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I had thought I had seen how low food could go on my return from my summer studies in the Soviet Union in 1987.  I had come home acclimated to the dour and sad Soviet supermarkets, with aisles of cabbages, dried apples and two brands of canned fish (but also with some surprisingly fine and cheap black bread).  On my first grocery trip back home, I felt barraged within five minutes.  I thought I would hold it together well enough until my mom and I passed the deli case and I saw something called "macaroni and cheese loaf."  It was like olive loaf (for those dear friends not familiar with olive loaf, it is a bologna-like lunchmeat with sliced pimento-stuffed green olives dotted through it; it looks like a bit like mortadella, but doesn't taste nearly as good), only it was flecked with macaroni and cheese instead of olives.  I thought it was the most revolting thing I had ever seen.

It *was* the most revolting thing I'd ever seen, and remained thus until I started working at the box factory, when I read an article in an industry mag about a company that was test-marketing microwaveable breakfasts in a push-up tube.  It was disconcerting to read salespeople and R&D weasels talk about being able to drive with one hand and eat scrambled eggs with the other, and to talk about this as if it were a desirable thing to do.  I do not want to contemplate what sort of eggs are used for these push-up scrambles.  I have seen pictures of them.  They are the most revolting things I've ever seen.

At least they were until last week, when I went to visit Raspberry Sour at The Sour Patch, who wrote a brilliant essay about the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.  How much plastic has been disgorged into our landfills and watersheds as a result of this grand experiment?  (Have no fear, the "Fun Facts" section will tell you!)  How much hydrogenated fat, how much high fructose corn syrup, had to be added to this formula to make the peanut butter sheet like that?  How much of the original peanut is left in this nonsense?  Why in the world do we need it?  Does anybody, in fact, want to buy it?

...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...

1.  Go to deli on your way back to the office from the gym.  Purchase a big salad with shrimp, feta, cherry tomatoes and a light vinaigrette.

2.  En route to office, decide that even though you've just come from the gym, and the motto for the afternoon is "no junk food for you!," decide that you really, really, really want a Cadbury Crunchie, those sublime 1"x 1"x 7" bricks of honeycomb toffee covered in milk chocolate.  Buy your Crunchie at the deli and drop it into the bag with your salad.

3.  Sit down at your desk.  Discover that you have managed to maneuver the lid off your salad, and light vinaigrette has leaked out all over the bag, saturating the bag, your plastic cutlery, all of your napkins and your Crunchie bar.  Swear.

4.  Grab a handful of tissues and begin wiping off puddles of vinaigrette off of everything.  Pick up the Crunchie and begin swabbing it with tissues.  Succeed only in flinging vinaigrette onto your shirt.  Swear.

5.  Dab your shirt with more tissues.  Renew your attack on the Crunchie, only to fling more salad dressing onto your shirt, as well as on your dry-clean-only black pinstripe trousers.  Panic.  Swear.

6.  Repeat Step 5 twice.

7.  In desperation, realize that wiping oil and vinegar off a Mylar wrapper is completely futile, and realize there is only one way to clean the damn thing off.  Slide the entire Crunchie into your mouth, suck the dressing off, and pull Crunchie from mouth.

8.  At the exact moment that you are executing Step 7, turn around just as the president of your division, a supremely-polished-in-a-corporate-Judy-Woodruff-way, no-nonsense woman, is leading a tour of VIPs through your office, announcing, "And this is our Luxury Packaging Sales Division..."

9.  Turn around again, very, very quickly.  Wonder just how badly busted you are.  Realize that if you apologize to the prez, you run the risk of making the situation worse, a la George Costanza on Seinfeld, and you should just cut your losses.  Wonder if there's a chance that you saved yourself just in the nick of time, or if you really have just been caught fellating a wrapped Crunchie bar in front of a bunch of bigs.  Look down and realize that your shirt is still full of salad dressing in the general breastal area.

10.  Wonder if that hushpuppy frycook position at Ozark Mountain Kitchens is still open.

(picture unashamedly stolen from orionoir. in blatant violation of copyright.)

Hi.  Remember me?  I'm the mango-loving 'mouse who brought you such gems as my instructions for eating deer dick.  Well.  Orionoir recently discovered that Bakerina leaves the keys under the flowerpot just to the left of her door.  So while the boss-cat's away at work the 'mouse, will play.

Pull up a chair and let me tell you a true story about homophones.  No, silly, not homophobes.  To the best of my knowledge there are none of them in this tale   Though, speaking of tales, there is at least one tail in this tale.  And that, my deers, is at the heart of the problem.  But I get ahead of myself.

By way of background 'mouse spent a couple years in China eating and trying to learn Chinese.  Chinese is an interesting language. Mandarin has a relatively limited number of sounds, leading to a lot of words which are homophones or near-homophones.  That's the reason for the headline.  To the non-native speaker, Ellie pant meat and Elephant meat are so close in pronunciation that you'd never have a chance of getting it right.  And if you'd had a bear (oops, a beer) or two, the whole process would be helpless… hopeless.  Oh, nevermind. 

