Home : Eating :

Plain Or Fancy

Theodore Roosevelt knew firsthand about seriously bad food. During the Spanish-American War he asked one of his Rough Riders why he was throwing away his canned meat. The soldier said he didn’t like it. “Eat it and be a man,” Roosevelt ordered. The fellow did so, and promptly vomited. Roosevelt examined the slimy, stringy ration and instantly understood why.

On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, establishing the nation’s very first regulatory agency. With a stroke of his pen he expanded the reach of the federal government and planted the enduring concept of a nonpolitical, science-based agency dedicated to protecting the public from commercial predation. But the law generated bitter controversy that continues to this day.

Not everyone conceded the benefits of the 1906 act and the succeeding legislation. In the 1980s the deregulation movement attacked the very notion of government oversight of business. The Heritage Foundation proclaimed that “the consumer bears the ultimate burden for excessive regulation.” President Ronald Reagan required all new regulations to be approved by the White House, and the heavy hand of politics began to be felt at the FDA.

The FDA still comes in for criticism from many who think it ties the hands of innovators and blocks citizens’ access to effective remedies. Others lambaste the agency as too lenient, saying that it fails to protect the public from dangers like the heart-disease risk associated with Vioxx and similar medicines. The complaints are part of an ongoing struggle, begun a hundred years ago, to balance freedom of commerce with basic protection for consumers and what President Roosevelt called “governmental power over big business.”

Name-brand specialties we'd like to see General Musharraf's Halal Hot Pockets In the wake of rival Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Pakistan's prez has attempted to curry favor with his people - literally. The strongman's home-style paratha is bursting with succulent spiced mutton laced with genuine Taliban-produced opium. The perfect pre-jihad snack! Kirk Cameron Meat Pie The Growing Pains star, who now hosts a Bible-thumping syndicated show called The Way of the Master, pulls ingredients from Deut. 14:4-8: "These are the animals which you may eat; the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain sheep." The David Wells Invented at a diner in San Diego, this sandwich is an homage to the town's homegrown baseball star. Layers of turkey and ham are piled high between thick slices of rye, along with Canadian bacon, cream cheese, Swiss, cole slaw, Russian dressing, and bacon bits. Then it's battered and deep-fried. Ho Chi Minh Trail Mix U.S. soldiers thought up this gorp variant while dodging punji sticks and venereal diseases in the jungles outside of Saigon during the Vietnam war. The smorgasbord of pork, papaya, daikon, gunpowder, mangosteen, and human ears will have you running for the latrines before you can say "quagmire." Heather Mills McCartney's Boneless Chicken Legs Paul McCartney's late wife Linda had a sideline in vegetarian microwave meals, and now his ex is getting in on the act. Mills McCartney's artificial legs are noteworthy for their characteristic British blandness, though they're still way more exciting than Wings Greatest.

Is America at its culinary heart the land of fast food, of meals that are at once bland, uniform, and grossly unhealthy, as so many Europeans and disapproving Americans insist? The story of a “lifestyle shift,” the expansion of high-level culinary enjoyment from a small elite of beef- and cream-stuffed restaurant-goers to a nation full of middle-class gourmets. The few fancy restaurants served predictable menus of rich standards and overcooked vegetables. Cooks were all anonymous laborers, and food writers were relegated to the “home-economics ghetto” of newspapers’ women’s pages. But for all its mundane stiffness, American dining was on the brink of a revolution.

Three visionaries launched the revolution—Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne. Child, the six-foot-two wife of a foreign service officer, was 50 and had no restaurant experience when she committed herself to introducing Americans to French cuisine. She hacked, flambéed, and warbled her way through her public television shows and several books on French cooking. James Beard, the son of an Oregon innkeeper, became the primary advocate for traditional American fare. Deeply passionate about food, he wrote books on grilling that helped bring male attention to what was widely seen as women’s work. Craig Claiborne, a Mississippi native, elevated American dining to an intellectual and artistic endeavor with his widely read New York Times restaurant reviews and recipe articles.

