By Scott Ferguson
Those of us who are seriously interested in food and the history of food in America have reason to celebrate. Molly O'Neill and the Library of America have compiled a 727-page anthology of food writing that spans more than 250 years of American culinary history. It begins with an excerpt from Pehr Kalm's Travels in North America, from 1753, and ends with a selection from Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma from 2006. In between are such classic accounts as Henry David Thoreau on watermelon, Herman Melville on clam chowder, H.L. Mencken on the hot dog, M.F.K. Fisher on oysters, William Styron on Southern fried chicken, and Ralph Ellison on baked yams.
Also included are more than 50 recipes, running from Thomas Jefferson's ice cream to Lady Bird Johnson's Pedernales Chili. One recipe, from 1877, for Mother's Rice Pudding, reads in full: "One cup rice, ten cups milk; bake five hours." You can, of course, "throw in a cupful of raisins, not stoned, but just carefully picked over, after the pudding has been in about half an hour. You may just stir them in; it will do no harm."
If we wish to speak of the book itself, it's best to start at the beginning—with the introduction. My advice to you, whether you're new to the food-writing canon or a seasoned veteran, is to read and savor Molly's well-written and highly informative opening pages. If you've not read M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me, here's the way she speaks of the reason she wrote about food:
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? … The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
Molly adds this pointed observation of her own:
Many of [M.F.K. Fisher's] successors see food as an end in itself—and end up producing something like food porn—but the most successful memoirists write about food and the self in order to write about the human condition, human appetite, human yearnings.
And why do we read about food? She ventures this opinion:
I think we Americans read about food to remember how it feels to be hungry and to deserve a meal, to imagine being windswept and exhausted, shivering and lonely; to feel, as the early explorers did, wracked by appetite born of long odds and great hope. We read about food to feel the things that thought of food can fix. Which is just about everything. Every meal, after all, is a new beginning."
(If that doesn't nearly give you goosebumps, you just weren't paying attention.)
This is not a book devoted only to the serious contemplation of humans and their food habits, though. If you want a lighter mood, turn immediately to Calvin Trillin's "The Traveling Man's Burden." It begins with one of his most memorable lines: "The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City. Not all of them, only the top four or five." And one can always—even in Kansas City—be directed to "some purple palace that serves 'Continental Cuisine' and has as its chief creative employee a menu-writer rather than a chef." That genre of restaurant is one Calvin pointedly labels "La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine." We've all eaten there, whether in Kansa City or Cleveland or San Diego.
And it's probably best for me to issue a word of warning regarding Guy Davenport's "The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onward": If you have even the slightest tendency toward what my mother would call "a tender stomach," do not, repeat, do not read this essay either right before eating, while eating, or right after eating. I fear there may be unfortunate consequences if you do. (Should you be interested, "geophagy" is eating clay.) That being said, he writes very well and is quite entertaining in his discussion of table manners around the world both ancient and modern.
Not to proselytize too broadly for one of my favorite and, sadly, nearly neglected modern food essayists, but the piece by Laurie Colwin, "Kitchen Horrors," is as good a four-page introduction to this amazing woman's writing as you're likely to get. (Read this, then go out and buy Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. You'll be enthralled.)
Contemporary favorites are included of course, so if you've been reluctant to pick up the full text of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, here are four pages to give you enough of a taste to know if you'll become a fan. As Molly O'Neill says, "What I love about his writing is not its shock value but its innocence. Bourdain sucks up life with an open heart and responds without ambivalence: If he likes it he inhales it, if he doesn't he spits it out."
You'll have heard of the origins of the American culinary "revolution" with Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne, but if you want to know what they were leading the revolt against, you must read Laura Shapiro's "Do Women Like to Cook?" (Actually, you should read her book Perfection Salad, from which this piece is taken.) By the mid-1940s, combinations of frozen, packaged, and canned foods were marketed to be "glamorous" and perfectly suited for family and company meals. At that time, Shapiro writes, cooking was "seen as so immutably female it was practically a secondary sex characteristic." But all these industrial products had made cooking a choice, something from which the modern woman was to be liberated. So, what the ever-inventive
"advertising industry, women's magazines and the home economics profession came up with was a theme that has enjoyed one of the longest runs in the history of marketing: 'too busy to cook.' … Women were advised to empty a can of cranberry sauce into the blender, pour the blended sauce into a cake pan, top it with whipped cream and nuts, and freeze the whole thing. At mealtime they would serve a chunk on a lettuce leaf, a presentation long employed to make otherwise inscrutable mixtures, or even lone foods, instantly recognizable as the salad course."
From just such unglamorous concoctions arose the clamor for a revolution. What a change the next 50 years were to produce!
This is a book to dip into: a chapter here, a recipe there. If you keep careful notes, you'll have quite a list of must-read titles and authors very quickly. In a wonderful way, American Food Writing succeeds in both entertaining and educating. So enjoy yourself. As Calvin Trillin once said, "Alice, let's eat!"
Recipes from American Food Writing:
Ice Cream
To Dress Macaroni a la Sauce Blanche
Chop Suey
|
"/>
