From the day it began, One Big Table has been a group effort. I am indebted to more people and more goodwill than I may ever know, but without the following people this book would never be in your hands.
Long before social networking had become a way of life, Arthur Samuelson understood that cooking and eating together have a powerful ability to turn strangers into friends, to create communities, and to celebrate what makes us human. His vision of building both real and virtual tables across the country guided me for over a decade. I am indebted to his prescience and his brilliance.
To widen the net that I cast across the nation, Arthur also helped forge a partnership with the nation’s food-bank network, now called Feeding America, and helped create potluck dinners across the country. The potlucks raised money to fight hunger and introduced me to thousands of home cooks I might not otherwise have met. Robert H. Forney, Alice Archabal, Carol Gifford, and Phil Zepeda provided invaluable support in the charity’s national office, and a portion of profits generated by the sale of this book will be donated to Feeding America.
Hundreds of people opened their homes and hearts to these potlucks, and I am especially grateful to Nancy Hechinger, Michael and Jane Hoffman, David Leite, Daisy Martinez, Geoff Drummond, Stephen Peters, Tommy and Karolyn Burkett, Barbara and Robert Blum, Marcy and Bill Ferris, Judge George Chew, Marilyn Yee, and Beth Wareham.
The national cooking contest that grew from these potlucks could not have occurred without the generous support of two great American businesses, Sur La Table and the Viking Range Corporation. I am grateful to both Doralece Dullaghan and Jane Crump for that support as well as for their personal effort, counsel, and goodwill. A number of gourmet clubs and food societies also helped in this effort, and I am grateful to Laverne Yost for her help in organizing Les Dames d’Escoffier in Washington, D.C., as well as several Slow Food chapters that contributed recipes.
I am indebted to the wise and steady support of family, friends and colleagues, especially Ed Breslin, Sam Busselle, Nancy Hechinger, Paul, Nevalee and Virginia O’Neill, Carol Puckett, Eric Rayman, Marie Salerno, and Alice Truax, whose boundless patience, insight, and generosity helped me do the next right thing, over and over again—at least when I took their advice. My agent, Andrew Wylie, remained steadfast even as the project morphed and grew and I required multiple extensions. At the Wylie Agency, Jeffrey Posternak worked far too hard filling every imaginable empty space, and I am more grateful than I can say to him for his help as a reader, a strategist, a cheerleader, an accountant, and a shrink.
Dozens of researchers across the country opened their hearts, minds, and Rolodexes to this project. As I began to grapple with the complexity of America, my friend and colleague Nancy Harmon Jenkins gave me hundreds of the files that she accumulated in over a decade of research into ethnic cooking in America. Sandy Oliver, Andy Smith, and Laura Shapiro could not have been more generous with their knowledge of food history, sharing their own research as well as commenting on the manuscript. I must have done something really good in a past life to be the beneficiary of such brilliant, generous, and stalwart friends.
Or perhaps I just got lucky. I also had the honor of working with some remarkable up-and-coming writers, food historians, reporters, and cooks. In Kentucky, the chef and former librarian Sara Gibbs was indefatigable in finding fabulous cooks. She gathered recipes from Maryland to Indiana, and her determination and ear for the weird helped keep me on my own game. In Michigan, Kim Bayer scoured the community cookbook collection at the William L. Clements Library and enriched both the regional and the ethnic contexts of this book. I am grateful both for this and for her family’s United Nations of fine salsas.
In Louisiana, Michaela York, the director of communications for Chef John Folse, helped me go deep into the bayous. I was inspired by the way she combined her own encyclopedic knowledge with grace and charm to pull the best from even the most reticent subjects. In Mississippi, LeAnne Gault was an inexhaustible font of good information and good humor as I pursued catfish and tried to outrun hurricanes. In Texas, Mary Margaret Pack taught me that impeccable historic research can have life, poetry, and humor—particularly when it comes to barbecue, tamales, gumbo, God, and food trucks.
California has become synonymous with the market-to-table approach pioneered by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse—so much so that it was difficult to scratch beneath the surface. Four dogged researchers—Valerie D’Ippolito Rodgers, Faith Kramer, Dianne Jacob, and Leticia Landa of La Cocina street vendor project—helped me find some of the home cooks whose daily efforts combine a sensitivity to seasoning and ingredients with family tradition and cultural history to create durable and of course delicious songs of place.
In New York, I am indebted to the pastry chef and researcher Judy Chen and her sister, the writer and editor Joanne Chen. Combining their vast knowledge of all things sweet, the Chens were indispensible in winnowing several thousand dessert recipes into the hundred or so that comprise that chapter of this book. Hail, Sugar.
And hats off to the people who raise the heritage breeds of plants and animals whose DNA holds the history of American meals. Sarah Obraitis of Heritage Foods USA, a fine writer with an uncanny eye for detail, scoured her files for growers who also cooked and enriched this book with their stories from the land. In West Miller’s Cove, Tennessee John Coykendall, an artist and seed saver and the master gardener at Blackberry Farm, taught me what how hard times and good times can all be tasted in a bean.
Rachel Kelsey in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought a working chef’s perseverance and grit, a detective’s eye, and a poet’s sensitivity to the idiosyncratic tastes and methods of other people’s cooking as she edited the recipes in this book. Underpaid and pregnant with her first child, she showed me a new level of the art of recipe testing and editing, and my gratitude is as large as the talent and determination she brought to this task.
