PETTIT, ELSA MARSTON August 10, 1913 to June 11, 2012 Elsa Marston Pettit was born in San Diego in 1913. She was the granddaughter of San Diego merchant and philanthropist George W. Marston. Elsa had two older siblings, Hamilton and Annalee, and two younger, Peter and Mary.
After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont, CA, Elsa married Gordon Pettit in 1935. They eventually settled in Bonita and raised five children: Mary, Arthur, Leda, Sara, and Steven. Doonie, as she was known to her friends, and Gordon shared a life-long interest in anthropology. This passion began in college while attending summer field schools in New Mexico. They traveled the world together, often focusing their trips on particular archaeological sites.
Doonie was an avid gardener and converted their Bonita home, and later their ranch in Julian, into wonderful gardens of roses, fruit trees, and wandering paths. She also enjoyed sewing colorful items for her family and friends. Elsa is survived by four children, 13 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Gordon, daughter Susan who died in infancy, son Arthur, and all her siblings. As a second generation San Diegan and third generation Californian, Elsa supported many local organizations including ZLAC Rowing Club and Wednesday Club.
The family would like to thank Malu and her staff at Richview Board and Care in Bonita for the special attention they gave Elsa during the last few years of her life. A small memorial gathering for family and friends will be held at 2:00 on July 29th at the Marston Home in San Diego. In lieu of flowers, Elsa requested that donations be made to the Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), specifically the Marston House.
______________________________________________
Steeped in history
Memorable Marston's Tea Room was a slice of '50s San Diego life
By Roger Showley, STAFF WRITER, Union Tribune
October 20, 2004
If you were a kid in San Diego in the 1950s, your grandmother might have taken you, all dressed up and on your best behavior, to Marston's downtown department store at Fifth Avenue and C Street.
After you were fitted for a new pair of pants and had picked out a toy in the basement, you would ride the elevator to the sixth floor for a piece of coconut cream pie in Marston's Tea Room.
For lunch, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in wedges, sans crust, and your granny might order a Pacific Paragon salad sandwich. You had to sit quietly through the daily fashion shows, as models casually walked among the tables, showing off the latest apparel.
Marston's is gone – succeeded by The Broadway and then Macy's – and department-store tearooms have given way to shopping-mall food courts. Coconut cream pie is sold frozen in supermarkets, and the freshly grated coconut that was the secret of the Marston's pie has been replaced by flaked coconut in a bag.
And whoever thinks of serving PB&J in wedges with the crust cut off?
These memories of a one-time San Diego tradition come to mind at the anniversary of the Oct. 22, 1850, birth of San Diego's great merchant prince, George W. Marston.
A progressive who battled the forces of unplanned development, Marston ran for mayor in 1913 and 1917 and lost; his smokestacks-minded opponents derided him as "Geranium George." But he figured in innumerable causes and charities from the time he came to San Diego in 1870.
At his death in 1946, San Diego's "first citizen" left behind as his greatest contribution the acquisition, development and maintenance of Presidio Park and its Serra Museum, completed 75 years ago and operated by the San Diego Historical Society, which Marston also founded.
But it was in his department store (along with investments in area real estate) that Marston made his fortune. Generations of San Diegans remember the elaborately decorated holiday windows, fresh flowers and high level of service.
Food service didn't make it into Marston's until a six-floor addition was built in 1954, and Marston's grandson, Hamilton, decided it was time.
"So many of our friends have asked us when our tearoom would be ready or have inquired about reservations for themselves and guests that we think (we) ought to give a report," Hamilton Marston said in a January 1955 message, titled, "About Our Tea Room ... " in the Evening Tribune.
Slice of the past
The 190-seat tearoom, opened April 27, 1955, was designed by San Diego architect Sam Hamill and featured several 200-to 400-year-old Japanese screens. The columns were covered in pigskin, and gray-green wall-to-wall carpet covered the dining-room floor and foyer.
Lunch was from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and tea from 2:30 to 4 p.m. daily; dinner was from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday and Friday.
And what was on the menu?
Salads, $1.25 to $1.50, ranged from tomatoes stuffed with cottage cheese to a frozen fruit salad "with whipped cream dressing, served with minced turkey finger sandwiches."
Sandwich choices, 95 cents to $1.50, included open-faced Swiss cheese and turkey with Thousand Island dressing, corned beef on pumpernickel, and a club sandwich served with fruit aspic.
A pot of coffee or tea for one cost 25 cents, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were 20 cents a glass, and desserts included fresh coconut cream pie, 40 cents; a selection of cheeses and crackers, 35 cents; and, the most expensive, ice cream cake with hot fudge sauce and almonds, 55 cents.
Minimum charge: 25 cents.
"Marston's Color Guide Book & Child's Menu" had four selections, 55 to 85 cents: creamed chicken over toast; soup with a cheese or PB&J sandwich; the sandwich with peas or carrot sticks; and cottage cheese salad with peaches and pears. Milk or lemonade and ice cream were included.
The accompanying line drawings of animals offered mini-lessons in color-wheel chemistry: "The monkey wants to say to you – for purple grapes, use red with blue."
According to Jan Whitaker, author of "Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2002, $29.95), the setting and menu at Marston's were typical.
"It was a slower, more leisurely meal," she said. "It was well served, and the proprieties were all observed. Some department stores had cafes in the basement for quick eating. If you were in a tearoom, you would spend a little more time, have dessert, a home-cooked meal, probably visit with friends while eating."
San Diego had many tearooms before Marston's, according to San Diego Public Library archivist Rick Crawford. He found references in 1920s telephone directories to such places as the Bungalow Tea Room at 6347 Imperial Ave., Mystic Tea Room at 819 C St. and the Lady Baltimore Tea Room at 4030 Goldfinch St.
But Marston's was apparently the first local department store to open a tearoom, more than 50 years after Marshall Field in Chicago introduced the idea in 1890. By 1933, 44 percent of 62 department stores surveyed nationwide had tearooms.
Elsa "Doonie" Pettit said her father, Arthur H. Marston, who took over company management from George Marston in 1903, had resisted food service for years.
"He said they were not in the food business, they were in the department-store business," Pettit said of her father, "and then he began to realize there were so many complaints from people that there was no place to eat downtown that he finally relented. "
A woman's oasis
Businessmen typically power-lunched at the Grant Grill at the U.S. Grant Hotel, which was off limits to women until 1972, while women had to settle for lunch counters or worse.
