Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Thomas Jefferson, thanks to his scrupulous – one might say obsessive – record-keeping (for eight years, while helping to run a new nation, he found time to track the first and last appearances on Washington market stalls of thirty-seven types of vegetable), has left us the most complete chronicle of the life of a farmer in colonial times, but also the least typical. As we have already seen with the tomato and potato, Jefferson was a tireless experimenter with foods and grew any number of plants that most Americans had never heard of, among them such exotica as eggplant, damson plums, Savoy cabbages, sugar beets, cauliflower, endive, chicory (which he called succory), broccoli, celery and a kind of squash called cymling. Only grapes of a sufficient calibre to make a palatable wine eluded him, to his unending despair.6

  Other planters were less adventurous, but compensated with quantity. Diners at the finer homes were commonly offered eight or ten kinds of meat or fish, a galaxy of vegetables, and half a dozen desserts, all washed down with copious quantities of wine, porter, rum, beer or Madeira. Jefferson, in his first year in the White House, spent $2,800 – more money than many people saw in a lifetime – on wine alone.

  For farmers, food was almost entirely home-grown. As late as 1787, even a prosperous yeoman farmer in New England might spend no more than $10 a year on all outside purchases. This might include a little tea or coffee, a good deal of salt and perhaps some molasses, but in all other respects he and his household were entirely self-sufficient.

  By the mid-1800s many Americans were eating well enough to give foreign critics something new to be appalled at. A correspondent for The Times of London recorded with amazement a ‘typical’ American breakfast – ‘black tea and toast, scrambled eggs, fresh spring shad, wild pigeons, pigs’ feet, two robins on toast, oysters’ and that, he implied, was one of the lighter repasts.7 If such breakfasts were eaten, and a touch of scepticism might not be misplaced here, they weren’t eaten by everyone. The bulk of urban dwellers ate poorly, partly because their meagre wages didn’t permit better, but also because such medical advice as filtered down to them suggested that most fresh foods were hazardous. Until the mid-nineteenth century, received wisdom had it that anyone reckless enough to consume an apple or pear or indeed almost any other vegetative product was all but asking for a speedy death at the hand of typhoid, dysentery or cholera.8 During cholera epidemics city councils routinely banned the sale of fruits and salads, but even during comparatively safe periods most people thought it imprudent to feed almost any plant food (with the exception of a well-boiled potato) to the more susceptible members of the community, especially children, who of course most needed the vitamins. As a result, diseases associated with malnutrition stalked even the better-off families.

  Milk, too, was widely regarded as perilous, though with some justification, since it spoiled quickly and was processed and delivered in a manner that owed little – in fact nothing – to modern standards of hygiene. Almost every family had a story of a member who had died of ‘milksick’ or ‘the trembles’ after drinking tainted milk.

  As the nineteenth century progressed, diet evolved into two camps – the few who ate well and the many who did not – and class antagonisms were not long in emerging. The patrician New Yorker Martin Van Buren was ousted from the Presidency in 1840 in large part because one of his Whig opponents made a celebrated speech attacking Van Buren for serving such delicate and unmanly fare in the White House as strawberries, cauliflower and celery. (Van Buren gained a sort of vicarious revenge when at the subsequent inauguration the crusty William Henry Harrison refused to don an overcoat, contracted pneumonia and with alarming haste expired; his tenure as President was just thirty days, much of that spent unconscious.)

  Gradually even poorer Americans became acquainted with a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, though the linguistic evidence shows that they weren’t always quite sure what to make of them. For the potato alone, the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles records such arresting nineteenth-century concoctions as potato custard, potato chowder, potato pone, potato pudding and even potato coffee. We can assume that most of these were consumed in a spirit of either experimentation or desperation and that most didn’t survive long in the native diet.

  Only a relative handful of new foods entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century, among them pretzel (1824), pumpernickel (1839), liverwurst (1869), tutti-frutti (1876) and spaghetti (1880). What changed was the way Americans ate. In particular they began to eat out. Before the 1820s, dining out was an activity reserved almost exclusively for travellers. Though it was possible to eat in hotels and taverns, there were no places dedicated to the public consumption of food for the mere pleasure of it, nor any word to describe them. Then in 1827 a new word and concept entered American English from France: restaurant.

