Near a Thousand Tables (28 page)

SIX
 
The Edible Horizon

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep
In blanchéd linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd
With jellies soother than the creamy curd
Manna and dates in argosy transferred
From Fes, and spicéd dainties, every one,
From silken Samarkand to cedared Lebanon.

—KEATS, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES

“Avez-vous any potted lobster?” “Non,” said the garçon, “potage aux vermicelle, au riz, à la julienne, consommé et potage aux choux.” “Old shoe! Who the devil do you think eats old shoes here? have you any mock-turtle or gravy soup?” “Non, monsieur” said the garçon, with a shrug of the shoulders. “Then avez-vous any roast beef?” “Non, monsieur; nous avons bœuf au naturel—bœuf à la sauce piquante—bœuf cornichons—bœuf à la mode—bœuf aux choux—bœuf à la sauce tomate—biftek aux pommes de terre.” “Hold hard,” said Jorrocks, “I've often heard that you can dress an egg a thousand ways and I want to hear no more about it.”

—R. S. SURTEES,
JORROCK'S JAUNTS AND JOLLITIES

I
am rarely allowed to cook at home because my wife says I make too much mess. When allowed, though I try to build up a huge repertoire, I always seem to revert to flavors in which I have a high emotional investment. Garlic intrudes;
olive oil is almost inescapable. Personal experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that this habit of reversion to a trough of one's own is typical. Even with the world's markets at their command, most people restrict their usual menus and demand the same dishes over and over again. In the prosperous West, this is particularly true of breakfast, a meal which seems to be enhanced, for most of the people who eat it, by the comfort of predictability: cereal every day; in some cases, the same cereal every day. Those who favor eggs will often choose to have them cooked in the same way every day. Even the partisans of fried eggs divide into those who like them viscous—“easy” in American restaurant lingo—and those who like them congealed. There are unremittingly ichthyophagous breakfasters; others who will have bacon every day but never sausages and vice versa. The kind of fruit preserved or the density with which its peel is shredded or the proportions in which it is combined with sugar become matters of inflexible dogma and unvarying practice.

When tasters are tempted to experiment, the palate often rejects unfamiliar flavors. The processed food industry makes “reliability” and “consistency” of flavor a major criterion for its products, so that every batch of food or drink which bears a particular brand always tastes the same and the customer is never surprised. Particular novelties can conquer markets with astonishing rapidity: “a swift-changing market in food—where pizza has swept its manufacturers into a multi-million dollar market, where kiwi fruit from the Antipodes has become a fashionable accompaniment for fish, and where frozen yoghurt competes with ice cream” puzzled Mary Douglas, without shaking “the sturdiness of belief in
consumer conservatism
.”

Eaters' bias in favor of the familiar affects entire cultures. “Organ meats” repel the American detective hero of
Masquerade,
a clever story by Walter Satterthwaite. When a case takes him to Paris, he is tricked into eating andouillettes, which he finds delicious until he learns that they are pigs' entrails stuffed with tripe and chitterlings. His vexation with foreign food begins with ruptured taboos—the consumption of the unwholesome rejects of his home culture; but it extends to any cooking which seems elaborate or, as he thinks, evasive. Haute cuisine is an un-American activity. To mask food with the maquillage of the great tradition of the chefs seems an act of dissimulation. To expend care, time and money on it offends his all-American puritanism; to invest emotion in it seems unmanly. He yearns for a steak grilled simply, without sauces, and scorns the superfluity of the pâté de foie and madeira sauce in tournedos Rossini. But he is condemned to unremitting gastronomy, guided between restaurants by a murderer who meticulously discusses every menu with the waiter, recipe by recipe, and who deflects an
interview with a policeman into a debate about the merits of rival recipes for coq au vin. The hero's American identity is threatened with submersion under the motley and masquerade of sauces and sausage skins.

Satterthwaite's satire is particularly clever because it locks into a long tradition of gastronomic hostility to French food in
le monde anglo-saxon,
where plain is preferred to fancy and the fastidious are not fussy. These pairings were already apparent in the late seventeenth century, when French cookery writing was only just beginning to set standards for fashion in eating. Samuel Johnson described the famous libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, thus: “in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness.” Rochester, who might be presumed to know something about pleasure, promised,

Our own plain fare, and the best terse the Bull
Affords, I'll give you and your bellies full,
As for French kickshaws, sillery and champagne
Ragouts and fricassees, in troth w'have none.
Here's a good dinner towards, thought I, when straight,
Up comes a piece of beef, full
horseman's weight
.

According to one of the popularizers of culinary antiquarianism in late eighteenth-century England (above p. 122), French cookery was all very well in France but the pretense of “disguising meat” was superfluous in England. “It is, here, the art of spoiling good meat…. In the South of France … it is the art of making
bad meat eatable
.” By the time of that pronouncement, the French Revolution had started and the chaos of the state seemed to complement the indiscipline of the kitchen. Over the next few years, the roast beef of old England became, in Gillray's cartoons, an emblem of solidity, unyielding to Napoleon's
batterie de cuisine.
In the famous opening passage of Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe,
the transformation of “old Alderman Ox” into “Monsieur de Veau” was cited as evidence of the corrupting effects of a former “French” invasion.

