American Home Cooking

atching the election results reinforced my belief that America is exactly what her name describes: United States. We are more like a union than a homogeneous country. There is no one American Culture. This country is too big and too diverse for that.

So why do we despair of having a culture of American Food? The question is asked over and over, "What is American Food?" Is it fried chicken, turkey stuffed with oysters and cornbread, Junior's cheesecake, bagels and cream cheese? LA bistro cooking? McDonald's? Yet when presented with a dish, everyone knows if it is American, just as in a foreign country you can spot another American a mile away.

Luckily for me, I was raised by a mom who had no interest in cooking. She wanted us to eat and be healthy. Occasionally she produced home-made macaroni and cheese or stuffed peppers. We had a familial history of bad brisket and pasta sauce that looked like the insides of a kangaroo pouch. I was lucky because I found food as a blank slate. There was no one right way to make anything. No prejudices, no opinions, no baggage.

At first, 18 years old and on my own in New York City, I was a chicken. I did not like anything unfamiliar. I once expressed the belief that I did not like tomatoes to a boyfriend. He then slipped them into everything he cooked for me and would say "Ha! There were tomatoes in there!" until I conceded that I did like them after all. I identified with the beleaguered hero in Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham."

The day I ate Indian food in a tiny dive on East 6th Street in New York City I became an adult--at least about food. I swore I would never turn anything down on sight. I would be brave. The rewards were great and the world an open air market filled with treasures.

So it is with food in America. We can look at our own food with beginners eyes. We have no one culinary history that traps us into any box. Once you realize that there is no one kind of American cooking, you can explore with abandon. Still, there always seems to be a taste that tells you this is southwestern USA, not Mexican. Or this is New Orleans, not French. We may not be able to define ourselves but we know who we are. We are a country of regional cooking.

Regional food is about as much categorization as we can stand. It is still a conceit, but a useful one. Organized by regions, we can begin to sort out what we like best. I hope you are approaching this as somewhat of a blank slate yourself. It makes the journey more fun.

This odyssey of thinking about American food came from reading Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison's new cookbook American Home Cooking: Over 300 Spirited Recipes Celebrating Our Rich Tradition of Home Cooking. This book has scope. While it does not claim to cover all of America, it does a good job of incorporating food from every region and much of our history.

The sidebars sold me on this book. Most pages have historical material next to the recipes. These are quotes and excerpts from primary source material. Cookbooks, food writing, historical figures, Junior League cookbooks. It is all there. My history loving husband who does not read cookbooks sat and read it for hours. I could not understand this until he directed me to these sidebars. In my fixation on the recipes and how easy they were I ignored half the book--an important half too. I was taught well by my 10th grade history teacher to trust only the primary source material, not some watered down distillation. When I saw these quotes I knew the Jamisons were on the right track.

Before I made a final conclusion on American Home Cooking I needed to do what that 10th grade history teacher mandated: Go to the sources. My sources anyhow. Who are the regional cooks I love? I would not pretend to define any region's cooking. This is an overview and admittedly a digression.

SOUTHWEST
In Santa Fe I rush to Pasqual's for breakfast. I have planned trips there just to eat at Pasqual's. I make green chili at home and try and imagine the sagebrush, the pinion trees, and the bustle of Pasqual's when the day is new and the windows are fogged up from the steaming dishes of rice, beans, and chili.

When I discovered there was a Cafe Pasqual's Cookbook I sat in my kitchen and beamed. I can eat this glorious food in my very own house. Well, nothing is ever that simple. Restaurant food is made by people who have much more time on their hands. The food is too complicated for someone with kids and a life. But I can make basics and I can pretend.

SOUTH
Edna Lewis is a genius. She is a culinary treasure, and a natural cook. Hers is not restaurant food, though she did run a restaurant in New York. I imagine it was one of those places where the best food was just what you could have gotten from her mother's kitchen. Ms. Lewis grew up in a small town in the south and has been capturing the essence of her childhood in recipes for decades.

