by Jane Kramer
Americans are possibly the least tradition-bound of hominids, having in the main left their sentimental attachments behind in whatever unhappy place they or their families came from. Whether or not they arrived with overbites remains a matter of speculation. (Check out the thrust of the lower jaw in portraits of Washington and Jefferson; it’s closer to Philip IV of Spain than to Brad Pitt.) But the enterprising spirit of the technology here, the trial-and-error search for the next best thing, has arguably done more for the modern kitchen than the competition in sterling that, as Wilson dutifully notes, produced the elaborate trefoil spoon of Restoration England, and the Victorian berry spoon, with its fancy holes, and for that matter, our own briefly ubiquitous silver spork.
It isn’t surprising, given the superpower ambitions and imperatives of the last century, that many of the great technological kitchen leaps were the inadvertent results of research at the industries and agencies that helped us win the Second World War, not to mention our cold war/star wars with the Soviets. (One exception is the refrigerator; the application of thermodynamic research to refrigeration also took place in Europe with, among others, Albert Einstein, who patented his own fridge in 1930. Another is the gas oven; the first safe and successfully enclosed ovens came from Britain.) NASA scientists developed the technology for freeze-dried food—like ice, smoke, and salt, a milestone in the history of preservation. And we owe the microwave oven to Percy Spencer, the engineer who helped develop the Navy’s radar system, and the Cuisinart to Carl Sontheimer, the engineer who invented a microwave direction finder for the Apollo moon mission. Sontheimer, it turned out, had a passion for the satiny poached purée of raw pike, cream, and pâté à choux known to the French as quenelles de brochet. (“A pain to make,” Wilson says. “Soufflés are child’s play by comparison.”) In 1971, at a cookery show in France, he spotted a large, cumbersome metal drum with a rotary blade inside—a restaurant food processor called the Robot Coupe—and as Wilson puts it, “what he saw was quenelles.” He set up shop in his garage, and two years later, his home-kitchen processor went on sale, named in homage to the art of French cuisine, but even then, as streamlined, versatile, and efficient as a room full of Noma prep chefs. Craig Claiborne, in the Times, called it an innovation comparable to “the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex”—the greatest food invention since toothpicks. (Richelieu would have chosen toothpicks.)
Our kitchens were never the same. Nor were our cookbooks. The words “blitz everything” came to replace the pages of chop this, mince that, grind or fine-slice something else, sweat to soften, and force through a sieve, twice. The American housewife of postwar suburban fantasy, who had been expected to love her hours of kitchen labor as long as her fridge was the color of a lemon or an avocado and, as Wilson says, matched her cabinets, now had the time and curiosity to—guess what!—take up cooking well. By the turn of this century, her kitchen was filled with handy gadgets (Wilson is especially partial to the OXO peeler and the Microplane grater) and complicated culinary equipment, and the husband of her fantasies had long since moved the family to the city, where he could prowl the markets for heirloom tomatoes, humane steaks, Moroccan spices, and the best Thai fish sauce, or simply open his Julia Child and spend the weekend making cassoulet for a big, casual “supper party” around the kitchen table. For the time being, pace molecular gastronomy, all happy families were the same.
Everything in Bee Wilson’s pithy book brings you back to the kitchen: her histories of weights and measures and pots and pans; her observations on the domestication of fire and ice (one is that a lot of the foods we now consider staples “principally came into being in order to give people something to put in their new fridges”); her homey riffs on small, exasperating “technologies” like egg timers, cake molds, tongs, and toasters. (The book came out in England last fall, the same week that Mrs. Hughes horrified Mr. Carson with one smoking, sputtering demonstration of a toasting machine, downstairs at Downton Abbey.) It’s been said that the kitchen was invented when cooking moved indoors. This was a long process. The first kitchens were solitary structures, built far enough from your house to contain a sudden fire. Then they moved to a courtyard, or to a room across the courtyard from where your family lived, and eventually, like the big Roman-orgy kitchens, to the cellar. In any event, your food was at best tepid by the time it reached the table. It took millennia to bring kitchens safely to where they are now—at most, a pantry away from the dinner table.
