Baking | Giveaway| Book Review … Fred Harveys French Apple Pie with Nutmeg Sauce … & a Shabby Apron Giveaway!

“Baked apples are at the core of modern thinking.”
Naomi Kobuko

A rather unsettling beginning of 2012 with the internet playing truant for a plethora of reasons, blame nature for a lightning strike, or man for cutting the underground cables … whatever, but it left PAB very hungry. I’m back to fill the hollow feeling with a chic Shabby Apple Apron Giveaway, and a recipe for Fred Harveys French Apple Pie with Nutmeg Sauce. The apron and the pie both very charming with a promise of retro charm. The pie from a cookbook {Appetite For America} that goes even further, a trail that chronicles ‘meaty‘ chunks of American culinary history from the roaring twenties!!

First the giveaway. The Shabby Apple folk wrote in to say … “We appreciate the quality of your website and its air of culinary chic, and we’d love to offer your fashionable readers a Shabby Apple Giveaway! Shabby Apple’s “Boysenberry Pie” Collection of aprons features designer fabric in cheery prints and charming styles, blended together for a vintage-inspired look that’s altogether sweet. Each apron comes complete with a recipe for its namesake dessert.”  … Whats not to love about these???

Shabby Apple, an online boutique of women’s dresses, casual dresses, skirts, and women’s apparel that caters to a need to make women feel feminine and beautiful. They offer flirty, stylish dresses a woman can wear just as comfortably in the office, at a family dinner, or on a date. Shabby Apple is a fashion company for women, by women, and of women. I’m giving away one apron from their Boysenberry Pie Collection to one lucky winner.

HOW TO ENTER: To win a Shabby Apple apron {value for $32-$40}, you must leave a comment before 22nd January, 2012, telling me you …

• LIKE Shabby Apple on Facebook
• Which Shabby Apple dress or item is your favorite by visiting the Shabby Apple site
• …and have a USA shipping address

To continue the nostalgia of the old world charm, I’m going to tempt you into making a simple and delicious French Apple Pie, pulled out from the pages of history. Serve it with a simple Nutmeg Sauce and it sends you back many years. This classic eating house comfort food dish was tarted up by the head Fred Harvey baker at the Los Angeles Union Station way back in the 1920’s!!The recipe comes from an entirely devourable book “APPETITE FOR AMERICA: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire that Civilized the Wild West“, penned by Stephen Fried who says, “Over the years, Fred Harvey has become something of an obsession, because it seems that the more I learn about him, his family, his business, and his world, the more I understand about my homeland, and how it came to be.” So who exactly was Fred Harvey?

An Englishman who came to America in the 1850s, he built a family and a career and then, in his early forties, started a revolutionary business feeding train passengers in the Wild West along the Santa Fe railroad. He became something much better understood today: the founding father of the American service industry. Fred Harvey ran all the restaurants and hotels along the country’s largest railroad, the Santa Fe between Chicago and Los Angeles.

This curious Englishman turned out to be more than just a brilliantly successful manager of hotels and restaurants and a true Horatio Alger story come to life (during the time when Alger actually was writing those stories). He created the first national chain of restaurants, of hotels, of newsstands, and of bookstores— in fact, the first national chain of anything— in America.

The restaurants and hotels run by this transplanted Londoner and his son did more than just revolutionize American dining and service. They became a driving force in helping the United States shed its envy of European society and begin to appreciate and even romanticize its own culture.

I often find the son completely immersed in the history channel America, the Story of the US on TV … taking in the history of America, from the American Indians, the Henry Ford car model, the railroad, oil, civil war, Confederate army, Abraham Lincoln, the Vietnam War … an extraordinary series indeed of how America was invented.While he devours history taught this way, I devour this book which deliciously crosses paths with the TV channel, as Fred’s grandson Freddy was an original partner in TWA with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. ‘Appetite For America’ takes you back many nostalgic years, where times were simple. Hospitality was a different ball game, and culinary trails and entrepreneurship developed in a remarkable way. Unlike the chains of today, the Fred Harvey system was known for dramatically raising standards wherever it arrived, rather than eroding them. It turns out that being a fast- food nation was originally a good thing!Fred Harveys success story and his methods are still studied in graduate schools of hotel, restaurant, and personnel management, advertising, and marketing. “More than any single organization, the Fred Harvey System introduced America to Americans,” wrote a historian in the 1950s. As Prof Fried says, “whether we know it or not, we still live in Fred Harvey’s America”.

Stephen Fried is an award-winning investigative journalist and essayist, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism.
Links {with recipes} you might enjoy: Fred Harvey Cooks, Fred Harvey Cookbook Project

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Also find me on The Rabid Baker, The Times of India