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Taste of Tombstone: A Hearty Helping of History | 
 enlarge | Author: Sherry Monahan
Publisher: Royal Spectrum Publishing, Incorporated
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $14.40
You Save: $2.55 (15%)
New (2) Used (8) from $12.50
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1837918
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 230
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8
ISBN: 1889473979
Dewey Decimal Number: 641
EAN: 9781889473970
ASIN: 1889473979
Publication Date: January 24, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Exterior and Interior in excellent condition. Cover has minor shelfware . We ship no later than next day, also we use padded envelopes.
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Product Description
This book reveals the sophisticated atmosphere unrivaled west of New Orleans and outside San Francisco during the late 1880s. Monahans detailed history of the people, restaurants, and hotels describes life in Tombstone, where six-shooters were on most mens hips, and miner picks were a common sight. Restaurants varied from simple fare, to exotic creations, and included trendy French cooking, along with fresh oysters. Monahan painstakingly cataloged the essence of how the West Was Won by presenting facts about real people and places that shaped the most famous town in Arizona. Included are 140 recipes from the era with actual photos.
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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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