A Few Books about Drinks

I’ve been thinking about some books I’ve read in the past that discuss various popular beverages that we drink without noticing their history. I’ve extracted a few paragraphs for each book in order to look back on things I’ve read in the past. These were selections of my culinary reading group, which has not met in 3 years because of the pandemic. I’m hoping it will be resurrected. 

Fizz: Read in 2014.

Fizz: How Soda Shook UP the World by Tristan Donovan is a comparatively light read, beginning with Joseph Priestly's discovery of how to add CO2 bubbles to water in the 18th century. People immediately LOVED soda as shown by rapid improvements in soda-making technology and the following rise of the soda fountain as a social and dining institution. And of course Donovan ends the book with a series of wars between Coke and Pepsi. Fizz is only about artificial bubbles -- naturally carbonated spring water and natural bubbles from fermentation in beer or sparkling wine were long known and loved before artificial carbonation.

Champagne: Read in 2015

The region of Champagne, France, has the misfortune to lie just between Paris and the French-German border. In 1870, 1914, and 1939 the hillside vineyards, historic wineries, and underground aging and storage cellars were ravaged by wars between the two countries. The total destruction of whole towns and villages and the suffering that occurred, especially in the near-by trenches of World War I, are nearly unimaginable. Don and Petie Kladstrup did an excellent job with this painful history in their book Champagne: How the World's Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times, published 2005.

Champagne contains a detailed history of both myths and facts about Champagne and its origins -- especially the mythologizing that's occurred about the early cellar-master Dom Pérignon. The authors begin with the invention and production of its famous bubbly wine, continue with details about the people who produced, promoted, and drank the wine (and made up things about the origins); and wrap up by detailing how the region suffered through the battles and occupations of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course there's a bit about the Belle Epoch and how champagne became a drink of high-living Paris. I found the book fascinating, a wonderful successor to the Kladstrup's earlier book, Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure, published 2001.

Liquid Jade: Read in 2010

I enjoyed the discussion of Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West in my culinary book club even more than the reading. A strong shared impression about Liquid Jade was the sense that it broke into two parts with somewhat different approaches. The early chapters described the legendary discovery of tea, the development of tea growing, and the almost mystical view of tea drinking in China and Japan. These chapters had a much vaguer historic approach than the later chapters, which were more social and politically oriented, as well as describing the content and origin of tea varieties and how tea is processed for consumption. Even the author's discussion of tea as a trade commodity is handled differently in the earlier and later parts of the book.

The author's politics (which I didn't know but one person said were very left wing) were held responsible for her drastically negative view of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation of workers in the later chapters about the Opium Wars, the introduction of tea-growing to the British colonies of India and Ceylon, the rapacious traders, and the discussion on fair trade in modern agriculture. One response to this in our conversation was that no one could have a positive view of the way the British treated and viewed the "coolies" who worked in the colonial tea industry. We discussed the chapter on a letter from a high Chinese official to Queen Victoria, appealing to her sense of decency and asking her to drop the pushing of opium on the Chinese people. The response was the Opium War which destroyed the Chinese authority over the opium trade and had terrible consequences.

Tequila: Read in 2012

Tequila! A Natural and Cultural History by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan is a book that I enjoyed. Science and poetic description combine beautifully as the author describes the taxonomy of the agave plant used in the beverage, its long history beginning in prehistoric Mexico, and the lives and traditions of the Mexican agricultural workers who plant, cultivate, and harvest the agave crop. Valenzuela-Zapata describes their hard physical labor and the taxing heat and aridity of the fields, the simple meals they cook and eat while working, and their "quixotic" oral tradition.

"Mescaleros are forever spinning yarns about mescal -- the plant and the spirit -- while working in fields or resting in the nearby shade, and while jiving on the street corner or drinking in the cantina on the village plaza," writes the author. "They keep up their running commentary while bolting for cover during a sudden downpour, or cursing the sun as it bakes the plants they have tended for seasons." (p. 31)

The labor continues in the distilleries where huge harvested "pinas" are roasted and their liquid fermented, possibly with sugar, into a variety of tequilas. The lore continues, backward and forward in time, in many traditions of eating and drinking the fruit of this very widespread plant.

Reviews © 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2023 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Shared with Elizabeth’s blog party.

"High on the Hog" -- Book and Netflix Series

High on the Hog, published 2011.

Jessica B. Harris has written several books on the cuisine of the African diaspora. Her most famous, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America has now inspired a Netflix documentary series titled "High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America." 

Journalist Stephen Satterfield is the host of series, which begins with a visit to the country of Benin in Africa and an exploration of markets and restaurants there. This episode is titled "Roots," and the next three episodes are "The Rice Kingdom," "Our Founding Chefs," and "Freedom."

Before beginning to watch the series, I reread the book, which was a very well-liked selection of my culinary book club a couple of years ago (blogged here). The book documents the many ways that American cuisine was influenced by the enslaved Africans who brought foods and cooking techniques to America. Okra, rice, watermelon, black-eyed peas, and a few other cultivated plants were brought directly from the countries of origin of the enslaved African people being forcibly taken to America. A very important fact stressed in the book is that many of the enslaved people had valuable skills in food preparation and farming, especially in the cultivation of rice, covered in the second episode. 

Harris, in her book, writes about the important foods of the pre-slavery era in Africa:

"A wide band below the Sahara spanned from Sudan in the east to Senegal in the west and developed around the cultivation of sorghum and several varieties of millet. A coastal area and the Niger Delta region, including what is today Senegal and the Republic of Guinea, depended on rice and fonio, a native cereal grass that produces a small mustard-like seed. A third area, also on the coast, ran from today’s Côte d’Ivoire through Cameroon and cultivated yams. These three crucibles—cereals, rice, and yams—also marked three distinct areas from which enslaved Africans were brought to the United States. Each had its own traditional dishes centered on the starch that was its preference. Those from the rice crucible were among some of the earliest transported by the Transatlantic Slave Trade to what would become the United States. They brought with them their knowledge of rice cultivation and their memories of a rice-based cuisine, like that of today’s Senegal, where wags say that the Lord’s Prayer should be rewritten to say, 'Give us this day our daily rice'!"  (pp. 9-10). 

