One Utah

The Trib’s food critique has a pretty sharp tongued take down of the Five All’s this morning - Ye olde mediocre restaurant.  This wonderfully snarky passage jumped out at me:

Five Alls, Salt Lake, is something of a period piece, but the period - as you understand the minute you see “Filet Oscar” on the menu - is not 18th century England. Rather, it is circa 1960s, the pre-Julia Child era when the apex of American dining was something called “continental cuisine,” a name that referred to no particular continent, but to a place whose cuisine was invented by professional chefs in hotels and cruise ships all over the world and tends to involve expensive proteins and heavy sauces.

American Vintageby Paul Lukacs, one of my favorite reads, chronicles the history of American dining since the 1950s in a fresh and interesting way, connecting it to the rise in American winemaking and consumption as well as changing tastes and a growing awareness of healthy eating.  Lukacs points out the connection between mid-twentieth century American attitudes toward cooking (that it was pure drudgery and should be avoided) and the poor quality of American cuisine - any society embraces tuna casserole with canned cream soup, canned tuna, canned peas, and potato chips is clearly pursuing something other than fine dining.  Starting in the 1920s, Americans saw cooking as drudgery, a task somone would naturally want to do as quickly as possible.

My mother is an antiques dealer; in pursuing this career, she would often purchase an entire box of items to get a single thing in the box.  As often as not the remaining contents of the box would be sold off the funky junk table for 25 cents apiece or given or thrown away.  She at time acquired a box of cookbooks to get a first edition of a Julia Child cookbook.  The remaining cookbooks languished in the store for a while before I claimed several for my own collection.  Today, these cookbooks are fascinating cultural artefacts - published from the mid 50s through the mid 70s, these books epitomize American attitudes toward cooking and eating from the mid 20th century.

The books have titles like The New Can Opened Cookbook, the Blender Recipe Treasury and (I am not kidding) The Lovely Wife’s Cookbook.  The recipes emphasize easy to prepare, fast to cook, and filling to eat.  The books include sample recipes that  clearly reflect the continental cuisine the Trib’s food critique found at the Five Alls.  Lots of sauces, especially cream sauces, drowning cuts of beef, pork or chicken, or fish and completely overpowering any and all other flavors.  Easy to prepare constitutes, almost without exception, opening canned food, stirring it together, and then baking to “blend the flavors” or mixing everything in the blender, dumping it into a pan and baking it.  Casseroles abounded, as do “spreads”, sauces, sandwiches, and a wide array of variations on a theme - “One Dish Meals” appear in every book. 

Few of the recipes fail to include cream, mayonnaise, cheese, butter, sour cream, or milk.  The more exotic recipes use cream cheese.  Whole grains, fresh vegetables and fresh fruits were noticeable in their almost complete absence. 

Looking through these cookbooks, I was hard pressed to find any recipe I would prepare.  High in fat, low in flavor, the meals from these cookbooks very likely dominated more than few dinner parties, potlucks and community gatherings for decades.  The emphasis was on getting cooking done as quickly as possible - hence casseroles made from canned and packaged foods that could be stirred together and baked, freeing the “chef” to pursue other domestic chores - like cleaning up after her husband and kids while washing down her Milltowns with vodka.

The books published in 70s included an array of vegatarian and ethnic (though safely Americanized) cookbooks.  Even the vegetarian recipes included a generous surplus of melted cheeses and high fat foods.  The ethnic recipes were, for the most part, safely Americanized - the Mexican cookbook included few recipes with cilantro, tomatillos or fresh onion.

Culturally, these cookbooks perfectly capture the twentieth century American attitude toward food - it is largely functional, preparation is misery and should be minimized, and eating is something we do because we have to, not because we enjoy it.  American stores stocked and sold a wide array of packaged, canned, bottled and dried foods and a generic sampling of fruits and vegetables that rarely dared the boundaries past iceberg lettuce, red and golden delicious apples, navel oranges, and bananas and the occassional green bell pepper.  The American palate wasn’t inherently bland, nor did all American necessarily embrace such boring food.

