imagination.

The American railway author Cy Warman, a former locomotive engineer (train driver) himself, travelled on the Orient Express in 1895 and judged the dining car service ‘equal to the best in any country, and the rates are reasonable’.⁸ For breakfast, lunch and dinner he paid only $2.55 a day, about 50 cents less than this would have cost in the United States. While American Pullman cars were ‘moving dormitories’ with only curtains offering some privacy, Warman preferred Wagons-Lits’ sleeping cars, which had separate compartments:

A compartment holds two or four people, and often, with the judicious expenditure of a few francs, the voyager can secure a small compartment all to himself, and he is quite as secluded and comfortable as he would be in the state-room of a Pullman.⁹

In 1889 the English wool merchant Joseph Riley went on a business trip to Constantinople. In his handwritten Notes of Journey from Bradford to Constantinople by the ‘Orient Express’, he did not try to be original: ‘It is in fact a huge travelling hotel,’ he wrote multiple times. Riley also described the inconveniences: troubles with customs officials at borders, snoring passengers, motion sickness, homesickness, and communication problems because he spoke only English. He also provided many details about the food and its costs. Riley wrote down a complete menu and was amazed by the fresh fruit on board. But contemporary readers might be more surprised by the breakfast habits of those days:

Orient Express dining car price list, 1887.

Petits pois aux artichauts (Peas with Artichokes)

Offered on an Orient Express menu in 1899, this would have been a seasonal side dish made with fresh green peas and tender young artichoke hearts. Modern cooks make the same dish year-round with frozen peas and artichokes, but fresh herbs are still essential for the flavour.

45 g (3 tbsp) unsalted butter

1 large shallot, minced

1 large garlic clove, minced

450–500 g (1 lb) frozen artichoke hearts, rinsed, thawed and quartered

450–500 g (1 lb) frozen green peas, rinsed and thawed

60 ml (¼ cup) chicken stock (broth)

1 tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

3 generous tbsp finely shredded flat-leaf parsley

2 generous tbsp finely shredded mint leaves

6 thin lemon slices, for garnish

Melt the butter in a large frying pan (skillet) over medium heat. When the butter begins to bubble, add the shallots and garlic. Cook gently, stirring frequently, for about 3 minutes. Add the artichoke hearts and cook, stirring frequently, for 3 to 4 minutes. Add the peas, chicken stock, salt and pepper. Increase the heat to medium-high, cover, and cook for 5 minutes or until the peas are tender but not mushy. Uncover, stir in the parsley and mint, and continue cooking, stirring constantly, until all the liquid has evaporated from the bottom of the pan. Serve hot, each serving garnished with a lemon slice for squeezing over the top.

Serves 6

Breakfast is not a great meal by the majority of travellers, many of them taking nothing more than a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine.

Déjeuner or Lunch is served at 11 a.m. and consists of soup, fish, joint and sweets, to my mind a capital dinner of four courses, and many of the passengers seem to enjoy it immensely.

. . . At 6 p.m. Dinner is served and with our travellers of the average French or German type this is no mere name. They do dine and to see how some of them attempt to consume their 6 francs’ worth is a sight not to be so soon forgot.¹⁰

Riley added that dinner consisted of soup, radishes, fish, and veal with watercress and asparagus, followed by ‘Tarts & Pudding’, cheese, fruits and, finally, coffee.

Drinking was also very important on the Orient Express. An 1887 price list contained two German Rhine wines, three Hungarian wines, three burgundies and five ‘fine wines’ of the Bordeaux classification, sealed with a castle stamp, including a ten-year-old fifth cru Pontet-Canet. Guests could choose from five different champagnes, of which the house brand, Sleeping Car Sparkling, was the most affordable, while the Veuve Clicquot cost twice as much.¹¹

Orient Express menu, c. 1890.

Very high-ranking passengers could order dishes that were not on the menu, according to the memoirs of Margaret Elizabeth Leigh Child-Villiers, the Countess of Jersey, who travelled back from Constantinople after her trip to Egypt and Syria in 1890:

At Sofia, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria got into the train accompanied by an imposing-looking man who we thought was Stambuloff, the Prime Minister afterwards assassinated. It appeared that Prince Ferdinand’s pastime was to join the train in this way, have his déjeuner on board, get out at the frontier, and return to his capital by the next train. It seemed a curious mode of enjoyment, but probably Bulgaria was less lively than it has become since.¹²

The prince was served apricot omelette and asparagus. The other passengers were told this was a déjeuner commandé and that they couldn’t share it, to the displeasure of some Britons and Americans, who complained about unequal treatment on the train. But royalty was no guarantee of comfort: at Budapest, the sister of the Serbian queen was escorted into the train with courtesy, but due to lack of space ‘the poor woman had to spend the night in the passage.’¹³

Wagons-Lits no. 2286 dining car, built in 1911, on display at the Dutch Railway Museum in Utrecht.

The French Orientalist writer Pierre Loti was less concerned with practical matters. In his diaries, published as Journal intime, he melodramatically described his Orient Express journey of 1890, emphasizing the international mix of travellers in contrast to the local population outside.

The train runs along the south side of Stamboul, along the shore of the Sea of Marmara. In the evening dusk it passes the deserted ancient quarters, the ruins around Yedikule. I can see the majestic but grim walls that are breached to let us through. What a contrast to travel through such desolate surroundings in a train with cheerful and elegant company! . . .

We are in the dining car, a cosmopolitan company seated at the dinner table without seating order, while a sad little mosque surprises us with unexpected illumination in this dreary environment.¹⁴

Restaurant of the Pera Palace hotel in Constantinople, c. 1925.

In 1892 the Wagons-Lits company opened a hotel in Constantinople to offer Orient Express travellers a trusted accommodation in connection with their journey. The Pera Palace was built in the Beyoğlu district, the location of many Western embassies, and offered panoramic views of the Golden Horn.¹⁵ The exterior was neoclassical, while inside marble, dark wood and Oriental rugs created an Eastern-exotic atmosphere. Shortly after its opening, the hotel became part of the Compagnie Internationale des Grands Hôtels, a subsidiary of the Wagons-Lits sleeping car company.

At the other end of the line, the Wagons-Lits’ hotel company opened a Western counterpart six years later. Located in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe, the prestigious Élysée Palace hotel had four hundred rooms with electric lighting and modern plumbing. The hotel’s amenities included a library, hairdresser, photographic studio, theatre box office and Wagons-Lits travel agency.¹⁶ Both hotels also had grand restaurants that offered classic dinners of twelve courses – even more opulent than those on the Orient Express. The dishes listed on an Élysée Palace menu dating from 1900 transitioned from light to heavy to sweet: soups, salads, fish, poultry, meats, vegetables, desserts and fruit – including crayfish bisque, salmon trout cooked in champagne, artichoke hearts with Parmesan, and iced cantaloupe.¹⁷ And on 5 June 1903, the Orient Express itself celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a menu in the dining car that featured ‘foie gras, saumon fumé, oeufs à la gelée, sole Metternich, poulet en cocotte, dessert, cheese, coffee’.¹⁸

Cross-section of an Orient Express dining car, fold-out published in a German magazine, 1896.

The beginning of the First World War in July 1914 brought an end to the golden age of the Orient Express. Railways across Europe were disrupted by the war; the Orient Express had to suspend its operations; and some of the Wagons-Lits carriages were put into service on military hospital trains. Four years later, on 11 November 1918, the armistice ending the war was signed in the Wagons-Lits dining car of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s private train, in the Forêt de Compiègne north of Paris. Later that historic railway carriage was preserved by the French as a monument to the defeat of Imperial Germany in that war.

The outcome of the First World War had major implications for the Orient Express. Borders within Europe and the Middle East had changed dramatically. The railway map was also redrawn. In 1919 the Orient Express service from Paris was reinstated, but limited to Bucharest as its final destination. For the connection to Constantinople a new train was introduced in the same year, bypassing Germany. This Simplon Orient Express was created by extending onward to Yugoslavia and Turkey the existing Simplon Express that already connected Paris to Milan through the Swiss–Italian Simplon Tunnel. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 granted the new train service a ten-year monopoly on the Paris–Constantinople connection.

Poulets Pochés Parmentier (Chicken and Potato Casserole)

Listed as ‘Poulets Pochés Parmentier’ on a Simplon Orient Express menu in 1924, this comfort-food casserole is the French equivalent of English shepherd’s pie, but made with poached chicken instead of minced mutton or lamb. For a more elegant presentation, bake individual portions in six to eight oven-to-table ramekins or gratin dishes, just until the cheese has lightly browned on top.

700 g (1½ lb) boneless, skinless chicken breasts (fat and membranes removed)

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) potatoes, peeled and quartered

30 ml (2 tbsp) milk

45 g (3 tbsp) unsalted butter (divided use)

1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

1 tbsp vegetable oil

110 g (¼ lb) bacon, diced

2 medium onions, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

60 ml (¼ cup) crème fraîche

2 tbsp Dijon mustard

90 g (3 oz/approx. 1 cup) coarsely shredded Gruyère or Emmental cheese

Salt

White pepper

Cut the chicken into 5-cm (2-in.) pieces and poach lightly in simmering water for 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, cool and finely chop. Boil the potatoes in lightly salted water just until tender. Drain well in a colander. Return to the pot and mash together with the milk, 2 tbsp of the butter, and 1 tsp each of grated nutmeg, salt and white pepper.

Heat the oil and remaining 1 tbsp butter in a large frying pan (skillet) over medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the bacon and onions and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the onions are translucent. Stir in the garlic and cook 1 minute more. Stir in the chicken, crème fraîche and mustard. Continue cooking and stirring, just until no liquid remains in pan.

Heat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Butter a deep-sided 20 × 20-cm (8 × 8-in.) glass or ceramic baking dish. Spread the chicken mixture in an even layer in it, followed by a layer of mashed potatoes. Sprinkle the cheese evenly over the top. Bake for 20 minutes or until the cheese is lightly browned on top. Let sit at room temperature for 10 minutes, then cut into squares and serve immediately.

Serves 6

Interior of a Wagons-Lits steel dining car, 1926.

Initially the Simplon Orient Express consisted of pre-war teakwood sleeping cars and dining cars. From 1922 onwards, the Wagons-Lits company introduced new steel carriages fitted with stylish Art Deco interiors. Those carriages first ran on the Calais-Méditerranée Express, nicknamed ‘Le Train Bleu’ because of the exterior colour of the new cars. Soon, the navy-blue railway cars with yellow lettering on their sides also became typical of the Simplon Orient Express – which many passengers now found to be faster and more fashionable than the original Orient Express itself.

While the steel carriages were technically very advanced, mahogany panelling provided a luxurious ambience inside. The comfortable couches of the sleeping car compartments were converted into full beds at night. The dining car interior was made of mahogany marquetry. The tables, set with fine china and cut-crystal glassware, were lighted by brass lamps. The galley (kitchen) at one end of the car was equipped with a large coal-fired stove and a wall of iceboxes, refrigerators cooled by blocks of ice that were replaced at major stations, where new food supplies were also taken on board. The seven-man dining car staff comprised the chef, the maître d’hôtel, kitchen helpers and waiters.

Simplon Orient Express/Taurus Express map, Wagons-Lits/Barreau & Cie, 1930.

Page from a Simplon Orient Express brochure, Wagons-Lits/Barreau & Cie, 1932.

Because of its speed and modern luxury, the Simplon Orient Express became particularly popular with diplomats, artists and writers. Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Agatha Christie and others immortalized the train in their books, creating an aura of thrilling intrigue. For the American novelist John Dos Passos, the dining car of the Simplon Orient Express was an especially good place to meet and observe other travellers:

Joggling three times a day in a dining car. First, through the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then through Bulgaria and a slice of Greece . . . There’s the lady from Wellesley who writes for the Atlantic Monthly; an egg-shaped Armenian . . . whose mother, father and three sisters were cut up into little pieces before his eyes by the Turks in Trebizond; there’s a tall iron-grey Standard Oil man, very tall with a little pot belly the shape of half a football . . . Then there’s a man with many seals on his watch who looks like a Fourteenth Street auctioneer, and two scrawny colonial Englishwomen; all these against a changing background of sallow Balkan people with big noses and dark rings under their eyes.¹⁹

With the introduction of the Simplon Orient Express, Athens had been added as a new final destination, in addition to Constantinople. At the Serbian town of Niš the train from Paris was divided into two. Direct coaches ran to Athens via Skopje and Thessaloniki, crossing the famous 194-m (636-ft) railway bridge over the Gorgopotamos river in Greece. Adding Greece to the route also added to the culinary diversity of the train. But the British railway author George Behrend did not think highly of Balkan cuisine when he travelled from Athens to Calais in the late 1930s:

The best thing about travelling in the Simplon-Orient Express in this direction was that the food and the dining-cars gradually became superior. This teak dining-car came off at Amfikleia [170 km/105 mi. northwest of Athens], after serving soup, risotto with shell fish, mutton pilaf, sauté potatoes and beans, cheese and fruit. The Naousa red wine went down well with the mutton, but the cheese was rather strong, as was the Turkish coffee and Ouzou. The menu was hand-written in Greek and French in the usual Wagons-Lits style.

After Skopje there was luncheon of hors d’oeuvres, pork, and odd-tasting pastry, and very local cheese. Jugoslav mineral water tasted most peculiar; Dalmatian Riesling was no thirst-quencher either, but its tippling qualities were enhanced by the fatigue of the journey.²⁰

Simplon Orient Express brochure, Wagons-Lits/Barreau & Cie, 1930.

Behrend was more impressed with the dinner served when the train travelled through Italy the next day: clear soup, ravioli, steak tortellini, Bel Paese cheese, fruit and cassata: ‘Finally a cappuccino instead of the thick Turkish coffee, and Strega [liqueur] to go with it.’²¹

Wagons-Lits dining car no. 3348 (1928), on display at the Cité du Train museum in Mulhouse, France.

By 1936 the Orient Express carriages and service in Eastern Europe were just as modern and comfortable as those on the Simplon Orient Express, as the British writer Beverley Nichols noted during his travels to Romania that year:

A bell tinkles in the corridor of the Orient Express. Lunch! We get up, with hunger gnawing at our inside, filled with delight at the prospect of eating crisp rolls, and potato mayonnaise, and veal and petits pois and slabs of fromage du pays, washed down by white wine, drunk from a tumbler (which is the only way to drink white wine). And not only does the prospect of the food allure us, but the fact that we shall be devouring it in a fantastic chariot of steel and glass, hurtling through a foreign country. There must be something seriously wrong with the man who does not enjoy lunching in the train.²²

Someone who apparently couldn’t enjoy the luxury was Roy Redgrave, who later became a Major-General in the British Army. During the 1930s he travelled alone as a young boy on the Orient Express, from his parents’ residence in Romania to England, to attend boarding school there. On his first journey, when he was only nine years old, the reticent British boy found it impossible to enter the dining car alone, select a table and sit opposite a complete stranger. For two days he ate biscuits (cookies) and chocolate bars. ‘On the third day I was hungry and feeling sorry for myself,’ he recalled later. ‘Suddenly the door slid open and a lady asked, “Do excuse me, but would you like to accompany me? I do so hate eating alone.” I leapt to my feet and followed.’ Redgrave, who later estimated that he spent almost three weeks a year on the Orient Express in the 1930s, also noticed the signs of the coming war. ‘The journey was no longer fun . . . people being taken off the train . . . searches for Jews and lots of black uniforms’.²³

Once again, the outbreak of war eventually halted the Orient Express. After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, most of the long-distance luxury trains in Europe suspended their services. But a Wagons-Lits dining car still played a symbolic role in that war. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Adolf Hitler demanded that the surrender of France be signed in the same Wagons-Lits carriage where the armistice ending the First World War had been signed in 1918. During the Second World War, the Germans would move that historic train car to Berlin and put it on show there, before they destroyed it very near the end of the war.

During the Second World War, many Wagons-Lits carriages were lost, and railway infrastructure was severely damaged. In the post-war era, reconstruction of Europe’s railways was partially funded by the U.S. Marshall Plan, which began in 1948. The Simplon Orient Express had already begun operating on part of its former route, making the entire run between Paris and Istanbul by 1947, but it was not until 1951 that Athens was reconnected to the route. Experienced travellers noted that many of the trains were not as well appointed, well maintained or well staffed as those before the war.

During the Cold War between the late 1940s and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Orient Express was, despite some interruptions, one of the few links between Eastern and Western Europe. Strict border controls made travel difficult, and Eastern Bloc citizens were not allowed to travel freely at all. Communist countries ‘democratized’ the former luxury trains by adding their own dining cars, sleeping cars and third-class carriages. During that same period, Western European railways also introduced tourist-class couchette cars (with bunks) and inexpensive seats in coach cars.

Provisioning of a Wagons-Lits dining car in Paris, 1956.

In 1950 LIFE magazine reporter Roy Rowan and photographer Jack Birns took the Simplon Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. They experienced it not as a single train but a complex combination of through-carriages with numerous destinations. Travelling through Switzerland and Italy, there was still a holiday atmosphere on the train, and passengers enjoyed the good food while it lasted. But at the Allied-controlled border city of Trieste (which later became part of Italy), the train entered the ‘twilight zone of the Cold War’. After Trieste only two cars from Paris were left, although third-class coaches filled with peasants and soldiers were added. Among the seven remaining passengers on the Simplon Orient Express, there were no tourists. Most of the passengers were diplomatic couriers: two Americans and two Britons, heading for their embassies in Belgrade and Sofia. According to one of them, you could tell a lot about the traversed countries by the food and drink served on the train. ‘In France and Italy you get wine and beer. That’s the way the people seem – light and bubbly. But in Yugoslavia you get that liquid dynamite, Rakia. Just like the Jugs [Yugoslavs] – real rugged.’²⁴

Turkish Green Beans with Thyme and Yoghurt

This tasty Turkish dish was featured as an appetizer on a 1971 menu of the Istanbul-Express between Istanbul and Munich, comparable to the Direct-Orient from Paris.

3 tbsp olive oil

2 medium onions, chopped medium-fine

3 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced

450–500 g (1 lb) fresh runner beans (Italian flat or Romano beans), cut on the diagonal into 8-cm (3-in.) pieces

2 tbsp tomato purée (paste)

1 tsp sugar

180 ml (¾ cup) water

1 tsp dried thyme (or 1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves)

½ tsp each salt and black pepper

2 medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped

Juice of 1 small lemon

Thick yoghurt (Turkish or Greek), to serve

Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Heat the olive oil in a large (30-cm/12-in.) frying pan (skillet) and sauté the onions over medium-high heat until translucent. Add the garlic and sauté 2 minutes more. Add the beans and toss to coat with oil. Dissolve the tomato purée (tomato paste) and sugar in the water and stir into the beans. Stir in the thyme, salt, pepper and chopped tomatoes. When the mixture comes to a boil, reduce heat to medium, cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the beans are very tender (about 30 minutes). Remove the lid and continue to cook briefly, until the liquid is reduced and the tomato sauce is thick.

Turn off the heat and let the beans cool to lukewarm in the pan, then stir in the lemon juice. Serve lukewarm or at room temperature, each serving garnished with yoghurt and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.

Serves 6 to 8

By that time the Wagons-Lits company had lost its licence for dining cars in the Balkans. ‘The Yugoslavs and Bulgarians operate their own dining cars, with disastrous digestive results,’ the LIFE reporter noted. He added that the British couriers had had bad experiences on Yugoslav dining cars before, so they brought their own burners and ate canned food with crackers.²⁵

In 1950 the journey from Paris to Istanbul took 80 hours, compared to 56 hours in the period before the Second World War. The LIFE reporter especially blamed Bulgaria for this: ‘They overload the schedule by flagging [stopping] the train at every mudhole.’²⁶ The strict visa policies of Communist Bulgaria also formed a major obstacle for through-travellers to Istanbul. In Turkey the Simplon Orient Express often carried more crew than passengers. That also applied to the Wagons-Lits dining car that was added to the train at the Turkish border, an old teakwood carriage dating from before the First World War. According to the LIFE reporter, it operated at a financial loss but was kept on because of train tradition.

The situation was not much better on the Eastern European branch of the Orient Express, which crossed the Iron Curtain at the border between Austria and Hungary. It also had through-carriages for Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Czech-American writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg provided an atmospheric description of a 1950s Czechoslovak dining car:

Instead of posters in French urging travellers to winter in Monte Carlo and summer in Deauville, there was one crying, in Czech, ‘Step in Step with the USSR for Peace and Democracy!’ and another about an exhibition of Russian books in Prague. Only four or five tables were set. The maître d’hôtel brought us a Czech slivovitz as an apéritif.²⁷

Because it was cold and there was no heating, Wechsberg and his travel companion ordered several more rounds of slivovitz. Finally, a ‘skimpy’ lunch was served, consisting of a watery soup, a tiny slice of meat, a couple of potatoes and an apple.

In 1962 the classic Orient Express to Vienna and Budapest lost its official luxury status, but still remained in service. The Simplon Orient Express ran only between Paris and Zagreb and was called the Simplon Express again, as in its early days. Only an inexpensive replacement train called Direct-Orient continued to reach Istanbul and Athens from Paris. The service and food were of lower quality, and travellers could opt for either a berth in a sleeping compartment or a less expensive seat in a coach car.

Mascarpone Mousse with Marsala

Italian ingredients are featured in this elegant but easy-to-make dessert, adapted from a recipe created by head chef Christian Bodiguel for the dining car on the nostalgic Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

3 large eggs, separated

150 g (¾ cup) caster (superfine) sugar (divided use)

170 g (6 oz) mascarpone cheese

1 tsp vanilla extract

60 ml (¼ cup) sweet Marsala wine

2 tbsp pine nuts, for garnish

Toast the pine nuts in a preheated oven (165°C/325°F) for 8 minutes. Leave to cool.

Beat the egg yolks and 120 g (scant ⅔ cup) of sugar together until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture is pale yellow and thick. Beat in the mascarpone and vanilla. In a separate bowl, use clean beaters to beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add the remaining sugar, beating until the mixture is stiff and glossy but not dry. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the mascarpone mixture.

Divide the mousse evenly among six stemmed parfait glasses or large wine glasses. Cover with cling film (plastic wrap) and refrigerate up to 24 hours before serving. Just before serving, spoon 10 ml (2 tsp) Marsala into each glass and garnish the mousse with the toasted pine nuts.

Serves 6

Pullman carriage no. 4110 (1926), refurbished as a Venice Simplon-Orient-Express dining car.

In 1971 a full menu could still be enjoyed on the Italian section of the line, including gnocchi alla Piemontese, grilled entrecôte of beef, artichokes cooked with fresh parsley and mint in white wine, Italian cheese, and fruit or a sweet dessert. On the same journey, the Yugoslav dining car served Russian salad, vegetable soup, roast veal with mashed potatoes and carrots, tomato salad, Turkish coffee and slivovitz.²⁸ A few years later, however, there were no dining cars left on the trains anymore. The remaining passengers, mainly migrants and hippies, had to buy food at the station stops or bring their own food supplies to last for several days.

The lack of luxury on the Direct-Orient became legendary. In 1975 it made the travel writer Paul Theroux stop wondering why so many authors had used the train as a setting for criminal intrigues, ‘since in most respects the Orient Express really is murder’. He continued:

The Orient Express, once unique for its service, is now unique among trains for its lack of it. The Indian Rajdhani Express serves curries in its dining car, and so does the Pakistani Khyber Mail; the Meshed Express serves Iranian chicken kebab, and the train to Sapporo, in northern Japan, smoked fish and glutinous rice . . .

Starvation takes the fun out of travel, and from this point of view the Orient Express is more inadequate than the poorest Madrassi train, where you exchange stained lunch coupons for a tin tray of vegetables and a quart of rice.²⁹

While aeroplane tickets were getting cheaper, the neglected Direct-Orient was only getting slower and more uncomfortable. Finally, the European railway companies decided to terminate the service. On 19 May 1977 the last Direct-Orient left Paris’s Gare de Lyon. In the extensive press coverage, the last train to Istanbul was labelled as the end of the Orient Express. But the classic route to Vienna and Budapest still remained in service, and nostalgia trains would soon revive the ‘mythical’ Orient Express.

In the same year, James Sherwood, President and CEO of Sea Containers Ltd, acquired two pre-war Wagons-Lits carriages (built in 1929) at an auction in Monte Carlo. He was inspired by the publicity surrounding the supposed end of the Orient Express, and also by popular books and movies such as the 1974 film based on Agatha Christie’s best-selling mystery novel Murder on the Orient Express. Sherwood thought he would be able to revive the name and brand of such a well-known train.³⁰ It took another four years and £11 million ($19 million) to purchase more railway carriages and renovate them before the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE) was launched in 1982. Since then, this luxury ‘rail cruise’ has run between London, Paris and Venice using restored Wagons-Lits carriages and modern locomotives. In the following decades, Sherwood also built a hotel empire – now called Belmond – around the VSOE and began operating other luxury trains in Great Britain, Ireland, Peru and Singapore.

In addition to sleeping cars, the VSOE includes sumptuous Pullman cars from the late 1920s, which hardly ever ran on the original Orient Express. Originally built as parlour cars with an on-board service kitchen, for the Étoile du Nord (Paris–Amsterdam train) and other luxury daytime trains, they were refurbished as dining cars for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

Dining aboard the VSOE became more refined than it had been since the golden ages of the Orient Express before the First World War and during the interwar period. The VSOE inaugural menu of 1982 included expensive ingredients such as caviar, foie gras and lobster.³¹ While Wagons-Lits chefs had been anonymous, the VSOE chefs were presented as stars. The first head chef was Michel Ranvier, and since 1984 that position has been held by Christian Bodiguel. His signature dishes are Charolais beef with truffle caviar and roast salt-marsh lamb served with sage-flavoured polenta. Inspired by the characters in Agatha Christie’s novel, head barman Walter Nisi created the train’s signature cocktail, The Guilty 12, made with twelve ingredients referencing the twelve suspects in the mystery.

Dishes served from the galley of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

Despite its high ticket price, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express became hugely popular, especially among those celebrating honeymoons and anniversaries. It also attracted many celebrities and was featured on several television programmes, which gave a slightly distorted image of the Orient Express to the general public. Once a year the VSOE runs all the way to Istanbul, the original terminus. New destinations within Europe are still being added to the schedule on a regular basis, even cities that were never reached by the ‘real’ Orient Express. These routes also inspire the dishes created by Chef Bodiguel:

Orient Express restaurant at Istanbul’s Sirkeci station, 2013.

Over the years, I’ve curated many dishes using seasonal ingredients and am inspired by the destinations the train travels through over the season. For example, certain spices are often incorporated into my cuisine served on the journey to Istanbul each year such as sumac seeds, cumin and sultanas. During the new route that launched from Venice to Stockholm via Copenhagen in 2013, myself and the team used many Scandinavian berries and flavours in each dish served aboard the train.³²

And in 2016 the Belmond company announced a partnership with Guy Martin, the Michelin-starred chef of Le Grand Véfour restaurant in Paris, to design healthier and lighter menus for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.³³

While nostalgia trains – the VSOE and also the less successful Nostalgie Istanbul Orient Express and Pullman Orient Express – attracted all the attention, the last remnant of the original Orient Express continued in silence, now forgotten by the popular media. As an unremarkable night train, the Orient Express still ran between Paris, Vienna and Budapest for several decades. From 1995 onwards it was part of the EuroNight network, using contemporary sleeping cars. Breakfast was included in the fare, but there was no luxury whatsoever, and in 2001 the itinerary was limited to Paris to Vienna. And a few years later the starting point was moved to Strasbourg, France, near the French–German border.

In December 2009 the EuroNight Orient Express was discontinued. After 126 years, aviation and high-speed trains had put an end to the classic express train. The British journalist Robin McKie witnessed one of its last journeys. Upon boarding at Strasbourg, he was provided with an apple and a bottle of mineral water. At 6 a.m. the passengers were awakened with plastic cups of coffee for arrival in Vienna: ‘A small group of disconsolate wanderers emerged from the Orient Express and trudged off into the grey morning, by now utterly uninterested in the fate of the historic train on which they had just travelled.’³⁴

3   FROM CAVIAR TO MYSTERY MEAT: DINING ACROSS TWO CONTINENTS ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

SHARON HUDGINS

For many travellers, riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway is the trip of a lifetime – a journey narrated in novels, chronicled in travelogues, featured in films and celebrated in songs. For others, the Trans-Siberian has been a railway to exile, to prison or worse. But for many people the railway has been – and still is – merely the most convenient, least expensive and sometimes only way to travel by land from one place to another across the vast distances of Russia.

Constructed between 1891 and 1916, the main Trans-Siberian route runs between Moscow, Russia’s capital, and Vladivostok, the country’s major port on the Pacific Ocean. Originally called the Great Siberian Railway, the rail line was built across southern Siberia between the Ural Mountains and the Russian Far East to link up with existing lines on the European side of Russia. Eventually the entire route between Moscow and Vladivostok came to be known in Russian as the Transsibirskaya Zheleznodorozhnaya Magistral (Trans-Siberian Railway Mainline), or the Trans-Siberian Railway in English. In Moscow the Trans-Siberian line connects with trains running between the capital and Russia’s second-largest city, St Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland – making it possible for passengers to travel the entire length of Russia by rail, a distance of nearly 10,000 km (6,000 mi.) across two continents, Europe and Asia.

When the Trans-Siberian line was completed in 1916, it was the longest railway in the world and one of the greatest engineering achievements of its time. Eventually it developed into a complex railway system comprising thousands of kilometres of tracks, including spurs, trunk lines and branch lines connecting to the intercontinental mainline, providing both freight and passenger services.

Between 1897 and 1903, a somewhat shorter, less costly Russian line was also built to the Pacific coast, leaving the main Trans-Siberian tracks near Chita, in the Transbaikal region of eastern Russia, then crossing northern China via Harbin, where it branched northward to Vladivostok and southward to Port Arthur and Peking (Beijing). Initially named the Chinese Eastern Railway, it later became known as the Trans-Manchurian Line. Other major lines that connect with the Trans-Siberian tracks are the more northerly Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) from eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast of the Russian Far East; the Amur-Yakutsk Mainline (still under construction) to Russia’s far north; the Trans-Mongolian Line between Russia and Mongolia, connecting with the Chinese railway system to Beijing; and the Turkestan-Siberian Line (Turk-Sib) between Russia and Kazakhstan.

Monument marking the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Vladivostok, 9,288 km (5,771 mi.) from Moscow.

Today the Trans-Siberian is still the longest continuous passenger railway on the globe. But, contrary to popular belief, there was never a single Russian train on that line named the Trans-Siberian Express. Although marketed in the West as the ‘Trans-Siberian Express’, it was actually a long-distance rail service with several passenger express trains crossing the entire route between Moscow and Vladivostok. By the 1930s three Trans-Siberian trains left both of those stations on alternate days each week, travelling in opposite directions – a schedule still in place today. In Russia, trains identified as ‘Number 1’ depart from Vladivostok and as ‘Number 2’ from Moscow – and all the trains with those two numbers are called Rossiya (Russia). In addition, other passenger trains with names such as Sibir’, Yenesei, Baikal and Tatarstan have plied part of the Trans-Siberian route, running only between certain major cities, such as Irkutsk and Vladivostok or Moscow and Kazan.

Commemorative postage stamp issued in 2002 for the 100th anniversary (in 2003) of the completion of the major portion of the Trans-Siberian route.

From the beginning, the Russian railway system has been a government-owned enterprise, although sometimes with private companies as investors or concessionaires. Depending on the time period – Tsarist, Soviet, post-Soviet – food service in the dining cars and railway station restaurants (‘buffets’) was provided by the government or by concessionaires and franchisees. And from the start, freelance vendors on the station platforms have also sold a range of local and regional foods to passengers all along the route.

During the initial phase of construction in the 1890s, when several sections of the tracks were not yet connected, there was passenger service on only some parts of the line and no dining cars on the trains. Travellers had to bring their own food in picnic baskets or eat at railway station buffets (usually at larger stations only), or buy home-grown, home-prepared foods from vendors on the station platforms.

When the Trans-Siberian section between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk opened to passenger trains in August 1898, an English traveller, Arnot Reid, reported that ‘Excellent refreshment rooms and buffets are placed at convenient intervals, while for the poorer passengers the country people have been allowed to establish stalls beside the stations, where coarse black bread, meat, cooked chickens, and other such provisions are sold at cheap rates.’¹

Platform vendors selling plates of food to passengers along the Trans-Siberian route in 1900.

Travelling in the 1890s, the Englishman Robert L. Jefferson described one of those early railway station buffets very vividly:

In we squeeze, and find ourselves in a long, white-washed apartment, heated to a suffocating degree. Down the centre of the apartment runs a long table covered with glasses, plate, and cutlery. Over on one side is a long bar, covered with smaller glasses and large bottles, mostly containing vodki, as well as at least half a hundred dishes of the hors d’oeuvre style – sardines, bits of sausage, sprats, caviare, sliced cucumber, pickled mushrooms, artful dabs of cheese, raw radishes, smoked herring, and such like . . . [and] a kitchen-like arrangement in the corner where steams a heterogeneous mass of cutlets and Russian’ beef-steaks . . . Vodki is the lodestone of the arrived passengers. Each man gulps down a small glass of the fiery fluid, seizes a piece of fish, or sausage, or cheese, or whatever he may fancy or may be handy, and subsides to the big table, chewing vigorously. Energetic waiters pounce upon him, lay before him a big plate of the universal ‘stche’, or cabbage soup, over which our Russian hangs his head and commences ladling away, apparently oblivious to its boiling heat or the feelings of people around him. The tables fill up. Great slabs of brown meat, floating in fat, are distributed with rapidity, and which with equal rapidity are demolished.²

A Russian railway station restaurant in 1901.

John W. Bookwalter, an American industrialist who travelled through part of Siberia in 1898, noted that at station restaurants ‘You can get soup, as fine a beefsteak as you ever ate, a splendid roast chicken whole, cooked in Russian style, most toothsome and juicy, potatoes and other vegetables, a bottle of beer, splendid and brewed in this country, for one ruble – about fifty cents.’³

In 1900, passenger service began on a continuous route between Moscow and Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia, approximately the halfway point on the line. At the time, it took eight days to travel from Moscow to Irkutsk – and considerably longer to travel the entire route between Moscow and the Pacific Ocean, since sections of the train line were not yet completed in the Russian Far East. Part of the journey between Irkutsk and Vladivostok had to be made on an icebreaker-train ferry across Lake Baikal and on paddle steamers along the Shilka and Amur rivers, or on sleighs over the ‘ice roads’ of rivers frozen in winter. Today, express trains between Moscow and Vladivostok traverse the entire route in six to seven days.

In the summer of 1900, Reverend Francis E. Clark travelled westward from Vladivostok to Moscow by rail and river, a journey that took 38 days because of unexpected delays along the route. His first meal on the train was in one of the earliest Trans-Siberian dining cars, on the Ussuri Line between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk:

A long table down the middle, at which perhaps twenty people can sit at one time, and a bar at one end, at which all kinds of light and strong drinks are served, and toothsome delicacies dear to the Russian heart, like caviare, sardines, and other little fishes . . . At the long table table d’hôte meals are served, consisting of three or four courses, and one can also order what he chooses at a fixed price . . . though not luxurious . . . [the meals] are quite sufficient for the average traveller. To be sure, one must get used to the greasy Siberian soup and to the chunks of tough stewed meat, which may be beef, mutton, or pork, one is never certain which.⁴

Solyanka (Spicy Meat Soup)

This rich, pungent soup is often served in railway station buffets and in dining cars on the trains. A good way to use leftover cooked meats, solyanka always contains salty ingredients such as pickled cucumbers, olives and capers, and sometimes also sauerkraut and marinated mushrooms.

115 g (4 oz) bacon, diced

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 medium onions, finely chopped

2 large garlic cloves, minced

1 tbsp sweet (mild) paprika

60 ml (¼ cup) tomato purée (paste)

340 g (12 oz) cooked sausages (such as frankfurters, bockwurst, knackwurst), cut crosswise into rounds 6 mm (¼ in.) thick

115 g (4 oz) cooked ham, cut into thin strips

4 small or 2 medium sour dill pickles, deseeded and cut into thin strips 5 cm (2 in.) long

1.75 l (7 cups) beef stock

1 bay leaf

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

½ tsp salt

100 g (½ cup) pitted whole black or green olives

1 tbsp pickled capers

Fresh lemon slices, for garnish

Sour cream, for garnish

Heat the bacon and the oil together in a large soup pot over medium heat to melt some of the bacon fat. Increase the heat to medium-high, add the onions and sauté until golden. Reduce heat to low, stir in the garlic and paprika, and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Quickly stir in the tomato purée (tomato paste). Add the meats, pickles, stock, bay leaf, pepper and salt. Bring the soup to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat and simmer, partially covered, for 10 minutes. Add the olives and capers and simmer for 5 minutes more. Serve hot, each bowl garnished with two thin slices of lemon and a large dollop of sour cream.

