A taste of Kansas City’s food history, with roots in Westport

When Kansas City native Andrea Broomfield came of age, she knew Kelly’s Westport Inn — said to be Kansas City’s oldest standing building — only as a party place where the beer flowed freely.

Westport’s nightlife is legendary, but what many hungry and thirsty Kansas Citians flocking to the neighborhood may not know is how that area’s food and drink originally put our town on the map.

Today, when Broomfield perches on a well-worn Kelly’s bar stool, the Johnson County Community College English and history professor can plot out points of interest dating back to the town’s whiskey-fueled frontier days.

Broomfield’s “Kansas City: A Food Biography” (Rowman & Littlefield) starts at Pennsylvania Avenue and Westport Road. In 1833, John Calvin McCoy built a log cabin trading post on the northeast corner (where McCoy’s Public House sits today) to sell provisions to area Indian tribes. McCoy sold the trading post in 1836, as well as the plot of land where Kelly’s now stands.

A saloon selling groceries and liquor got its start there, and eventually the log cabin was replaced by the brick Ewing-Boone building, distinctive for its stair-step facade. In 1947, Randal Kelly leased and eventually bought the building from the Wiedenmann Brothers Grocery. His descendents still own and operate the bar.

Although it’s unlikely most Saturday night revelers stop to look at the memorabilia hung on the walls at Kelly’s or read the historic stone placard in front of McCoy’s, they are still part of a longstanding food tradition. A new spate of chef-driven restaurants such as Bluestem, Port Fonda, Char Bar and Westport Cafe & Bar and a booming craft cocktail scene, including Beer Kitchen, Julep, Ale House and CaVa, continue to cement Westport’s reputation for hospitality.

Q: What made you interested in delving into Kansas City’s culinary history?

A: Well, I grew up here, and I never had any real understanding of (its food history). I just lived my life like everyone else does; I knew what highway to get on to get downtown, and I knew that we have good barbecue.

Q: In your book, you started with the geology and prehistoric food cultures, then worked your way up to the 1980s. I wonder how a historian decides where to begin and end.

A: A lot of historians are really leery of getting too close to the present because, in a historical perspective, the last 20 years is a blip.

Where I left off was the development, growth and maintenance of suburban life and the fact that Kansas is still largely dependent on cars and on the freeway system. That has a direct bearing on how and where people eat.

In 30 years, we’ll be ready to write about the ’90s and the aughts, up to the return of the streetcar. I think that’s what’s really going to change our understanding of food history.

Q: How will the streetcar change how we eat?

A: Let’s say it grows, and that’s the beginning of our light rail. That’s going to have an effect on where restaurants are located and how people access them. It’s going to have an effect on groceries. But we’re not there yet.

Q: There’s no guarantee the streetcar will expand beyond the current strip of downtown bars and restaurants …

A: At some point, issues of sustainability and technology will challenge the way we get around and affect food distribution. The globalization of the food supply and how a lot of our food is cheap because it is subsidized and/or imported — that’s still our reality.

I use the flood of 1951 as an important benchmark in our food history. That was the death knell of the old industrialized system of how Kansas City understood its provisions history.

Q: Explain what you mean by provisions.

A: The whole reason for the city’s existence is food. To realize that was one of those most extraordinary a-ha moments for me.

Most cities start because of a natural resource. That could be turpentine and lumber or maybe it’s steel. I began to realize that the city started because a man decided to open a trading post to sell provisions to Indians. John McCoy starts selling cornbread and fatback and coffee and sorghum and sugar.

And then you look at where the city is located geographically, so you’ve got this landscape that has been prehistorically — and continuing well into the 20th century — a crossroads.

If you’re situated at a crossroads, then you’re used to people coming here and leaving. Those who decide to stay inevitably find work catering to people passing through.

Those passing through need to eat and sleep, and so you have this industry of hospitality that is intricately tied to food that grows up in Kansas City.

Q: Where did you go to find the information you needed?

A: The vast bulk of primary research I did was at the Missouri Valley Special Collections (at the downtown Kansas City Public Library) and the Black Archives of Mid-America. The Westport Historical Society and the Missouri Historical Society were also helpful.

There has not ever been a full-length history on Kansas City food written, so I was always working with primary resources. That might mean that I would be sitting in special collections and ask to have brought to me the menu from the Baltimore Hotel, or it might mean when I was working on the immigrant foodways chapter I made an appointment with a woman who had one of the only known remaining copies of Kansas City’s first Jewish cookbook.

From there I began to construct the history of the food. But the food is always the last thing. I had to spend a lot of time on archaeology, anthropology, geology, geography, economics, politics, religion, culture. You’re not going to understand how something grows in a certain place, or where a city begins to put in roads, until you have an understanding of the land.

