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Taste of Tombstone: A Hearty Helping of History | 
 enlarge | Author: Sherry Monahan
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $9.95
You Save: $10.00 (50%)
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Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1524926
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0826344496
Dewey Decimal Number: 647.9579153
EAN: 9780826344496
ASIN: 0826344496
Publication Date: April 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new, still in shrinkwrap. No marks, not ex-library, not a remainder. Quick shipping from a highly rated seller.
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Product Description
The image of Tombstone, Arizona, doesn't often stray from its rough and tumble roots. Despite a tradition of gunslingers, gamblers, and cowboys, the town's businesses, hotels, and restaurants continually emphasized the boomtown's refinements, and nowhere was their promotion more apparent than in the foods of the town. The massive silver strike of 1879 gave rise to a number of grocery stores, butcher shops, ice cream parlors, and restaurants that spoke to a refined urban scene.In this lively study, Sherry Monahan offers a brief history of Tombstone and the evolution of its increasingly sophisticated dining scene. Businesses that began in tents due to a lack of building supplies raced to keep up with the area's exploding population. Soon the town boasted restaurants to rival the finest establishments of San Francisco and the business district achieved fame for the availability of posh hotels and luxurious eating. Monahan includes 140 recipes from the 1880s, most from Tombstone restaurants, so that readers may experience their own taste of Tombstone.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Old West Haute Cuisine March 17, 2008
This is a specialist but none the less fascinating account of a relatively unconsidered aspect of Old West lore in one of it's livelier towns; that is, what was for dinner? And breakfast, lunch and for snacks in between as well. After all, it couldn't all have been gunfights, gambling and mining, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week - people must have taken a coffee break some time or other. As this book so thoroughly demonstrates and documents - they did just that. There are even recipes for what they would have had with their coffee; some of baker Otto Geisenhofer's butter cookies, perhaps, or even some of his Nuremburg cookies, made with slivered almost and candied lemon peel. (The recipes for these are on pages 96-97)
Yes, the West was wild and sufficiently woolly to fuel about a century and a half of exciting dime novels, B-movies and television shows. A steady diet of those may leave one with the impression that no proper denizen of the wild West ever drank anything but whiskey or coffee from a tin pot hanging over an open fire, or anything but beans and salt pork cooked up and served in a cast-iron pan. People tend to forget that the late 19th century American frontier not only coincided with that high Victorian culture which saw the dining room as a temple and a well-set table as a high altar, but that efficient transportation networks and food-preserving technology made setting a splendid table a very achievable proposition. To put it plainly, they would have eaten lavishly and very well in 1880s Tombstone, probably at least as well as they can now, and this book proves it.
Six lovingly researched chapters, about half of this volume outline the growth of Tombstone and its commercial heart, from a waterless and desolate camp on the site of a nearby silver strike through its arc of success as a lively and cosmopolitan city and it's steep decline when the mines closed; not just the hotels and restaurants, but the saloons, chop-houses, grocery stores and ice-cream parlors... yes, there was an ice-cream parlor.
The finer hotels and restaurants published their daily bills of fare in the newspaper. On an autumn Sunday in 1881 for example, the most popular hotel in town, the Russ House dining room offered a fish course of salmon with mayonnaise sauce, a choice of entrees which included chicken giblets, pot pie, stewed brisket of beef, veal cutlets, ox tongue with spinach, and a choice of string beans, tomatoes, sweet potatoes or mashed potatoes, with pumpkin or blackberry pie, sponge cake or floating island pudding for dessert. Recipes for many of these culinary delights take up the rest of the book; gleaned from the specialties of Tombstone's bakeries, ice cream parlors, grocery stores, restaurants and meat markets. All in all; a wonderful invocation of what, exactly was going on in the background of one of the Wild West's livelier small cities.
 Eating up history May 29, 2000
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ms. Monahan's Taste of Tombstone surpasses being a cookbook...it is a slice of life from the late 1800's. As an historical fiction writer (The Texicans), I recommend it as a writer's guide to the people and foods of that era.
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