Serves 6

Poster by Rafael de Ochoa y Madrazo and Lemercier (printer) advertising the Trans-Siberian Railroad exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian government published a Guide to the Great Siberian Railway, a 520-page book with complete editions in English, German, French and Russian, designed to attract passengers to the new railway line. Illustrated with more than 350 photographs and drawings, it provided detailed information about the history, geography, agriculture, industry, economy, ethnic groups, cities, cultural landmarks, railway stations and rolling stock of the entire Trans-Siberian route between Moscow and Vladivostok at that time.

The Russian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, 1900.

To promote the Moscow to Beijing route that was being constructed as a branch of the main Trans-Siberian line, four luxury train carriages were displayed in the Pavilion of Asian Russia and Siberia at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 – passenger cars that were to be operated on the Russian railway line by the Belgian Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens (similar to the Pullman railroad car company in the United States). These elegant railway cars included two dining cars where visitors to the Exposition could dine on foods supposedly featured on the menu for the train trip.

The Wagons-Lits wing of the Russian pavilion also housed two ‘station restaurants’, one ‘Russian’ and one ‘Chinese’, representing the two ends of the rail line, Moscow and Peking. These restaurants offered multi-course meals of French, Russian or Chinese dishes – but according to some contemporary accounts, the meals served inside the railway dining cars at the Exposition were much simpler, consisting of only a soup and main course, followed by fruit and coffee.⁵

The luxury carriages, including the dining cars, were a stationary display on a section of steel railway track inside the pavilion. To create the illusion of a moving railway journey across Russia to China, the Wagons-Lits company commissioned two French theatrical scene painters to produce a large panorama of the landscapes and landmarks along the route. This scrolling canvas panorama was installed outside the railway cars’ windows, along with separate sections of cut-out figures and other scenery moving at different speeds in the foreground. The spectacle gave visitors inside the carriages the illusion that the train was rolling across the steppes of Russia, past towns with log houses and onion-dome churches, through forests and mountains, and finally into the exotic land of China. Diners in the restaurant cars could sip wine and enjoy a meal while imagining making that real journey themselves in the near future. The whole experience was cleverly designed to advertise the thrill of a new railway trip across two continents.⁶

But reality did not always live up to the publicity. In the early 1900s, the Wagons-Lits company did operate a couple of so-called ‘International’ trains in Russia, which were marketed in Europe as a ‘Trans-Siberian Express’ service. Designed to attract foreign passengers on the Trans-Siberian route, those trains were more luxurious than standard Russian trains of the time. But since the company was not certain that the Trans-Siberian enterprise would be profitable, it initially did not run its best cars on the line. An American who crossed Siberia several times on those International trains was still favourably impressed: ‘The food in the dining car was superb – an abundance of game, unlimited caviar which came from Lake Baikal en route, thick Siberian cream, rich sauces, brandy, good cigars.’⁷

The Russians also operated their own upmarket ‘State Express’ trains on the new Trans-Siberian line. Foreign travellers’ accounts of those Russian luxury trains varied considerably. Some compared them favourably to the Belgian-run ‘International’ trains, whereas others found them to be inferior to their counterparts in the United States and Europe. Most Russians, as well as some foreigners, rode the regular, slower, less expensive, local and long-distance trains on the Trans-Siberian route, which had lower standards of comfort, cleanliness and food service.

In 1901 E. Burton Holmes, an American travel writer and photographer, crossed Russia on one of those Russian ‘State Express’ trains. Holmes wrote that the dining car was ‘a stuffy little affair’ where the meals were ‘badly served, but surprisingly well-cooked and appetizing: good bread, excellent veal, and hearty soups, sometimes frappés with a clinking cake of ice floating on their chill depths, sometimes seething hot, with a hunk of steaming beef rising from them like a volcanic island’.⁸

The British MP Henry Norman, who also travelled on a Russian State Express train in 1901, noted that ‘The dining car will not bear a moment’s comparison with that of the Orient Express or the Riviera Express’ and complained that ‘If the dining car were properly arranged, it would hold all the passengers. As it is, one has to intrigue and struggle for a table . . . We waited interminable times for our meals.’⁹ Norman had a better opinion of the station restaurants on the Trans-Siberian route, especially the one at Omsk:

You pass into the usual hall, which is waiting-room and restaurant combined; well set tables . . . and tall crystal candelabra veiled in red muslin. At one side is the tea-counter, its brass samovar purring softly; at another a display of hot dishes to tempt the hungry, with a chef of smiling face and much-starched linen waving his knife above the baked meats. The proffered meal was so attractive that we took it here instead of in the restaurant-car.¹⁰

But an American traveller in the early 1900s was less approving, complaining about a station buffet meal at Chita, in southeastern Siberia: ‘We reach Chita at 2 p.m., and have a wretched luncheon at the buffet, bad soup and steak that never was part of any beef. I think it was dog.’¹¹

Passengers eating foods sold by vendors at a stop on the Trans-Siberian line, 1901.

Foreign travellers were more likely than Russians to eat in the station restaurants and dining cars, because foreigners usually had more money. Many Russians even preferred their own foods brought from home or purchased from platform vendors, as the foods served in the dining cars could be limited in variety, sometimes poor in quality and preparation, and more expensive than other options.

Travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1901, the Scottish travel writer John Foster Fraser noted that locals did a good business on the platforms, selling:

very hot dumplings with hashed meat and seasonings inside . . . huge loaves of new made bread, bottles of beer, pats of excellent butter, pails of milk, apples and grapes and fifty other things. Passengers loaded themselves with provender at the stall, and ate picnic fashion in the carriages until the next station was reached. There it began all over again.¹²

In the early twentieth century, Tsar Nicholas II and his family travelled in their own elegantly furnished railway carriages, with their own private dining car and lounge car. But the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Russian Civil War that followed put an end to the era of luxury train travel in Russia. In the chaotic period between the start of the First World War in 1914 and end of the Civil War in 1922, more than 60 per cent of the railway network, 80 per cent of the carriages and 90 per cent of the locomotives were destroyed. Traffic volume on the Russian railway system did not reach its pre-war level again until 1928.¹³

After the Revolution, the Bolshevik government confiscated the Belgian Wagons-Lits company’s railway cars in Russia, including the dining cars. But in rebuilding the damaged railway system, the new Soviet government focused primarily on the military and industrial uses of the railway, at the expense of ‘bourgeois’ passenger service, including food service. However, during the Soviet era the major Communist Party figures and top government officials had their own private railway cars, which were considerably better than those for ordinary travellers. High Soviet officials even rode on private trains with the best accommodations and food service in the country – mimicking their tsarist predecessors and pre-dating the same practices by important government officials in the Russian Federation today.

Salat Oliv’ye (Russian Potato Salad)

Russian potato salad is a popular starter served at home and in restaurants, railway dining cars and cafeterias all over the country. Vendors along the Trans-Siberian tracks also sell it to passengers on the trains. The Golden Eagle train chefs make it with smoked duck, which adds a special flavour.

1.1 kg (2½ lbs) firm boiling potatoes, peeled and cut into 12-mm (½-in.) cubes

1 tsp salt (for the cooking water)

180 ml (¾ cup) full-fat mayonnaise

180 ml (¾ cup) sour cream (containing no additives)

2 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp lemon juice

1½ tsp salt

250 g (1 cup/9 oz) diced cooked chicken, beef, ham or duck, diced in 6- to 12-mm (¼- to ½-in.) cubes

2 medium to large carrots, peeled, cooked and cut into 6-mm (¼-in.) cubes

1 medium onion, finely chopped

2 medium dill pickles, cut into 6-mm (¼-in.) cubes

135 g (1 cup) cooked green peas (preferably frozen peas, lightly cooked but not mushy)

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Put the potatoes in a large pot, cover with cold water, add 1 tsp salt and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until tender. Drain and cool in a colander.

Make the dressing by whisking together the mayonnaise, sour cream, olive oil, lemon juice and salt until well combined. (The dressing will taste too salty at this point, but when combined with the potatoes and other ingredients the saltiness will be diluted.)

Gently toss the cooled potatoes, chopped meat, carrots, onion and pickles together in a large bowl. Add the peas and hard-boiled eggs, tossing again gently to keep the peas from being mashed. Pour the dressing over the salad ingredients and mix gently with a wooden spoon. Try not to mash the vegetables – they should retain their shape. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours for the flavours to meld.

Serves 6 to 8

Crossing Siberia by train in 1926, Junius B. Wood, European correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, observed that the previously well-maintained passenger cars were now very dilapidated, with cracked windows and torn carpets. The dining car food was also bad:

At 3:30 a plate of soup appeared – greasy hot water poured over cold pieces of fish which had been cooked earlier in bulk. The next course was pre-cooked cauliflower warmed with a sauce of unknown texture. Roast veal, cooked weeks earlier and now dry and hard, smothered in warm brown gravy, without vegetables, was the main course. A compote of fruit completed the hurried meal. The price was 1.75 rubles. Drinking water, butter, or a napkin cost extra.¹⁴

During this period, travellers continued the practice of buying food from private vendors on the station platforms. Sven Hedin, a Swede who crossed China and Russia by train in the early 1920s, wrote that

Buffets had been set up on the platforms of all the major stations, booths that were either open or covered with sackcloth or a few planks of wood. Farmers, both women and men, warmly wrapped up in furs, sold very fatty milk in bottles, cheese, butter, fresh bread, roasted duck, goose and partridge, eggs, and other assorted victuals. Several of the fellow travelers in my coach preferred the goods on offer at these booths to those available in the dining car.¹⁵

In the 1930s a few railway passenger carriages were better than most, especially those that the Soviet state travel agency, Intourist, reserved for foreign tourists, who were required to pay their fares in hard currency, much needed by the Soviet Union. A 1936 Intourist booklet published in English to attract American passengers stated that ‘All Trans-Siberian Express trains carry dining cars’ and that meals must be paid for in advance, at the time the railway ticket is bought. The total price per day for all three meals – breakfast, lunch, supper – was either $2.35 or $3.10, depending on the category of ticket purchased.

In 1937 two American women travelled together from Moscow to Peking on the Trans-Manchurian Line, which branches off from the main Trans-Siberian tracks. One of them described the dining car food very positively (in contrast to the reports of other foreign travellers on Soviet trains in the 1930s):

Breakfast in the dining car was a real treat – one of the best ham omelettes ever, with toast and a fruit compote . . . There was always ‘chai’ (tea) at every meal, served with lemon . . . For lunch we chose the cabbage soup – very good – and a turkey, onion, cucumber, and tomato salad with sour cream dressing. At another time we had breaded mutton chops for lunch, which were also very good. For dinner the first night we ordered half a fried chicken, and the next night . . . ‘biffsteak’. That was so delicious that we ordered it every night after that.¹⁶

Soviet-era locomotive on display at the West Siberian Railway History Museum in Novosibirsk, Russian Federation, 2008.

But another American who rode on the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Manchurian routes from Moscow to Peking in 1935 remembered the dining car as ‘dismal’ and recalled surviving the trip on vodka and apples purchased from the vendors on the station platforms.¹⁷

In the mid-twentieth century the Second World War greatly disrupted much of the civilian passenger rail service in the Soviet Union. Enemy bombers, invading troops and saboteurs destroyed tracks and rolling stock, with 50 per cent of the locomotives and 40 per cent of the carriages lost during the war. Many of the surviving trains were used for transporting soldiers, food and military supplies to the western front, as well as moving entire factories eastward beyond the Ural Mountains into Siberia, to protect them from attack.¹⁸ One can also assume that food service, if any, on the trains was poor, because of food shortages in Russia during the war.

Among the trains on display at the West Siberian Railway History Museum near Novosibirsk is a Second World War Russian hospital train, with a doctor’s office, a surgery (operating room) and a galley (kitchen car) where meals were cooked for the wounded soldiers on the train. The galley has four large coal-fired, steam-heated, sturdy metal vats bolted to the floor, each about 90 cm (3 ft) wide and 1.2 m (4 ft) tall with heavy lids attached, like giant pressure cookers, for making soups, stews and porridges. The kitchen includes a small preparation area, a sink and a large black cast-iron cooking stove, much like an early AGA. It is a very poignant exhibit of a kitchen for wounded soldiers during that devastating war.

Soviet poster promoting a socialist attitude towards the steam locomotive and the rapid fulfilment of work norms, by Dmitri Anatolyevich Bulanov, 1931.

Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, dining cars on most Soviet trains generally had a bad reputation. They seated 48 people at twelve tables or booths (six on each side of a centre aisle), with a tiny galley located at one end staffed by a cook, one or two waitresses and a busboy, who also washed the dishes. But few people chose to eat in the dining cars, because the food was usually poor, the staff were surly and the prices were relatively high for the average Russian. Most travellers brought their own food to the train, or bought food from vendors on the station platforms along the way – as travellers had done ever since passenger service began on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Interior of the galley (kitchen car) of a Second World War Russian hospital train at the West Siberian Railway History Museum in Novosibirsk, Russian Federation.

Standard dining-car menus during the post-Second World War period were up to ten pages long and offered a wide range of dishes – appetizers, soups, main dishes, side dishes and desserts – although usually only two or three of the listed dishes were actually available on the train. Meals commonly consisted of a piece of unspecified meat, often dubbed ‘mystery meat’ by the passengers, accompanied by potatoes or another starch (rice, pasta), maybe a sauerkraut salad and perhaps canned peas. In addition, the dining-car staff often ran a lucrative (and illegal) side business selling the train’s food supplies to locals at the stations where the train stopped; hence less food was left for serving in the dining car.

The British writer Eric Newby chronicled his 1977 Trans-Siberian journey across Russia in a popular travel book, The Big Red Train Ride. Shortly after he boarded the train in Moscow, a woman working in the galley brought to his cabin ‘cream in bottles, borsch, rice, and meat the colour of the weather outside swimming in a sort of greasy bouillon, all of which she carried in nestling aluminium containers’.¹⁹ Having heard from previous travellers that the food on Russian trains was both poor in quality and high in price, Newby had brought several boxes of his own food supplies with him. His expectations of Russian railway cuisine were confirmed on his first foray to the dining car: ‘The food was as unappetizing as that being hawked up and down the train, and the kitchen was equally so . . . There was no beer or vodka on board, and the only wines on offer were Russian champagne . . . and what appeared to be some sort of dessert wine of a sinister brown colour.’²⁰

Despite the Soviet Union’s economic decline in the late 1980s, the railway system reached its peak year of passenger travel in 1988, transporting nearly 4.4 million travellers that year. Three years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union greatly affected all segments of the economy, including the state-owned railway network, which was thrown into disarray by the break-up of the Soviet rail system into separate segments within the newly established countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1990s, the Russian railway system continued to deteriorate due to lack of funds for investment in infrastructure, while passenger fares were kept low through subsidies from the more profitable freight sector.²¹

My own experiences on Trans-Siberian trains in the mid-1990s were similar to those of previous travellers because dining on Russian trains had changed very little since the recent Soviet era. Travelling from Vladivostok to Irkutsk in January 1994, I ate in a dining car that looked like an American roadside diner from the 1950s, with fake wood panelling, chrome fixtures, fluorescent lighting and two rows of red leatherette booths with white Formica-topped tables. At the furthest end of the car was a cramped, dimly lighted kitchen. A table near the kitchen displayed cans of Miller Draft beer and bottles of Russian champagne, Italian fizzy white wine, Rasputin vodka and Fiesta orange soda for sale.

There was no menu. Long after the waitress had told me that goulash was the only meal available that evening, she returned to my table with several slices of stale bread and a plate of ‘goulash’, chunks of tough meat smothered with a tasteless, pasty brown gravy, accompanied by a few brownish noodles, half a large pickled tomato, and a surprisingly good cabbage and carrot salad garnished with canned green peas. All the customers shared the dining car’s single, faceted-glass salt shaker (missing its lid) and the substitute for a pepper shaker, an old canning jar half-full of very hot paprika, which I sprinkled liberally over the bland meat. When the train stopped at a station, the cook busied herself selling butter, oranges, chocolate and cookies to local Siberians who boarded the dining car to buy food supplies.²²

Since dining-car fare was so limited (and uninteresting), my husband and I always carried food with us on Trans-Siberian train trips: cheese, bread, boiled eggs, smoked sausages, canned fish, packages of ramen noodles. At the end of each sleeping car there was a big coal-fired water boiler, which the conductress used for making hot tea for the passengers and which we tapped for hot water to rehydrate bowls of instant noodles in our cabin.

Platform vendor with homemade food brought to the station in a pram, Trans-Siberian route, 1994.

We also bought food from vendors at the stations. Some stations had official kiosks where people were licensed to sell certain kinds of foods, like alcohol and dairy products. At most stations there were also individual freelance sellers who cooked food at home and brought it to the station on sleds or in baby carriages. As our train rolled to a stop, the vendors quickly unpacked their wares and set up an instant outdoor buffet on the ground: hot pirozhki (little savoury pies filled with meat, potatoes, cabbage or mushrooms), sweet pastries and yeast buns, jars of fruit preserves, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, roasted potatoes, marinated mushrooms, salmon caviar, fresh white curd cheese (farmers’ cheese), sour cream, sauerkraut salads, salted sunflower seeds and Siberian pine nuts, gingerbread biscuits (cookies), and smoked or salted fish – all wrapped in newspapers or served in paper cones made from pages torn out of books and magazines. Buying foods from local vendors was a good way to sample regional specialities along the route, and regular travellers on the Trans-Siberian trains knew which kiosks, or which private vendors, had the best foods for sale at each station.

Travel on Russian railways improved noticeably in the twenty-first century. During the first decade, the rising price of oil on the international market brought more revenue to the Russian government, which began investing in railway infrastructure. Tracks and roadbeds were repaired, some equipment was upgraded and new lines were built. Many of the dilapidated old stations were cleaned up and repainted, their ornate exteriors and elegant pre-First World War interiors restored to their former glory. New station buffets, food shops and platform kiosks were opened. Between 2006 and 2008 I crossed Russia by train five times from Vladivostok to Moscow and saw how much the food sold along the route had changed since my first trips in the mid-1990s. Major stations such as Novosibirsk now had glitzy delicatessens selling well-prepared foods to take away or eat on site. And some of the larger stations also housed an attractive restaurant, such as the beautifully restored station restaurant in Vladivostok, originally constructed in 1911.

Garlic Cheese

This garlic-flavoured cheese mixture is popular in many parts of Russia. Local cooks in Siberian villages make zakuski (starters) of garlic cheese mounded on thick slices of fresh home-grown tomatoes. Chefs on the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express use it for stuffing ripe red tomatoes as a starter for summer meals on the train.

225 g (½ lb) medium-sharp white Cheddar, finely shredded

225 g (½ lb) Emmental, finely shredded

60 ml (¼ cup) sour cream (containing no additives)

60 ml (¼ cup) full-fat mayonnaise

8 to 10 large garlic cloves, put through a garlic press

½ tsp ground cayenne pepper or hot paprika (optional)

¼ tsp salt

Fresh chives, snipped, or finely chopped spring onion tops or chopped wild garlic leaves, for garnish (optional)

Toss the shredded cheeses together by hand in a large bowl. Mix together the sour cream, mayonnaise, garlic, cayenne pepper or paprika, and salt in a small bowl. Add to the cheese, stirring gently to mix well. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours (preferably overnight) for the flavours to meld.

Let the cheese come to room temperature before serving. Use as a stuffing for small firm, ripe tomatoes or cherry tomatoes, as a spread for dark bread or as a topping for baked potatoes. Garnish with chopped fresh chives, spring onion tops or wild garlic leaves if desired.

Makes approximately 750 ml (3 cups)

Trans-Siberian tour group eating at the newly restored, early 20th-century station restaurant in Vladivostok, 2008.

The dining cars on Russian trains are now run as private franchises, instead of being operated entirely by the government as they were during much of the twentieth century – which also means that the food, the service and the prices vary widely depending on the rail line and the franchisee. Some dining cars sell no cooked food at all, just packaged foods and drinks. Others offer cooked food of various quality and prices. Although many of the dining cars have upgraded decor, some twenty-first-century travellers have reported eating in dining cars that were just as dirty, dingy and smoky as those in the 1970s, with equally limited menus and surly staff.

With the leasing of franchises to private food service providers, dining-car prices have risen considerably in the twenty-first century. In 2004 a traveller could easily spend $10 to $12 on a three-course meal with wine or beer in a dining car – a lot of money for Russians, who earned an average of only $200 a month at that time. In 2006 another dining car offered a four-course, fixed-price daily menu at $25 for a cold appetizer of sturgeon in aspic, cabbage soup, a bowl of Siberian meat-filled dumplings, and ice cream for dessert. Not surprisingly, it was mainly foreigners and business people who could afford to eat meals at that price.

In 2012 a report described the food on Russian trains as ‘generally adequate, though the menus are limited . . . typically ham and fried eggs for breakfast, schnitzel and potatoes for lunch or dinner, with soups and salads for starters. Beer, Russian champagne, vodka, chocolates and snacks are sold at the bar.’²³ In the summer of 2014 a ten-page Russian-English menu from the dining car on the Russian segment of a Moscow to Beijing journey listed thirteen separate food categories, from starters to desserts, with the bill for a four-course meal ranging from about $20 to $43, not including drinks, depending on whether it was composed of the least expensive or most costly items on the menu. But the website on which this menu was posted warned, ‘Don’t expect everything on the menu to be available, they have usually run out of this or that, or have just a selection of the things on the menu.’²⁴

On the lines that branch off the main Trans-Siberian tracks into Mongolia and China, Russian dining cars serve Russian food on the Russian segment of the route. When the trains cross into those other countries, a different dining car (Mongolian or Chinese) replaces the Russian one, and the system is reversed when the trains enter Russia from Mongolia and China. Many contemporary travellers have reported that meals on the Mongolian and Chinese dining cars are superior to those served on the Russian part of the journey.

Sous-chef with potatoes in the vestibule of a Trans-Siberian dining car, 2006.

Golden Eagle Chicken Salad

Recipe from a chef on the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express, where this chicken salad starter was always popular with guests in the dining car.

100 g (¾ cup) chopped white onions

100 g (¾ cup) frozen green peas

320 ml (⅓ cups) mayonnaise

1 tbsp lemon juice

900 g (2 lb) boneless, skinless, cooked chicken breasts, diced into small cubes

125 g (1¾ cup) peeled and deseeded cucumber, diced into 6-mm (¼-in.) pieces

60 g (½ cup) coarsely chopped toasted walnuts

Salt

Whole lettuce leaves, for garnish

Toasted walnut halves, for garnish

Blanch the chopped onions in boiling water for 3 minutes. Drain thoroughly in a colander, then squeeze out as much liquid as possible.

Pour boiling water over the frozen peas in a heatproof bowl, let sit for 3 minutes, then drain thoroughly.

Whisk together the mayonnaise and lemon juice. Combine the chicken, onions, peas, cucumbers and chopped walnuts in a large bowl, tossing them together to mix thoroughly. Add the mayonnaise and mix gently until well combined. Taste and add salt as needed. Serve on whole lettuce leaves as a cold starter, garnished with toasted walnut halves.

Serves 8 to 10

It is still customary for many passengers to bring their own food for the journey, whether homemade or shop-bought: cheese, sausages, ham, roast chicken, canned fish, small savoury pies, boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, bread, chocolate bars, biscuits (cookies), fresh fruit, bottled fruit juices and vodka. Some of the larger stations also have small shops where travellers can buy everything from fancy boxes of confectionery to fresh breads and pastries, hamburgers and rotisserie chickens, sausages and cheeses. And most stations, even the small ones, have at least a kiosk or two where travellers can buy vodka, beer, cigarettes and packaged snack foods.

The long tradition of platform vendors continues, too. Travelling from Beijing to Moscow at the turn of the twenty-first century, John Lee described the culinary scene on station platforms along the Russian segment of the route:

Chocolate, ice cream and dark Russian beer are easy to find, but the best food comes from the droves of gnomish old babuskhas who descend on the train as it enters a station. Dressed in head scarves and thick woolen coats, most have red faces, bright blue eyes and strong, scarred hands. Many sell stews and boiled vegetables, cooked in their kitchen and warmed on their car engines for the trip to the station. Others walk the platforms with pale cheeses, curled brown sausages, smoked fish and leather-skinned rye breads. My favorite breakfast of the journey turns up in Omsk: a plastic bag of warm potatoes and onions drowned in butter and herbs.²⁵

Vendors selling food on the platform of a Trans-Siberian station, 2009.

But after post-Soviet Russia began importing more foods from abroad, many vendors on station platforms began selling fewer homemade regional specialities and instead more commercially processed products, like Hungarian sausages, packaged German cakes and biscuits (cookies), Chinese candies and Korean ‘Choco Pies’.

A new development after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that foreign investors were allowed to operate private charter trains on Russian territory, reviving the standards (and nostalgia) of pre-Revolutionary luxury train travel there. Four privately owned charter train companies, with full-service dining cars, now offer tours on the Trans-Siberian tracks. These trains are much more expensive to ride than standard Russian Railways trains, with prices in 2014 ranging from $4,950 per person (second class) on a twelve-day tour between Moscow and Irkutsk, to $33,995 per person (deluxe suite) for a fifteen-day journey between Moscow and Vladivostok. Those prices include all meals on and off the train, most drinks, the group’s day tours off the train with professional guides, and gratuities for the staff.

From 2006 to 2008 I travelled across Russia five times on the private chartered luxury trains run by GW Travel Ltd (now named Golden Eagle Luxury Trains Ltd, headquartered in England), working as a lecturer on tours organized by National Geographic Expeditions. Founded in 1988, GW Travel began operating private chartered train tours in European Russia in 1992 and on the Trans-Siberian route in 1996. Initially the trains comprised several old Soviet/Russian VIP cars, including dining cars, which the company leased from the Russian Federation government. These were higher-standard private cars that had previously been reserved only for top government and Communist Party officials and not used on regular trains. Some of the train carriages even dated back to 1914.²⁶ Travellers on those refurbished luxury railway cars were probably unaware they that were drinking champagne and eating caviar in the same carriages formerly used by some of Russia’s most notorious political figures of the twentieth century.

In 2007, the British company inaugurated the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express, an entirely new, $25-million train on the route between Moscow and Vladivostok – the first privately owned train in Russia on which each sleeping compartment has its own toilet and shower. The new train includes two elegantly decorated dining cars, which seat 64 people each, as well as a comfortable lounge car where classical music is provided by a pianist or guitarist. The tables in the dining cars can also be folded up against the windows to convert the space into a lecture hall or film theatre. The table d’hôte meals served in both dining cars are the same, and passengers can choose to eat in either dining car at the specified meal times.

The Golden Eagle train also includes a separate modern kitchen car and a food service staff of 21 people. In addition to preparing all the meals for 75 to 100 passengers, the chefs cook two meals a day for approximately fifty staff members on the train. One of the Golden Eagle chefs, a ‘Level 5’ master chef who has been cooking on trains for thirty years – including luxury trains in Germany, Switzerland and France – said that working on this private train in Russia was much more challenging than on Western European trains and required more skill: ‘Everything on European trains is pre-cooked. You just open the package and re-heat it. That’s not really cooking. On this train, everything is fresh. All the cooking is done from scratch. Here we do everything ourselves, from peeling potatoes to plating the food.’²⁷

One of the dining cars on the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

The Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

The breakfast buffet includes a selection of ham, salami and cheese, salmon caviar, fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables, fruit juices, hot and cold cereals, toast and jams, fresh savoury and sweet pastries, eggs cooked to order, yoghurt, kefir, coffee, tea, and daily specials such as Russian kasha (porridge of buckwheat, millet, rice or semolina), bliny (yeast-raised buckwheat pancakes) stuffed with tvorog (fresh curd cheese), ol’adiy (smaller, thicker pancakes) with jam or sour cream, hash brown potatoes, and tvorozhniki (fried curd cheese patties) garnished with sour cream.

Chef Il’khomudin Kamolov in the galley (kitchen car) of the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

Lunch and dinner are three-course meals (sometimes four courses) with a choice of two appetizers and occasionally also a soup, two main dishes (one of which is always vegetarian), and one or sometimes two desserts, accompanied by wine, beer, bottled water, soft drinks, coffee or tea. Traditional Russian starters (appetizers), soups and main dishes are often among the selections offered on the menu, along with Russian vodka and wines from around the world. Breads and pastries are baked daily, and special cakes can be ordered to celebrate the passengers’ birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other personal milestones that occur during the trip. Except for the breakfast buffet items, the chefs never serve the same dish twice for the entire twelve days aboard the train.²⁸ And at the end of the tour, the passengers receive a complete set of menus for all the meals eaten on board.

A century after the original Trans-Siberian line was completed, many aspects of railway dining along the route remain remarkably similar to those in the past, despite major social, political and economic changes in Russia over that time. One hundred years ago, railway station restaurants and dining cars catered to travellers who could afford to eat in them – as they do today. In the past, dining-car menus often promised more than they could deliver – as they still do today. A century ago, travellers carried food from home or bought food from vendors on the station platforms, which they often shared with other passengers on the train – as they continue doing today. Luxury train service, with higher standards of dining, was provided by the Russian government and a foreign company (the Belgian Wagons-Lits company) – as it is today by other private companies operating in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II had his own private railway cars with elegantly appointed accommodations – and later, Soviet government and Communist Party VIPS had special high-quality train carriages, including dining cars, reserved for their exclusive use. Today special carriages (and even entire trains) for senior government officials still run on Russian Railways’ tracks. The French epigram ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’ certainly applies to the history of dining on Russia’s railways, from the earliest days to the present.

Siberian pel’meni (stuffed dumplings), one of the regional specialities served in the dining cars on the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

Colourful starter served aboard the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express.

In 1926 at the Harvey House in Hutchinson, Kansas, the famous, primly dressed ‘Harvey Girls’ stand ready to serve both locals and passengers on the Santa Fe trains.

4   ALL ABOARD: CLASSIC AMERICAN CUISINE ON THE SANTA FE SUPER CHIEF

KARL ZIMMERMANN

In the panoply of famous trains, the Super Chief ranks with the very best: the 20th Century Limited, the Orient Express and their peers. Operated by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway (popularly known as just the Santa Fe), the Super Chief travelled the 3,576 km (2,222 mi.) between Chicago and Los Angeles in just under forty hours. It was exclusively a sleeping-car train, with no coach (seat-only) cars, and it had higher ticket prices to match. The Super Chief was also the premier train on its route, from its inauguration in 1936 until 1971 when it was taken over by Amtrak, the quasi-governmental corporation established to run most of the surviving long-distance passenger trains in the United States. Glamorous, stylish and elite, the Super Chief was patronized by moguls and movie stars, especially during its first two decades in operation. And in keeping with its commitment to high-class travel, the Super Chief also featured some of the finest meals ever cooked and served on the rails in America, the work of the renowned hospitality organization the Fred Harvey Company.

In its heyday, the Super Chief was rivalled only by another streamliner, the 20th Century Limited, which ran a much shorter distance, 1,547 km (961 mi.), between New York and Chicago. In his book All Aboard Amtrak (1991), Mike Schafer, an authority on the streamlined trains of the United States, asked, ‘What was the most famous, luxurious American passenger train of all time? Half of you probably said New York Central’s 20th Century Limited, the other half probably said Santa Fe’s Super Chief. Which is correct? It’s an argument’, he concludes, ‘that undoubtedly never will be settled.’¹

Even before the Super Chief was launched, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway had a tradition of passenger train excellence that stretched back many decades. The earliest of its luxury Chicago to Los Angeles trains was the California Limited, inaugurated in 1892 and which ran on that route for more than six decades. The Fred Harvey Company had begun operating dining cars for the Santa Fe four years earlier, in 1888. The California Limited carried a Harvey-catered dining car on one leg of its route and used Fred Harvey lunchrooms for meal stops elsewhere along the way.

Lunchrooms were the Fred Harvey Company’s first enterprise, and the company went on to cater for Santa Fe for more than ninety years. Santa Fe passengers enjoyed ‘Meals by Fred Harvey’ as far back as 1876, when the English immigrant Frederick Henry Harvey took over the operation of a lunchroom in the Santa Fe railroad depot in Topeka, Kansas. From this modest beginning grew an entire business empire of Santa Fe-owned, Fred Harvey-operated restaurants, hotels, resorts and dining cars. Harvey and the railroad had agreed on business terms that would last almost a century. The railroad would provide, without charge, the buildings, coal, ice, water and transportation for all of the Harvey facilities’ furnishings, food, other supplies and personnel. All profits would go to the Harvey Company, but the Santa Fe railroad would reap huge benefits as well – namely, the passengers who would be attracted by the Fred Harvey reputation for excellence in food service.

Advertisement from a National Geographic magazine in the late 1940s highlighting the Super Chief’s connection to Hollywood glamour.

The most famous of the Fred Harvey employees were the prim, pretty, efficient and respectable ‘Harvey Girls’ who waited on tables at the lunchrooms and restaurants that soon stretched the length and breadth of the Santa Fe line. Always dressed neatly in black dresses and white aprons, these young women – ‘of good character, attractive and intelligent, ages 18–30’, according to the newspaper ads that recruited them – became emblematic of the Fred Harvey Company. Part of their fame was due to the popular MGM Technicolor movie The Harvey Girls (1946), starring Judy Garland. Harvey brought some 5,000 of these women to work in the Harvey restaurants located in the so-called ‘uncivilized West’ of the United States – and most of them later stayed there, marrying railroaders and ranchers. ‘Fred Harvey kept the West in food . . . and wives,’ the humourist Will Rogers once famously said.²

After Fred Harvey’s death in 1901, and with his sons Byron and Ford in charge, the company had it greatest expansion, including the development of the infrastructure at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. This included El Tovar, a luxury hotel, and the wonderful fitted-stone structures by the architect Mary Colter, one of the few female architects in America at that time: Hopi House, the Lookout, Hermit’s Rest and the Watchtower. Along with the restored La Posada, a hotel with dining room and lunch counter in Winslow, Arizona, where the Super Chief once stopped (and its successor, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, still stops today), the Grand Canyon South Rim buildings are the Harvey Company’s and Colter’s greatest living legacy.

Brandy Flip Pie

This sophisticated dessert was offered by Chef Adolphe Aschenbach at the Fred Harvey restaurant in Chicago’s Union Station. Fred’s son, Ford Harvey, made a deal to run all the concessions there, including a drug store with soda fountain, as well as eight other places to eat. Chef Aschenbach’s domain was the stately, club-like formal dining room in the station.

1 tbsp unflavoured gelatin

240 ml (1 cup) cold water

4 eggs, separated

8 tbsp plus 1 tbsp sugar

½ tsp ground nutmeg

120 ml (½ cup) milk, scalded

60 ml (¼ cup) brandy

1 baked 23-cm (9-in.) pastry shell

Whipped cream, for garnish

Chocolate curls, for garnish

Soften the gelatin in the cold water. Beat the egg yolks, then combine with the 8 tbsp sugar, nutmeg and milk in the top of a bain-marie or double boiler, and cook over simmering water until the mixture coats a spoon. Remove from the heat. Add the gelatin with the water it was softened in, stirring until dissolved. Chill until slightly thickened, then stir in the brandy.

Beat the egg whites with 1 tbsp sugar until stiff, then fold into the yolk mixture. Pour into a baked, cooled pastry shell. Chill until firm. Serve with whipped cream and garnish with chocolate curls. (Make chocolate curls by shaving a slightly softened semi-sweet chocolate slab with a potato peeler.)

Serves 6 to 8

Fred Harvey butchers cutting meat in the commissary.

In this period Harvey also operated 122 dining cars, staffed by more than 2,000 male employees: stewards, chefs, other cooks and waiters. Harold R. Ray, head of the dining-car department, oversaw the huge enterprise. The finest meats were chosen from packing houses in Chicago and Los Angeles; once stamped ‘Fred Harvey’, steer carcasses were hung to age for two weeks before being butchered and shipped out to the galleys (kitchens) on the trains. Depending on the season, fresh fruits and vegetables would come from the West Coast or from Chicago’s South Water Market. Two refrigerator cars shuttled back and forth weekly so that fresh produce would be available at both starting points on the line, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The 15 May 1936 breakfast menu for the original Super Chief’s first eastbound run from Los Angeles to Chicago featured a selection of eight different fruits and preserves, shredded wheat biscuits or rolled oats for cereals, eight choices of steaks and chops (including sirloins and veal cutlets), three kinds of potato dishes, ham and bacon, eggs cooked six different ways, eight kinds of breads and toasts (including ‘Wheat Cakes with Maple Syrup’), two coffees, four teas, hot chocolate and malted milk.

Grand as it was, the first Super Chief, in 1936, was actually only a temporary stand-in while the new train the company really wanted was being built. Pulled by diesel locomotives, its luxurious cars were of ‘standard’ design – a traditional style later known as ‘heavyweight’, different from the ‘lightweight’ or ‘streamlined’ trains that were just becoming popular in North American railroad design. Launched a year later, in 1937, that first Super Chief’s immediate successor – the Super Chief of lore – was one of those new streamliners. Never before or since has there been a more magnificently styled, distinctly detailed train in the United States, a train whose design, construction and operation were the result of a unique confluence of many talents.

