This article appears in the November 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
I would be willing to bet serious money that right now in your
kitchen you have olive oil, garlic, pasta, parmesan cheese, and
dried basil (maybe even fresh basil!). Nothing exotic there, right?
They’re ingredients we take for granted. But their appearance in
our kitchens is a relatively recent phenomenon. Believe me, those
big-flavor items did not come over on the Mayflower. It
took generations, even centuries, for Americans to expand their
culinary horizons to the point where just about everybody cooks
Italian and orders Chinese take-out. Heck, the supermarket in my
little Connecticut hometown even has a sushi bar.
Alas! It was not always thus. American cuisine, like the
settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, got off to a rocky start.
Blame it on our English and Scotch-Irish ancestors. As a people
they possessed many admirable qualities; they were tough, they were
independent, some of them could read. Yet the original settlers of
the American colonies were not famous for their discerning palate.
Let me give you an example.
When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, lobsters
were so common all you had to do was stroll down to the nearest
tidal pool and pluck them out by the bushel. But the Pilgrims
wanted meat, not fish — not even fish as succulent as lobster.
Very quickly familiarity bred contempt: The better class of
colonists scorned the crustacean as suitable only for the poor. In
his journal for the year 1622, William Bradford, governor of the
Plymouth colony, recorded the landing of a boatload of new
colonists from England. Their arrival was a thrilling event, yet
Bradford confessed that he and his fellow Plymouth residents were
humiliated that they had nothing better to offer the newcomers than
lobster. (How times change. These days, the only thing that could
make a Yankee recoil from lobster is the price.)
In fact, the English settlers looked upon virtually all fish
(sturgeon and oysters being the exceptions) with scorn — and this
in a land where the shoreline and coastal rivers were teeming with
salmon, cod, flounder, shad, haddock, and sea bass. As for clams
and mussels, the Pilgrims fed them to their pigs. As if this
prejudice against seafood weren’t enough, early Yankee cuisine
suffered from a severe disadvantage: The Pilgrims had brought no
livestock with them. The first cattle — three cows and a bull —
did not arrive in Massachusetts until 1624. In other words, during
their first four years in America the Pilgrims were without butter,
cheese, milk, and cream. Their neighbors to the south, the Dutch on
the island of Manhattan, moved much more quickly to bring diary
products to America. Barely a year after the Dutch established the
New Amsterdam colony, the first huddled mass of Holsteins came
ashore at what is now New York City’s Battery Park.
THE CULINARY SITUATION in colonial America improved somewhat when
the first German colonists arrived in 1683. If there isn’t a
commemorative plaque at the site of that little settlement at
Germantown, Pennsylvania, there ought to be. Here was the
birthplace of the first sauerbraten in America; the cradle of cole
slaw; the spot where for the first time boiled potatoes were tossed
in a warm, savory dressing of fried bacon, white vinegar, and
mustard. It is not going too far to say that food that tasted good
arrived in America with the Germans. Under the influence of the
newcomers English and Scotch-Irish cooks added some German recipes
to their repertoire, but by and large they clung to their classic
overcooked, under-seasoned, overly sweetened fare.
Yankees are often derided for boiling perfectly good meat. I
wish I could dismiss this as slander, but I am afraid that our
ancestors did indeed boil everything from loins of beef to the
turkeys that were served at the first Thanksgiving. But they had
their reasons. Roasting meat over an open fire took hours,
requiring someone to stand there and turn the spit. Adults were too
busy to do the job, and it was hard to dragoon the children into
spending three monotonous hours sweltering over a hot fire. The
simplest solution was to plunk the meat in the boiling pot and walk
away.
This sad desecration hung on among Americans of British and
Irish descent well into the 20th century. I knew a Michigan woman
who shortly after her wedding day in the late 1940s invited her
in-laws over for dinner. She bought a loin of beef and prepared it
the way her Irish-born mother always had — by boiling it until it
was well done. While helping with the dishes after the meal was
done, the new homemaker’s mother-in-law confided, “When I was first
married I boiled beef, too. But trust me, dear, beef is much
tastier if you roast it. Especially if you take it out of the oven
when it’s medium rare.”
