COOKERY

According to a study by Dr. Paul A. Fine, a psychological consultant to major food corporations, the diet of the "American mainstream" consists of "Oreos, peanut butter, Crisco, TV dinners, cake mix, macaroni and cheese, Pepsi and Coke, pizzas, Jell-O, hamburgers, Rice-a-Roni, Spaghetti-O's, pork and beans [canned], Heinz ketchup and instant coffee." One might add hot dogs, ice cream, tacos, and diet soda, perhaps, but his findings remain as valid today as in the 1970s when they were presented to the American Medical Association.

Yet there is a traditional American cookery, and it is a magnificent tapestry of which the warp is English, with wondrous shadings and strands of color from myriad influences: Native American, African, French, Dutch, West Indian, Spanish, and German, among the early ones.

In the beginning, American cookery was Native American. All products were natural; fish and game were plentiful; the aroma of their cooking mingled with that of wood fires; food that was not eaten fresh was dried or smoked. Although the settlers brought many new products from the Old World, along with radically different cooking methods, some aspects changed but little for a century or so. William Byrd, in Natural History of Virginia (1737), described the country as "the Newly Discovered Eden" and was lyrical over the quality and array of fruits and vegetables that were being grown: "beautiful cauliflower ... very large and long asparagus of splendid flavor . . . watermelons and fragrant melons," as well as all sorts of squash, pumpkins, beans, apples, apricots, pears, plums, quinces, cherries, walnuts, and many more. In History and Present State of Virginia (1705) Robert Beverley described Native American cookery in some detail. He too was enthusiastic about the quality and variety of produce and observed that before the English had come, fish were so plentiful that children could take them with pointed sticks. So things had already started to change. Still, as late as 1780, the Englishman Samuel Pegge was able to write that ""American" fruits are exceedingly odoriferous ... to us Europeans ... [so that] our fruits appear insipid to them, for want of odour."

Native American influence on colonial cookery was incalculable, but primarily in terms of kinds of produce, leading off with maize, which the settlers dubbed Indian corn, or simply indian. The Native Americans taught them how to grow it and how to prepare it for storage; they learned how to roast young ears and how to make popcorn; and they observed that cornmeal could be made into cakes, wrapped in leaves, and baked in the ashes. But peoples historically are highly conservative about food, particularly basic foods, so that at the beginning, maize was accepted only out of necessity. The English came to love it, however, and they adapted their own traditional recipes for hearth cakes, puddings, and the like, to cornmeal, which could be substituted for ground oats. The flavor was different but the method was identical. Thus Americans have johnny cakes (from jannock, an old English word for oat bread), boiled and baked Indian puddings, and other dishes, all made by English recipes but using Indian corn. This use of maize is the most important and original aspect of American cookery, and because Mexican recipes have entered the cuisine as well, the nation has an extraordinarily rich repertory of corn dishes. They are more American than apple pie.

Two other important groups of indigenous vegetables were easily accepted. Various Cucurbitae, the group to which squash and pumpkins belong, had been known in Europe since classical times; recipes for pumpkinlike gourds appear in fourteenth-century manuscripts. The specific American varieties were new to the settlers, but not strange. And the American bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, although not related to the broad bean of Europe nor to any other, resembled it sufficiently to be immediately accepted. The French early developed improved varieties of this American bean, so that well into the nineteenth century, the term French bean referred to the young edible pod, or string bean, in both English and American sources.

Other plants of American origin, such as potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, chocolate, vanilla, and Capsicum peppers, came into use somewhat later, partly because they originated far away to the south, often coming to the colonies by wildly circuitous routes, and also because they seemed strange to Europeans. That said, the use of all of them, the tomato particularly, was far earlier than many writers claim.

Acceptance of American edible animals and birds was easier. Some were "new," but many were reassuringly similar to European species. The uniquely American turkey had come to Elizabethan England by way of Spain, so that its presence in Massachusetts did not seem remarkable to the Puritans when they held their first Thanksgiving feast.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, seventeenth-century English cookery was very fine, making skillful use of aromatic herbs and wine. Whatever the faults of American cookery today, they cannot be blamed on that legacy, as admirably demonstrated in cookbooks and surviving family manuscripts. Most of the books are known to have circulated in the colonies, and a number of manuscripts came over, notably one inherited by Martha Washington, a brilliant example of early seventeenth-century English cookery. This is the lineage of The Virginia House-Wife (1824) by Mary Randolph; indeed, she may have known the work. She presents the same sophisticated cookery with wine and herbs, the same lovely custards, and the same breads and cakes baked in the brick oven. She also gives recipes for some forty vegetables and often echoes Hannah Glasse's admonition in The Art of Cookery (London, 1747), far and away the most popular cookbook in the colonies: "Most People spoil Garden Things by over boiling them. All Things that are green should have a little Crispness, for if they are over boil'd they neither have any Sweetness or Beauty." But the Virginia work also includes the un-English use of maize, pumpkin pie, West Indian recipes specifically attributed, seventeen recipes calling for tomatoes, recipes collected by her sister in Cádiz, turnip greens "boiled with bacon in the Virginia style," and above all, the African influence—in short, an eclectic, aromatic cuisine, authentically American. (It may be objected that this represents upper-class cookery. But the poor have always eaten badly—they still do—and their cookery is ill-recorded.)

