Taste of Tombstone No. 1: A Hearty Helping of History

I bought this book on a trip to Tombstone, and it really helped me to understand the town better. Many books about the history of the Old West, and Tombstone in particular, focus on gunfights and outlaws. The gunfights are fascinating, but there is a lot about everyday life in the Old West which often goes unexplained. This book particularly focuses on food and hospitality in the Old West, documenting the restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in town that supplied food for the miners and other people living in Tombstone from its earliest days as a mining camp in the 1870s until the mines started closing and the population dropped in the late 1880s. The restaurants were more numerous and served more of a variety than one might expect from a frontier town, including seafood, oysters, and goods imported from overseas. The first half of the book is history, and the second half contains recipes from the late 1800s, many of which were actually used by the restaurants in Tombstone. The book is illustrated with reproductions of newspaper advertisements for the restaurants and businesses, including menus. It's an interesting look into the daily life of people living in the Old West more than one hundred years ago.

When I saw this book, I had to have it. History & cooking!! What a unique idea! This creative book is chockfull of history and great recipes--what's NOT to like???

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.

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.