"You just didn't eat down there," Pettit said. "You went downtown in the morning and went home in the early afternoon, or you went shopping in the early
afternoon. The tearoom became a very, very popular place."
Pettit's husband, Gordon, was the Marston vice president who oversaw the tearoom construction. He and another Marston brother-in-law traveled to department stores around the country for ideas.
Whitaker said the department stores elevated the tearoom beyond what other stand-alone restaurants catering to women had done: "In many cities and towns, department-store tearooms were considered among the finest eating places."
She said in an interview from her home in North Hampton, Mass., where she is working on a book about department stores, that the tearoom popularized the idea of a salad for lunch.
"Sometimes they were referred to as a 'California salad,'" she said. "There were health-food faddists in California, apparently, much more so than in the rest of the country."
And sure enough, Marston's won the 1960 American Restaurant Magazine contest for the best sandwich, Pacific Paragon, which was really a salad served on two pieces of rye bread. It is still served at Cafe Lautrec in La Jolla with only the hard-boiled egg and ripe olives left out.
Pat Kelly, food services manager for Marston's from 1958 to 1964, was the one who submitted the sandwich to the magazine. Then she came across it at Cafe Lautrec some months ago.
She asked the owner, Franc Alonso, where the sandwich had come from, and he told her it originated with Dorothy Sorenson, who opened the restaurant in 1972.
"I told him another side of the story," Kelly said.
Where tearooms served light, healthy food, men's grills specialized in chops and roast beef. Men smoked in grills; nobody could smoke in tearooms.
"The highest value food, the more expensive, was the meat," Whitaker said. "Somehow they were seen as masculine, whereas vegetables and fruits were seen as female."
Of course, food preferences have blurred today, and many health-conscious men order salads for lunch. Smoking is gone, along with men-only seating rules.
Another distinction in tearooms was the prevalence of women as cooks and dietitians.
"A lot of department stores had home economists, women staffs in the kitchen," Whitaker said.
At Marston's, the original manager was Grace Olson, recruited from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her assistant, Mary Hunter, was former food manager at Marshall Field.
"I was a young widow at the time, and it fit the bill," said Hunter, who had never been to San Diego before she answered Marston's employment advertisement posted at the American Dietetic Association in Chicago.
Living originally in Ocean Beach, Hunter went to work at Marston's in 1955 with the idea of combining Marshall Field's food approach with her own ideas.
"We were pretty unique," she said. "We didn't want to copy."
To entice shoppers to the tearoom, Marston's soon instituted casual fashion shows.
Joyce Stockton modeled four hours a day, three days a week, in between classes at San Diego State University. Her earnings: $30 per week.
"They needed a mature model – I was in my 30s about the time the tearoom opened – and that was lots of fun," Stockton said.
She added, "You could practically spend your whole day there. There weren't so many women working then, and they had more leisure time. And whether you had any money or not, you could go have lunch. You would spend all morning window shopping and have lunch and be home when the children came home from school."
In 1961 the Marston family sold the business to The Broadway chain, which opened stores in area shopping centers over the next few years. On Sept. 4, 1969, the downtown Marston's/Broadway closed, and two days later The Broadway opened in Fashion Valley. Federated Department Stores acquired The Broadway chain in 1996 and redubbed the stores Macy's.
The Marston building between Fifth and Sixth avenues north of C Street was demolished to make way for a parking garage to serve what is today the Golden Eagle Plaza office tower on the north side of the block.
But the favored recipes were preserved in 40,000 booklets printed to commemorate the tearoom's fifth anniversary in 1960. It includes the details of the Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie.
Recalled Tea Room manager Kelly: "The secret was that we would bake the crust, let it cool to room temperature and fill it as we served it. We would make a huge batch of wonderful basic cornstarch pudding with egg yolks and add chopped coconut or bananas, sometimes fresh strawberries – not like today."
_____________________________________________
Turkey Almond
8 servings
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups celery, sliced 1/2 inch thick on the diagonal
2 tablespoons diced carrots
1/2 cup sliced fresh white mushrooms
4 cups turkey, cooked and diced
1/4 cup diced pimiento
1/2 cup sliced water chestnuts
1/2 cup diced bamboo shoots
3/4 cup slivered almonds, sauteed
1 quart turkey gravy
Salt and pepper, to taste
Crisp chow mein noodles
In a saute pan, melt butter and cook celery and carrots until softened. Remove from pan. In the same pan, saute mushrooms until they release their liquid.
In a large pan, combine turkey, celery, carrots, mushrooms, pimiento, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and half the almonds. Stir in gravy and heat thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve turkey mixture over crisp chow mein noodles and sprinkle with remaining almonds.
(Adapted from Marston's Tea Room.)
Pacific Paragon
4 servings
8 slices oval rye bread
1/2 cup butter or margarine
4 slices cooked white turkey meat
16 strips cooked crisp bacon
1 cup shredded lettuce
12 rings sliced ripe avocado
(1/3 inch thick)
1 hard-cooked egg, cut in 4 wedges
4 tomato wedges
4 colossal ripe olives
4 leaves endive
Blue Cheese Dressing
2 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Spread the rye bread with butter. Cut four slices in half; on each serving plate place one whole slice of bread and two halves. For each sandwich, top the bread with one slice turkey and four strips bacon; cover with shredded lettuce. Arrange three avocado rings on top of lettuce. Garnish with egg, tomato and ripe olive on a leaf of endive. Serve the dressing separately, to be poured over the sandwich.
For the dressing: Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie
Makes 1 (9-inch) pie
1 quart milk
2/3 cup cornstarch
11/4 cups sugar
11/2 teaspoons salt
4 medium egg yolks, beaten
2 tablespoons butter
11/2 teaspoons vanilla
2/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh coconut
1 (9-inch) baked pie shell
Sweetened whipped cream
Heat milk in a saucepan until scalding but not boiling. Mix cornstarch, sugar and salt. Add to hot milk. Stir continuously over medium heat until thickened and smooth. Add a little of the hot milk mixture to the beaten egg yolks, stirring. Add eggs back into milk mixture slowly, stirring. Remove from heat. Add the butter and vanilla; let cool thoroughly.
