On the blog
My American Melting Pot, Lori asks the question "what is white American eating," and I thought I'd respond.
I've thought about American cuisine a lot lately - national cuisine, micro-culture cuisines - and I've been doing something like a comparative culinary "study" of my heritage, and what differences I've noticed are pretty stark: not in the cuisine itself, but in the culture that grows up around it.
One important different, I think, in the culinary cultures of black American and white America is the pride. Every relative on my Southern, black creole side is damn proud of their food. In spite of the claims that black food developed from rejected scraps from the slave owner's table, black American food seems to be a source of pride, and a binding cultural fact. Culinary anthropologist and southern cooking denizen
Vertamae Grosvenor has expressed a desire to demolish the myth that African American cuisine arose out of lack, but was instead built out of a rich culinary history and a great deal of creativity. Just look at the common ingredients throughout the African Diaspora: okra, cassava, chilies, yams, beans, etc. You can't tell me that's spontaneous and created from scraps only. Hell, you could argue that what we know as Southern food is built on these African offerings. But that is a topic for later.
When you begin exploring white American cuisine, you start meeting with, well, shame. One of the staples of my family's Thanksgiving spread remains to this day
green bean casserole. This goofy dish is by all accounts wholly unnatural: canned green beans, canned mushroom soup, canned fried onion. I don't think there is one fresh ingredient throughout its prefabricated stratosphere. If you ask my sister, the green bean casserole queen, she'll proudly tell you how to make it. And I still love to eat it. But one college Thanksgiving, too broke to fly home from the East Coast, Melanie and I visited some family friends in Thanksgiving. Besides the two of us, the remaining party consisted of East Coasters, and over an elegant yet non-traditional table, the New Englanders mocked green bean casserole to the chagrin of us interloping Midwesterners.
Foods like these - macaroni and cheese from the box, hot dogs, canned cranberry sauce - that are closely tied to my WASP heritage. But, at the same time whole empires are being built to shame us out of enjoying "American food," these foods keep selling briskly on the market.
I recently read an article entitled "
The State of American Cuisine" that address this; issued by the James Beard Foundation, written by two food academics, the article is based on surveys conducted for the Taste American national food festival. Survey respondents were asked the following questions: do you believe there is an American cuisine? If you believe there is an American cuisine, how would you define it? If you don't believe there is an American cuisine, why not? Out of 131 respondents, roughly 90% said yes and 10% said no, and references to unique regional cuisine aside, most examples listed could be claimed as white American cuisine. More on this later.
There were frequent references to the melting pot of American cuisine. "American cuisine reflects the multicultural background of Americans. We are a country of people from many countries, living together in one melting pot. American cuisine, similarly, is the fusion of cuisines from many places." My suspicion of the idea of an American melting pot aside, I agree that American cuisine may be unique in its "eagerness for cultural borrowing." There are, of course, other nations with equally diverse immigration rates, who have borrowed many culinary treats - Brazil's booming sushi market, for example - but no other nation that I've experienced has borrowed cuisines at the expense of developing its own culinary heritage. America doesn't have a national dish like many other countries do.
American cuisine, some anthropologists and chefs have claimed, varies too greatly from region to region, and trying to pinpoint a quintessential cuisine leaves no room for variety. But this is true of any nation; we tend to forget that southern Italian cuisine varies greatly from Northern, that coastal Indian food varies from that of the interior, that Buddhist Chinese food varies from Muslim Chinese food. So we can't, as respondents wanted to, claim that America has no overarching cuisine because Southern, East Coastal, Southwestern and Midwestern foods are supposedly vastly different. You'll find variety anywhere.
Before reading the article, I made a list of what I thought were white American foods; the authors of the article compiled a similar list of respondents' ideas of typical American cuisine (by now it seems apparent that most respondents were making the assumption that American cuisine is
white American, and that all other cuisines are regional, cultural, and racial, and which require an accompanying adjective). My list consisted of items specifically remembered from my childhood: margarine, English muffins, runny eggs and bacon, caramel corn, apple pie, supermarket bread, bread stuffing with chicken liver, boxed macaroni and cheese, and cabbage and bacon. Survey respondents added to that list hamburgers, barbecue, fried chicken, pot roast, pancakes, ketchup, corn on the cob, pizza, and meatloaf.
A lot of items on this list are dishes borrowed from imported cuisines but adapted to our American lifestyle. One respondent said this: "American cuisine is the fast, easy and common. The cereal, milk and orange juice in the morning, the peanut butter and jelly for lunch, and the hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, fried chicken and apple pie for dinner. These are American, and are associated with America." Sometime after World War II, the focus became cooking for the family on the go. Meals became less about community and more about swift ease.
So what is white American cuisine? From what I can tell, it is easy, pre-fabricated, or somewhat snobbishly multicultural. Where the common recipes thrown together by grandma are served at the same table as multicultural culinary borrowings.
And so forth.
So I've taken my first steps. Towards life, I suppose.
