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...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.

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...

Dear friends, I can tell what you're thinking.  You're thinking, hold on...this piece seems awfully familiar...well, you're right.  The piece below originally ran on PTMYB on December 11, 2003.  Lest it seem that I am degenerating into cheesy-clip-show theatrics, I promise that this is not the case.  I decided to rerun this piece as a tribute, after a fashion, to John L. Hess, who died on Friday at the age of 87.  Together with his wife Karen, John Hess is my ultimate food hero; it was their iconoclastic 1970's masterpiece The Taste of America that shaped my deepest feelings about food and cookery, that convinced me that I wanted to write about food, and that I wanted to study food history, serious, disciplined food history, not a glib pop-culture shadow of food history.  In The Taste of America, Mr. and Mrs. Hess identify Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families as the finest cookbook written in the English language.  I should be doing better by John Hess than this, but tonight I just can't find the words to explain just why he was a giant among journalists, so instead I will share with you one of the finest cookbooks I own, and I will raise a glass to John Hess, for if it were not for him and his brilliant collaborator, I never would have found it.

Today Julie Powell announced the official closing of the Julie/Julia Project. For those not familiar with her or her blog, Julie Powell was a bright, frustrated administrative professional working in Lower Manhattan and living in Brooklyn (later Long Island City, Queens) when she decided to embark on an ambitious project, namely preparing each of the 536 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. By day she went to work; at night she came home and prepared blanquette de veau and Jambon Braise Morvandelle and a series of aspics, each more terrifying than the one that preceded it. Each night's cooking adventure was recorded in her blog, which attracted a large, fascinated and devoted readership. Eventually the media (including CBS News and Amanda Hesser of the New York Times) took notice, and today Julie Powell has an agent and a book deal. Her book is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2005. It is a writer and cook's dream writ large, a career born of something originally started as a lark, and in my opinion, it could not happen to a more deserving cook/writer than Julie. Her blog is -- or was -- great reading. Julie is funny, salty, opinionated, bemused by the task she set in motion, yet ultimately glad for it.

When news of Julie Powell's book deal broke, I received a lot of helpful suggestions to try the same thing. Hey! You're a writer, you know food, why don't you pick a cookbook and cook your way through it and blog it and shop around for a publishing deal? Because the people who recommend this course of action are generally sweet and kind, I try to be diplomatic when I tell them I've heard better ideas. Assuming that I had the stamina to do something like that, there is something vaguely pathetic about glomming onto a good idea and hoping lightning will strike twice. This might be fine for network programming executives, but I don't want to do it, at least not now. Regardless of my opinion of savekaryn.com -- I was not impressed, to put it mildly -- I will give her credit for having enough moxie to be first out of the gate with the internet-panhandling idea. I give less credit to people who tried to panhandle their way to divorces, breast implants and sportscars.

Nevertheless, a girl can fantasize, and if enough time passes where it is once again acceptable to cook one's way across a book and keep a meticulous journal of it, I have my candidate at the ready.

The first edition of Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton was published in 1845. A revised, updated edition was published 10 years later; it is this edition that was published in facsimile by Southover Press in 1993. It has been acknowledged as one of the finest cookbooks in the English language, and it is easily one of the best cookbooks I own, superior, in my opinion, to the vaunted 20th century kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Although it was written over 150 years ago, Modern Cookery is still so appropriate, so usable and practical that it would not be untoward to think of it as Timeless Cookery for Private Families instead. Unlike many of the cookbooks published in the 18th and 19th centuries, Miss Acton's cookbook was directed at small, middle-class families, rather than to the mistresses of households with a full complement of servants. As a result, very little scaling up or down needs to be done to these recipes to make them practical for daily use today. Most of her contemporaries included detailed directions for housekeeping, which, while interesting from a historical perspective, ultimately gives the books a dated feel. Miss Acton preferred to focus, in her words, on the "elegance and economy" of food, and it shows. Every page is replete with the consideration, intelligence and energy she brought to her work, and the result is a sublime collection of recipes and instruction.

I reread the soups chapter on the subway home tonight, and I was filled with the desire to make every single soup, even consomme, the time-consuming and meticulous rendering of bones into clear, concentrated meat stock. I wanted to make milk soups, and beef tea, and mulligatawny, and the extraordinary-sounding Mademoiselle Jenny Lind's Soup, which was given to Miss Acton by a popular Swedish writer, who in turn obtained it from the great singer's cook. It is made from strong veal or beef stock, eggs, cream and sago, a tapioca-like starch. Miss Acton said that Miss Lind tended to take it before performances, as she found the sago and eggs soothing to the chest and beneficial to the voice. (This recipe was later "appropriated" by Isabella Beeton, who changed its proportions slightly and rechristened it as "Soupe a la Cantatrice." About 100 of Miss Acton's recipes were similarly lifted, revised ever so slightly, and published without attribution in Beeton's Book of Household Management. Sadly, Mrs. Beeton was neither the first nor the last writer/editor to produce a cookbook in this way. The 18th and 19th centuries were rife with cookbook plagiarists, and it would be disingenuous to say that such dirty tricks are behind us today.)

