"I went to A Chinese restaurant for dinner....."
I am looking through a diary found in the Waddie Hudson Collection and found this entry. It is dated October 31, 1900, and I'm not sure who the author is, although her first name appears to be Maude, and I know she was born in Camargo on November 16, 1868. She briefly attended school at St. Mary's Academy near Terre Haute, Indiana, and then was married three days before her sixteenth birthday. As she records in the preface to the diary: "November 13, 1884, when not quite sixteen years old I was married, which naturally was a mistake. A baby came March 10, 1886, but died the same day." As far as I can tell this is her only reference to that marriage. By 1900 she is living, as a single woman, in Chicago, working as a secretary and a stenographer for the Prohibition Party and The New Voice, a newspaper that may have been a prohibition paper. While in Chicago, she talks about visiting the Art Institute, Hull House, and the Woman's Temple (a W.C.T.U. venture).
Then, on Halloween 1900, she describes her first visit to a Chinese restaurant:
Oct 31
I went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner with Mr. Johnson, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Mulviihill. It was a very interesting place. The tables are quite high, made of ebony with gray marble centers, and the sides inlaid with pearl. The chairs and stools were the same. The furniture was very pretty. We at what sounds like is [sic] might be spelled "chop-souie", and is made of meats of various kinds, no one knows what, cooked up altogether with a kind of brown gravy. This is served in one bowl in the center of the table and every one is supposed to dip in with chop sticks and put it in a bowl of rice, with which each person is served and eat it from that after dipping it in some kind of liquid that takes the place of salt. We also had preserves made of some kind of native fruit, that tasted very much like citron to me. And of course we had tea.
[p. 59]
I think Johnson is William E. "Pussyfoot" Johnson a much acclaimed and famed prohibition enforcer.
Then, on Halloween 1900, she describes her first visit to a Chinese restaurant:
Oct 31
I went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner with Mr. Johnson, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Mulviihill. It was a very interesting place. The tables are quite high, made of ebony with gray marble centers, and the sides inlaid with pearl. The chairs and stools were the same. The furniture was very pretty. We at what sounds like is [sic] might be spelled "chop-souie", and is made of meats of various kinds, no one knows what, cooked up altogether with a kind of brown gravy. This is served in one bowl in the center of the table and every one is supposed to dip in with chop sticks and put it in a bowl of rice, with which each person is served and eat it from that after dipping it in some kind of liquid that takes the place of salt. We also had preserves made of some kind of native fruit, that tasted very much like citron to me. And of course we had tea.
[p. 59]
I think Johnson is William E. "Pussyfoot" Johnson a much acclaimed and famed prohibition enforcer.