I am also grateful to the deeply annoying and nitpicking copy editor, Suzanne Fass. Knowing that she was merrily ripping apart each line of this book allowed me to sleep at night. My blissful rest was further abetted by the cantankerous Roy Finamore, cook, editor, and all-around food savant, whose close reading of the edited manuscript ferreted out even more imperfections. Nora Sherman and Kate Sonders spent months chasing leads and organizing information, and Dana Silverstein, keeper of all lists, files, budgets, whereabouts, and formats, found my memory when I lost it—thank you all for your patience, efficiency, good humor, and goodwill.
Sydny Miner and David Rosenthal originally brought this project to Simon & Schuster and I remain grateful for their vision and support. Against all odds and a loudly ticking clock, Ruth Fecych and Michelle Rorke shepherded the outsize, complicated manuscript into type. No one should have to inherit such a project, and few would do so with such determination to do it well—thank you.
Even as she juggled hundreds of moving parts with unflagging courtesy and optimism, Nancy Singer, Simon & Schuster’s director of interior design, allowed the photo editor, Rebecca Busselle, and me to work with the wonderful designers, Joel Avirom and Jason Snyder, to find the book’s visual voice over frustrating months of iterations. Jackie Seow was equally stalwart in managing my visual obsessions while creating a cover that expressed the spirit of this book. Through it all, as editors changed and the landscape of publishing shifted, Nancy Inglis, the wise and unflappable director of copyediting at Simon & Schuster, maintained both the admirable can-do-ism and the drawer full of sugary snacks that helped in creating a book even more substantial, generous, and quirky than I’d hoped.
I’m also indebted to Ramin Ganeshram, cook, reporter, writer, and eternal spring of pithy worst-case scenarios, whose insight, resourcefulness, generosity, and love for this project helped move this book through its gawky adolescent stage, enriching both its pages and my life. Working with Ramin was like working with a younger (and much improved) version of myself, and I am as grateful for the mirror she held up as I am for the wonderful gifts she gave to this book.
About halfway through this project I was introduced to Rebecca Busselle, a writer, photographer, cook, and editor who is the great-grandniece of Irma Rombauer, the author of The Joy of Cooking. After listening to what I was doing, Rebecca put aside the book she was writing and began traveling with me, taking photographs, researching, editing, driving, reading maps, sharing rooms, and carrying this book—and me—to the finish line. For Rebecca, One Big Table was a new chapter in a family story; for me, Rebecca was a saving grace. I love her more than bacon.
Speaking of bacon, I will never be sure whether the cooking in the American South is more real, more vivid, more regional than in other parts of the country, or if my friends at Southern Foodways just make it seem that way. In either case, I am grateful to the entire organization and especially to John T. Edge and Amy Evans for their deep roots, boundless enthusiasm and unwavering commitment to pig. Up with Lard.
Vincent Virga, the legendary photo editor, shared his decades of experience at the Library of Congress and was unwavering in his support for this project. We would have been sunk without the finely honed technical abilities of the photographer Damaso Reyes, who presided over our image archives. Paula Kupfer, a photographer with a quirky eye and a steady hand, was dogged in tracking down vintage and contemporary images and irrepressible in finding—and taking—pictures for this book. Thank you.
I am also indebted to Peter Workman and Suzanne Rafer of Workman Publishing, whose patience and guidance as I wrote the New York Cookbook taught me how to translate joy and excitement into recipes and stories. I am also grateful to the ever-raunchy Ms. Beth Wareham, whose lessons in all forms of Twittering have been most invaluable, and to my friend Mary Bissbee-Beek, whose marketing acumen is matched only by her belief in the American people, American cooking, and this project. Thank you.
I am also grateful to those whose love of place changed the way that I saw the world. Experiencing New Mexico through the eyes of Phyllis Montgomery, Pat West Barker, and Ronni Lundy was the start of what I hope will be a long-term affair with chiles, corn, and the mystical beauty of the high desert. Getting to know the salmon fisheries from the Pacific Northwest to the most remote corner of the Alaskan Yukon with Jon Rowley was a rare and glorious introduction to the spirit and pathos of that corner of earth. These adventures were perhaps all the more epic because I shared them with my stepdaughter, Ariana Samuelson, who is game for just about anything and lives for the subtle connections and unexpected synchronicities that give meaning and magic to daily life.
Exploring the Eastern Shore of Virginia under the tutelage of Bernie Herman, who has documented the region’s foodways and folkways for nearly thirty years, changed the way I thought about soft-shell crabs, sweet potatoes, and unschooled art. Through his introduction, I was able to ravel the back roads of the South from Atlanta to Gee’s Bend, Alabama, with the legendary art collector Bill Arnett and his son Matt Arnett. Those trips and the artists we met—particularly Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and Mary Lee Bendoph—remind me every day of why I do what I do.
For all its imperfection, the United States remains a place where an individual can be what he or she was born to be—fully human, full of imperfection, and one of a kind. Making art, music, poems, gardens—or dinner—is an ode to this opportunity. Not many have the courage to seize that opportunity. I am in awe of those of do, and finally, my greatest thanks goes to those who risked being exactly who they are as they stood facing their stoves.
Thank you all for making me better than I am.