Add 1/3 cup coconut to cooled filling. Place in the pie shell. Spread with whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining fresh coconut. Chill before serving
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
____________________________________________
After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont, CA, Elsa married Gordon Pettit in 1935. They eventually settled in Bonita and raised five children: Mary, Arthur, Leda, Sara, and Steven. Doonie, as she was known to her friends, and Gordon shared a life-long interest in anthropology. This passion began in college while attending summer field schools in New Mexico. They traveled the world together, often focusing their trips on particular archaeological sites.
Doonie was an avid gardener and converted their Bonita home, and later their ranch in Julian, into wonderful gardens of roses, fruit trees, and wandering paths. She also enjoyed sewing colorful items for her family and friends. Elsa is survived by four children, 13 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Gordon, daughter Susan who died in infancy, son Arthur, and all her siblings. As a second generation San Diegan and third generation Californian, Elsa supported many local organizations including ZLAC Rowing Club and Wednesday Club.
The family would like to thank Malu and her staff at Richview Board and Care in Bonita for the special attention they gave Elsa during the last few years of her life. A small memorial gathering for family and friends will be held at 2:00 on July 29th at the Marston Home in San Diego. In lieu of flowers, Elsa requested that donations be made to the Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), specifically the Marston House.
______________________________________________
Steeped in history
Memorable Marston's Tea Room was a slice of '50s San Diego life
By Roger Showley, STAFF WRITER, Union Tribune
October 20, 2004
If you were a kid in San Diego in the 1950s, your grandmother might have taken you, all dressed up and on your best behavior, to Marston's downtown department store at Fifth Avenue and C Street.
After you were fitted for a new pair of pants and had picked out a toy in the basement, you would ride the elevator to the sixth floor for a piece of coconut cream pie in Marston's Tea Room.
For lunch, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in wedges, sans crust, and your granny might order a Pacific Paragon salad sandwich. You had to sit quietly through the daily fashion shows, as models casually walked among the tables, showing off the latest apparel.
Marston's is gone – succeeded by The Broadway and then Macy's – and department-store tearooms have given way to shopping-mall food courts. Coconut cream pie is sold frozen in supermarkets, and the freshly grated coconut that was the secret of the Marston's pie has been replaced by flaked coconut in a bag.
And whoever thinks of serving PB&J in wedges with the crust cut off?
These memories of a one-time San Diego tradition come to mind at the anniversary of the Oct. 22, 1850, birth of San Diego's great merchant prince, George W. Marston.
A progressive who battled the forces of unplanned development, Marston ran for mayor in 1913 and 1917 and lost; his smokestacks-minded opponents derided him as "Geranium George." But he figured in innumerable causes and charities from the time he came to San Diego in 1870.
At his death in 1946, San Diego's "first citizen" left behind as his greatest contribution the acquisition, development and maintenance of Presidio Park and its Serra Museum, completed 75 years ago and operated by the San Diego Historical Society, which Marston also founded.
But it was in his department store (along with investments in area real estate) that Marston made his fortune. Generations of San Diegans remember the elaborately decorated holiday windows, fresh flowers and high level of service.
Food service didn't make it into Marston's until a six-floor addition was built in 1954, and Marston's grandson, Hamilton, decided it was time.
"So many of our friends have asked us when our tearoom would be ready or have inquired about reservations for themselves and guests that we think (we) ought to give a report," Hamilton Marston said in a January 1955 message, titled, "About Our Tea Room ... " in the Evening Tribune.
Slice of the past
The 190-seat tearoom, opened April 27, 1955, was designed by San Diego architect Sam Hamill and featured several 200-to 400-year-old Japanese screens. The columns were covered in pigskin, and gray-green wall-to-wall carpet covered the dining-room floor and foyer.
Lunch was from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and tea from 2:30 to 4 p.m. daily; dinner was from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday and Friday.
And what was on the menu?
Salads, $1.25 to $1.50, ranged from tomatoes stuffed with cottage cheese to a frozen fruit salad "with whipped cream dressing, served with minced turkey finger sandwiches."
Sandwich choices, 95 cents to $1.50, included open-faced Swiss cheese and turkey with Thousand Island dressing, corned beef on pumpernickel, and a club sandwich served with fruit aspic.
A pot of coffee or tea for one cost 25 cents, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were 20 cents a glass, and desserts included fresh coconut cream pie, 40 cents; a selection of cheeses and crackers, 35 cents; and, the most expensive, ice cream cake with hot fudge sauce and almonds, 55 cents.
Minimum charge: 25 cents.
"Marston's Color Guide Book & Child's Menu" had four selections, 55 to 85 cents: creamed chicken over toast; soup with a cheese or PB&J sandwich; the sandwich with peas or carrot sticks; and cottage cheese salad with peaches and pears. Milk or lemonade and ice cream were included.
The accompanying line drawings of animals offered mini-lessons in color-wheel chemistry: "The monkey wants to say to you – for purple grapes, use red with blue."
According to Jan Whitaker, author of "Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2002, $29.95), the setting and menu at Marston's were typical.
"It was a slower, more leisurely meal," she said. "It was well served, and the proprieties were all observed. Some department stores had cafes in the basement for quick eating. If you were in a tearoom, you would spend a little more time, have dessert, a home-cooked meal, probably visit with friends while eating."
San Diego had many tearooms before Marston's, according to San Diego Public Library archivist Rick Crawford. He found references in 1920s telephone directories to such places as the Bungalow Tea Room at 6347 Imperial Ave., Mystic Tea Room at 819 C St. and the Lady Baltimore Tea Room at 4030 Goldfinch St.
But Marston's was apparently the first local department store to open a tearoom, more than 50 years after Marshall Field in Chicago introduced the idea in 1890. By 1933, 44 percent of 62 department stores surveyed nationwide had tearooms.
Elsa "Doonie" Pettit said her father, Arthur H. Marston, who took over company management from George Marston in 1903, had resisted food service for years.
"He said they were not in the food business, they were in the department-store business," Pettit said of her father, "and then he began to realize there were so many complaints from people that there was no place to eat downtown that he finally relented. "
A woman's oasis
Businessmen typically power-lunched at the Grant Grill at the U.S. Grant Hotel, which was off limits to women until 1972, while women had to settle for lunch counters or worse.
"You just didn't eat down there," Pettit said. "You went downtown in the morning and went home in the early afternoon, or you went shopping in the early
afternoon. The tearoom became a very, very popular place."
