David Shields new book brings the history of American food to life through chefs, caterers, and restaurateurs of the past.
560 pages | 16 color plates, 91 halftones, 10 line drawings | 7 x 10 | © 2017
He presided over Virginia’s great political barbeques for the last half of the nineteenth century, taught the young Prince of Wales to crave mint juleps in 1859, catered to Virginia’s mountain spas, and fed two generations of Richmond epicures with terrapin and turkey.
This fascinating culinarian is John Dabney (1821–1900), who was born a slave, but
later built an enterprising catering business. Dabney is just one of 175 influential
cooks and restaurateurs profiled by David S. Shields in The Culinarians, a beautifully produced encyclopedic history of the rise of professional cooking in
America from the early republic to Prohibition.
Shields’s concise biographies include the legendary Julien, founder in 1793 of America’s
first restaurant, Boston’s Restorator; and Louis Diat and Oscar of the Waldorf, the
men most responsible for keeping the ideal of fine dining alive between the World
Wars. Though many of the gastronomic pioneers gathered here are less well known, their
diverse influence on American dining should not be overlooked—plus, their stories
are truly entertaining. We meet an African American oyster dealer who became the Congressional
caterer, and, thus, a powerful broker of political patronage; a French chef who was
a culinary savant of vegetables and drove the rise of California cuisine in the 1870s;
and a rotund Philadelphia confectioner who prevailed in a culinary contest with a
rival in New York by staging what many believed to be the greatest American meal of
the nineteenth century. He later grew wealthy selling ice cream to the masses. Shields
also introduces us to a French chef who brought haute cuisine to wealthy prospectors
and a black restaurateur who hosted a reconciliation dinner for black and white citizens
at the close of the Civil War in Charleston.
Altogether, Culinarians is a delightful compendium of charcuterie-makers, pastry-pipers, caterers, railroad
chefs, and cooking school matrons—not to mention drunks, temperance converts, and
gangsters—who all had a hand in creating the first age of American fine dining and
its legacy of conviviality and innovation that continues today.
Andrew F. Smith, editor-in-chief, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink
“The Culinarians is well researched, highly original, and well written. It is a tremendous
resource for general readers and a must-read for those interested in American food
history. And it’s an enjoyable read!”
Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making
of an American Region
“Once again, Shields adds another critical volume to the American cannon of food scholarship
with this first ever history of the nation’s foundational ‘culinarians’—the chefs,
caterers, and restauranteurs who made cooking an art long before ‘celebrity’ and ‘chef’
became a phrase in popular culture. This compelling selection of exhaustively researched
biographical profiles reveals a multi-layered American cuisine grounded in labor,
economic smarts, creativity, and skill that speaks of a nation inextricably shaped
by race, class, gender, ethnicity, and region.”
Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and author
of The Third Plate
"The Culinarians is more than a collection of biographies. It is a celebration of
lost voices--cooks, creators, and visionaries who paved the way for the food we eat
today. With this book, Shields pulls back the curtain of modern cuisine in America
to reveal a story we forgot existed."