Choice Cuts

by Mark Kurlansky

  Several years later I heard those identical words spoken by an Italian grocer to whom I had gone for provisions. It was in one of those intimate shops, none too tidy, crowded with sacks of beans, peas, lentils, ceci, barrels of olives, huge wheels of cheese and stacks of salami and dry cod, where the opulent and inefficient operator is more ready to chat than to sell. He took me into his dingy office, rolled back the top of some late executive’s desk, as if he were about to show me his ledger or perhaps a recent issue of Practical Merchandising, and revealed loaves of bread, slabs of cheese, and several salami. He then pulled out a drawer, which in any sensible establishment would have catapulted a typewriter into view, and several bottles of wine emerged from the darkness. He locked the door to the establishment, sliced the salame, uncorked a bottle, and opened a can of olives. As he sat down and reached for the cheese, he mumbled, in his own version of the English language, “America ees gude. Today, leet the paesani spend the mawney in the safetyway store.”

  I left New York for the West Coast during the harvest season. As the train raced westward, the prodigality of America unfolded in a series of beatific visions, marred, alas! by bewildering disappointments. Somewhere along the way, the train skirted an apple orchard. Apples were heaped upon the ground in veritable mountains—or so it appeared at the time to my eager fancy. Perhaps there had been an unusual storm; perhaps they had been shaken down to be carted away to the cider mill. Or were they actually abandoned to rot on the ground? I had no way of knowing. Whatever the reason, there they were, in unguarded profusion and apparently available to anyone. There were no farmers lurking with clubs and pruning hooks among the trees, as I had seen them in Italy, ready to ward off sugar-hungry lads who might be tempted by the ripe fruit. As we continued our journey, I added apples to my blessings.

  There were, as I have said, disappointments. The food distributed to immigrants on the train and at railway stations was awful. It was sold in box lunches that contained sandwiches of salame and cheese. There were also oranges, bananas, and apples. The bread was suspiciously white, moist, tasteless, and it stuck to the teeth. The salame was completely phony. It was a dry, rancid, foul-smelling substance parading under an honorable name. The cheese, a sickly-yellow mess, was positively revolting. The oranges were sour, the apples large, mealy, and without flavor. The bananas were so totally unfamiliar, both in appearance and taste, that I approached them with misgivings. I learned to like them, but it took a little time. Ham and eggs I never saw again until I reached the West Coast. Somewhere along the way I found enough French bread to take care of my needs for the remainder of the journey. I had grave doubts about the quality of such American food as bread, salame, and cheese, but I reserved final judgment. There is no need to hold back any longer. The bread is worse now than it was then, since the great baking trusts have become more adept at perverting wheat flour. American salami is still a stinker in disguise. The yellow counterfeit for cheese is still extant, though one may now find cheeses of excellent quality manufactured according to European formulas. American fruit would be comparable to any other if it were left on the tree long enough to ripen. I suspect that it would have more flavor if the Burbanks had plied their trade with a little less zeal and if water were used more sparingly in the orchards.

  When I arrived at what was to be my future home in Washington, I realized the full meaning of America in terms of food, clothing, and shelter. Everyone ate quantities of meat, pastries, and fruit. Everyone was well-dressed. Everyone bought wood for the cook-stove though he lived in the midst of a forest where wood was rotting on the ground. To a lad who had combed the countryside in Italy in search of sticks and corncobs for fuel, this latter fact was shocking and unintelligible. Even to this day the forests of the Pacific Coast have an immediate significance for me of which the natives are totally unaware. When I drive to the hills for an outing I cannot resist the ancient urge. So I never leave the woods without first filling the trunk with wood for the fireplace.

  During the first few months in America I went to the forest every day and returned home laden with its precious fruit. There were nuts and berries in profusion. With my father I hunted grouse, pheasant, quail, and rabbit. Here and there were abandoned homesteads with pear, plum, and apple orchards. The reality was more fantastic than the dream. What the returned natives had reported about America proved to be entirely accurate. It seemed possible to live on the prodigal yield of the surrounding hills. Although we all worked hard in our eagerness to take advantage of new opportunities, we did not neglect what was to be had for no more effort than was required in gathering it. We never bought a bit of fuel. A variety of game from the forest provided much of our meat for the dinner table. The cellar was always well stocked with jams, jellies, nuts, and fruit gathered in the woods and abandoned orchards. And while we were gradually becoming naturalized and eagerly looking forward to citizenship, we were also naturalizing our cuisine. We were realizing its potentialities in a land where we were no longer frustrated by scarcity and lack of variety.