Wilson’s chronicle of the history of modern kitchens is socially astute and funny: a tour with stops at the small but “rational” 1920s Frankfurt Kitchen, with its Teutonic procession of fifteen aluminum drawers, moving you efficiently, if relentlessly, from task to task at counter height; and at the American kitchen of the 1950s, with its pretty tiles and purring fridges; and earlier in the book, at the old-ways-are-the-best-ways kitchen of recent decades, filled with hanging salamis, butchering tools, laboriously polished copper, hand-turned spits, and homemade ricotta dripping its whey through cheesecloth on the windowsill. Wilson admires those “old-ways” kitchens and the tastes they produce, and has even taken courses in one, with the food historian and sixteenth-century-spit enthusiast Ivan Day, but given the choice of an old-ways life or the Cambridge archives, she seems to have made the wise decision. In fact, I have a list of questions, in the event that she considers the fork again. The most pressing is this: How do the Polynesians cook now?
Bee Wilson has since succeeded Paul Levy as chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery and has also become a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Her latest book, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, came out in 2016.
GOOD GREENS
APRIL 2014
Three years ago, I retired the chili party that I used to give in Italy at the end of August. This was a shame, because I liked my party and thought that the chili made a nice reprieve from the ubiquitous barbecues of summer. Two of the twenty-four regulars at my party were vegetarians—one reluctantly, under a doctor’s orders. A doable number, it seemed to me: for years, I put out a bowl of pasta al pesto just for them. Then, from one chili party to the next, everything changed. Seven formerly enthusiastic carnivores called to say they had stopped eating meat entirely and would like to join my vegetarians for the pesto. Worse, on the night of that final party, four of the remaining carnivores carried their plates to the kitchen table, ignoring the cubes of beef and pancetta, smoky and fragrant in their big red bean pot, and headed for my dwindling supply of pasta. “Stop!” I cried. “That’s for the vegetarians!” Aggrieved, they replied, as in one voice, “But we’re kind of vegetarian now.” Some have yet to forgive me for scooping the pasta off their plates.
Until that summer, the only books I had read about food proscriptions and taboos were Leviticus and Deuteronomy, those inadvertently comic masterpieces of the Old Testament, so addictive that I keep copies on my laptop. But since then I have collected a stack of vegetarian food histories with names like Eat Not This Flesh (by Frederick J. Simoons), The Heretic’s Feast (Colin Spencer), and The Bloodless Revolution (Tristram Stuart), from which I’ve learned first, that people have been arguing about eating animals since the day they began eating or, more to the point, not eating them, and second, that the history of their arguments is a hermeneutical minefield. Take your pick. There is the ascetic argument, which can be religious (monks, holy men, and hermits, attached to the discipline of renunciation), or the philosophical one (as old as Pythagoras, whose belief in the transmigration of souls is said to have led generations of like-minded Greeks to follow a “Pythagorean diet”), or the mystical one (shamans, saints, and quantum physicists, searching for the ecstatic union or trippy oblivion produced by hunger hallucinations). Then there is the natural-man argument, which Rousseau, with a nod to Plutarch, used in making the claim that eating meat was an aberration, a sustained assault on the innocence and empathy of childhood, and produced “cruel and ferocious” people, like the English. (
English vegetarians preferred “like the Tartars.”) There is the caste, or “spiritual identity,” argument, like the one advanced by Brahmans who renounced flesh in order to distinguish themselves, in matters of high-mindedness and noble breeding, from the hungry poor. There is the ethical, or animal-rights, argument, which holds that the pain and terror suffered by slaughter animals is morally indefensible. There is also the health argument (doctors and nutritionists, alarmed by the rise in illness and obesity in a high-fat Big Mac world), and the carbon-footprint argument (environmentalists, equally alarmed by the amount of energy consumed, and ozone layer depleted, by the livestock industry that feeds that world).
Then there are the subsets of rejection. There are the orthodox Jains, who will eat the visible sprouts and leaves of root vegetables but not the roots themselves—which is to say, they will eat plants but not “kill” plants. There are the vegans, who will refuse not only animal flesh but anything that living animals produce, including honey (because it comes from bees), eggs, milk, and by extension, cheese. Some vegetarians will refuse fish but happily consume oysters, clams, and mussels—on the ground that those mollusks, having neither eyes nor a central nervous system, do not qualify as “real” animals, capable of feeling. The list goes on, because at the end of the day vegetarianism turns out to be a highly idiosyncratic spectrum. It runs from the strictest vegans to the “kind of vegetarian” vegetarians, who will eat fish and occasionally chicken, and even indulge themselves, once a year, in a Christmas rib roast, to the ladies who lettuce-leaf lunch and their stick-figure daughters, dreaming of a size 0 dress, who will ram their fingers down their throats in order to throw up whatever meat they are made to eat.
