...in which your Bakerina, having shied away from The Taste of America by John L. Hess and Karen Hess for nearly ten years, having heard that it was nothing but a poison-pen attack on some of the best-loved figures on the American culinary scene, takes the plunge, reads the book and finds no poison but plenty of righteous anger.
In her biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life, Noel Riley Fitch accuses the Hesses of sniping bitchily at Julia, and of holding her to standards that they concede no American cook can meet. (It's my opinion that Fitch fails in her argument because the quote she uses to support it is taken completely out of context, but that is another opinion for another post.) I had heard that the Hesses had an agenda, one that included tearing down Mrs. Child, Craig Claiborne and James Beard. I had heard that they took pleasure in being negative, in giving terrible reviews to the city's most prestigious restaurants, in complaining about the bounty of foodstuffs gracing the American table. Dear friends, I have read The Taste of America, I have read it over and over and over, and I have come to the conclusion that the supposed best and brightest of the food world really needed -- still needs, in fact -- to grow a thicker skin. I am looking for hatred, looking for schadenfreude, and I'm still not seeing it in this book.
This is not to say that this is not an angry book. The Hesses are indeed angry: at Beard, Child and Claiborne; at the food companies that denature and corrupt our food; at the pop historians who misrepresent our magnificent culinary heritage; at the home economics teachers who, in combination with the food industry, send cooking teachers who can't cook into the public schools (thus raising another generation of non-cooks who will turn to prepacked, hyperprocessed foods); at frauds, plagiarists, lazy reporters and Green Revolution dogmatists. "It is, as far as we know, a story never properly told," they write in reference to the story of the birth of American cuisine; they follow this sentence up with a chapter entitled "Colonial Eden," one of the most beautiful valentines ever written to the lush variety and quality of produce available to our forebears, and to their skill at preparing these foods to their best advantage. Their tribute to hearth cookery is similarly heartfelt and gorgeous. They print a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to the Gazetteer of London (and subsequently reprinted in a 1958 American Philosophical Society publication, Benjamin Franklin on the Art of Eating), as a response to a letter writer who japed that the American colonists' boycott of tea was doomed to be short-lived, as the Indian corn on which they would have to subsist was not agreeable for long-term consumption:
Pray, let me, an American, inform the gentleman, who seems ignorant of the matter, that Indian corn, take it for all in all, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains in the world; that its green leaves [read: ears] roasted are a delicacy beyond expression; that samp, hominy, succatash, and nokehock, made of it, are so many pleasing varieties; and that johny or hoecake, hot from the fire, is better than a Yorkshire muffin -- But if Indian corn were so disagreeable as the Stamp Act, does he imagine we can get nothing else for breakfast? -- Did he never hear that we have oatmeal in plenty, for water gruel or burgoo; as good wheat, rye and barley as the world affords, to make frumenty; or toast and ale; that there is everywhere plenty of milk, butter and cheese; that rice is one of our staple commodities; that for tea, we have sage and bawm in our gardens, the young leaves of the sweet hickery or walnut, and above all, the buds of our pin, infinitely preferable to any tea from the Indies; while the islands yield us plenty of coffee and chocolate? -- Let the gentleman do us the honour of a visit in America, and I will engage to breakfast him every day in the month with a fresh variety, without offering him either tea or Indian corn.
This was our starting point. This is where fine food and fine technique converged and grew through the 19th century, only to lose its luster as iron stoves replaced the hearth, as chemical leaveners supplanted yeast, as new industrial rollermill flour milling techniques caused a decline in flour quality that brought on the increasing use of sugar in bread recipes (most notoriously by Fannie Farmer). It is harsh enough to contemplate that our forebears had access to foods of quality that we will never see, or pass on to our grandchildren's generation and beyond. It is worse to realize that the story has been appropriated, and is being told, by pop historians and foodwriters who eschew legwork in favor of pat, erroneous anecdotal apocryphal history, in which our colonial forebears ate plainly and poorly, as opposed to our smart 20th century parents and grandparents, who supposedly came back from fighting in Europe and introduced the U.S.A. to shiny new concepts like tossed salad (never mind that Thomas Jefferson's market diary showed records of salad lettuces like corn salad, sorrel and lambsquarter, which are practically nonexistent in American supermarkets). This is what left me shaking my head: how did this happen? How did we develop such woeful ideas about our food? How do we change this?
Dear friends, if I sound like I am in despair, I am not. In order for this to change, two things must happen: 1. Real historians, real cooks, real food lovers, real believers in the truth, must learn our true history, from primary sources, share that history, and loudly call out the people who would deny that history its true greatness. 2. We have to read it, consider it, and try as well as we can to learn as much as we can -- but it all starts with reading. Consider the following passage from The Taste of America, in which the Hesses quote a piece written by Horace Sutton in a food issue of The Saturday Review/World (in which Sutton quotes an anonymous source accusing John Hess of being "too conditioned to France and to French restaurants to defend American fare properly"
, and waste no time in replying, vigorously:
Beginning his piece with the salivating notion of Gael Greene that "food and sex are completely interwoven anthropologically," Sutton tells us: Europe and the Orient developed sophisticated cultures embracing both sensualities. But the settlers who came to the New World were too busy with basic needs to bother about the niceties. In America, food initially was a matter of survival; later, it was little more than a function." Sutton abandons without explanation the problem of how the settlers procreated -- presumably, not in a sophisticated manner. (Actually, the carryings-on of some of the Virginia gentry, as recorded in diaries and lawsuits, were depraved enough to have interested even Gael Greene.) He continues: "It was not until the end of World War II, says James Beard...'that Americans began to think of eating as a pleasurable thing, a sensual delight.'" Thanks to returning GI's and tourists..."The kitchen cook in America, hired or housewife, was encouraged to embark on new cooking experiments at home. Restaurateurs were encouraged to forsake steak and potatoes for heavy forays into the world of snails and highfalutin sauces."
That is defending American fare?
That is only Beard-Boorstin history, a farrago of errors that insult our intelligence, our scholarship, and our forebears. We repeat: the earliest settlers, and the Indians before them, had a marvelous array of foods to choose from, and developed sophisticated and sensual ways of handling them. The foods were gradually homogenized by the Industrial Revolution, and good American cooking was gradually supplanted by the gourmet plague. Finally, the Pepsi generation of gourmet writers taught Americans to be ashamed of their own great food heritage.
Dear friends, my hand tingles, typing that passage, much as the very top of my head tingled the first time I read it, and the second time, and every time after that. It was at that very moment that I stopped granting Julia Child and James Beard leeway for a little creative interpretation of history just because I liked them so well. It was at that moment that I decided to check out some of those historical cookbooks in facsimile mentioned by Mrs. Hess and sold at Kitchen Arts and Letters. I have never been the same since.