It was the African presence in the South that accounts for the near mythic reputation of southern cookery as distinguished from that of the North. Many of the products that have characterized southern cookery came from Africa, or by way of Africa or the West Indies and the slave trade: okra or gumbo, black-eyed peas, benne seeds (sesame), eggplant, sorghum, watermelon, and, ironically, the peanut, which had early traveled from its native Brazil to Africa in the slave trade. The American sweet potato reminded blacks of the African yam. And there is the long association of African-Americans with rice. Rice is indigenous to Africa—as well as to India and the Malay Archipelago—and had been the staple of many slaves brought from West Africa so that their expertise in rice culture might be used in the new rice lands of South Carolina.

Southern food is soul food. African-American women did the cooking, and they imbued southern cookery with heady aromas; even English recipes, dictated by the mistress, developed unsuspected nuances in the hands of those cooks. And they brought their own recipes, most dramatically hoppin' John, rice and black-eyed peas, which to this day is a signature dish of South Carolina, even among whites. The African-American way of cooking rice "Carolina style" became the paradigm of rice cookery, so much so that rice companies today exploit the name, as well as depictions of African-American cooks, as logos. This rice kitchen was recorded by Sarah Rutledge in The Carolina Housewife (1847). Rice came to be grown in many states, but nowhere else did such a rice kitchen develop except to some extent in Georgia and, of course, New Orleans with its distinctive Creole cuisine, a unique blend of French, Spanish, African, and Native American influences.

It is not possible here to detail all influences, even important ones. It must suffice to say that the great chowders and baked bean dishes of New England, the hearty fare of the Germans in Pennsylvania, and the Dutch olykoeks (doughnuts) and cole slaw of New York, for example, are familiar to most Americans.

Immigrants to the American heartland brought their cookery with them. Nearly all came westward from the Atlantic seaboard states, as did all but a handful of American cookbooks published before 1870. Life on the frontier left little time for fancy cooking, yet there is a recipe for Southern Rice in Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis, 1880) signed "Mrs. P. F. Morey, Charleston, S.C.," and one for Okra Gumbo in The Kansas Home Cook-Book (Leavenworth, 1886)—these in addition to less surprising recipes such as one for New England Johnny Cakes.

The annexation of parts of Mexico and succeeding waves of immigration added further scintillating accents to the tapestry of American cookery: Mexican, Italian, Portuguese, Bohemian, Scandinavian, Russian, Latin American, Greek, Polish, Jewish, Chinese, and many others. It is primarily those demographic patterns of settlement that account for regional variations in American cookery.

In cities and prosperous farming regions the quality of food and cooking tended to be good well into the nineteenth century. Then the Industrial Revolution began to transform it, beginning with the canning industry. Cookbooks reflected the change by calling for ever longer cooking times for greens, for example. When milling of wheat was centralized and speeded up, the new flour was so lifeless that yeast was unable to make bread dough rise properly unless it was hyped up with sugar. The taste of American bread, remarked upon by early travelers, declined, so more sugar was added, and food writers were enlisted to defend it. New processing, new fertilizers, breeding for hardiness and shelf life, even improvements such as refrigeration, all conspired to suppress flavor. Major staples produced in distant areas replaced the freshness of local produce. As is often said, these changes have made it possible to eat strawberries and tomatoes in January—with a near total loss of flavor. Indeed, the strawberries of June and the tomatoes of August suffered a similar fate. (It is to be noted that many cookbook authors routinely recommend the use of canned imported tomatoes in cooking, rather than fresh ones.)

The quality of cooking suffered along with the produce. Recipes in cookbooks appearing since the turn of the century, especially those for bread and salads, show the doses of sugar increasing almost decade by decade to replace lost flavor. The old cookbook writers, themselves fine cooks, were replaced by home economists like Fannie Farmer (1896 on) adapting the dish to the product. At the same time, many ersatz products, such as Crisco, margarine, and Jell-O, were coming on the market and being touted by the new food writers. The break with earlier generations, and the pressure to conform and cut corners, the influence of advertising and marketing, and finally the movement of women out of the kitchen and into paid jobs all took their toll.

The microwave oven, designed primarily to reheat frozen precooked food, became a fixture in a majority of kitchens. The family meal itself became something of a myth. The dominant pattern of American eating became the snack—on the run, at the desk, before the television set, between meals. Meanwhile, concerns about health and about contaminants in food, such as pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics, led to waves of dietary fads based on changing nutritional theories—good fats and bad fats, good fibers and bad fibers, and so on. Not only packages but also cookbooks and even some restaurant menus listed calories, lipoproteins, and soluble fibers.

Amid all this, a genuine interest in good food and the environment developed a countervailing trend. Interest in exotic cuisines has made it possible to find products that previously were all but unavailable, such as leeks, shallots, wild and cultivated mushrooms. Organic gardening, revival of heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables, revival of farmers' markets, small-scale output of honest breads, old-fashioned cheeses, wines, and beers, all have found new practitioners and willing customers. Even large companies have found it profitable to cater to these tastes. The palate survives, and with it a craving for traditional foods.

John L. Hess and Karen Hess, The Taste of America (1977; 3rd ed., 1989); Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, transcription and commentary by Karen Hess (1981); Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife (1824; facsimile ed., introduction by Karen Hess, 1984); Sarah Rutledge,The Carolina Housewife (1847; facsimile ed., introduction by Anna Wells Rutledge, 1979).

Karen Hess