  It was in that year that two Swiss-born brothers, Giovanni and Pietro Del-Monico, opened a coffee and pastry shop in the Battery district of New York City. The enterprise was sufficiently successful that in 1831 they invited their nephew Lorenzo to join them. Though just nineteen and with no experience in catering, Lorenzo was born to culinary greatness. He did none of the cooking, but he did buy the food, and made a point of arriving before dawn at the city’s main markets to acquire the best and freshest provisions, a practice now routine but at the time unheard-of. He transformed the Del-Monicos’ pastry shop into America’s premier restaurant (actually a series of restaurants: Delmonico’s moved frequently and sometimes operated under as many as four roofs at once), bringing a dimension of elegance to American dining that it had theretofore lacked. Under the new, unhyphenated name Delmonico’s, the restaurant introduced Americans to many unfamiliar dishes, ranging from artichokes and mayonnaise (named originally for the Minorcan port Mahón)9 to fricasseed calf’s head, and invented several as well, notably lobster Newburg, which began life as lobster à la Wenburg. It was so called in honour of an esteemed client, Ben Wenburg, until he disgraced himself through some unseemly (but intriguingly unspecified) altercation on the premises, and the dish was abruptly anagrammatized. A similar transformation happened with another Delmonico’s creation, chicken à la Keene, named for one Foxhall Keene, which became over time (for reasons that appear to have gone unnoted) chicken à la king.

  Inspired by Delmonico’s example, restaurants sprouted all over. By the 1870s New York City alone had over five thousand restaurants, many of them, like La Maison Dorée, Louis Sherry’s and Lüchows, of a standard comparable to the finest restaurants of Europe. With the new restaurants came new dishes, like Waldorf salad and eggs Benedict, both created at the Waldorf-Astoria in the 1890s. The latter was designed as a hangover cure for one Samuel Benedict, though how anyone with a hangover could face poached eggs swimming in hollandaise sauce and think it recuperative will for ever be a mystery to me.10

  For many immigrants, and for the Italians in particular, the restaurant business became an attractive way to establish a foothold in the New World. Trattorie – family-run restaurants – became a feature on street corners in every large city, some of them growing into large and celebrated establishments like Mama Leone’s and Sardi’s in New York and Colisimo’s in Chicago. Most, however, stayed small, like G. Lombardi’s on Spring Street in New York, which would now be forgotten to history except that one of its early proprietors had the uncommon prescience in 1905 to introduce Americans to a dish for which they would develop an abiding addiction: the pizza.11

  Many ‘classic’ Italian dishes are in fact New World creations. Chicken tetrazzini – chicken in a cream sauce on spaghetti – was named for the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini but invented in New York. The caesar salad comes from Tijuana. It was devised by a restaurateur named Caesar Cardini who, so the story goes, whipped up the salad from leftover ingredients when a party of hungry guests descended on him late one night. Fettuccine primavera was born in the kitchen of New York’s Le Cirque restaurant. Veal parmigiana, clams Posillipo, fettuccine Alfredo, even spaghetti and meatbal
ls were all products designed to satisfy the American palate. ‘By the 1950s,’ as one writer has put it, ‘Italian-American food was all but unrecognizable to visitors from Italy. A businessman from Turin might peruse a menu in an Italian restaurant in Chicago and not be able to decipher a single item.‘12

  A similar situation obtained with many other well-loved ‘foreign’ foods. Russian dressing is unknown to the Russians, as is the American variety of French dressing to the French. Vichyssoise was invented not in France but in New York in 1910, and Liederkranz cheese sprang not from Germany, or even from Austria or Switzerland, but from Monroe, New York, in 1892. (The name, meaning ‘wreath of song’, commemorates a local choral society.) Chilli con carne was unknown in Spain until introduced there from the New World. Salisbury steak has nothing to do with the English cathedral city (it was named for an American, Dr J. H. Salisbury), nor does Swiss steak have even the tiniest alpine pedigree. Chop-suey (based on the Cantonese word for miscellany) first saw light not in China but in San Francisco in the late 1800s, though the word itself does not appear in print until 1903. The fortune cookie was invented in Los Angeles in the second decade of this century. More recent still is chow mein, which first appeared in 1927, though the pidgin word chow dates in print from 1856 and the slightly more emphatic chowchow is first recorded in 1857.13