The first streamlined Super Chief of 1937, with its sleek E1-class diesel locomotive.

The 1937 Super Chief’s sleek, slant-nosed diesel locomotives were of a pioneering model produced by a new enterprise, the Electro-Motive Corporation, which in the decades ahead, as the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors, would for a time be the country’s foremost builder of diesel locomotives. The locomotives’ Native American-inspired logo and paint scheme, known as the ‘Warbonnet’, became famous partly because of its replication on thousands of toy and model trains in the United States.

The modernistic, Art Deco carriages on this eight-car train were manufactured using a newly patented process whereby stainless-steel panels were fused seamlessly, without exterior blemishes. Sterling B. McDonald, a Chicago designer-decorator, was primarily responsible for the Super Chief’s fashionable interiors. Southwestern Indian art was the defining aesthetic, a style that had already gained popularity with Santa Fe in its advertising art and interior decor. Roger W. Birdseye, the railroad’s general advertising manager and an expert on Native American culture, also contributed to the design.

Each of the Super Chief’s seven passenger-carrying cars was unique in decor and bore the name of a Native American tribe. The observation-lounge car, named ‘Navajo’, featured upholstery designs based on the tribe’s traditional weavings. The ceiling was painted turquoise and the carpeting was the colour of desert sand. On the pier panels between windows were copies of Navajo sand paintings. The car named ‘Acoma’ – a buffet-lounge that also contained a dormitory for the crew and a barber shop – had walls of zebrawood veneer, with replicas of Navajo art in its lounge area. The diner, named ‘Cochiti’, featured walls of bubinga wood. And each of the 32 sleeping compartments was furnished in a different combination of fabrics and rare, exotic woods.

Aboard the Super Chief, dining-car steward E. L. Haworth debones a fresh Colorado trout for a passenger. Note the Mimbreño-pattern china with Mimbres pictographs.

Mary Colter, the architect and designer who worked for the Santa Fe railroad and the Fred Harvey Company on many projects over the decades, created a unique china pattern for the Super Chief dining cars that was used on the train’s tableware throughout its history. Called Mimbreño, it was based on the pottery of the Mimbres people, a tribe that lived in the American Southwest a thousand years ago. Each of the 36 different pieces of Colter’s china carried a different pictograph, making this special pattern both elegant in design and desirable as a collectible. (Reproductions are still for sale today.) But the food served on those plates and in those bowls – the product of chefs provided by the Fred Harvey Company – was of paramount importance.

The 16 May 1937 dinner menu for the Los Angeles to Chicago preview run of the new streamlined Super Chief – a trip for selected dignitaries, sponsored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce – offered starters of malossol caviar, fresh lobster cocktail, and cream of fresh tomato soup, followed by a choice of grilled Lake Superior whitefish ‘maître d’hotel’; sautéed Chesapeake Bay shad roe with fine herbs; grilled calf’s sweetbreads with fresh mushrooms; filet mignon ‘jardinière, en casserole’; and roast spring lamb with mint jelly. Desserts included mocha eclair, fresh strawberries with cream and pineapple parfait.³ Other early Super Chief menus listed Blue Point oysters on the half-shell, fillet of sole à la Normande, sweetbread cutlets with French peas and claret sauce, and tenderloin of beef with mushrooms.

Romanoff malossol caviar is a highlight of this 1938 Super Chief menu.

In 1938 the Super Chief began twice-weekly runs between Chicago and Los Angeles with a second set of railway carriages, identical in configuration to the first but with more standardized interiors. A mouth-watering dinner menu from that year included (among many choices) malossol caviar, antipasto, California artichoke hearts, and fresh avocados; ‘Chicken Okra Louisiannaise’, swordfish steak, poached salmon; mushrooms sautéed with bacon, ‘Old Fashioned Boneless Chicken Pie, Americaine’; sirloin steaks and lamb chops; fresh asparagus with drawn butter, corn on the cob; raisin pie, and strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.

Dining-car page of a booklet issued when the Super Chief began daily service in February 1948. The equally luxurious running mate Chief was featured jointly in this publication.

Nearly a decade later, in 1947, passengers lunching on the Super Chief were offered a selection of two kinds of relishes (‘Queen Olives’ and watermelon cubes), hot or cold consommé, broiled fresh fish, oysters (fried, stewed or creamed), Boston baked pork and beans with brown bread, assorted meats with potato salad, ham, smoked ox tongue, potatoes cooked three different ways, sandwiches (cheese, ham, chicken), and assorted breads, salads, fruits, preserves and beverages. The menu also stated that ‘An extra charge of Twenty-five cents each will be made for all meals served outside of Dining Car.’ And it helpfully noted that the ‘Steward will gladly arrange for any special diet.’

Advertisement from a National Geographic magazine touting the uniqueness of the Turquoise Room, which was introduced on the Super Chief in 1951.

By 1951 more cars were added to the operation, so the Super Chief trains now ran daily in each direction between Chicago and Los Angeles. The trains’ literal and figurative centrepiece was the Pleasure Dome car, a mid-train lounge car that was unique to the Super Chief. During the early 1950s, sample menus for another Santa Fe train on that line, the California Limited, offered American ‘comfort foods’, such as bacon with shirred eggs and cottage fried potatoes for breakfast, braised beef with noodles for lunch, and roast turkey with dressing, cranberry sauce, fresh peas and mashed potatoes for dinner. In contrast, aboard the Super Chief of that era, passengers had more lavish choices. The ‘Famous Super Chief Breakfast Entrees’ included kippered herring on toast with scrambled eggs, calf’s liver sauté with a rasher of bacon, grilled French lamb chop ‘au Cresson’, and browned corned beef hash with poached egg. Alternatively, passengers could sample ‘Old Fashioned Hot Breads and Cakes’: griddle cakes with maple syrup and bacon, buckwheat cakes with ‘little pig’ sausages, or French toast with apple sauce or currant jelly.

The Super Chief with its Pleasure Dome car, poised to leave Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal for its eastward sprint to Chicago.

The westbound Super Chief ready to depart Chicago’s Dearborn Station en route to Los Angeles, 1940s.

Lobster Américaine

This recipe was published in the ‘Super Chief Cook Book of Famous Fred Harvey Recipes’. Developed by Super Chief chef Carlos Gardini, this ‘gourmet dish’ often appeared on the special menus of the train’s Turquoise Room.

1 (900 g/2 lb) lobster, boiled for 10 minutes

45 g (3 tbsp) butter, plus 15 g (1 tbsp) butter, softened

1 tsp each minced celery, carrots, leeks and shallots

½ garlic clove, minced

2 tbsp brandy

2 tbsp flour

60 ml (¼ cup) stock (broth)

2 tbsp white wine

2 tomatoes, peeled and chopped

Dash each of salt, pepper and cayenne pepper

Remove the lobster meat from the shell and cut into pieces 2.5 cm (1 in.) thick. Melt 3 tbsp butter, add the minced celery, carrots, leeks and shallots, and sauté gently for several minutes without browning. Add the lobster meat and the garlic and continue sautéing for 5 minutes. Add the brandy and set aflame. Blend in the flour, add the broth and stir until the sauce is smooth and slightly thickened. Add the wine and chopped tomatoes, season to taste with salt, pepper and cayenne, and cook slowly for 10 minutes. Add 1 tbsp softened butter to the lobster mixture and serve at once.

Serves 1

Referring to the Turquoise Room in the dome car, a Santa Fe railroad brochure promised that ‘Nine persons can be served and when [the room is] not reserved for private parties, all passengers may enjoy this room for relaxation and refreshment.’ This was the only version of the Super Chief that I experienced at first hand. On a late August evening in 1969, my wife and I stepped out of the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal and saw stretched before us a silver train, glimmering in the half-light of dusk: the legendary Super Chief, pulled by multiple diesel engines. The windows of sleeping compartments and other cars glowed cosily, promising rest and comfort, a home (albeit temporary) on the way to home.

We walked by Pullman cars named ‘Pine Beach’, ‘Indian Squaw’ and ‘Regal Court’, until reaching our own sleeping car, the ‘Palm Arch’, where our porter, smartly dressed in dark-blue livery, waited to show us to our cabin and stow our bags. No sooner had we settled in than we felt the gentle tug of the departing train, signalling the beginning of our two-night, one-day journey through the American Southwest and Midwest. Even this late in its career, the Super Chief remained an outstanding way to travel. The only significant diminution was the loss of the original chic bedroom-lounge-observation car, previously the last car on the train, which had been a feature of the train since 1937, its rounded back end sporting the train’s distinctive Native American headdress logo. But the survival of the spacious Pleasure Dome car helped compensate for that loss.

By the late 1960s most other American passenger trains were a shambles, running out their last miles under the aegis of railroad companies that focused on the more profitable freight business, to the detriment of passenger service. But in 1969 the Super Chief remained clean, impeccably maintained, expertly staffed and well equipped in a reasonable equivalence of its previous grand manner. The train we rode had been refurbished in 1958 and had aged well since that time. The Santa Fe railroad retained a corporate pride in its flagship train and even seriously considered staying out of the national Amtrak network, as three other railroads did, and continued to run the Super Chief itself.

A Santa Fe diner being stocked for the eastbound run at Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal.

Not long after our 7:30 p.m. departure we were ensconced on a sofa in the main lounge of the Pleasure Dome, a softly lighted space appointed much like a smart but comfortable living room. A steward delivered our cocktails: Old Fashioneds, hand-mixed and properly garnished with a cherry and orange slice by the bartender in the adjacent cocktail bar. No packaged cocktail mixes here.

The Super Chief’s private Turquoise Room after its 1957 remodelling, featuring the turquoise-and-silver medallion and tables laid with linen, silver and Mimbreño-pattern china.

Afterwards we moved on to dinner, and to our brief chagrin found that the dining car was already full. So the steward ushered us into the Turquoise Room at one end of the dome car, adjacent to the dining car. We were seated at a table for two in that intimate room, lined with tan wooden panelling decorated with a reproduction of a silver-accented turquoise medallion displayed in a shadow box. The tables, swathed in crisp, white linen, were set with the Super Chief’s classic Mimbreño dishware, hotel-grade silver-plated cutlery (flatware) and bud vases that held fragrant fresh roses. The waiters were skilful and attentive. From the moment one of them had walked through the train playing his set of melodic chimes calling the passengers to dinner, to the end of the meal when another waiter brought fluted finger bowls to our table, we revelled in the great tradition of dining on rails.

A 1960s postcard of the Turquoise Room; the reverse reads ‘A champagne toast – the perfect way to begin a superbly prepared meal on Santa Fe’s Super Chief ’ and ‘Sent courtesy of the Super Chief ’, suggesting that the railroad would pay the postage, as a public relations ploy.

We both ordered the ‘Super Chief Champagne Dinner’, offered on a special gold-coloured menu card complete with a silk tassel, inside an oversized folder decorated with the turquoise wall-medallion motif. The menu card described the meal as ‘a specialty of this fine train prepared for the finest in gourmet dining and distinctively served with fine champagne’. The starter was shrimp cocktail, followed by several main-dish options: a 16-ounce (450-g) New York strip sirloin ‘for the steak connoisseur, carefully aged for your dining pleasure, broiled over charcoal to your liking’, served with a choice of ‘golden French fried onion rings or fresh mushroom caps’; or filet mignon with sauce Béarnaise; or mountain trout. Diners could also select a side dish of potatoes – either hash browns, cottage fries, French fries or baked au gratin – with a tossed green salad and toasted garlic rolls or cheese rolls on the side. Each of the meals was accompanied by coupes of California champagne. Finally, dessert consisted of a choice of pastries, sundaes, fruits in season or cheeses, followed by coffee and after-dinner mints. In 1969 that ‘Super Chief Champagne Dinner’ cost $7.90, up from $6.50 over the six years since it had first been offered on the train.

Passengers in the Pleasure Dome’s upper-level swivel seats have a clear view as the westbound Super Chief climbs to Raton Pass in the mountains of southern Colorado.

After dinner we found an open pair of swivel chairs upstairs in the Pleasure Dome car, whose plush, comfortable chairs pivoted to allow us views in any direction, an amenity offered by no other dome cars. There was plenty to see, even at night, as we settled in, drinks in hand, for our winding ascent of Cajon Pass, culminating at Summit, California, more than 1,200 m (4,000 ft) above sea level.

The next morning we relaxed in our sleeping compartment with the ‘Wake-up Cup’ of coffee, another Super Chief amenity, delivered by our porter, before we headed to the dining car to breakfast on the Super Chief’s famous French toast. According to James D. Porterfield in Dining by Rail, ‘This special and renowned recipe, perhaps the best French toast of them all, was perfected by Fred Harvey chefs in 1918 for the Santa Fe Railway’s dining cars. It produces a puffy, golden brown delicacy.’⁴ The secret, we now know, was finishing the pan-fried toast by baking it in a hot oven. Although French toast was a breakfast speciality on many railroads, the oven-baking technique was apparently unique to the Santa Fe’s dining cars. Drizzled with maple syrup, sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with crispy bacon, the delicious Fred Harvey version we ate on the Super Chief lived up to its reputation among railway travellers.

An elegantly served breakfast of Santa Fe’s famous French toast, probably aboard the coach streamliner El Capitan, c. 1960. There are now paper placemats instead of linen tablecloths, and the railroad’s Poppy-pattern china instead of Mimbreño, but the cream and syrup pitchers are still of the Santa Fe’s distinctive silver pattern.

Santa Fe French Toast

So many people asked for the recipe for the railroad’s most famous breakfast dish that it was finally published in a little handout given on the train to any passenger who requested it. A last-minute trip to the oven is what sets this dish apart from other French toast recipes, but getting the slices to puff is not as easy as it seems.

120 ml (½ cup) cooking oil

2 slices white bread, sliced 1½ cm (¾ in.) thick

2 eggs

120 ml (½ cup) single (light) cream

Pinch salt (optional)

Icing (confectioners’) sugar, for garnish

Heat the cooking oil in a cast-iron frying pan (skillet) until hot. Meanwhile, cut each bread slice diagonally to make four triangles.

In a small bowl, combine the eggs, cream and salt, beating well. Soak the bread thoroughly in egg mixture. Fry the soaked bread in the hot oil until golden brown on both sides, about 2 minutes per side. Drain the toast on paper towels to absorb any excess cooking oil. Transfer the toast to a baking sheet and place in an oven preheated to 200°C (400°F). Bake for 4 to 6 minutes, until the bread slices have puffed. Serve sprinkled with icing sugar.

Serves 1 or 2

Postcard showing the westbound Super Chief in the 1940s, arriving at the Albuquerque complex comprising the depot and Fred Harvey’s Alvarado Hotel.

A short midday stop at Albuquerque, New Mexico, offered us the chance to shop for Southwestern Indian artefacts arrayed on the station platform. This station-platform market was a remnant of the long-gone Indian Room in the Alvarado Hotel, a Fred Harvey facility in the station complex, where Native Americans once demonstrated their crafts and sold their wares. And on the afternoon of the next day we rolled into Chicago, ending what was perhaps the finest train ride we had ever experienced.⁵

Many years later, I had a chance to talk with Chet Riedemann, a former cook on the Santa Fe Railroad who had begun working in 1938, not long after graduating from high school in Illinois. After three weeks’ training at the Santa Fe Railroad’s commissary, run by the Harvey Company, he was ready to go to work on the train. ‘The food was superb,’ Riedemann told me, recalling his days as a cook on the Super Chief. ‘It was a cut above everything else. The Fred Harvey Company recruited chefs from the Austrian ski resorts for the busy summer season and from France – outstanding, great chefs.’

Riedemann recalled that after completing his training,

At noon I got on my assigned car and began preparations. We made everything aboard from scratch except the demi-glace. After a time I felt the coupling as a switch engine came to the commissary track to get us, and we were cut into a train. I didn’t even know where we were going. As a new guy I didn’t say anything, just did my job. Finally I asked another cook, who told me we were on the Texas Ranger to Galveston.

After three weeks on this secondary train, Riedemann was switched to the Super Chief – a considerable compliment to his skills – where he worked aboard the railroad’s two premier diners, the original ‘Cochiti’ and the ‘Awatobi’, the latter added when the Super Chief had become a twice-weekly train.

Chef Spiro slices turkey in a Super Chief kitchen. Turkey was a highlight on the train’s Thanksgiving menus but was also a Fred Harvey staple.

‘We had four in the kitchen,’ Riedemann told me, ‘plus six waiters and a steward. The kitchen staff consisted of a chef and first, second and third cooks.’ The Super Chief’s dining cars had 36 seats for diners – tables for two guests and tables for four, located across the aisle from each other – even though 48-seat diners were more common at the time. (In contrast, the Superliner dining cars that run on the current Southwest Chief have 72 seats and are staffed in peak season by a lead service attendant, two waiters, a chef and an assistant.)

‘I started as third cook, with responsibility for things such as sauces and vegetables and washing dishes,’ Riedemann said. ‘After dinner I made and laid out the dough for the morning breadstuffs. I was out at 11 p.m., then back at 4 a.m. to bake the Danish pastries, muffins, and so forth.’ Riedemann went on to say:

Each cook had specific responsibilities and each waiter, too. Waiters wore little round buttons on their uniforms to identify their stations. Number 1 waiter was the pantryman, responsible for salads, non-alcoholic beverages, ice cream, rolls, butter, cream. Number 2 polished all the silver every night, number 3 was responsible for the linen, and so forth.

There was incredible attention to detail. Salad plates were chilled in the pantry before service and dinner plates warmed in the kitchen. The company had inspectors who supposedly made surprise visits on board, but we had ways of learning in advance.

‘The stewards on the Super Chief were clearly men of mâitre d’ quality,’ Riedemann concluded. ‘The Harvey Company was a stickler for service. On other railroads the stewards just seated guests and made change. On the Santa Fe, they supervised all the ordering from the commissary. They wore tuxedos at dinner, not just suits as they did on other railroads.’⁶

For a time in the 1950s and ’60s, the railroad gave passengers an attractive 22-page booklet called the ‘Super Chief Cook Book of Famous Fred Harvey Recipes’. A sketch of the Turquoise Room was on the cover. According to the foreword, ‘Most of the recipes included in this booklet are the ones especially requested through the years. All have been tested for consumer use by home economists.’ Many of the recipes were for dishes served at Fred Harvey station dining rooms or hotels, and others were for dishes listed on the dining-car menus.

After my ride on the Santa Fe Super Chief in 1969, the next time I rode its Los Angeles to Chicago route was in 1985 – aboard its successor, the Southwest Chief – fifteen years after Amtrak had taken over almost all of America’s long-distance passenger trains. In 1971 the Santa Fe company had, after long deliberation, decided to join Amtrak and let three of its few surviving passenger trains, including the Super Chief, become part of Amtrak’s national network. One reason the railroad had considered staying apart from the Amtrak network was that in 1968 it had discontinued nearly all of its other passenger trains, including – to the dismay of many rail travellers – the historic and revered Chief, which had first started running on the Chicago–Los Angeles route in 1926. John Reed, the Santa Fe railroad’s president, who had overseen these extensive changes, nevertheless revered the company’s three surviving flagships and thought hard before eventually turning them over to Amtrak.

Cover of the beverage list from late in the Super Chief’s career. Appropriately, the wines and champagnes listed are from California.

Stuffed Zucchini Andalouse

According to the ‘Super Chief Cook Book of Famous Fred Harvey Recipes’, the menus of all Santa Fe trains and Fred Harvey restaurants were ‘planned to satisfy a wide range of tastes and pocketbooks’. Presumably this main dish was designed for thrifty travellers.

6 small whole courgettes (zucchini)

75 g (½ cup) chopped tomatoes

75 g (½ cup) chopped cooked beef

40 g (¼ cup) chopped cooked ham

3 tbsp chopped mushrooms

3 tbsp chopped green pepper

2 tbsp chopped onion

½ garlic clove, minced

80 g (1⅓ cups) soft breadcrumbs, lightly packed

2 tbsp stock (broth) (if needed)

Dash each of salt and pepper

Cook the courgettes in unsalted water for 5 minutes. Cool, cut in half lengthwise and carefully remove the pulp. Combine the pulp with the remaining ingredients. Pack this into the courgette shells and bake in a moderate oven (180°C/350°F) for 30 minutes.

Serves 6

‘Amtrak, for all its efforts and all its dollars,’ wrote Fred Frailey in Twilight of the Great Trains, ‘hasn’t made passengers feel more wanted than Santa Fe, even after Santa Fe people realized that the time was up, the cause was lost.’⁷ Since the three Santa Fe trains that Amtrak inherited had been maintained to a high standard, Amtrak purchased their cars and at first left the train configurations intact.

For a time, even the Super Chief name survived, as did its menus. The striking, oversize menus in summer 1972 even carried an image embossed in silver of a Santa Fe diesel with its famous ‘Warbonnet’ logo. But there was no longer the ‘Super Chief Champagne Dinner’ that I had enjoyed in 1969. The 1972 ‘Super Chief Complete Dinner’, which still included sparkling wine, now offered a choice of ‘charcoal-broiled’ sirloin served ‘on a sizzling platter with French fried onion rings and grilled tomato’; charcoal-broiled lake trout amandine; ‘Breast of Chicken Marecale’; tournedos of beef tenderloin with Béarnaise sauce; roast rib-eye of beef; or old-fashioned broiled French lamb chops, General Grant-style.

By 1974, however, standards had slipped to the point where the Santa Fe’s president ordered Amtrak to drop the train’s famous name. So the Amtrak train became the Southwest Limited. In 1985 Amtrak upgraded the train’s offerings with special menus, a hospitality hour and Native American guides, and with Santa Fe’s blessing renamed it the Southwest Chief, which it remains today.

But vestiges of the former Super Chief still linger in the Southwest Chief that runs on the old Super Chief’s Los Angeles–Chicago route. The menu in 2017 (identical to those on virtually all of Amtrak’s long-distance trains) featured ‘The Amtrak Signature Steak, a well-marbled, USDA Choice Black Angus flat iron steak, grilled to order and served with Portobello mushroom sauce’, and ‘Seafood Catch of the Day, griddle seared shrimp-crab cakes with a chilled remoulade sauce’. The steak, which sounded better than it was, was priced at $24.75, the shrimp-crab cakes at $22.75. Since 1986 meals have been included in the substantial sleeping-car fares, and passengers in those carriages are the primary patrons of the dining car. Most coach passengers use the café car, which offers only sandwiches, snacks and beverages, but they can also pay to eat in the more expensive dining car when there is room.

Eastbound Southwest Chief at Lamy, New Mexico, 2015.

China, silver and fresh flowers (or, more recently, any flowers) have long been gone from the table. Now you will find disposable, heavy-plastic plates and, sometimes, cardboard cups for coffee, although napkins are still cloth and cutlery is stainless steel, not plastic. However, much of the food is grilled or otherwise finished (from pre-prepared foods) on board. Breakfasts remain a dining-car staple, with fresh scrambled eggs cooked to order. Even the ‘Railroad French Toast’ is creditable, although a far cry from the Santa Fe’s original puffy speciality. And today it is served with ‘breakfast syrup’, not real maple syrup.

Although my first trip on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief was more than three decades ago, I have travelled nine more times on that train between 1985 and 2015. In every case, the train’s configuration has been the same, with double-deck Superliners: sleeping cars, a dining car, a Sightseer Lounge with skylights and broad windows, and standard, seat-only coaches. Dinner in the diner, however, ranged from very good to barely acceptable to unspeakably bad. All of those swings in quality reflected the ups and downs of dining aboard long-distance trains throughout the Amtrak system, where the nadir occurred in June 1981, aboard four of its premier long-distance trains. Tablecloths disappeared, along with fresh flowers, china and even stainless-steel cutlery. Half the waiters and most of the cooks had been dismissed. Instead there were bare tables, on which were placed little plastic trays with precooked meals warmed in a microwave.

The situation eventually improved for a time, with even table flowers making a comeback, although they no longer grace the dining tables. But even though today’s Amtrak is again dealing with politically mandated cost-cutting, the experience aboard its diners, however imperfect, is better than it was 35 years ago.

So what survives of the legendary Super Chief, other than its route and its still-running successor, the Southwest Chief? A number of the Super Chief’s pre-Amtrak cars are still around, and some are used in private charter and excursion services. Perhaps most notable, historically, is the ‘Acoma’, the lounge car from the 1937 train. After a restoration that took nearly two decades, the car is now a gem, as magnificent as it was in 1937. Most of the furniture is original, and the decor is pure Southwest Indian-style. The car is fully certified for operation on Amtrak trains and is used frequently, sometimes also with the ‘Palm Leaf’, a sleeping car built in 1951 for the Super Chief. ‘Navajo’, the sleeping car-observation lounge from the 1937 train, is on outdoor display at the Colorado Railroad Museum. The Pleasure Dome car, ‘Plaza Santa Fe’, has been beautifully restored, with many of its original fixtures, including its swivel chairs in the dome. The Turquoise Room today looks much as it did in 1950, and fine meals are still served there. Like the ‘Acoma’, ‘Plaza Santa Fe’ is Amtrak-approved and runs on charter and excursion trains. But these historic Santa Fe Railroad cars are among the few that remain from the heyday of luxury train travel, and luxury railway dining, in the United States – a nostalgic reminder of a past age, when travel on the top trains was romantic and when diners still dressed for dinner.

5   SOCKEYE SALMON AND SASKATOON PIE: REGIONAL FOODS ON CANADA’S LONG-DISTANCE RAILWAYS

JUDY CORSER

In 1961, when I was just nine years old, my parents put my brother and me on the train at the small Alberta town of Edson, heading west about 950 km (600 mi.) by rail to Chilliwack, in Canada’s province of British Columbia, where we were to spend part of the summer with our grandmother. As a family we had travelled by train many times to visit relatives, but this was the first time my brother and I had travelled alone.

My brother, who was eight, cried most of the way to the Rocky Mountain town of Jasper, three or four hours away. But he cheered up after that. There was so much for us to see and do on the train. The conductor put us in the care of a porter, a kindly man who took us to the snack car, where we could buy a drink or a package of potato chips from the man at the counter. The porter showed us where the glass-topped ‘dome’ observation car was located, too. Then – extra-special! – he opened the upper half of the Dutch door in the vestibule between two cars and lodged a small stool on the floor, so we could step up and stick our heads out the open door, side by side, as the train clickety-clacked along the tracks, revealing a glorious view of sunlight glinting off snow-topped mountains. We inhaled deeply the aromas of fresh pine and spruce forests in the province of Alberta, which gave way the next day to the scent of cedar and Douglas fir in British Columbia. As the wind tossed our hair about, my brother and I felt we were on the most magnificent adventure of our lives.

At night we were tucked up in our cosy berths, with their smooth, white cotton sheets, scratchy wool blankets and canvas pocket-compartments on the walls, in which I stored my shoes, wallet, eyeglasses and new Timex watch. And at the other end of that overnight journey, there was Grandma in her big 1951 Buick, waiting for us with the promise of hotdogs and macaroni for lunch and the sweet prospect of trips to the penny-candy store across the tracks.

That was an idyllic time in our lives. And that’s what train travel in Canada was all about. In late August every year, my grandmother would pick a ‘flat’ (a large flat wooden box) of blackberries, tag them with our address in Edson, and put them on the afternoon train to be delivered the next day, just in time for my mother to bake Dad his favourite birthday pie. Every June, Grandma would also send strawberries by train. As in the decades before, Canadians in the 1960s and ’70s still travelled and shipped goods here, there and everywhere by train. In addition to the lengthy transcontinental lines – the Canadian Pacific Railway on the southern route and the Canadian National Railway on the more northerly route – there were many branch lines leading into the vast spaces of Canada, into what some people might call ‘nowhere’. If someone wanted to get off the train at a particular spot, even in the remotest bush of, say, Northern Ontario or British Columbia, the conductor would signal the engineer and the train would make a so-called ‘whistle-stop’.

Canadian Pacific Railway freight train crossing the plains in Wilkie, Saskatchewan, Canada, 2015.

Coronation Dressing

This recipe is a 1937 Canadian Pacific Railway tribute to the coronation of King George VI on 12 May that year. Two years later, George and his consort, Queen Elizabeth, travelled across Canada on a 22-day journey by train that my ninety-year-old mother still recalls. She and her sisters all got new dresses for the occasion and were taken from the family farm to the city of Edmonton, Alberta, where they waved from bleachers set up on Kingsway as the royal couple passed by.

80 ml (⅓ cup) white wine vinegar

Juice of half a lemon

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp redcurrant jelly

1 tbsp ketchup

2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

½ tsp salt

½ tsp paprika

Dash Tabasco sauce, to taste

240 ml (1 cup) olive oil

Whisk together all the ingredients except the oil, then add the oil in a thin stream, whisking constantly to emulsify the dressing. Cover and refrigerate. Use as a dressing for green salads.

Makes about 375 ml (1½ cups)

Canada’s first transcontinental railway line was inaugurated on 28 June 1886. A small crowd cheered as the first train, the Pacific Express, left Windsor Station in Montreal, Quebec, en route to the brand-new western terminus of Port Moody, on the Pacific Coast of British Columbia, arriving six days later, on 4 July, to a rousing welcome with a brass band. John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, had fulfilled a promise he had made 21 years earlier to provide a transportation link that would knit the young country together, from east to west, by rail.

The two decades following Macdonald’s promise had included a long period of discouraging failures in financing and construction of the massive railway project. But eventually, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company completed the project, on 7 November 1885, when the final spike was driven into the rails at Craigellachie, British Columbia, near the summit of the Selkirk Range. With work ongoing simultaneously in three regions, the project had taken four years to finish and was completed six years ahead of schedule under the direction of the company’s American president. Extending 4,655 continuous kilometres (2,893 mi.) between Montreal and the Pacific Ocean coast, the Canadian Pacific was the world’s longest railway line at that time, an even more impressive achievement considering Canada’s small population and the rugged terrain that the rail line traversed. Adding the tracks acquired from connecting regional lines, the total length of the company’s railway in 1886 was 7,091 km (4,406 mi.).

The Canadian Pacific Railway changed the very nature and future of Canada, which had become a confederation only in 1867, with the province of British Columbia joining in 1871. The especially difficult mountainous, western portion of the railway had been built on the backs of thousands of men brought into the country as cheap labour, including an estimated 10,000 Chinese workers, half of whom returned to China after labouring under horrific conditions for one dollar per day. The remaining 5,000 or so Chinese, nearly penniless and unable to return home, stayed in Canada and changed the migrant food mosaic of the country, most notably by opening restaurants in small towns across western Canada and introducing such Canadianized versions of ‘Chinese’ food as chicken chow mein, sweet-and-sour spare ribs and egg foo yung. Another 4,000 Chinese labourers came from the United States, fresh from the California goldfields, as well as workers from Ireland, England, Russia, Poland, Italy and other European countries, all lured to Canada by the prospect of work and by the hope of a new life in a new country.

In the earliest days as well as today, making a trip by rail often meant packing a lunch beforehand. Depending on the passengers’ own ethnic backgrounds, that Canadian lunch might include foods like sandwiches, hardboiled eggs, Russian or Ukrainian pirozhki, bread and butter, pickles and radishes, raisin cakes and oatmeal cookies, butter tarts, baking-powder biscuits with jam, cheese and crackers, an apple or two, dried prunes and, these days, packaged snack foods like potato chips and Cheezies. Perhaps there would even have been fried chicken and coleslaw to eat on the first day, before it spoiled. But there were other dining options as well.

In 1867 an earlier Canadian railway – the Great Western Railway of Canada (an Ontario regional line) – had been the first railway in the world to purchase George Pullman’s newfangled American invention, the hotel car, but true single-use dining cars were not widely used on Canadian railways until some years later. Ground-breaking innovation that it was, the hotel car was only produced from 1867 to 1879, by which time dining cars had already begun to take over. The first hotel car, named ‘President’, carried ‘133 food items, a wine chest under the floor, 1,000 napkins, and 150 tablecloths, and the china, glassware, and utensils needed to serve on a trip of from four to seven days’ length. When meals were to be served, tables were installed at the seating sections and the porter became a waiter.’¹ The hotel car also had seats that converted into sleeping accommodations at one end of the car and a small kitchen with pantry at the other end.

This was a considerable improvement over the previous practice of passengers having to dash from the train to gulp down meals at railside station buffets when the train stopped to take on more coal and water for the engine. In 1870 one passenger remarked, ‘To breakfast, dine, and sup in this style while the train is speeding at the rate of nearly 30 miles an hour is a sensation of which the novelty is no greater than the comfort.’ He added, less charitably, ‘An additional zest is given to the good things by the thought that the passengers in the other cars must rush out when the refreshment station is reached and hastily swallow an ill-cooked meal.’²

Canadian Pacific Railway dining car advertisement, 1888.

With the goal of reproducing the ‘hotel experience’, another hotel car boasted an extensive menu that included a selection of oysters, raw, fried or roasted; beef tongue, sugar-cured ham, pressed corned beef, or sardines; chicken or lobster salad; broiled beefsteak, mutton chops or ham, served with potatoes; eggs, boiled, fried, scrambled or made into an omelette (if you wanted rum with your omelette, that cost extra); with French coffee and tea to finish up your meal.³

After true dining cars on Canadian trains were introduced in 1868, eating on railway trips became an even more pleasant experience. Stops for locomotive and train servicing were spaced about 240 km (150 mi.) apart, with usually twenty to thirty minutes for passengers to be off the train. There was always a refreshment room at each of those stops where quick meals and snacks could be purchased by passengers who did not want to use the dining car. Stories abound about these station buffets (as they were often called in Canada), including that of a distinguished but very ‘economically minded’ scientist who, crossing Canada with all his expenses paid by someone else, was so shocked by what he thought were the high prices charged in the dining car for his first meal that he made the rest of the three-and-a-half-day journey by consuming only sandwiches and soft drinks – and later told the tale with keen delight.⁴ In the early days of travel, whether by rail or by road, sandwiches were generally considered an inferior form of sustenance. The more ‘acceptable’ packed lunch – like a picnic lunch – would comprise, possibly, roasted chicken or cold veal, cakes or pies, buttered biscuits, a beverage such as lemonade or raspberry shrub (a drink made with fruit juices, vinegar and water), and perhaps pickles and condiments.⁵

Interior of a Canadian Pacific Railway dining car, c. 1886–9.

Private railway cars, owned by the wealthy or kept by the railways themselves for use by prominent people, often had their own cooks aboard – as did the private cars named ‘Jamaica’ and ‘Ignace’ used by Prime Minister Macdonald and his wife, Lady Agnes, on their first transcontinental railway journey in 1886. As Lady Agnes later wrote, ‘My closely curtained sofa, with its mattress and soft pillows, was very comfortable. My maid slept opposite. Both the little bedrooms were occupied, while the porter, who also acted as cook, was ensconced in a tiny berth opposite the kitchen.’⁶

Of the first Canadian transcontinental journey that left from the city of Toronto on 26 June 1886 – and joined up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with the Pacific Express train that had originated in Montreal – one passenger, Elizabeth Spragge, later wrote about the dining experience:

After leaving Brandon [Manitoba] we partook of our first meal in the dining car, where every-thing was well-arranged and an excellent menu provided; including fresh salmon and other delicacies of the season. The car itself was a new one, exceedingly handsome and massive: the seats of solid dark leather designed to imitate alligator skin, the mirrors and all suitable portions of the car inlaid with bronze, the linen and plate, glass and china, all fresh and resplendent.⁷

Both Lady Agnes’s and Elizabeth Spragge’s trains provided dining-car service from either Montreal or Toronto to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. There the trains shunted off the heavy dining cars, unable to pull them over the high Rogers Pass (elevation 1,330 m/4,364 ft) and Kicking Horse Pass (elevation 1,643 m/5,390 ft), then picked up a replacement dining car on the western side. At the highest points of the Rockies, passengers took their meals at the railway company’s scenic mountain hotels in the towns of Field and Glacier, in British Columbia.⁸

The Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Alberta, 1930. The construction of a luxury ‘lodge’ in the Rockies brought tourists by rail to what became the first of Canada’s many national parks.

Published in 1887, Agnes Macdonald’s travel memoir By Car and By Cowcatcher provides a glimpse into one result of the railway’s construction: the establishment of the first of Canada’s National Parks, in the Canadian Rockies, and the building of the railway company’s great ‘lodge’, the Banff Springs Hotel. As the company’s president is reported to have said at the time, ‘Since we can’t export the scenery, we shall have to import the tourists.’⁹ Today, Parks Canada administers 140 sites, some accessible by rail, in 39 different biogeographic regions of the country. Two of the most popular tourist destinations today are still the Banff and Jasper national parks in the Canadian Rockies, as well as the rail leg running from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, where visitors can observe the town’s population of polar bears awaiting the return of the winter Arctic pack ice.