High on the Hog Episode 2, "The Rice Kingdom" begins in Charelston, South Carolina, which was the port of entry for a large percent of the enslaved Africans being brought to the colonies that became the US. It continues with the remote sea islands where the Gullah Geechee people -- descendants of the slaves of the region -- were extremely isolated. As a result, their culture has preserved more African folkways and foodways than most other communities. 

Rice grew in fields in the South Carolina lowlands. These had been cleared by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and continued to be cultivated there, especially Carolina Gold, the special rice of the region. After the Civil War, the absence of slave labor nearly put an end to the highly profitable rice-growing industry, but rice cuisine survives in African-American communities as explored by Satterfield and several local food personalities. I found this episode to be a really interesting extension of  Harris's book, not a repeat of her material. The interviews and communal dinners shown are especially appealing and informative.

Jessica B. Harris and Stephen Satterfield in Episode 1.

One of many residents of Benin interviewed.

Cooking a rice and okra soup on an open fire: Episode 2.

Pre-Civil-War rice cultivation by enslaved people. This and the previous illustrations are screen shots from the Netflix series.

After watching the first two episodes, I am enthusiastic, and will write more when I’ve seen more of them. This post © 2021 mae sander. Images are from the Netflix series.

Orange Juice

Orange juice from Whole Foods Market (screen shot January 8, 2021)
My preference is for half-gallon cartons of pasteurized orange juice.

Throughout the pandemic, I've been ordering Whole Foods orange juice through the above page at amazon.com.  Evidently, a lot of people are drinking orange juice this year. While sales of orange juice in the US had been declining for years, in 2020 they increased by around 10%, partly because there's a general belief that orange juice improves one's health -- which everyone is worried about. Also, more people have been eating breakfast at home, including more orange juice. (Source: Citrus Industry Magazine, January 8, 2021)

John McPhee's book Oranges tells the history of orange groves and orange juice production in Florida, as well as the history of oranges in many other times and places. In the 1960s, when McPhee wrote, the Florida orange-growing industry was completing the transition from producing and shipping fresh fruit up the east coast to producing frozen concentrate. 

The invention of frozen orange juice had caused huge change: while formerly, growers shipped boxes of fresh oranges to consumers, they now sent most of their produce to nearby factories, in which the more imaginative businessmen among them were investing their money. Instead of selling fruit whose flavor varied from season to season, from tree to tree, and even from one section of an orange to another, the factories blended multiple types of concentrated, processed, frozen juice (which tastes, says McPhee, like a blend of sugar and aspirin) with a little of the real thing. Small or large cans of juice concentrate became ubiquitous in supermarkets and home freezers.

McPhee wrote about consumers who had gladly switched over from squeezing oranges to reconstituting the syrupy stuff from the frozen cans. He discussed the sociology of orange-juice drinking: the blue-collar families of his day were still buying canned juice, while the educated consumer had embraced the frozen, and hardly anyone still squeezed their own. Neither the juice box nor the pasteurized OJ that's now most popular had yet been invented.

Researching his book, McPhee traveled the byways of rural Florida -- remember, before Disney. He observed that even the remaining roadside orange juice stands that he found were serving reconstituted juice concentrate. Further, his interviews with growers, pickers, and factory owners revealed that many orange groves were being cleared for new land use: the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral was in the process of being built on former groves. Finally, he wrote about the frenzy of effort to create new chemical orange juice surrogates. Add water to some crystals they were inventing -- they thought you would get orange juice. (I think they were actually creating Tang, but that was still in the future and they were optimistic.)

My orange juice for breakfast almost every day.
The Whole Foods orange juice carton has a new design.

When I was a child, everyone in my family had a small glass of orange juice with breakfast. My sister, brother, and I had been given "baby orange juice," that is, strained and sweetened orange juice, in our nursing bottles from something like the age of 6 months. It was a standard practice then, but is now considered very bad for babies. We survived.

My mother, like many people, switched from squeezing oranges to reconstituting frozen juice when this innovation became available in the 1950s. Some time in the 1970s, fresh-squeezed juice became a kind of a fad. Small markets or restaurants would have juice squeezers so they could make fresh juice on demand for their customers. Soon, bigger beverage bottlers began to offer fresh juice for the refrigerator aisles in the grocery store. This was much better-tasting than frozen juice. Then the orange processing industry developed pasteurized juice, which was less expensive and had a longer shelf-life but still tasted good. I continue to purchase and drink it. I guess I’ve been a very conventional consumer all my life!

Florida growers were the largest supplier of orange juice to Americans until 2017, when Brazil overtook them. Brazil currently leads the world in production of orange juice with nearly three times US production. Many Florida groves have been converted to other land use, like subdivisions of retirement homes. Florida citrus growers have struggled unsuccessfully against citrus diseases, and occasional frosts and hurricanes have destroyed orange trees over the years. Moreover, the price of Brazilian juice is lower; thus, many bottlers no longer buy American juice. The two cartons of orange juice in my refrigerator list Mexico -- the world's third-largest producer -- as the country of origin. (Statistics on global production here.)

Hesperides by
Samuel Tolkowsky. (link)

Over the years, I've read several other books about the history of citrus fruit. My favorites are McPhee's book (which I first read in 2008 and then In 2016, with my culinary history reading group, and again this week) and a very old and hard-to-find book titled Hesperides: A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits by Samuel Tolkowsky. This extensive book covers the history of entire citrus family from ancient times up until the book’s publication in 1938 -- a very interesting cultural study!

