American epicures

Nicholas von Hoffman

Afriend swooped in from Berkeley not long ago to report on what's happen- ing in that famous university town housing more Nobel laureates than any other com- munity on the face of the earth. 'We're eating,' he told me.

They had started eating some years ago when Chez Panisse, a now famous restaurant, was opened with several newly discovered vegetables — or was it a new theory of cuisine? Whichever it was, in a town renowned for scholarship, sunny afternoons and foggy nights and vehement- ly eccentric politics, the future belonged to gastronomy. Prior to that time, people with Lucullan appetites residing in the Bay Area went to San Francisco to eat. That was in the era when you could only get a decent meal in eight or ten American cities.

Huge stretches of the heartland promised the travelling diner heartburn. From Baltimore, once the home of a justly celebrated regional cuisine, to New Orleans, still celebrated for the same, it was pan fried steak and hominy grits. Elsewhere man and womankind inserted fork and spoon into inedible New England boiled dinners or, in the Missouri Breaks or the Montana highlands, twitching uncooked steer meat. Stomach ulcers, not obesity, were the public health problem. On the traditional American diet we were a lean and suitably mean people whose dyspepsia gave us the motivation to dominate the world.

The failure of the national will, noted and so deplored by recent presidents, spread across the country par; passu with the conquest of old America by the gustatory obsessions. The change, of course, did not occur overnight. Credit for making Americans food-conscious is generally accorded to a Civil War veteran named Alferd E. Packer who led a party of gold prospectors over the San Juan moun- tains of Colorado in the winter of 1874. Trapped by a blizzard and presumed dead, only Packer survived, stumbling into a government Indian agency in Lake City, refusing to eat the barbarously prepared meat which was the staple in those parts. All Packer wanted was whisky.

In the spring the bodies of Packer's travelling companions were found, their skulls smashed in by an axe. After confess- ing to eating the prospectors, he was tried and convicted for murder by District Court Judge Melville Gerry who was moved to remark to the prisoner at the sentencing, `Stand up, Alferd Packer, you voracious, man-eating son of a bitch. There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you eat five of them. I sentence you to hang until you are dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democratic population of the state.'

Today Packer is honoured as America's first cordon bleu chef. As early as 1928, long before the present food craze had got hold of the country, the Lake City Ladies Union Aid Society had caused a plaque to be erected to this pioneer gastronome on `Cannibal Plateau' and just the other day the Washington Chapter of the Friends of Alferd E. Packer had a Saturday brunch at the National Press Club at which bloody manes, hearts of palm and steak tartare were served.

But a long hiatus ensued between the days of the gourmet trail-breaker and today's food frenzy. The modern era began some years ago when for the first time since the Civil War Americans moved away from buying processed food and began purchas- ing little wooden mills to grind whole pep- pers. The pepper mill was the beginning of an entirely new home food equipment in- dustry, it being impossible to prepare today's complicated food with yesterday's simple kitchen utensils. Let's browse through the April catalogue put out by Williams-Sonoma, a chain of stores specialising in gastronomic exotica. Would you care for a 'Creme bralee set from Spain including rustic pottery custard cups'? Or for $650 you can have delivered to your house a 'handmade Minigel ice cream machine'.

Make it yourself, nothing processed in a food factory please. I know people who will invite you to dinner, and as you're sitting down to the feast will say, 'I'm so sorry. Junior came down with spinal meningitis this afternoon so I had to use store-bought filo dough in the spanakopeta.' Walk unan- nounced into some people's living rooms and you'd think you were in a pasta forest. They'll have the noodles which they have just cranked out of their home pasta press- ing machine draped over every chair and table drying out for the lasagna they are about to assemble. It is an oddity' that the society which came up with the cheap, mass-produced vacuum cleaner, the clothes washing machine, the home dishwashing machine and a score of other devices to get people out of the home is now hell-bent on acquiring an infinity of complicated, time- consuming machines to get people back in the house again.

Williams-Sonoma are by no means the only folks in the gourmet utensil business. There must be at least a dozen other large firms selling gadgets to help you while away the hours that your other gadgets made idle for you. This spring the Chef's Catalog (a trademarked name) has the 'New Maxim Electric Wok and 10 piece Deepfry/Tem-

The Spectator 12 May 1984 pura Set'. In the last ten or fifteen years every city in America has got itself at least one first-class Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese restaurant whose kitchen is staff ed by hand-picked, imported coolies. Wouldn't you think affluent Americans of both genders would prefer to have the coolies spend their afternoons choPPhig and preparing the veg? No way, Jose, as they say in LA, which now has French restaurants offering food that rivals in quality that served in the land of Larolisse Gastronomique, a work threatening t° muscle its way onto the New York Pries bestseller list. If it fails to make it the blame will fall oa the more than 3,500 cookbooks currently to print here. You can get Eskimo cookbooks, and Urdu cookbooks; there is a speci, cookbook for every province in. France and Italy, there are cookbooks for every activit,Yt from camping to golf, to preparing a rePa', to be served on the tailgate of your 'w°uclien (Ivy League jargon for an antique stati11 wagon) before the Yale-Princeton footilt game. If you are a participant you trig , also wish to consult Kitchen Auditions: " Cookbook for Bands and

Squads.

