Saturday, February 05, 2005
...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.
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Dear ones, you cheer me so. I have to admit that I was less than 100% satisfied with this post. I dropped a lot of Child/Beard/Claiborne references without actually addressing what the Hesses had to say about them. (In short, they said that Claiborne was a poor cook and a snob, favoring expensive gourmet “elegance” over good, solid cooking; Child was also a poor cook who dismissed the cookery of French women [she is quoted by Nancy L. Ross in the Washington Post as saying “French women don’t know a damn thing about cooking, although they think they know everything"]; and Beard was both a sloppy historian and a relentless corporate shill [although they did acknowledge that of the three, Beard showed the most affection for American cooking, and did try to convey his affection for it in his work].) And I know I spent a lot of time talking about what the Hesses thought was wrong, but not enough about what they thought was right. When Karen Hess writes of a cookbook she likes, her prose is like that of a love letter. But maybe I should just count my blessings, thank you for your very kind words, and let you all read the book already.
Michael, any praise from you is high praise indeed, and gladdens my heart, but it certainly was not my intention to make you, or anyone, feel like a food dullard. There’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking on my shelf, too; in fact, there are two, the 1975 spiral-bound edition, and the 1943 wartime edition, which I bought after reading Anne Mendelson’s biography of the Rombauers, Stand Facing the Stove. I don’t know if you learned to cook from books or by your mother’s side. If it was the former, you are not alone. Lots of us had parents or grandparents who didn’t cook, and if we were interested in cooking for ourselves, we had to take our instruction where we could find it. If you were able to take what you learned from cookbooks and apply it so that you could get dinner on the table without having to keep your nose in a cookbook the whole time, then you learned well. If it was the latter, then you learned cooking in the best way possible, by the side of someone who taught you well. Either way, you are no food dullard, and you have no reason to feel sheepish. So don’t, please. And heavens, if I ever start to take the tone of the smarty-pants know-it-all, don’t be shy about letting me know. 
See, it’s days like this that I hate working for a living. Had the siren call of a regular paycheck not been singing sweetly in my ear, I could have stayed at home and talked with all y’all about this all day long.
Dearest C, demographically insignificant pal o’my heart, I am so tempted to answer your question “Move to Philadelphia and buy all your produce from the Amish farmers at Reading Terminal Market,” but of course that is a facile and silly answer. The full answer is longer, and I’m afraid that it is pretty exhausting; after all, we all have jobs, families, lives, bills to pay and dishes to wash. How are we supposed to marshal the energy to make extra trips to farmer’s markets, assuming we can even find them, and to press our supermarket managers for better food? But any step you can take makes a difference. Buy as locally as you can. If you want to buy grass-fed beef at your market, try asking the meat manager. S/he might say no, s/he might not. If you have access to a decent butcher shop, take advantage of it while you can; butchers are a dying breed.
And, of course, it’s small-scale change, but the best thing you can do toward making your food better is to make an investment in the next generation. If you and your wife don’t do this already, get your daughter in the kitchen with you. Let her stand on a chair and watch as you stir a sauce, or bake a cake. Karen Hess learned to cook as a little girl, helping her grandmother with chores such as mixing butter and flour together for beurre manie. Long before I could cook, I was allowed to stir sauces, and long before I could bake without supervision, my mom would let me knead bread dough. Your daughter will grow up with a palate, she will search out the best food she can, and she will turn a skeptical eye toward the food industry chatterers who will try to tell her that it’s just too difficult to cook and why should she even bother?
Oh, my word, it’s Julie! Everyone, go visit Julie’s site right now. She makes amazing food, and she lives right over the river from me! (Julie, consider yourself warned.) Seriously, I’m glad you stopped by, and I’m impressed with your memory. The Hesses did indeed take exception to what Julia called “Brandade a la Soissonnaise.” Brandade is salt cod and olive oil pounded together, a Provencal dish. Soissons is a region hundreds of miles to the north, where beans are grown. Julia’s brandade was a pounded hummus-like mixture of white beans and sesame paste. The Hesses objected on two accounts: the dish was nothing like true brandade, and by calling it “brandade a la Soissonnaise,” Julia showed a disregard for the geography of foodways. This might sound like parsing to people who think that as long as a dish tastes good, who cares where it comes from? But the Hesses had no problem (well, little problem) with improvisation; their problem was with casual, sloppy nomenclature. Imagine if you (that’s the editorial “you”, not you specifically, Julie) went to a restaurant and saw a dish on the menu called “Gumbo a la Maryland.” Being a curious eater, as well as a lover of gumbo, you order it and are treated to a bowl of stewed chicken, dredged in flour and swimming in a floury cream gravy. It’s not really Maryland chicken, and it’s certainly not gumbo; no roux, no sausage, no chicken, no okra or sassafras file. This is how I imagine the Hesses felt upon reviewing some of Julia’s wilder flights of fancy, and again, while I still think of Julia as that cheerful, game, happy woman on The French Chef, I can see the Hesses’ point on this one.
