Luxury Dining in 1899: One Duck’s Journey from Pond to Table

If, on April 18, 1899, you happened to be in New York City and wished to have dinner at the finest restaurant in Manhattan, you might make your way to the Financial District and find the corner of Beaver and William streets. Above the entrance of a grand brick and brownstone building, flanked by two Corinthian columns allegedly imported from Pompeii, you would see the name of the restaurant, in all capital letters: DELMONICO’S. 

Assuming you had the money, wardrobe, and social cachet to get a table, you would sit down to a menu featuring a dizzying assortment of dishes — vol-au-vent financiere, Baltimore terrapin, Kingfish meuniere, or lamb cutlets a la “Victor Hugo.” You would also find listed a healthy assortment of game birds – English snipe, Plover, Reed-birds, and Mallard, Red-head, and Ruddy ducks. But the most expensive item on the menu, at four dollars per serving (equivalent to $147 today), was Canvasback duck, which was the standard for haute cuisine of the 19th century. 

Canvasbacks are wide-ranging ducks, migrating between the prairie potholes of the Midwest, high into Canada’s central plains, over to the mid-Atlantic coast and down to the Gulf. But to bring a Canvasback to your table, an industrialized system of market hunting would be mobilized to take the duck on a different kind of migration. By tracing the journey of a Canvasback duck backwards from table to pond, across the 200 miles between the Chesapeake Bay and lower Manhattan, spanning several months and passing through dozens of hands, we can see how market hunting in the 19th century transformed tens of millions of living, breathing ducks into mere commodities.

Supplying Delmonico’s

In order to place Canvasback on their April 18 menu, Delmonico’s would have sent a steward on a pre-dawn visit to procure the day’s supply of game at Fulton Market, located on Manhattan’s East River piers a short 10 minute walk from the restaurant. Funneling in with the other buyers from restaurants and hotels, well before the busy public bustled in to crowd the narrow streets, the steward would have seen market stalls piled high with “butter and eggs, apples, pears, bananas, oranges, potatoes, cabbages, ducks wild and tame, fat geese and chickens, grouse, quail, and woodcock”.¹ Passing these vendors, the steward sought out a stand specializing in game, such as that of A. & E. Robbins, which was one of the city’s premier poultry and game dealers, moving 60 tons of poultry every month.² The steward would be looking to buy canvasbacks by the barrel, and would examine the birds carefully for their plumpness, looking closely for any sign of rot. 

As early as the Delmonico’s buyer roused himself to make the day’s purchases, the many clerks, longshoremen, and drivers responsible for delivering bulk shipments of game to A. & E. Robbins were up even earlier. While the rest of the city was sleeping, the electric lights of Fulton Market illuminated the organized chaos of industry and its cacophony of wagon wheels creaking under heavy loads of produce, dock workers shouting directions, and boats knocking against the quay. Porters pushing their hand-trucks loaded with barrels of game — each one holding 60 Canvasbacks packed tightly with sawdust and ice –- trundled their way from the docks to the market. Earlier that night, barges had picked up barrels and crates of perishable goods from railroad depots on the far bank of the Hudson River, in Hoboken or Jersey City, and deposited their loads on the New York City waterfront.³

Migrating By Rail

To reach the New Jersey rail depots, the barrels of Canvasbacks traveled two hundred miles from Baltimore by express rail, packed in refrigerated railcars. The game agency managing the shipment had paid a premium to ensure that the railcar would make as few stops as possible to minimize the chance that the birds and other perishable goods they were carrying would spoil en route. 

Before beginning their journey by rail, the barrels of ducks had spent months sitting in a cold storage facility in Baltimore, frozen solid, waiting for the right market conditions to be shipped north to New York City. Prices for game fluctuated with the seasons, falling in the winter as the markets were flooded with the yearly catch of overwintering ducks, and rising in the summer when the birds left for their northern breeding grounds. 

