Introduction to the New Edition

The idea that this book could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes after all these years shows that its bones were always strong, and to continue this awkward imagery, that they might be fleshed out now for a new audience. We might all benefit from a look backward at foods that once did, and now again will, entice us. A good meatball is not “dated”—it stands the test of time—and an almond torte has nothing to do with trends and all to do with taste. The dishes I prepared for my catering assignments in the 1970s might now seem less exotic and challenging than they appeared forty years ago, but they will still please both cook and consumer.

And the use of the book to create meals for larger numbers than fit at the dining table remains relevant. We still love large, noisy parties of happy eaters, whether they sit at table or, as at my house on occasion, crossed-legged on the floor.

I would not deny the historicity of this book, however: There are in its pages stories of change in American eating and in the place of food in our values and experiences. The book came out of my first real job—catering for Harvard’s Center for West European Studies, a special institution then (before history happened to change its name) and now (when it has become the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies). I loved to cook, but I didn’t know anything about cooking for crowds; after college I took on catering as a challenge and a necessary source of income almost on a dare. Abby Collins, one of the wonderful people at the Center, was brave enough to ask me if I would cater her wedding.

Well, I’d eaten around the world (on a student’s shoestring) by then and I thought—how hard can this be? Besides, it was a friendly, slightly hippyish event where foods I liked, Indian curries and Middle Eastern foods like dolmathes and lentils and baklava, could work. Just an extension of informal gatherings of friends around a kitchen table heaped with “ethnic” food—a term that had gained currency as an expression of taste and politics in the late sixties. Up the road was an emblematic restaurant called “Peasant Stock,” where large bowls of variously and vaguely ethnic dishes that were politically and nutritionally correct were served family-style on long wooden tables. The oddments served at the wedding were intriguing enough to lead Abby and her colleague Leonie Gordon to take me on as the Center caterer, and therein begins this book’s tale.

I took the job as a way to learn about food and, of course, support myself. I enjoyed exploring—trained as an anthropologist, I kept pushing into new “exotic” realms. I rarely cooked anything that I’d made before and almost never made anything twice for the audience. Living in Cambridge meant having a lot of friends who had lived somewhere else and who had grandmothers from faraway places, friends who were generous enough to share their recipes. The book is a collection of those recipes and thus approaches what we would now, rather timidly, call “authenticity”—at least as measured by the food’s proximity to the grandmother’s own version.

My own grandmothers didn’t figure much in this work; they were of the “modern” school of efficient boxed mixes and frozen vegetables. I’d grown up in the Midwest, and there was scarcely a pizza in my Minnesota neighborhood, nor did Chinese food in Chicago offer more than egg foo young and subgum chop suey. Not that there is anything is wrong with these dishes.

By the time I reached high school, we had moved to Boston, and both school and home experiences of food were so very boring that in sheer frustration I reacted by seeking madly intense tastes—which at that time were hard to find. In high school, lunch was a course called “Gracious Living,” which aimed to prepare us young ladies for our future roles as genteel hostesses and especially to separate “civilization” from the lower functions of the body, including appetites of any kinds. The meals, all beige, were not to be discussed, but politely eaten. Chicken breast covered with white sauce, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower were served up by black-uniformed Irish maids. One day, I really couldn’t swallow it, literally, and asked the teacher at my right, “Could I please have some salt and pepper?” The response still rings in my ears: “Pepper is too heating for young ladies.” From then on my life has been a search for the heat and pleasure of food. I wanted food to excite, not to suppress the senses.

What a reach to my last night’s dinner of Umbrian lentils or the pork-and-fennel Chinese dumplings of the night before, or even the chopped fennel and dried persimmon in the turkey stuffing this past Thanksgiving. The themes of change and continuity in food-ways (as we anthropologists call “food cultures”) show that tradition never stands still, that we enhance old forms with new ingredients, and that it’s not all about heat, though I now insinuate it into more dishes than “tradition” would permit.

The foods in this book are the children of necessity and desire: I cooked to please, and a little also to surprise the guests, whom I hoped hadn’t yet encountered Afghan pizza or rogan jaush or kulfi. These Europeanists were culinary sophisticates—in European foods—but they perhaps weren’t so acclimated to other cultural models of good eating. I counted on their inexperience (which was matched by my own) in Asian, African, and Latin American realms. And I didn’t want them comparing my food to what they’d had at that perfect Parisian bistro or that red-velvet-seated vestige of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Vienna. For most of my guests and clients, even the sophisticates, quiche, now as common in cafés as doughnuts, was still exotic. This fact allowed me to make tiny little shrimp quiches, exotic enough to serve to Jackie Onassis as a starter before pâté-stuffed squabs at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. That’s another story.