When my culinary reading group read Oranges, we particularly admired John McPhee's style and his captivating way of portraying the many people in the orange growing business in Florida. His sketches of the lives of advertising men, grove owners, fruit pickers, and many others enlivened his description of the history of citrus in Florida. Though out of date (the book has not been revised since its publication in 1966) the book brings a lot of the business of citrus to life. We wished there would be an update to tell us about modern issues like labor fairness, water consumption, climate change, and fluctuating demand from consumers of orange juice. 

I'm sharing my orange juice memories with Elizabeth and the other bloggers who like to talk about drinks once a week. This post is based on my previous writings about McPhee's book,  blogged here and here as well as current thoughts, so it is copyright © 2008-2021 by mae sander.

"All About the Burger" by Sef Gonzalez

This self-published pile of trivia was for some reason the selection of my culinary reading group this month. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the meeting. Unfortunately, I did buy and read the book.

If for some reason you do want to know the details of the founding of some huge number of hamburger chains in twentieth and twenty-first century America, you will find it here. From White Castle to Shake Shack, from Hardee's to Five Guys, not missing In-N-Out, Culver's, Whataburger, or special ethnic and regional burgers like the New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger or the Miami/Cuban Frita.

Doesn't it sound interesting? Sorry, it's just a compendium of miscellaneous facts, presented in a formulaic way. Who, where, how many, did they have pickles? There's a ton of detail. The author also covers various advertising campaigns and rivalries from MacDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, and so on, but I found a lack of any perspective on public reactions -- sometimes he says they failed, sometimes they brought in customers, but there's no insight.

In fact, that's my reaction to the whole book: it lacks insight. Yes, the man loves burgers, and he's tasted a humongous number of brands and types of burgers. That's all, folks.

This review is by Mae Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

If you read it elsewhere, it's been pirated. © 2020 mae sander.

“Hotbox” by Matt Lee & Ted Lee

New York food ways are not the food ways of the rest of the country. Not enough billionaires. Matt Lee and Ted Lee have written a very revealing book about how New York billionaires' catered party food (and that of a few slightly less wealthy New Yorkers) is created or designed, presented to party planners and party givers, and then cooked, delivered, and served. Because the emphasis is on the workers in the catering industry, the billionaires don't spoil the story -- they really don't talk to the help anyway.

What do billionaires eat? Here are a few examples:

• Hors d'oeuvres: "Tuna Tartare with Dijon and Diced Celery on Round Potato Crisp; Curried Chicken with Black Currant and Toasted Coconut of Bite-Size Papadum; Peking Duck Roll with Cucumber, Scallion,  and Hoisin; Mission Fig Puree with Candied Walnut and Whipped Boursin on Brioche." (p. 79-80)
• A dinner menu for 14 billionaires: "Frisée Salad, Pecorino, Cipollini Onion with Bacon Marmalade; Braised Lamb Shank with Winter Greens and Huckleberry Jus, Vanilla Bean Pot de Crème." (p. 121)
• Standard canapés "like pigs in blankets, the little triangular phyllo-dough pies called beggars' purses, and Chinese-style spring rolls" or high cost items like "Sunny-side Quail Egg with Tomato and Asparagus on Brioche." (p. 188)

The hotbox is the appliance that makes it possible to serve such food in venues where there's no kitchen at all. The hotbox, effectively unique to the catering industry is "an upright aluminum cabinet on wheels ... that conveys the partially cooked food from the refrigerator at the caterer's prep kitchen to the site of the party.... Once on-sight the hotboxes are emptied and transformed into working ovens."  (p. 4)

The heat source for a hot box is cans of Sterno in startlingly large numbers: enough to finish cooking partially cooked food and heat it to serving temperatures. Or these boxes can keep food cold with the use of dry ice.

Most fascinating: the techniques for making them work include a vast number of ingenious tricks and strategies. And the workers who understand this are wizards! Without the hotbox, the entire method of delivering food to exotic party venues would be impossible.

Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World's Richest Business by brothers Matt Lee and Ted Lee is enjoyable, informative, well-researched, and well-written. The illustrations are entertaining too: I've included a couple of scans at right. The two authors researched the subject by working for catering companies over a period of years. They really worked! And the work ranges from hard to grueling.

These authors weren't just journalists who embedded themselves for a few days. The Lees really got to know and respect the people who did the labor, as well as understanding the relationships among the various businesses that allow million-dollar (or more) fund-raising dinners, weddings, political dinners, bar mitzvahs, and other events to be held at kitchenless venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or big meeting places without food facilities. They wore the "polyester black pants, black clogs, and untailored white chef's jackets," (p. 79) and received the same salary as the other workers.

The best feature of the book, in my opinion, is the numerous interviews. These reveal the skills and responsibilities of the workers who staff the temporary kitchens, where the authors were working alongside them. They explain the rationale and challenges of chef-owners of catering companies who hire these workers. They delve into history through interviews about the origin of modern kitchenless catering in 1970s New York. They reveal the statistics of vast quantities of rental items -- obvious like cutlery, dishes, glassware, and tablecloths, less obvious like special wooden tables to give a party a rustic look, or special covers for fancy hors d'oeuvres.

I was never bored or impatient with anything in this book, though I didn't know I would be interested in the subject. I think that's the mark of really skilled and thoughtful authors. It's also really fun to read!

This review © 2019 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com

Kwame Onwuachi's "Notes from a Young Black Chef"

"At that time [1946, when the Culinary Institute of America was founded] being a chef was still a vocation, a blue-collar trade not unlike that of welder or electrician. Chefs were not seen as artists. It took nearly fifty years for cooking to become the exalted career it is today." (Notes from a Young Black Chef, p. 152)

From Newsweek right now, an article on Kwame Onwuachi.
The book is a current best-seller. (Photo from the article.)

Is cooking an exalted and artistic career? Or is it still a trade, a type of skilled manual labor? In the opinion of Kwame Onwuachi, a chef who has reached the peaks of achievement on food TV and in the restaurant business, there's no question at all that his profession requires artistic creation of the first order. Notes from a Young Black Chef, his bestselling memoir, explains how he reached these heights swiftly and despite the major obstacles of poverty and racism.