The food writer Barbara Kafka: “It’s like there was no food in this f---ing city until that miraculous apparition [Beard] came along . . . or there was no cooking at home until Julia [Child]!” Fifty years ago, only the most adventurous Americans would dine on sushi, pesto, or even an arugula salad; now millions purchase these meals from gourmet grocery chains like Whole Foods. There’s almost no place in America where people don’t snack on tortilla chips, re-energize with Starbucks coffee, and relax with Sam Adams beer. What was formerly gourmet has become so commonplace that we hardly notice it. It is this casual culinary revolution, launched by the big three and countless other innovators, that keeps the faith in American eating.

Snobbery so often drives Americans from gourmet food. It was formerly low-end Italian food that suddenly became extremely trendy in the balsamic vinegar-drenched 1980s. Our democratic discomfort with social hierarchy has led us to alter traditional European cuisines, so that that we tend to lump aristocratic repasts with the most common peasant meals at our French restaurants.

History of earlier American cuisine fails to establish a nadir from which our tastes rose to their current heights. German immigrant cuisine—frankfurters, hamburgers, potato salads, and especially light lager beers—ascended to dominance in a nation with a primarily English food heritage. American cooking was highly esteemed long before the mid-century dreariness. The fascinating hybrid of English, African, German, and Native American cooking was the kind of food this country enjoyed before the rise of industrialized agriculture.

When visiting Europe Mark Twain pined for American food and even criticized Europe’s supposedly “feeble, characterless, undrinkable coffee” compared with “the rich beverage of home.” In Venice Twain wrote up a list of 81 dishes he planned to gorge on when he got home. James Beard dedicated himself to preserving traditional American recipes, from barbecue to oyster stew.

When the face of rural America elsewhere has changed drastically in appearance, the Pennsylvania Dutch region still looks much the same. At the food stalls in the farmers’ markets of Lancaster, Mennonite and Amish ladies in trim bonnets preside over the most appetizing array of food to be found anywhere—fresh butter elegantly stamped by a mold which is a family treasure, bursting white cauliflowers, mountains of golden pumpkins, and stacks of gay cakes and cookies, shoo-fly pies, smoked hams, and sausages. A glorious army of glass jars contains the homemade condiments-including pickled oysters, corn relish, fox-grape jelly, apple butter, and ginger pearsfrom which a Pennsylvania housewife selects the “seven sweets and seven sours” which traditionally accompany a meal.

Here, over a period of nearly three hundred years, has grown up the most enduring American regional cuisine. Well into the age of advanced homogenization, Pennsylvania Dutch cooking has held its own. It has done even better. As billboards along the highways attest, it has become a major tourist attraction. From all over America, as they have been doing for a long time, people come here just to eat.

It is interesting to speculate why. The Pennsylvania Dutch are predominantly German in origin—with a strong admixture of Swiss, Moravians, and some Hollanders among them—and many of their favorite dishes, like sauerkraut and pickled pig’s feet, are available anywhere that Germans have foregathered. Others which the Pennsylvania Dutch can take credit for introducing, like scrapple, waffles, apple butter, and Philadelphia pepper pot, have long since joined the nationwide menu. Still others, of course, like chicken corn soup or schnitz-un-gnepp (made with slices of dried apple soaked back to original size, dumplings, and ham or pork), are available only here. No one else seems to know how to make a shoo-fly pie from molasses, brown sugar, flour, and spices. (The name may have come from the fact that a cook working with these ingredients on a hoi summer day wotdd have winged visitors.) But the genius of this cuisine lies not so much in its unique dishes as in the fresh touch which these people give to the conventional American food obtainable anywhere. They have quite a way with common things.

