British Undeservedly Snotty about American Cuisine

[Queequeg]

A welcome slice of American pie
A POINT OF VIEW

Forget greasy burgers, a growing enthusiasm for good local food in the US is getting the nation salivating, says Simon Schama.

Ask people in the UK what they think of American food and all too often their faces settle into the amused expression Mahatma Gandhi is said to have assumed when asked what he thought of Western civilisation. "It would," he replied, "be a very good idea." The same, many think, would be true of American food.

For most people in Europe, I suspect, it seems not so much food at all as fuel. The burgers and fries shovelled down while the car is idling at the drive-thru, or gobbled by marooned air travellers waiting for the "delayed" sign to flip so they can finally make their connection to Detroit.

Along the concourse plod the heavy herds in search of their own aviation fuel until at last they park their trolleys by the ketchup-stained corral, over which hangs a micro-climate of vaporised frying fat. Yum.

It could be worse. You might in a moment of desperation try the salad, or more tragically, the seasonal fruit. For an instant, these offerings - the greenery and the frighteningly livid cherry tomatoes, the day-glo cubes of pineapple - offer a tantalising resemblance to something you might actually want to put in your mouth. So you do. Big mistake.

What happens is more or less what happens after you've opened wide to the dentist and he's given you a shot of novocaine. You can't feel a thing. You're vaguely aware of something rolling around between tongue and gullet, but for the life of you you can't imagine what it is?

Could that papery thing glued to your tongue have once been a plant form? But the slimy pink cube purporting to be melon defeats you. You gulp and swallow only because it has to go somewhere and after all, you're in public.

At these human feeding troughs speed is what counts. In the 19th Century travellers to the US gazed in horror on river boats and in city taverns, at the spectacle of Americans sawing away at slabs of bloody beef. What particularly struck these foreigners was that all this brutal chewing precluded the activity which for them made a meal a social occasion - the act of speech.

Luscious

Most American eating seemed swift and silent, as befitted a bodily function. Except in the grandest society it was enacted for business rather than pleasure. "Are you still working on that?" a polite waiter will inquire to this day if you rest briefly from your labours. "Good job", a proud parent will congratulate little Kelly when she cleans her plate.

Pleasure could be had from the table, but it was what you merited when all that arduous work was accomplished. Pleasure was, above all things, pie. Not steak and kidney, but fruit. And not just the proverbially patriotic apple, but the particular fruit of your own back country. Wild blueberry, tiny and intense in northern New England, picked when the pale bloom lies on the purple skin like a coating of light frost, luscious dripping peaches in the deep south.

Saddle-sore dry goods peddlers, snake-oil quacks fresh off the stagecoach, itinerant ranters with dirty collars and pummelled prayer books, rustlers and wranglers, the highfalutin and the lowdown could all be brought to a state of grace with a forkful of pie.

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Better yet, the whole thing would be brought to table and a stab through the puffed up pastry, made, if my wife - a Nevada hunter's daughter - is right, with bear fat, would liberate a clove-scented sugary steam that would draw you in.

A mouthful would take you to America's lost childhood. Your mama's at the hot stove, wiping her hands on a floury apron, while the Whippoorwills warble on a backyard hickory. The pie emerges, fills the kitchen with benevolence and all is right with your corner of the world.

But this is not a lament for the lost innocence of American eating. There's a place in downtown New York that dishes up a pretty fine sour cream apple pie. More important, though, I am here to announce that great American food is back, if indeed it ever went away.

Just don't go looking for it in places where they think fit to fob you off with a Caesar's salad that is merely a sorry bowl of lettuce in which lurk cardboard croutons, while the things that are supposed to be rendered unto Caesar's salad - raw egg yolk, lashings of anchovies and a heavy grating of fresh parmesan - have gone missing.

'Drooling respect'

Go look for the real McCoy in places where the locals tell you cooks guard their mysteries with their life. In an African-American section of Houston, Texas, some years ago I joined a line of expectant diners waiting for what was said to be the best barbecue chicken in the south. The place was nothing more than a roadside shack, presided over by the duchess of barbecue who did indeed keep her secrets close to her mighty chest.

You took the bird away in paper trays along with "dirty rice", red beans and collard greens slippery with oil. But the bird seemed to be disintegrating in its own juices, challenging you to get stuck in before it gave up on you as someone who knew no better than to let it go cold.

Crossing the lobby of the fancy hotel where I was staying, well-dressed crowds parted like the Red Sea to let me and my packet of pungency through, as it leaked juicily on to the corporate marble floor. Half of the guests recoiled in horror, half retreated in drooling respect. But I was in no mood to hand out samples to the covetous. I just wanted to be alone in my room with the barbecued fowl and its mystery sauce.

There have always been two great pots from which American nourishment, cultural as well as gastronomic, has stirred - ethnic immigration and the idyll of the family farm. Where those life forces of the republic flourish and resist homogenisation, so will its good food. Their nemesis has been the factory farms of antibiotic-stuffed poultry that are no more than water-pumped breasts mounted on claws.

But against the odds, ethnic eating and small family farms have not only survived, they are doing better than for many a year - a longed for antidote to the shrink-wrapped cheese of the supermarkets. New waves of immigrants - Vietnamese or Uzbek - have found markets in the big cities for their cooking.

Local farmers' markets are flourishing, bringing the produce of the season directly to customers. Right now in the Hudson Valley you can buy wild garlic shoots, fiddlehead ferns and spring morel mushrooms. Richard Harrison, who grew up in Sussex and farms in upstate New York, brings his own meat - rabbit and pork, lamb and chickens that taste like chickens should - to market, every week from spring until November.