(P.S.  You'll need this later to make sense of this tail… er, tale:  In Chinese, "elephant" is a near-homophone for "fragrant" which is a more poetic analogue for …. (keep reading) ).

The other thing that's important to this story is that Chinese use a lot of creative poetic license in naming food.  Examples include "Phoenix Claws" for plain old barnyard chicken feet down at your local dimsum house.  Try asking for chicken feet and they'll look at you like you just farted rather loudly in public.  Ask for Phoenix Claws and you get a warm smile and a delicacy..  Or, apropos to my earlier story, "Exploding Flower Dish" is the only way to order the otherwise far too pedestrian and crude "deer dick."  America's got our Rocky Mountain Oysters, so who are we to criticize.

One last cultural tidbit before we begin.  Chinese peasants can become increasingly loud and essentially shout at you when you don't understand something.  I guess they figure you're deaf, not stupid.  Thanks for the vote of confidence, but we howlies are just stupid sometimes.  Deal with it.

Beginning already.  This story didn't happen to me (unless you don't buy that about any story that begins "I have a friend…"  I have a friend we'll call "Frank" since, frankly, I cannot recall his real name and I'm too lazy to try to drag it up from the depths of memory just to have to change later it to protect the guilty.

Frank was in China.  The year was about 1987.  In those days it'd been nearly 40 years since Caucasians had been in many parts of China if they ever were there at all.  The great "opening" of China to foreign teachers and students had only begun three years earlier.  We were rare beasts.  However, the most creative of us students had discovered an obscure law that said that one of the "benefits" we received as students was the right to stay in local hotels and to travel as a local anywhere but military-secure areas.  In 1987 tourists were limited to specific hotels in specific cities, had to stay on tour, etc.  Not us.

Several of us students decided we'd abuse our travel privileges during our 1-week break to travel alone and have Adventures™.  'Mouse sensibly decided to make a pilgrimage in search of the source of Tsingtao beer.  I'm no dummy.  "Frank," however, decided that he'd honor the memory of Chairman Mao by putting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book in his rucksack and set out alone along the well-worn path to visit Mao's original home village.  Who cares that he was about 15 years too late.

After 30+ hours on various and horrid trains, Frank had made his way from Beijing in the north to the heart of rural southern China to Mao's sleepy now-neglected village.  Dead tired in a way that one who hasn't spent 30 hours on Chinese trains cannot truly understand, Frank disembarked and staggered into town near midnight.  A light beckoned from a small "guest house."  Smoke poured from the barbeque.  A good sign.  As in all the world, Southerners eat and drink and sleep late.  This is a Good Thing for Frank who's very hungry.

"A beer please."  (Drinking it quickly to clear the train dust and to add courage to support this crazy, I-cant-believe-I'm-alone-in-the-middle-of-goddamn-nowhere-where-no one-speaks English-and-my Chinese-sucks escapade.)  "Hi, my name is Frank.  I came to visit Mao's home town."

You what?

I came to visit Chairman Mao's home town.  Long live the Chairman, etc. etc….

You're late.  He's dead.  We've adopted a whole new set of values.  How do you think I opened this guest house.  "To Get Rich is Glorious" is the new slogan.  But we're really glad you're here.  Would you like something to eat or are you going to drink beer all night?

Umm.   Errrr.  I'd… ahhhh.   What's the house specialty?   I've come 1500 miles from Beijing and 6000 miles from my home to Mao's birth village and I'd like to eat something local and special. 

The special is "Ellie Pants Meat."

Ellie Pants Meat?  What's that?  (Here's where the game of 20 questions begins:  Is it pig?  Cow?  Duck?  Chicken?  Oh, shit, I'm running out of meats.  Venison?  Pigeon?  Water Buffalo?  (how'd I remember that one?)

Nope nope nope nope and nope.  It's ELLIE PANTS MEAT!. 

(Stretching my vocabulary here)  Zebra?  Kangaroo?  Raccoon?  Koala bear?

Nope.  Elephant meet.   

What? 

ELEPHANT MEAT!!!

Hunh? 

I said, "FRAGRANT MEAT" like "smells good,"   are you stupid?

Okay, I'll have it.  Whatever.  And bring me two more bears.  Beers.

Which brings us to the point where Frank tells us that the hostess reached into the 'frig and grabbed a piece of meat by some long appendage that, in retrospect, post-hangover, was long and skinny and boney.  She swung it onto the outdoor cutting block and whacked off a hunk and tossed it on the barbeque and threw on some sauce and put the remaining pieces-parts back in the frig.

Later, she brings over a well-charred hunk of meat and another beer.  (Are we on #5 yet?)  "Here's your Fragrant Meat."  "The house specialty!"

Fragrant Meat?   Do you mean "dog?"

DOG IS CRUDE.  WE PREFER TO CALL IT BY ITS PROPER NAME:  FRAGRANT MEAT.

(I'll have another beer, thanks.)