The huge swathes of land originally granted to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company led to settlement of the country itself, as the company integrated its ocean-transport arm, Canadian Pacific Steamships, with its railway system and began an enormous publicity campaign, including paid advertising and numerous travel reports in the European press, to attract immigrants to the prairies. The company even offered twenty-year, easy-term payment plans to prospective farmers for purchasing the necessities to begin farming, such as seeds, equipment and livestock. And those tens of thousands of immigrants gave rise to another Canadian rail innovation. Instead of the near cattle-car conditions on some other railways of the world – where immigrants were regarded as just another type of freight to be transported as economically as possible – special ‘colonist cars’ were built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, which provided room for 72 passengers. These simple ‘colonist cars’ had sleeping platforms that dropped down from above the seats, plus linens and privacy curtains available for a fee, and a large cooking stove at one end of the car where the immigrants could prepare their own food, brought with them or purchased from shops along the route. More than a thousand of these ‘colonist cars’ brought millions of immigrants to many parts of Canada from the 1880s until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when immigration slowed drastically.

Dining at the Banff Springs Hotel, Banff, Alberta, 1924.

Waitresses picking up orders filled at the Banff Springs Hotel kitchen, 1924.

Baked Alaska

This recipe, dating from 1965 and by chef Bernie Desanlis of Canadian National Railways, is the most popular dessert served at the Macdonald, the railway’s hotel on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, Alberta.

1.5 l (6 cups) ice cream (any flavour), slightly softened

1 (20-cm/8-in.) round pre-baked cake layer, about 1.5 cm (¾ in.) thick

100 ml (scant ½ cup) water

280 g (1½ cups) sugar

3 large egg whites

Oil the inside of a bowl 20 cm (8 in.) in diameter and line with cling film (plastic wrap). Fill with the ice cream and freeze for 4 to 5 hours or overnight. Loosen the ice cream from the bowl (set the bowl briefly in a larger bowl of cold tap water, if necessary). Put the cake layer on a heatproof platter. Working quickly, invert the bowl, turning the ice cream out onto the cake, and remove the plastic film. Then cover the cake and ice cream together with cling film and freeze until firm.

A few minutes before serving, bring the water and sugar to a boil in a pot. Cook on medium heat to a temperature of 120°C (250°F) on a sugar thermometer. While this sugar syrup is cooking, beat the egg whites until stiff. Add the hot syrup to the egg whites in a slow, steady stream, beating continuously until all the syrup is added and the egg whites have cooled to room temperature.

Working quickly, remove the cake and ice cream from the freezer and spread the meringue over all of it. Brown the meringue lightly with a kitchen blowtorch, or set the baked Alaska under the grill (broiler) for 1 to 2 minutes to brown lightly, watching closely to prevent burning. Serve immediately.

Serves 8

Canadian Pacific Railway poster, c. 1910–30, designed to attract immigrants to Canada.

By 1914 the Canadian Pacific’s dining cars were serving up to 6,000 meals a day, and by the end of the First World War in 1918 the company was operating 169 dining, café and parlour cars, built by both the Pullman Company in the United States and the Canadian railway’s railcar supplier, Barney & Smith, in Montreal. There were also railside station buffets (also known as lunch counters) where customers sat at counters with servers on the other side, a style that originated very early in the railway’s history when railway employees – generally without the management’s knowledge – would set up a long counter the length of a baggage car and sell food and drink to passengers.¹⁰ These station buffets were sometimes operated by the railway company itself, but more often, especially in small places, by independent concessionaires or railway company attendants, on commission. Today, independently run concessions in the major stations – Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Jasper, Vancouver – provide food for passengers, including sandwiches and wraps, fresh fruit and vegetables, coffee, tea and other refreshments, yoghurt, ice cream, packaged snack foods (potato chips, sweets and candy, nuts), as well as homemade or commercially prepared confections, cakes, cookies and biscuits.

Postcard, c. 1900, of the interior of the rail-side station at Truro, Nova Scotia, on the Intercolonial Line, which became part of Canadian National Railway in 1919. Note the moose-head decor on the walls.

By the early 1900s, the heyday of long-distance rail travel, huge quantities of food were being served in Canadian dining cars, at railside stations and buffets, and in the railway hotels’ dining rooms: more than 700,000 lb (320 t) of beef, 800,000 loaves of bread, 3,500-dozen eggs, 60,000 bushels of potatoes and 100,000 lb (45 t) of tea were consumed annually.¹¹ And many famous railway hotels from the early decades of the last century are still the grand old hotels of Canadian cities today, like the Macdonald in Edmonton, Alberta, still famous for its signature 1960s-era baked Alaska dessert; the Fort Garry in Winnipeg, with its smoked gold-eye fish on the menu; and the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, renowned for its afternoon English ‘high tea’.

Much of the food for these railway company dining outlets came from experimental farms set up by the company and the Canadian federal government, which not only provided supplies for the railway and its hotel kitchens (and even its ocean-going ships, which brought immigrants and tourists to Canada) but showcased the agricultural products of the new country. By the First World War, there were thirteen of these farms in three Canadian provinces, and commissary buildings in major cities along the line held vast supplies of linens, uniforms, tableware, baked goods, and various regional delicacies for the dining-car menus, including hundreds of sides of beef, pork and lamb; thousands of bottles of beer and wine; and cases of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Codfish Steaks à la Canada

This recipe is a version from 1929, served on the Canadian Pacific Railway. If Atlantic cod is not available, any firm white fish, such as halibut, can be used. The original recipe called for 1 cup of double or heavy cream (35 per cent butterfat), which makes this a very rich dish. But single or light cream (10 per cent butterfat) can be substituted successfully.

4 skinless cod steaks, 120–170g (4–6 oz) each

120 ml (½ cup) milk

2 tbsp butter (divided use)

225 g (8 oz) mushrooms, sliced

240 ml (1 cup) single (light) cream

2 egg yolks, beaten

750 g (1½ lb) Yukon Gold potatoes, boiled, peeled and mashed with butter, salt, pepper and milk

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Season the cod steaks lightly with salt and pepper and place in a buttered 20 × 20-cm (8 × 8-in.) glass baking pan. Pour the milk into the pan and dot with 1 tbsp butter. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining 1 tbsp butter in a medium-size frying pan (skillet) and sauté the mushrooms over medium-high heat until golden. Season with salt and pepper, add the cream and continue cooking on medium heat to reduce the liquid by half, to the consistency of double cream. Keep warm over a very low heat. Whisk a small amount of the sauce into the egg yolks, then slowly add this mixture back into the ingredients in the pan, cooking on low heat, stiring occassionally, until the sauce is thickened.

Serve the cod on a bed of mashed potatoes, topped with the mushroom sauce and garnished with parsley.

Serves 4

The years of the First World War added another innovation to Canadian railway dining: the cold-buffet car, where a white-coated chef was on hand to serve various cold meats, salads and desserts displayed under a glass cover. When troops were transported, the menus were similar for men and officers, with the notable difference that officers were offered soup and a salad at lunch and dinner, but those dishes were not included for the enlisted troops – possibly because they were presumed to be only meat-and-potatoes men. At breakfast, ordinary soldiers were given marmalade with their morning toast, while officers had a choice of marmalade or other fruit jams.¹²

Canadian Pacific 1913 steam engine number 1095, ‘The Spirit of Sir John A’, on display at Kingston Station, Ontario, Canada.

As tourism picked up again after the First World War, for most passengers dinner in the dining car was the highlight of their travelling day. However, while reports on earlier train travel had often praised the dining-car service itself, the food had not been quite so highly rated. As early as 1905 Britain’s Financial News had reported that although the sleeping cars and coaches compared favourably with any railway in the world, ‘the catering is the least satisfactory part of the Canadian Pacific Railway transcontinental route.’¹³ Determined to change the situation, the company embarked on a detailed review of the food service, which resulted in strictly controlled and specific instructions to kitchen staff, a precursor to restaurant fast-food practices of today. By 1914 a Canadian Pacific passenger department bulletin read just like a modern-day fast-food pitch:

Travellers on the Canadian Pacific Railway may have noticed that whether they are creeping across the western plains, descending the Pacific slope of the Rockies, circling the pretty curves of Ontario lakes, or skimming along the coast of the Atlantic, in that company’s dining cars, a steak is a steak, chicken Maryland is chicken Maryland, and hodge-podge is hodge-podge [one-pot vegetable stew], the same amount, the same price, and the same way served.¹⁴

The kitchen staff was also trained to strictly comply with the railway’s standard portions for serving: ‘eight olives and eight radishes per person, one full eight-ounce slice of ham with two fried eggs, marmalade or jam served in individual bottles – cream, if desired’.¹⁵ (This strict quality-control philosophy has continued to the present time, where a rack of lamb prepared on the Toronto–Winnipeg run will be cooked in the same way as the rack of lamb on the Winnipeg–Vancouver route.) Standard table service aboard the trains included the railway’s famous water bottles with silver flip-tops (a hygienic improvement on the cork), developed before the First World War; silver fluted flower vases with weighted bottoms to prevent spillage; silver crumb trays and crumb scrapers; and bespoke ironstone or porcelain tableware with various railway patterns that changed throughout the years. Today there are still flowers on the table, white linen tablecloths and napkins, and pure white, elegant Noritake china settings (with no logo); but the silver and silver plate is gone, replaced with less expensive, more serviceable stainless steel.

Bespoke porcelain cup and saucer from the Canadian Pacific collection, West Coast Railway Museum, Squamish, British Columbia.

In the 1950s the changing prairie and mountain vistas outside the train windows were augmented in the dining and lounge cars by large landscape murals, painted by well-known Canadian artists, so the passengers were always surrounded by ‘views’ of the stunning landscape of the regions the trains travelled through. Promises of spectacular scenery complemented by good food and table service kept people travelling by train for a while, even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, despite stiff competition from cars and aeroplanes. But after the Second World War, Canadian governments neglected rail travel, instead spending taxpayer dollars on infrastructure such as roads, bridges and airports.

Habitant Pea Soup

Developed in 1946 by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s head chef Joseph Plante, this recipe was presumably derived from the settlers of French origin living in Quebec, who were known by the French word habitants. Plante’s colleague Stephen Sitarski, a dining car steward, noted that ‘Joe Plante has been on the road for the past six years and has helped to make the Montreal–Quebec City run famous for its excellent cuisine. Thousands of American tourists visit the Ancient Capital each year and almost invariably ask for Joe’s specialty, Habitant Pea Soup.’

500 g (1 lb 2 oz) split (dried) peas

3 l (12 cups) water or meat stock of your choice

250 g (½ lb) salt pork (rind removed), diced

4 celery stalks, diced

1 small turnip, peeled and diced

2 onions, diced

2 carrots, diced

80 ml (⅓ cup) chopped parsley

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Put the peas in a large pot, cover with cold water, bring to a boil, and boil for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover and let stand for 1 hour.

Drain the peas well and return them to the pot. Add the 3 litres of water or stock, salt pork, celery, turnip, onions and carrots. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer gently for 1½ to 2 hours, or until the peas are very tender. Stir in the parsley, along with salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 6

Rare clear view of Mt Robson (elevation 3,954 m/12,972 ft) in the Canadian Rockies, from the glass-topped dome car of the Canadian.

Passenger service on Canada’s transcontinental railways had always been a money-losing proposition. Both the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National railways made their profits from moving freight: coal, wheat, lumber, manufactured goods, iron ore, chemicals and, today, oil. But even though dining-car services had lost money since their inception, they were still considered vital to attracting passengers. For many years the two companies tried to maintain good service, yet the number of passengers continued to dwindle. In the mid-1950s, both companies invested heavily in new rolling stock and made a valiant effort to rebuild passenger service, with Canadian Pacific’s train the Canadian running a thrice-weekly service between Toronto and Vancouver, and Canadian National’s train the Super Continental running the same service on its line between Montreal and Vancouver. In 1955 Canadian Pacific ordered 173 new stainless-steel cars from the Budd Company of Philadelphia – baggage cars, coaches, dining cars, sleeping cars and glass-domed ‘Skyline’ observation-lounge cars.

But despite government subsidies, passenger numbers continued to drop. In February 1977 the federal government formed a new corporation, VIA Rail, to take over passenger service from both the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern railway companies and to form one unified rail service throughout the country. VIA Rail chose the best rolling stock from the two railways, added some new locomotives and began a thrice-weekly service running between Toronto and Vancouver, selecting the more northerly Canadian National Railway route and calling their transcontinental flagship train the Canadian – thus ending the 110-year history of transcontinental passenger service by the legendary ‘nation-builder’ the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Today’s VIA Rail dining cars are still operated in many ways like those of seven decades ago, described in a 1946 copy of Canadian Pacific Facts and Figures:

After the car is equipped and ready for service, a crew is selected, which under normal traffic conditions consists of a steward, chef, second, third, fourth and fifth cooks, and five waiters. The menus for the trip, which have already been made up by the superintendent, are handed to the steward and chef, who place a requisition on the dining car stores for a sufficient quantity of food to prepare all the items on the bill of fare. The supplies are then put up by the storekeeper, like an order in a grocery store, the steward signs for what he receives and is handed an invoice showing the cost of the food supplies. When the car returns from a trip, the supplies on hand are checked, and the cost of food consumed is figured out. The amount of cash received for meals is balanced with the food cost, and the profit or loss for the trip is then known . . . that losses will occur on dining cars is recognized . . . [but] a satisfactory dining car service at comparatively low prices must be given if people are to be encouraged to travel by railways.¹⁶

Today, however, there is only one chef and one helper in each dining car, who prepare and cook all the meals on board. Gone are the three cooks who baked the bread and pastries, and butchered the meats, in the past; bread and pastries are now purchased from high-end suppliers, and cuts of meat are supplied by specialist butchers. There are four waiters instead of five, to serve three meals, each with three sittings every day in high season.

The chef, not the steward, oversees the supplies loaded aboard the train and often stows them as well. The steward takes care of the alcoholic refreshments, placing an advance order with the commissary for the wine, beer and other drinks served in the dining car. Menus are tested and decided upon at the company’s head office in Montreal. From time to time, VIA Rail also hosts competitions among its chefs, who bring their special personal recipes and spend several weeks at the company kitchens in Montreal, vying for a place on the menu. Menu selections are monitored carefully. For example, roast duck, typifying Quebec cuisine, was taken off the menu recently because it did not prove popular. Tickets for passengers who reserve sleeping accommodations on the train include all meals in the dining car, with the exception of alcoholic drinks.¹⁷

Most of the Canadian passengers are gone as well, lured away by inexpensive air fares, the closure of many branch rail lines to communities that are now better served by roads and buses, and an unwillingness to spend four nights and three days travelling the 4,493 km (2,792 mi.) between Toronto, Ontario, in the southeastern part of the country, and Vancouver on the west coast. As one friend told me, ‘an hour in the air, a day on the train’. But train travel now, as compared to the past, isn’t really about arriving at a destination: it’s about the journey itself.

‘Skyline’ car kitchen on the Canadian. One chef prepares meals for the Dayliner and Economy car passengers, from breakfast pancakes with maple syrup to dinner pot roast.

Today, VIA Rail showcases the refurbished stainless-steel cars of the 1955 era, the pride of Canadian train travel for decades. Now they are filled with tourists from other lands: retirees from Manchester, in the United Kingdom, on their second cross-country trip; young honeymooners who have ‘always wanted to go across the country by train’; a Korean postgraduate student ‘seeing the world’ who decides to go next from Winnipeg to Churchill to see the polar bears; twenty or so New Zealanders who came to Vancouver, British Columbia, and are travelling to Jasper, Alberta, in order to experience ‘a white Christmas’, then flying back home from Calgary; retired Americans on an educational tour for senior citizens; a Japanese family – parents and two teenagers; and, at the back of the train, in the newly inaugurated, completely refurbished, ultra-premium ‘Prestige’ cars, several well-heeled visitors from Sweden and Germany. But many Canadians, especially with children, still travel in the less expensive ‘economy’ coaches.

Most of those Canadian passengers still bring their own food. But when a passenger’s packed lunch runs out, one dining option on today’s train is the ‘Skyline’ car, where hot meals and snacks can be found, including pancake-and-bacon breakfasts, burgers, salads and – a popular choice – pot roast for $12. Another, more upmarket, choice is the dining car that serves three-course meals on white tablecloths, with fine china and, until recently, silver-plated cutlery (flatware). Back in 1924, reflecting the tastes of the day and the Canadian prairies that the train traversed, cold sliced buffalo tongue and calves’ sweetbreads were on the lunch menu. Today, quinoa salad and cooked-to-order burgers, made with farmed bison meat, are served in the ‘Skyline’.

Chef preparing the day’s meal in the galley of a VIA Rail train.

Table laid for dinner aboard the Canadian.

During two recent VIA Rail journeys, one between Vancouver and Edson, Alberta, in 2015, and the other between Montreal and Vancouver in 2016, I talked with many passengers and found them uniformly enthusiastic about the service, the scenery and the food. Breakfast choices included the ‘Transcontinental’ (a bacon-and-egg meal), the ‘Chef’s Omelette’ and a daily special, as well as pumpkin pancakes; blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and bacon, ham or sausage; oatmeal with berries; and VIA Rail’s sinfully spectacular French toast with a cheesecake filling, served with berry compote and whipped cream. Competition for the best French toast recipe has a long tradition among railways, from the days when men were the primary travellers and steak, served on all the dining cars, was the most popular main course on the trains. French toast thus became the menu item that each rail company could make its own, to distinguish itself from its competitors.

Lunch brings VIA Rail’s passengers back to the dining car to choose among four main-course dishes listed on the menu. After a starter of soup or salad, the selections might include grilled shrimp and scallops on a bed of greens with raspberry vinaigrette, or a pulled-pork sandwich, or ‘Salmon Rose’, a patty made of Greenland turbot and Atlantic salmon wrapped in a thin salmon fillet. For vegetarians, there might be a so-called ‘fusion’ salad – corn, black beans and edamame with a sesame oil dressing, or a tofu and vegetable stir-fry. Although my travelling companion has coeliac disease (a serious autoimmune disease triggered by eating anything containing wheat, barley, rye or other grains that contain gluten), she was able to easily find gluten-free items on the menu, and if she was not satisfied with those choices, the waiter asked the chef to prepare something suitable for her. One woman I met, a traveller from South Africa, had 22 food sensitivities and was thrilled that the on-board chef prepared meals to suit her needs.

Dining car on the Canadian.

There are two sittings at each meal (three in high season). Dinner also starts with a soup or salad, then proceeds to choices that might include a 300-g (10-oz) veal chop, grilled to order; pan-seared crispy duck breast with a rosemary, maple syrup and soy sauce glaze; portobello mushroom caps stuffed with lentils, feta cheese and sun-dried tomatoes; roasted rack of lamb; or seared tuna steak. In the long tradition of offering dishes that reflect the variety of Canada’s regions, the menu might include pickerel remoulade (a type of perch from the prairie rivers, served with a mayonnaise sauce flavoured with vinegar, mustard, shallots, capers, chopped pickles and sometimes fresh herbs); Canadian lake trout from Nunavut in Canada’s far north; prime rib of beef from Alberta; or sockeye salmon from British Columbia. Desserts are not prepared on board but instead purchased from high-end suppliers in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, and might include sticky toffee pudding, a rich chocolate brownie or Saskatoon (a prairie berry) pie.

Breakfast aboard the Canadian: country-smoked ham, hash browns and a perfectly poached egg.

On Sunday, after a continental breakfast starting at 6 a.m. for early risers, the late morning brunch menu, cooked to order, includes the railway’s ‘Transcontinental’ bacon-and-egg dish, a ‘Chef’s Omelette’, and cheesecake-stuffed French toast, as well as classic eggs Benedict, a ‘fusion’ salad and lobster ravioli. Although the pre-made ravioli are purchased from a quality supplier, the sauce, made with leeks and white wine and studded with lobster pieces, is prepared on board by the chef. And the day ends with perhaps a glass of wine or brandy under the stars, in one of the domed glass-top observation cars on the train. Then passengers return to their turned-down beds, to find their pillows topped with pretty foil-wrapped squares of premium Belgian chocolate from the Montreal chocolatier Galerie au Chocolat.

The experience of riding on VIA Rail’s transcontinental train was summed up by Andy, a German from Heidelberg who had travelled on many of the world’s famous railways and was making his fourth trip across Canada: ‘When I am in Union Station in Toronto,’ he said, ‘and I see those beautiful 1950s stainless-steel cars, hear the shouts, join the crowd waiting to go aboard, I just get shivers. This is a real train. This why I take my holidays here. The Canadian is the most wonderful train, and this is the most wonderful train journey in the world!’¹⁸

Prawn and scallop salad with raspberry vinaigrette, one choice served at lunch aboard the Canadian.

6   KANGAROO, CROCODILE AND CUSTARD: EATING ACROSS THE OUTBACK ON AUSTRALIA’S GHAN RAILWAY

DIANA NOYCE

What a strange memory of onion soup, white linen tablecloths and old English silverware laid perfectly on the fixed tables while the never ending desert entertained us at the windows.¹

June Williams, 1953

For British-born June Williams, travelling on the old Ghan railway in the 1950s was an adventure into unknown territory. Her husband, John, had been given a promotion as a telegraph supervisor at the post office in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory, where the old Ghan service terminated. June eventually made several trips on The Ghan, where the biggest thrill of the day for her was ‘the call’ to the dining car. Passengers were summoned by a softly spoken waiter in a bow-tie for the three daily meals in the dining car, an impressive carriage with a highly polished wooden interior engraved with ‘old English’ designs.

June’s favourite time was breakfast. After being awakened by a steward who brought a cup of tea, she made her way to the dining car. The steam-driven locomotive rocked as it raced along the track under the vast sky of the Australian Outback, with the new sunrise lighting up and warming the desert morning. At the same time as the smell of the ‘bush’ burst through the open window, there was the ‘familiar smell of bacon, eggs and fresh tea filtering through the dining car from the busy kitchen’.² The Ghan has undergone several incarnations in its history, in both a technical and a culinary sense, but the call to the dining car remains the highlight of the day, almost equal to the spectacular landscape.

The story of The Ghan from the very beginning has been about venturing into unknown territory, a story that took a century and a half to compose. In 1861 the Scottish-born explorer John McDouall Stuart (1815–1866) led an expedition (his sixth and final attempt) through the centre of Australia, traversing the land of the Indigenous Australians to the north coast. Stuart’s purpose was to navigate and map the country for white settlement and for the construction of an overland telegraph line. Completed in 1872, the telegraph line extended from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north of the continent, making it possible for pastoralists (ranchers) to take up land leases in the centre of the country. However, it was the discovery in 1887 of alluvial gold in central Australia at Arltunga, about 100 km (62 mi.) east of Alice Springs (formally known as Stuart, after the explorer), that led to a population boom in what is sometimes referred to as The Centre.

Immigrant cameleers believed to be from Afghanistan (although actually from Pakistan) and their camels followed in Stuart’s footsteps, forging their place in Australian history. In driving their camel trains across the desert, the cameleers opened up transport routes to the arid zones, took part in exploration and delivered essential provisions to settlers, contributing to the local population as a whole. Their contribution to the opening up and accessibility of the great mass of inland Australia was enormous and vital. According to the historian Christine Stevens, ‘the very backbone of Australia’s economy, the traditional spheres of pastoralism and mining, owe an immense historical debt to the cameleers and their camels.’³ Their importance is remembered in the naming of the train (‘Ghan’, from Afghan), and in recognition of the cameleers’ pioneering spirit The Ghan’s symbol is a camel and its handler.

Afghan camel train on the Wanaaring Road near Bourke, New South Wales, 1890–1917. Camel trains varied from 20 to 80 camels.

In 1878 work began on the Great Northern Railway to link Port Augusta in South Australia with the present-day Northern Territory capital of Darwin. Following Stuart’s route, a light, single, narrow-gauge, 1,067-mm-wide (3 ft 6-in.) track was laid well to the east of the track the train travels today. However, it was not until 1929 that the southern section of the railway line linking Adelaide in the south with Alice Springs in the centre of Australia was completed. The line then became known as the Central Australian Railway, and the train running on this line became known as The Ghan. It was also at this time that mechanized trains began replacing camel trains. Yet the final link between Alice Springs and Darwin, begun in 2001, was not completed until 2004.

The Ghan’s symbol, ‘The Camel and its Driver’, monument designed by Gabriel Sterk, c. 2007.

Map of Australia showing the old and the new Ghan routes, c. 2008.

There have actually been three versions of the train known as The Ghan: the narrow-gauge train that ran from Adelaide via Oodnadatta to Alice Springs; the train on the standard-gauge, 1,435-mm-wide (4 ft 8 1/2-in.) line from Adelaide via Tarcoola to Alice Springs from 1980 onwards, which firmly established the train as a tourist route; and the modern luxury passenger train that now operates over the completed link between Adelaide and Darwin. Today’s Ghan is operated by the Australian-owned Great Southern Rail (GSR).

The first Ghan train left Adelaide railway station on Sunday 4 August 1929, carrying post, three vans of fresh fruit, a dining car, sleeping cars and over one hundred passengers bound for the remote town of Alice Springs. Two days later, on 6 August, the train’s whistle pierced the silence of the MacDonnell Ranges surrounding Alice Springs. From then on, The Ghan ran fortnightly, but during the 1930s it did not carry a dining car, and passengers had to bring their own food for the trip. By 1940 The Ghan was running three times a week.

It was necessary for the steam-driven locomotives to stop every 200 km (124 mi.) or so to take on water. Since there is very little surface water in outback Australia, the route evolved as it did not only to follow the telegraph line but to track the natural artesian springs that surfaced from the Great Artesian Basin, providing water at regular intervals. Bores also were drilled at many locations to tap into the subterranean water supply.

Commonwealth Railways NM 34, an NM-Class Narrow Gauge Steam Engine, c. 1925–56. National Railway Museum, Port Adelaide, South Australia.

No refreshment rooms were provided at the watering holes, but passengers were allowed to disembark to stretch their legs. Few stations had refreshment rooms either, only the local pub. June Williams recounts that men only, many dressed in hat and suit, as was the custom when away from home, made their way across the red earth to the pub to drink the liquid amber commonly known as beer – a favourite Australian beverage.⁴ However, at Adelaide, Port Augusta and Quorn, meals including alcohol could be obtained at refreshment rooms. At Port Pirie and Marree, only light meals could be purchased.

Servicemen dining at the Adelaide station Cheer-Up Hut, c. 1943.

The old Ghan passed through the township of Finke that sat astride the Finke River, normally a dry riverbed. Police officer Tony Kelly, who was a constable in the Camel Patrol in the 1950s, recounted that the main event of the week was the arrival of The Ghan on its way to and from Alice Springs. The train stopped at Finke for around half an hour to fill the depleted water tanks. At the time The Ghan did not have a bar, so the passengers used the interval to refresh themselves at the local pub. However, the time restraint did not allow passengers enough time to enjoy their beer. When ready to leave, the train would blow its whistle to empty the pub. According to Kelly, at times the train would have to start up and move the carriages to convince reluctant drinkers to leave: ‘It was a hectic half-hour but never any trouble as the customers concentrated on drinking.’⁵

Throughout the Second World War the railway played a major role in national defence. On 19 February 1942 the Japanese attacked Darwin with an air raid equal to the one that had devastated Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The threat to ocean shipping by enemy mines, air raids and submarines meant that freight as well as military personnel and equipment had to be transported by road and rail. In particular, once the Pacific War began, and with the subsequent military build-up in Darwin, The Ghan played an important role in transferring equipment, essential supplies and troops to military camps. The increase in traffic put an immense load on the lightly laid, narrow-gauge, single-line track. The limitations of the line and the necessary speed limits it imposed made travelling on The Ghan at 48 km/h (30 mph) slow and tedious.⁶ At least two troop trains, twice a day, seven days a fortnight, with no fewer than 321 men, left Adelaide for Alice Springs.⁷

Volunteers and a soldier sorting food supplies at the Cheer-Up Hut in Adelaide, c. 1945.

Near Adelaide station, a Cheer-Up Hut run by volunteers provided home-cooked meals for returning and departing servicemen. Unique to South Australia, the Cheer-Up Hut originated during the First World War and was revived on a much larger scale in 1939. Farmers donated whole sheep, fresh fruit, vegetables and eggs. Meat, rabbits, poultry, homemade cakes and pies, dairy products, almonds and dried fruits were donated by the Country Women’s Association (CWA). Established in 1929, the CWA provided relief services for victims of floods, droughts and disasters in rural areas and played a vital role in feeding troops, particularly at railway stations, during the war.⁸ On 4 July (not Thanksgiving), the Cheer-Up Hut always served a rather bland pumpkin pie for the American troops.

Quorn railway station, South Australia. Members of the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion line up at the railway station for their evening meal, holding their mugs and dixies (food containers), c. 1941.

Even though a dining-car service had been added to the passenger train by that time, dining cars were deemed unnecessary on troop trains, and flat carriages to carry military equipment were added to the train instead. Troops were required to carry some personal provisions such as tins of corned beef and fruit to sustain themselves during the journey. However, in February 1941 the army established a Service Corps Canteen at Quorn to provide a meal for troops in transit to Alice Springs. Here the train remained for two hours, allowing enough time for the troops to enjoy a meal but not an alcoholic drink. Army Military Police (MPS) were posted at the doors of all four Quorn pubs to prevent troops from buying alcohol.

The meals for the troops were served in a Sidney Williams Hut (corrugated metal hut) erected by the army in the railway yard. The CWA was called upon to help provide extra luxuries at the meals, such as freshly made sandwiches and scones. This arrangement was short-lived, though, because the Quorn CWA was soon asked by the army to accept full responsibility for serving meals to the troops. In 1942, with increasing troop movement, it was necessary to move to the Memorial Hall on the Quorn Oval playing field to provide sufficient accommodation for the food service. Using ovens, coppers (large boiling vats) and dixies (food containers) provided by the army, the CWA members cooked in an earth-floored shelter attached to the hall. Meals were served at all times, day or night, in all weather. According to a Royal Australian Air Force serviceman, the country women ‘wearing crisp flowered aprons’ were a welcome sight after a hot, seemingly interminable journey. As the men stumbled from their ‘mobile sweat boxes’ with stomachs rumbling, ‘fabulous food from a trestle table set under a marquee greeted the men . . . Food and drink meant to be hot, was piping hot and served, not on service-issue tin plates, but on gleaming white bone china.’⁹

Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) personnel having a meal served from a Wiles Mobile Cooker attached to The Ghan, seen in the background, c. 1944.

Wiles Mobile Cooker, c. 1940.

Baked Snapper

First served on the Indian Pacific Railway in 1919, baked snapper was the signature dish on The Ghan until the 1990s. Paddy Greenfield, who was a cook and piano player on The Ghan in the 1960s and ’70s, regarded baked snapper as a ‘fabulous’ dish and continued to make it at home long after he retired from the railway.

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) snapper fillets (a firm, white- fleshed fish), deboned and skin removed

2 medium onions, finely chopped

2 medium tomatoes, roughly chopped

Salt and pepper

480 ml (2 cups) milk

200 g (2 cups) fresh white breadcrumbs

115 g (8 tbsp) melted butter

Place the fish fillets in a lightly oiled 30 × 20-cm (12 × 8-in.) baking dish. Scatter the onions and tomatoes over the fish. Season with salt and pepper. Pour the milk over the fish, allowing the vegetables to fall between the fish fillets. Mix the breadcrumbs with the melted butter and scatter evenly over the fish. Bake, uncovered, in a moderate oven (190°C/375°F) for 30 minutes.

Cut into 10-cm (4-in.) squares and serve as a main dish, or cut into smaller portions and serve as a first course.

Serves 6 as a main dish or 10 as a first course

Hot meals were served whenever possible, consisting of rissoles, gravy, mashed potatoes and at least two other vegetables in season. Plum pudding garnished with custard was always served for sweets (dessert), and the walls of the hall were hung with precooked plum puddings, wrapped in clean cheesecloth, ready for future use. In hot weather, cold meat, salads and banana custard, with seasonal fruit from members’ own gardens, were served. Fresh bread and butter were always on the table. From September 1944, however, the army attached Australian steam-heated Wiles Mobile Cookers to its troop trains – but the CWA continued to provide eggs, fruit and salads, which were loaded onto the troop trains. According to its 1944 annual report, the Quorn CWA provided 137,000 meals to the troops in that year, and by war’s end 360,000 meals had been served.¹⁰

A weekly passenger service with a dining car ran during the war, but passengers were subject to wartime food rationing. A menu in 1944 advised passengers they were ‘entitled to three courses only in accordance with “Simplification of Meal Order – National Security Regulations, 1942”’.

Although Australia became a food arsenal for the Allies during the Second World War, sending meat, sugar, butter and cheese to Britain and supplying over a million American troops with fruits, vegetables and Australian beef,¹¹ The Ghan patrons were still able to enjoy lamb and beef as well as vegetables and tinned fruit. After the war, and when Australia saw the end of rationing, The Ghan resumed its regular dining service, and from 1956 the food service was in an air-conditioned dining car.

Central Australian Railway dinner menu, The Ghan, c. 1944.

Australia’s gastronomic heritage is largely British. Dishes (with slight variations) from the ‘mother country’ were the backbone of Australian cooking. In 1942 Australians, moreover, earned the dubious honour of the world’s greatest meat-eaters, beating the Americans almost twofold in the meat stakes, with an average consumption of 96 kg (212 lb) a year (an amount that did not include wild foods like rabbit and kangaroo), and they drank more tea than the British, averaging 3.2 kg (7 lb dry weight) per head per year.¹²

A typical Aussie breakfast of the 1950s and ’60s was served on The Ghan. Patrons could choose among fruit compote, rolled oats, wheat biscuits and cornflakes, followed by a choice of bacon and eggs, lamb chops and eggs, or pork sausages or lamb’s fry (liver) and bacon, served with mashed potatoes. Numerous cups of tea were drunk throughout the meal. For dinner, passengers enjoyed onion soup or mixed-vegetable soup, a second course of baked snapper or poached fish served with parsley sauce, and for the main course a choice of roast turkey, sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding, lamb, or pork with apple sauce, served with baked or boiled potatoes, green peas and cauliflower. For dessert they had a choice of apple pie and cream, baked rice custard or wine sponge, followed by fruit, nuts, cheese, and coffee or tea.

Australian Commonwealth Railways dinner menu, The Ghan, c. 1960.

Paddy Greenfield served as a cook on the old Ghan in the 1960s and ’70s. In an interview conducted in 2006, Greenfield recalled that throughout his time on The Ghan the menu did not change much. Menus and recipes remained the same, but a ‘block’ of recipes changed about every six months. Most passengers were regulars and enjoyed the predictability of the menu. In particular, passengers preferred baked snapper for the fish course, followed by roast turkey with savoury seasoning, accompanied by baked potatoes and peas and carrots, with lemon meringue pie for dessert. Passengers were rather annoyed if poached fish, regarded as ‘sloppy’, was substituted for baked snapper, recounted Greenfield. Other menu items included soup, Waldorf salad, lamb and green pea pie, casserole of lamb, and steak and kidney pie.¹³ Greenfield said that to feed a hundred passengers, The Ghan carried 50 kg (110 lb) of turkey (whole birds), 40 kg (88 lb) of pork, 40 kg (88 lb) of lamb and 35 kg (77 lb) of beef for the two-day journey.¹⁴ All meals were included in the return (round-trip) fare, which in 1963 was £31.18s for first-class passengers and £23.1s for second class (in pre-decimal currency days – in today’s money, a$881 and a$636.60 respectively.¹⁵

Plum Pudding

The Country Women’s Association served meals at Quorn railway station to both Australian and American service personnel during the Second World War. Actually made with raisins and currants, plum pudding is traditionally served in Australia at Christmas, but plum pudding with custard sauce was always served to the troops, year-round, for sweets (dessert). The dining hall was even hung with precooked puddings wrapped in cheesecloth, ready for use. Ingredients were limited because of wartime rationing, so this is a less elaborate, more economical plum pudding than that traditionally served at Christmas. However, a good half-cup of rum or brandy is a welcome addition to the recipe. (Note: Country women measured ingredients with a breakfast cup, which is slightly larger than a fancy tea cup.)

2 breakfast cups (280 g/2 cups) self-raising flour

1 breakfast cup (140g/1 cup) brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 breakfast cup (140g/1 cup) currants

1 breakfast cup (140 g/1 cup) dark raisins

1 tbsp melted butter

1 tbsp dripping (rendered meat fat) or substitute

1 egg, beaten

60 ml (¼ cup) boiling water

Pouring custard, to serve

Put the dry ingredients, followed by the melted butter and dripping, in a medium-size ceramic bowl. Add the beaten egg and enough boiling water to form into a stiff dough. Mix well and flatten down. Dust the top of the mixture with flour. Cover with a circular piece of baking (parchment) paper. Place foil over the top of the bowl, overlapping by 5 cm (2 in.). Secure with string. Let stand at room temperature overnight. Next morning, steam the pudding for 5 hours. When ready to serve, steam the pudding for a further 1 hour. Serve with thin pouring custard.

