For many years I lived in a Hell’s Kitchen loft, and from its windows I could see a patch of the Hudson River. I liked knowing that the water was there, keeping the place that I’d chosen to live, New York City, safely apart from Ohio, the place I’d left behind. But for about fifteen years, I forgot to look out the window. I was a restaurant critic and I was eating, drinking, inhaling the city, writing books and stories, living the life that I’d imagined when I was growing up in Columbus.
But in the mid-1990s, I began to stare at the river. Work was great, life was good, but there I was, staring at its far shore in the direction I’d come from. I did not imagine any connection between my reveries and my sudden mania for transforming my terrace into a small farm. To my mind, the container garden was an early expression of locavorism. After the garden, a dog moved in with the boyfriend. And as far as I was concerned, these creatures and cultivars accounted for my otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm to follow the river north to find a weekend house.
I had no trouble explaining to myself the difference between my city and country cooking. My Manhattan kitchen was not all that different from the restaurants where I’d worked: I imagined a dish, I ordered the ingredients—et voilà!: Centerfold Cuisine. But there was no such cornucopia ninety miles up the river from Manhattan. The availability, not imagination, determined dinner. The best produce that the local farms had to offer was sold in the city; what was left required long, slow, homey cooking to coax out its flavor.
Nevertheless, at Manhattan’s restaurants, at dinner parties and charity events, my colleagues and other members of the food cognoscenti began to talk about the end of American home cooking. The argument was that the more people spend on their kitchen range, the less likely they are to cook on the thing and that the fastest-growing department in grocery stores was the prepared foods. One survey found that an increasing number of Americans tuned in to the Food Network on their kitchen TVs so they’d have someone cooking. In New York City, dinner had long meant eating out, or getting take-out, which was no longer my experience. But I refused to believe that this philosophy had crossed the Hudson and infiltrated the mainland.
To reassure myself, I called each of my five brothers in Ohio. Our conversations were less than comforting.
“How many times a week do you cook dinner at home?” I asked.
“How are you defining cooking?” one answered warily.
I was soon reading reports that somewhere between supersizing and the current romance of farmers’ markets, Americans had stopped cooking. The possibility that the results might be true gave me a sense of urgency about finding true American cooking.
My weekends upstate began to stretch to four days. I cooked more, ate out less, spent days lurking on food sites chatting with people about what they cooked and why. A wall of my study was soon covered with historic maps of the United States: the Armour Company’s Food Source Map (“The Greatness of the United States is founded on Agriculture”), the hog-shaped Porcineograph, and Miguel Covarrubias’s Map of Good Eating were soon joined by contemporary examples like Gary Nabhan’s Regional Map of North America’s Place-Based Food Traditions, the National Golden Arches Locator, and Kentfield’s America Eats Organic Coast to Coast. I spent a year reading American food writing and constructing maps of my own—what was grown, what was eaten, when, why, and by whom.
I’ve never known a food-obsessed person who did not have someone in a cotton apron—a grandmother or mother, an uncle, a father, a neighbor, a teacher—standing behind them who could turn an ordinary meal into an extraordinary one and make the world seem larger, full of heart, and bursting with possibility. But these American cooks had been forgotten over the past several decades as “cooking” morphed into “cuisine.” I wanted to find them and cook with them and get a taste of their America. I had no idea that I’d also find a part of myself.
In 2001, I packed my maps and divided the country into roughly twenty-five geographic patches. I traveled to a particular spot for a few weeks or months, and then returned home to write and cook. I was aided and abetted in my search by motley crews of local food obsessives. Comprised of food cart owners and retired food editors, local dining clubs, slow food consortiums, gourmet societies and cooking contest winners, grocers, bloggers, farmers who grow the high quality ingredients that lure fine cooks and people who live to eat, these advance teams guided me into corners of the nation where cooking is still something that pulls people together.
Some communities come together around long-established feasts—Maine’s beanhole dinner and clambake; the St. Pius Barbecued Mutton day in Kentucky; New Mexico’s horno tamales; the fish boils of Door County, Wisconsin. Others converge for what the writer Jonathan Gold describes as Folkloric Food: fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries, clam chowder, boiled lobster, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese, which are as much about cultural identity as they are about dinner. Still others converge for occasions—family reunions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, coming-of-age ceremonies in New Mexico, the Blessing of the Fleet in Provincetown, Indian Diwali feasts, and Iranian No-Rooz. And then there are the smaller tables that bring families and friends together. I found melting-pot moments and incidents of “unmeltable” pots, but the nation I discovered was more like one big table.