Despite the indebtedness of American independence to French help, the patriotism of plain cooking was one feature of Englishness that survived on the far side of the Atlantic. If anything, it grew during the nineteenth century, along with “Know-Nothing” resentment of immigrants who did not conform to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant pattern. To forsake one's home cuisine in favor of plain American
food became a badge of the “assimilation” which qualified immigrants for citizenship. In 1929 dining car franchisees on the Santa Fe Railroads crack
California Limited
line found, when framing their menus, that “Small Tenderloin, mushrooms” hugely outsold “Filet Mignon, champignons.”
The dishes were identical
. Duncan Hines, who can claim an important place in the history of food as the originator of restaurant guides, shared the Anglo-American heritage of prejudice against French methods.
Adventures in Good Eating,
which he began to compile in 1936, had a title that promised more than his singularly unadventurous tastes could deliver. He aimed to inform the long-range motorist—the sort trapped twenty-four hours from Tulsa with no place to eat. He liked homey roadside eateries that served “simple fare” and his most important criterion was cleanliness, “I steer clear,” he announced proudly, “of dishes disguised with French names that don't mean a thing in a Midwestern hotel.” He never went abroad until he was nearly seventy: his motive was a gastronomic fact-finding tour in Europe, where he professed to like English food best on the grounds that it most resembled that of America, In 1961, John F. Kennedy appointed a French chef to run the
White House kitchen
. As if to make up for this, his wife had to sacrifice the Parisian fashion houses she had formerly patronized and entrust her wardrobe, formerly the responsibility of Hubert Givenchy, to American designers like Oleg Cassini and Donald Brooks (though she continued to wear line-for-line copies from the French house Chez Ninon), The devoted American gourmet A. J. Liebling regaled readers of
The New Yorker
with self-parodic stories of his love for French food. His columns were calculated to evoke the same sort of combination of sensuality and revulsion played on in the popular vampire movies of the time. His experiences in 1926-27 threaded stupefyingly rich and costly meals between low-life encounters, in his penurious pension, with all the denizens of the Parisian demimonde: matelots, apaches, whores, pimps and lice. His descriptions of meals were triumphs of black humor. Truite au bleu was “simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath” with “enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment.” A snail was forced back into his shell after cooking with “not even a sentimental justification for his reincarnation.” Alternatively, the same dish was served in crocks called “pots de chambre.” Liebling's father, on a visit to Paris, opted for “Plain food,
no
schmier.”

In France—until recently, when the game changed and America's new ethos of pluralism opened her mouths to the tastes of the world—American rejection of French food seemed so perplexing that it demanded sociological investigation: this was the revenge of a culture wounded in its pride by barbarians' failure to recognize its superiority. English indifference to French food was easily dismissed as the contrivance
of a rival notorious for hypocrisy: one could understand it without quite believing it. America, however, had nothing to fear in France and everything to admire. It was as if Rome had rejected Greece. Roland Barthes declared that the differences that made French and American menus incommensurable could be defined as sweet
versus unsweet
. This had long been a vulgar opinion in France. It was and is quite unconvincing. No one can generalize about the French palate without taking into account the taste for sweet aperitifs, for sauternes with foie gras, for patisserie, for meat sauces made intense with reductions of strong dessert wines.

In reality, the historic chasm between French and Anglo-American tastes is only an extreme example of a common fact. Food—at least as much as language and religion, perhaps more so—is cultural litmus. It identifies and, therefore, necessarily, differentiates. Fellow members of cultural communities recognize each other by what they eat and scan the menu to spot the excluded. Although food fads are commonplace and advertisers can whip up a craze, food culture is conservative. The obstacles to cross-cultural eating start a long way back in history, and deep in individual psychology. Personal taste is hard to modify. Babies suckled on the sweetness of mother's milk retain a sweet tooth for life unless weaned toward new flavors as well as new textures. Children are tenaciously resistant to experiments in eating. Cheap tourism shrinks from gastronomic horizons. People recur to familiar flavors. Households with limited budgets refrain from experiment to
limit waste
. Wives are exasperated by the cry of the spouse in the song: “Gimme a plate of the bangers 'n' mash me mother used t'make!”

Contempt for foreign food and foodways was well established in antiquity. According to Herodotus, in Egyptian temples the heads of sacrificed animals were cut off, cursed and sold to Greeks, if any Greeks were available. Otherwise, the heads were thrown in the river. Egyptians, countered Galen, ate “grubs and hedgehogs.” The Greeks' food prohibitions were part of their common culture, which distinguished them from other peoples. Dolphins they held sacred. They were “doubtful of turtle and tortoise, seldom ate dog and very
seldom horse
.” Many of the Greeks' neighbors found their eating habits showed irreverence before heaven: their gods had to be content with the discards of sacrifice—“the tail-end and the gall-bladder, the
bits you can't eat
.” Within the Greek world, similar prejudice was evinced between different cities and colonies. The polarity represented by French and American cuisine today echoes antiquity's between the indulgence of Syracuse and the indifference of Athens. The Syracusan gourmet Lynceus disliked Attic dinners.