What is Cuisine?

"Underlying the rich symbolic universe that food and eating always represent... there is the animal reality of our living existence. It is not separate from our humanity, but is an integral part of it. Only because most of us eat plentifully and frequently and have not known intense hunger may we sometimes too easily forget the astonishing, and at times even terrifying, importance of food and eating. ... A principal source of human suffering in the modern world is still – and has for so long been – hunger. ... Food is something we think about, talk about, conceptualize. But we more than abstract it and desire it – we really must consume it to stay alive." (Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, p. 4-5)

Sidney W. Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) wrote many books and articles on the anthropology of food and cooking. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past is a collection of his essays published in 1996, and mainly written in the 1990s. These essays cover a number of subjects, but I want to look at just one: the attempt to explore the many meanings of the word cuisine and to ask the question: Is there such a thing as American Cuisine? Mintz’s answer is NO.

The word cuisine, Mintz points out, can be used many ways; one can talk about "national cuisines, regional cuisines, haute cuisine, and the possiblity of a society having no cuisine." He sees its use in the United States as mostly taking on "an ethnic or national character: French cuisine, Indian cuisine, Thai cuisine, Chinese cuisine." In fact, he says: "the only real cuisines are regional because of the enduring distinctiveness of local ingredients." Signature foods in various cuisines stand for something more than themselves, being related to "cooking methods and ingredients typical of certain locales, and perhaps only obtainable there. Such foods are intimately linked to the local economy." (p. 94-95)

Grande cuisine and haute cuisine are distinct from regional cuisines, but closely related. These extensions reflect the emergence of capital cities, courts, and the presence of powerful and privileged elites, and the chefs who served them, and of cookbooks that recorded them. "I mean to argue here," says Mintz, "that what makes a cuisine is not a set of recipes aggregated in a book, or a series of particular foods associated with a particular setting, but something more. I think a cuisine requires a population that eats that cuisine with sufficient frequency to consider themselves experts on it. They all believe... that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should taste. In short, a genuine cuisine has common social roots; it is the food of a community – albeit often a very large community." (p. 96)

Things become more complicated the more Mintz looks at them. In some societies, the same foods are eaten by all economic and social levels, though of course at the level that each person or family can afford. In other societies, different social levels eat different things; this situation sometimes results in haute cuisine for the privileged, but the term haute cuisine, Mintz says, means more than just that. The high cost of haute cuisine results from the use of expensive ingredients and/or intense amounts of skilled labor in preparing them. Eventually, haute cuisine also becomes associated with restaurant food, but above all, it represents a social distinction among those who appreciate and value it.

To me, Mintz's many explanations of cuisine are very interesting, and offer useful insights. His chapter titled "Eating American" applies these ideas to American food. "When it comes to food, grasping our particularity as a nation requires us to get some sense of where our history differs from that of other countries, especially European countries," he points out, and cites the very large size of the US, and its recent domination by immigrants, especially from Europe, as well as the displacement of the native population. The mobility of Americans is another factor in his discussion. He seems to see this mobility as countering the fact that different regions of the country during its early history had widely varying foods available to the people's diet, as well as the differing customs of immigrants from many places.

As the immigrant groups arrived, he points out, they experienced a great deal of pressure to become like the already present populations, and this (I think he meant) prevented true cuisines from developing. The homogeneity of foods that became acceptable, he suggests, did not result in the development of an American cuisine. He lists a lot of American foods (like hot dogs, hamburgers, clam chowders, pizza, and desserts) but says they aren't a cuisine. Further, many regional ingredients, such as local fish, have become scarce or have disappeared. The integrity of fresh local and seasonal foods and of foods reflecting immigrant or introduced cuisines has also degraded, being replaced by "substitutes lacking any resemblance at all to the original." (p. 115)

In sum, Mintz does not see American food as adding up to a common cuisine -- he doesn't see "a community of people who eat it, cook it, have opinions about it, and engage in dialogue involving those opinions." (p. 117) He doesn't see people who take the time to contemplate food in the way he thinks a cuisine requires.

I have several problems with Mintz's dismissal of the idea of American cuisine. Although Mintz elsewhere has cited the major contribution of enslaved Africans to the food ways of the US (it's the substance of Chapter Three, "Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom") he seems to forget about this contribution when he talks about the possibility of American cuisine. I find this disturbing. I also find it disturbing that he dismisses so much of the history of American foods, and that he feels that the only unified sense of a meal is Thanksgiving Dinner when effectively the entire country eats the same menu. I thought about Mark Twain's list of American foods that he wrote in 1879. (For this, see Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs). Despite these misgivings, I found the chapters on cuisine, and all the rest of the book very fascinating.

When I was new to reading about culinary subjects, I read Mintz’s most famous work, Sweetness and Power (published 1985). I vastly admired it and still do! He's widely recognized as one of the inventors of the anthropology of food.

Review by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com. © 2022.