Cold storage facilities, only first developed at scale in the 1870s, allowed hunters and game merchants to preserve part of their catch for up to a year while they closely followed market reports in distant cities, waiting until they judged prices to be at their highest before arranging by telegraph to sell the birds to buyers in the Northeast. “The limitations of season have ceased to be any bar to the demands of appetite”, wrote G. T. Ferris in 1890. “The development of cold-storage warehouses has banished in large measure the divisions of summer and winter, and the epicure can feast on pecan-fed turkey and canvas-back duck on the Fourth of July with as much relish as he can at Christmas.”⁴

Living Ducks to Dead Commodities

Back in December, a small force of bit-rate workers employed by a game agency prepared the canvasback for its hibernation in cold storage. One worker gutted the duck, and another plucked it, leaving the head feathered to guarantee that it was indeed a Canvasback, and not an inferior species. Another worker packed the ducks in a barrel with ice and sawdust, and yet another carried the barrel to the subterranean ice room where it would find its place with dozens of its peers. 

This brings us at last to the beginning of the duck’s journey as a commodity, and the end of its journey as a living Canvasback, aythya valisineria, eater of wild celery. The man responsible for carrying the bird across that threshold was a market hunter, employed by a game agency and paid a small commission for every canvasback he perforated with No. 3 birdshot fired from his company-supplied pump-action shotgun. This gunner, held responsible for the country’s precipitous decline in bird life, was the most reviled link in the chain stretching from a patch of reeds on the Chesapeake Bay to the diner at Delmonico’s.

A single hunter could kill hundreds of ducks in a day for weeks on end, and the Chesapeake was crowded with gunners. In 1888 the Baltimore Sun reported that there were so many hunters packing the bay that “it is impossible to secure an eligible place without getting into dangerous proximity with some other sink-box or push-whack boat.”⁵ This “campaign against the masses of wild-fowl” produced hundreds of tons of marketable birds to ship north every year,⁶ but the good times would not last – by the end of the century, the bay’s supply of Canvasbacks was nearly depleted.

Draining the Countryside

People in America had always eaten ducks and geese and turkeys and any other meaty bird they could capture. But since the Civil War an increase in urban incomes, advances in technology for hunting, shipping, and storing game, and the development of supply chains linking cities with hinterlands had created a system where anyone, in any city, could eat any bird, at any time of year. Markets for birds transformed from something local and decentralized into a national and sometimes international system that pulled in tens of thousands of workers, netted massive profits for game dealers, and connected wealthy diners in coastal cities with far-away hinterlands on the frontier.⁷

Every day, express cars pulled into New York’s rail yards, as well as those of Boston and Chicago and Philadelphia and every large city in the nation, carrying grouse from Iowa and quails from California, geese from the Dakotas and sandpipers from Texas. Wealthy diners sought out Canvasbacks and other game because they offered a connection to the wild nature that in their minds defined the United States, but which they feared was being lost to modernity and urbanization. But to satisfy these urban palates, a network of thousands of market hunters, game processors, shipping agents, merchants, wholesalers, and restaurateurs swept up the country’s birds by the tens of millions, bringing some species to the brink of extinction, and others across its threshold. 

---

1. Harper’s Weekly. (1901). “When the Market-man is King.” December 28. United States: Harper’s Magazine Company. ↩︎
2. Harpers Weekly, (1878). “Christmas in the Markets,” January 5. United States: Harper’s Magazine Company. ↩︎
3. Harper’s Weekly. (1901). “When the Market-man is King.” ↩︎
4. G. T. Ferris. (1890). “How a Great City is Fed.” March 22. United States: Harper’s Magazine Company. ↩︎
5. Smyrna times. (1888). “Maryland Items.” December 26. ↩︎
6. Murphy, John Mortimer. (1882) American Game Bird Shooting. United States: Orange Judd, p. 282. ↩︎
7. Smalley, A. L. (2022). The Market in Birds: Commercial Hunting, Conservation, and the Origins of Wildlife Consumerism, 1850–1920. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 4. ↩︎

---