The type of food that's best-loved on the Food Network was Onwuachi's goal from his childhood in New York, when he loved to watch cooking contests on TV. At age 10, he was deprived of TV and all his urban life because his mother sent him to live with his father's family in rural Nigeria for around 2 years; among other things, he learned about Nigerian cooking. Although his parents were well-educated, his mother struggled to make a living as a caterer, and once he returned home to New York, he joined the kids from one of the tough and difficult "projects."

During high school and in a doomed few months at college, Onwuachi dealt drugs to make money. In an effort to get away from this environment he joined his mother, who by then had moved to New Orleans. There he worked low-end, poorly paid cooking jobs; to make more money, he took a job cooking for the crew on an oil-slick-clean-up boat in the Gulf. His goal was always to return to New York to establish a high-end catering business and to excel as a creator of fine food. He credits his mother with helping him launch his catering operation, and then he kept it going to earn the money to attend the Culinary Institute of America. As part of the CIA curriculum, he was an apprentice at Per Se, probably the most famous restaurant in New York, owned by famous chef Thomas Keller.

Onwuachi presents the descriptions of his early life and early success in a clear-headed and coherent way, sticking to two themes. First, everything he experienced contributed to his love of food and his dedication to the idea of being a chef of the type he saw on TV, a creative chef who combined food trends into incredible high-end menus with unusual and very expensive ingredients. Second, whenever he tried to enter the world of food and restaurant cooking, he experienced prejudice and outright hostility because he was a black man.

As you may know, I have read many food memoirs and other memoirs as well. Compared to many of them, Onwuachi presents his story with a very interesting "sense of urgency" (a term he quoted from Thomas Keller). I wasn't entirely surprised at the ugly bigotry he often encountered from gate keepers to culinary success, who often stated that the only appropriate food for a black chef to cook is the food of black people, whether from the American South or from Africa. I find especially depressing the un-surprising portrayal of racism in the kitchens of fine dining establishments. A major example of this racism occurred when Onwuachi called out a racist word used by a fellow employee at Per Se and was told "black people don't eat here anyway." After the book's publication, Per Se denied this (not too convincingly) to the New York Times. (source)

The author's life story is very similar to many stories of kids who grow up in disadvantaged areas of New York, with parents who struggle to get by, like his mother, and parents who are abusive and distant, like his father. So for me, there were many chapters that frankly seemed a bit boring, as if I had read it before.

That said, the author's success at getting funding for a very upscale and extremely expensive restaurant in Washington, D.C., was impressive. His qualifications at the time were sketchy, but he managed to find financing. I was a little suspicious that there was more to the story than I read in the book, as he says that the financial backers of the restaurant told him they had unlimited money -- who does that!? In any case, the restaurant ran out of money so quickly that it was only serving meals for 11 weeks.

This fiasco was the last thing covered by the memoir. According to updates in the reviews and the many other articles about him, Onwuachi ended up poor but with a fantastic reputation that enabled him to receive several major honors. He did manage to have his own restaurant. And all in the short time since he completed the book.

I'll close with a quote that captures for me the complex and ambiguous nature of Onwuachi's success. He was filling out an application to work at another famous New York restaurant: Craft owned by chef Tom Colicchio:

"It was a standard application, but aside from biographical information... the last question was 'If there was one dish you could eat right now, what would it be?' ... I knew it was a loaded question. What did I want to eat, and how honest did I want to be about it? What I really wanted was the comforting warmth of my mom's gumbo. The last time she cooked for me was a farewell feast the last night before I left Louisiana. Her small apartment kitchen in New Orleans was filled with the pepper-tinged seafood smell of gumbo, the faintly chlorinated scent of shrimp, and the spicy meatiness of andouille. But that's not what I wrote. 

"Instead, I came up with the most sophisticated and fancy-sounding combination of ingredients I could. Drawing on the knowledge gleaned from years of watching cooking shows and reading food magazines, from the menus of the places I had been that summer, I wrote: 'Foie gras crostini with white truffle and black garlic.'" (p. 140-141)

It's a reasonably good book, though considering all the similar ones I've read, I really can't quite understand why it's such a terrific best seller! Or why this particular memoir has been chosen as an upcoming movie. I'm glad it is the selection for the next meeting of my culinary reading group, and I'm looking forward to the discussion next week.

This review is © 2019 Mae Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. 

 If you read this elsewhere it's been stolen.

“High on the Hog” by Jessica Harris

Our culinary reading group, sponsored by Motte and Bailey bookshop, met last night to discuss High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica Harris (published 2011). In the photo above, you can see the bookstore setting where we meet. Gene Alloway, owner of Motte and Bailey, is at left. I thought I had included everyone, but unfortunately cut off one participant at far right.

Each of us who read the book liked it very much. Several participants praised the consistent and useful organization and the author's skillful writing. The ten chapters are in chronological order, and each chapter has three parts: a historical/sociological description of Black Americans during the selected era, a description of the foods and foodways that characterized the era, and information about restaurants at the time.

I also liked the many illustrations, the detailed descriptions of foods, and  the way Harris used quotes from many authors, like this one:

"In Harlem, as in other northern communities around the country, the newly arrived had to survive on what African American writer Ralph Ellison called 'shit, grit, and mother wit.'" (p. 174). 

In the chapters on the era of slavery, we were all quite fascinated to learn about the lives of the slaves who worked in the kitchens of the "Big House." We wondered about those who escaped in one way or another, and often became proprietors of restaurants, catering establishments, or food carts in the North. So many new ideas. For example, we were all quite fascinated by the information about Black cowboys and about the responsible role of Blacks as cooks on the cowboy chuck wagons out West.