Tears

Eleven-year-old Reese, growing up blonde and bony like his dad, and his older sister Grace sell the produce. Next to the Harrisons of Cowberry Crossing, you can buy the best cheese in the western hemisphere - soft or hard, sharp or barnyard ripe and a heel of dense, black, garlic-studded rye bread to eat with it.

This is the American food that has miraculously escaped the tyranny of agribusiness. And sometimes, in backwoods corners of the country, you encounter cooking that is the refutation of despair. I was reminded of just such a meal by the harrowing tragedy of the 29 coalminers killed on 5 April, in a methane explosion in West Virginia.

Some years back, filming in towns where the wreckage of the coal industry had torn the heart out of old communities, where abandoned derelict houses were collapsing into the roadway, our crew pulled up at a modest cafe expecting nothing more than a turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich. What we got was an excited welcome from the owner who every day waited for someone to come through her door wanting something more than turkey and Swiss.

She came from a Greek family, so what she set out for us was slow baked lamb, honeyed baklava and kataifi. She told us of her struggles against the banks, against slurry floods which twice had destroyed her place and her house, against the plagues of emphysema and joblessness stalking her world. But she wouldn't give up. Not when she could still make the lamb and the kataifi and see people like us spoon it up with grateful pleasure.

"I am so glad," she said. "I am so glad," through tears that suddenly came spilling on to the pastries. And so were we.

Fuck Britain.  Simon Schama shouldn't have to apologize for America's culinary culture.  We are fucking China rolled in India served in France compared to Britain's array of boiled-beef pies filled with vegetables whose texture would not be different if the cook had let them stew in his own stomach for a few hours before vomiting them into the the tasteless, fatty crust.

[Jaron]

America has no cuisine. All of our most delicious foods come from other countries. What is our most innovative local invention? Hot dogs?

[Queequeg]

America has no cuisine. All of our most delicious foods come from other countries. What is our most innovative local invention? Hot dogs?

(Derives from an Italian dish, but is basically unrecognizeable)
as opposed to

[The Brain]

I love American food.

[Barrister]

Haggis was actually fairly tasty.

Was amongst the best I had of "British" cuisine.

But yeah, if you ignored all the Indian restaurants, Britain was fairly disappointing in terms of food.  Easily the worst place I've visited in Europe on that front.

[Palisadoes]

But yeah, if you ignored all the Indian restaurants, Britain was fairly disappointing in terms of food.  Easily the worst place I've visited in Europe on that front.

You mean all of the Indian restaurants which serve curries which British people invented? That is to say, the main curries to be eaten in Indian restaurants are British cuisine.

But yeah, most Europeans (not just the British) look at American food in disgust. Squeezy cheese... seriously!? Your dairy industry is renowned for being rubbish. Also, the most famous American foods tend to be unhealthy and fried in some form (see: McDonald's "Restaurant" - though I do quite like McDonald's).

However, none of that is to say that our cuisine is particularly brilliant either (the traditional stuff like black pudding is particularly nasty ).

[Queequeg]

Isn't British food kind of the original terrible fast food? Stuff like Meat Pies and Soda Bread came out of the Industrial Revolution, when meat was increasing in quantity, dramatically decreasing in quality and rapid urbanization and the industrialization of agriculture resulted in really rapid change of the cuisine, damaging it in ways it never really recovered from.

[HisMajestyBOB]

Slightly related note: Do Europeans make pies? When I was in Germany, I couldn't for the life of me find a pie crust, or frozen fruit pie. Is it just a German thing, or pan-European thing?
Koreans also don't seem to make pies, either. Maybe its exclusively American.

[Queequeg]

But yeah, most Europeans (not just the British) look at American food in disgust. Squeezy cheese... seriously!? Your dairy industry is renowned for being rubbish.

Our dairy industry IS rubbish, but most great American cuisines don't focus on cheeses.  I'm hard pressed to think of a great American dish (besides our native-born types of pizzas) from outside of the Sun Belt that does give cheese the same kind of importance it might have in Italian. 

Then again, Cheese isn't that important in most Oriental cuisines, so I fail to see why bad cheese should condemn an entire nation's cuisine. 

[Queequeg]

Slightly related note: Do Europeans make pies? When I was in Germany, I couldn't for the life of me find a pie crust, or frozen fruit pie. Is it just a German thing, or pan-European thing?

IIRC, the Dutch were supposed to have invented Apple Pie, and there are many varieties of disgusting pies in Britain.

[Monoriu]

I really don't find American food to be crap.  They have very good steak houses, for starters.  Baby back ribs, clam chowder and chili are excellent dishes.  Even hamburger and hotdogs are thoroughly enjoyable if done right and in moderation. 

[Eddie Teach]

America has no cuisine. All of our most delicious foods come from other countries. What is our most innovative local invention? Hot dogs?

That's simply not true. There are tons of dishes that originated in America, and most of the dishes we favor that originated in other countries are highly modified from their original form.

[CountDeMoney]

rendered unto Caesar's salad

Heh.

[Josquius]

Haggis is good yeah.
People always post pictures of it in that form to show how disgusting it is...by that reasoning though you should just post a picture of a dead chicken to show how bad chicken is. Haggis looks like fairly normal mince in its edible form.

And as for bashing meat pie....Thats just simply madness. A good steak and ale pie is one of the best foods in the world.

Haggis was actually fairly tasty.

Was amongst the best I had of "British" cuisine.

But yeah, if you ignored all the Indian restaurants, Britain was fairly disappointing in terms of food.  Easily the worst place I've visited in Europe on that front.

You've avoided Scandinavia and the low countries then.
And thats being uncontroversial. I'd put French food below British too (the cliche is its awesome but really, what does it have going for it? Nice cheese and wine but not much in the way of good meals) and German stuff also (plastic sausages- bleh)

[Queequeg]

(the cliche is its awesome but really, what does it have going for it? Nice cheese and wine but not much in the way of good meals)