  As America became increasingly urbanized, people took to eating their main meal in the evening. To fill the void between breakfast and dinner, a new and essentially American phenomenon arose: lunch. The words lunch and luncheon (often spelled lunchon, lunchen, lunchion or lunching) have been around in English since the late 1500s. Originally they signified lumps of food – ‘a lunchen of cheese’ – and may have come from the Spanish lonja, a slice of ham. The word was long considered a deplorable vulgarism, suitable only to the servants’ hall. In America, however, ‘lunch’ became respectable, and as it dawned on opportunistic restaurateurs that each day millions of office workers required something quick, simple and cheap, a wealth of new facilities sprang up to answer the demand. In short order Americans got diners (1872), lunch counters (1873), self-service restaurants (1885), cafeterias (1890s), automats (1902), and short-order restaurants (1905).

  The process began in 1872 in Providence, Rhode Island, when one Walter Scott loaded a wagon with sandwiches, boiled eggs and other such fare and parked outside the offices of the Providence Journal. Since all the restaurants in town closed at 8 p.m. he had no competition and his business thrived. Soon wagons began appearing all over. By the time Scott retired forty-five years later he had fifty competitors in Providence alone. They were called lunch wagons, which was odd: because they didn’t come out until dusk, lunch was the one thing they didn’t serve. When residents complained about having food served outside their houses, cities everywhere enacted ordinances banning the wagons. So the lunch wagon proprietors hit on the idea of moving their wagons to vacant lots, taking off the wheels and calling them restaurants, since restaurants were immune from the restrictions. By the 1920s several companies were mass-producing shiny, purpose-built restaurants known everywhere as diners. From a business point of view diners were an appealing proposition. They were cheap to buy and maintain. You could set them up in hours on any level piece of ground, and if trade didn’t materialize you loaded them on to a flat-bed truck and moved them elsewhere. A single diner in a good location could make a profit of $12,000 a year – a lot of money in the 1920s. One of the more enduring myths of American eating is that diners were built out of old railway dining-cars. Hardly any were. They were just made to look that way.

  The first place known to be called a cafeteria – though the proprietor spelled it cafetiria – was opened in Chicago in the early 1890s. The word came from Cuban Spanish and as late as 1925 was still often pronounced in the Spanish style, with the accent on the penultimate syllable. Cafeterias proved so popular that they spawned a huge, if mercifully shortlived, vogue for words of similar form: washeteria, groceteria, caketeria, drugeteria, bobateria (a place where hair was bobbed), beauteria, chocolateria, shaveteria, smoketeria, hardware-ateria, garmenteria, furnitureteria – even casketeria for a funeral home and the somewhat redundant restauranteria.

  The automat – a cafeteria where food was collected from behind little windows after depositing the requisite change in a slot – was not an American invention but a Swedish one. In fact, they had been common in Sweden for half a century before two entrepreneurs named Horn and Hardardt opened one in Philadelphia in 1902 and started a small, lucrative empire.

  Luncheonette (sometimes modified to lunchette) entered American English in about 1920 and in its turn helped to popularize a fashion for words with -ette endings: kitchenette, dinette, usherette, roomette, bachelorette, drum majorette, even parkette for a meter maid and realtyette for a female estate agent.14

  The waitresses and hash slingers (an Americanism dating from 1868) who worked in these establishments evolved a vast, arcane and cloyingly jocular lingo for the food they served and the clients who ate it. By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that ‘Noah’s boy’ was a slice of ham (since Ham was one of Noah’s sons) and that ‘burn one’ or ‘grease spot’ designated a hamburger. ‘He’ll take a chance’ or ‘clean the kitchen’ meant an order of hash, ‘Adam and Eve on a raft’ was two poached eggs on toast, ‘cats’ eyes’ was tapioca pudding, ‘bird seed’ was cereal, ‘whistleberries’ were baked beans and ‘dough well done with cow to cover’ was the somewhat laboured way of calling for an order of toast and butter. Food that had been waiting too long was said to be ‘growing a beard’. Many of these shorthand terms have since entered the mainstream, notably ‘BLT’ for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, ‘over easy’ and ‘sunny side up’ in respect of eggs, and ‘hold’ as in ‘hold the mayo’.

