food history – The Inquisitive Eater

Books & Media November 7, 2013

1970, a Turning Point in American Cuisine

by Fabio Parasecoli

1971, the year when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, is often cited as a turning point for American cuisine. The young woman, who had lived in France while pursuing her degree in cultural studies, had discovered the pleasure of shopping for fresh, local produce, and a relaxed yet creative way of preparing and serving food. What’s more important, she had found a way to translate those values in an American context.

Yet, something else had been stirring in France, something that would have an equally crucial impact on the development of the culinary arts in the U.S. Just before Waters’ visit in the winter of 1970, some Cialis vs viagra of the most visible and influential innovators in the American food world happened to cross paths in Provence. James Beard, Julia Child and her co-author Simone Beck, M.F.K Fisher, Richard Olney, and culinary book editor Judith Jones found themselves dining together and visiting with each other while discussing their past work and their future projects.

This is the story that Luke Barr, whose great-aunt was M.F.K. Fisher, tells with gusto in his book, Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste. Barr’s narrative follows the movements and gatherings of these iconic figures, revealing their confidences, their tensions, and even some of their less lofty moments. Beard, Child, and Fisher are described in all their humanity, in a tone that avoids the hagiographic quality that is used regularly in celebrating their achievements. Much of the information that Barr includes in the story comes from Fisher’s diary that he found in a storage unit where her family members had stored and forgotten it. The diary chronicles the final weeks of 1970, when Fisher was in Provence with her famous friends and then traveled by herself trying to evaluate France more objectively and to rethink the role that country had played in her imagination up to that point. The diary is an important document, which, when read with Beard’s, Child’s, and Fisher’s already known letters, allow Barr to give readers access to an important slice of American culinary history.

According to Barr, Fisher’s personal reflections and resolutions intriguingly reflect important changes in the attitudes and outlooks of the other culinary giants she interacted with in Provence. James Beard was trying to finish American Cookery, an important book that was meant to assert the value and relevance of American cuisine without any sense of cultural or material subordination to foreign traditions. Julia Child, who had introduced French cuisine to the general public in the U.S. through her writing and TV show, had been able to make everyday cooks feel comfortable with complicated recipes and exotic ingredients. At the same time, she felt it was time reclaim a certain freedom from the strictures of total obedience to the French tradition. She was also fully aware that many elements given for granted among French cooks had to be explained and broken down in layman’s terms for many of her readers this side of the Atlantic.

Barr suggests that Beard and Child’s pragmatic approach put them at odds with Simone Beck, who was proud of the uncompromising “Frenchness” of her food and considered Julia less strict when it came to the requirements of serious cooking, and with Richard Olney, a relative newcomer in the field of culinary writing asserting himself as an unadulterated interpreter of the most authentic French food. Fisher herself realized that France was changing and many of the notions they were fondly attached to might have become anachronistic. At the same time, she had started to realize the changes in the American culinary scenes in terms of production, availability of ingredients, and social relevance of food.

With its focus on the media world, cultural perceptions, and the role of writers and intellectual mediators, Barr’s book helps us add another layer to our understanding of the dynamics that have made American food what it is now in terms of practices and ideas. The author comes back over and over again to some central concepts, as though making sure the readers get his point, but these repetitions aside, the book makes for a nice, relaxing reading, taking us back to a time and a place that still exerts a strong charm on many of us.

This article first appeared on the Huffington Post.

Fabio Parasecoli is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Food Studies at the School of Undergraduate Studies for The New School for Public Engagement. He also a Senior Editor of The Inquisitive Eater, and regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

Video Archive November 14, 2012

Culinary Luminary: Henri Soulé | The New School

The Food Studies program at The New School draws on a range of disciplines to explore the connections between food and the environment, politics, history, media, and culture. Students learn the theoretical and practical tools they need to engage in the burgeoning conversation about food production, distribution, quality, and taste and to effect positive change in their own food environments.| http://www.newschool.edu/ce/foodstudies

This series is devoted to the life and work of distinguished culinary professionals of the recent past and the present who have changed the way we eat and drink. It examines the lives and legacies of food culture luminaries.

Henri Soulé (1903–1966) came to New York from France in 1939 to serve as maitre d’ for the restaurant in the French pavilion at the World’s Fair. When the fair closed in 1940, France was under German occupation, and Soulé elected to remain here. The next year, he opened Le Pavilion, which became the model for high-end restaurants in the United States. Through his restaurants and the staff he trained, he probably had more influence on haute cuisine in the United States than any other chef or restaurateur in the 20th century.

Moderated by Andrew F. Smith, faculty member of the New School Food Studies program, speakers include:
William Grimes, New York Times columnist
Ariane Batterberry, co-founder of Food and Wine Magazine
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, author of Accounting for Taste: the Triumph of French Cuisine.

Sponsored by the Food Studies program of The New School for Public Engagement. | http://www.newschool.edu/continuing-education/food-studies/

*Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor, Wednesday, November 07, 2012 6:30 pm

Books & Media July 10, 2012

Eating the Enlightenment: What 1700s Paris Can Teach Us About Today’s Food Debates

by Fabio Parasecoli

from Huffington Post

I admit it, I am a shameless history nerd, and I got excited when I received the advance copy of E.C. Spary’s upcoming book, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and Science in Paris. As much as we think we know French cuisine and its past, there is always new research shedding light on aspects that are not well understood or, even worse, are misunderstood. Spary’s work continues the efforts of other important books such as Susan Pinkard’s A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, Sean Takats’s The Expert Cook in Enlightenment France, Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, Amy Trubek’s Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, just to mention a few. So much material is available that it would be easy to teach a well-sourced course on the cultural history of French food.