Not only celebrities but orga:ilisaeti:5 and institutions print cookbooks. Altholliga_ awful thereotdhesreerviesd, innevtherethnealetisosnal CaPit° sional Cookbook and, need it a C°tig a re be said, n_ White House Cookbook. The San Frall_ cisco Opera Association sells a volume c, a ed What Aria Cooking? which inelude'„rt recipe for Die Meistersalad. Its counterP:0 in Cleveland raises money by selli_ingBach volumes entitled Bach's Lunch and has for More. Every region in America, are recipe books telling how to cook wila,ties. purported to be unique, local sPec'" ,;00 From Kansas, a wasteland of indiges"_,, whose state symbol is the sunflower' °Ter, you guessed it, the Sunflower Saint:tate from the fruit-growing section of ,u1),.:ther. New York comes Applehood and Pie, and one cookbook from Texas ;-ti'es, tains recipes for Aggression Cookies Opulent Asparagus and Machismo fo,es que Sauce. Not only do localities and slat 's° of mind have their own cookbooks is do foods. The special lemon cookboe°:0y but one, there being a volume for tole zucchini. You vegetable ranging from aPY tu have You are not a superstar unless Y soper. a cookbook out, and if you are a t only superstar like Jane Fonda you will 11° ,t fat have a cookbook to help your fans get to but you will be selling an exercise who slim them down again. Minor celeo_, uo don't rate a cookbook of their own in recipe anthologies, like the much shutby ed Jan go Mess Kit recipe book Put_ years the Junior Army-Navy Guild a f:e"ooyer's back. It contains the late J. EPats

formula for making Lemon General Maxwell Taylor's 'Not-

Frankfurter Sandwiches'. Mau and General Taylor was an infant dogs that may explain why he liked hot

saun,Lvowly

when-he came back from the wars but that is not the way American stomachs are ten- ding. We are in an era when even a kitchen whose owners do not subscribe to any of the mass circulation cooking magazines wiil still have four or five different kinds of vinegar. A serious cook will have strawberry vinegar, lemon vinegar, sage vinegar raspberry vinegar, tarragon vinegar and you name any other flavour you can think of. You will, naturally, make your vinegar Yourself, although you will pur- chase a bottle of Balsamic vinegar which any gourmet snob will tell, whether correct- ly or not I cannot say, comes only front the village of Modena in Italy. The point to note is that this recondite item is now com- monly available in the better grocery stores across America. What holds for vinegar is true for the rest of what goes into the salad dressing. Only an oaf would use anything but first pressing live oil costing per ounce about the same as opium. But the food madness places as 4Much emphasis on variety as it does on qualitY, so now you may get your vinaigrette made from walnut oil or hazelnut oil. As for the salad itself, every year they discover al new kind of lettuce to put into it. Until 982 nobody in America had ever heard of rugula (or roquette as some call it); until ast Year Americans would have told you Mdieeio

was an acronym for a left-wing Italian terrorist group.

t F.00dism is too big and has been going on if becoming ee lng to be calle a fad. It is on its wooming a majod r element in the culture,ay it hasn't already done so. But within the new American foodism fads streak across the national palate with the speed of yel: vice in a fast food franchise. A couple of co'ars ago it was pesto. Everybody in the r,,untrY making over the medium income ‘rn"'e Po' folks don't get into gourmetry too Thuch, Ya know) was growing basil plants. ctl it was sushi time and this year it's i-t`a Prima vera all winter long. Everything pt.s. got the name prima vera stuck in front

There are restaurants, admittedly of v

,.'iceraertain quality, advertising pizza prima _ro.odism is changing American domestic 4_chnecture. More homes are built shout living rooms or dining_ rooms. lif kitchen has taken over that space. The pi: of, the family revolves around the %I:ring and eating of food interspersed bur periods when the family members, bresting at the gut from gustatory pleasure, exeak. out of the front door and do violent „,_r,ise to keep the fat off and blow the ,-131,1aoniesterol out of their tubes. Home is a v4tit eting hall and outside is a thienenolvv.ebrijueh, so to speak, for we are a na-

wants both to pig out and to

strap tummies flat. inve ange and inexplicable land, America withmed and invaded the rest of the world

food franchised, mass-manufactured fast moreset_aurancltset now 'the number of four-star

Fried is growing more rapidly than nalds or Col. Sanders's Southern these places The chef/proprietors of e Places are generating star quality of near cinematic proportions and one, Paul Prudhomme of New Orleans, literally takes his restaurant on tour from time to time. Last year he opened up for a month in San Francisco where lines longer than those waiting to see an Oscar-winning picture queued up for hours fof their turn to sam- ple ecstasy.

Having wider impact is the multiplication of good but not great restaurants where the new kind of critic, guide and teacher waiter flourishes. After you're seated he hands you the menu and then tells you to ignore it. He is about to recite the specialities of the day in the manner of a teacher dealing with

a retarded pupil. Tor the first course you should have the salade tiede de ris de veau, poele de pleurotes, confit de trevise and truffes noise a l'huile de noisette, which means (stupid) a warm salad of calf's sweet- breads, mushroom, a mildly bitter red chicory, black truffles and hazelnut oil. The chef is very good with sweetbreads. Oh, I recognise that look on your faces. What are you? From Iowa. Just don't think what they are and learn to eat them.'

Americans are learning to eat sweet- breads and sea urchins and where once they had to go to Europe to eat well, now they stay home.