Pettit's husband, Gordon, was the Marston vice president who oversaw the tearoom construction. He and another Marston brother-in-law traveled to department stores around the country for ideas.
Whitaker said the department stores elevated the tearoom beyond what other stand-alone restaurants catering to women had done: "In many cities and towns, department-store tearooms were considered among the finest eating places."
She said in an interview from her home in North Hampton, Mass., where she is working on a book about department stores, that the tearoom popularized the idea of a salad for lunch.
"Sometimes they were referred to as a 'California salad,'" she said. "There were health-food faddists in California, apparently, much more so than in the rest of the country."
And sure enough, Marston's won the 1960 American Restaurant Magazine contest for the best sandwich, Pacific Paragon, which was really a salad served on two pieces of rye bread. It is still served at Cafe Lautrec in La Jolla with only the hard-boiled egg and ripe olives left out.
Pat Kelly, food services manager for Marston's from 1958 to 1964, was the one who submitted the sandwich to the magazine. Then she came across it at Cafe Lautrec some months ago.
She asked the owner, Franc Alonso, where the sandwich had come from, and he told her it originated with Dorothy Sorenson, who opened the restaurant in 1972.
"I told him another side of the story," Kelly said.
Where tearooms served light, healthy food, men's grills specialized in chops and roast beef. Men smoked in grills; nobody could smoke in tearooms.
"The highest value food, the more expensive, was the meat," Whitaker said. "Somehow they were seen as masculine, whereas vegetables and fruits were seen as female."
Of course, food preferences have blurred today, and many health-conscious men order salads for lunch. Smoking is gone, along with men-only seating rules.
Another distinction in tearooms was the prevalence of women as cooks and dietitians.
"A lot of department stores had home economists, women staffs in the kitchen," Whitaker said.
At Marston's, the original manager was Grace Olson, recruited from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her assistant, Mary Hunter, was former food manager at Marshall Field.
"I was a young widow at the time, and it fit the bill," said Hunter, who had never been to San Diego before she answered Marston's employment advertisement posted at the American Dietetic Association in Chicago.
Living originally in Ocean Beach, Hunter went to work at Marston's in 1955 with the idea of combining Marshall Field's food approach with her own ideas.
"We were pretty unique," she said. "We didn't want to copy."
To entice shoppers to the tearoom, Marston's soon instituted casual fashion shows.
Joyce Stockton modeled four hours a day, three days a week, in between classes at San Diego State University. Her earnings: $30 per week.
"They needed a mature model – I was in my 30s about the time the tearoom opened – and that was lots of fun," Stockton said.
She added, "You could practically spend your whole day there. There weren't so many women working then, and they had more leisure time. And whether you had any money or not, you could go have lunch. You would spend all morning window shopping and have lunch and be home when the children came home from school."
In 1961 the Marston family sold the business to The Broadway chain, which opened stores in area shopping centers over the next few years. On Sept. 4, 1969, the downtown Marston's/Broadway closed, and two days later The Broadway opened in Fashion Valley. Federated Department Stores acquired The Broadway chain in 1996 and redubbed the stores Macy's.
The Marston building between Fifth and Sixth avenues north of C Street was demolished to make way for a parking garage to serve what is today the Golden Eagle Plaza office tower on the north side of the block.
But the favored recipes were preserved in 40,000 booklets printed to commemorate the tearoom's fifth anniversary in 1960. It includes the details of the Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie.
Recalled Tea Room manager Kelly: "The secret was that we would bake the crust, let it cool to room temperature and fill it as we served it. We would make a huge batch of wonderful basic cornstarch pudding with egg yolks and add chopped coconut or bananas, sometimes fresh strawberries – not like today."
_____________________________________________
Turkey Almond
8 servings
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups celery, sliced 1/2 inch thick on the diagonal
2 tablespoons diced carrots
1/2 cup sliced fresh white mushrooms
4 cups turkey, cooked and diced
1/4 cup diced pimiento
1/2 cup sliced water chestnuts
1/2 cup diced bamboo shoots
3/4 cup slivered almonds, sauteed
1 quart turkey gravy
Salt and pepper, to taste
Crisp chow mein noodles
In a saute pan, melt butter and cook celery and carrots until softened. Remove from pan. In the same pan, saute mushrooms until they release their liquid.
In a large pan, combine turkey, celery, carrots, mushrooms, pimiento, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and half the almonds. Stir in gravy and heat thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve turkey mixture over crisp chow mein noodles and sprinkle with remaining almonds.
(Adapted from Marston's Tea Room.)
Pacific Paragon
4 servings
8 slices oval rye bread
1/2 cup butter or margarine
4 slices cooked white turkey meat
16 strips cooked crisp bacon
1 cup shredded lettuce
12 rings sliced ripe avocado
(1/3 inch thick)
1 hard-cooked egg, cut in 4 wedges
4 tomato wedges
4 colossal ripe olives
4 leaves endive
Blue Cheese Dressing
2 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Spread the rye bread with butter. Cut four slices in half; on each serving plate place one whole slice of bread and two halves. For each sandwich, top the bread with one slice turkey and four strips bacon; cover with shredded lettuce. Arrange three avocado rings on top of lettuce. Garnish with egg, tomato and ripe olive on a leaf of endive. Serve the dressing separately, to be poured over the sandwich.
For the dressing: Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie
Makes 1 (9-inch) pie
1 quart milk
2/3 cup cornstarch
11/4 cups sugar
11/2 teaspoons salt
4 medium egg yolks, beaten
2 tablespoons butter
11/2 teaspoons vanilla
2/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh coconut
1 (9-inch) baked pie shell
Sweetened whipped cream
Heat milk in a saucepan until scalding but not boiling. Mix cornstarch, sugar and salt. Add to hot milk. Stir continuously over medium heat until thickened and smooth. Add a little of the hot milk mixture to the beaten egg yolks, stirring. Add eggs back into milk mixture slowly, stirring. Remove from heat. Add the butter and vanilla; let cool thoroughly.
Add 1/3 cup coconut to cooled filling. Place in the pie shell. Spread with whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining fresh coconut. Chill before serving
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
____________________________________________
PETTIT, ELSA MARSTON August 10, 1913 to June 11, 2012 Elsa Marston Pettit was born in San Diego in 1913. She was the granddaughter of San Diego merchant and philanthropist George W. Marston. Elsa had two older siblings, Hamilton and Annalee, and two younger, Peter and Mary.
