1868 | Food And Drink
Food And Drink
A new mechanical cooler for English trains permits quick-cooled milk to be delivered by rail in new metal containers to cities such as London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. The milk is far safer than milk from cows kept in town sheds (see 1863).
The first regularly scheduled U.S. dining car goes into service on the Chicago-Alton Railroad. Trains up to now have stopped for passengers to take meals at stations en route, but the available fare has been limited and of poor quality; George M. Pullman's dining car is named the Delmonico for the New York restaurant. Menus on Pullman's Palace Car Company dining cars will rival those at the best hotels of Boston and New York (see 1876).
Claus Spreckels of San Francisco patents a sugar-refining method that takes just 8 hours instead of the usual 3 weeks (see 1863). Spreckels has gone back to Europe to study manufacturing methods. The California Sugar Refinery that he opens will win him the title "Sugar King" (see 1883).
Liverpool meat packer John Morrell opens the first North American Morrell slaughterhouse at London, Ontario, after having opened Irish plants in the 1850s and a New York buying office in 1864 to obtain American bacon (see 1842; Ottumwa, Iowa, 1877).
Chicago meat packer P. D. Armour adds a second plant as business booms (see 1864). Armour moved from Milwaukee last year; he and his partner John Plankinton have invested $160,000 to take over a slaughterhouse on Archer Avenue and set up under the name Armour & Co. (see 1869).
Tabasco Sauce is formulated on Avery Island off Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Former New Orleans banker Edmund McIlhenny fled New Orleans with his wife, Mary (née Avery), when Union troops entered the city in 1862 and settled on his in-laws' 2,500-acre island, where the Avery family operated America's first salt mine (salt was essential for preserving the meat that fed Confederate troops). Union forces took over the island in 1863, the McIlhennys escaped to Texas, and when they returned in 1865 they found their plantation ruined and their mansion looted. Nothing much remained but a crop of red peppers (capsicum frutescens). McIlhenny has crushed the peppers and mixed them with vinegar and salt to create a piquant sauce, aged the mixture for a few days in wooden barrels, siphoned off the liquid, and put up the sauce in empty cologne bottles. Encouraged by the response of friends, he produces 350 bottles for Southern merchants and next year will sell several thousand at $1 each, starting a business in the Cajun condiment that will be popular for generations with seafood, especially shellfish. McIlhenny will soon open a London office to handle a growing European demand for his product.
Commercial production of compressed yeast begins for the first time in America. Charles Fleischmann has emigrated from Hungary and joined his brother Maximilian and Cincinnati yeast maker James F. Gaff to form Gaff, Fleischmann & Co. (see 1865). He sells to Cincinnati housewives from a basket at first, then by horse and wagon (see 1870).
Brewer Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness dies at London May 19 at age 69, having been created a baronet last year.