  Eating out – usually quickly, cheaply and greasily – became a habit for urban workers and a big business for the providers. Between 1910 and 1925 the number of restaurants in America rose by 40 per cent. A hungry New Yorker in 1925 could choose from among 17,000 restaurants, double the number that had existed a decade before.15 Even drugstores got in on the act. By the early 1920s, the average drugstore, it was estimated, did 60 per cent of its business at the soda fountain.16 They had become in effect restaurants that also sold pharmaceutical supplies.

  As the nineteenth century wore on and the American diet became consistently livelier, it inevitably sparked alarm among those who believed that sensual pleasures were necessarily degenerate. There arose mighty bands of men and women who believed with a kind of religious fervour that the consumption of the wrong foods would lead to the breakdown of the nation’s moral fibre. One man went so far as to form a Society for the Suppression of Eating, which would appear to be taking matters about as far as they will go. Others were only slightly more accommodating to the need for sustenance. Typical of the breed was the Revd Sylvester Graham, who equated insanity with eating ketchup and mustard, and believed that the consumption of meat would result in the sort of hormonal boisterousness that leads men to take advantage of pliant women. Many believed him – so many indeed that by mid-century the nation was not only following his cheerless recipes, but many thousands of people were living in Graham boarding-houses, where his dietary precepts were imposed with rigour. Then there was Horace Fletcher, who gave the world the notion that each bite of food should be chewed thirty-two times. Though he had no standing as a nutritionist – he was an importer by trade – that didn’t stop him from disseminating his theories in a phenomenally successful book, The ABC of Nutrition, published in 1903.

  But the zenith of America’s long, obsessive coupling of food with moral rectitude came with a Seventh Day Adventist doctor named John Harvey Kellogg who in 1876 took over the failing Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, renamed it the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium (though everyone soon knew it as the Battle Creek Sanitarium or simply the Kellogg) and introduced a regime of treatments that was
as bizarre as it was popular. Possibly the two were not unconnected.

  Patients who were underweight were confined to their beds with sandbags on their abdomens and forced to eat up to twenty-six meals a day. They were not permitted any physical exertion. Even their teeth were brushed by an attendant lest they needlessly expend a calorie.17 The hypertensive were required to eat grapes and nothing else – up to 14 lb. of them daily. Others with less easily discernible maladies were confined to wheelchairs for months on end and fed experimental foods such as gluten wafers and ‘a Bulgarian milk preparation known as yogurt’. Kellogg himself was a trifle singular in his habits. It was his practice to dictate long tracts on the evils of meat-eating and masturbation (the one evidently led to the other) while seated on the lavatory or while riding his bicycle in circles around the lawn. Despite – or very possibly because of – these peculiarities, Kellogg’s Temple of Health’, as he liked to call it, thrived and grew into a huge complex of buildings with such classy amenities as elevators, room service and a palm house with its own orchestra. Among its devoted and well-heeled patrons were Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller.

  Throughout much of his life, Kellogg nurtured a quiet obsession with inventing a flaked breakfast cereal. One night the process came to him in a dream. He hastened in his nightshirt to the kitchen where he boiled some wheat, rolled it out into strips and baked it in the oven. It was not only tasty but sufficiently unusual as to be without question good for you. Dr Kellogg’s patients simply couldn’t get enough of it. One of these patients was a young man named C. W. Post, who spent nine months at the sanitarium sitting listlessly and needlessly in a wheelchair before abruptly embracing Christian Scientism and fleeing. One thing Post took away with him was a profound respect for the commercial possibilities of Dr . Kellogg’s cereal. Unable to get a licence from Kellogg, he decided to make his own, and in a breath-takingly short time became one of America’s wealthiest men. Among Post’s inventions were Grape-Nuts (a curious name since it contained neither grapes nor nuts) and Post Toasties, or Elijah’s Manna as it was known until 1908.