David Kamp: The United States of Arugula

Just a couple of quotes. Had I worked at it I could have found more. (That I marked the Fussell quote is probably because I much enjoyed her book.) The early parts cover the introduction of French haute cuisine to New York, although even there James Beard was as much known for his advocacy of down home American fare. The book then expands variously -- Chez Panisse, Dean & Deluca, Wolfgang Puck. Rachel Ray got her mug into the cover illustration but has no real role in the book. I keep reading from recent tracts on or about the Republican Right that anyone with a taste for high class or exotic food is an elitist snob. What I find is that while many people are baffled by such things, their sense of taste welcomes them when given the chance and a comfortable environment. Some folks think I'm some sort of gourmet cook, but I don't, and I try my best to dispell such nonsense. What I cook is mostly down home fare, but I can do that in a dozen cuisines that I've bothered to learn something about -- including the one I learned from my mother. I rarely do anything fancy, but I do exotic things that often catch my guests by pleasant surprise.

I've never cooked anything from Julia Child -- indeed, the only French dishes I've every attempted were from the south, like garum and salade niçoise. And I can't imagine attempting an Alice Waters salad -- I pretty much take what the grocery store gives. But it seems silly to me to nurture an attitude against fine food, or any new life experience, or expertise thereof. Read most of this while traveling, a nice way to spend the time.

(pp. 90-91):

Twenty years after the opening of Le Pavillon, the notion of an asparagus soufflé wasn't as intimidating as it used to be. "In food terms, we middle Americans were all nouveaux riches, giddy with a cornucopia of goods and techniques that poured in from Europe, along with its refugees, after the Second World War. To put it another way, we didn't know how poor we'd been until we hit it rich," writes Betty Fussell in her 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars. Fussell was, in the sixties, one half of a New Jersey couple that went out of its way to showcase its erudition, worldliness, and exquisite taste; her then husband, the historian Paul Fussell, was a professor at Rutgers University, and the Fussells lived an Ice Storm-like life of suburban status consciousness and adulterous intrigue in tony, verdant Princeton, where they and their professorial-class ilk competed to see who could put on teh best, most menu-accomplished dinner party, with the finest selection of French wines to match. Mastering the Art of French Cooking functioned as a sort of domestic equivalent of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and the French term for kitchen equipment, batterie de cuisine, never sounded more appropriately martial.

(p. 126):

"Alice [Waters] and I gave frequent dinner parties," says David Goines, who was Waters's live-in boyfriend in the mid to late 1960s. "It became more and more obvious that what was needed were ingredients that we couldn't get, or ways of cooking that weren't common. THe whole trend of American family cooking, since the 1940s, had been toward faster and easier, and things that were already prepared. It was gradually whittling away the very essence of what it meant to cook dinner for your family. It's like the story of the farmer who decided that his mule was eating too much, and he gradually fed the mule less and less. And just when he'd trained the mule to live on nothing, the damn mule died on him. That's kind of what'd happened to American family cooking."

(p. 213):

[Mimi] Sheraton, in her memoir, Eating My Words, explained the allure of this format, saying, "I remain convinced that there are more people interested in knowing where to buy the best bagel than about the latest act of political or corporate corruption, primarily becauce they personally can do something about the bagel but feel powerless against the Enrons of the world." Sheraton had come to the Times from New York, whose founder, Clay Felker, was the dean of what Gelb admiringly terms "high-class consumerism," and she was among the first to recognize a sea change in the way the middle class felt about restaurant dining -- whereas it had long been regarded as an extravagance, by the mid-seventies, she told the culinary scholar Mitchell Davis, "[people] were beginning to entertain by going out."

posted 2008-07-08