I’m not a vegetarian. I would describe myself as a cautious carnivore. The “cautious” dates from a trip to Texas in the mid-seventies, for a book that introduced me to the pitiable state of industrial feedlot cattle, crammed into pens to be fattened on quasi-chemical feed laced with antibiotics and hormones, to say nothing of the frantic baying of ranch yearlings driven through chutes to be branded and cut by cowhands, their testicles fed to the foreman’s dogs. Not much later, I was in Europe watching the tubal force-feeding of French ducks and geese, for foie gras. But the truth is that I worried much more about myself than about those animals. What drugs and diseases was I ingesting when I ate their meat? For that matter, what waste was I consuming with fish bred and raised in the dirty waters of industrial fish farms? Today I buy organic meat and chicken and milk and eggs, and the fishmonger at Citarella knows me as the woman who calls and says, “I don’t want it if it’s not wild.” (You can’t win this one, given the size of the dragnet fleets now depleting nearly every marine habitat on the planet.)
That said, I am unlikely ever to give up my applewood breakfast bacon, or the smoked salmon on my bagels, or the prosciutto that’s always in my fridge. A week ago, I read about an Ibérico tasting in the Financial Times. It had reminded the writer of an episode of the British sitcom The Royle Family, in which the son invites a vegetarian girlfriend home for dinner and nobody knows what to feed her until his grandmother suggests, “Very thinly sliced ham.” I’m with the grandmother, and should add that Spain’s Ibérico pigs lead pampered and pristine lives in oak forests, feasting on tasty acorns.
Today, the best reason for people like me to love eating plants probably has less to do with vegetarians and their theories than with the great carnivore chefs and cookbook writers who started making vegetables delicious by approaching, say, a cauliflower with the same culinary imagination that they would otherwise apply to a Mexican short-ribs braise or an inside-out porchetta. It was about time this happened, given the dreary vegetarian cookbooks that had prevailed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a Lancashire housewife by the name of Martha Brotherton—her husband, Joseph, was the Nonconformist minister and animal rights crusader who helped found the Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom—published what appears to have been the first one in the English language.
Mrs. Brotherton called her book A New System of Vegetable Cookery, and its particular evangelical mission was to banish all sinful pleasure from whatever legume was in your pot. Her culinary precepts, though not her book, outlasted her by more than a hundred and fifty years—as evidenced by the preachy vegetarian communes and collectives that began to proliferate in this country in the sixties and seventies, when a generation of postwar babies came of age. Those collectives were defiantly artisanal. Remember the breads and the carrot cakes that weighed nearly as much as the people eating them? The most enduring (and evolving) collective was the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York—perhaps because for some years the healthfulness of the food was often camouflaged by blankets of sour cream, or seasoned with liberal splashes of soy sauce (with paprika running a close second), or even on occasion tossed in a somewhat unnerving combination of yogurt and mayonnaise. The original Moosewood Cookbook, assembled in 1977 by the Moosewood founder Mollie Katzen—who went on to become a consultant to Harvard’s dining and “food literacy” initiatives—was exemplary in its “Eat it, it’s good for you” style. The drawings were as folksy as the food, and, as if to drive home the point, the recipes were handwritten. Within a few years, it had sold a million copies.
In 1979, two years after Katzen’s cookbook appeared, a young California chef named Deborah Madison left her job at Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, to open a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. She called it Greens, and you didn’t need to be a vegetarian to want to eat there. Greens has been described as the first high-end vegetarian restaurant in the country. It was (and remains) minimalist rather than minimal, with glass walls looking out over San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge and the soft hills of Marin County, and more to the point, with food that looked, and tasted, like something you had always dreamed of eating. “Farm driven” is how Madison described the menu. People kept asking for her recipes, and eight years later she and a Tassajara-trained cook named Edward Espé Brown, whom she’d met studying at the San Francisco Zen Center, put those recipes together as The Greens Cookbook and transformed the experience of a home-cooked vegetarian meal. The cookbook, like the restaurant, wasn’t at all admonishing or self-righteous. Words like “healthy” were not in evidence. The operative words were “fresh” and “bright” and “flavor,” and if you weren’t a vegetarian there was nothing really to prevent you from sneaking some ham into Madison’s recipe for herbed corn pudding, or adding a little beef or veal to her mushroom lasagna—the first lasagna I ever made—or a bit of pancetta to her winter-vegetable soup. If you were a decent cook, you knew at a glance that those deceptively simple recipes would stand up to some guilty tampering—and as often as not, you discovered that they didn’t need it. For most of us, that was a revelation.