Serves 8

Australians’ tastes in food began to change after the war, however. Overseas travel and the migration of people from war-torn Europe were broadening Australia’s culinary horizons. Although The Ghan’s cuisine was still very much meat-based, some rather ‘exotic’ dishes were making their way onto the Ghan menu in the 1960s: ‘Spanish beef’, made with celery, onions and apples; beef stroganoff, cooked with onions, paprika, white wine and cream, served with rice; ‘Mexican beef’; chicken cacciatore; and beef casserole served on rice.¹⁶ Pasta was still considered a ‘novelty’, according to Constable Kelly.¹⁷ However, Paddy Greenfield served spaghetti bolognaise and risottos to the train’s cabin crew, although those dishes were never on the menu for the passengers. According to train manager Greg Fisher – who has worked on The Ghan for 43 years and at one time worked with Greenfield as a kitchen helper – roasted meats (beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey) served with vegetables in season and followed by lemon meringue pie remained the most popular dinner meal on The Ghan well into the 1980s. For lunch, the leftover meat was served cold with a selection of salads. For breakfast it was meat all over again.¹⁸

Until the 1970s the Stuart Highway – now a paved road that extends almost 3,000 km (1,860 mi.) across the flat expanse of the Australian continent – was just a seldom-used dirt track. So travelling by rail to and from Alice Springs was considered the quickest, fastest and safest way, despite the condition of the railway line. The Ghan provided – as it does today – a freight car to carry passengers’ automobiles for use at their destination. Unlike today, however, passengers before the 1980s were not generally tourists but Outback residents who travelled to work at Outback stations (ranches), or to Adelaide for business or medical appointments or to visit family. For many people from ‘the bush’, Ghan trips were considered ‘one of the best in Australia’.¹⁹ As Carl Petering remarked when travelling on The Ghan with his family in 1955, although ‘the dust would swirl in and out [of the carriage], The Ghan was a mobile oasis, like heaven’.²⁰ Nevertheless, travelling on the original Ghan line was not always bliss.

The interior of Australia is a harsh and unforgiving land, a landscape of extremes. Train derailments occurred due to extreme high temperatures that buckled the line, as well as termite damage to the wooden sleepers (railroad ties). Flash flooding occurred at times when the normally parched riverbeds spilled out onto the low-lying desert plains, frequently washing away the track. Sand drifting across the line, as well as dust storms and fires, were also some of the hazards that passengers and crew encountered. Therefore, The Ghan was often an irregular service with prolonged delays – sometimes up to two weeks. For passengers travelling in the summer months in a non-air-conditioned train, any delay was uncomfortable.

Roast Rack of Lamb

This recipe was inspired by Joseph Cobiac, senior Chef de Partie for Great Southern Rail. The rack of lamb is prepared with mustard and Australian bush dukkah, a nut and herb mixture made from native Australian bush ingredients, including saltbush. The sprawling blue-grey saltbush shrub is a common sight across large swathes of Australia’s inland and can be seen from The Ghan.

2 racks of lamb (500 g/1 lb 2 oz each)

4 tbsp Dijon mustard

4 heaped tbsp of Australian bush dukkah (a combination of ground macadamia nuts, wattleseed, lemon myrtle and crushed salt-bush leaves), or any preferred dukkah mixture

Sear the lamb on a griddle over a high heat, then rub the mustard over the meat. Sprinkle the dukkah over the mustard. Roast the lamb in a preheated oven at 180°C (350°F) for 20 minutes, until medium-rare.

Let the lamb rest on a serving plate for 10 minutes, then cut each rack of lamb into three or four cutlets. Serve with a red onion tarte tatin (see p. 164), green pea purée and red wine jus (made with either beef or veal stock, red wine, onions and garlic, brown sugar and butter, reduced over high heat).

Makes 3 or 4 cutlets per person

In the event of delays, The Ghan carried ‘tin rations’ – tins of corned beef, baked beans, vegetables and fruits – as well as bags of potatoes, cabbages and carrots, kept in a non-refrigerated tin-lined ‘cool room’. At times the tin rations ran out, and food had to be obtained from the local surroundings. Constable Kelly recounted a time when the Finke River flooded. ‘We ran a herd of some 300 goats, which provided us with both milk and meat. On one occasion when The Ghan’s stores were running low, we provided a goat for a barbecue for the passengers. They said they had never tasted better lamb.’²¹ (At the time, many Australians were unfamiliar with the taste of goat.) When The Ghan was held up for any prolonged period it was not unusual for the local cattle station to bring a slaughtered animal to the stranded train to feed passengers and crew. Moreover, the train always carried rifles, and in the event of food shortages wild goats and brush-turkeys were sometimes shot to feed the passengers. Whenever there were serious delays, provisions such as meat, bread and potatoes were dropped from a light plane. It was a great advantage, though, if the train was held up near one of the sidings that featured a pub, like at William Creek. The train at one time was stranded for ten days at William Creek, in South Australia, and between the passengers and crew the pub was drunk dry.²²

Great Southern Rail certificate given to passengers aboard the ‘legendary’ Ghan who travelled in the inaugural year, c. 2004.

The locomotive crew were required to carry their own food, including emergency rations. Long-time train driver Keith Eastern, who drove The Ghan for 37 years from 1937 to 1974, recounted in his book The Ghan and the Men that Worked the Line the provisions required for the journey:

We all carried a big tucker [food] box, about 2 feet × 1½ feet × 1½ feet deep [61 cm × 46 cm × 46 cm], made of galvanised iron with a small shelf at one end to carry the fork, knife and spoon, salt and pepper and other small things. We carried it over our shoulder with a leather strap.

When advice notes [notice to drive the train] arrived, our wives, boarding house or hotel staff would pack our tucker box. The contents of the tucker box were 2 loaves of bread, tea, sugar, half a pound of butter (wrapped in a piece of cheese cloth to keep it cool), tomato sauce, pickles, jar of beetroot, jam, condensed milk, usually cooked leg of lamb or beef, a couple of pounds of steaks or chops and a few eggs. Then of course there was always the tin ration, in case of delay, derailment, washaways etc. These would consist of tinned corned beef; baked beans and tinned fruit etc. Besides the above we would usually have a vegetable bag of spuds [potatoes], cabbage, carrots etc. We also had a supply of cakes and biscuits that had been cooked by the family or boarding house staff before leaving. When that was gone you just ‘pulled the belt’.²³

When delays due to flooding and derailment became untenable, and when the new, standard-gauge track was being planned, surveyors steered well clear of the old route. The earlier introduction (in 1958) of new diesel-electric locomotives to replace the rather worn-out old steam locomotives made the change in route possible. There was now no need for water to run the train, allowing the line to take the much drier, 839-km (521-mi.) route from Tarcoola to Alice Springs. In 1980 the old Ghan rail track was finally abandoned in favour of the new standard-gauge rail line built with termite-proof concrete sleepers. The track was laid farther to the west to mitigate the flooding problems encountered in the Lake Eyre Basin. When the old Ghan train ceased running, it was replaced by the now ‘legendary’ Ghan.

It was not until early 2004, however, that the train line extended all the way to Darwin, finally linking the city by rail to the rest of the continent and closing a major transportation gap. The completion of this long-awaited line extension meant that this line would become the only great north–south transcontinental journey by train in Australia. The Ghan embarked on its inaugural 2,979-km (1,851-mi.) transcontinental journey on 1 February 2004, pulling into Darwin on 3 February.

The new luxury Ghan travels for three days and two nights at an average speed of 85 km/h (53 mph), but can travel as fast as 115 km/h (71 mph). Two diesel-electric locomotives are used, but only one is actually required to move the train; the second provides back-up in case the first breaks down in the desert. The locomotive pulls, on average, thirty passenger cars, along with crew quarters, four dining cars, four lounges, and power carriages. When I travelled on The Ghan in 2015, the train was almost a kilometre (⅔ mile) long. Guests paid from A$1,709 in Gold class to a$3,599 in Platinum class depending on the season, a price that included all food and drink as well as off-train excursions in Alice Springs and Katherine.

Dinner menu from The Ghan featuring produce from various food regions in Australia, c. 2015.

Between August and October, Great Southern Rail also offers a Ghan Expedition for four days and three nights from Darwin to Adelaide via Coober Pedy, an opal-mining town in South Australia. Due to the intense heat, 90 per cent of Coober Pedy residents, many of whom are of Greek descent, reside in underground ‘dugouts’. Passengers are served Greek cuisine for lunch in an underground opal mine. In Alice Springs, passengers experience an outback bush barbecue set in a strikingly lit quarry, where they dine on steak, salad, damper (bread) and homemade apple pie. The Ghan Expedition’s Platinum service costs a$4,299 per person, and its Gold service is a$3,199 per person.

Red Onion Tarte Tatin

This red onion tarte tatin, inspired by Joseph Cobiac, senior Chef de Partie of Great Southern Rail, is a savoury version of the classic French tarte tatin.

2 large red onions, peeled

30 g (2 tbsp) butter

1 tsp fine white sugar

2 tbsp red wine vinegar

1 tsp chopped fresh thyme

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 (375-g/12-oz) packet of all-butter puff pastry

1 egg yolk

2 tsp milk

Trim the tops and bottoms off the onions and slice each onion crosswise into three thick rounds. Heat the butter and sugar together in a saucepan until sugar is dissolved. Add the red wine vinegar, thyme, salt and pepper, and continue to stir over heat for a few minutes.

Line a baking pan with baking (parchment) paper and place the six onion rounds in a single layer in the pan. Brush the onion pieces with the butter mixture. Cover the onions with baking paper to prevent sticking, then cover the tray tightly with foil. Bake in a preheated oven at 170°C (340°F) for 40 minutes or until soft. Remove from the oven, remove the baking paper and foil, and leave to cool completely.

Cut the pastry into six circular pieces, each 2 cm (1 in.) larger in diameter than the onion rings. Place a pastry piece over each onion round, tucking in the edges all around. Cut a small ‘X’ in the top of each pastry so the steam can escape. Whisk the egg yolk with the milk in a small bowl, and brush the pastry with this egg wash. Bake in a preheated oven at 220°C (425°F) until the pastry is golden-brown.

Remove the tarts from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes. To serve, use an egg turner to carefully flip the pastries over so that the pastry is on the bottom and the onion on top.

Serves 6

Preparing a meal in The Ghan’s galley (kitchen car), c. 2015.

In linking the cities of Adelaide and Darwin at opposite ends of Australia, The Ghan passes beneath the vast cobalt-blue sky of the diverse Australian landscape – the temperate, rolling pastoral lands of South Australia merging into rugged mallee scrub; the jagged, 350-million-year-old MacDonnell Ranges; the vast, flat, rusty-red landscape of the desert with its majestic termite mounds; and the tropical greens of Katherine and Darwin. In that region, often referred to as the Top End, the train passes tropical fruit plantations, mangrove swamps, and little rivers on their way to the Timor Sea. Along the way, passengers might spot a lonely cow or one of the many feral camels that roam the Outback – descendants of the camels set free in the 1920s by the Afghan cameleers. At sunset, when the sky is at its tangerine best, kangaroos hop in and out of view.

Once the sun has set, it is time for dinner. Canapés are served in the ‘Outback Explorer Lounge’, followed by the call to the dining car. Entering the ‘Queen Adelaide’ dining car, like June Williams sixty-odd years before, I was struck by its ornate, old-world charm. The dining car seats 48 passengers at a total of six staggered meal times, for breakfast, three-course lunch and four-course dinner. Passengers can dine alone if they prefer, but central to any meal is the company of others. Most people choose the camaraderie of newfound travelling companions who share a passion for travel and discovery.

Wattleseed rotolo, c. 2015.

Joseph Cobiac, senior Chef de Partie, and his team of 24 chefs (total) who work for Great Southern Rail have turned an adventure through the heart of the continent into an adventure of the palate. Gone is the ‘roast’ of the day. Instead, fresh produce from specific Australian regions, as well as wines from designated wine districts, take centre stage on The Ghan’s menus, acknowledging Australia’s climatic variations and diverse food regions. In particular, Cobiac has recently turned the spotlight on native ingredients, the unique flora and fauna that have nourished Aboriginal Australians for many thousands of years but until now were largely ignored by European Australians. Indigenous flavours are now woven through every menu. Today’s Ghan has become one long degustation journey.

The movable feast prepared in the train’s narrow galley is cooked by two hard-working on-board chefs. Since there is limited storage and fridge space on The Ghan and only one cooktop, one grill and two ovens, sauces are therefore pre-made to GSR recipes, and portions are measured and pre-cut, including potatoes that are peeled and ready to cook. Everything else is prepared fresh, including the herbs.²⁴

The menus give passengers the opportunity to sample the flavours of South Australia’s various food regions: seafood from South Australian waters, cheeses from the Fleurieu Peninsula or Limestone Coast and cured meats from the Barossa region. Among the three main dishes for lunch and dinner (one of which is always vegetarian) could be Top End saltwater barramundi or freshwater crocodile sausages, Angus beef or lamb from South Australia’s pastoral area, or Nullarbor Plains kangaroo. Saltbush, a common desert plant used extensively by Indigenous Australians to make damper, is now an ingredient in the herb and nut mixture dukkah and in brioche. Although traditional ‘roasts’ are no longer on the menu, lemon meringue pie remains a favourite dessert. Other desserts include a cake made with passionfruit, lemon aspen (a native fruit) and coconut, served with passionfruit coulis, or a wattleseed and meringue ‘rotolo’ served with macerated strawberries and riberry (a native berry) coulis. Breakfasts and brunch are equally appealing: fruit salad composed of tropical fruits and native fruits from Australia’s southern coast, crêpes topped with wild berry salsa and cream, Barossa ham, and, for a special indulgence, Belgian chocolate waffle with strawberries, chocolate sauce and double (heavy) cream. All meals are complemented by Australian wines from a variety of wine districts, and the staff are expert in helping passengers match wines with their meals.

The Ghan travelling through the MacDonnell Ranges to Alice Springs in Central Australia, c. 2009.

Each continent has its legendary railways, and the tales surrounding their construction and history rank among the great stories of the modern era. The Ghan is Australia’s great story. Among all the celebrated trains of the world that traverse continents, linking cities at opposite ends of a land mass, The Ghan is unique: it is the only north–south transcontinental railway that passes through the iconic Australian Outback.²⁵ The Ghan in its century-and-a-half history has evolved from a steam-driven, non-air-conditioned train serving the ‘roast of the day’ to one long luxury ‘degustation journey’ showcasing Australia’s diverse and regionally inspired cuisine.

Enjoying lunch in the ‘Queen Adelaide’ dining car on The Ghan.

Sunset and the evening descending upon the ‘Queen Adelaide’ dining car.

Shinkansen (‘Bullet Train’) at Hakata Station in Fukuoka, Japan, 2011.

7   FAST FOOD: EATING WITHIN THE BOX ON JAPAN’S ‘BULLET TRAIN’

MERRY WHITE

Although dining-car service on Japan’s trains ended in 1970, some of the best food you can eat in Japan is on your pull-down tray as you rush, at a top speed of about 320 km/h (200 mph), through the countryside on the famous ‘Bullet Train’.

The Shinkansen, Japan’s super-speed train, began operating more than half a century ago, in 1964. Nearly a hundred years earlier, railways had been established in Japan to convey people, goods and ideas of the modern nation-state, as well as ideas of what the modern person could be. But the association of good food and train travel did not take the same track as elsewhere in the world. What people ate on the train, in the constantly changing variety of ekiben (or ekibentō), ‘station lunchboxes’, demonstrated the persistence of the local and the importance of the seasonal in Japanese foodways. Today, eating on the modern, nationally unifying railway system, instead of representing that unity as ‘Japan’, actually epitomizes and celebrates the tastes of different localities, the preservation of the past and the enormous diversity of Japan.

After almost three hundred years of relative seclusion, revelations of industrial and social development in the rest of the world woke up Japan’s leaders to the need to move quickly to catch up. The Meiji Period (1868–1912) brought the shock of foreign ideas and technologies, motivating Japan to ‘bootstrap’ itself into the modern world. The ‘foreign’, embodied in modern forms of transportation, looked powerful: when the first train appeared in Japan in 1872, it was the emblem of industrial modernity and represented the speed needed for Japan to catch up with the West. Hurtling along iron tracks, trains took people quickly from known to unknown places. The very anonymity of the spaces through which people hurtled made the train modern. And its passengers became part of Japan’s great project of national modernization, which seemed to supersede the local, the regions whose distinct characteristics were blurred by speed and which simply provided land for the tracks along which the trains sped.

The first train in Japan ran between Shimbashi and Yokohama, two places of novelty for the Japanese at the turn of the twentieth century. Shimbashi is the area around what is now called Ginza in Tokyo. By 1905 that area housed many ‘Western’ types of businesses, including dry-goods stores, cafés and restaurants. Cafés, like trains, introduced novel foods and experiences to urban dwellers, from spaghetti to sponge cakes.

In addition to transporting passengers, the trains also carried the new print media – magazines and newspapers – from region to region and from the new metropolis of Tokyo to the hinterlands, providing windows on to the novelties appearing in fashion and furnishings, work and play – even if those goods and activities themselves (such as sitting in urban cafés) were unavailable to most people beyond Tokyo. And the connection to Yokohama harbour made it possible for new goods, and new people, to come to Tokyo as well. As a result a new urban consumer society grew up: families now wanted what they saw in newspapers and magazines: bobbed hair and flapper dresses, dining tables, electricity, bicycles – and the chance to ride the trains.

However, modernity came to Japan differently from in the West, and developed in different ways because of Japan’s leaders, who cherry-picked from the options presented by ‘advanced’ Western nations in a distinctly Japanese approach of wakon yōsai: Western technology, Eastern spirit. Modern Japan was going to be created Japanese, not Western. And the new kind of Japanese person, speeding along the rails, was going to be a modern person, but not a Western one.

The experiences of industrialization in Japan were uneven. For example, poorly paid industrial workers would seldom ride the trains. However, for those who could afford to travel by rail, trains created experiences of diversity, carrying people from different areas of the country who wouldn’t ordinarily bump up against each other. The novelty of train travel included the novelty of learning other people’s ways. And by the 1920s, technologies and media such as radio would also help homogenize some aspects of Japanese society, while still allowing for recognition of distinctions.

However, other differences were maintained on trains, especially socio-economic class. Initially there were three classes of travel: first, second and third, depending on one’s ability to pay. The earliest trains did not have seats at all, but beginning in 1875 zabuton (floor cushions) were made available to passengers. Trains were not luxurious, providing only the luxury of speed relative to other forms of transportation at the time.

At first, foods and drinks were not provided on trains, in part because the passenger carriages were smoky from the steam engines that pulled them and uncomfortable to ride in – for sitting, let alone eating. Historians disagree about where the first train-specific, station-provided food was prepared. But we do know that on 16 July 1885, the Shirokiya Inn in Utsunomiya, a town in Tochigi Prefecture about 127 km (79 mi.) north of Tokyo, began to provide snack foods to travellers, chiefly onigiri (rice balls), a popular travel, picnic and festival food. The onigiri were flavoured with black sesame seeds, filled with umeboshi (pickled plum) and wrapped with takuan (pickled daikon radish) in a bamboo leaf, and were priced at 5 sen (approximately 2.5 U.S. cents at the time). Another contender for seller of the ‘first ekiben’, or train-station food, was Kumagaya Station, about 60 km (37 mi.) north of Tokyo, in 1883 or 1884. There, it is said, sushi and bread (not served together) were sold to passengers.

Two varieties of onigiri, rice balls with seasonings, a typical train snack.

A full ekiben was sold in 1888 at Himeji Station, 620 km (385 mi.) southwest of Tokyo. This box of labour-intensive and high-quality foods held grilled tai (sea bream), chicken, kamaboko (fish paste), datemaki (a sweet rolled omelette), kinton (candied sweet potato and chestnut), udo (spikenard or ‘Japanese asparagus’), yuri (lily bud) and narazuke (vegetables pickled in the style of the town of Nara). Such impressive ekiben quickly proliferated. Oyama Station, 83 km (52 mi.) north of Tokyo, sold ekiben that contained fried tofu and egg in addition to rice and pickles. By the end of the 1880s, luxurious boxes (not just bamboo leaf-wrapped foods) available at Utsunomiya Station offered tamagoyaki (rolled omelette), kamaboko, shiitake mushrooms, kanpyō gourd, gobō (burdock root), kuromame (black beans), takuan (pickled daikon) and misozuke, or miso-pickled cucumbers. These were supplemented by fried and slightly pickled ayu (sweetfish) in season. Prices ranged from the very cheap onigiri-and-pickle meal for 5 sen, to 30 sen (about 15 U.S. cents) for a full meal. The period from the late 1880s to the end of the nineteenth century is referred to as the first ‘golden age’ of ekiben.

Ekiben is thus a specialized form of the bentō, a box of prepared food usually made for one person and enclosed in a container that is portable, convenient and appropriate for high-speed travel. The foods in an ekiben make a complete meal. As in other Japanese meals, all elements of the meal are presented together (except for the formal kaiseki meal, which is served in courses before a traditional tea ceremony). Ekiben have to display the same principles of variety in colour, shape, texture, aroma and flavour as a formal meal provides – and presentation, the importance of a well-designed box, is paramount. The visual is most important: me de taberu, to eat with your eyes, is a basic tenet of Japanese food preparation.

The first foods sold to eat on trains were not ‘Western’, although boxed sandwiches soon became popular. These sandwich boxes, first sold in 1899 at Ōfuna Station, 60 km (37 mi.) south of Tokyo, were called seiyō bentō, or ‘Western boxes’, and contained examples of the hybridizations of Western foods adapted into Japanese cuisine. The Ōfuna sandwich box had two layers: the top was bread and butter, and the bottom had omelette, ham, roast beef and pickles, for the passenger to assemble as sandwiches. It was rather pricey for the day: 35 sen (about 17 U.S. cents). Sandwich bread, with the crusts cut off, might also surround fried pork or potato cutlets, or even noodles.

Tsukemono (Pickled Vegetables)

Made from a wide variety of ingredients that reflect both locality and season, pickles accompany every Japanese meal. Many are ‘quick pickles’, as in this recipe, which can be eaten the same day they are made. The recipe combines vegetables of different colours to produce a dish that is visually attractive as well as refreshing in taste.

1 large daikon, peeled

3 large carrots, peeled

2 English cucumbers (or 4 or 5 smaller Japanese cucumbers), peeled in strips to leave on some of the green skin

2 tbsp sea salt (divided use)

60 ml (¼ cup) rice wine vinegar

1 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sesame oil

2 tbsp black sesame seeds, toasted in dry pan, for garnish

Cut the daikon and carrots into small, narrow sticks about 5 cm (2 in.) long. Place in a colander and toss with 1 tbsp sea salt. Set over a bowl to drain the liquid, about 40 minutes. If using English cucumbers, cut in half and scoop out the seedy centre. Cut the cucumbers into 5-cm (2-in.) pieces like the daikon and carrots. Salt with the remaining 1 tbsp of sea salt and set aside to drain in another colander, about 20 minutes.

Simmer the vinegar, sugar and 1 tsp salt in a small saucepan until the sugar dissolves. Add the sesame oil. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

Rinse all the vegetables to remove the excess salt, drain well, and dry the vegetables on paper towels. Toss with the vinegar mixture in a glass bowl and set aside at room temperature for 3 hours before serving.

These pickles are even better the next day (and can be refrigerated for up to 4 days). Serve cold or at room temperature, sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Makes about 6 servings (2 tbsp each)

In the early era of Japanese trains, these station-bought foods were so popular and the sellers so competitive that in 1894 the Meiji government established a set of rules for the sale of ekiben among the regulations for all business conducted in railway stations, which codified standards for safety, pricing and such matters as the ekiben seller’s uniform.¹ They also pre-dated and presaged the beginning of a national railway system, which began in 1906 and would not be dissolved until privatization occurred in 1987.

By 1899, dining cars had also been introduced, but for first- and second-class passengers only. It was thought that ‘the poor manners of many third-class passengers would offend first- and second-class passengers.’² As a newly emerging middle class appeared in the late nineteenth century, these narikin (new rich) – whose manners were not approved of by older elites – appeared in the dining cars, and eventually, by 1901, the class system of trains disappeared in the dining cars, with even third-class passengers able to join the tables if they could afford the meals. Dining cars served mostly Western fare, which was actually easier to provide than Japanese food, which needed more preparation space. Meals were provided by a single company, Nippon Shokudo, a catering company contracted to the railway whose monopoly on train food was not broken until 1953.

By the 1920s, sometimes called the ‘second golden age’ of ekiben, Japanese foods were made with Western ingredients, just as Western foods were made with Japanese ingredients. Japanese sandouitchi (sandwiches) contained such fillings as ham and cheese, or vinegared egg salad (prepared with Kewpie-brand mayonnaise, which is made with rice vinegar and is lighter than Western mayonnaise), or sometimes even strawberries. By the end of the first decade of the 1900s, some sweet snacks were also available, including anpan, a steamed bread confection stuffed with sweetened adzuki (red bean) paste. Tea was sold from carts on the platform or on the train, as was sweetened ‘coffee milk’ in glass bottles.

By the 1920s and ’30s, industrialization had filled cities with new populations of workers from the countryside. Those workers, when they could afford to, travelled by train for midsummer or New Year’s holidays to their furusato, or old country home, as did urban middle-class people who wanted to flee the cities for a newly romanticized ‘natural’ experience in the countryside. The ekiben business grew, and ‘rustic’ lunchboxes with local and seasonal ingredients became desirable objects of nostalgic consumption: in autumn, a meshi box with matsutake mushrooms, and in spring a salted-cherry-blossom-infused meal would sell out. The desire for narazuke pickles in a box purchased at Nara station, or morizuke pickles in a box bought in Nagoya, made you a connoisseur.

With food shortages during the Second World War and the decrease in rail travel in post-war Japan, the sale of ekiben declined. But by 1952 travel on trains began to pick up, and so did the availability of ekiben, although post-war rationing continued to limit the foods that might be contained in the box. In homes, schools and ekiben, early post-war rations included more bread than rice – partly because the U.S. shipped wheat to Japan in an Occupation effort to revitalize American farming – but by 1953 rice reappeared as a regular part of home meals and ekiben. However, bread remained part of the school lunch programme as the staple carbohydrate until the twenty-first century.

Hōrensō ōhitashi (Seasoned Spinach)

Spinach and other greens are often used as condiments and side dishes, lightly cooked to retain their colour and tossed in a variety of soy and sesame dressings.

2 tbsp Japanese soy sauce

2 tbsp Japanese mirin (sweet rice wine)

1 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

2 tbsp white sesame seeds, toasted in a dry frying pan

500 g (1 lb 2 oz) fresh spinach, or 2 boxes (350 g/12 oz each) frozen leaf spinach

Simmer the soy sauce, mirin, sugar and salt together in a small saucepan for 3 minutes. Set aside. Grind the sesame seeds by hand with a mortar and pestle (or Japanese suribachi and surikogi), and set aside. Remove any fibrous stalks from the fresh spinach and steam for 3 minutes to wilt the leaves. (Or cook the frozen spinach according to package directions.) Let cool to room temperature.

Squeeze the water out of the spinach leaves by hand, pressing and rolling the damp spinach together into a cylindrical shape. Slice crosswise into 5-cm (2-in.) pieces and set in the bento box or a plate. Drizzle the sauce over the spinach portions and sprinkle with the freshly ground sesame seeds.

Makes 5 bento-size portions

Japanese foods – including the sandwiches that by the 1950s were considered ‘Japanese’ – dominated railway eating experiences. Dining cars, with their Western (or at least ‘Westernized’) foods, had appeared later than the ekiben and never had the impact or popularity of the boxed lunch. For one thing, the dining cars could not offer the variety, or the local cachet, of the ekiben foods prepared at each station.

The Shinkansen, or ‘Bullet Train’, which became famous worldwide, was launched in the mid-1960s, at the time of the ‘economic miracle’ when Japan had bootstrapped itself out of post-war reconstruction and into full participation in the world economy. The product of long planning from well before the Second World War, the Shinkansen started as a futuristic scheme aimed at promoting economic development as well as tying Japan to its colonies in Asia – an ambitious project that included a tunnel to Korea and then to Beijing, connecting with the Trans-Siberian Railway and allowing for more direct Japanese colonial control in key parts of Asia. The goal of speed was ultimately accomplished by constant tweaking of the technologies as well as the creation of special tracks in Japan designed for, and dedicated to, high-speed trains; in some cases special stations were built, too. (Shinkansen means ‘new trunk line’, but the nickname ‘Bullet Train’ was given to the project as far back as the 1930s.)

Map of the Shinkansen network, 2004–10.

After 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics and the completion of the Shinkansen, the train’s speed meant that travellers had less need for elaborate full meals. The trip from Tokyo to Osaka took less than three hours. Although initially there were dining cars on the trains, they were soon discontinued and instead a buffet car provided an on-train snack service. At first there was also a cafeteria line and tables in the buffet cars, but these caused a distinct problem on the Tōkaidō line between Tokyo and Osaka: the short partitions considered necessary to provide at least the illusion of privacy while eating in the buffet car also blocked the view of Mount Fuji from the train. The partitions soon came down, and the Japanese embarrassment of eating in public view was tolerated in favour of access to the most important sight on the trip. Today, too, the prized seats on the Tōkaidō trains are those with Mount Fuji views: on the right going west and on the left going east.

On the Tōkaidō line, most people bought nigirimeshi (similar to onigiri) with takuan pickles, wrapped in bamboo, similar to the first onigiri served at Utsunomiya in the mid-1880s. The workers who built the Tōkaidō line, no longer employed after the line was completed, started selling nigirimeshi boxes along the route they had built. Passengers who could not afford to eat in the earlier dining cars bought these lunchboxes, but so did others – even those who were planning to have meals at their destinations. Gradually, ekiben became the desired meal, not the second-best, as travel for the sake of tasting regional specialities became more developed.

Dining cars, still available on other lines, disappeared altogether by 1970 in the final crisis faced by Japan National Railways, which was a government-owned line at the time. Almost all lines but the Shinkansen were losing money. With decentralization and privatization in 1987, the regional private companies now running the trains relied on passengers to bring their own food on board. Cart sales at the seats provided passengers with snacks and sometimes with ekiben bought at stops along the way for sale on board. Kishaben, or ‘train bento’, sold on trains, were less varied than the ekiben or ‘station bento’. On the Kodama, the slowest Shinkansen trains, ‘café cars’ with ‘service corners’ where kishaben could be bought began replacing the buffet cars in the 1970s, although even these café cars were eventually replaced with vending machines offering only drinks.

Tabi no makunouchi, one of the most prevalent styles of bento, containing rice and a variety of side dishes depending on region and season.

There was a brief spate of onboard luxury again in the late 1980s, when the faster Shinkansen trains, the Hikari, sometimes had upper decks where foods were available for purchase. One, the western Hikari, even had a cinema car, as trains tried to compete with the falling ticket prices of airlines. Today there are additional seating options, such as ‘office seats’ with outlets for computers, and ‘silent cars’ where unnecessary noises, such as mobile phone conversations, are kept to a minimum. On the newer lines to Hokkaido, the northern-most island of Japan, there are showers and sleeping cars as well. Aiming to serve the rising number of female passengers, some trains also have women’s ‘powder rooms’ with three mirrored walls.

In 1997 the fastest Shinkansen train at the time, the Nozomi, reached the speed of 270 km/h (167 mph), travelling between Tokyo and Kyoto in two hours and twenty minutes. At such speeds, passengers did not really need a meal because they reached their destination so rapidly. Despite the speed of the journey, however, passengers wanted the ekiben as an important part of their travel experience – and went out of their way to find the very best boxed meal to take onto the train. Ekiben became the culinary reason to travel.

From the mid-1950s to the present day, ekiben have more than revived: they are now a prime food experience in Japan. In 1953, as a promotion for local foods, the first ekiben festival was held at Takashimaya, the largest department store in Osaka. Soon other department stores followed: the Ueno store in Tokyo in 1958, and Yokohama’s Takashimaya in 1960. These festivals, now held annually, involve hundreds of ekiben makers and are destinations for food lovers, who buy these boxes as ‘souvenirs’ of the food specialities of other places (making the ekiben a form of ‘virtual travel’) and as takeaway meals to be eaten at the office or at home.

Ekiben matsuri (ekiben festival), Tokyo Station, with a wall of model ekiben displaying a small portion of the many foods for sale at this store inside the station. Ekiben from every part of Japan are available, organized by region and available by season. Several large department stores also run seasonal ekiben matsuri in their stores.

Ekiben are portable destinations in themselves, public cultural icons, to such an extent that people travelling through train stations, if only on their way to a suburban stop or simply passing through to the other side of the station, will often pick up an ekiben to take home. In Tokyo, at Tokyo Station, there is even a permanent ekiben matsuri, or ‘ekiben festival’, where the station foods of many regions can be bought. Passengers who arrive back from somewhere other than the region where they were supposed to have travelled might even attempt to provide verisimilitude to their stories by buying the box of that region to bring home as a souvenir of where they should have been. It is also possible to buy ekiben online, to be delivered to one’s home or workplace. The ekiben has become so inevitably part of a voyage that now at airports soraben (sky bento) are sold to take on board, whether or not a meal is served by the airline on the flight.

While the term ekiben refers specifically to train-station meal boxes, the more general category of bento includes boxed meals sold at other venues, too. Bento have long been provided for many public and private events, such as sumo tournaments or traditional theatrical events like Kabuki or Noh performances. Bento customs are regional – sumo matches in Osaka offer quite different foods from those available in Tokyo – and might have to adhere to certain customary rules (such as, for sumo, not including the meat of any four-legged animal, since being on all fours, with hands and feet on the ground on the same time, would be defeat for a wrestler). Bento also appear at cherry-blossom viewing time, for eating under the flowering trees accompanied by large amounts of alcohol – although recently, younger people’s boxes are sometimes bought from KFC or McDonald’s, and even Starbucks sells ‘to-go’ boxes for such events. Having a bento, in any case, is never a second-best eating experience but a preferred option.

Candied Kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin)

Use only a Japanese kabocha pumpkin (a dense Asian winter squash with a green peel), sold in most Asian supermarkets in the UK and the U.S. Standard large orange pumpkins are too watery.

1 small kabocha (about 1 kg/2 lb 3 oz)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp sugar

Sea salt, for garnish

Dried chilli flakes (medium-hot), for garnish

Deseed and partially peel the kabocha, leaving on several 2.5-cm (1-in.) stripes of the edible green rind around the pumpkin for colour. Cut into 5-cm (2-in.) chunks. Boil until the tip of a sharp knife can pierce the centre of each piece; do not overcook. Drain and cool to room temperature.

Heat the oil in a heavy frying pan (skillet) and melt the sugar in it until it bubbles. Toss the kabocha pieces in it, caramelizing them on at least two sides. Remove the kabocha pieces from the pan. Serve at room temperature, sprinkled with sea salt and chilli flakes.

Makes 6 servings (2 or 3 chunks each)

School lunch bento, made by mothers for their children, are also attractive, healthy and tasty. Begun the night before or, often, at dawn, with the making of chicken or fish, and rice for onigiri, the assembly is as important as the ingredients. As one child said, ‘My lunchbox is like a doll’s house with good things in every room.’³ Paying attention to what your child might like to see – a bright red cherry tomato cut like a flower, or a carrot cut to resemble a rabbit – will help get a healthy lunch eaten. Some teachers might even send a note home to a parent whose lunchbox does not measure up to the expected standards of taste, appearance and nutrition. In recent years the appearance of elementary school lunchboxes has included onigiri in the shape of panda faces or characters from anime and manga (Japanese animated films and comic books), the features tricked out in carefully cut bits of nori (sheets of seaweed). A purchased lunch, perhaps too perfect in its industrial standardization, might also be criticized as lacking the sentiment of a mother’s love in its preparation.

Railway station ekiben also have emotional references, along with overtones of history, politics and regionality. They also express the sensory aspects of Japanese culinary culture. In the West, the taste of something refers mostly to what happens in your mouth, whereas in Japan it includes all the senses: the visual (the Japanese concept of ‘eating with your eyes’ captures the importance of visual aesthetics – colour, design and presentation – as an aspect of taste); aroma (the savour of cooked rice, the smell of pickles, the mingled scents of aromatics like soy, sesame and vinegar); textures (which should be contrasting); and sound. The sound of unwrapping the box, removing chopsticks from their sleeve, the sounds of crunch, slurp and slither, are all part of an ekiben experience of taste. There must also be balance: a good meal should include elements of ‘mountain, sea and plains’ – a grain, a vegetable and a sea product. Thus a typical makunouchi bento will contain rice from the plains, vegetables from the uplands and nori seaweed from the ocean. Other principles of seasonality might also be present, such as the kabocha pumpkin as an autumn ingredient. Pickles – according to the season and the region – also accompany every bento. Like many Japanese meals, all the elements appear at once: only in a kaiseki or other formal meal would there be a succession of courses. And since much food in Japan is served at room temperature, eating a meal from a box prepared earlier does not present a problem.

