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John and Karen Hess's influential 1977 book, The Taste of America, is a long rant aimed in part at fifteen years of celebrity chefs. John Hess despised most of the famous cooks of the time and almost all the famous cookbooks...to Hess, and a few other cranky resisters, their great collective sin was that they were bad cooks. In his book, Hess spends many pages and citations discussing why a certain sauce can't have flour in it and why it's a travesty to add sugar to bread. He dissects recipes, thrusting and parrying so vigorously I can almost hear him shouting, "En garde!" as he skewers the upstarts and interlopers messing with good food. But far fewer people have read John Hess than have read the paragons who put flour in sauces made with canned stock and added sugar to their bread, and in the end, Hess's quixotic battles disappeared from sight.

-- Sallie Tisdale, The Best Thing I Ever Tasted (Riverhead Books, 2000)

Contrary to a reputation we developed, Karen and I worked hard to find things to commend: chefs who knew the metier and had perceptions to share; little restaurants that tried; ethnic ones that kept the faith. We could not persuade the brass to abandon the silly custom of grading restaurants by stars...Our chiefs did not want us to tell our readers they were being taken for suckers, they wanted us to tell them how to be chic. When Richard Severo and Frances Cerra tried to practice consumer reporting at the Times, they were brutally silenced. I was not, but when an article of mine about Chinese truck farming was held back indefinitely on the ground that we'd had enough about that sort of thing for a while, I decided it was time for me to go back to home cooking.

-- John L. Hess, My Times: A Memoir of Dissent (Seven Stories Press, 2004)

If you are wondering, dear friends, if I'm this tough and reckless with all my books, let me assure that I'm not. In general I treat my books carefully, and I'm not one for wearing away pages, stripping the plastic coating from the board stock or leaving smudgy fingerprints and smears all over the margins. But I do have a handful of books that are my own version of the Velveteen Rabbit; much as the Velveteen Rabbit was so well loved that eventually his fur was worn away and he became shabby, so it is with my handful of key texts. For me, the text doesn't get much more key than The Taste of America.

"...but what are *your* thoughts on the book, Bakerina?" asks Tvindy, shortly after I post the pictures above. Why, I thought you'd never ask.

I had been hearing about The Taste of America for years before I read it. I knew that John L. Hess had had a long career at the New York Times before walking away in frustration and disgust. I knew that Karen Hess was a peerless cook and a brilliant culinary historian, who first came to my attention via her annotations to the first American edition of Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery. I knew that Laurie Colwin cited them in her essay "Without Salt" in her book Home Cooking when she said that our national salt addiction was due to the lack of flavor in our produce. And I also knew that they had some harsh words for late 20th century American food, the people who were producing it for us and selling us to it and teaching us how to cook it. Somewhere in all this feeble knowledge was a vague memory that this book had set off a ruckus in professional food circles, for their supposedly bitter and venomous treatment of Julia Child, Craig Claiborne and James Beard. Time after time I would pick up a copy of the book in bookstores, only to put it down. I wasn't interested in venom. I loved Julia Child, and had ever since I was five, when our local public TV station scheduled The French Chef in the time slot immediately preceding Sesame Street. Craig Claiborne was the hero of two of my own dessert heroes, Maida Heatter and Lora Brody. James Beard was titanic, iconic, the biggest cheese of them all. The foundation which bears his name awarded me a scholarship which, along with two other scholarships I'd won, enabled me to go to culinary school with 90% of my tuition taken care of. How could I read a hatchet job on these wonderful folks? Who would read something like this? Who would write it?

I don't know what it was that motivated me to pick up the new edition of The Taste of America, published by University of Illinois Press in 2000, off the shelf at Coliseum Books one day. I picked it up, sighed at the description of the book as a "classic barbeque of our foodways," and opened it to Chapter One. The title jumped out in large bold type: "The Rape of the Palate." Wow, I thought. But that was nothing compared to what followed:

We write with trepidation. How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged, that our food is awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs? Can most Americans be wrong? Considering our recent political and social history, the answer is evidently yes. But that is the wisdom of hindsight, imposed upon us by Vietnam and Watergate. In challenging our very taste, we must confront the housewife interviewed on a television program not long ago. She claimed that she prepared a wholesome balanced diet, but her children preferred junk food "because it tastes good."

How shall we tell her that she is a terrible cook, and that junk food does not taste good? When she says "taste good," she simply means "taste sweet." If she is a typical American, and she sounds like one, her very first mouthful of nourishment was a synthetic, sweetened bottle formula; she was weaned on starchy baby foods loaded with sugar and monosodium glutamate, and she grew up on soda pop, candy, corn flakes, ketchup-doused hamburgers, and instant coffee. Her grandmothers may have known how to cook, but her mother probably did not. Her cooking teacher in public school knew no more, and the authors of the recipes she now relies upon are very nearly as ignorant as she is.

An hour later, I was still in the store, still reading. Of course I bought the book; of course the rest of the afternoon dragged on like cold sorghum; of course I spent the rest of the night immersed in the Hesses' words, wide-eyed, reading the more amazing passages out loud to Lloyd. The next day was a Friday, and I spent half an hour agonizing whether to call in sick so I could stay home and finish reading the book. I did not stay home from work, but I might as well have, so fixed was my mind on the book. "Oh, you wouldn't," my boss told me, when I'd confessed this, months later. "You're right," I said. "I wouldn't. I almost did, though."

to be continued...