After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont, CA, Elsa married Gordon Pettit in 1935. They eventually settled in Bonita and raised five children: Mary, Arthur, Leda, Sara, and Steven. Doonie, as she was known to her friends, and Gordon shared a life-long interest in anthropology. This passion began in college while attending summer field schools in New Mexico. They traveled the world together, often focusing their trips on particular archaeological sites.
Doonie was an avid gardener and converted their Bonita home, and later their ranch in Julian, into wonderful gardens of roses, fruit trees, and wandering paths. She also enjoyed sewing colorful items for her family and friends. Elsa is survived by four children, 13 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Gordon, daughter Susan who died in infancy, son Arthur, and all her siblings. As a second generation San Diegan and third generation Californian, Elsa supported many local organizations including ZLAC Rowing Club and Wednesday Club.
The family would like to thank Malu and her staff at Richview Board and Care in Bonita for the special attention they gave Elsa during the last few years of her life. A small memorial gathering for family and friends will be held at 2:00 on July 29th at the Marston Home in San Diego. In lieu of flowers, Elsa requested that donations be made to the Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), specifically the Marston House.
______________________________________________
Steeped in history
Memorable Marston's Tea Room was a slice of '50s San Diego life
By Roger Showley, STAFF WRITER, Union Tribune
October 20, 2004
If you were a kid in San Diego in the 1950s, your grandmother might have taken you, all dressed up and on your best behavior, to Marston's downtown department store at Fifth Avenue and C Street.
After you were fitted for a new pair of pants and had picked out a toy in the basement, you would ride the elevator to the sixth floor for a piece of coconut cream pie in Marston's Tea Room.
For lunch, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in wedges, sans crust, and your granny might order a Pacific Paragon salad sandwich. You had to sit quietly through the daily fashion shows, as models casually walked among the tables, showing off the latest apparel.
Marston's is gone – succeeded by The Broadway and then Macy's – and department-store tearooms have given way to shopping-mall food courts. Coconut cream pie is sold frozen in supermarkets, and the freshly grated coconut that was the secret of the Marston's pie has been replaced by flaked coconut in a bag.
And whoever thinks of serving PB&J in wedges with the crust cut off?
These memories of a one-time San Diego tradition come to mind at the anniversary of the Oct. 22, 1850, birth of San Diego's great merchant prince, George W. Marston.
A progressive who battled the forces of unplanned development, Marston ran for mayor in 1913 and 1917 and lost; his smokestacks-minded opponents derided him as "Geranium George." But he figured in innumerable causes and charities from the time he came to San Diego in 1870.
At his death in 1946, San Diego's "first citizen" left behind as his greatest contribution the acquisition, development and maintenance of Presidio Park and its Serra Museum, completed 75 years ago and operated by the San Diego Historical Society, which Marston also founded.
But it was in his department store (along with investments in area real estate) that Marston made his fortune. Generations of San Diegans remember the elaborately decorated holiday windows, fresh flowers and high level of service.
Food service didn't make it into Marston's until a six-floor addition was built in 1954, and Marston's grandson, Hamilton, decided it was time.
"So many of our friends have asked us when our tearoom would be ready or have inquired about reservations for themselves and guests that we think (we) ought to give a report," Hamilton Marston said in a January 1955 message, titled, "About Our Tea Room ... " in the Evening Tribune.
Slice of the past
The 190-seat tearoom, opened April 27, 1955, was designed by San Diego architect Sam Hamill and featured several 200-to 400-year-old Japanese screens. The columns were covered in pigskin, and gray-green wall-to-wall carpet covered the dining-room floor and foyer.
Lunch was from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and tea from 2:30 to 4 p.m. daily; dinner was from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday and Friday.
And what was on the menu?
Salads, $1.25 to $1.50, ranged from tomatoes stuffed with cottage cheese to a frozen fruit salad "with whipped cream dressing, served with minced turkey finger sandwiches."
Sandwich choices, 95 cents to $1.50, included open-faced Swiss cheese and turkey with Thousand Island dressing, corned beef on pumpernickel, and a club sandwich served with fruit aspic.
A pot of coffee or tea for one cost 25 cents, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were 20 cents a glass, and desserts included fresh coconut cream pie, 40 cents; a selection of cheeses and crackers, 35 cents; and, the most expensive, ice cream cake with hot fudge sauce and almonds, 55 cents.
Minimum charge: 25 cents.
"Marston's Color Guide Book & Child's Menu" had four selections, 55 to 85 cents: creamed chicken over toast; soup with a cheese or PB&J sandwich; the sandwich with peas or carrot sticks; and cottage cheese salad with peaches and pears. Milk or lemonade and ice cream were included.
The accompanying line drawings of animals offered mini-lessons in color-wheel chemistry: "The monkey wants to say to you – for purple grapes, use red with blue."
According to Jan Whitaker, author of "Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2002, $29.95), the setting and menu at Marston's were typical.
"It was a slower, more leisurely meal," she said. "It was well served, and the proprieties were all observed. Some department stores had cafes in the basement for quick eating. If you were in a tearoom, you would spend a little more time, have dessert, a home-cooked meal, probably visit with friends while eating."
San Diego had many tearooms before Marston's, according to San Diego Public Library archivist Rick Crawford. He found references in 1920s telephone directories to such places as the Bungalow Tea Room at 6347 Imperial Ave., Mystic Tea Room at 819 C St. and the Lady Baltimore Tea Room at 4030 Goldfinch St.
But Marston's was apparently the first local department store to open a tearoom, more than 50 years after Marshall Field in Chicago introduced the idea in 1890. By 1933, 44 percent of 62 department stores surveyed nationwide had tearooms.
Elsa "Doonie" Pettit said her father, Arthur H. Marston, who took over company management from George Marston in 1903, had resisted food service for years.
"He said they were not in the food business, they were in the department-store business," Pettit said of her father, "and then he began to realize there were so many complaints from people that there was no place to eat downtown that he finally relented. "
A woman's oasis
Businessmen typically power-lunched at the Grant Grill at the U.S. Grant Hotel, which was off limits to women until 1972, while women had to settle for lunch counters or worse.