For most of the twentieth century, the American attitudes toward food held that cooking was drudgery - something best avoided.  Even architecture reflected that value - starting in the 1920s, kitchens were quite small and crowded, with little work space and the open space turned over to breakfast nooks or table.  Gadgets - mixers, blenders, toaster ovens, and electric can openers - dominated what little counter space was available.  A few years ago, I was looking for a new house - I walked into a fabulous older building that had been updated and renovated - the kitchen however remained authentically 1930s.  Two people would not fit into the kitchen, despite the fact that the apartment was a three bedroom with large, airy rooms, the kitchen was cramped, poorly lit, marginally functional, the kitchen was designed as a space in which a person would spend as little time as possible.  Next to the kitchen was a comfortable, sunny dining room - on the other side was a large living room.  My aunt lives in a six bedroom home in Holladay - built in the high fifites style, the kitchen is almost unusuably designed.  A built in dining table uses half the space in the room.  There is almost no counter space.  To sell her house, she’ll have to completely remodel the kitchen.  The design of physical space is as much a reflection of values as any activity that takes place in those spaces. 

Starting in the 1970s, a shift took place in American attitudes toward food and cooking.  Julia Child played a role with her show - leading the way in demonstrating that cooking could be fun, and eating an unadulterated pleasure.  Even my vintage cookbook collection shows hints of the change - vegetarian and ethnic cookbooks began appearing in large numbers in the early 1970s.  At the same time, more and more Americans began demanding not just better food but more variety, better flavors, more spice, and - this is key - more authentic cuisine and flavors.

The American culinary scene has exploded in the last 30 years - recovering not only its roots, but discovering new flavors and ideas.  Regional specialities, long ignored or marginalized, have come into their own - and I don’t just mean “Southern Cooking” - Cajun, New Mexico, Minnesota Scandanavian, New England specialities and other interesting wrinkles.  Exciting new fusions of international flavors have stepped to center stage.  Chain restaurants, once home to the fried meal have expanded their offerings - grilled or Thai spiced chicken or turkey, mesclun salad, lowfat turkey burgers, feta in place of the once omnipresent cheddar. 

Grocery stores now offer a wide array of foods that were traditionall available only in speciality stores - hummus, sushi, real curries and fresh mozarella are now available at the deli counter.  Fresh garlic, ginger, lemongrass, serrano and poblano chilis are now readily available in the produce deparments.  Last night I counted ten varieties of apples at Albertsons, six different types of citrus fruit, at least five different types of lettuce, along side mustard and collard greens, next to containers of Kim Chee.  There were more varieties of cheese than I could count. 

Ethnic restaurants which had long “Americanized” their food are now offering more flavorful and authentic dishes.  As dining has become more interesting, Americans have become more adventurous.  When I was growing up, my family ate at The Hawaiian frequently (the owner was a family friend).  The food was generally standard Chinese restaurant fare for the day - day-glo red sweet and sour sauce, egg foo yung, chow mein and chop suey, fried shrimp and clear broth soups.  These days, such menus just don’t hold their own against restaurants offering freaky ass spicy Kung Pao or hot and sour soup to make your eyes water.  Japanese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern, Nepalese and a wide variety of Latin American cuisines have become readily available in American restaurants and stores, in addition to more authentic European foods - Spanish, Italian, and Greek have all come into their own, replacing the “French food” once considered fancy.

American homes are now designed with massive kitchens where huge groups can gather, talk, prepare food and eat together.   

Even Salt Lake City, not so long ago a barren wasteland of dining out, has a wide array of great restaurants.  Back in the day, a restaurant like The Hawaiian or The Five Alls were more than sufficient.  A salad adorned with a slice of tomato was fancy, and cream sauces and dressing abounded.  Today, more and more Americans want their food flavorful, fresh, and most important, they want to taste the food, not the sauce.  There will likely always be a market for places like The Five Alls, but they are no longer the entire market.  And we are all better off for it. 

The change in American attitudes toward food cannot be underestimated.  Always a nation which had plentiful ingredients, American cooks lacked imagination and daring.  Americans are fearlessly expanding our palates today - huge servings aren’t enough - we want better, not more.

This entry was posted Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.