Oh, Moira, dearheart, you are not a rube. I thought Julia and James Beard were beyond reproach, too, which is why it took me so long to take the plunge and read the Hesses. We grew up hearing of Child/Beard/Claiborne as this unquestioned trilogy of authority, soothing voices for a world of nervous cooks, and the nervous tend not to ask a lot of questions of their teachers. I thought that Taste of America would just be one long unbroken train of hate, but I promise you it is not. There is a lot of love in there, and poking through their obvious despair are shining moments of hope.
Rachel, many thanks for stopping by. You are certainly not alone in your assessment of the Hesses. I didn’t know that Alan Davidson and Charles Perry thought they were cranks; I know that Alan Davidson thought enough of Mrs. Hess’s scholarly work that she was a regular presence in the pages of PPC, but I can certainly see how other people, even scholars, would find them a bit dogmatic. (I know that I don’t see Heinz ketchup as quite the evil that the Hesses do, but I think that it’s possible to disagree on certain points while still agreeing with the larger picture.)
I don’t know that I agree with you that the Hesses were “jealous of anyone who became popular with the masses.” Of course, I don’t know what your definition of the masses is, but I know they certainly had kind words for Elizabeth David, who is not a “fringe” writer by any definition. I do know that Mrs. Hess is very tough on people who she believes are sloppy researchers; she even had some strong words for John Thorne, who I certainly don’t think is a slouch. But to his great credit, he took her words and recognized them not as a shot at himself, but as a call to set the record straight, and that’s exactly what he did. He once said that reading The Carolina Rice Kitchen “leaves [the reader] with an open, chastened mind,” which I thought was a great description.
As I had written in an earlier post, I wouldn’t read the Hesses for years, because I’d heard all about how bitter and jealous and negative they were, and I wanted no part of that. What surprised me, when I finally read Taste of America, was just how full of love the book was: love of our history, love of well-prepared food, love of language, love (tempered with sadness and caution) for the people who were trying to rediscover good eating by way of gardening, baking, finding their way to good food. It was surprising, and, ultimately, disarming. My mind was indeed chastened and opened.
So even though I know we don’t agree on this, I can certainly understand how it’s possible to come to a completely different conclusion about the Hesses from the one I drew—and I’m glad you stopped by to keep me on my toes.
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Dear ones, you cheer me so. I have to admit that I was less than 100% satisfied with this post. I dropped a lot of Child/Beard/Claiborne references without actually addressing what the Hesses had to say about them. (In short, they said that Claiborne was a poor cook and a snob, favoring expensive gourmet “elegance” over good, solid cooking; Child was also a poor cook who dismissed the cookery of French women [she is quoted by Nancy L. Ross in the Washington Post as saying “French women don’t know a damn thing about cooking, although they think they know everything"]; and Beard was both a sloppy historian and a relentless corporate shill [although they did acknowledge that of the three, Beard showed the most affection for American cooking, and did try to convey his affection for it in his work].) And I know I spent a lot of time talking about what the Hesses thought was wrong, but not enough about what they thought was right. When Karen Hess writes of a cookbook she likes, her prose is like that of a love letter. But maybe I should just count my blessings, thank you for your very kind words, and let you all read the book already.
Michael, any praise from you is high praise indeed, and gladdens my heart, but it certainly was not my intention to make you, or anyone, feel like a food dullard. There’s a copy of The Joy of Cooking on my shelf, too; in fact, there are two, the 1975 spiral-bound edition, and the 1943 wartime edition, which I bought after reading Anne Mendelson’s biography of the Rombauers, Stand Facing the Stove. I don’t know if you learned to cook from books or by your mother’s side. If it was the former, you are not alone. Lots of us had parents or grandparents who didn’t cook, and if we were interested in cooking for ourselves, we had to take our instruction where we could find it. If you were able to take what you learned from cookbooks and apply it so that you could get dinner on the table without having to keep your nose in a cookbook the whole time, then you learned well. If it was the latter, then you learned cooking in the best way possible, by the side of someone who taught you well. Either way, you are no food dullard, and you have no reason to feel sheepish. So don’t, please. And heavens, if I ever start to take the tone of the smarty-pants know-it-all, don’t be shy about letting me know.