Naniwa mansai, bento box containing local and street foods of Osaka.

The Osakan Naniwa mansai box contains foods such as yakisoba (fried noodles), takoyaki (octopus balls) and imo-tako-nankin, a mixture of sweet potato, taro, octopus and kabocha pumpkin. The box celebrates local street food and a nostalgia for the more rambunctious side of Osaka life.

The social anthropologist Paul Noguchi considers the ekiben to be a condensed food experience in which, as in other types of food experience, meanings of many kinds are conveyed in food.⁴ Each ekiben represents something beyond the sheer nutrients it provides: it is most particularly about the place, the local station and its environment, and the local people, seen as craftspeople, who make it. It is the result of choice on the part of the consumer, who has many varieties from which to select. And it is a lesson in discernment to watch besuited sararīman (‘salary men’, meaning white-collar workers) taking pains to select an ekiben from the station shops: they read the descriptions carefully before choosing, with the attention one might give to selecting a fine wine.

Shinkansen train bento for children; the foods inside have a sakura (cherry blossom) theme.

‘Sakura’ Shinkansen train bento, including seasonal preparations such as sakura-cut kamaboko (fish paste), a hot dog (which are sometimes flare-cut to look like a cartoonish octopus), and rice decorated with shredded egg and pickle. The box is designed to be reused later as a pencil case.

Ekiben thus represent the local, a specific sense of place that belies the speed and anonymity of the most modern form of ground travel, the ‘Bullet Train’. The image of the ekiben reflects a love of travel and a love of home-place: eating the local food (meibutsu) of a region inspires nostalgia, even if the nostalgia is for someone else’s space.

The cost of an ekiben varies, but few are beyond the means of ordinary travellers. Prices range from about ¥630 ($5.20) for a complete meal to about ¥1,500 ($12.40) for a meal featuring more costly ingredients such as fresh crab or seasonal matsutake mushrooms. The container might bring up the price, too. Some are quite impressive, made of ceramics, wood or lacquered wood (or plastic imitations of these), while ordinary ones might be cardboard or very light wood – although all are enclosed in paper wrappers. The attractiveness of presentation, both inside and outside the box, is part of the allure, as is the transience of the object and its contents.

Children’s ekiben are, like children’s school lunchbox meals, meant to be bright and attractive. Sometimes they are packaged in toy-like plastic containers that might be taken home from the train trip as prized pencil cases or trinket boxes. Purchased before boarding the Shinkansen, a children’s ekiben might even come in a plastic replica of the train’s engine, complete with its characteristic platypus-shaped snout. Best-selling children’s (and avid adult fans’) ekiben may also feature design characters such as Hello Kitty, with the boxes shaped like Hello Kitty and the ingredients in Kitty-related shapes.

Ekiben magazines and books ‘feed’ the fanbase for train cuisine. Ekiben tourism has even become the object of travel as passengers pick their routes with the goal of collecting the best of the station ekiben. A popular comic book for adults, Ekiben hitoritabi (‘A Solo Journey for Station Bento’), features a man who travels through Japan by train and by bento, eating his way around the regions and illustrating the almost fetishistic interest in variety and skill that fans of ekiben display. This comic-book series was also made into a television serial drama in 2012. Jun Hayase, the artist, and Ken Sakurai, the writer, have, through the manga and the television series, popularized the concept of ekiben train travel, on a culturally enriching trip. The television show also featured the protagonist’s travels to the Tōhoku region of the country, to the areas ravaged by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant disasters of March 2011. The show drew attention to the plight of local farmers and food purveyors whose crops and supplies were at first destroyed or curtailed and then, with an unknown and longer effect, contaminated by radiation, thus destroying their livelihoods. In this case, ekiben travel was used as a vehicle for social criticism and concern.

Uzumasa roke bento, a meibutsu (special product) of the Toei Kyoto Studio Park in Kyoto, sold at Kyoto Station as a memory box of foods associated with old-time movie-making in Japan. Epitomizing both regionalism and romantic historical references, these foods are Kyoto specialities loved by the actors who worked at the studios in the 1920s.

In the same way that ekiben reveal culinary diversity, techniques, and the significance of seasonality and locality, the way of eating ekiben also reveals certain cultural characteristics. One eats in prescribed ways in designated spaces: it is rare in Japan to eat standing, or to eat while walking on the street. Eating in parks under the cherry blossoms is a time-honoured tradition, but eating on the cement stairs leading to a temple or other public building is not often done. Eating on long-distance trains does not carry over to eating on commuter trains, subways or urban buses, where it is definitely not done. Part of the joy of travel on the Shinkansen, however, is eating right there, in your seat, watching the landscape flash by. Rarely do you see a person not eating on the ‘Bullet Train’. It is also rare to see people eating foods made and packaged at home: ekiben purchased at the station are a much more popular accompaniment to travel. And while the seat of a long-distance train is a semi-public space where people can easily see what you have and watch how you eat, actually commenting on someone else’s meal is rare. Noticing, but not being noticed in your noticing, is the rule.

Eating in anonymity (being ‘private in public’) is part of the modern experience of train travel in Japan, and it is done carefully, with the knowledge that others are watching: to watch a person unwrap a bento and remove its amenities – a small plastic-covered wet towel (oshibori), chopsticks in their own paper wrapper, possibly small sachets of flavourings such as soy sauce or wasabi, or an envelope of flavoured nori – is to learn the right way of doing this. Even folding the external wrapper, to be used for re-wrapping the box when finished, is a skill in itself.

Eating an ekiben is done conscientiously, but with obvious pleasure. Although no premium is placed on piping-hot or ice-cold foods, some ekiben are equipped with a thermal device: pull a tab, and the bottom of the box heats up to warm the contents. This might be a feature on a box of noodles, but most ekiben are offered at room temperature, as is much Japanese food in general. A passenger might also have a squat bottle of cold green tea, a beer or perhaps a can of coffee (hot or cold, depending on the season). There is no order of eating – you can start anywhere and eat around the box at will. There might even be a small sweet, perhaps a mochi (glutinous rice dumpling) with sweetened red bean paste inside. Then, rewrapping and tying up the box, for disposal in the station platform’s waste containers, shows your civility.

Those wrappers, however, are often kept as souvenirs, and there is an active subculture of ekiben wrapper collectors. Ekiben wrappers, called kakegami (a type of paper wrapper initially made for famous confectioners), are now prized as collectors’ items. Aficionados preserve them in special plastic sleeves or albums as mementos of journeys taken.

Examples of the celebration of regionality in ekiben include some historically interesting foods. The port city of Nagasaki, on Kyushu, the southernmost main island of Japan, has been the recipient of many culinary influences. Like the port city of Hakodate in Japan’s far north, where Russian and Central Asian steppe cultures arrived, Nagasaki was a gate for Chinese and Western migrant ideas and material culture. The first Portuguese Jesuit missionaries arrived in Kyushu in the 1540s. But in the early 1600s, Japanese government officials, wanting to limit and control the arrival of foreign ideas and goods – and thus preserve Japanese cultural and political autonomy gained through geographical isolation – created a manmade island in the harbour at Nagasaki as the only place where foreign traders were allowed to reside. This island, called Deshima (or Dejima, ‘offshore island’), housed first Portuguese and French and then mainly Dutch merchants. The foods that came with each of these European arrivals were much later assimilated into what is now called shippoku ryōri, a Nagasaki-specific meal containing all of these influences. At Nagasaki Station, an ekiben containing cheese (Dutch), tempura (Portuguese) and usually a pair of dumplings (Chinese) as well as Japanese foods exemplifies this merging of different foodways.

An example of a kakegami, a bento wrapper, an object collected as a souvenir. This box contains foods of western Japan, from Kyoto to Hiroshima, as the illustration explains.

There have always been foreign incursions into ekiben, as well as representations of the constantly changing Japanese diet – ‘tradition’ in Japan has always been on the move, and not only because of foreign culinary input. Ekiben today may include ‘farm-to-box’ information about the food suppliers, as well as ‘organic’ and ‘locavore’ designations and nutritional information. There are also top-chef boxes, with biographies of the chefs whose creation you are unwrapping. A popular ekiben sold at Tokyo Station’s Ekiben Matsuri shop is the ‘paella bento’, with rice, shellfish and Spanish flavours. Spaghetti, curry and other imports now assimilated as Japanese favourites fill other boxes.

Most railway travellers, however, still prefer the local boxes which are characteristic of the regions covered en route. Through the ekiben, the passenger can experience local culture in a way that cannot be captured by looking out of a train window at the scenery whizzing by. History, regionality, environment, popular culture, nutrition and experimentation in taste are all contained within the box. The most popular way to eat in Japan might not, in fact, be at a sushi counter or even at the beloved ramen stalls: it might be on your pull-down tray on the train, a culinary experience that ties the whole country together as it particularizes and celebrates all the diversity that is Japan.

The Tōkaidō Shinkansen with Mt Fuji in the background.

Kara-age (Japanese Fried Chicken)

Kara-age is a staple of lunchboxes and bento. Like most bento foods, it is prepared ahead and can be eaten hot or at room temperature.

2 tbsp Japanese soy sauce

1 tbsp each Japanese sake and mirin (sweet rice wine)

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp minced fresh ginger

1 garlic clove, minced

450 g (1 lb) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 5-cm (2-in.) chunks

140 g (1 cup) corn starch, potato starch or rice flour

480 ml (2 cups) vegetable oil

Heat the soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar, ginger and garlic in a small saucepan, simmering until the sugar dissolves. Let cool to room temperature. Marinate the chicken in this liquid for 30 to 60 minutes. Remove the chicken and dry on paper towels.

Toss the chicken together in a bowl with the starch to coat the pieces well. Heat the vegetable oil in a deep, heavy pan until the surface of the oil shimmers. Fry the chicken, a few pieces at a time, for about 3 minutes on each side, until golden. Remove with a slotted spoon. After all the chicken has been fried, heat the oil again until it begins to shimmer and re-fry the chicken, about 2 minutes per side, to crisp it further. Drain on paper towels.

Makes 5 to 6 servings (2 chunks per bento)

Adapted from Debra Samuels, My Japanese Table (Rutland, VT, 2016)

View of the Himalayas from one of the stations on the Darjeeling Himalayan route.

8   SPICY CURRIES AND CUPS OF TEA: DINING ALONG THE DARJEELING HIMALAYAN LINE

APARAJITA MUKHOPADHYAY

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is one of only six railways to be accorded UNESCO World Heritage status. As one of the earliest railways to develop innovative engineering solutions for rail transportation in a steep mountain environment, its operation spans the timeline from the colonial to the post-colonial periods in India, from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Its narrow-gauge tracks, only 610 mm (2 ft) wide, wind along a tortuous route from the West Bengal plains to the Himalayan town of Darjeeling, passing through India’s highest railway station at Ghum, 2,258 m (7,408 ft) above sea level. Affectionately known as the ‘Toy Train’, it features diminutive carriages originally pulled by small steam locomotives (now also by diesel engines) that travel over a distance of only 88 km (55 mi.) through some of the most varied and spectacular scenery on earth. As one commentator noted, ‘from the tiny train, the passengers can look down on the stifling tropical plains of Bengal or up to the eternal snows of the highest peaks of the Himalaya. No railway anywhere else offers such a sight.’¹

Today India has the fourth longest railway network in the world, its lines covering more than 67,000 km (41,800 mi.). But railways had a rather modest beginning in India. The first trains began operating there in 1853, over a distance of only 38 km (21 mi.) from Bombay (now Mumbai) to Thane, and the first train lines reached Calcutta (now Kolkata) soon afterward. But by the turn of twentieth century, India had one of the largest and densest railway networks in the world, a growth indicative of the popularity of trains as a means of transportation for both passengers and freight.

The growth of railways in India was also a result of political decisions. Between 1757 and 1857, much of Indian territory came under the colonial control of the British East India Company. After the East India Company’s rule came to an end with a violent mutiny in 1857, India formally became a colony of the British crown, until India gained its independence in 1947. And one result of British rule in India was the introduction and development of railways, for a combination of economic and military reasons.

The colonial context of railway development in India had an important bearing on all aspects of railway management and operations, including food catering. Since the development of railways was designed to profit the British imperial economy, offering food to passengers was not an aim of the companies operating there. Partly this was because arranging for food in transit would have increased the operating costs. But the railway companies were also not certain that Indian passengers would even want to have food provided, because Indian society was governed by strict rules of commensality, the religious and caste rules governing which categories of people could eat and drink together.

Aloo dum (Spicy Potato Curry)

This spicy potato curry, cooked in the traditional Bengali style, is a popular vegetarian dish widely available in railway refreshment rooms and from food vendors on station platforms. Bengalis eat aloo dum both as a breakfast dish with puffy luchi (Bengali deep-fried wheat bread) and as a main dish with rice for lunch and dinner. The spices used in this curry are all available at Asian grocery stores in the West.

2 medium tomatoes

1 kg (2 lb) small new potatoes, unpeeled and well washed

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

½ tsp ground turmeric

2 tsp Kashmiri mild red chilli powder

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp mustard oil (divided use)

1 dried hot red chilli

1 bay leaf

1 cinnamon stick

2 green cardamom pods

½ tsp whole cumin seeds

¼ tsp ground asafoetida

1 tbsp ginger paste

120 ml (½ cup) fresh or canned green peas

700 ml (3 cups) water

1 teaspoon garam masala spice blend

1 tsp ghee (clarified butter)

Purée the tomatoes in a blender. Steam the whole potatoes over hot water in a steamer until cooked but not mushy. Transfer to a bowl.

Make a thick paste by mixing together the ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, red chilli powder, salt, sugar and 1 tsp mustard oil in a small bowl. Heat the remaining mustard oil over a high heat in a large heavy-bottomed pan. When the oil is hot, add the dried red chilli, bay leaf, cinnamon, green cardamom and whole cumin seeds. When the spices crackle, add asafoetida, mixing well. Stir in the tomato purée, reduce the heat to low, and cook for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the ginger paste and cook 1 minute longer. Stir in the prepared thick spice paste and continue cooking on a low heat until the oil separates from the mixture. Mix in the green peas and water. Taste and add more salt if needed.

Add the steamed potatoes, mix well, cover with a tight lid, and cook on medium heat for 8 minutes or until all the water is absorbed. Remove from the heat and add the garam masala and ghee, mixing well. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes. Serve warm, with rice.

Serves 4

Soon after being built in India, railways became very popular there, with Indians constituting a large percentage of the passenger traffic, a development that surprised the railway promoters and colonial administrators alike.² This had a direct bearing on the food-service arrangements on Indian railways. As the Indian passenger traffic swelled and became the most important revenue-producing section of railway operations, authorities had to respond quickly to the legitimate needs of the passengers. Not surprisingly, passengers demanded arrangements for food and drink in transit, a need exacerbated by the length of journeys on many trains and the heat of the Indian summer, when many people travelled.

Initially some railway companies (although not all) responded by offering passengers drinking water at stations. But the question of food was more complicated. Constructing refreshment rooms at stations would be expensive, a cost that the railway companies did not want to incur. Their lukewarm response to a potentially substantial financial outlay was anchored in the realities of Indian society. Railway authorities knew that providing food for Indian passengers would be a major challenge because of religious and caste rules. Although people travelled side-by-side in trains with other people belonging to different castes and religions, it was unlikely that they would eat in a communal facility where they did not know the caste or identity of the cooks or whether caste rules had been followed in preparing the food.

For a considerable time, therefore, railway refreshment rooms at stations across India were places where only Europeans and ‘Westernized’ Indians dined (that is, those Indians who either had no caste scruples or ignored them when travelling). For average Indian passengers, however, the railways had to offer alternative arrangements that respected caste and religious sensibilities. The solution at first was to allow vendors to sell a variety of foods on the railway platforms and within the station precincts – a practice that eventually became commonplace in India, underscoring the immense popularity of that arrangement, which still continues today.

It was within this context of an informal railway food-service system that the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Company began its operations in the late nineteenth century. The railway was developed to offer a direct connection between Calcutta, the capital of British India at the time, and Darjeeling, the nearest hill station in northern Bengal. Hill stations were creations of the British Empire in India – settlements in the hills or mountains where British residents in India could escape the heat of the plains. The hill station at Darjeeling was the first, and one of the most important, of these. Many of the hill stations also served an economic function. For instance, Darjeeling is the district where tea had been cultivated since the 1820s, and if it were connected with a railway then the tea could be transported to markets more efficiently. Likewise, rice and other food supplies could be brought more easily to the Himalayan villages by train, instead of being transported in slow-moving ox carts along the steep Hill Cart Road.

Station stop on the Darjeeling Himalayan line, with the steam engine taking on water, 1974.

The Bengal plains in general – and Calcutta in particular – were noted for their oppressive and humid summer heat. So British residents of the region wanted a quicker and easier way to travel to the nearest mountains, where the weather was cooler. The preferred destination was Darjeeling, situated at 2,134 m (7,000 ft) above sea level and the location of both a health sanatorium and a British military depot. But the trip from Calcutta to Darjeeling was long and tedious, the journey taking several days. Passengers had to travel first by train on a broad-gauge railway from Calcutta for 195 km (121 mi.), then cross the Ganges river by steam ferry, transfer to a different gauge train for the 315-km (196-mi.) ride to Siliguri, and finally ascend to Darjeeling in either an ox cart or a palki, an enclosed box-like carriage for one person, carried on the shoulders of four bearers up the steep Hill Cart Road.

The desire for a rail connection between Calcutta and Darjeeling led to the formation of the Darjeeling Steam Tramway Company. Construction began in 1879 at Siliguri, which became the southern terminus of the Darjeeling Himalayan line, at the point where the ascent to the steeper gradients of the Himalayas begins. Progress was so rapid that in July 1881 the line was opened all the way from Siliguri to the new Darjeeling passenger station, covering a rail distance of 82 km (51 mi.) at the time. But building the railway line for this short distance was extremely challenging. The terrain between Siliguri and Darjeeling was very hilly and required substantial engineering skills to enable the line to traverse the steep and twisting route through the Himalayas, requiring numerous railway loops, zigzags, switchbacks and tight curves. After the completion of the first phase of construction, the project changed from a steam tramway (as originally envisaged) to a steam railway named the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

The railway loop at Agony Point on the Darjeeling Himalayan Line, late 1890s.

The construction of the new line reduced the travel time from Calcutta to Darjeeling from several days to less than 24 hours. But the journey continued to remain challenging. Despite the direct rail line from Siliguri to Darjeeling, the journey from Calcutta to Siliguri remained divided into several stages. Passengers first had to take the Darjeeling Mail train from Sealdah station (the Calcutta terminus of the Eastern Bengal State Railway), which left the city in mid-afternoon, and cross the Padma river on a large steam ferry that took them overnight to Sara Ghat, a station at a landing point on the north bank of the river. There they boarded a Northern Bengal Railway train for an even longer journey to Siliguri. And from there they travelled on the narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway line, arriving in Darjeeling around midday or sometimes later.³

Hill town on the Darjeeling Himalayan route.

Although the journey was not easy, it did offer certain culinary experiences en route. Dinner for the Darjeeling-bound passengers was served while the ferry was in transit, and breakfast the next morning was served at the railway refreshment room at Siliguri. Since the ferry was also managed and operated by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Company, the dining experience was a part of the food culture of that railway. Contemporary accounts describe the dinner served on the ferry as excellent, with a menu offering a combination of both European and local dishes, including one made with hilsa, a type of local herring, that was highly regarded by passengers.

Darjeeling Himalayan passenger train leaving the roadside village of Tung, near the upper end of the line, in 2008.

In 1896 a new guidebook published by the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway spoke highly of the catering on the ferry crossing, telling readers that ‘during the ferry transit, dinner (at which the Hilsa fish is a standing dish, and strongly recommended) is served.’⁴ But government inspectors, who reported annually on each Indian railway, wrote in 1904:

The kitchen arrangements aboard the Sara ferry boat require attention. On the sink or wash-up table was a disgusting mass of fragments of meat, fish and other plate sweepings mingled with crockery used at a meal recently given. The Baboo [Indian attendant] excused this on the ground that the crockery, as I saw, was washed up [cleaned up] on the floor, which was also remarkably dirty. Water for this purpose was obtained by ladling it out of a tank standing on the floor, with the probable consequence that the amount of water used is a minimum.⁵

Although the refreshment room at Siliguri usually received satisfactory reports, a report from 1900 by the Senior Government Inspector of Railways wrote,

I regret to notice that there is a falling off in the Refreshment Rooms at Siliguri (and Kurseong). At the former station, the milk and butter are noticeably inferior. Siliguri is one of the most frequented Refreshment Rooms in India, and there is no excuse for the standard of catering being low.⁶

And one foreign traveller who arrived in Kurseong by train on a chilly September day in 1900 commented,

We had to content ourselves with turning our nose at the dirty bazar with its crowd of beggar boys, and with eating some good English beef at Clarendon Hotel where the kind and considerate Railway Company give you about half an hour’s time to satisfy your inner man.⁷

Travel time improved in 1915 when the Hardinge Bridge was built across the Ganges, eliminating the ferry crossing. By 1926 the line onwards to Siliguri was completely converted to broad-gauge tracks, so that a train with sleeping cars could travel all the way from Calcutta to Siliguri directly, again arriving in time for breakfast before a morning ride up the Darjeeling Himalayan line to Darjeeling itself. The breakfast menu at the Siliguri station refreshment room was designed to cater to the British palate, offering such items as omelettes, cutlets, baked beans, sliced bread, and hot beverages like tea and coffee. A British passenger who travelled with his parents in 1931 later recalled,

I always enjoyed a silver service dinner at Siliguri when travelling from the Himalayan Hill Stations of Darjeeling or Kurseong to Calcutta and an excellent breakfast consisting of fruit juice followed by bacon and eggs with toast and coffee and even if I requested, cornflakes also in the morning when travelling the other way.⁸

At the beginning of railway operations in colonial India, station refreshment rooms served an exclusively British clientele. This was partly because of the Indian passengers’ inhibitions, for reasons of religion and caste, to eat with strangers, as well as the cultural rules that dictated Indian passengers’ food choices in transit. The situation eventually forced the railway companies in colonial India to construct segregated dining rooms at the railway stations to serve Hindu and Muslim passengers separately. By the turn of twentieth century, Indian passengers constituted the vast majority of the passenger traffic, and separate refreshment rooms and food stalls for Hindu and Muslim passengers became a common feature of railway stations across India. But since the cost of building different types of refreshment rooms with separate cooking and eating arrangements for different groups was substantial, the railway companies provided such dining arrangements only at the larger, more important stations.

Bhapa ilish (Steamed Hilsa Herring)

This Bengali (Indian/Bangladeshi) dish is widely popular as a main course and enjoys a special status in the food culture of that region. In the late nineteenth century it was regularly served to the diners during the ferry ride from Damookdeah to Sara Ghat en route to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway line. Originally the fish would have been wrapped in a banana leaf for steaming. Banana leaves are abundantly available in Bengal, and they impart an earthy, fruity flavour to foods steamed in them.

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) hilsa herring, cleaned, skinned and cut into medium-size pieces

Salt

1 tsp each yellow mustard seeds, black mustard seeds and ground turmeric

2 or 3 long hot green chillies, sliced lengthwise

2½-cm (1-in.) piece of fresh ginger, peeled

3 tbsp mustard oil

Season the fish with a sprinkling of salt. Make a smooth paste by grinding the yellow and black mustard seeds, turmeric, chillies and 1 tsp salt using a mortar and pestle.

Place the fish pieces in a single layer on a large piece of aluminium foil, and liberally rub the spice paste all over them. Pour the mustard oil over the fish and close the foil, sealing it well.

Put 700 ml (3 cups) water and a steamer rack inside a large pot over high heat. When the water comes to a boil, place the fish on the rack. Reduce the heat to a simmer, cover the pot tightly, and steam the fish for 10 minutes, or just until it flakes easily. Serve hot, accompanied by white basmati rice.

Serves 4

Vendor selling food at a stall near a Darjeeling Himalayan train station in 1974.

During the operations of Indian railways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, third-class passengers constituted, on average, a large majority of the total passenger traffic. Railway dining cars, which were introduced on some long-distance passenger trains around 1910, were generally patronized by only a small minority of people, either British or Westernized elite Indians travelling in the firstand second-class carriages. Dining cars were a luxury that most passengers could not afford. So they either carried food with them, even on long journeys, or ate in the refreshment rooms, or purchased food sold by vendors at the stations, who were either licensed by the railway companies or working as independent food sellers. At some places, vendors also boarded the trains to sell food en route.

Since colonial times these vendors in and around stations have provided a variety of fresh foods, at prices usually kept low by intense competition from other vendors. As such, eating when the trains halted, or when vendors came aboard with foods to sell, offered a better option at many levels than eating a dining-car meal cooked by a person of unspecified caste. Eventually some hotels also set up food stalls near the railway stations, managed and operated by Indians and catering to different religious and caste groups. And in recent times, the category of food vendors has even expanded to include popular restaurant chains opening outlets at various stations.

Kosha mangsho (Spicy Mutton Curry)

Kosha mangsho cooked in the traditional Bengali way is a staple dish of railway refreshment rooms and vendors of non-vegetarian foods on the railway station platforms. Enjoying this dish is often a culinary highlight for railway travellers. Although best served with rice, it goes equally well with naan or roti (Indian flatbreads).

3 tbsp unsweetened yoghurt

1 tsp cumin seeds, toasted in a dry pan and finely ground

6 tbsp mustard oil

6 whole cloves

5 green cardamom pods

2 cinnamon sticks, each 2.5 cm (1 in.) long

2 medium red onions, thinly sliced

5-cm (2-in.) piece of fresh ginger, grated

4 large garlic cloves, grated

1 tsp red chilli powder

1 tsp ground turmeric

850 g (2 lb) mutton, cut into bite-size pieces

1 tsp salt

3 long hot green chillies, thinly sliced crosswise, for garnish

5 sprigs fresh coriander (cilantro), for garnish

Beat the yoghurt with the toasted cumin powder in a mixing bowl. Set aside. Heat the mustard oil in a deep, heavy-bottomed pan over a medium heat. When hot, add the whole spices (cloves, cardamom, cinnamon) and fry for only 30 seconds, until the spices crackle and the oil is fragrant. Add the onions and sauté for 3 minutes on medium to high heat until translucent. Reduce heat to low, add the grated ginger and garlic, and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes longer. Keeping the heat low, add the chilli powder and turmeric. Cook for only 1 minute, stirring constantly. Don’t let the mixture burn!

Stir in the mutton pieces, mix well, and cook on medium to high heat for 7 to 8 minutes, stirring constantly, until the oil separates from the spice mixture. Add the yoghurt mixture and cook on medium heat for 5 to 6 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the salt. Cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid and continue cooking on medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes or until the meat is tender. Do not add any water. When the meat is cooked, transfer to a serving bowl and garnish with green chillies and coriander. Serve hot with rice or with naan or roti.

Serves 4

After Indian independence from Britain in 1947, when railway management passed into the hands of the state-owned Indian Railways, dining cars continued to operate on some trains, mainly due to the attraction of eating well-served food while gazing outside at the passing scenery. But dining cars were expensive, and their popularity began to dwindle, except on certain trains such as the Deccan Queen from Bombay to Poona, or the high-priced luxury tourist trains of today. Indian passengers preferred not only less expensive food, but food cooked by someone who belonged to their own religion or caste. So in the post-independence years dining cars eventually vanished from many trains, after facing a period of declining service, food quality and customer numbers.

While the dining cars on most trains died a slow death, the refreshment rooms at stations survived. But their nature changed. The strict separation between Hindu and Muslim refreshment rooms eventually disappeared, although the menus, with their wide range of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, reflected a broad adherence to Hindu and Muslim food cultures. Another development was the ‘pantry car’, which became very successful on Indian railways. As during the colonial period, the issue was how to provide passengers with refreshment in transit when they were travelling for many hours over long distances. So the post-colonial railway authorities began operating pantry cars on long-distance trains, offering freshly cooked vegetarian and non-vegetarian food to passengers who chose to eat on board at their seats. These different arrangements, tailored to suit the needs of Indian passengers, contributed to a dynamic railway food culture in which a wide array of food sold by vendors provided an alternative catering model to the more formal settings of railways in many other countries where dining cars were provided on the trains.

After India gained independence from Britain, changes also occurred on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway line. Post-colonial India was partitioned into two independent countries, India and Pakistan. Pakistan was further divided, geographically, into West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and, since 1971, Bangladesh, respectively), and much of the Darjeeling Mail route was now in East Pakistan. Although rail service continued for a while, India badly needed a new route on her own territory, to Siliguri and the whole of Assam in the northeast part of the country. But India possessed only a narrow corridor about 20 km (12 mi.) wide through which to thread this new route.

The journey from Calcutta to Siliguri was now much longer, with trains leaving Calcutta on the broad-gauge line travelling northwest on the Indian side of the East Pakistani border and passengers crossing the Ganges on the Manihari Ghat ferry, then continuing on a different gauge rail line to Siliguri. Eventually a new broad-gauge line north of the Ganges was constructed to serve both the Darjeeling area and the whole of India’s northeastern states. In 1964 a new station was built at New Jalpaiguri, 6 km (4 mi.) south of Siliguri, and the narrow-gauge Darjeeling line was extended south to offer a direct connection with this new line. By the early 1970s, timings had improved to the extent that the Darjeeling Mail train could leave Calcutta mid-evening and travel directly overnight to Siliguri to connect with the train to Darjeeling, a practice that has continued largely unchanged into the present.

In many towns the Darjeeling ‘Toy Train’ passes very close to food stores and other shops near the line.

Tea stall opposite the Ghum station that sells chai and snacks to passengers and crew on the Darjeeling Himalayan line.

In the late twentieth century, most large stations – like New Jalpaiguri – still had two separate refreshment rooms, one for vegetarians and one called ‘non-veg’, the latter the most popular with Western visitors to India. With refrigeration still in its infancy in much of India, meat was sometimes of questionable vintage, but all Indian cooks could deal admirably with eggs. In both refreshment rooms, tea was available, either Western-style (a pot of tea with milk and sugar available to be added) or traditional Indian chai (water, tea, milk and sugar boiled up together). Both kinds of refreshment room had a reasonably lengthy menu, and the cooks were expected to cook each meal to order from basic ingredients, rather than have pre-prepared meals ready for reheating.

On the Indian main lines, vendors at many stations sell pre-cooked foods through the windows of the trains.

In addition to this form of catering, there were many ‘platform barrows’ (push carts) on which snacks (and occasionally, proper meals) were cooked. Sometimes, though, the food was cooked well in advance and left exposed (and therefore subject to contamination from the flies that inhabit all Indian stations). But most of the snack foods were fried on the spot and, if bought fresh out of the hot fat, could be very tasty, even if highly spiced for Western palates. As an extension of this, vendors at the larger stations filled paper plates with food and sold it through the train windows to the passengers on board – a practice that continues today and is especially popular with second-class travellers. There were also several permanent food stalls, most of which were equipped to produce hot food. Omelettes were always popular at the food stalls, along with chai and coffee and the usual assortment of packaged crisps (potato chips) and biscuits (cookies).

Upper-class travellers were treated with much more decorum, with bearers travelling on the train and taking individual meal orders from first-class passengers. At a station stop these orders were telegraphed down the line to the next stop that had a railway kitchen. The meals were then prepared in advance, to be waiting when the train arrived. The cooked food was then collected by the bearers and served to the first-class passengers at their seats on board, on trays that resembled traditional army mess tins. Tea or coffee in small vacuum flasks accompanied the meals. Further down the line, the used trays and cutlery were collected and sent back to the kitchens for reuse on a train going the other way. Breakfast was usually a choice of an omelette or a vegetable curry, with toast, butter, jam and tea. Lunch and dinner were often either chicken curry or vegetable curry, with rice, chapatis (flatbreads) and some pickled vegetables.

Having spent a night on the train from Calcutta, and refreshed with some breakfast at New Jalpaiguri, passengers set off on the Darjeeling ‘Toy Train’ across the edge of the plains to Sukna, where the climb into the Himalayan foothills began. After 32 km (20 mi.), the train approaches Tindharia, where the railway’s route makes a large elongated ‘S’, climbing back and forth across the mountain-side to gain height. Boys would take orders from passengers at the foot of the ‘S’ and run up the mountainside to Tindharia station, arriving somewhat breathless, in time for lunch to be cooked before the train arrived. Although refreshments can still be obtained at Tindharia, the system of advance ordering by runners has been discontinued.

Typical Indian thali meal served on a sectioned metal tray.

On the Darjeeling Himalayan train itself, formal dining options have always been restricted, because breakfast was traditionally served at Siliguri and dinner taken in one of the Darjeeling hotels. But in this period there were still some dining options on the Darjeeling trains. Ted Scull, an American railway enthusiast, rode on part of the line in the summer of 1974, on a train consisting of one first-class carriage with padded seats, two second-class cars with wooden seats, and a luggage van, all pulled by a steam locomotive. Passengers could order a meal when they boarded, which was then brought onto the train by bearers working for the railway’s commissary, when the train stopped to take on water for the engine. As Scull later recalled,

I don’t think there was a European option, just Indian, which I preferred anyway. Think of a TV dinner with more parts, a metal tray with four or five compartments for a piece of chicken on the bone (if you weren’t a vegetarian), a vegetable, some kind of sauce, Indian bread, and tea. Tea was the safe drink to have because the water would have been boiled for a long time. The train bounced so much that it was hard to eat, and a few of us got into a low-key laughing fit. I was the only European on this particular train. Monsoon season was clearly not tourist season.⁹

The Darjeeling ‘Toy Train’ passing the Druk Thupten Sangag Choling Monastery near Darjeeling.

The curving tracks of the Darjeeling Himalayan line.

He added that coffee and tea with biscuits (cookies), served on white china, were also provided by the commissary and brought aboard the train – and that passengers could also buy food from platform vendors, sold in paper wrappings or disposable containers.

The tradition of buying food from station vendors on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway line has a special charm because the train stops at twelve villages along the route and, especially above the Kurseong station, the line runs through the bazaars (markets) in the villages, where passengers can get off and buy a wide array of freshly made foods from the market stalls and freelance vendors. These arrangements, although affected by Indian rules of commensality, do not formally acknowledge the division between different social groups, religious groups and castes. While there are still refreshment rooms at the stations, the division in food arrangements for Hindus and Muslims is formally gone. But vendors continue to supply a wide variety of foods that certainly cater to diverse palates, influenced by religious and caste rules. For example, vegetarian and non-vegetarian items are usually sold by different vendors, and if not, separate and often scrupulous arrangements are made to cook, keep and serve the food separately.

Bearers who brought tea and coffee service aboard a Darjeeling Himalayan train in 1974.

But modernity has caught up with the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Although the beautiful scenery and breath-taking views are still there, the little blue steam locomotives, built specially in the United Kingdom for the Darjeeling line, were replaced in 2000 by diesels on the daily trains. Some tour companies do offer steam-hauled trips on part or all of the line. But improvements in road transport have taken nearly all of the local transport function away from the line, so – like interesting rail byways throughout the world – the Darjeeling railway is more a tourist operation than a transport business. Most tourists now arrive in the area by air and spend a night in a Siliguri hotel before proceeding by train up to Darjeeling. Among the good hotels in Siliguri, one favourite is the Cindrella (sic), which is the base for the Indian chapter of the international Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Society. The hotel is also a good place to eat, with excellent meals in both Indian and Chinese style, all vegetarian.

One of many roadside stalls offering basic refreshments at Sukna, where the steep hill climb starts.

The Darjeeling train tracks run through the crowded town bazaar in Siliguri.

Vegetable Jalfrezi

A popular dish in many restaurants run by Bengalis and Nepalese, this recipe comes from the Cindrella Hotel at Siliguri on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway route. Jal means ‘spicy’ and frezi means ‘stir-fry’. The vegetables should remain fairly crisp, and the dish should be more dry than soft or juicy.

3 tbsp ghee (clarified butter) or vegetable oil

1 tbsp ground coriander

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 medium cauliflower (about 800 g/2 lb), florets only, broken into small pieces

200 g (½ lb) fresh green beans, cut crosswise into 2.5-cm (1-in.) pieces

1 large carrot, cut into thick matchstick pieces

2 large onions, finely chopped

2 hot green chillies, cut into thin matchstick pieces

3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

1-cm (½-in.) piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

2 to 3 tsp sugar

½ tsp hot chilli powder

½ tsp ground turmeric

¼ tsp salt

2 medium tomatoes, finely chopped

120 ml (½ cup) tomato purée (paste)

Handful of fresh coriander (cilantro) leaves, plus extra for garnish

Have all the ingredients chopped, sliced and measured in advance. Heat the ghee in a large, deep frying pan (skillet) over a medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the ground coriander and cumin seeds. Stir-fry quickly, about 30 seconds.