As I think of the book’s beginnings, all the years between its first appearance and the present time collapse, fold up like an accordion. I see Ed Koren, my friend and favorite cartoonist, just as I saw him then, a bit fuzzy like his characters and modestly philosophical, meeting me to eat at the old Chang Sho restaurant, where one of his cartoons hung over the cash register. I see Erwin Glikes, the director of Basic Books, who first picked up the pile of typed recipes from the front desk of the Center, where they sat in case anyone wanted to try a dish at home, and as I found out later, swiped them to take to New York. That phone call—Could we publish your recipes in a book?—now seems a dream.

I see Leonie Gordon and Abby Collins, who made everything work so that I could get by without servers or dishwashers—with no catering staff at all. I see Peter Gourevitch and Peter Lange, always first in line for Friday lunch at the Center. I also see the avuncular Daniel Bell, who told me, kindly but confusingly, that I’d be better off continuing to cook than going to graduate school. I see Charlie Maier, Guido Goldman, and Stanley Hoffmann and remember Stanley’s attempt to name the book “Mob Cookery,” which was too redolent of wiseguys to work in the end.

I also see Julia Child, who saved me more than once from utter disaster. There were legendary near-failures. One day, I was preparing lunch for fifty—our standard Friday lunch at the Center. I had made a huge pot of Ukrainian soup—a specialty of the Putney (Vermont) School Harvest Festival, where I got the recipe. I suspected none of the audience would have had this big, blowsy, peasant cabbage-and-pork stew, redolent with garlic and caraway seeds. I’d made salads and big loaves of nearly black pumpernickel, and there were chives and sour cream for garnish. Makes me hungry to think of it now, but at the time—when I’d left the kitchen to help set up the dining room—the dish burned, horribly. Nothing, nothing is as acrid as burned cabbage. I rushed back into the kitchen, removed the pot from the stove and collapsed in a tearful heap on the floor. Ruined.

I got on the phone to Julia as we opened windows and decanted the stew into clean pots. She was just down the block and had said I could call for help. She always knew it was me because I was almost always crying. “What is it now, dearie?” I explained, and she briskly instructed me on the phone: have someone run down to Savenor’s—get more sour cream, get lemons, and get parsley. Sour cream coats the mouth so the bitter taste of burn is masked. Lemon rind and juice changes the taste itself, brightening it. “Why parsley, Julia?” “Because, silly, it makes it pretty.” Then, she said, put it in a large tureen and carry it into the dining room and announce “The dish of the day is Smoked Borscht”—and I did, and it was, and all was well.

When I finally cooked the last meal at the Center and entered graduate school, my advisers were a bit embarrassed by my cooking past and suggested that I take all my food writing and cookbooks off my résumé if I wanted an academic career. Food has come a long way in status since then, and many of my anthropological research projects and teaching now include food. As soon as I got tenure, the cookbooks and all the food journalism went right back on the CV: I now announce myself as a food anthropologist with pride and no qualms.

This edition owes much to the people in the past who helped, who ate, who wanted more. And to the people who might now use it. I’ve had many requests for the book over the decades from people who want a “crowd” cookbook for events (it is still not for everyone: one comment was “the food is too foreign for my church”) and from young people whose parents have the book on their shelves. Adventuring with Gus Rancatore of Cambridge’s Toscanini’s Ice Cream means expanding the culinary repertory into corners and byways new to me. It is he who first “named” me a food anthropologist, and I am very grateful for the companionship, the identity, and the fieldwork. If I were to do the book over, his contributions would double its size. Our experiments have also taught me that paying attention to small things is a very big idea.

I want to thank Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press for his interest and stewardship in getting the book back and out, and Ed Koren, whose work is legendary. It has been a great honor to work with him, then and now.

The first edition was dedicated to my daughter Jennifer, who worked hard, tossing lettuce in sheets, kneading bread, and drying dishes. This book is now happily dedicated to Meghan, my granddaughter, whose mom was the best helper this cook ever had.