It is a dangerous thing for me to quote Miss Acton, because the temptation is strong to quote the entire book (but I will not). I will give, however, her recipe for something which sounds like a heavenly dish for a cold wet night, an original recipe of hers she calls "The Young Wife's Pudding":

Break separately into a cup four perfectly sweet eggs, and with the point of a small three-pronged fork clear them from the specks. Throw them, as they are done, into a large basin, or a bowl, and beat them up lightly for four or five minutes, then add by degrees two ounces and a half of pounded sugar, with a very small pinch of salt, and whisk the mixture well, holding the fork rather loosely between the thumb and fingers; next, grate in the rind of a quite-fresh lemon, or substitute for it a teaspoon of lemon-brandy, or orange-flower water, which should be thrown in by degrees, and stirred briskly to the eggs. Add a pint of cold new milk, and pour the pudding into a well buttered dish. Slice some stale bread, something more than a quarter of an inch thick, and with a very small cake-cutter cut sufficient rounds from it to cover the top of the pudding; butter them thickly with good butter; lay them, with the dry side undermost, upon the pudding, sift sugar thickly on them, and set the dish gently into a Dutch or American oven, which should be placed at the distance of a foot or more from a moderate fire. An hour of very slow baking will be just sufficient to render the pudding firm throughout; but should the fire be fierce, or the oven placed too near it, the receipt will fail.

In a postscript, Miss Acton cautions the reader that while this is an easy and satisfactory pudding, it is easy to ruin if the cook does not watch the temperature of the oven with care. It is a plain, grand dish, and it shows Miss Acton at her best: her attention to detail, her no-nonsense but good-humored voice. These qualities are found in abundance throughout the book, evidence of the years she spent testing and retesting, writing and rewriting. (According to Elizabeth Ray's introductory notes in the 1993 edition, a review in a popular magazine of the day stated that Miss Acton had spent ten years writing Modern Cookery, and compared her sauces to those of the great French chefs Vatel and Careme.) The chapter on fish preparation, and the introductory chapter on carving techniques, should be used as primary texts in cooking schools. Not only are they filled with meticulous direction, they are also illustrated -- as is the rest of the book -- with detailed, breathtakingly beautiful prints, near-perfect combinations of form and function.

It strikes me that I am doing a poor job convincing myself that it would be a bad idea to do this. But no, I will not steal Julie Powell's thunder.

Miss Acton wrote another book two years before her death, a smaller but still-brilliant and well-considered tome, The English Bread Book. Maybe if I start small...no, no, no. I will be good. For now.

Dear friends, since it is well after midnight in Scotland, I can safely say happy birthday to one of my favorite men, Robert Burns.  I can also say thank you to another of my favorite men, who saw me looking sad and forlorn one day and decided that I needed a little consolation, a little love in a jar, a little more love in the form of a wide-mouthed jar filled with the best blackberry jam I have ever had the privilege of eating, and a little chocolate to perk up the endorphins.  Best of all, I can say it all by way of Mr. Robert Burns's poem, which begins with probably the most famous, and definitely most fun to recite, couplet in Scottish poetry.

Dear friends, it is Meyer lemon season, and I am in a quandary.  Three pounds of these beauties sit in my fridge tonight, waiting for me to do something with them.  I have one sitting on a plate on top of the pile of books next to my writing space, smooth, golden and warm.  I pick it up, cradle it in my hand, pierce a bit of the zest with my thumbnail and inhale.  There it is, that lemony hit that makes me merrier than Christmas, but there is something else, too, something that only today I learned was thymol, a flavor note found in tangerines.   The skin of the fruit is thinner than that of our familiar large-crop lemons, and softer, so soft that I find myself picking it up, rolling it from hand to hand, stroking it with my thumb, feeling the little muscles in my hand relax.  I had much the same reaction at the market when I found them; as I bagged them, I found myself holding them in hand, a split second longer than necessary, until I realized that the produce guys were looking at me strangely.

I love Meyer lemons, the way I love Seville oranges in January, rhubarb in May, tomatoes and nectarines in August, fresh chestnuts in November.  They are fleeting, these sweet little guys, and in the next day or so, I plan to capture that sweetness as well as I possibly can, in the kitchen and on the page.

But how?  The lovely and talented Snowball has suggested a lemon curd tart, while the lovely and talented Steve has suggested that Meyer lemons might substitute nicely for the limes in my cardamom tea cake.  There is the flourless lemon and almond cake from Michele Urvater and David Liederman that I love so well.  There is Meyer lemon granita, Meyer lemon sorbet and Meyer lemon ice cream, variations on a theme.  There is Shaker lemon pie, featuring lemon slices so thin as to be see-through.  (I am a fool for Shaker lemon pie, but whenever I feed this pie to a crowd, there are always at least two people who are weirded out by the idea of eating a whole slice of lemon, zest, pith and all, and they end up sucking the fruit off the membranes and leaving a little pile of lemon skins on their plate, so maybe I'll give Shaker lemon pie a miss.)  There is lemon curd, lightened or not.  I always shy away from Meyer lemon curd, thinking that the fruit is too sweet to make a really assertive curd.  Then I pop my nail into the zest again, breathe in the fragrance again, and I realize that I am a dope for ever doubting.

The outcome of all this foofaraw, and the continued story of Why Meyer Lemons are So Damn Neat, will follow in the next day or so.  In the meantime, i'll take suggestions, any and all.  The season will be with us for a while.