World Best French Toast

So I'm interviewing Gene Nopper, one of the volunteers down at Union Station, about his career working at Union Station's laundry building in the 1950s, how he worked in the commissary as well, helping provision the many passenger trains and so forth, and learned many interesting things.

Gene's a great guy. His dad saw the original Union Station burn down in 1923, worked at the new one in 1924, Gene worked there in the baggage room as well as the laundry and commissary shop. He saw the place when it was booming, the industrial center of Ogden.

Ate some good food then, too.

The interviews are for oral histories that we're doing on conjunction with Weber State University. The idea is, get the past down from witnesses while they're still here. While it's fun to ask about the big stuff, what's interesting is the small details of life you pick up.

Such as, on the passenger trains in the dining car they cooked with what we now would call fireplace logs, and charcoal. The logs burned and kept the ovens hot, and the charcoal was to grill stuff. I would have thought electric, on a train, or maybe steam somehow, but wood and charcoal?

He was there, he loaded the cars.

Anyway, what was interesting was that he said he also rode as a passenger and ate on the trains and said the Union Pacific served the world's best French toast.

Most French toast is egg-milk soaked in bread and grilled, right? Mine is. Probably so is yours.

Gene said they used plain old white Wonder bread on the UP, but after soaking it in batter it was deep-fried.

Deep fried? Submerged in grease?

Yup.

"It was sure good," he said. "People loved it."

We've Been Framed at Union Station

A couple weeks ago I told you about how Derek Henderson volunteered to rip all the wood off an old caboose at Union Station.

Derek's team and I and another friend or two spend a fun day ripping the old caboose apart. Derek and his team spent the next week collecting the wood and ripping the rest off that car which, I hasten to add, was a lot better built than any of us expected.

Derek wanted to make the wood into picture frames. Today he brought some samples by. They'll be sold in the Union Station gift shop and wherever else he can think of. Have to admit, they're pretty spiffy.

We're still working to get the steel from the caboose salvaged and hope to sell or trade the trucks -- wheels and suspension -- to another railroad museum in exchange for whatever we can get.

Point is, a trashed and burned junkheap of a caboose that was mostly a motel for transients is being repurposed, bit by bit, as art.

The Effie Hopkins "Heart Attack Waiting to Happen" Post-War cookbook

As I told you recently, I'm going through a huge pile of newspaper clippings donated to Union Station's library by the family of Effie Hopkins, a farm wife from North Ogden, whose interests were very broad.

Movie stars, local weddings and funerals, cartoons, random news events and sewing and cooking advice filled two large steel boxes. As I go through these things I am finding some real treasures, mirrors of the time if not actually valuable.

Last time I mentioned a gasoline ration book. This time it's a recipe for a bacon-wrapped oyster roll.

A couple of things about the 1940s.

People then didn't eat nearly as much meat as we do today. Even before the war, dead animal was not as common on the dinner table as it is now, especially for the lower income types.

Most food was home-made, so it was better for you. Pork, not beef, was the more common meat on American tables. Fast food meant the chicken was outrunning you as you tried to chop off its head.

And when people cooked, they flavored darn near everything with bacon.

Also, in 1945, the nation was still in the throes of wartime rationing. I'm finding a lot of recipes that stress they save on sugar or fats, both of which were rationed. There's recipes for foods designed to survive being mailed to troops overseas.

And there's recipes designed to really throw caution to the wind when you do manage to score.

Like this one.

The Oct. 17, 1945 article from the Salt Lake Tribune is headlined "Bacon and Oysters Make a Super Dish."

Reflecting the wartime rationing, the article says "a pound of bacon still is something to lock up in the wall safe with grandmother's diamond neckless. A totally useless bit of information is that it rates six red points per pound because only an FBI agent can ferret out a pound these days. But over the horizon happy days will come again and there's no law against imagining."

Red points are ration points. You exchanged points to buy the meat, and getting points was a chore. So, in that context, this recipe is more than imagining. It's downright decadent.

To make the stuffing you mix one pint of Blue Point oysters, chopped, with 3 cups bread crumbs, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, dash of pepper, 1 tsp scraped onion, and 2 eggs slightly beaten.

Spread your pound of bacon out on waxed paper in a solid sheet, spoon the stuffing mix, roll up and bake at 375 degrees for an hour until the bacon is brown. Garnish with tomato quarters and parsley and serve.

After dinner, notify EMTs that everyone is in danger of a heart attack.

But I bet it tastes good.

"Don't mess with 25th Street?" Wow, have we come a long way

Love this story in today's S-E (click) about a couple of shoplifters who got busted by the owners of Sock Monkey'n Around antiques and the KoKoMo Lounge.

Picture of Cindy Simone, cops and perps in today's S-E

I tend to agree with the cops that a citizens' arrest is a dicey thing, but on the other hand we've cut back funding for police protection so far that the cops can't really respond to these things like this rapidly, if at all, leaving an open field for petty crime.

Unchecked crime of any sort is the last thing 25th Street needs. When I moved to town 35 years ago I'd drive down the Two Bit Street and girls on the sidewalk would wave to me. I was able, almost, to think that their attentions were because I was so good looking and not because they rented by the hour.

Now Two-Bit street is as family friendly as Disneyland. My son runs a business there. I ride my bicycle down it to get to work at Union Station. I take my grandchildren there. So can you.

But letting people get away with even small crimes threatens that. The "broken window" theory of crime is that if you allow one broken window on an abandoned building, pretty soon they're all broken. This stuff needs to be nipped in the bud.

So when these guys robbed CJ's store, on tape, and the police professed to not be able to find them, Cindy Simone at the Kokomo and CJ Bovee in the antique store decided they'd had enough. They, like all the business owners on 25th Street, are local, they've worked hard to build their business, they don't want to give all that up because of a couple of twits.

They had video of the guys, social media had been all over the deal, when the perps (love this cop talk!) were sighted again they called the cops, yes, but also took action.

Next thing the guys knew they were zip-tied to lawn chairs on the sidewalk.

Good for Cindy and CJ. 25th Street is our street in our city, guys like this should learn to behave or get out.