The time and place where I had the best French toast of my life was once each year in the Dining Car of the eastbound Denver Zephyr starting in 1956 and ending in 1967, six years before the end of train’s 40-year run.
The Dining Car on the old Denver Zephyr presented a high standard of elegance in a time of elegant travel. White linen tablecloths and napkins, heavy silverware, bone china tastefully emblazoned with Burlington insignia, and sparkling glassware were set at each of the tables, and each table was gracefully adorned with a single red carnation in a crystal bud vase. China finger bowls on silver trays would be delivered between courses.
People dressed up in those days. In fact, men, even little boys (I was five years old in 1956), had to wear a sports coat or suit and a tie to be seated, even for breakfast.
Like the Pullman porters in the passenger cars and sleepers, the waiters were African-American men of considerable girth, unbounded grace and beaming smiles that may or may not have hidden some of their lives’ disappointments, as smiles often do. They were an underpaid, overworked group of men who were only a generation or two removed from slavery. And yet, they had some of the best jobs black men could have at the midway point of the twentieth century. I knew nothing about such matters at the time; but I knew that their smiles made me genuinely happy because I was treated as my own little person rather than as some adjunct to my parents.
The breakfast menu was not too extensive and each entrée was accompanied by something appropriate. With the French toast, which is what we always ordered, you got fresh-squeezed orange or grapefruit juice and coffee, the latter of which I had yet to start drinking in 1956.
The shining, stainless steel Denver Zephyr, twenty-eight cars long in its standard configuration, zipped along its track at 60 miles per hour, creating a rhythmic motion that fascinated and delighted the five-year-old me. The water sloshing neatly back-and-forth within the confines of the stemmed glass, always stopping just shy of the lip, was more mesmerizing than the flat, greening landscape of Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois that blurred as it passed in either direction.
My mother’s parents lived in Imperial, Nebraska, a town of about 1,200 which was the county seat of Chase County. There was no passenger rail service. McCook, Nebraska, home to the nearest train depot to my grandparent’s adopted home, was sixty miles to the southeast and it was there that we disembarked when we traveled west from Chicago each spring.
The annual trip was more duty than pleasure. My grandfather, the editor/publisher/owner of the town’s newspaper, The Imperial Republican, and its leading Democrat, would have his right-hand man take his annual vacation when we came to visit each spring. My father performed Loral’s printing-shop duties with sort of a resigned half-smile.
The recreational opportunities in Imperial were slim—pretty much limited to my fishing for bluegill and sunfish in a nearby reservoir, my father golfing with borrowed clubs on a course with oiled sand greens, and the whole family going for interminably long rides in the country to gaze through the windows of my grandfather’s 1949 two-door Plymouth at great oceans of wheat fields and herds of Hereford cattle.
Unless tornado season had gotten off to an early start across the Great Plains in any given spring, which it did from time to time—the sudden stillness of the air, the drab green the sky would turn, the ominous sense of peril was exciting—the actual train travel was the highlight of our annual vacation.
Getting there was half the fun. Getting back was clearly the other half.
The trip west began at around 4 p.m. when we’d walk down the wide platform to the door to our train car. A conductor, always a white man in a dark-blue coat with polished brass buttons and a hat adorned with braided gold plaits like a French legionnaire, would check our tickets and direct us to board. There was a little step-stool leading to the steel stairs that swung down from the car. A smiling porter would take my mother’s makeup case and then her hand to help her board. We’d follow. He’d lead us down the blue-and-gray colored hall to our quarters. My father would tip him generously and we’d busy ourselves with settling into the bedroom we’d been assigned in one of the Slumber Coaches. It was an awkward space, though ultimately comfortable once our things had been stowed. I’d make a fuss about wanting the floor-level single bed so my sister wouldn’t insist on the upper berth which, of course, was what I really wanted. Passive-aggressive behavior was fully developed—it just hadn’t been assigned a name yet.
As the train pulled out of the station, we’d make our way to the nearest Vista-Dome car, taking our time passing through the noisy vestibules that connected the cars and presented a sense of great adventure and potential danger. My sister and I would scurry up the carpeted stairs to get the best seats up top (the front seat gave me a sense of driving the train). The train wended its way through the steep canyons of Chicago to the low-profile suburbs and, finally, the sprawling countryside. My parents would have joined us by then, cocktails in hand. As my mother smoked cigarettes, we’d sit watching our world pass by until almost dark, when we’d make our way to the Dining Car where my father had made a reservation and a table would be waiting.
After dinner, we would retire to the bedroom and soon fall asleep to the gentle side-to-side rock of the train and the oddly comforting clickety-clack of the steel wheels over the evenly spaced connecting joints of the rails. I’d awaken during the night at various station stops, peeking out the window from my upper berth to see where we were. My father would wake us up in the morning darkness as we approached McCook. We would disembark at dawn. Granddad and MeMa would be waiting, the car still running to keep warm against the spring morning chill.
Because of the train schedule, breakfast was not an option traveling west, but in a week or so, we’d be making the return trip and the French toast—light (despite its inch-and-a-half thickness), crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and served with whipped butter, maple syrup and fresh berries —would be awaiting us.
It would be good to be going home.
WHAT WE KNOW AS French toast is not what the French call it (they call it pain perdu); nor is it particularly French. Evidence of people consuming bread that had been soaked in milk and then cooked dates back to the Medieval Period throughout Europe. There is no shortage of modern recipes for concocting this confection-like breakfast staple.
I repeat without hesitation that the best French toast ever made was on the Denver Zephyr. I personally know three other living people of my generation who agree, thereby confirming my assertion. All others I‘= have tried in the ensuing sixty years have failed by comparison and will continue to do so because I’ve failed, even in this day of at-your-fingertips instant information, to discover the railroad’s 1956 secret. In Dining by Rail: The History and Recipes of America’s Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine by James D. Porterfield, there is a recipe from the Fred Harvey kitchen that supplied food to the Santa Fe Railway and it is just fine. But it is not what I remember eating on the Zephyr.
It is important to note that food is possibly just one part of what makes a memory and missing from other French toast experiences might be the train, in the way that Farmer John Official Dodger Dog Hot Dogs taste remarkably better at Dodger Stadium than anywhere else.
So, to best approximate and accommodate my memory, start with a day-old brioche loaf, challah, or any other loaf of white bread of exceptional quality. (The Burlington might well have used a uniformly square white bread called, appropriately enough, a Pullman loaf.) Slice four pieces of whichever bread you choose to a thickness of one-and-a-half inches. In the meantime, make a batter by vigorously whisking 4 large eggs, ½ cup whole milk, ½ cup heavy cream, 1 Tbs. sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, ½ tsp. of cinnamon and a large pinch of salt.
Preheat an oven to 400 degrees and place a wire rack over a sheet pan. Put equal amounts of butter and vegetable shortening in a heavy pan over medium-high heat. Dip the bread slices, cut diagonally, into the batter until well soaked. Transfer to the frying pan and cook, about 2 minutes per side. Cook in batches. Place bread slices on a rack in the oven and bake for 4 to 6 minutes. Serve with any or all of these toppings: butter, jam, syrup, fresh fruit. A light dusting of confectioner’s sugar provides a festive touch.
Photography by Courtney A. Liska