The Eastern Tour Cont'd: 297 Miles from the Van Ornum Trading Post to Delmonico's


Like the water that nearly connects Lake Champlain at Ticonderoga to Lake George and southward along the Hudson River into the back pockets of NYC's five burrows, highway 87 just about links Janet's Dutch ancestry at Lake Saranac NY

down to a place where I'd love to try the best steak in the world, at Delmonico's, Wall Street – the first established restaurant in America.

Old Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, one set of Revolutionary heroes at the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, helped make an 'American' New York possible in the first place by generally disrupting British land grabs along the countryside in NY colony.  At the same time that Allen was demanding the surrender of the fort, Janet's Dutch ancestors would have have been settling the exact area of Lake Champlain. According to the VanOrnum Saga, 1962, "The English colony of Vermont lay along the east side of Lake Champlain.  This territory was settled by English people who came through, or from the port of Boston, Mass.  Among these people was a daring young woman who discovered that there were people on the west shore of the lake.  The lake was about a mile wide at Ticonderoga.  This young woman and a friend got into their Indian canoe and paddled across the lake.  They were greeted by the Dutch settlers with great Friendliness.  One of the Dutch families at the fort had the uncommon name of VanOrnum."  Around 1772 the young woman and a VanOrnum son married and moved northwest to establish a trading post at the now-considered jewel of the Adirondacs, Saranac Lake, where the likes of Albert Einstein and Mark Twain summered for its beauty and quaintness.

Five hours south on the Hudson, famished, sitting at a white clothed table, we could sample a steak that has a controversy attached to it.  What cut of meat, exactly, was the original Delmonico steak, prepared by the great 19th century head chef Charles Ranhofer?  A ribeye, New York Strip, bone-in top sirloin, a bone-less top sirloin, what?  Ranhofer, in his cookbook The Epicurean, names his specialty cut "Bifteck de Contrefilet Delmonico au Beurre et aux Fines Herbes Cuites."  Hard to find at Festival Foods, but basically a rib-eye rare, olive -oiled, and basted in herbed butter.

Abby might like the place because it was the first restaurant to have a female cashier; Janet because it was the first restaurant to allow women to congregate as a group; Julia because it was the first to offer Lobster Newburg; Carly because it was the first restaurant to have a 'star chef.'  I might because I get to write about it.