In previous book selections, we had learned about Hercules, the enslaved cook of George Washington, and about James Hemings, the mixed-race cook who worked for Thomas Jefferson. (Hemings was the half-brother of Jefferson's wife, and brother of Sally Hemings, Jefferson's mistress: the heartlessness of Jefferson's treatment of these enslaved relatives never ceases to amaze us all!) Their stories, and many others, really capture something about the deeply troublesome and immoral aspects of slavery. Here's a very interesting passage about the escape of Hercules (also called Harkless) --

"His escape troubled the Washington family. 'The running off of my cook has been a most inconvenient thing to this family,' wrote Washington, who spared no expense in attempting to find him. No doubt finding it difficult to understand why one such favored slave would leave, Washington charged Frederick Kitt, his former house hold steward in Philadelphia, with finding Hercules and returning his property to him, noting, 'but little doubt remains in my mind of his having gone to Philadelphia, and may yet be found there, if proper measures were employed to discover (unsuspectedly so as not to alarm him) where his haunts are.' Several weeks later, Washington renewed his request to Kitt, stating that any expenses incurred in finding Hercules and returning him to Mount Vernon would be paid by Colonel Clement Biddle, but it was to no avail. Hercules had slipped off into the night. His six-year-old daughter, who remained enslaved at Mount Vernon, expressed thoughts that were probably more representative of those of Uncle Harkless himself. When asked by a guest at Mount Vernon if she were upset to never see her father again, she replied, 'O! sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.' Despite our lack of knowledge of him or his dishes, Hercules, the chef who doesn’t even have a last name for history, was more than a grace note to the history of African American chefs. He was the first black chef for the country’s first chief executive." (p. 76). 

Our discussion turned to one interesting twentieth-century phenomenon: the rise of Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims or Nation of Islam (NOI). We were interested in the way that the Black Muslims challenged traditional foodways of the American Black community. The following passage illustrates what Harris had to say:

"Pork is haram, or forbidden, to traditional Muslims. Pork, especially the less-noble parts, was also the primary meat fed to enslaved African Americans. Pork in any form was anathema to NOI members, as were collard greens or black-eyed peas seasoned with swine. The refusal of the traditional African American diet of pig and corn was an indictment of its deleterious effects on African American health, but also a backhanded acknowledgment of the cultural resonance that it held for most blacks, albeit one rooted in slavery. Pork had become so emblematic of African American food that the forbidding of it by the Nation of Islam was radical, and the refusal to eat swine immediately differentiated members of the group from many other African Americans as much as the sober dress and bow ties of the men and the hijab-like attire of the women. Forbidding pork made a powerful political statement, but the real culinary hallmark of the Nation was the bean pie— a sweet pie, prepared from the small navy beans that Elijah Muhammad decreed digestible. It was hawked by the dark-suited, bow-tie-wearing followers of the religion along with copies of the Nation’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, spreading the Nation’s gospel in both an intellectual and a gustatory manner." (pp. 210-211).

A recipe for this counter-cultural bean pie, along with many more traditional recipes, appears in the recipe section at the end of High on the Hog. A very interesting and enjoyable book!

Text and photos © 2019 by Mae Sander for Mae's Food Blog

Recent Reading

Bruno, Chief of Police

First: for this month's culinary reading group, we chose the initial book in Martin Walker's long series: Bruno, Chief of Police: A Mystery of the French Countryside.  Everyone enjoyed reading it, and I was glad to have recommended it: one participant enjoyed it so much that she's reading the entire series.

Briefly: Bruno works in St. Denis, an idealized French village, where all problems can be resolved, even very deep issues left over from the divided loyalties of resistants and collaborators in World War II. There's a lot of good food, and much about local food production. From Walker's introduction to the town:

"From the secretaries and social workers to the street sweepers and tax assessors, the staff of the Mairie would also be at Fauquet’s, nibbling their croissants and taking their the tartes aux citron and the millefeuilles they might take home for lunch along with the essential baguette of fresh bread and scanning the headlines of that morning’s Sud Ouest. Alongside them would be a knot of old men studying the racing form and enjoying their first petit blanc of the day. Bachelot the shoemaker would take his morning glass there, while the neighbor he despised, Jean-Pierre, who ran the bicycle shop, would start his day at the Café de la Libération. Their enmity went back to the days of the Resistance, when one of them had been in a communist group and the other had joined de Gaulle’s Armée Secrète..." (Bruno, Chief of Police, p. 7). 

 I've written about this series before, especially about the most recent one titled The Body in the Castle Well.

Stone Cold Heart

Second: this weekend I read Stone Cold Heart, a police procedural by Caz Frear, sequel to Sweet Little Lies (which I wrote about here). I didn't like it quite as much as the first in the series, though it's not bad, just a little too long-winded. I found the character development in Sweet Little Lies to be more effective as well.

In the first book there were a lot of good wisecracks and punchy observations. This one: not quite so much. But here's one that I liked, a quote from a conversation with the police department shrink:

“I took Gill to Paris last year and she dragged me to the Louvre. Do you know what we saw there? People— and I’m not just talking kids, grown-ups too— taking photos of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa. The most famous bloody painting in the world and folk think they need to put their ugly mugs in front of it. If that’s not narcissism, you tell me what is.” (Stone Cold Heart, p. 240). 

Zeitoun

My third recent book, earlier this week, was Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, an account of one family's experience during and after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The hurricane hit the city at the end of August in 2005, and the book was published in 2009.

Zeitoun is a very painful book to read, because the central character, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, was unbearably abused by the FEMA authorities. Jailed for no good reason, he and many others were held without trial and without respect for their constitutional rights. Although his status as a Syrian immigrant was part of the reason why he was so badly treated, many other people of various origins received equally horrible misuse.

The pain and humiliation of Zeitoun's experience was all too real, and the resonance with our current arbitrary imprisonment of immigrants was all too clear. I don't feel like writing more about the details, except to say that it's an extremely well-organized and readable book.