Almost as soon as I decamped from one place at this table to another, I knew that the reports of the demise of home cooking were greatly overstated. I found a preponderance of grocery stores, markets, and farmstands with stocks of uncooked food—irrefutable evidence that most homes still contain working kitchens—and observed many people preparing dinner.
The more miles I logged, the clearer it became that “Americans don’t cook” is an updated version of an old slur. From the birth of the nation until quite recently, Europeans and those Americans who measure culture in relationship to European society claimed that Americans can’t cook. The assertion may have been reality-based in the nation’s early days—rare is the culture that mints a refined cuisine before it clears the wilderness and establishes communities—but in more than 300,000 miles, I found that my fellow citizens can and do cook. Some cook badly, some cook well, all cook to say who they are and where they come from.
Recipes are family stories, tales of particular places and personal histories. They bear witness to the land and waterways, to technology and invention, to immigration, migration, ambition, disappointment, triumph, and most of all, change.
After stalking the country’s best cooks by region, I spent several years in the home kitchens of recent immigrants. And then I had the good fortune to spend a year creating potluck dinners across the United States that raised money for 232 local food banks and brought me recipes and covered dishes to consider for this book. Hundreds of additional recipes arrived from magazines, newsletters, and Internet postings, from friends and friends of friends, from people I’d met, and people who’d heard about my quest. My tower of recipes began to resemble Pisa’s.
When cooks were conflicted about which of their recipes to offer to this project, I often said: “Which recipe embodies your life and times and your own personal America? If you could leave one recipe to your family, which one would it be?”
In the end, it was the endless highway that showed me the most about American cooking. Between the tasty tidbits and the occasional stomach-turner, I experienced the narcotic rumble of the road, the fear (and frequent reality) of getting lost, the fatigue and tedium. Then, turning a corner, I would meet someone in a kitchen, or digging a pit on a beach, or stoking the coals in an oil-drum smoker. American cooks are wacky, idiosyncratic, and heartfelt. They refuse to bow to time constraints, overwork, and media pressure, refuse to eat like everybody else, insist on making their dinner—and often their lives—with their own hands.
Americans don’t have to cook anymore. Those who choose to cook are throwbacks, the last living cowboys, Huck Finns, would-be Julias, embracing America’s unbridled individuality. Many are capable of creating deliciousness. Most cook from the heart as well as from a distinctly American yearning, something I could feel, but couldn’t describe until thousands of miles of highway helped me identify it in myself: hometown appetite.
“We all have hometown appetites,” wrote the cookbook author Clementine Paddleford in 1960, “every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown [he or she] left behind.” This book is a journey through hundreds of the “hometowns” that fuel the American appetite, recipe by recipe, bite by bite.
Over the past decade, I collected more than 10,000 recipes, tested about one-third of them, and narrowed the final collection down to around 600. In the winnowing process, there were many duplicates. Generally they were recipes that had first appeared in old cookbooks or cooking pamphlets issued by food manufacturers, became “standards,” and were then passed from one generation to the next. When their origins were lost, these dishes were ascribed to the person who passed the recipe along. The provenance was not meant to be misleading—for instance, a man who finally passes along his great-great-grandmother’s recipe for dumplings has no idea that the same formula appears in the original edition of The Settlement Cookbook. He has a desire to hold on to a piece of his family’s past, to connect an heirloom recipe to a person rather than the cookbook she must have used.
I endeavored to research the recipes included here, and when it seemed appropriate, to credit the original “inspiration,” but it is impossible to ensure the provenance of every recipe. If you should find a familiar recipe, I would love to hear your stories about it. Please send them to comment@onebigtable.com.
Because grocery stores are stocking an increasing array of ingredients that were once difficult to obtain and because online and mail-order sources shift constantly, an up-to-date list of mail-order sources for specialty cookware and ingredients can be found at www.onebigtable.com.