Granger Food and Drink: From the Farm Table to the Corridor

Food & Drink · From the Farm Table to the Corridor

Granger's eating record has the longest fuse of any leg in this build. The two county histories, read first-hand for it, name between them not one tavern, hotel, eating house, restaurant, or store in Harris or Clay township: the first wheat was cut on Harris Prairie in 1831 and the grain went out of the townships to be ground and sold, and when the railroad came, the 1880 history's verdict on the Granger depot was that no business of any kind was done there. People ate — abundantly, on farm tables, and at one great institutional table, the farm Notre Dame kept in Harris Township for its beef and milk — but nobody ate out, in any record that survives, until the automobile suburb was already standing. The restaurant record of this ground is therefore short, dense, and almost entirely a corridor record: State Road 23, Bittersweet Road, Gumwood Road, Adams Road, decade by decade, house by house, with the failures and the successions at the same size as the survivals. This section prints it whole, at the record's true size.

Food & Drink carried the parish tables and printed its fish-fry negative, but two lines of the checklist were never run: the ethnic meat and sausage trades at directory strength, with the cookbook that is not there printed as a negative; and the county's sugar camp, with a campus signature sandwich tested beside it. Both are run here. The trades, like so much of this ground's food history, prove to stand across the line in South Bend's west-side parishes, at a scale the directories let us count; the sugar camp stands at the county's western edge, in New Carlisle.