"You just didn't eat down there," Pettit said. "You went downtown in the morning and went home in the early afternoon, or you went shopping in the early
afternoon. The tearoom became a very, very popular place."
Pettit's husband, Gordon, was the Marston vice president who oversaw the tearoom construction. He and another Marston brother-in-law traveled to department stores around the country for ideas.
Whitaker said the department stores elevated the tearoom beyond what other stand-alone restaurants catering to women had done: "In many cities and towns, department-store tearooms were considered among the finest eating places."
She said in an interview from her home in North Hampton, Mass., where she is working on a book about department stores, that the tearoom popularized the idea of a salad for lunch.
"Sometimes they were referred to as a 'California salad,'" she said. "There were health-food faddists in California, apparently, much more so than in the rest of the country."
And sure enough, Marston's won the 1960 American Restaurant Magazine contest for the best sandwich, Pacific Paragon, which was really a salad served on two pieces of rye bread. It is still served at Cafe Lautrec in La Jolla with only the hard-boiled egg and ripe olives left out.
Pat Kelly, food services manager for Marston's from 1958 to 1964, was the one who submitted the sandwich to the magazine. Then she came across it at Cafe Lautrec some months ago.
She asked the owner, Franc Alonso, where the sandwich had come from, and he told her it originated with Dorothy Sorenson, who opened the restaurant in 1972.
"I told him another side of the story," Kelly said.
Where tearooms served light, healthy food, men's grills specialized in chops and roast beef. Men smoked in grills; nobody could smoke in tearooms.
"The highest value food, the more expensive, was the meat," Whitaker said. "Somehow they were seen as masculine, whereas vegetables and fruits were seen as female."
Of course, food preferences have blurred today, and many health-conscious men order salads for lunch. Smoking is gone, along with men-only seating rules.
Another distinction in tearooms was the prevalence of women as cooks and dietitians.
"A lot of department stores had home economists, women staffs in the kitchen," Whitaker said.
At Marston's, the original manager was Grace Olson, recruited from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her assistant, Mary Hunter, was former food manager at Marshall Field.
"I was a young widow at the time, and it fit the bill," said Hunter, who had never been to San Diego before she answered Marston's employment advertisement posted at the American Dietetic Association in Chicago.
Living originally in Ocean Beach, Hunter went to work at Marston's in 1955 with the idea of combining Marshall Field's food approach with her own ideas.
"We were pretty unique," she said. "We didn't want to copy."
To entice shoppers to the tearoom, Marston's soon instituted casual fashion shows.
Joyce Stockton modeled four hours a day, three days a week, in between classes at San Diego State University. Her earnings: $30 per week.
"They needed a mature model – I was in my 30s about the time the tearoom opened – and that was lots of fun," Stockton said.
She added, "You could practically spend your whole day there. There weren't so many women working then, and they had more leisure time. And whether you had any money or not, you could go have lunch. You would spend all morning window shopping and have lunch and be home when the children came home from school."
In 1961 the Marston family sold the business to The Broadway chain, which opened stores in area shopping centers over the next few years. On Sept. 4, 1969, the downtown Marston's/Broadway closed, and two days later The Broadway opened in Fashion Valley. Federated Department Stores acquired The Broadway chain in 1996 and redubbed the stores Macy's.
The Marston building between Fifth and Sixth avenues north of C Street was demolished to make way for a parking garage to serve what is today the Golden Eagle Plaza office tower on the north side of the block.
But the favored recipes were preserved in 40,000 booklets printed to commemorate the tearoom's fifth anniversary in 1960. It includes the details of the Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie.
Recalled Tea Room manager Kelly: "The secret was that we would bake the crust, let it cool to room temperature and fill it as we served it. We would make a huge batch of wonderful basic cornstarch pudding with egg yolks and add chopped coconut or bananas, sometimes fresh strawberries – not like today."
_____________________________________________
Turkey Almond
8 servings
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups celery, sliced 1/2 inch thick on the diagonal
2 tablespoons diced carrots
1/2 cup sliced fresh white mushrooms
4 cups turkey, cooked and diced
1/4 cup diced pimiento
1/2 cup sliced water chestnuts
1/2 cup diced bamboo shoots
3/4 cup slivered almonds, sauteed
1 quart turkey gravy
Salt and pepper, to taste
Crisp chow mein noodles
In a saute pan, melt butter and cook celery and carrots until softened. Remove from pan. In the same pan, saute mushrooms until they release their liquid.
In a large pan, combine turkey, celery, carrots, mushrooms, pimiento, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and half the almonds. Stir in gravy and heat thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve turkey mixture over crisp chow mein noodles and sprinkle with remaining almonds.
(Adapted from Marston's Tea Room.)
Pacific Paragon
4 servings
8 slices oval rye bread
1/2 cup butter or margarine
4 slices cooked white turkey meat
16 strips cooked crisp bacon
1 cup shredded lettuce
12 rings sliced ripe avocado
(1/3 inch thick)
1 hard-cooked egg, cut in 4 wedges
4 tomato wedges
4 colossal ripe olives
4 leaves endive
Blue Cheese Dressing
2 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Spread the rye bread with butter. Cut four slices in half; on each serving plate place one whole slice of bread and two halves. For each sandwich, top the bread with one slice turkey and four strips bacon; cover with shredded lettuce. Arrange three avocado rings on top of lettuce. Garnish with egg, tomato and ripe olive on a leaf of endive. Serve the dressing separately, to be poured over the sandwich.
For the dressing: Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie
Makes 1 (9-inch) pie
1 quart milk
2/3 cup cornstarch
11/4 cups sugar
11/2 teaspoons salt
4 medium egg yolks, beaten
2 tablespoons butter
11/2 teaspoons vanilla
2/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh coconut
1 (9-inch) baked pie shell
Sweetened whipped cream
Heat milk in a saucepan until scalding but not boiling. Mix cornstarch, sugar and salt. Add to hot milk. Stir continuously over medium heat until thickened and smooth. Add a little of the hot milk mixture to the beaten egg yolks, stirring. Add eggs back into milk mixture slowly, stirring. Remove from heat. Add the butter and vanilla; let cool thoroughly.