They are gifted pancake cooks, for instance. Their buckwheat cakes may contain—besides buckwheat flour —corn meal, potato water, and a touch of molasses. The Pennsylvania Dutch know how to bring to greatness a simple meal like the classic breakfast of fried mush, fried apples, and sausages. They are connoisseurs of corn-meal mush, to begin with, always choosing yellow meal, preferably from corn that has been roasted for extra flavor before grinding. And unlike New Englanders with their “hasty pudding,” the Pennsylvania Dutch like to let mush bubble happily away in a big iron pot for hours. They may eat it hot with cold milk or cold with hot milk, but always with a puddle of melted butter in the middle. When it is fried, they pour all sorts of good things over it—old-fashioned dark molasses from a country store, comb honey, pure maple syrup, or their own apple butter, which is dark and spicy with cloves, cinnamon, or sassafras and quite different from that found elsewhere.

They choose the tastiest kind of apples for frying, depending on the season, for they have a choice of many kinds on the orchard slopes of their misty blue hills. The apples, of course, are lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinnamon before serving. The sausage is homemade, delicately seasoned and smoked. This is a cuisine of abundance, created by thrift and hard work. “Fill yourself up, clean your plate,” is a popular motto.

Like the people themselves, their cooking can be either plain or fancy—parsnip fritters or oysters and caviar. Both varieties will be good, and both, whatever the more exquisite type of gourmet may think, could well appear on the same table. This cuisine is completely without class consciousness. What is good—and not what is novel, fashionable, or easy to fix—determines what the Pennsylvania Dutch eat and serve to their guests. “No trouble,” they always say politely to appreciative visitors. By this, they do not really mean that good cooking is no trouble. They mean simply that the results are worth it, in terms of human happiness.

In one way or another food became a sort of religious symbol with all of the Plain People. After worship, the Dunkards held love feasts, suppers at which the main dish was a lamb stew commemorating the paschal lamb. The House Amish, fundamentalist Mennonites who felt their brethren were backsliding, held their services in each other’s homes and followed them with a memorable dinner for all. The Moravians, at Bethlehem, became famous for their baking. Their delicate love leasts consisted of rolls and a beverage, served in church and shared in a spirit of devotion and brotherhood.

In anything pertaining to food they were especially inventive. To bring home more game, they designed a longer, more accurate rifle, mistakenly called the Kentucky rifle after Daniel Boone took it there from Pennsylvania. The first American cookstove was cast here, at Mary Ann Furnace in 1765. They made a long-handled waffle iron, imprinting a tulip design, for use on the open hearth. Instead of diamonds, which were notably scarce, young men gave their sweethearts handsomely carved rolling pins as engagement presents.

In fact, a rich folk art grew up around their cooking and eating. Many of their early stoves were so decorated with biblical scenes that they have been called “the Bible in iron.” Henry William Stiegel’s glassware, a treasure today, was blown here, and they made gay pottery. And inevitably, from this rich soil and these busy kitchens a surplus of food began to emerge. Therefore the Pennsylvania Dutch invented the great Conestoga wagon, a ship on wheels, to transport their produce to fairs and farmers’ markets. Since good food knows no language barrier, their own diet became the standard for the region. For example, the bachelor President James Buchanan, a Lancaster man, was famous for his sauerkraut suppers after he left office; he won the hearts of a Dutch family with whom he sheltered one night by insisting that the big bowl of corn-meal mush which was all they had planned for supper was exactly what he wanted.

Many Dutch still cherish this heritage. A few miles north of Lititz, a venerable log tavern can be found filled with neighborhood families eating nothing but Pennsylvania Dutch food and drinking beer, both in substantial amounts. A visitor will be warmly welcomed and invited to come back next day for an “all-day raffle.” (The prizes will be live turkeys and Black Angus cattle, the price of one dollar will include raffle ticket, Dutch soup, and free beer with eggs pickled in beet vinegar.) And in a store window a sign advertising a church fair recommends, “Bring container to take home soup.” Such soups there will be! Corn soup with popcorn floating on top, pretzel soup, calf’s-liver soup, pea soup “thick enough to stand on.” This is still a country of abundance, where good people make good food and lots of it.

---

top of page

back a page