She has written three cookbooks, two of which are still in print. These are In Pursuit of Flavor and The Taste of Country Cooking. The Edna Lewis Cookbook is out of print but worth looking for.

Everything is in there from cake to greens to biscuits to every meat, pork chicken preparation you can imagine. You could live the rural southern life from 60 years ago just by opening the covers of Edna Lewis' books.

NEW YORK
Molly O'Neill is a food writer for the New York Times. She came to New York, as I did, an outsider. She also fell in love with the city and the diversity of food and culture. She captured all this in her New York Cookbook. None of the recipes in the book are hers. They are the best of everything that exists from the source, every nationality you can imagine with every kind of food you could ever find on the street in New York. The real carrot cake from the Carrot Top Bakery, latkes from the latke king of Queens. Katherine Hepburn's brownies. Don't ask how these fit into this book. It does not matter. They are too good to worry about. As New York is the melting pot, so there is no way to describe this book in less than 10 words. Everyone I know who has it uses it a lot.

CALIFORNIA
The quintessential California dining experiences for me are eating at Greens in San Francisco and Chez Panisse in Berkeley. I recently had a meal in LA that may have changed this but that is another article altogether. Chez Panisse is also its own whole article. So Greens Restaurant. Greens has produced some of my favorite chefs: Deborah Madison, Annie Sommerville, Edward Espe Brown. And some of my favorite cookbooks: The Greens Cookbook, The Savory Way and Field of Greens. Very California Vegetarian and, well, green.

The produce called for in the cookbooks that have come out of this restaurant is so California. You will not be able to get half of it. Too bad. But it almost does not matter. The recipe that most defines these books for me is the Macaroni and Cheese in "Savory Way." I grew up with Macaroni and Cheese. I am a connoisseur. This one has an herb-infused milk and uses four cheeses and spiral noodles. Nothing indigenous to Cleveland here.

Oh my gosh. A lot of the above is restaurant food.

Well, in that case do look at "American Home Cooking." You will get flapjacks, chowders, soups, and stews, turkey many ways, Iowa Skinny (a pounded pork sandwich), Buttermilk-Bathed Pan-Fried Chicken, Crunchy Catfish with Heavenly Hush Puppies, A Bowl of Red (Chili), Venison Chili, Peach Cobbler, Carmel Apples and the Mint Julep, described here as having once been a breakfast drink. Much of it is Texas this and New England that. Still it seems to actually describe what people eat--or ate at one time--with that twist that says "American." No, I cannot define it. But check it out for yourself. It will be worth it.

When you read this we will (hopefully) have picked a new President. Looking at that map with all the states turning up different colors my mind did wander to food. I could imagine when New Mexico turned blue for Gore it should have been green for chili. When New York also turned blue it should have been red for all those flashing diner signs. When Texas turned red I felt it was right. The red chilies and reddish bar-b-que sauce. And when Ohio turned red I thought it ought to have been yellow for macaroni and cheese.

We have a diverse and eclectic tradition in our own country. It is certainly not describable by saying "American food" just as no one person's political beliefs can be well described by either party in our two party system. There probably is no cookbook out there that captures exactly the way you or I cook. This is a good thing. You know how to make what you are used to. Who needs a cookbook for that?

Use these books as a guided tour of the unfamiliar, right in your own country. You will add to your repertoire, you will understand your neighbors better. Perhaps you will even spare your children the experience of stuffed peppers. In the end we are bound as much by our differences as our similarities.

Even though I want a sense of what is our country's culniary heritage, I don't want to see American food become so cookie-cutter that you can get the exact same food in Arkansas as you can in Oregon. Long live Oregon marionberries and Ohio maple syrup. And long live the great regional cooks, be they restaurant chefs or the ladies of the Junior League. It takes all kinds in this country...for politics or for cooking.

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Michelle Auerbach Brode was a professional chef. Now she is much happier cooking at home for her family and talking about food incessantly. If you need to talk to her about food or anything else she can be reached at Michelle.Brode@pobox.com.