Madison’s recipes are still deceptively simple. Her books—among them the encyclopedic Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, from 1997—have none of the riotous potlatch spicing and herbal jumbling of Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty or the sublime caloric decadence of Ruth Rogers’s and the late Rose Gray’s River Café Cook Book Green. But she is materfamilias to the dozens of other chefs who are rapidly turning vegetables into, as it were, the cash cow of the cookbook trade. Depending on which polls you read, and whether it’s herbivores or carnivores who have framed the questions and done the counting, somewhere between 5 and 19 percent of all Americans are now vegetarians or kind-of vegetarians, and between 2 and 9 percent are vegans. The market they represent, at a time when most book publishing is either in crisis or in Kindle, has been irresistible to writers hoping to strike pay dirt with a cookbook. At Kitchen Arts & Letters, the Lexington Avenue bookstore where I buy my food histories and cookbooks, the number of people shopping at its vegetarian and vegan shelves has just about doubled in the past ten years—and not only because of the rise in vegetarian conversions suggested by those polls but because of all the carnivores who have got interested in making whatever vegetables they do eat
tastier.
Nach Waxman and Matt Sartwell, the patron gurus of Kitchen Arts & Letters, call this “the Ottolenghi effect,” because it was Ottolenghi’s strictly vegetarian Plenty, which came out in 2010, just a couple of years after his meaty, eponymous first cookbook appeared in England, that definitively took vegetables out of the good-for-you niche and into the “You’re going to love this” sales stratosphere, and sent every envious meat-eating chef in search of what could be called a vegetarian feeding frenzy. Even Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall—who had famously celebrated his passion for animal flesh (as in the lambs and chickens cosseted, killed with kindness, and cooked with “respect” on his River Cottage Farm) in a cookbook called Meat—entered the fray last year by writing a new book, Veg.
Vegetable Literacy is Deborah Madison’s thirteenth book and her turf revenge. It turns the tables, though you probably won’t know this until you read the recipes and discover, as I did, that while there is predictably no marrow or pancetta in Madison’s cardoon risotto, there is permission to simmer it in a “light chicken stock,” and even an acknowledgment that vegetable stock might “overwhelm” the flavor of that delicately bitter member of the sunflower family. I started cooking immediately, guiltless at last at my own stove, trying out soups in which the choice was water, vegetable stock, or chicken stock—especially the ones with chicken stock listed first. (Perhaps to mollify the purists, Madison’s The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which came out this spring, remains unbendingly vegetarian; it’s new mainly in that it now flags every vegan-friendly recipe with a big V and adds 200 recipes to the original 1,400, making it, at nearly seven hundred pages, the OED of vegetarian cuisine.)
The clue to Madison’s heretical chicken stock is the word “vegetable” in her title. Before Vegetable Literacy, the meaning of “vegetable” in a cookbook’s name was largely a function of its author’s reputation and its audience’s expectations—which is to say that the people who had rushed to the store to buy Alice Waters’s third book, Chez Panisse Vegetables, were unlikely to be shocked that the vegetables in a stew called Beans Cooked in the Fireplace were meant to be sautéed, with bacon, in duck or goose fat, any more than the people who had bought Madison’s ninth book, Vegetable Soups, were likely to be shocked by the absence of anything remotely resembling bacon, let alone goose fat, in her potage of mustard greens and black-eyed peas. The field is muddier now. Food writers new to the vegetarian canon tend to use “vegetarian” and “vegetable” interchangeably. (The shrewdest may have been Fearnley-Whittingstall, whose Veg, wittingly or not, let you end the word for yourself, according to how much “vegetarian” you hoped to find when you opened it in your kitchen; in fact, there isn’t a trace of meat, fish, or fowl lurking among his plants.) Or they include the kind of conspicuously “carnivore” disclaimer that Simon Hopkinson, the chef responsible for Roast Chicken and Second Helpings of Roast Chicken, produced when he put a recipe for the broth of that estimable bird at the beginning of a book called The Vegetarian Option in 2009. (Not a vegetarian’s vegetarian, the people who bought the book complained.) But Vegetable Literacy is first and foremost a book about vegetables, not about the kind of people who don’t eat anything else—and, as Aristotle could have told anyone he found browsing the shelves of some Athenian Kitchen Arts & Letters, the fact that all vegetarians eat vegetables does not mean that all vegetable eaters are vegetarians.