Quickly add the cauliflower, green beans and carrot, stir-frying 2 minutes more. Add the onions, green chillies, garlic and ginger, and stir-fry 2 minutes longer. Add the sugar, chilli powder, turmeric and salt. Cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Stir in the tomatoes and tomato purée, mixing all the ingredients well. Stir in a handful of coriander leaves. Reduce the heat to low, partially cover, and simmer, stirring frequently, 10 minutes. Remove the lid and continue cooking 5 minutes more.

Serve hot, as a vegetarian main dish or spicy side dish, with boiled white basmati rice and chapati or naan. Garnish each serving of jalfrezi with a few fresh coriander leaves.

Serves 4 to 6

Modern food court offering both fast foods and traditional dishes at New Jalpaiguri, the junction where the main lines from Delphi and Kolkata meet the Darjeeling Himalayan line.

The food stalls at New Jalpaiguri are still there, in addition to a modern ‘food court’, but these are largely patronized by mainline passengers rather than those travelling on the Darjeeling line. Since more passengers arrive and depart at Siliguri Junction (which is more convenient for the hotel quarter of the town), the platform vendors, tea sellers and food stalls do a good business there, too.

The rail journey to Darjeeling now takes about six and a half hours. Describing the snail’s pace of the train, a traveller in 2014 commented,

Our journey was enlivened by locals, schoolchildren and hawkers who hopped on and off the train for a free ride. Even more welcome invaders were the enterprising vendors who boarded with tiffin dishes [stacked metal lunchboxes] full of steaming dumplings, brandishing huge kettles of sweet tea and coffee.¹⁰

At Tindharia there is a short break in the journey. Although the station refreshment room is no longer open, there are several shops beside the road and the railway and below the station. From Tindharia, the line runs to the market town of Kurseong, the largest township between Siliguri and Darjeeling, where the train pauses for about twenty minutes to give the crew a break. There are also several opportunities for passengers to fortify themselves. Excellent samosas (fried, triangular-shaped dough pockets with savoury fillings) are sold for a only few rupees at a small stall about 25 m (30 yd) from the platform, and many of the shops on Kurseong High Street, adjacent to the station, sell a variety of packaged snacks and biscuits. The station itself has a small snack bar offering sweets and chocolates and the ubiquitous chai.

Darjeeling Himalayan train being serviced at Ghum station, 2014.

Small refreshment bar at Kurseong, near the halfway point on the line between Siligun and Darjeeling where the train stops for about 10 minutes.

Women of the village of Rangtong, just north of Sukna, welcoming passengers on Darjeeling Tours Ltd’s charter train with freshly cooked momo dumplings served with a spicy sauce.

The line leaves Kurseong by running straight up the High Street, just inches from the shop-fronts. After leaving the town, the character of the line changes, with the railway clinging to the hillside on a narrow ledge, a route still shared with the original Hill Cart Road, all the way up to the summit at Ghum, just 6 km (4 mi.) from Darjeeling. Traditionally the train stops there for a few minutes for passengers to buy something at a snack bar on the station platform or at a tiny café built into the opposite hillside, which offers very good momos (Nepalese steamed dumplings with vegetable filling, a local delicacy), fried samosas and milky chai – and this is usually the favourite stop for the train crew, too.

Momo dumplings ready to be steamed at a small restaurant in Gayabari.

For the final part of the journey, the line drops downhill into Darjeeling itself. Although there is a small tea bar at the station, most passengers look for a taxi to their chosen hotel. Darjeeling is full of hotels, including the Windamere (sic), which has been providing hospitality both to local tea planters and to holidaymakers since 1841. Afternoon tea, elegantly served in the lounge, is especially popular there, featuring Darjeeling tea (of course) with cucumber sandwiches (bread crusts removed) and Madeira cake. Dinner is still served formally in the dining room. The menu offers a main-course choice between a traditional Nepalese dish or a Western dish (such as roast lamb), but it is always possible to have a taste of both.

‘Toy Train’ in Darjeeling, 2004.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway now has its own twelve-seater dining car, built in 2001 and named ‘Tenzing Norgay’ (after the Nepalese Sherpa who reached the summit of Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953), but it runs only on special steam-hauled charter trains. Little can compare to the experience of a quality meal in the plush surroundings of ‘Tenzing Norgay’ as a small steam locomotive blasts its way uphill through the sal forests at dusk. As one traveller noted in 2003,

A meal in the line’s dining car must not be missed. Having a four course dinner while climbing through the forests at dusk, with a ‘B’ class locomotive [historic steam locomotive] working flat out just in front is an experience that will stay with you for the rest of your life.¹¹

Usually the train runs with two coaches: a first-class saloon carriage and the ‘Tenzing Norgay’ dining car. Passengers scheduled for the first sitting at dinner enjoy their meal as the train leaves Siliguri Junction and sets off beside the Hill Cart Road, proceeding over the 10-km (6-mi.) run beside the tea gardens towards Sukna. Meanwhile, passengers for the second sitting are ensconced in the first-class saloon car, enjoying light snacks and drinks. At Sukna, where the steam engine needs fifteen minutes to take on water and make up the fire for the boiler, diners for the two sittings exchange places. For the next 8-km (5-mi.) section up the steep incline through the forests to Rangtong, diners at the second sitting receive their meal while the others relax in the first-class car with tea or coffee.

Interior of a first-class car on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, 2006.

The four-course, set-price menu is exclusively Indian, although changed regularly to add variety. And, in a departure from past practices, the meal is served with chilled Indian beer. But the dining car experience is not shared by everyone using the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, because the high price of a ticket for this train puts it beyond the reach of average Indian railway passengers. So the train with the dining car mostly caters to non-Indian tourists who pay for their tickets in currencies more valuable than the Indian rupee.

However, this disparity has had an interesting influence on the railway’s food culture. Priced out of the train with a dining-car service, most Indian passengers patronize the station platform vendors. Responding to a sizeable demand by the passengers, food vendors compete to offer an increasing variety of foods, including fresh foods, for immediate consumption as well as packaged (or more lasting) items such as crisps (potato chips) and bottled carbonated drinks. Consequently, passengers enjoy access to fresh foods with local flavours that reflect the diverse culinary cultures of the West Bengal–Himalayan region through which the train travels.

Small roadside restaurant in Gayabari, just above the Darjeeling Himalayan railway station.

Because of its history and development, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway has created and sustained a food culture in which relatively formal dining on the special, more expensive tourist train coexists with informal food stalls at the station platforms, more mundane fare at the refreshment rooms, and different options at the hotels used by tourist travellers. Thus many choices are available to passengers with different budgetary and taste preferences. This is also part of the way in which railway catering in India as a whole – and the food cultures it has spawned – has had wider implications for Indian society. Railway catering was (and continues to be) dynamic and vibrant, a reciprocal system that has influenced, and continues to influence, the local society and economy in many ways. It responds to passenger demands, making it accessible to a wide range of railway travellers. And the informality and flexibility of railway catering contributes to creating and sustaining a variety of food cultures, which are shaped by local culinary traditions. In a huge country like India, where diversity of cuisines is a matter of fact, such influences go far beyond the railway tracks.

9   BAKED BOBOTIE, FRIED KINGCLIP AND CHOCOLATE POTJIE : TRADITIONAL FARE ON SOUTH AFRICAN LUXURY TRAINS

KARL ZIMMERMANN

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ murmured the voice on the audio speaker in our compartment, ‘the Blue Train is ready to depart. Will all guests not travelling with us please leave the train?’ Happily, that request did not apply to my wife and me, as we were settling in for the 27-hour, 1,600-km (994-mi.) journey from Pretoria to Cape Town on the southwest coast. We had gathered with our fellow travellers in the Blue Train’s own private lounge in the station, insulated from the far less stylish comings and goings of the local trains in Pretoria’s handsome terminal, built in 1912. Then we had been ushered to the train itself, where Fanie, the food and beverage manager, briefed us. ‘If you don’t get, you didn’t ask,’ he said. ‘Aboard the Blue Train, everything is free [that is, included in the ticket price] except the French champagne and the souvenirs in the gift shop.’

With two bells announcing our departure at 8:50 a.m., the train slid away from the platform. We were barely moving when our ‘butler’, a young woman named Hadi, came to explain the intricacies of our room: a remote control that raised, lowered and adjusted the angle of the Venetian blinds between the inner and outer window glass, and also worked the video, which on channel 1 showed an engineer’s-eye view of our progress along the tracks; a mobile (cell) phone to call our butler; and a temperature control with a digital display. In addition to these high-tech features the compartment, a Deluxe Suite – compared to a Luxury Suite, which included a CD player and VCR, the most superfluous amenities I could imagine – was simply elegant, with finely crafted honey-coloured wood panelling of anigre (African hardwood) veneer, framed by solid birch.

The bathroom, decorated in Italian marble, had a shower (some had bathtubs); souvenir bathrobes and slippers were provided. On the table by the window was a plate of sliced fresh fruit. Two built-in seats, piled with cushions, would be converted into twin lower berths at night, with a table between them, while some rooms had double beds instead. For daytime use there was also a movable chair. Though compact, the room was well designed, completely comfortable, and efficiently convertible from daytime to night-time use. In fact, it felt surprisingly spacious considering that the standard gauge of South African trains, sometimes called ‘Cape Gauge’, is just 1,067 mm (3 ft 6-in.), considerably narrower than the true standard gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8½ in.) that is almost universal in Britain, much of Europe, and the United States.

For a time, the Transnet Heritage Foundation operated excursions like this one that recreated the Union Limited in its final colour scheme in the steam-hauled days. Photo taken on the Porterville Branch in July 2000.

In July 1977, the Blue Train pauses under catenary at Touwsriver, showing off the livery that only it wears. The headboard carries its name both in English and Afrikaans: ‘Bloutrein’.

Currently operated by Luxrail – a division of Transnet Freight Rail, South Africa’s national railway operator – the Blue Train has its roots in the Union Limited, a luxury train inaugurated in 1923 that ran biweekly from Pretoria via Johannesburg to Cape Town to connect with the Union Castle Line mailships to and from England. The northbound train was called the Union Express. Both of these trains served the Table Bay docks as well as downtown Cape Town, carrying only post and first-class passengers. In 1933 ‘Protea’, a luxurious new diner, was built for Union Limited/Express service and decorated in azure-blue and cream with an azure roof, as was its adjacent kitchen car. Initially the train’s other cars were unpainted, with a varnished teak exterior, but the ‘Protea’ paint scheme caught on, and by 1936 all Union Limited and Union Express railway carriages were painted blue and cream. Soon the Union pair of trains acquired the nickname Blue Train.

Later a dozen air-conditioned sleeping cars, two lounges, two saloon cars (dining cars) with adjacent kitchen cars named ‘Orange’ and ‘Zambesi’, and a single baggage-guard’s van – all made in England – were added to the train, with a similar, older car rebuilt to fill out the second set of train carriages. Four more sleeping cars, two for each train, were also later added to meet increased demand. When all these cars were delivered in 1939 and 1940, they were painted blue. (In South Africa, only the various iterations of the Union Limited/Express and Blue Train would have trains in that colour. Otherwise, red-and-grey was the norm.)¹

The Blue Train’s Deluxe Suite is both stylish and comfortable, with a plate of fresh fruit awaiting passengers upon boarding.

Discontinued in 1942 for the duration of the Second World War, these luxury trains resumed service in 1946 and were officially named the Blue Train. The next major evolution was in 1972, when the service was completely re-equipped with all new cars built in South Africa. These were stunning railway carriages, both opulent and modern. When I first rode the Blue Train in 1977, I thought it was the most elegant conveyance imaginable.

Much changed in the world of South African railways in the 23 years that separated my two trips on the Blue Train. Long-distance passenger rail service had declined, with relatively few trains remaining, although since then another company, Shosholoza Meyl, has inaugurated some creditable services. Meanwhile, a new demand for upmarket, super-luxury tourist trains had surfaced worldwide. The Blue Train was re-examined in this light and the decision made in the mid-1990s to thoroughly rebuild the 1972 cars, essentially creating a new train within an old shell. All compartments – now called ‘suites’ – had private toilet facilities, a scarce amenity on South African trains in general and even on the older 1972 Blue Train. The first of the rebuilt train carriages returned to service in 1997 and the second set in the following year. Today the train is marketed as ‘A window to the soul of Africa’ and ‘The ultimate in luxury and relaxation’.²

The Drakensberg Express accelerates out of Bloemfontein on a bright, crisp morning in June 1977, bound for Cape Town.

Years earlier I had already had a taste of what a previous Blue Train, the 1939–40 version, would have been like. In June 1977 I had travelled on the Drakensberg Express, which was equipped with the pre-war Blue Train carriages that had been displaced by the updated 1972 train. The Drakensberg Express ran on two routes: Johannesburg to Durban and Durban to Cape Town, thus serving South Africa’s three major cities. (The Durban–Cape Town route was discontinued not long after my visit.) When a friend dropped me at the vast station in Johannesburg in time for the Drakensberg’s 5:50 p.m. departure for Durban, I found a train of heavyweight railway carriages richly traditional in design, but decked out in a dramatically untraditional colour, a creamy, pastel lime-green accented by black-and-white striping, with the name ‘Drakensberg’ splashed across the side of each car in a jaunty script.

I learned my room assignment from a reservation board on the platform. Once aboard, in a wood-panelled car with traditional appointments, I could have been back in the 1930s. My accommodation was a coupé, a room generally occupied as a single on the Drakensberg and Blue Train, although on other South African overnight services it usually slept two. This coupé was much like an early American Pullman sofa-style bedroom, with a seat along the length of the room that made up into a bed at night, an upper berth that folded down from the wall, a wash basin in one corner, and a small table that folded up from the wall. The train’s other type of sleeping accommodation was the compartment, twice as large as a coupé, with facing sofas and two windows. In addition to eight sleeping cars, a lounge, a dining car and a kitchen car, the train carried a composite car – a so-called ‘compo van’ – with baggage space, an office for the guard (conductor) and also a few passenger rooms.

This ‘compo van’ was the only car that lacked air conditioning. Its rooms had once been used for non-white passengers (under the practice of apartheid), but by 1977 – according to a policy adopted from South Africa’s five-star international hotels – non-whites were accommodated without discrimination on the Drakensburg Express and the Blue Train. However, I encountered no non-white passengers on my Drakensberg journey, or on the Blue Train a few weeks hence – or, for that matter, on our journey in 2000. The service personnel did not include non-whites, either.

Chimes sounded, meaning that our 784-km (487-mi.) Drakensberg trip to Durban was about to begin, the train pulled by electric locomotives all the way. Soon we were rolling through the nearly complete darkness of a South African winter’s evening. The lounge was a cheerful, congenial setting for a pre-dinner Scotch whisky. In its centre stood a bar with a bouquet of fresh flowers, lavish in size, colour and variety, on the counter.

When the call for dinner came at 7 p.m., I moved to the next car, the dining saloon, where I was greeted by an arresting vision: seemingly a stage set, but actually a real-life version of what I had always imagined a dining car in the great age of rail travel must have been like. Soft incandescent lighting glimmered off dark wood panelling. In the centre, on a service buffet, stood another impressive bouquet of flowers. The seating was in booths, with tables for four on one side of the aisle and tables for two on the other. The tablecloths and napkins were made of ecru damask, and woven into them, with threads of various subtle hues, was the South African Railway coat of arms, including the motto Ex Unitate Vires (Strength from Unity), surely referring to the consolidation of the railways after the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Pedestalled silver bowls filled with fresh fruit were on the tables for four people. All tables, large or small, were covered with a variety of hollow-ware and cutlery (flatware): silver seemingly sufficient for two or three meals. The profusion of silverware was put to good use, for this South African dinner did indeed seem like multiple meals rolled into one. Service was table d’hote, with choices limited or non-existent within each course, although there were many courses in the meal. The menu, or spyskaart in Dutch-based Afrikaans, stayed on the table throughout the meal so that diners could consult it for ordering one course at a time, perhaps pacing themselves as the copious dinner progressed.

Aboard the Drakensberg Express, the elegant dinner table with 22 pieces of silverware and with linens subtly adorned with South African Railway’s coat of arms.

When I sat down I found a tropical fruit-based cocktail waiting on my table. I followed this with mushroom soup, fried kingclip (a local fish), delicately prepared chicken, steamed sultana pudding and a demitasse of coffee. Everything was served from silver: tureen, platter or pot. My dinner companion, a jovial Durban businessman, and I shared a bottle of Nederburg Edelrood, a South African red wine. That splendid scene, in which we were acting a small part, had undoubtedly changed little since that same dining car, painted dove-grey and blue on its exterior, had begun service on the Union Limited and Union Express nearly forty years earlier.

The sleeping carriages were arranged in pairs, with each two cars served by a single ‘bedding boy’. On all services other than the Blue Train, bedding (including the mattress) was purchased separately from the transportation ticket. If hired, all the bedding was placed in the room by the bedding boy when he made down the berth. When not in use, it was stored in a space off the corridor.

After dinner I enjoyed a snifter of fine local brandy in the lounge, followed by a good, hot shower in my sleeping car before tucking in for a dreamless sleep. The next thing I knew the bedding boy was knocking on my door to wake me at 6 a.m., when it was still dark, as we were leaving Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal Province. A few minutes later, one of the waiters from the dining car appeared with my early morning coffee, served with all accoutrements: silver sugar bowl, jug (creamer) and coffee pot, with a napkin folded in the handle to protect the pourer’s hand. I learned that it is a South African custom to have coffee or tea in one’s hotel or train room immediately upon arising, although that wake-up drink is not meant to replace or inhibit a full breakfast later.

That morning I limited myself to grapefruit juice, smoked haddock with mashed potatoes, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Plain white linen napery had replaced the colourful damask of the evening before, but the breakfast was served with the attention it deserved. Outside the windows were spectacular vistas as we dropped seaward towards an 8:45 a.m. arrival at the port city of Durban, on the Indian Ocean. During the night we had passed the rugged Drakensberg range, the ‘Dragon Mountains’ after which the train was named.

The Durban-bound Drakensberg Express via Bloemfontein crossing the arid Karoo north of the railway town of DeAar.

In 1977 South Africa’s best long-distance rail service was the Blue Train, followed in quality by the Drakensberg Express, then a handful of other ‘name’ trains: the Trans-Natal Express between Johannesburg and Durban, the Durban to Cape Town Orange Express, and the Cape Town to Johannesburg Trans-Karoo Express. The three lesser trains had air-conditioned dining cars and lounges, and non-air-conditioned first- and second-class sleeping cars, with separate accommodations in both classes for non-white passengers. Next in quality were a substantial number of long-and medium-distance trains having dining cars and first-, second- and third-class carriages, with third class for non-whites only. On the bottom rung were many other rail services provided by goods (freight) and mixed (passenger and freight) trains. However, those classes of railway cars are now long gone, replaced by Tourist- and Economy-Class trains operated by Shosholoza Meyl, a company that has been in business since 2001, which also has some more upmarket Premier Classe trains on some of their routes.³

On the exterior the Blue Train today looks much as it did in this 1977 photo, but the interior has been entirely transformed into high luxury.

So I would be at the top of that pyramid when, two weeks after my Drakensberg experience, I boarded the Blue Train – or Bloutrein, in Afrikaans – at Cape Town in the summer of 1977. When I arrived at the station an hour before departure, the train was already open and available for boarding. Bon voyage parties were under way. As I walked alongside the royal-blue train, looking for my sleeping car, I noticed that a single window, much broader than any of the others, had its Venetian blinds open, clearly an invitation for anyone to peek in. Nose pressed to the glass, I saw a spacious sitting room. Two club chairs and a small table with a bouquet of fresh flowers were near the window, and beyond was a love seat with end tables bearing lamps and a bowl of fresh fruit. To the right I could barely glimpse a fully stocked bar and a door leading to a bathroom. A door on the other side led to a bedroom. This one-of-a-kind, super-luxury suite dwarfed my own smaller, single-person coupé, but I was still happy as could be.

Shortly before departure I wandered to the dining car, where the stewards buzzed around in seemingly orchestrated chaos, putting the finishing touches to the table settings for the first luncheon sitting. Avocado cocktails were placed on tables already sporting crisp white linens and polished silver. Then the stewards made the final checks of their tables before lunch was to be served.

The Blue Train’s dining saloon, photographed in 1977 with its original decor, provided an elegant setting for luncheon.

Suddenly the buzz of activity became organized and calm. The stewards, all standing at parade rest, manned their stations – in an orderly line, with just enough informality to keep the exercise from seeming somewhat militaristic. The train manager bustled through, inspecting the scene, then nodded an okay to the dining car manager and hastened on. At the stroke of noon, the Blue Train began to move, slowly, almost imperceptibly, past the station platform. The stewards remained at parade rest, an impressive if fleeting tableau. Out of the windows I could see well-wishers waving farewell to departing friends and family. As the train gathered speed and cleared the station, the tableau dissolved as the dining-car staff made ready to welcome the guests and a steward headed off with chimes to ring for the first sitting.

The dining car’s decor was primarily brown and gold with wood accents. Broad windows flooded the car with light. A spray of flowers crowned a central service buffet laden with trays of tempting salads and desserts. I felt cheerful indeed as the dining-car manager seated me, expressing his personal wishes that I would find the meal acceptable. It was.

To follow the avocado cocktail, I ordered a soup made with finely diced vegetables, followed by fried kingclip for the second course, fillet of beef with mushrooms and assorted vegetables as the main course, and ice cream-and-fruit coupe Alexandra for dessert. I was joined for lunch by an expatriate Rhodesian now living in Britain, and after coffee we continued our conversation in the lounge car. In the centre of this comfortable car was a semicircular bar with white mushroom-shaped bar stools. A golden glow seemed to illuminate the lounge, an effect partially explainable by the thin layer of real gold dust fused into one layer of all the train’s windows to deflect heat and glare – a nice, and appropriate, South African touch.

At the 8:30 dinner sitting, the dining car’s evening personality was even more elegant than at lunch, with the muted colours of its damask napery, similar to that on the Drakensberg Express, setting the tone. My table-mates and I chatted about this and that while sampling such fare as asparagus vinaigrette, fillet of sole St Germain with Béarnaise sauce, tournedos of beef Tyrolienne (with tomatoes and onions), stuffed chicken with Madeira wine sauce, and an excellent local Camembert-type cheese for the savoury course.

Over the next two decades, by the time my wife and I boarded the Blue Train at Pretoria in 2000, the train had become even more upmarket, featuring an impressively opulent decor, with ‘butlers’ replacing the traditional ‘bedding boys’. Part of this elevation in service had been the shift in purpose from transportation to recreation, typical of luxury trains around the world. By 2000 the sets of railway cars that made up the two Blue Trains were each eighteen cars long and nearly identical, but only our train, number 2 (with accommodations for 76 passengers), carried an observation car – with an aft-looking, full-width, full-height picture window – that could also be used as a conference facility. Today one set of Blue Train railway cars carries 52 passengers and the other accommodates 80 passengers, with a conference car and also a suite for guests in wheelchairs. The view was good from our observation car in 2000, but both the lounge car and the club car (in which smoking was allowed) were more handsomely appointed. The club car also featured a large video screen showing the track ahead, a mesmerizing moving image for many passengers, who couldn’t take their eyes off the screen.

Blue Train dinner menu from 6 July 1977.

At 5:10 p.m. we stopped at Kimberley, the famous diamond centre, for a tour of the Kimberley Mine Museum – a large assemblage of carefully restored buildings, most of them moved from other places around the region, plus the ‘Big Hole’ left by the De Beers company’s diamond-mining activity. This Kimberley stop is still part of the programme for travellers on the southbound Blue Train. Northbound, a similar but briefer stop is made at Matjiesfontein, a village rich in Victorian architecture and an oasis in the vast, semi-desert Karoo region.

The Blue Train’s observation car offers fine views of the lush, mountain-backed vineyard and orchard country of the Western Cape.

After cocktails in the club car came dinner in the elegant full-length, 42-seat dining car. (The separate kitchen car was adjacent, standard in South African railway practice.) With tables for four on one side of the aisle and tables for two on the other, the dining car had a spacious feel that belied the degree of diminution inevitable for a car riding on 1,067-mm-wide (3½-ft) rails – the reason, no doubt, that the separate dining and kitchen cars operated in tandem. One bulkhead (end wall) was adorned with mountainscape art, perhaps of the Hex River Valley that we would traverse the next morning. Between the tables on either side of the aisle, half-partitions of glass trimmed in light wood created a look reminiscent of the elegant ‘pillared’ dining cars, made of teak with fluted pillars between the tables and arches over the aisle, that in earlier times were emblematic of rail dining in South Africa. Handsome lamps sat on the tables, along with silver vases holding orchids. The Blue Train logo, a stylish ‘B’ that encircles itself, was everywhere: incised into the dark wood frames of the chairs, etched on the glass partitions, embossed in gold on the menu folders.

Today’s Blue Train offers meals in this elegant dining saloon. The aisle-seat chairs are set aside so that window-seat patrons can easily reach their places.

The menu inside the folders itemized each course of the meal: cappuccino of mushroom soup (that is, served with a foamy top); boneless rack of lamb in pecan crust, with barbecue sauce; and chocolate potjie, a dessert made with Amarula Cream (a South African liqueur made with the fruit of the African marula tree), served in a small individual pot. Today’s Blue Train dinner offerings include pepper-crusted venison paired with a lamb cutlet encrusted with pistachios and barley; prosciutto-wrapped monkfish served with lima (butter) bean purée, orange-braised fennel and herbed butter; and seared duck breast atop pommes Anna, with steamed asparagus and red-cabbage marmalade on the side. Brunches are baked Scottish salmon with sweet potatoes, Asian vegetables and herb coulis; dry-aged fillet of beef with blue cheese dusted with powdered biltong (South African dry-cured meat), sauced with a herb reduction; and chicken breast with Peppadew red peppers and feta cheese, served with julienned vegetables and maple-sweetened potatoes.

Seared Duck Breast with Pommes Anna and Red Cabbage Marmalade

The Blue Train is the rolling equivalent of an international five-star hotel, and its dining cars offer the best of Continental and international cuisine. This elegant dish, a highlight on the Blue Train menu, is easy to prepare and looks beautiful on the plate. Served in a variety of ways, duck breast is very popular throughout South Africa.

For the red cabbage marmalade

375 ml (1½ cups) finely chopped red cabbage

5 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp vinegar

2 tbsp red wine

For the duck and pommes Anna

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) baking potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced crosswise

35 g (2½ tbsp) melted butter

Salt and pepper

2 medium boneless duck breasts, about 170 g (6 oz) each, skin attached

Make the red cabbage marmalade by combining the chopped red cabbage, sugar, vinegar and red wine in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring frequently, for about 40 minutes, or until the liquid is absorbed. Cool to room temperature, then refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F). Butter well a heavy 30-cm (12-in.) ovenproof frying pan or skillet (or round baking dish). Arrange the potato slices, overlapping them slightly, in several layers, brushing each layer with the melted butter and sprinkling with salt and pepper as you layer them. Cover the potatoes with a round of greased baking (parchment) paper and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the paper and bake for an additional 25 minutes or until browned and crisp.

While the potatoes are baking, score the tops of the duck breasts in a cross-hatch pattern, cutting deeply into the fat. Season generously with salt and pepper. Place them skin-side down in a cold iron frying pan or skillet, set the heat at medium-high, and sear for 8 to 10 minutes or until crisp. Turn the meat over and cook 3 to 5 minutes longer, to medium-rare. Let the duck breasts rest at room temperature for about 5 minutes before slicing diagonally. Cut the potatoes into portions and serve the duck warm, on top of the potatoes, with the red cabbage marmalade on the side.

Serves 2

The contemporary Blue Train’s Club Car has a video screen showing an engineer’s-eye view of the train’s progress.

Dinner on the Blue Train is dressy. Passengers are instructed that ‘dinner is an elegant affair and men are requested to wear a jacket and tie and ladies elegant evening wear.’⁴ Certainly such an atmosphere elevates expectations, so the somewhat scattered service we experienced surprised us. When we returned to our compartment, however, we found that Hadi, our female butler, had been at work. Beds were made up with B-embroidered duvets. Lights were dimmed and chocolates proffered.

At 7 a.m., through the suite’s broad window, the sky showed red-orange under a dome of ever-paler blue, ringed by black silhouettes of jagged hills. Now well off the Karoo desert, we traversed a trio of tunnels – as seen on the television screen in our room – amid a brushy mountain landscape that reminded us of the American West. This was the Hex River Valley. When we went to the dining car for breakfast, I turned traditional, ordering the over-the-top English breakfast: fried eggs sunny-side-up, a grilled banger (sausage), bacon, sautéed mushrooms, grilled tomato and minute steak.

After breakfast we headed for the observation car, where we watched the lush, mountain-backed vineyard and orchard country of the Western Cape roll by. Conversation was animated. A modish woman from Johannesburg who claimed to be Nelson Mandela’s interior decorator held centre stage, although she was in fact upstaged by the scenery beyond the wall of glass. Before we knew it, the morning had sped by. Table Mountain loomed to the left as we arrived in Cape Town at noon, right on schedule. I was back where I’d been almost exactly 23 years earlier, at the railway station in Cape Town, when I was about to board the Blue Train for the first time and experience luxurious rail travel like I had never known before. At the end of that earlier journey, I could never have imagined that, two decades later, the Blue Train would be an even more opulent way to travel.

In South Africa today, the Blue Train is not the only super-luxury service. There is also Rovos Rail’s Pride of Africa, which operates on a variety of itineraries. And just before boarding the Blue Train in June 2000, my wife and I had ridden on the Pride of Africa as well.

Mimosas, champagne and orange juice on offer as passengers gather at Rovos Rail’s Capital Park station, anticipating the departure of the luxurious Pride of Africa train.

As I wandered through Rovos Rail’s impeccably manicured 10-hectare (25-acre) Capital Park complex, just north of Pretoria, I thought of those elaborate model train ensembles set up in many people’s attics or basements. But at Capital Park the scale was 1-to-1: a trim, full-size colonial-style station, perfect in all details, seemingly new but in fact a reconstruction of a building where apprentice engineers once trained; a dozen or so railyard tracks that held shiny, spotless cream-and-green carriages; and steam engines dating from the 1940s on the far tracks, poking out from the locomotive and carriage shops.

Capital Park is actually the private railway layout of one man: Rohan Vos (hence his firm’s name, Rovos), who made his fortune in the automobile parts business and who also loves trains. As he wrote in a booklet published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Rovos Rail on 29 April 1999, ‘At 40 I was well off. At 53 I’m broke. But boy do I have a great trainset.’⁵ In the years since Rovos Rail began running the Pride of Africa, it has achieved a worldwide reputation for luxury service that, until recently, even retained at least a whiff of steam.

With our Blue Train adventure roughly a week away, my wife and I were at Capital Park to embark for Victoria Falls, a trip among Rovos’s staples since it was introduced in 1994 and which remains today on the list of possible itineraries. Not long before our departure, we learned that our trip would not be the classic direct route to ‘Vic Falls’, but rather a loop east to Kruger National Park and back, concluding with a hop on a DC-4 aeroplane operated by South African Airways Historic Flight.

About an hour before our 10 a.m. departure, passengers began to gather in the plush waiting room. French doors opened on to a terrace where, in a tiled mosaic, the Rovos Rail logo was at the centre of a compass rose. Also embedded in the mosaic were tile signs to endpoint cities on Rovos’s various routes: Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Victoria Falls. A cellist and violinist played light classical selections, while train attendants passed around glasses of champagne, orange juice and mimosas.

Prosciutto-wrapped Monkfish with Warm Bean Purée

This recipe, a Blue Train favourite, features monkfish (also called anglerfish), which resembles lobster in taste and texture.

300 g (11 oz) frozen baby lima beans, or 400 g (14 oz) canned butter beans

90 ml (6 tbsp) olive oil (divided use)

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 tbsp lemon juice

4 monkfish fillets, 140 g (4½ oz) each

Juice of half a lemon

4 thin slices prosciutto

½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

Make the bean purée by cooking the frozen beans in salted water until very soft, then drain and purée in a food processor with 4 tbsp (¼ cup) olive oil, the garlic and 1 tbsp lemon juice. Add salt and pepper to taste. (If using canned beans, rinse with cold water, drain, and purée with other ingredients.) Warm the bean purée in a saucepan just before serving.

Preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F). Sprinkle the monkfish fillets with lemon juice and pepper, and wrap each in a slice of prosciutto. Sauté in 2 tbsp hot olive oil in a 30-cm (12-in.) ovenproof frying pan or skillet for 2 to 3 minutes on each side. Place in the oven for 7 to 8 minutes, then serve on top of the warmed bean purée.

Serves 4

Beyond a burbling fountain on the brick platform stood the graceful guest of honour: a steam locomotive named ‘Brenda’, beautifully polished, with brass ornamentation gleaming. Rohan and Anthea Vos have three daughters and a son, and each has a namesake locomotive, as does Rohan’s mother, Marjorie. (Today, their daughter Brenda Vos is Rovos Rail’s communications manager.) In its early years the Pride of Africa was largely steam-hauled, but that has changed now – dramatically, as South Africa’s railway system has dismantled the infrastructure needed to support steam-driven locomotives. By 2000, steam had been reduced to a largely ceremonial role, with steam engines hauling trains for the first or last hour or so from the Rovos Rail Station at Capital Park, before turning the trains over to electric- or diesel-powered locomotives. And even that doesn’t happen anymore: ‘Our iron ladies [steam engines] are used for every departure from and arrival into Rovos Rail Station,’ said Ms Vos. ‘They pull the train onto or off the platform but they no longer leave our 60-acre property. They are essentially museum pieces.’⁶

At Capitol Park, the highly polished ‘Brenda’ locomotive makes a cameo appearance before being coupled to the train’s carriages.

‘Brenda’ the locomotive did indeed make a lovely sight when we rode in 2000, steaming softly at the platform, on display for the admiring passengers until, as departure neared, she moved into the railyard to couple with the carriages. The foggy morning had retained a cool, damp softness, so the locomotive was wreathed in white – steam, smoke and mist – as she curved out of the Rovos Rail compound. For a time the chuff of the locomotive was steady and muted, then more of a loud bark on an upgrade, but before long it became the satisfying roar of speed. The whistle shrilled in an exhilarating high-pitched shriek foreign to American ears accustomed to more melodic train whistles. I had the window down and, wearing the plastic goggles provided to the passengers, enjoyed every moment of that brief steam experience.

Rovos claims to offer the most spacious rail-borne accommodations in the world. Our Royal Suite had a double bed permanently in place; a credenza with a complimentary minibar, as well as a tray with coffee and tea equipment; ample closets and enough overhead storage for a much longer journey; and a bathroom with not only a stall shower but a claw-foot bathtub. The room, named Limpopo for an area river, was panelled in dark wood and equipped with plenty of amenities: bathrobes, a hair dryer and a fully stocked toiletries kit. The evening turn-down service included setting up the coffee pot for the morning brew, requiring just a flip of the switch from us when we woke up the next day. Palatial now, the carriage was nothing special when it was built as an ordinary sleeping car in 1977, with accommodations for 36 people. Today it holds only two Royal Suites, so cars originally built to sleep 36 passengers now sleep only four. Deluxe Suites, like a Royal Suite but without a bathtub, are three to a car.

The open platform of the observation car on Rovos Rail’s Pride of Africa’s is an ideal place to view the scenery.

Rovos Rail got its start when Rohan Vos bought a few railway cars to restore and use for holiday travel with his family. ‘The whole thing started with dining cars,’ he told me, and they remain the pearls of the train.⁷ The first, acquired in 1986, was ‘Shangani’, built in 1924, one of the ‘pillared’ dining cars uniquely characteristic of South African Railways. Paired with a kitchen car, ‘Shangani’ took eighteen months to refurbish. And we enjoyed dining on that ‘Shangani’ with a luncheon of duck-and-ostrich terrine, baked kingclip and banana with curry sauce, and chilled citrus fruit mousse. Beautiful in dark wood, with ceiling-supporting pillars and arches, the dining car rolled along with a symphony of creaks, reminiscent of an old steamship or yacht, as we travelled east. For breakfast we had a choice of a traditional English breakfast or a cold buffet (which we chose): half a dozen cheeses, meats, marinated herring, smoked salmon, and a selection of fresh fruits and dry cereals.

Traditional Cape Brandy Pudding with Crème Anglaise

This brandy-laced dessert is a classic South African pudding also known as ‘tipsy tart’ and dadelpoeding (Afrikaans for ‘date pudding’), an old recipe from the Western Cape area. This version is served on Rovos Rail’s Pride of Africa train.

