Chef Rufus Estes’ pioneering cookbook

At a time when most fine restaurants would not hire a black chef, Estes, as a Pullman chef, was serving Presidents Cleveland and Harrison, the Polish pianist Paderewski and the African explorer Stanley, as well as European royalty

By: Pat Tanner
   The contribution of African slaves and their African-American descendents to what we have come to know as Southern cooking can hardly be exaggerated. Among contemporary practitioners are Sylvia Woods, the restaurateur who is Harlem’s queen of soul food, and the late Edna Lewis, the renowned chef from Virginia and author of "The Taste of Country Cooking," a groundbreaking 1976 memoir and cookbook that chronicled her life and recipes in rural Freetown, Va.
   I recently came across another aspect of a distinct African-American culinary experience — and a fascinating one: that of the legions of dining car chefs and attendants, mostly black, employed by the Pullman Company to service its luxury trains beginning in the late 19th century and continuing well into the 20th.
   Rufus Estes, who was born a slave in Tennessee 1857, worked his way up from Pullman porter to spend much of his working life as a chef handling special parties in private cars. At a time when most fine restaurants would not hire a black chef, Estes, as a Pullman chef, was serving Presidents Cleveland and Harrison, the Polish pianist Paderewski and the African explorer Stanley, as well as European royalty.
   We know this and a bit more about Estes because he also went on to write the first cookbook by an African-American chef. The book’s 591 recipes for elegant and mouthwatering dishes provide a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of dining car chefs, who in the Estes’ days used wood and coal stoves for heat and blocks of ice for refrigeration.
   Estes opens his book with a short sketch of his life, and an equally short but graceful and gracious foreword. It begins, "That the average parent is blind to the faults of its off-spring is a fact so obvious that in attempting to prove or controvert it time and logic are both wasted. Ill-temper in a child is, alas! too often mistaken for an indication of genius; and impudence is sometimes regarded as a sign of precocity. The author, however, has honestly striven to avoid this common prejudice."
   Chapters are allotted not only to the usual soups, fish, meats, salads, etc., but also to soufflés, lunch dishes, Lenten dishes, and "Game, Gravy, and Garnishes." Some recipes are delicious picture-postcards from the past — oysters fricassee, broiled sheep’s kidneys, boiled samp (broken hominy), for example. Directions, too, sometimes speak to another time, like these for preparing poultry before dressing: "To serve poultry tender and delicate, it should be kept some hours after being killed before boiling or roasting. Poultry intended for dinner should be killed the evening before."
   Many other recipes, though, are startlingly contemporary, like an omelet made with squash blossoms, turkey stuffed with black truffles, and asparagus fritters. Estes even provides directions for making blackberry vinegar, a substance I would have sworn first saw the light of day in the 1970s.
   He is also wonderfully opinionated and informative. "To fry steak properly (although some claim it is not proper to fry steaks under any circumstances), it is necessary to have the butter, oleo, fat or grease piping hot, for two reasons: First, the steak sears over quickly and the juices are thus retained within the steak to better advantage than by the slow process of cooking, but even more important is the fact that the incrustation thus formed not only holds the juices within the steak, but prevents the fat from penetrating and making the steak greasy, soggy and unattractive. As a rule, however, we must acknowledge that broiled steak is in varying degrees largely superior to fried steak."
   The recipes below have been altered very little from how they appear in Estes’ book, which he first published in Chicago in 1911. Although he does not provide modern-day amenities such as a separate list of ingredients, the number of servings yielded, or exact cooking times or temperatures, home cooks with a modicum of experience will be able to follow them. For the ham and chicken pie, for example, I would take a "moderate oven" to mean 350 degrees and expect that its puff pastry top would turn golden brown in about 40 to 45 minutes.
   I also suspect no one nowadays skins and seeds grapes, but how luxurious they must have been to eat!
TRIANON SALAD
"Rufus Estes’ Good Things to Eat:
The First Cookbook by an African- American Chef"
(Dover Publications 2004;
first issued by Rufus Estes in 1911.)
   Cut one grapefruit and two oranges in sections and free from seeds and membrane. Skin and seed one cup white grapes and cut one-third cup pecan nutmeats in small pieces. Mix ingredients, arrange on a bed of romaine and pour over the following dressing: (In advance) mix four tablespoons olive oil, one tablespoon grape juice, one tablespoon grape vinegar, one-fourth teaspoon paprika, one-eighth teaspoon pepper and one tablespoon finely chopped Roquefort cheese. This dressing should stand in the icebox four or five hours to become seasoned.
HAM AND CHICKEN PIE
"Rufus Estes’ Good Things to Eat"
   Trim off the skin of some cold (cooked) chicken and cut the meat into small pieces. Mix with an equal quantity of finely chopped lean ham and a small lot of chopped shallot. Season with salt, pepper and pounded (i.e., ground) mace, moisten with a few tablespoons of white stock (chicken, veal or vegetable). Butter a pie dish, line the edges with puff paste and put in the mixture, placing puff paste over the top. Trim it around the edges, moisten and press together, cut a small hole in the top, and bake in a moderate oven. When cooked, pour a small quantity of hot cream through the hole in the top of the pie, and serve.
COCOA RICE MERINGUE
"Rufus Estes’ Good Things to Eat"
   Beat one pint of milk, add one-quarter cup of washed rice and a salt-spoon of salt. Cook until tender. Add one level tablespoon of butter, one-half cup of … raisins, half a teaspoon of vanilla, and one slightly rounding tablespoon of cocoa, cook five minutes. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs and one-half cup of beaten cream. Turn into a buttered baking dish, cover with the whites of three eggs beaten stiff with one-third cup of powdered sugar and a level tablespoon of cocoa. Set in a moderate oven for a few minutes until the meringue is cooked.