Spary’s volume is far from being a light read, as it mines its way through a staggering amount of memoirs, letters, books, and all sorts of documents from the budding printing industry of the decades before the Revolution. But it definitely rewards those who might decide to engage with its fascinating content. Focusing on the Parisian who’s who, Spary explores debates and cultural dynamics that eerily remind us of the way many contemporary consumers in post-industrial societies decide what and how to eat, especially those in the upper income brackets who can afford to make expensive choices.

Of course, any crude simplification should be avoided: the author emphasizes that 18th century France was beginning to develop as a consumer society, in particular thanks to colonial products such as sugar and coffee. This epochal transformation was the cause of widespread unease and preoccupation: were French citizens going to be the same, even when ingesting exciting foreign substances and indulging in luxuries that were becoming increasingly affordable? Now, we live at a time when the consumption of exotic products and novelties is a daily occurrence and whole industries are based on our desire to experiment and try new stuff all the time. Also, 18th century upper class French consumers did not have to deal with global corporations, brand names, and the pervasive marketing that shape today’s food culture — one of the main reasons behind the renewed interest in traditional and so-called “authentic” foods.

Nevertheless, just like at the time of the philosophes, ingestion still functions as a metaphor for the cultural and political self. Standards of taste in the civic sphere were not only determined by fashion and practices, but also by political discussions, clashing scientific theories, and the attitude of public intellectuals. The connoisseur, who became a visible Parisian figure in the period that Spary explores, not only displayed expertise, but also claimed forms of authority and revealed specific approaches to the mind and its relationship of the body. Individuals modeled their behaviors based on scientific information, media, culture, personal preferences, popular advice , and competing ideals about health and well-being.

Then as now, dietary preferences can be used to distinguish us from one another, underlying our own uniqueness and personality, and it is possible to express political and social ideals by deciding to eat specific things. When we opt for products labeled as local, organic, sustainable, and fair trade, we are actually participating in political projects, just like the eighteenth century Parisians could express their discontents with the absolutist regime of the court by embracing sobriety and fasting. Spary shows how political controversies originated around coffee, liqueurs, and what was already known as nouvelle cuisine — a term that will enjoy long-lasting fortune and will be used under very different circumstances in the following centuries.
We should not be surprised: it is enough to think about the contemporary discourse on foie gras and high fructose corn syrup, just to mention two examples at opposite ends of the foodie spectrum. Spary’s book not only provides us with great information to understand the development of a cuisine that is still among the most prestigious worldwide, but also elicits reflections to our present-day attitudes about food, dietary choices, and their connections to much larger social issues.

Books & Media July 9, 2012

Book Review: Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat

by Larissa Zimberoff

In Harvey Levenstein’s new book, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, we spend a great deal of time wallowing in the early 1900’s. As a Jewish girl from Los Angeles, I felt like I was being followed down the grocery aisle by my mother. Scratch that, my grandmother.

When I read the title of the book, I had high hopes. I anticipated getting a better understanding of my own food issues. To put it plainly: I’m a picky eater. I avoid bread (bad, bad, evil carbs), I don’t eat processed foods (most of the time), I try to buy organic and, when possible, I eat local. Did this book explain any of my “issues” to me? No. Well, mostly no.

Levenstein, a professor emeritus of history, sets forth in his preface to “uncover the forces that have lead to Americans inability to enjoy eating.” He goes on to say that he will regard his book as a success “if he can help lessen even a few people’s anxieties and increase the pleasure they get from eating.”

Throughout the ten chapters of Levenstein’s book we explore the history of the American diet, from milk mandates to the invention of Betty Crocker. The chapters range in topic from the war on flies (leading to an abundance of packaging still in use today), swill milk (resulting in the creation of the Dairy Council and a shift in production from many to few), germ warfare, the life prolonging yogurt craze (eat yogurt and you’ll stay young!), beef scares (both contamination of the product and its effect on our hearts), vitamania (the discovery of missing nutrients, which led to manufacturers fortifying food) and fear of fat, aka lipophobia.

This history of our food chain was fascinating and compelling but I also wanted to be reading about my generation of eaters, or rather I had hoped the thread of historical food production would be brought all the way up to present day. Instead, much of this book is rooted in the past. Levenstein, content to do historical research, leans heavily on quotes from early issues of The New York Times and he fails to carry the topics forward to 2012. Why couldn’t the talk of swill milk in 1903 be connected to the low-fat craze of the 80s, when we got skim milk, to today, where everyone drinks an entirely different non-Jersey product: almond, hemp, coconut, rice and soy milk?

An example of the disconnect between past and present is the discussion of beef in the 1800s. Levenstein writes that cows were “fed the foul-tasting mash that was a by-product of brewing beer, giving their meat an unpleasant taste.” Well, flash forward to today and you read stories of chefs like Mario Batali, who gives the barley mash from the brewery at his Eataly establishment to heritage meat suppliers (who use it as feed), and then buys back that very meat to sell. It seems clear to me that our concept of food requires an evolving mindset. We are bombarded by media who tell us one week that meat is bad and the next that it’s good. How do we go about staying informed and still enjoy what we put in our mouths?

Fear of Food helped inform me of some major historical why’s, which I am thankful for, but perhaps in his next book Levenstein can tie all the strings together into a more compelling present day argument for why Americans worry about what they eat. Me, I’m still a little fearful.

Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. She is currently working towards her MFA at The New School. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Untapped Cities and The Rumpus.