American Cuisine

July 15, 2019
In this well-researched history, Freedman (Ten Restaurants That Changed America) tracks American eating habits from the colonial era to the present in search of a definitive “American cuisine.” Freedman scours decades of dining guides and community cookbooks (sharing recipes throughout) for evidence of regional traditions. He discovers that once Americans could buy “factory-made products at any market anywhere in the country, distinctions among regions and places were obliterated” and mainly lived on in cultural imagination. (Who really eats baked beans in Boston?) Freedman picks apart patterns of appropriation, starting with colonizers’ adoption of indigenous crops, from the now out-of-favor “Indian pudding” (cornmeal, eggs, raisins, butter) to the still ubiquitous pumpkin pie. He exposes the efforts of white Southerners to distance their cooking from African-American soul food in the early 20th century and examines “ethnic” cooking in a country shaped by its immigrants (while German food “was incorporated into the American repertoire, Chinese cuisine remained identifiably foreign”). He finds that, though the farm-to-table movement has revived interest in local, seasonal cooking, many Americans still turn to packaged foods that sacrifice flavor for reliability. History buffs will dig into this astute culinary narrative.