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American foodies and how they grew
American foodies and how they grew
By Mary Blume International Herald Tribune PARIS: The C.I., or Calamari Index, was invented by Jeffrey Steingarten, American Vogue's esteemed food critic since 1989, to gauge acceptance of tentacles and suckers in the land of sliced white bread. It didn't take long. "For a while every single restaurant started having fried calamari as a first course," Steingarten said from New York. "Now it's such a cliché you don't see it anymore." It was not ever so, as Sylvia Lovegren's "Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads" makes clear. Back in the 1920s, where the book begins, a favorite dish in the United States was Ginger Ale Salad. Spurred by new home refrigerators and by a wish to dilute ethnic foods into a notional Wasp cuisine, at least one-third of the popular salad recipes of the time were gelatine based, though there were exceptions such as banana and popcorn salad relieved by a lettuce leaf and a dab of mayonnaise. The still small voice of the then president of the Food and Wine Society inveighed against "messing up otherwise palatable dishes with marshmallows," but food tended to be white, bland and, still an American trait in the recipes of, say, Martha Stewart, irrevocably dainty. Finger food such as crustless little sandwiches favored by the women's clubs swept the country as did desserts so sweet The New Yorker predicted that maple-nut martinis might soon become the rage. In view of the disgusting taste of bathtub gin, this idea was perhaps not all bad. The booze was harsh, but speakeasy food, owners being mostly Italian, had at least color and taste if little authenticity. Spaghetti and meatballs, a non-Italian "Italian" dish was one of the favorites and so later was chop suey, unknown in China. Other foreign foods were adapted in the United States between the wars: Welsh rarebit made with the inevitable ginger ale instead of beer or real ale, for example, or "Spanish" rice browned under a layer of bread crumbs, or Good Housekeeping's "Arabian Stew" made with, of all things, pork chops. There was also a "Japanese" dish: bean sprouts with mayonnaise. Two still-dominant American traits were soon evident: gadgetry (a food columnist in the '30s admitted she had blown out all her fuses by attempting to use her toaster, waffle iron and percolator all at once) and the obsession with eating that has so invigorated the publishing industry. By 1961 the epicure Joseph Wechsberg was complaining that "people who wouldn't dream of attempting a Chopin concerto after five piano lessons are confident to turn out 'gourmet food' after reading five non-cookbooks." Gourmet, as opposed to home, cooking came with the 1940s, presumably spurred by wartime refugee chefs, and in 1941 a new magazine, Gourmet, appeared with contributions by M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard. Desserts were flamed and quiche arrived, known then as Swiss tart. No one these days is likely to make Lady Baltimore cake or beef Wellington, although in the 1960s a recipe proposed the latter with frozen pie dough and liverwurst instead of foie gras. The '60s were the heyday of instant foods: even the French chef at the Kennedy White House made his beef stroganoff with canned cream soup. Now that coulis is a cliché, convenience food is back in the highest of haute cuisines, according to The Wall Street Journal. The worshipful Daniel Bouley in New York uses Heinz ketchup and the secret of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's sauce for fried shrimp is Hellmann's mayonnaise and condensed milk. Another chef uses Gravy Master in his $75 Kobe beef special and, pace Jeffrey Steingarten, Jay Murray of Boston crusts his native calamari with dehydrated potato. In 1977 pasta primavera, another non-Italian "Italian" recipe, was the most talked-about dish in Manhattan, according to Craig Claiborne, while in Berkeley, California, six years earlier Alice Waters had begun a real revolution at her Chez Panisse, a strictly American revolution featuring natural native products including forgotten, or heirloom, tomatoes. With so much on his plate, the American foodie had been born, moving easily from Velveeta to parmesan (which foodies pronounce parmezhan). Green peppercorns, balsamic vinegar, kiwis were in every supermarket and fusion cooking got a label although American cooking had always been a meld of many cuisines. Julia Child, who in 1961 made French cuisine accessible to Americans, had proclaimed that every kitchen should have a blowtorch to crust a crème brûlée. These days the gadgets are more likely to be test tubes and retorts. Spain's Ferran Adrià is the household god, molecular cuisine is the thing, and a whiff of a flavor is as good as a mouthful. If the Americans and British have proved willing to take an interest in lecithin and alginate, the French have proved more resistant to the pleasures of molecular gastronomy. "I find Paris rather