Add 1/3 cup coconut to cooled filling. Place in the pie shell. Spread with whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining fresh coconut. Chill before serving
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
____________________________________________
After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont, CA, Elsa married Gordon Pettit in 1935. They eventually settled in Bonita and raised five children: Mary, Arthur, Leda, Sara, and Steven. Doonie, as she was known to her friends, and Gordon shared a life-long interest in anthropology. This passion began in college while attending summer field schools in New Mexico. They traveled the world together, often focusing their trips on particular archaeological sites.
Doonie was an avid gardener and converted their Bonita home, and later their ranch in Julian, into wonderful gardens of roses, fruit trees, and wandering paths. She also enjoyed sewing colorful items for her family and friends. Elsa is survived by four children, 13 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Gordon, daughter Susan who died in infancy, son Arthur, and all her siblings. As a second generation San Diegan and third generation Californian, Elsa supported many local organizations including ZLAC Rowing Club and Wednesday Club.
The family would like to thank Malu and her staff at Richview Board and Care in Bonita for the special attention they gave Elsa during the last few years of her life. A small memorial gathering for family and friends will be held at 2:00 on July 29th at the Marston Home in San Diego. In lieu of flowers, Elsa requested that donations be made to the Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), specifically the Marston House.
______________________________________________
Steeped in history
Memorable Marston's Tea Room was a slice of '50s San Diego life
By Roger Showley, STAFF WRITER, Union Tribune
October 20, 2004
If you were a kid in San Diego in the 1950s, your grandmother might have taken you, all dressed up and on your best behavior, to Marston's downtown department store at Fifth Avenue and C Street.
After you were fitted for a new pair of pants and had picked out a toy in the basement, you would ride the elevator to the sixth floor for a piece of coconut cream pie in Marston's Tea Room.
For lunch, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut in wedges, sans crust, and your granny might order a Pacific Paragon salad sandwich. You had to sit quietly through the daily fashion shows, as models casually walked among the tables, showing off the latest apparel.
Marston's is gone – succeeded by The Broadway and then Macy's – and department-store tearooms have given way to shopping-mall food courts. Coconut cream pie is sold frozen in supermarkets, and the freshly grated coconut that was the secret of the Marston's pie has been replaced by flaked coconut in a bag.
And whoever thinks of serving PB&J in wedges with the crust cut off?
These memories of a one-time San Diego tradition come to mind at the anniversary of the Oct. 22, 1850, birth of San Diego's great merchant prince, George W. Marston.
A progressive who battled the forces of unplanned development, Marston ran for mayor in 1913 and 1917 and lost; his smokestacks-minded opponents derided him as "Geranium George." But he figured in innumerable causes and charities from the time he came to San Diego in 1870.
At his death in 1946, San Diego's "first citizen" left behind as his greatest contribution the acquisition, development and maintenance of Presidio Park and its Serra Museum, completed 75 years ago and operated by the San Diego Historical Society, which Marston also founded.
But it was in his department store (along with investments in area real estate) that Marston made his fortune. Generations of San Diegans remember the elaborately decorated holiday windows, fresh flowers and high level of service.
Food service didn't make it into Marston's until a six-floor addition was built in 1954, and Marston's grandson, Hamilton, decided it was time.
"So many of our friends have asked us when our tearoom would be ready or have inquired about reservations for themselves and guests that we think (we) ought to give a report," Hamilton Marston said in a January 1955 message, titled, "About Our Tea Room ... " in the Evening Tribune.
Slice of the past
The 190-seat tearoom, opened April 27, 1955, was designed by San Diego architect Sam Hamill and featured several 200-to 400-year-old Japanese screens. The columns were covered in pigskin, and gray-green wall-to-wall carpet covered the dining-room floor and foyer.
Lunch was from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and tea from 2:30 to 4 p.m. daily; dinner was from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday and Friday.
And what was on the menu?
Salads, $1.25 to $1.50, ranged from tomatoes stuffed with cottage cheese to a frozen fruit salad "with whipped cream dressing, served with minced turkey finger sandwiches."
Sandwich choices, 95 cents to $1.50, included open-faced Swiss cheese and turkey with Thousand Island dressing, corned beef on pumpernickel, and a club sandwich served with fruit aspic.
A pot of coffee or tea for one cost 25 cents, 7-Up and Coca-Cola were 20 cents a glass, and desserts included fresh coconut cream pie, 40 cents; a selection of cheeses and crackers, 35 cents; and, the most expensive, ice cream cake with hot fudge sauce and almonds, 55 cents.
Minimum charge: 25 cents.
"Marston's Color Guide Book & Child's Menu" had four selections, 55 to 85 cents: creamed chicken over toast; soup with a cheese or PB&J sandwich; the sandwich with peas or carrot sticks; and cottage cheese salad with peaches and pears. Milk or lemonade and ice cream were included.
The accompanying line drawings of animals offered mini-lessons in color-wheel chemistry: "The monkey wants to say to you – for purple grapes, use red with blue."
According to Jan Whitaker, author of "Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America" (St. Martin's Press, 2002, $29.95), the setting and menu at Marston's were typical.
"It was a slower, more leisurely meal," she said. "It was well served, and the proprieties were all observed. Some department stores had cafes in the basement for quick eating. If you were in a tearoom, you would spend a little more time, have dessert, a home-cooked meal, probably visit with friends while eating."
San Diego had many tearooms before Marston's, according to San Diego Public Library archivist Rick Crawford. He found references in 1920s telephone directories to such places as the Bungalow Tea Room at 6347 Imperial Ave., Mystic Tea Room at 819 C St. and the Lady Baltimore Tea Room at 4030 Goldfinch St.
But Marston's was apparently the first local department store to open a tearoom, more than 50 years after Marshall Field in Chicago introduced the idea in 1890. By 1933, 44 percent of 62 department stores surveyed nationwide had tearooms.
Elsa "Doonie" Pettit said her father, Arthur H. Marston, who took over company management from George Marston in 1903, had resisted food service for years.
"He said they were not in the food business, they were in the department-store business," Pettit said of her father, "and then he began to realize there were so many complaints from people that there was no place to eat downtown that he finally relented. "
A woman's oasis
Businessmen typically power-lunched at the Grant Grill at the U.S. Grant Hotel, which was off limits to women until 1972, while women had to settle for lunch counters or worse.
"You just didn't eat down there," Pettit said. "You went downtown in the morning and went home in the early afternoon, or you went shopping in the early
afternoon. The tearoom became a very, very popular place."