For the crème anglaise

120 ml (½ cup) milk

120 ml (½ cup) heavy whipping cream

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 large egg yolks

3 tbsp sugar

For the pudding

250 g (9 oz) stoned (pitted) dates, finely chopped (divided use)

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

240 ml (1 cup) boiling water

125 g (4½ oz) butter, softened

200 g (1 cup) granulated white sugar

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

240 g (2½ cups) flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon, plus extra for garnish ½ tsp salt

150 g (1⅓ cups) chopped walnuts or pecans

Grated zest of 2 medium oranges

For the brandy sauce

350 g (1¾ cups) soft brown sugar

120 ml (½ cup) water

1 tbsp (½ oz) butter

Large pinch salt

120 ml (½ cup) brandy

1 tsp vanilla extract

Make the crème anglaise in advance by combining the milk and whipping cream with 1 tsp vanilla extract in a heavy medium-size saucepan. Bring to a simmer over a medium heat, then remove from the heat. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together well in a medium bowl. Gradually whisk the hot milk mixture into the yolk mixture. Return the custard to the saucepan and stir constantly over a low heat until the custard thickens and coats the back of a spoon, about 5 minutes (do not boil). Cool, stirring occasionally, then cover and refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Divide the dates into 2 equal portions, placing 1 portion in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle with the bicarbonate of soda, pour boiling water over the dates and mix well. Set aside to cool.

Beat the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl, then add the eggs, beating well until the mixture is creamy and smooth. Sift the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt over this mixture and fold it in. Add the chopped nuts and the dry portion of dates, stirring well. Stir the separate date and bicarbonate of soda mixture together (with any liquid that has not been absorbed) into the pudding batter. Add the orange zest and mix very well.

Butter a 28-cm (12-in.) square glass baking dish and spread the batter in it. Bake uncovered in the oven for 40 minutes, until the pudding springs back when pressed in the centre.

Make the brandy sauce while the pudding is baking. Combine the sugar, water, butter and salt in a small saucepan over low heat. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the brandy and vanilla extract. Prick the hot pudding all over the top with a toothpick and pour the brandy sauce over the pudding. Serve the pudding in a pool of crème anglaise and sprinkle ground cinnamon over the top.

Serves 8 to 10

Among the dishes currently found on the Pride of Africa dining car menu are, for lunch, traditional South African bobotie, a gently spiced minced (ground) beef dish oven-baked with a layer of savoury egg custard, served with a chutney of Peppadew red peppers, kiwi fruit and bananas; and garlic-lemon grilled prawn on a skewer, served on a green salad with julienned bell peppers, sugar snap peas and cucumbers, all drizzled with a coriander-ginger dressing. For the main course at dinner we could choose between slow-roasted deboned Karoo lamb shank, served with creamed potatoes and a parcel of baby green beans, along with mushrooms and flash-fried Roma tomatoes; or grilled queen scallops (a species of small scallop) served with hollandaise sauce.⁸

Today there are long-haul passenger train options in South Africa beyond the Blue Train and Rovos Rail, one of which is also considered a ‘luxury’ train: Shosholoza Meyl’s Premier Classe, their top level of service, on trains that run between Johannesburg and Cape Town and between Johannesburg and Durban. Their Premier Classe is best categorized as ‘affordable luxury’, with one- or two-person coupés or family compartments. Lavatories (toilet facilities) are communal, as was always the case except on the refurbished Blue Train and the private Rovos Rail trains. Meals in the Premier Classe dining cars include a full English breakfast, four-course luncheon, traditional English afternoon tea and a five-course dinner. Shosholoza Meyl also offers Tourist Class sleepers on those same routes and on additional routes, with more basic coupés and bedrooms and a less glamorous dining car, where meals are not included in the ticket price as they are in Premier Classe.⁹

The Pride of Africa’s kitchen produces superb cuisine.

Service with a smile aboard one of Rovos Rail’s elegant dining cars.

But of all the luxury railway travel options in South Africa, only the Blue Train has such a deep history and unquestionable pedigree. And fine food to boot.

South African Bobotie

Served on Rovos Rail’s Pride of Africa train, bobotie is a traditional luncheon dish of gently spiced minced beef or lamb (or both) with a layer of savoury egg custard baked on top, served with fruit chutney and fresh fruit salsa. The recipe originated with the Cape Malay people of South Africa.

For the bobotie

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) minced (ground) lean beef or lamb (or a combination)

2 thick slices wholemeal (whole wheat) bread

240 ml (1 cup) boiling water

2 medium onions, finely chopped

30 g (2 tbsp) butter

1 to 2 garlic cloves, crushed

2 tsp curry powder

1½ tsp each ground cumin and coriander

½ tsp each ground turmeric and ginger

2 tsp smooth apricot jam

75 g (1 cup) raisins or sultanas (optional)

60 ml (¼ cup) red wine vinegar or lemon juice

50 g (⅔ cup) toasted blanched or unblanched almonds, chopped

2 extra-large eggs

240 ml (1 cup) sour cream

8 to 10 bay leaves

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the fruit salsa

3 kiwi fruits, sliced

2 bananas, sliced

500 g (1½ cups) chopped dried apricots

50 g (⅔ cup) julienned spicy red and green chillies

Juice of ½ lime

Slivered almonds, for garnish

Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). In a skillet, brown half the meat in a little oil, breaking the meat into small pieces with a wooden spoon or large fork. Remove from the skillet and brown the rest of the meat in the same pan. Remove and set aside.

Soak the bread in boiling water in a bowl. In the same skillet, sauté the onions in butter until translucent. Add the garlic, curry, cumin, coriander, turmeric and ginger, sautéing for 1 to 2 minutes longer. Return the meat to the pan. Squeeze the water from the bread and add the bread to the meat, mixing well. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Add jam and raisins or sultanas, if using, and season with vinegar, salt and pepper. Spoon the meat into a 2-litre (2-qt) ovenproof glass baking dish and sprinkle with toasted almonds.

Beat the eggs and sour cream together. Spoon the mixture over the meat and tuck bay leaves around the edges. Bake, uncovered, for 35 to 40 minutes or until golden brown. Remove the bay leaves before serving. Meanwhile, make the fruit salsa by tossing together the kiwi, banana, dried apricot, chilli and lime juice. Top each serving with a few slivered almonds.

Serve the baked bobotie with Major Grey’s Chutney and the fruit salsa on the side.

Serves 8

REFERENCES

1 Sandwiches, Savouries and Strawberry Fizz: Dining at Speed on the Flying Scotsman – Adam Balic

¹ ‘Flying Scotsman’s 70th Birthday 392 Miles in 7½ Hours’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 29 June 1932, p. 5.

² Charles Rous-Marten, Notes on the Railways of Great Britain (Wellington, 1887), p. 13.

³ The American Railway Journal, XXXVIII (1884), p. 206.

⁴ ‘Cuttings from the “Comics”’, Bridport News, 7 February 1890, p. 8.

⁵ Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (London, 1869), p. 292.

⁶ G. H. Turner, Pocket Guide to the Midland Railway of England (London, 1894), p. 76.

⁷ ‘New East Coast Corridor Trains’, London Evening Standard, 30 June 1896, p. 2.

⁸ Victoria Breething, ‘The Flying Scotsman’s Wonderful Kitchen’, Leeds Mercury, 1 October 1925, p. 4.

⁹ ‘The Man Who Feeds the Flying Scotsman’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 14 June 1928, p. 2.

¹⁰ Stuart George, ‘Off the Rails: London and North Eastern Railway Wine List from 1936’, www.stuartgeorge.net, 21 April 2016.

¹¹ A. E. Rogers, A Century of Meals on Railway Wheels, National Railway Museum, York, UK (hereafter NRM), Archive Inventory No. ALS5/37/C/5.

¹² ‘Notice. Railway Executive Committee. No Restaurant Cars. Withdrawal of Restaurant Cars from 5 April 1944’, NRM, Archive Inventory No. 1978-2689.

¹³ ‘Menu, London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) luncheon menu for the Royal Station Hotel, York, 17 May, 1941’, NRM, Archive Inventory No. 2003-8826.

¹⁴ ‘Menu, London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) luncheon menu for the North British Station Hotel, Edinburgh, 6 September, 1941’, www.ebay.co.uk, accessed 23 October 2016.

¹⁵ Raymond Postgate, ‘Railway Fare’, The Spectator, 4 August 1960, p. 28.

¹⁶ ‘Leading Article: A Nation Split by the Great British Sandwich’, www.independent.co.uk, 16 May 1997.

¹⁷ Nigel Bunyan, ‘Revealed: The Secrets of a British Rail Sandwich’, www.telegraph.co.uk, 22 November 2002.

¹⁸ Sharon Hudgins, ‘Making Tracks to Dinner on the Diner’, www.europeantraveler.net, 7 October 2016.

¹⁹ ‘East Coast Train Shake-up to Include Flying Scotsman’, www.bbc.co.uk, 23 May 2011.

²⁰ ‘Dine Behind Flying Scotsman’, www.flyingscotsmanatelr.com/dine, 10 September 2016.

2 Of French Champagne and Turkish Coffee: Feasting and Fasting on the Orient Express – Arjan den Boer

¹ Henri Opper de Blowitz, Un course à Constantinople, 3rd edn (Paris, 1884), p. 9.

² Roger Commault, ‘Le Centenaire du train d’essai Paris-Vienne’, in unknown French magazine, 1982, pp. 26–7, author’s collection.

³ Jean des Cars and Jean-Paul Caracalla, The Orient-Express: A Century of Railway Adventures (London, 1987), p. 22.

⁴ Blowitz, Un course à Constantinople, p. 6.

⁵ Georges Boyer, ‘L’Orient à toute vapeur’, Le Figaro, 20 October 1883.

⁶ A. Laplaiche, ‘L’Orient-Express’, La Nature, 575 (7 June 1884), p. 6.

⁷ Edmond About, L’Orient-Express [De Pontoise à Stamboul] (Paris, 2013), p. 57.

⁸ Cy Warman, Tales of an Engineer (New York, 1895), p. 129.

⁹ Ibid., p. 127.

¹⁰ Joseph Riley, My Eastern Journey 1889, unpublished transcription by J. L. Riley, J. B. Priestley Library, University of Bradford, 2007.

¹¹ Orient Express price list 1887–8, author’s collection.

¹² Margaret Elizabeth Leigh Child-Villiers, Fifty-one Years of Victorian Life (New York, 1922), p. 236.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Pierre Loti, ‘15 mai 1890’, in Cette éternelle nostalgie. Journal intime, 1878–1911 (Paris, 1997). Cited in Pierre Escaillas, ‘Orient Express’, 20 March 2008, http://debarcaderes.over-blog.com.

¹⁵ Jürgen Klein, Die Grandhotels der Internationale Schlafwagengesellschaft (Mönchengladbach, 2012), p. 68.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 131.

¹⁷ Elysée Palace menu, 16 July 1900, via http://menus.nypl.org, accessed 1 October 2016.

¹⁸ Jeri Quinzio, Food on the Rails: The Golden Era of Railroad Dining (Lanham, MD, 2014), p. 137.

¹⁹ John Dos Passos, Orient Express (New York, 1927), p. 15.

²⁰ George Behrend quoted in Michael Barsley, Orient Express: The Story of the World’s Most Fabulous Train (London, 1966), p. 128.

²¹ Ibid., p. 133.

²² Beverley Nichols, No Place Like Home (London, 1936), p. 47.

²³ Sir Roy Redgrave, ‘A Passage to Rumania’, Orient Express Magazine (1986), at www.tkinter.smig.net, accessed 1 October 2016.

²⁴ Roy Rowan, ‘LIFE rides the Simplon Orient Express’, LIFE (11 September 1950), pp. 137–45.

²⁵ Arjan den Boer, ‘Jack Birns Photographs the Simplon Orient Express in 1950, Part 5: Yugoslavia’, RETOURS, www.retours.eu, 27 August 2013.

²⁶ Rowan, ‘LIFE rides the Simplon Orient Express’, p. 139.

²⁷ Joseph Wechsberg, ‘Take the Orient Express’, New Yorker (22 April 1950), p. 89, available at www.josephwechsberg.com.

²⁸ Werner Sölch, Orient-Express: Glanzzeit und Niedergang eines Luxuszuges (Düsseldorf, 1974) pp. 126–7.

²⁹ Paul Theroux, ‘Misery on the Orient Express’, Atlantic Monthly, 1 (1975), pp. 30–36.

³⁰ James Sherwood and Ivan Fallon, Orient-Express: A Personal Journey (London, 2012), Chapter One, accessed via https://books.google.com.

³¹ Shirley Sherwood, Venice Simplon Orient-Express: The Return of the World’s Most Celebrated Train (London, 1985), p. 124.

³² ‘An Interview with the Head Chef of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express’, www.kuoni.co.uk, accessed 1 October 2016.

³³ ‘Venice Simplon-Orient-Express Launches New Spring Menus with Michelin-star Chef Guy Martin’, www.belmond.com, 13 April 2016.

³⁴ Robin McKie, ‘Final Call for Passengers on the Orient Express as Service is Scrapped’, The Observer, 6 December 2009, www.theguardian.com.

3 From Caviar to Mystery Meat: Dining across Two Continents on the Trans-Siberian Railway – Sharon Hudgins

¹ Arnot Reid, From Peking to Petersburg, 2nd edn (London, 1899), p. 194.

² Robert L. Jefferson, Roughing It in Siberia (London, 1897), pp. 8–10.

³ John W. Bookwalter, ‘A Ride on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1899’, Ainslee’s Magazine, May 1899, at www.digitalhistoryproject.com.

⁴ Revd Francis E. Clark, A New Way around an Old World (London, 1901), p. 37.

⁵ Harmon Tupper, To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (Boston, MA, 1965), pp. 274–5; Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu, Au bon temps des wagons-restaurants (Paris, 2012), p. 103; Jürgen Klein, Die Grandhotels der Internationalen Schlafwagengesellschaft (Mönchengladbach, 2012), pp. 161, 217, 218.

⁶ Arjan den Boer, ‘Panorama Transsibérien’: The Trans-Siberian Express at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900’, RETOURS, www.retours.eu, November 2014.

⁷ Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, pp. 354–5.

⁸ E. Burton Holmes, The Burton Holmes Lectures, vol. VIII (New York, 1905), p. 246.

⁹ Henry Norman, MP, All the Russias: Travels and Studies in Contemporary European Russia, Finland, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (New York, 1902), p. 104.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 142, 145.

¹¹ Michael Meyers Shoemaker, The Great Siberian Railway from St Petersburg to Pekin (New York and London, 1903), p. 116.

¹² John Foster Fraser, The Real Siberia (New York, 1902), p. 28.

¹³ Russian Railways, ‘The Company/History’, www.eng.rzd.ru, accessed 21 October 2014.

¹⁴ Quoted in Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 408.

¹⁵ Quoted in Anne Meinhardt and Olaf Meinhardt, The Trans-Siberian Railway: From Moscow to the Pacific Ocean (Munich, 2008), p. 100.

¹⁶ Mildred Widmer Marshall, Two Oregon Schoolma’ams, around the World, 1937 – via Trans-Siberian Railroad (Woodburn, OR, 1985), p. 87.

¹⁷ Author’s interview with Ray Ehrensberger, University of Maryland University College Chancellor Emeritus, College Park, MD, Spring 1996.

¹⁸ Russian Railways, ‘The Company/History’, http://eng.rzd.ru, accessed 21 October 2014.

¹⁹ Eric Newby, The Big Red Train Ride (London, 1978), p. 26.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 34–5.

²¹ Russian Railways, ‘The Company/History’.

²² Sharon Hudgins, The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East (College Station, TX, 2003), pp. 56–7.

²³ Anthony Lambert, ‘Trans-Siberian: Great Train Journeys’, www.telegraph.co.uk, 9 November 2012.

²⁴ Mark Smith, ‘Trans-Siberian Railway – Sample Restaurant Car Menus’, www.seat61.com, accessed 25 October 2015.

²⁵ John Lee, ‘Beijing to Moscow: Six Days on the Trans-Siberian’, Russian Life, XLIV/3 (2001), p. 38.

²⁶ Author’s telephone interview with Tim Littler, founder of GW Travel (now Golden Eagle Luxury Trains Ltd), 5 May 2006.

²⁷ Author’s interview with chef Il’khomudin Kamolov aboard the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express, August 2006.

²⁸ From complete set of Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express menus, Moscow to Vladivostok, 2014.

4 All Aboard: Classic American Cuisine on the Santa Fe Super Chief – Karl Zimmermann

¹ Mike Schafer, All Aboard Amtrak (Piscataway, NJ, 1991), p. 89.

² Quoted in Stephen Fried, Appetite for America (New York, 2010), p. iv.

³ Stan Repp, The Super Chief, Train of the Stars (San Marino, CA, 1980), p. 100.

⁴ James D. Porterfield, Dining by Rail (New York, 1993), p. 174.

⁵ This journey was first recounted by the author in ‘A Miracle of Rare Device’, National Review, 15 May 1971, pp. 655–65, and subsequently in ‘Remembering the Super Chief’, in Santa Fe Streamliners: The Chiefs and their Tribesmen (New York, 1987), pp. 5–9.

⁶ Author’s interview with Chet Riedemann aboard the American Orient Express, May 2005, en route from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles.

⁷ Fred W. Frailey, Twilight of the Great Trains (Bloomington, IN, 2010), p. 55.

5 Sockeye Salmon and Saskatoon Pie: Regional Foods on Canada’s Long-distance Railways – Judy Corser

¹ James D. Porterfield, Dining by Rail (New York, 1993), p. 41.

² Ibid., p. 42.

³ Joseph Husband, The Story of the Pullman Car (Chicago, IL, 1917), p. 7.

⁴ Robert E. Legget, Railways of Canada (Vancouver, 1973), p. 176.

⁵ Author’s conversation with curator Jean-Paul Viator, Canadian Railway Museum, Saint-Constant, Quebec, 20 June 2016.

⁶ Agnes Macdonald, ‘By Car and by Cowcatcher’, Murray’s Magazine (London), 1 (1887), p. 215.

⁷ Elizabeth Ellen Cameron Spragge, From Ontario to the Pacific by the CPR (Toronto, 1887), p. 30.

⁸ David Laurence Jones, Famous Name Trains: Travelling in Style with the CPR (Calgary, 2006), p. 56.

⁹ Bill McKee and Georgeen Klassen, Trail of Iron (Calgary, 1983), p. 147.

¹⁰ Porterfield, Dining by Rail, p. 48.

¹¹ Jones, Famous Name Trains, p. 61.

¹² Department of Public Relations, Canadian Pacific Facts and Figures (Montreal, 1946), p. 175.

¹³ Jones, Famous Name Trains, p. 56.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 59.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 58.

¹⁶ Canadian Pacific Facts and Figures, p. 178.

¹⁷ Author’s conversations with chef Steve Wood on a VIA Rail train from Vancouver to Edson, Alberta, 22–3 December 2015.

¹⁸ Author’s conversation with traveller, 2 July 2016.

6 Kangaroo, Crocodile and Custard: Eating across the Outback on Australia’s Ghan Railway – Diana Noyce

¹ Quoted in Kenn Pearce, Riding the ‘Wire Fence’ to the Alice: Memories of the Old Ghan Railway (Elizabeth, South Australia, 2011), p. 41.

² Ibid., pp. 41–3.

³ Christine Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns (Alice Springs, 2002), p. viii.

⁴ Pearce, Riding the ‘Wire Fence’, p. 42.

⁵ Tony Kelly, ‘Early Days and Camel Patrol’, www.users.on.net, July 2000.

⁶ Pearce, Riding the ‘Wire Fence’, p. 32.

⁷ Heather Parker, The First Fifty Years: Golden Jubilee History of the South Australian Country Women’s Association (Adelaide, 1979), p. 70.

⁸ Ibid., p. 75.

⁹ Ibid., pp. 69–71.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 69–70.

¹¹ Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London, 2011), pp. 443–4.

¹² Special Service Division, Services of Supply, United States Army, issued by War and Navy Departments, Washington, DC, Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, 1942 (reproduced from the original, Camberwell, Victoria, 2006), p. 16.

¹³ Patrick J. (Paddy) Greenfield, TS 1162, Typed Transcripts of Oral History Interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, pp. 13–14. Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin, NTRS 226. Interview conducted at Port Pirie, South Australia, in February 2006 by Meg Kellham, pp. 13–14.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Australian Commonwealth Railways, ‘Central Australia Railway Time Table’, 10 November 1963, www.comrails.com.

¹⁶ Greenfield, TS 1162, pp. 13–14.

¹⁷ Kelly, ‘Early Days’, p. 6.

¹⁸ Author’s Interview with Greg Fisher, Train Manager, Great Southern Rail, November 2015.

¹⁹ ‘Ghan Crew’s Christmas Greeting’, Centralian Advocate, Wednesday 24 December 1952, p. 4, at www.trove.nla.gov.au, accessed 10 June 2015.

²⁰ Pearce, Riding the ‘Wire Fence’, p. 44.

²¹ Kelly, ‘Early Days’, p. 7.

²² Pearce, Riding the ‘Wire Fence’, p. 68.

²³ Keith Easton, Narrow Gauge Journal, 8: The Ghan and the Men that Worked the Line (2003), p. 10.

²⁴ Author’s interview with Russel Seymour, Chef de Partie, Great Southern Rail, November 2015.

²⁵ The Indian Pacific is Australia’s other great long-distance train. It traverses the continent east to west, connecting Sydney with Perth, travelling 4,530 km (2,720 mi.) twice weekly in each direction.

7 Fast Food: Eating within the Box on Japan’s ‘Bullet Train’ – Merry White

¹ Kikuko Oda, ‘Historical Change in Ekiuribento in Japan’, Journal of Contemporary Culture, 778 (2005), pp. 15–28.

² Toshiki Utsu, ‘Dining Car and Meal Services on the Train’, Japan Railway and Transport Review, 58 (February 2012), p. 12.

³ Jennifer Callaghan, personal communication, 1976.

⁴ Paul Noguchi, ‘Savor Slowly: The Fast Food of High-speed Japan’, Ethnology, XIII/4 (Autumn 1994), pp. 317–30.

8 Spicy Curries and Cups of Tea: Dining along the Darjeeling Himalayan Line – Aparajita Mukhopadhyay

¹ Robert Lee, The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, India: Railways as World Heritage Sites (Paris, 1999), p. 19.

² G. Huddleston, History of the East Indian Railway (Calcutta, 1906).

³ T. Martin, The Iron Sherpa: The History of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (Chester, 2010), p. 61.

⁴ The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway: Illustrated Guide for Tourists (London, 1896), p. 9.

⁵ C. V. Llyd, Government Inspector of Railways, Calcutta, Eastern Bengal Railway: Inspection Report for the Half-year Ending 30th June 1904, British Library, London, Volume Reference IOR/P/7089.

⁶ G. V. Martyn, Senior Government Inspector of Railways, Calcutta, Eastern Bengal Railway: Inspection Report for the Second Half-year of 1900, British Library, London, Volume Reference IOR/P/6153.

⁷ Rustum Pacha, ‘Darjeeling’, Calcutta Review, 224 (April 1901), p. 265.

⁸ Ken Staynor, ‘Travelling by Train in the Days of the Raj: Restaurant Cars and Refreshment Rooms’, Indian Railways Fan Club, www.irfca.org, accessed 5 February 2017.

⁹ Personal communication from Ted Scull, 6 February 2017.

¹⁰ Zoë Renfrew, ‘All Aboard the Darjeeling Himalayan Express!’, 28 November 2014, www.currylifeblog.blogspot.co.uk.

¹¹ Peter Jordan, ‘2003 Tour Report’, Darjeeling Mail, 27 (August 2004), p. 7.

9 Baked Bobotie, Fried Kingclip and Chocolate Potjie: Traditional Fare on South African Luxury Trains – Karl Zimmermann

¹ Karl R. Zimmermann, Paradise Regained: A South African Steam Diary (Oradell, NJ, 1979), pp. 8–9.

² See www.bluetrain.co.za, accessed 10 September 2016.

³ See www.shosholozameyl.co.za, accessed 5 January 2017.

⁴ See www.bluetrain.co.za, accessed 10 September 2016.

⁵ Rovos Rail 10th Anniversary Commemorative Publication (Cape Town, 1999), p. 1.

⁶ Email interview with Brenda Vos, Rovos Rail communication manager, 2 July 2016.

⁷ Author’s conversation with Rohan Vos at his Capital Park office, 21 June 2000.

⁸ Menus provided by Michelle Ferreira, Rovos Rail food and beverage manager.

⁹ See www.shosholozameyl.co.za, accessed 5 January 2017.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Adam Balic is a professional researcher and independent scholar specializing in the food culture of Scotland. Born and raised in Australia, he has lived in Scotland for more than a decade. He actively promotes the idea that Scotland has a rich and interesting food history, and is particularly interested in debunking the widespread misconception that Scotland is a country that has only recently discovered edible food. He has contributed entries to the Oxford Companions series and is currently involved in organizing and producing dining events highlighting the rich history and delicious flavours of Scottish cuisine. He is also a committee member for the Leeds Symposium on Food History and Traditions, and has presented papers on Scottish food culture at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and at the Leeds Food Symposium.

Arjan den Boer holds a master’s degree in Arts and Humanities from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is a Dutch author, lecturer and tour guide specializing in architecture, design and railway history; the creator of the RETOURS digital magazine on railway history, design and photography; and a collector of vintage railway posters. He also writes regular columns about railway and travel poster art for Rail Magazine in the Netherlands and Railroad Heritage magazine in the United States. He is a frequent train traveller and in 2012 followed the route of the legendary Simplon Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul on modern trains. In 2015 he created the Orient Express History tablet app and ebook, illustrated with historical images, most of them from his own private collection.

Judy Corser is a former journalist who holds a master’s degree in Food Culture and Communications from Università degli Studi Scienze Gastronomiche in Bra, Italy. She is also an award-winning author of nineteen novels and several novellas (written under the name Judith Bowen). She has written numerous articles on food culture and history for such publications as CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, The New Gastronomes, and the Canada entry in At the Table: Food and Family around the World (2016). She grew up on moose meat and wild blueberries in an Alberta logging camp and has criss-crossed Canada many times on both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railway, where she had her first experience with an amazing new invention at that time, the microwave oven, in a train snack car.

Sharon Hudgins is an award-winning author, with five non-fiction books and hundreds of food and travel articles published worldwide. In addition to working as a university professor, photographer and film-maker, she has edited books on cooking, travel, history and political science; edited a culinary magazine and other food periodicals; presented several papers at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery; and written culinary entries for the Oxford Encyclopedia and Oxford Companion series. An avid rail rider, she has travelled by train in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. On assignments in Siberia, and as a lecturer for National Geographic Expeditions and Smithsonian Journeys, she has crossed Russia several times on the Trans-Siberian Railway, logging more than 65,000 km (40,000 mi.) on that line. Her books include a travel memoir, The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East (2003), and T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East (2018). She holds degrees in Political Science (Russian Studies, Stategic Studies) and Communications (Radio–TV–Film) from the University of Texas and the University of Michigan.

Aparajita Mukhopadhyay earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in India and her PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She was Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Salisbury University, Maryland, and is the book review editor of the Mobility in History blog, an online publication of the International Association for History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Her research interests include the social history of technology, the history of infrastructure and technology transfer in a colonial context. Her publications include peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, book reviews and a monograph that assesses the impact of railways on colonial Indian society. She has travelled extensively by train in India, as well as on railways in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe and the United States.

Diana Noyce holds a master’s degree in Gastronomy from the University of Adelaide in Australia and has been researching and teaching food history and food culture for several years. She has presented papers at a variety of conferences and given lectures at venues from Oxford to Antarctica, including the International Commission for Research into European Food History, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy. Her publications include many articles in print journals, online journals and newspapers, on subjects as diverse as international exhibitions, Charles Darwin, and food and war.

Merry White is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University, specializing in Japanese society, material culture and food anthropology. She received her bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees from Harvard College and Harvard University. Her publications include several books about Japan as well as two cookbooks, one recently republished in a fortieth-anniversary edition. Her most recent publication is Coffee Life in Japan, a study of Japanese social, political and economic changes as seen in cafés as public social spaces, which was awarded Best Food Book of 2013 by the Association for the Study of Food and Society. She is currently working on a new book, World History of Food. For her lifetime of work in Japanese studies she has received a John Thayer III Award from the Japan Society and an Imperial award, the Order of the Rising Sun, from the Government of Japan.

Karl Zimmermann is the author or co-author of 24 books, nearly all related to trains, spanning several decades from his first book, CZ: The Story of the California Zephyr, to his most recent, Little Trains to Faraway Places. His articles have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Travel and Leisure, Cruise Travel, Bon Appétit and Gourmet. He has also written extensively for American train-enthusiast magazines such as Trains, Railfan and Railroad, Classic Trains, Locomotive and Railway Preservation, Railroad Model Craftsman and Passenger Train Journal, where he is the North American Intercity Rail columnist. Zimmermann has travelled by train in North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia and South Africa.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1 Sandwiches, Savouries and Strawberry Fizz: Dining at Speed on the Flying Scotsman – Adam Balic

Many thanks to staff at the National Railway Museum in York, especially Peter Thorpe, Search Engine Assistant, Collections & Research, for his kind assistance; to Arjan den Boer for supplying images of the Flying Scotsman; to Sharon Hudgins for her personal recollections of travelling on the Flying Scotsman; to my family and friends for recipe testing.

2 Of French Champagne and Turkish Coffee: Feasting and Fasting on the Orient Express – Arjan den Boer

Thanks to my travel companion Ben Bregman; to Marjan van Oostrum for her support and feedback on my Orient Express research and writings; and to Laas van der Wouw for his English-language corrections. Special thanks to Sharon Hudgins for developing and testing the Orient Express recipes.

3 From Caviar to Mystery Meat: Dining across Two Continents on the Trans-Siberian Railway – Sharon Hudgins

Special thanks to National Geographic Expeditions and Smithsonian Journeys for the opportunity to work on trains on the Trans-Siberian route. Many thanks also to Tim Littler, President, and Marina Linke, Operations Manager, Golden Eagle Luxury Trains Ltd; Tatiana Kolesnikova, Senior Train Manager, Il’khomudin Kamolov, Master Chef, and the other chefs on the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express; Tom Hudgins, photographer and cook; Arjan den Boer, RETOURS digital magazine of railway history, design and photography; and Michael Ward, Publisher, www.burtonholmes.org.

4 All Aboard: Classic American Cuisine on the Santa Fe Super Chief – Karl Zimmermann

I am grateful to the public relations staff of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway (now part of BSNF Railway) for their generosity in providing photographs and other historical materials from their files when I was researching a book on this subject three decades ago, on which part of the chapter in this current book is based. I also owe a substantial debt of gratitude to my wife, Laurel, an excellent cook who selected, developed and tested the recipes, making them suitable for the home kitchen.

5 Sockeye Salmon and Saskatoon Pie: Regional Foods on Canada’s Long-distance Railways – Judy Corser

Thank you to VIA Rail Canada staff, especially Denise Henn, Josephine Wasch and Louise Bellemare; Jean-Paul Viaud, Curator, and Josée Vallerand, Archivist, at the Canadian Railway Museum, Saint-Constant, Quebec; Julia Dykstra; David Gagnon, railway buff; P. J. Cramond for helpful suggestions; Maggi Kneer, travel companion extraordinaire; Trevor Mills, Curator, West Coast Railway Association; David Gubler, photographer; family members who tested and tasted; and the service staff aboard the Canadian for sharing their insights.

6 Kangaroo, Crocodile and Custard: Eating across the Outback on Australia’s Ghan Railway – Diana Noyce

Many thanks to Great Southern Rail in Australia: Amelia Mitchell, Publicity and Events Coordinator; Greg Fisher, Train Manager; Joseph Cobiac, senior Chef de Partie; and Russel Seymour, Chef de Partie; also to Gabrielle Sexton, National Railway Museum, Port Adelaide, South Australia, and to Kenn Pearce for his kind assistance. Special thanks to Elisabeth Marnie, Archive Service Officer, Northern Territory Archives Services. Many thanks to my friends who tasted and tested recipes. The author travelled on The Ghan courtesy of Great Southern Rail.

7 Fast Food: Eating within the Box on Japan’s ‘Bullet Train’ – Merry White

I am grateful to Debra Samuels and Elizabeth Andoh for their inspiration and advice. Chie Abe’s careful research was invaluable, and Noriko Nakamura contributed important documents to the project. Gus Rancatore and Benjamin Wurgaft participated actively in the collection of ekiben in Japan and offered cogent observations.

8 Spicy Curries and Cups of Tea: Dining along the Darjeeling Himalayan Line – Aparajita Mukhopadhyay

My sincere thanks to the staff of the Asian and African Studies reading room at the British Library in London for locating relevant research materials, and to the staff of the Asian reading room at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, for their help, especially in finding Bengali travelogues. Many thanks also to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Society in the UK; photographers Ted Scull and Bruce Anderson; Anuradha Goyal, www.inditales.com; and to Peter Jordan and Sharon Hudgins for their valuable contributions to this chapter.

9 Baked Bobotie, Fried Kingclip and Chocolate Potjie: Traditional Fare on South African Luxury Trains – Karl Zimmermann

Thanks to fellow rail enthusiast Tom Kelcec, who helped me plan the itinerary for my first railway journey in South Africa in 1977. For my subsequent rail travels in South Africa in 2000, I want to thank South Africa Tourism, Spoornet (operator of the Blue Train), Rovos Rail (operator of the Pride of Africa), and especially Rohan Vos, owner of Rovos Rail. My wife, who travelled with me in 2000, deserves the credit for testing the recipes and letting me taste them.

PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interests of brevity:

© 2016 Bruce Anderson (reproduced by permission of photographer): p. 204; © 2017 Adam Balic: p. 249; George Bell, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney: p. 148; collection of Arjan den Boer: pp. 44, 46–7, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58–9, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 73, 81; © 2014 Ben Bregman: p. 250 (top); Brigden’s Studio, Toronto (reproduced by permission of the Glenbow Museum and Archives): p. 133 (top); © Dmitri Anatolyevich Bulanov: p. 87; Chris Drymalik Collection, 2010: p. 155 (bottom); © Judy Corser: pp. 139, 141, 143, 144 (bottom), 145, 146 (both); © Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Society (permission granted by photographer): pp. 195, 201 (bottom), 202, 207 (both), 209, 210 (bottom), 211 (both), 214; De Agostini/Biblioteca Ambrosiana: p. 2; Digital Magazine of Railway History, Design and Photography (reproduced by permission): p. 80; © 2017 Maree Drury: p. 252 (left); John Drysdale/Keystone Features/Getty Images: p. 41; Dutch National Archives: p. 55; courtesy Dutch Railway Museum: p. 12; © 2010 Julia Dykstra: p. 250 (bottom); Ephemera Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra: p. 162; Fox Photos: p. 30; reproduced courtesy of David Gagnon: p. 136; General Collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide: p. 152; reproduced by permission of the Glenbow Museum and Archives: pp. 130, 131, 132, 133 (bottom), 135; Golden Eagle Luxury Trains (reproduced with permission): p. 97 (top); © Great Southern Rail, Adelaide: pp. 163, 165 (Tom Roschi), 166 (Josie Withers), 167, 168, 169; © 2015 David Gubler (reprinted by permission of photographer): pp. 126–7; Matt Hind/with permission from Belmond Media: p. 72; from E. Burton Holmes, The Burton Holmes Lectures, Vol. VIII, 1901 (photos Michael Ward/www.burtonholmes.org): pp. 77, 78, 83; © Sharon Hudgins: pp. 19, 76 (top), 86, 88, 90, 92, 97 (bottom), 98, 99 (both); © Tom Hudgins: pp. 93, 251; Hudson/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images: p. 31; Hulton Archive/Getty Images: p. 20; istock/bizoo_n: p. 15; istock/ColinMyersPhotography: pp. 10–11; La Vie du Rail: p. 66; Mr T. Maughan, Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne: p. 158; © Petar Milošević: p. 95; Norma Burns Collection, Northern Territory Library, Darwin: p. 157; collection of Diana Noyce: p. 155 (top); from The Queen’s Empire, Vol. I: A Pictorial and Descriptive Record Illustrated from Photographs (London, 1897–9): p. 193; John Ramsbottom, Australian War Memorial, Canberra: p. 154; Rich@rd (Wikimedia Commons): p. 42; courtesy of Rovos Rail: pp. 233, 236 (both); Santa Fe Railway photo/Karl Zimmermann collection: pp. 100, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120; © 1974 Ted Scull (reproduced by permission of photographer): pp. 192, 194, 198, 205, 206; Darian D. Smith, Cheer-Up Hut collection, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide: p. 153; SSPL/Getty Images: pp. 24, 27, 33; Topical Press Agency/Getty Images: p. 25; Universal History Archive/Contributor/Getty Images: p. 6; Willem van de Poll/Dutch National Archives: pp. 29, 34, 35, 37; © 2017 Via Rail (reproduced by permission of Via Rail Canada Inc.): p. 144 (top); © Merry White: pp. 173, 179, 181 (both), 182 (both), 183, 185; © 2016 Benjamin Wurgaft: p. 252 (right); Karl Zimmerman: pp. 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232; collection of Karl Zimmerman: pp. 102, 107, 108, 109, 115, 119, 121, 123, 225; © 2016 Laurel Zimmermann: p. 253.

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