From the Bookshelf II

I recently finished Sarah Lohman’s Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine.  It’s not a cookbook, although it does have recipes in it.  It is a trip through 250 years of American cookbooks and menus to tell a rich story of something called “American” cuisine and how it got to be where it is today.

There are many facets to this tale but one theme that runs consistently throughout the book is how people and place mingle over time to create food that is both new and timeless, and often had elements you would never have imagined.  Consider soy sauce for a moment.  According to Lohman, it is the third best selling condiment in the US (trailing ketchup and mayonnaise) and it is ubiquitous in stores that sell food.  Most of us, I think, would attribute its introduction to Chinese and Japanese immigration in the 20th century but we’d be wrong.  The first soy sauce was brewed in Georgia in 1767(!) and not only that, Samuel Bowen introduced soybeans to the colonies for the express purpose of brewing soy sauce.  Just think about that for a second.  Since there is no ethnic  community using soy sauce, merchants bringing it back from China had generated enough demand from wealthy colonists that some entrepreneur decided to produce it here.  By the middle of the 18th century, there was already a market for “exotic” flavors.

On the other end of the culinary spectrum, does anyone remember green bean casserole?  It’s an iconic Thanksgiving dish of the 1950s that always seems to elicit either warm fuzzy memories of the past or chuckles from those who marvel at how ridiculous food could be in the ’50s and ’60s.  It was invented by Dorcas Reilly, a home economist working for Campbell’s Soup charged with creating a dish using no more than six ingredients that every housewife would have on hand all the time.  So here goes – a can of green beans, a cap of Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, a can of French’s Crispy Fried Onions, milk, black pepper, and soy sauce.

There are other stories here, too.  In the chapter on chili, for example, we learn that what we now call Tex-Mex food might be more accurately termed German-American Southwest cuisine, as it is fundamentally an adaptation of the food of a very large German immigrant community from Texas and northern Mexico to the ingredients and techniques of the area.  Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, written in 1824 and republished consistently through the 19th century, had recipes for curry and ice cream (not together) long before there was a significant South Asian community here or the late 19th century world fairs introduced commercially produced ice cream.

It’s also interesting to see how this can effect your work in the kitchen.  She describes in her introduction how dishes we make today would be different 200 years ago because of a difference in available ingredients. One of these ingredients that would have been used constantly in stews, soups, roasts, and even desserts in the 18th century was mace, a relative of nutmeg.  My local supermarket doesn’t even carry it.  I had to go to a speciality herb/spice/tea store (thanks Melange) and I’ve been experimenting with it ever since.  It does make a difference – a bit like nutmeg with a brighter edge.  Try it if you can find it.