Text copyright © 2019 Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot.com

"The Gourmands' Way" by Justin Spring

The title of this book could be "Spring Cleaning." The author, Justin Spring, takes a fresh, and not always flattering look at six famous American writers that he says contributed to the idealized image of French food and wine in much of American intellectual and gourmet life. Spring concentrates on the post-war years, approximately 1945-1975, with bits of background and followup -- a wonderful era in France, and an interesting time for the development of American taste in food, especially French food.

Although I was already very familiar with the lives and works of four of Spring's subjects, and moderately aware of the other two, I learned something -- usually a lot of things -- about all of them from Spring's book. His research into their lives, their publications, and the history of their time in France is incredible. I very much liked his narrative style: he doesn't separate the discussion of the six, but treats their experiences as a continuing history and describes their relationships to one another and common approaches to food and to French life. In the course of the book, Spring also provides lots of information about a vast number of other books and personalities, both French and American, which I equally enjoyed.

Ruth Reichl, in her New York Times review titled "Iconic Food Writers Toppled Off Their Pedestals" took this view of the book --

"Spring sets out to prove that the six writers he chronicles — Julia Child, M. F. K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A. J. Liebling, Richard Olney and Alice B. Toklas — were responsible for making 'the age-old French dialogue surrounding food, wine and the table' part of the American dialogue. I’m not convinced he’s done that, but he has achieved something much more interesting: offered us an entirely new perspective on a group of people we thought we knew."

Instead of writing a review here, I'm going to show a photo of my own books by five of these authors and tell you one or two new things I learned about each one. I do not own any works by Alexis Lichine, and virtually everything about him was new to me.

From My Bookshelves

Richard Olney (1927-1999)

Although I have his cookbook, Simple French Food, I was very little acquainted with author Richard Olney, and Spring's detailed and highly admiring portrait was enjoyable to read. I was particularly interested to learn about Olney's relationship with a number of other American ex-pats in Paris and France in the fifties and sixties, especially his friendship with James Baldwin. I also was unaware that Olney had written in French for the magazine Cuisine et Vins de France, a publication that I used to read (though after his tenure there).

Julia Child (1912-2004)

While I knew much of the life story of Julia and Paul Child, I was very interested in Spring's detailed treatment of their restaurant-going in Paris:

"Apart from Michaud, which became their local favorite, the Childs began following the Parisian custom of visiting particular restaurants for particular dishes. Having been stunned shortly after disembarking the transatlantic liner by the sole meunière at the restaurant La Couronne in Rouen...she was delighted to discover that La Couronne had a sister restaurant in Paris, La Truite... serving the same seafood just as beautifully. ...

"The Childs also liked the poulet gratiné at Au Gourmet; the tripe at Pharamond; the snails at L'Escargot d'Or; and the onion soup -- de rigueur after a late night visit to Les Halles -- at Au Pied de Cochon. For choucroute they went, of course, to Brasserie Lipp ... On special occasions, they went to Prunier, so famous for its fish, or to Lapérouse, the ancient and celebrated restaurant on the quai des Grands Augustins. Still, it was the intimate Le Grand Véfour, with its unbelievably elegant neoclassical interiors fronting the gardens of the Palais-Royal, that quickly became their favorite...." (p. 92-93)

Spring explains that Julia Child had a substantial inheritance that enabled them to dine out and generally live well beyond the means that Paul's salary as an American government employee would have covered.

Just a note about money: Spring is fascinated by it! For example, virtually every bottle of wine mentioned in the text is footnoted with its price at the time of its purchase, along with the price one would have to pay at the time he wrote the book in around 2016.

A,J. Liebling (1904-1963)

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris was one of the first food books that I read, a long time ago, and I knew little else about Liebling except that he wrote about boxing for the New Yorker. Spring's Chapter One opens thus "When the Allied forces entered Paris on August 25, 1944, war correspondent A.J. Liebling (or 'Joe') was right there with them." (p. 7). Spring's account of the liberation of Paris from Liebling's point of view was a great beginning.

M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)

Rather than the more popular books by M.F.K. Fisher, Spring concentrates on her disastrous endeavor to write the first of the Time-Life food books, which was supposed to be about Provincial French cuisine. Spring is incredibly dismissive of Fisher, whom he calls a liar on more than one occasion, and whose writing he clearly despises. He gleefully quotes a set of highly negative and pretty snarky footnotes by a French author (and food snob; excuse me, food expert) that were somehow added into the French edition of the Time-Life book. The notes constantly contradict Fisher's text; usually they were right, but it's somehow underhanded to have this be Spring's main discussion of her work.

Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967)

"I Love You Alice B. Toklas" was a pretty forgettable film with Peter Sellers, except that in 1968 the hashish brownies that Sellers' character eats were beyond transgressive. And the recipe came from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, probably from a paperback that looked like mine, which dates to 1960. I was pretty familiar with the way Toklas's book impressed the American public (especially the hippies), but I didn't realize that she copied all of the famous words about the brownies from the letter and recipe contributed by her friend, beginning with the famous line "This is the food of paradise." (p. 273). According to Spring, Alice steadfastly claimed that she did not know that the exotic herb in the ingredient list was the famous intoxicant, and seriously illegal.

Conclusion

In Spring's Afterword, he underscores his principal claim about his subjects: "While none of these six writers invented French cooking, and while none could be called a definitive authority on the subject, each did his or her readers an extraordinary service by introducing them to the genius of French gastronomy." (p. 381)

The Gourmand's Way is a deep and rich history, very much worth reading. It will be the selection for the next meeting of my culinary reading group. It's also very appropriate for the ongoing blog event "Paris in July" hosted by Tamara. I especially want to encourage my fellow bloggers who love France and love Paris to read Spring or to read any of the other authors he discusses -- I hope to go back to some of these authors and read more of their work/try more of their recipes! After all these years, you know, hashish fudge is finally legal in many states.

All content in this post is written and copyright 2019 by Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. If you are reading this at another blog, it's been stolen.

