Food on the Move: Dining on the Legendary Railway Journeys of the World

Christmas, food, and trains are a trifecta of winter tradition and with good reason. When it’s cold outside, staying inside with a hot meal and watching a choo-choo make its way around a little track while the cat freaks out is a good way to spend a snowy day. Seeing as how all of us food addicts love ourselves some fancy culinary book learnin’, a good cookbook or history book is also the perfect Christmas gift for us. And now there’s a food history book that covers some of the most famous train adventures and the cuisine among them.

Cookbook author and food writer, Sharon Hudgins, has edited a new book, Food on the Move, which serves up the culinary history of nine famous railway journeys on five continents, from the earliest days of rail travel to the present. Discover the haute cuisine of elegant dining cars on the Orient Express; classic American breakfasts of steak-and-eggs on the Santa Fe Super Chief; and home-cooked regional foods along the Trans-Siberian tracks. Eat your way across Canada’s vast interior and Australia’s dusty Outback. Grab an infamous “British railway sandwich” to munch on the Flying Scotsman. Snack on spicy samosas on the Darjeeling Himalayan “Toy Train.” Dine at high speed on Japan’s bullet train, the Shinkansen. And sip South African wines in a Blue Train’s luxury lounge car featuring windows of glass fused with gold dust.
Written by eight authors who have traveled on those legendary lines, the book includes 36 recipes from the dining cars and station eateries, taken from historical menus and contributed by contemporary chefs. In your own kitchen you can make such dining-car classics as a Flying Scotchman cocktail, French petits pois aux artichaux (peas with artichokes), Turkish green beans with thyme and yoghurt, spicy Indian vegetable jalfrezi, Russian potato salad, Canadian baked Alaska, and a seductive Italian mascarpone mousse with Marsala.

You’ll also learn how these railways originated, what dishes were served in their dining cars in different periods of time, and how passengers ate in railway-owned hotel-restaurants at both ends of the line. You’ll discover how catering services on the trains coped with supplying fresh foods to discerning passengers, and how railway food services were disrupted by the two world wars in Europe. And you’ll laugh at the rise and fall of the “infamous British railway sandwich” on rail lines throughout Britain.