What a delight to find this amazing classic back in print, in a reprintbredition with new comments by the authors. This will spare thousandsbrof food enthusiasts the perennial burden of scouring the used-bookbrmarket for copies of it. (I ordered several copies of the reprint at oncebrfor gifts and to have on hand.) People who were following food brwriting at the time will recall the stir created by the Hesses' book whenbrit first appeared in the late 1970s. The book is iconoclastic, even psubversive, in the same sense as Prometheus's gift of fire to mankind.pIn this case the gift is not fire but perspective, or a sense of history.brCo-author John Hess was himself a senior and very experienced brfood writer and editor, but he has a scholar's dislike of pretentiousbrmisinformation being quoted around until it becomes conventionalbrwisdom. Karen Hess is a food historian noted elsewhere for herbrwork on the mysterious "Martha Washington" cookbook.brTheir book addresses questions like: How did things like icebergbrlettuce and phony "gourmet" products displace centuries of finebrimmigrant and indigenous cooking wisdom in the US? Who helpedbrto "sell" such changes, only to be celebrated later (Orwellian-style)brfor contributions to US cooking? Moreover, it is remarkable to seebrhow many "innovations" in US cooking since about the time this bookbrwas written consist actually of rediscovery of principles widely knownbr100 or 200 years ago, as the book documents in detail.pThe casual reader should be forgiven for not having heard of all brof this in the general media. Journalism in the US about food (and notbronly about food) is lately graced with legions of people blissfullybrand confidently unconscious of anything that preceded their own words.brSuch people will gush uncritically about food pundits like CraigbrClaiborne (distinguished on the basis that the gushing writersbrhave heard of them) without any real research or perspective.pThese writers would not do so if they read the Hesses' book.pFrom the Hesses', and other, evidence it seems that around thebr1950s, "gourmet" became a convenience-food-industry euphemism forbr"sucker" in the US. "That flabby midget called Cornish game hen was,brnext to chocolate-covered ants, the gourmet racket's funniest joke on abrgullible public. It has no more taste of game than a wad of cotton," saybrthe Hesses. Such game hens are one of several gimmicks CraigbrClaiborne is quoted pushing; canned beef gravy and instant whippedbrpotatoes are others. Claiborne receives especial attention here,brthough James Beard, the Rombauers, Fannie Farmer, even JC Herself,brare not spared. Yet this criticism is constructive, at least for the reader,brwith positive counterexamples. pIt is an angry, or perhaps indignant, book but an informed one, brmeticulous in its documentation of sources. The bibliography by itself isbrvaluable, sort of an annotated miniature of Katherine Bitting's epic 1939br"Gastronomic Bibliography" (also cited; that book is very expensivebron the used market; I know because I own one; even its 1980s reprint isbrexpensive and I am told, unlike the original, is printed on acid paper).
The Taste of America (The Food Series) Feature
The Taste of America (The Food Series) Overview
'This classic barbecue of our food ways is as valid and as savory today as when it first tickled ribs a generation ago. Based on the superlative authority of John L. Hess, onetime food critic of the "New York Times", and Karen Hess, the pioneering historian of cookery, "The Taste of America" is both a history of American cooking and a history of the advice smiling celebrity cooks have asked Americans to swallow'.'"The Taste of America" provoked the cooking experts of the 1970s into spitting rage by pointing out in embarrassing detail that most of them lacked an essential ingredient: expertise. Now 'Kool-Aid like Mother used to make' has become 'Kool-Aid like Grandmother used to make', and a new generation has been weaned on synthetic food, pathetic snobbery, neurotic health advice, and reconstituted history. This much-needed new edition chars Julia Child ('She's not a cook, but she plays one on TV'), chides food maven Ruth Reichl, and marvels at a convention of food technologists (whose program bore the slogan 'Eat your heart out, Mother Nature'). Delectable reading for consumers, reformers, and scholars, this twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of "The Taste of America" will serve well into the new millennium'.
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