by Laura Schenone
I don't remember exactly why some of the reviewers diss'd this book. I saw some bellyaching about a limitation of scope, but I don't agree. It seemed properly scoped to me--It covered over a thousand years of cooking and eating in America, from fine cuisine for the rich politicians to down home eats of grits and greens. Maybe it skipped some of the interesting outliers--jambalaya from swamp country, beef brisket from Texas, cabbage stew from the poor folk in Maine with the compressed growing season--but it hit the mainstream right in the guts.
It filled me with deep sadness and loss as I recalled how housewives turned away from the food of their mother's and anxiously studied the nutritional guidelines that the government said would make their family strong. Spicy food was harmful; beans gassy. A well-balanced meal consisted of an overdone pot roast of beef, boiled potatoes, green beans seasoned with butter and a sprinkle of salt, a slice of clean, pure white bread, and a jello mold with canned fruit. I suffered through "home economics" myself, and while I did learn how to preheat an oven and measure brown sugar, I never learned the really useful stuff--like how to chop an onion. There's a good way and a lot of bad ways to chop an onion and I didn't learn the good way until I was fifty years old. I had to find out for myself how to cook a pot of pinto beans seasoned with garlic,cumin and jalapenos. How to throw ears of corn in a 450-degree oven for 40 minutes and eat them with just a sprinkle of Kosher salt and cayenne pepper. How to saute collard greens with onion, garlic, bell pepper and vegetable broth, then season them with cider vinegar and a touch of sugar.
Okay, I didn't mean to go all Food Network on you. I should be blasting Home Ec classes for different reasons--not for the crimes they committed against taste, but the crimes against healthy. Even though we didn't know the true nature of milk, meat, white grains and cheese back then, we did know that fresh fruits and vegetables were good for you. We knew that oatmeal made a hearty breakfast and black-eye peas gave you good luck
I could go on and on, but back to the book. As I said, the most heart-breaking thing was the loss of the immigrant's skills and tastes as they homogenized into American culture. But the most warming thing was the story of how a generation of cooks were led by Julia Child, James Beard, Alice Waters and many others to start thinking of cooking as love, not duty; kitchen time as a privilege, not a pain to be avoided; and good taste as a joy, not a forbidden fruit. The story of how America learned to love cooking again.
. They never taught us future "frugal housewives" (aka single moms on food stamps) how to make nutritious, economical meals out of the stuff found at the A&P. We learned nothing about buying in bulk, canning, drying and freezing. Nothing about the staying power of a one pound bag of dried beans. Nothing about seasonal fruit....
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