Then there are vegetables: Yankees didn’t like them. The Yankee
idea of a fine meal was several varieties of meat, a heaping basket
of wheat bread, followed by lots of sweets for dessert. If
vegetables appeared on the table, they were boiled beyond
recognition. It was the Shakers who first taught American cooks to
undercook vegetables. Shaker chefs also discovered that a cup or
two of vegetable stock went a long way to enriching the flavor of
gravy and sauces.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS a hope-filled era, and not just in
terms of politics. When our French allies arrived in America to
support our Revolution, they brought their flair for cuisine with
them. They took to roasting American turkey, although they added
truffles to the stuffing. They even adopted that American staple,
corn mush sweetened with molasses, but they improved on the
American recipe by adding a shot of cognac and topping the mush
with whipped cream. It sounds like a promising beginning, but sad
to say the French alliance had no lasting impact on Yankee cuisine.
As late as 1796, when the first American cookbook was published in
Hartford, Connecticut, author Amelia Simmons declared, “Garlicks,
tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine
than cookery.” One reads such a statement and sighs heavily.
Although George Washington employed a French chef and Thomas
Jefferson enjoyed French recipes he had collected in Paris, they
were the exception; the upper classes in America held fast to the
British Isles style of cooking. In fact, all classes of Americans
were suspicious — even hostile — when confronted with fancified
food. It was not until the late 19th century, when the new American
millionaires began importing French chefs to serve in their
kitchens, that French cuisine gained some ground in the United
States.
By the 1830s, a large majority of Americans had begun to see
their plain food as a virtue. Cookbooks emphasized simplicity and
frugality, not meals that brought a succession of interesting
flavors to the table. Plain cuisine even became an issue in the
presidential campaign of 1836. William Henry Harrison’s supporters
managed to convince voters that their man was just ordinary folks,
content to live in a log cabin, eat his corn mush, and wash it down
with old-fashioned hard cider. Martin Van Buren, on the other hand,
was portrayed as a foppish, Frenchified, un-American snob who
sipped champagne from a silver goblet and liked to begin his meals
with consomme. The smear worked, and the gourmandizing Van Buren
lost the election.
I DON’T MEAN TO OVERSTATE my case. For all the hide-bound
conservatism of Yankee cooks, they did manage to whip up some
pretty tasty dishes. New England clam chowder may not sound as
sophisticated as bouillabaisse, but it is delicious nonetheless.
And then there is Boston baked beans, a Yankee staple that marks
the only occasion in American history when the Puritans actually
improved upon an existing recipe. The first settlers learned how to
bake beans from the New England Indian tribes who mixed beans with
maple syrup in an earthenware pot, added a large piece of fatty
bear meat, then set the pot in a pit lined with hot stones to bake
for several hours.
The colonists preferred molasses as a sweetener, and replaced
the strong, nasty tasting bear meat with salt pork. The result was
a New England classic that is especially associated with Boston.
Food folklore tells us that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
Saturday night was baked beans night in Boston. It’s impossible to
say whether the story is 100 percent accurate, but it is true that
baked beans appear in the oldest Yankee cookbooks.
Ultimately, it was immigration that proved to be the making of
contemporary Yankee cuisine. The Italians brought us the good stuff
I mentioned at the start of this article. From the Dutch we learned
how to make waffles and donuts. Thanks to the Hungarians paprika
appears in the spice rack of every Yankee kitchen. From Eastern
Europe, Jewish immigrants brought us the bagel, cheesecake, and
world-class chicken soup. The Chinese gave us stir-fry, sticky
rice, and dim sum. The Japanese taught us to love sushi, sashimi,
and tempura. And via our friends the Turks and the Armenians, come
summer, shish kebab is as likely to appear on a Yankee grill as hot
dogs.
It’s commonplace to say that the United States is a nation of
immigrants, and each group that came to America brought its own
gifts. Yankee self-sufficiency may have come ashore at Plymouth
Rock, but tasty food arrived by way of Ellis Island.
