Delicacies of the Dining Car [View all]

FOOD ON THE MOVE

Dining on the Legendary Railway Journeys of the World
Edited by Sharon Hudgins
Illustrated. 256 pp. Reaktion Books. $35.

A friend once stayed at my Beacon Hill apartment because, he said, he had booked serial flights for the sole purpose of writing and they kept laying over in Boston. I understood, sort of. When I most need to concentrate, I find reasons to take serial trips on the Acela, the pleasantest work environment I know. The postcard parade of the Connecticut coast, the soothing water views — what could be more delightful, more conducive to creativity? My houseguest’s airplane isolation produced several best sellers that keep him flying to highly paid speaking gigs. And he was indifferent to the food! Imagine what those Amtrak views fueled by delightful meals could inspire.

I am of course far from the first to find trains uniquely pleasant or productive. “Food on the Move,” a new collection of essays by various writers, describes dining by rail — in an exalted past and, in the book’s tantalizing narratives, sometimes today — as an experience as exhilarating and varied as watching the scenery unfold mile by mile. Trains, after all, are not like planes or long-haul ships, which must stock their food on departure and face the challenges of onboard storage and cooking facilities — all but insurmountable on arid, space-challenged planes if relatively minor on cruise ships, which have become floating 18-hour buffets. Trains can replenish their stocks with the very freshest and most local produce every day. Enterprising galley chefs can explore the best local bakers and fishmongers and farmers and take their goods aboard at dawn stops.

The visions laid out in this book of the glory days of the Orient Express, the grandest and most local cuisine-oriented of the trains surveyed here, or of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, on which bearers would telegraph orders to a railway kitchen down the line for hot delivery at the next stop, make my celebrations over the appearance of a new snack packet in the Amtrak cafe car seem particularly paltry.

Yet the norm was more often exemplified by the English writer who warned in 1884 that “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.”'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/books/review/sharon-hudgins-food-on-the-move.html?