Pettit's husband, Gordon, was the Marston vice president who oversaw the tearoom construction. He and another Marston brother-in-law traveled to department stores around the country for ideas.
Whitaker said the department stores elevated the tearoom beyond what other stand-alone restaurants catering to women had done: "In many cities and towns, department-store tearooms were considered among the finest eating places."
She said in an interview from her home in North Hampton, Mass., where she is working on a book about department stores, that the tearoom popularized the idea of a salad for lunch.
"Sometimes they were referred to as a 'California salad,'" she said. "There were health-food faddists in California, apparently, much more so than in the rest of the country."
And sure enough, Marston's won the 1960 American Restaurant Magazine contest for the best sandwich, Pacific Paragon, which was really a salad served on two pieces of rye bread. It is still served at Cafe Lautrec in La Jolla with only the hard-boiled egg and ripe olives left out.
Pat Kelly, food services manager for Marston's from 1958 to 1964, was the one who submitted the sandwich to the magazine. Then she came across it at Cafe Lautrec some months ago.
She asked the owner, Franc Alonso, where the sandwich had come from, and he told her it originated with Dorothy Sorenson, who opened the restaurant in 1972.
"I told him another side of the story," Kelly said.
Where tearooms served light, healthy food, men's grills specialized in chops and roast beef. Men smoked in grills; nobody could smoke in tearooms.
"The highest value food, the more expensive, was the meat," Whitaker said. "Somehow they were seen as masculine, whereas vegetables and fruits were seen as female."
Of course, food preferences have blurred today, and many health-conscious men order salads for lunch. Smoking is gone, along with men-only seating rules.
Another distinction in tearooms was the prevalence of women as cooks and dietitians.
"A lot of department stores had home economists, women staffs in the kitchen," Whitaker said.
At Marston's, the original manager was Grace Olson, recruited from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her assistant, Mary Hunter, was former food manager at Marshall Field.
"I was a young widow at the time, and it fit the bill," said Hunter, who had never been to San Diego before she answered Marston's employment advertisement posted at the American Dietetic Association in Chicago.
Living originally in Ocean Beach, Hunter went to work at Marston's in 1955 with the idea of combining Marshall Field's food approach with her own ideas.
"We were pretty unique," she said. "We didn't want to copy."
To entice shoppers to the tearoom, Marston's soon instituted casual fashion shows.
Joyce Stockton modeled four hours a day, three days a week, in between classes at San Diego State University. Her earnings: $30 per week.
"They needed a mature model – I was in my 30s about the time the tearoom opened – and that was lots of fun," Stockton said.
She added, "You could practically spend your whole day there. There weren't so many women working then, and they had more leisure time. And whether you had any money or not, you could go have lunch. You would spend all morning window shopping and have lunch and be home when the children came home from school."
In 1961 the Marston family sold the business to The Broadway chain, which opened stores in area shopping centers over the next few years. On Sept. 4, 1969, the downtown Marston's/Broadway closed, and two days later The Broadway opened in Fashion Valley. Federated Department Stores acquired The Broadway chain in 1996 and redubbed the stores Macy's.
The Marston building between Fifth and Sixth avenues north of C Street was demolished to make way for a parking garage to serve what is today the Golden Eagle Plaza office tower on the north side of the block.
But the favored recipes were preserved in 40,000 booklets printed to commemorate the tearoom's fifth anniversary in 1960. It includes the details of the Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie.
Recalled Tea Room manager Kelly: "The secret was that we would bake the crust, let it cool to room temperature and fill it as we served it. We would make a huge batch of wonderful basic cornstarch pudding with egg yolks and add chopped coconut or bananas, sometimes fresh strawberries – not like today."
_____________________________________________
Turkey Almond
8 servings
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups celery, sliced 1/2 inch thick on the diagonal
2 tablespoons diced carrots
1/2 cup sliced fresh white mushrooms
4 cups turkey, cooked and diced
1/4 cup diced pimiento
1/2 cup sliced water chestnuts
1/2 cup diced bamboo shoots
3/4 cup slivered almonds, sauteed
1 quart turkey gravy
Salt and pepper, to taste
Crisp chow mein noodles
In a saute pan, melt butter and cook celery and carrots until softened. Remove from pan. In the same pan, saute mushrooms until they release their liquid.
In a large pan, combine turkey, celery, carrots, mushrooms, pimiento, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and half the almonds. Stir in gravy and heat thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve turkey mixture over crisp chow mein noodles and sprinkle with remaining almonds.
(Adapted from Marston's Tea Room.)
Pacific Paragon
4 servings
8 slices oval rye bread
1/2 cup butter or margarine
4 slices cooked white turkey meat
16 strips cooked crisp bacon
1 cup shredded lettuce
12 rings sliced ripe avocado
(1/3 inch thick)
1 hard-cooked egg, cut in 4 wedges
4 tomato wedges
4 colossal ripe olives
4 leaves endive
Blue Cheese Dressing
2 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Spread the rye bread with butter. Cut four slices in half; on each serving plate place one whole slice of bread and two halves. For each sandwich, top the bread with one slice turkey and four strips bacon; cover with shredded lettuce. Arrange three avocado rings on top of lettuce. Garnish with egg, tomato and ripe olive on a leaf of endive. Serve the dressing separately, to be poured over the sandwich.
For the dressing: Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
Tea Room Fresh Coconut Cream Pie
Makes 1 (9-inch) pie
1 quart milk
2/3 cup cornstarch
11/4 cups sugar
11/2 teaspoons salt
4 medium egg yolks, beaten
2 tablespoons butter
11/2 teaspoons vanilla
2/3 cup coarsely chopped fresh coconut
1 (9-inch) baked pie shell
Sweetened whipped cream
Heat milk in a saucepan until scalding but not boiling. Mix cornstarch, sugar and salt. Add to hot milk. Stir continuously over medium heat until thickened and smooth. Add a little of the hot milk mixture to the beaten egg yolks, stirring. Add eggs back into milk mixture slowly, stirring. Remove from heat. Add the butter and vanilla; let cool thoroughly.
Add 1/3 cup coconut to cooled filling. Place in the pie shell. Spread with whipped cream. Sprinkle with remaining fresh coconut. Chill before serving
(From Marston's Tea Room.)
____________________________________________
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