Two Good History Books by Adrian Miller

The selection for this month's meeting of my culinary history reading group is The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed our First Families. I enjoyed it so much that I immediately bought an earlier book by the same author, Adrian Miller. His book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time was also very interesting and full of insights and information that I had not been aware of before. These books are very appropriate for reading this month since February is African American History Month.

The President's Kitchen Cabinet presents a chronological study of African American cooks and kitchen workers who served in the White House, first occupied by John Adams, and the homes of Washington and Jefferson prior to the White House. Miller, in my opinion, did a wonderful job of illustrating certain aspects of American history through the specific individuals in presidential service. Using as much detail as he could find, he presents the conditions of work and the lives of the presidential cooks. Sadly, at times even their names are lost to history, and details are often scarce, but he made the best of it. We get a general picture by learning how these particular African Americans dealt with mainstream white attitudes and prejudices.

Several of the pre-Civil-War presidents brought enslaved African Americans to their kitchens. Until the Truman years, presidents had to pay their own expenses -- so the slave-owners among the early presidents were using the unpaid labor at their disposal rather than hiring employees. But even when kitchen staff were free men and women, they were far from equal to whites. Legal and conventional limitations on African American workers' potential professions and occupations meant that kitchen work was one of the few areas where they were allowed employment. For around a century and a half, kitchen employees were virtually the only black workers in the lives of US presidents: Miller describes how at times, these workers became informants that gave the president an African American point of view, and thus played a political role. Obviously, quite a bit of the historical background is painful to read, but Miller shows how the African American cooks had dignity and high principles despite the evils of American society.

Author Adrian Miller (from amazon.com)

Miller's book Soul Food takes a very different approach to history, but it's just as engaging and interesting as The President's Kitchen Cabinet. Miller's definition of Soul Food is both personal and sociological. He chooses a number of his favorite typical African-American foods, and then works through their history, particularly trying to discover which foods and preparations have deeper roots in West Africa where most African Americans' ancestors came from.

I completely enjoyed the way that Miller combines personal memories, historical narratives and memoirs, published cookbooks and well-known cookbook authors, and what I see as diligent scholarship in looking up the history of these foods. He considers questions of taste, socio-economic status, and whether Soul Food is good or bad for one's health. He also describes many social contexts for Soul Food consumption, such as having the preacher as a guest at a fried-chicken Sunday dinner, or the organization and content of communal meals.

Where he can, Miller connects his chosen food topics to native foods in West Africa. However, he also connects Soul Food favorites to recipes that black workers cooked in southern kitchens: both enslaved workers and later free workers. The favorite desserts he lists (banana pudding, pound cake, and peach cobbler, particularly) all, in his view, have British origins.

Some of the foods he describes are familiar, classic choices that almost anyone associates with Soul Food: for example, fried chicken, fried fish, cornbread, candied yams, greens, and chitlins. Others were a bit of a surprise, like "the most famous dish probably unknown to you" which is roasted possum with sweet potatoes! One chapter is titled "How did Macaroni and Cheese Get So Black?" -- he's right, I had no idea that mac & cheese was a major choice on Soul Food tables. There's also a chapter on hot sauce, which I thought was more generically southern. Or red Kool-Aid, which I had no idea was so central to Soul Food, but which he shows is actually closely related to beverages consumed in West Africa.

My summary really doesn't capture the fascinating way that Miller knits all these different forms of research and experience into a readable book that's full of insights about history, food history, and good eating.

Vacation Reading

During our recent vacation, I had quite a bit of time to read, both in airports and while relaxing in the condo where we stayed. Here's a brief summary of the books I read:

Hunger: A Memoir of my Body by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is a powerful social critic, and a suffering human being. She's experienced mistreatment and scorn because she's black and because she's very obese. Throughout this memoir, she keeps her focus on how her own pain connects to her experience in American life. As she describes being shunned, ignored, abused, hated, derided, blamed, and disrespected, the reader should cringe! Although many of the specific experiences she describes have been covered by others who were abused because of their race or size, her words are poignant.

Gay probes the causes of her obesity, which she says was a result of her having been raped when she was around 12 years old: she responded by trying to be as unattractive as she could, and she did this by eating to become fat. She describes the sympathy and loyalty of her parents during her lost years in her 20s, when she was very poor and lived in difficult circumstances. A sad and impressive book.

Here's a paragraph that embodies some of the things I'm trying to say:

"When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes." (Kindle Locations 1107-1110).

The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman

A long time ago, culture could be classified into simplistic pigeon holes: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. These were very judgmental words! One of the biggest popularizers of middlebrow culture was named Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999). He was the moderator of a popular radio program titled "Information Please" from 1938 to 1951. He chose books for the Book-of-the-Month Club. I believe that he's now mainly forgotten.

In her memoir, Fadiman's daughter Anne Fadiman described his early life in Brooklyn. She discusses his parents who were poorly-educated immigrants, and how he left them behind. (Her grandfather died when she was 10 years old: she met him only once!) She tells how he went to Columbia University and managed to invent himself as a cultural icon. This story is very fascinating.

Anne Fadiman especially explores her father's love of wine, about which he wrote several books. It's details her struggle to love wine as much as her father did. One of the most interesting chapters of the memoir, in fact, is not about him at all, but about her discovery of modern neuroscience of taste and how it enlightened her about her lack of wine love -- and thus her fear that she was not a "good" daughter.

If you want to read only a part of the book this chapter was excerpted in the New Yorker: "How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine:The fault was not in my stars, nor in myself, but in my fungiform papillae." By Anne Fadiman, September 30, 2017.

Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee.

This book, I would say, is jut OK. Edward Lee, the author, seems to try too hard to be bold and imaginative. Sometimes I found him to be sort of a shadow of another famous Korean-American chef, David Chang.

Lee travels around America to immigrant communities, and tries to talk to the people who are cooking in ethnic restaurants. Sometimes they refuse to let him in the kitchens, and won't tell him anything. Sometimes they invite him into their homes and workplaces and the bars where they hang out. He tries to understand how they have adapted their native foods to America. Sometimes he seems to get more insights than other times. Sometimes I felt like his writing had too many clichés.