Q: Did you visit historic sites to get a better understanding of the city’s geography?

A: McCoy was a surveyor so he was strategically mapping out what plots of land to buy to create a city. He can’t be in Indian Territory, but he says, “Where am I going to situate these plots?”

When I wasn’t writing, I walked so I got to understand the contours of the geography through my feet and my bike. I was fascinated with the geography of the Blue River because it was what caused all the difficulties for Independence to remain the hub of Santa Fe traffic. People didn’t want to cross the Blue River or wait if it flooded, so why not start the trading post at the Missouri River so you can forgo the Blue?

Turkey Creek is another really important landmark because the rail tracks were laid along it, and you could see the development of industry all along it because that was the natural way into what became Kansas City. Of course, I-35 now follows that path.

Q: Are there any historical figures that you particularly fell in love with while doing research?

A: Father Benedict Roux was one of the first priests to come to this area. I write in the book that he lived through his stomach, and he really hated the fact that it was hard to find food in those early days.

He lived with the Chouteaus (a French fur trading family) as long as he could get away with it so he was well fed there. When Madame Chouteau got him a presbytery and told him he needed to get out there and minister to the Kickapoo and the Pottawatomie, things didn’t go well. His letters are really funny. He writes constantly back to Bishop Rosati, his superior in St. Louis, about his hunger pains.

The person who replaced him was Father Bernard Donnelly. Of all of the people, I grew to love him the most. I think he had such a generosity of spirit. He was really, really talented to negotiate with rival clans, if you will.

He was ministering to the French Creole as Kansas City gets its first big influx of Southerners, so you get these two communities that are set apart from each other. Donnelly was a really good conduit between the two and facilitated dialogue and understanding.

He also was responsible for bringing the Irish who literally built the city. He was a civil engineer by training, so he was able to understand what needed to happen. If the commerce on the narrow flatlands by the river was going to grow upland, he knew he needed to cut through bluffs. He petitioned the city’s leaders at that time to allow him to recruit Irish workers.

Interestingly, he recruited from only one county — and not his. Most who came were already in Boston and New York. He offered them higher wages and train tickets and set up boarding houses in what we think of as the North End. The North End has always been the arrival point for many, many immigrants, most recently the Vietnamese.

Q: That’s one ethnic group that doesn’t really show up much in your chapter on immigrant contributions. I found that interesting because I’m seeing quite a bit of Asian influence on our current culinary scene.

A: One of the challenges of this book was picking and choosing which immigrant groups to focus on. It was torturous because I kept thinking: Who am I leaving out? And why am I leaving them out?

The Asian influence is really important. I tried to give it a portion of a chapter so that readers could see there is a history developing here. The very first Asian contributions were probably Chinese, but the Vietnam War resulted in a significant population settling here.

The person who was really helpful in understanding that was Carl DiCapo (former owner of Italian Gardens). He’s very, very proud of the role Italian restaurant owners played in helping to settle the Vietnamese refugees in what had been Little Italy.

Q: I also found the African-American chapter particularly fascinating, with many of Kansas City’s jazz and barbecue joints among the first establishments to be racially integrated.

A: I told the publisher I’m not going to do this book if I have to shove African-Americans into the chapter on immigrants.

Kansas City has not had a way to talk about race. I guess I wanted to find a way to open that conversation in a way that wouldn’t be so painful and difficult, and I thought food might be the way to do it.

If we’re going to understand the fact that Kansas City is a jazz and barbecue city, well why? It had to take slavery and thousands and thousands of Southerners flooding into Missouri when it became a state, and the Great Migration.

Then it takes the rowdiness and raucousness. That was already here; and it took (Tom) Pendergast to exploit it. So he comes in with his brothers and colludes with the mob to keep all those speakeasies and barbecue juke joints going, and all these musicians, who are starving, come here so they can eat.

Q: History is becoming a relevant part of the stories many modern-day chefs, restaurateurs, barbecue pitmasters and micro-distillers are trying to tell.

A: I wanted to give people in the industry sort of reference points so they can say, ‘OK, why are we championing things like turkey red wheat? What does that have to do with the past?’ They know it’s the past, but they don’t know how it’s part of the past. Without that wheat Kansas City would never have become a milling center.

Q: You have some of Kansas City’s signature recipes in the last chapter of your book. I know you’ve also taken culinary classes at JCCC. Did you test the recipes you included?

A: When you work with historical recipes, you’re doing a dance with what people will allow you to change. Some have been tested and tested, and some are just how they were copyrighted.

The Green Rice Casserole was our family’s recipe that we grew up with. I think I made that six or seven times, and my sister made it with me so that we had it right.

This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 8:00 AM with the headline "A taste of Kansas City’s food history, with roots in Westport."