provincial," Steingarten said. In the United States, plastic- sealed, or sous-vide, cooking, which used to be confined to storing foods, is the new way of preparing them, so slowly that the New York Health Department intervened on the grounds that they weren't cooked at all, Steingarten says. Quinces, heirloom pork and brining are à la mode, and as for vegetables, Steingarten notes in a somewhat inscrutable e-mail: "Ramps, in season; crosnes; microgreens, including amazing little things such as hop sprouts or sprouts from the pop-corn plant; second tier root vegetables for purees or boil- in-butter, such as parsnips and parsley root; carrots, peppers and tomatoes in flamboyant colors and patterns, mainly stripes." Popcorn plant cannot be found in Paris, even for ready money, but like New York, Paris is having a mild nostalgia wave. The chocolate- covered tiny marshmallow bears from French childhood are again available -- at the fashion store Colette -- and in New York Steingarten has wolfed down miniature versions of Nabisco's Oreos and Mallomars baked by the city's best pastry chef. If provincial Paris lags behind avid Manhattan, there is hope from Hélène Darroze, who has two Michelin stars. She has just brought to Paris a brand-new and dainty thing: le finger food. |
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American foodies and how they grew
Victor Sack wrote: > Hélène Darroze, who has two Michelin stars. She has just brought to > Paris a brand-new and dainty thing: le finger food. Do you suppose "people who **** with their faces", as PJ O'Rourke once so eloquently put it, can manage to eat with their fingers? --Blair "Or did they invent that, too?" |
Posted to rec.food.cooking
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American foodies and how they grew
Victor Sack wrote:
> PARIS: The C.I., or Calamari Index, was invented by Jeffrey > Steingarten, American Vogue's esteemed food critic since 1989, to > gauge acceptance of tentacles and suckers in the land of sliced white > bread. > > It didn't take long. "For a while every single restaurant started > having fried calamari as a first course," Steingarten said from New > York. "Now it's such a cliché you don't see it anymore." I've read that in the 1950s, bratwurst turned out to be too exotic for the Twin Cities. At a German festival. Things have changed. However: I don't consider a food fully accepted till it gets outside the gourmet category. Espresso reached that point when it became common for gas stations (at least in the Twin Cities) to offer "Coffee and Espresso." The University of Minnesota campus now has at least one vending machine with Seattle-style coffees. Bagels have gone from being an exotic food in much of the US to being a different form of sliced white bread. I've not yet seen calimari in, for example, Burger King. -- Dan Goodman All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician. Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood Political http://www.dailykos.com/user/dsgood |
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American foodies and how they grew
In article > ,
"Dan Goodman" > wrote: > I've read that in the 1950s, bratwurst turned out to be too exotic for > the Twin Cities. > > At a German festival. > > Things have changed. _Some_ things have changed. If I had a quarter for every time I heard someone refer to "Eye-talian" food (which, generally, isn't Italian at all), I could move to Italy and live there. It kills me a little that chains like Lee Ann Chin (generic Chinese-American steam-table food) and Olive Garden still top "reader's choice" polls. The Twin Cities are growing up, gastronomically, but there still are plenty of people here who have led _very_ sheltered lives with food. I'm hoping our new Latino, African, and Hmong residents will change that. sd |
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American foodies and how they grew
In article > ,
"Dan Goodman" > wrote: > > The Twin Cities are growing up, gastronomically, but there still are > > plenty of people here who have led very sheltered lives with food. > > I'm hoping our new Latino, African, and Hmong residents will change > > that. > > I'm not the most adventurous person around, actually. I've never tried > lutefisk, and don't intend to. Or the Ethiopian bread which looks like > gray sponge (available in the Cub near Lake and Minnehaha). Understood. I tried lutefisk once. It was OK -- I could swallow it :-) But I now see why people drown it in butter or white sauce: it gives it a nicer flavor and makes it swallow easier :-) I've checked "Try lutefisk" off my life's to-do list. The bread you speak of is injera, and I've grown to love it. It _is_ an acquired taste (my ex said it always reminded her of cold pancakes). I prefer it warm to cold, but it works. Reminds me of a sourdough -- a bit tangy. It is surprisingly low in carbs (one big sheet is about 10 effective carbs), so it's become a much bigger player in my diet. sd |
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