Lee's description of a visit to a Lebanese diner in Louisiana:

"The menu is split into three sections: Southern favorites, Lebanese foods, and Italian dishes such as spaghetti and lasagna. I order something from each section. Tom is impressed by my appetite. He has the girth of a chef who likes to eat and a handlebar moustache that he teases with his fingertips when he speaks. Tom and I talk about the history of Clarksdale, about food and authenticity, about what it means to have a culture sewn so tightly into the fabric of everyday life that it is normal for a white blue-collar worker to come here and ask for his kibbeh on a roll as though he were ordering a cheeseburger. This isn’t Lebanese food anymore, Tom tells me. This is Delta food and, more specifically, Clarksdale food."  (Kindle Locations 2029-2034).

St. Burl's Obituary by Daniel Akst.

This book was supposed to be a selection for my culinary reading group, but I think it's been deferred or replaced. I’m not liking it much — it’s very forced, and the plot gets worse as it goes along.

Burl, the main character, was a very very fat man. Having read Roxane Gay's book, I'm aware of how cruel it is to use a fat person in a book the way this book uses its protagonist. Yes, he does love food, and detailed food descriptions are a major thing in this book. But... But...

An example of how the author uses food and fatness:

"For his own meal he was constrained as usual by fastidiousness, or an overdeveloped sense of propriety. Burl loved barbecue, for example, and fried chicken, but was too self-conscious to eat it in public, imagining himself in the eyes of onlookers as a living Thomas Nast cartoon, or Henry VIII brandishing a drumstick. He settled on smothered rabbit, cooked crisp in an iron skillet but salty and moist on the inside, heaped with sautéed onions and served over grits, with coconut sweet potatoes and greasy, smoky-tasting stringbeans." (Kindle Locations 480-484). 

Harvey Washington Wiley

“To be cheated, fooled, bamboozled, cajoled, deceived, pettifogged, demagogued, hypnotized, manicured and chiropodized are privileges dear to us all.” -- Harvey Washington Wiley, quoted in The Poison Squad, p. 52.

“Whenever a food is debased in order to make it cheap, the laboring man pays more for any given nourishment than the rich man does who buys the pure food.” -- Harvey Washington Wiley, quoted p. 230. 

Deborah Blum's book, The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, presents the life, accomplishments, and political experiences of Harvey Washington Wiley (1844-1930), chief chemist of the US Department of Agriculture. Blum highlights the uncanny resemblance between food politics now and then, particularly during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (in office from 1901-1909). After many years of government employment, Wiley founded the test labs of Better Homes and Gardens and created their famous "seal of approval."

At our regular, once-a-month meeting of the culinary history reading group, my friends discussed this book along with many issues that it brought up. The four of us who had read it agreed that it was a very good read!

A few comments from our discussion:

Celeste said: "The book made me feel like we were living through that time." She expressed her shock at some of the abuses as well: "Who would poison cake frostings?"

Dan said about the repetition of history: "It's really discouraging: a vicious cycle, a debilitating cycle. For example, the suppression of the papers that Wiley's team wrote. Beyond food contamination, look at the efforts today to destroy the EPA."

Gene said: "It's all about freedom of choice vs. regulation: it took a while for the government to struggle with  the idea of regulating commerce. The American ideal of freedom had to be lined up with the way that regulation could be beneficial, to get away from the idea that cleaner food would ruin American business. Roosevelt didn't have a problem with big business, and had to understand the danger of allowing them total freedom."

Here are some big examples of the events in Harvey Wiley's career that have uncanny parallels to modern food politics:

• The alteration and debasement of food, including false labeling, false advertising, and other corruption. For example, in the late 19th century, a process was invented to manufacture corn syrup of corn sugar. Wiley wanted to require it to be labeled by a different name (glucose) to prevent confusing it with real sugar: the industry fought back. Further, manufacturers substituted saccharine for sugar in many products, and adulterated many others with considerably more dangerous chemical additives. Ketchup was a big example: H.J.Heinz demonstrated could be made from real tomatoes and condiments, instead of being "made from assorted trimmings dumped into barrels after tomatoes were canned, then thickened with ground pumpkin rinds, apple pomace (the skin, pulp, seeds, and stems left after the fruit was pressed for juice), or cornstarch and dyed a deceptively fresh-looking red." (p. 212).
• Self-interest of corporations above the welfare of the public -- notably, Monsanto and Dow Chemical, which both promoted chemical additives that they were selling to industry in the late 19th century. Laboratory studies were often commissioned by corporations -- with results coming out to please their sponsors. Wiley was an important counterweight to this, as he did actual tests to see what chemicals were dangerous to human health and life. He was famous for "the poison squad," a series of studies where he controlled the diet of groups of young healthy men to see what would happen if they ate certain commonly used additives.
• Corporations abused their workers, who were often helpless immigrants. The book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair especially highlighted the dangerous working conditions in meat-packing plants resulting in horrendous filth being sold as sausage. Growing public sentiment favoring regulation was widely rejected by politicians, but The Jungle stirred up the will of the people, supporting Wiley's ongoing efforts.
• Corrupt elected officials. The book offers a wide variety of examples of the many efforts to pass legislation that were derailed by unsavory deals and campaign contributions between business and politicians. Wiley struggled with this political scene for his entire career in government service.
• A gap in the nutritional possibilities of rich and poor citizens, especially in large urban areas. Rich people could acquire wholesome, fresh, and not-mislabeled foods; poor people had to shop where they could and buy the often-adulterated foods they could afford. Wiley was acutely aware of this discrepancy and felt responsible for all people, not just those who could afford to help themselves.

From our discussion, a summary of the main theme of the book: this is about the tragedy of the commons, the conflict of freedom with the idea of the common good. As always, I'm grateful to Gene Alloway of Motte and Bailey Books for sponsoring this great group and leading our discussions!