  The sinful waste among the native population left me amazed and horrified. On the school grounds, and later in the mills and lumber camps, I discovered the American’s disrespect for food. Old and young alike drew from their lunch buckets huge sandwiches of homemade bread filled with meats, jams, and precious butter. They took large bites from the centers and threw irreverently upon the ground “the fringe of crust.” The slabs of apple and raisin pie, prepared with so much care by Grandmother—grandmothers always make the best pies—were seldom entirely eaten. Only a few ate the neatly folded flaky crust at the edge.

  In view of what I later heard women say about making piecrust, this fact convinced me that the ways of the American, as of the Almighty, are inscrutable. Women either apologize for, or take inordinate pride in, their pies. The only reason which makes any sense at all, why Grandmother’s pie is so universally acclaimed, is that pie-making is a process which requires a lifetime to perfect. Since anyone can slice apples, the secret must lie in making the crust. I have never heard women discussing new techniques for slicing apples, though I have heard them a thousand times inquiring of each other how to make a good crust. Tell me, then, why even Grandmother’s crust, perfected after three score years of study, toil, and kitchen gossip, should be ignominiously thrown into the slop pail!

  The account of my discovery of abundance summarizes an experience in which millions of immigrants to America have shared. The overwhelming majority of them, from northern and southern Europe, from the Balkans and the Near East, have found a new felicity here basically explainable in terms of bread. They have brought to this prodigal land a profound respect for everything that the native takes for granted. Their frugal habits, their willingness to work, their resourcefulness in meeting adversity, explain why their names appear so infrequently on relief roles. Their culinary aptitudes, evolved in scarcity and a bleak environment as a means of turning nothing into something, when applied even to the most modest ingredients available to them here, yields a consistently distinguished cuisine. Man for man and dollar for dollar, the immigrants’ daily fare is several degrees of excellence higher than that of the natives. They have evolved what can be defined only as a naturalized cuisine. In all the population of America, they are the most satisfied, the most gay, and the least neurotic.

  —from The Unprejudiced Palate, 1948

  JOSEPH WECHSBERG ON COOKING FOR AMERICANS

  Sometimes I would go downstairs to visit the great chef in his large, stainless-steel kitchen empire where he ruled over a hundred toques blanches: assistant chefs, rôtisseurs, poissoniers, entremetteurs, potagiers, sauciers, hors-d’œuvriers, grilladiers, buffet-froid men, pastry cooks, butchers, helpers, dishwashers. He was always near the sauce department, sticking his forefinger into sauces and tasting. When he tasted a sauce, his blue eyes took on the cold fire of a sapphire, and his forehead was wrinkled in concentration. Many a time when I came down he would be on the verge of breaking into tears.
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  “All day long those passengers come here asking me how I make this and what I put into that!” he would say. “Allez, allez! Cooking at sea isn’t like cooking in a big hotel. On the Atlantic you can’t send out to the market because you’ve forgotten something. My clients are French and Americans. The French love liver, tripe, cervelle au beurre noir, kidneys, and sweetbread. Americans may eat calf’s liver, but they wouldn’t touch the other things. They want grillades—steak, sirloin, châteaubriant, lamb chops. Their doctors have told them that grilled red meat is healthy for them. Allez, allez! There is more to cooking than steaks. Here we are trying our best and they complain!”

  The chef looked grim. The saucier quickly stepped in front of his pots. It was whispered that under the angry stare of the great chef a sauce béarnaise would sometimes curdle.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “a passenger ordered braised pork loin with tomatoes, spread with tuna fish, served with macaroni.” He paused a little to let the horror sink in. “He was from Ohio.”

  —from Blue Trout and Black Truffles, 1948

  ALICE B. TOKLAS ON GERTRUDE STEIN’S RETURN TO AMERICA

  When during the summer of 1934 Gertrude Stein could not decide whether she did or did not want to go to the United States, one of the things that troubled her was the question of the food she would be eating there. Would it be to her taste? A young man from the Bugey had lately returned from a brief visit to the United States and had reported that the food was more foreign to him than the people, their homes or the way they lived in them. He said the food was good but very strange indeed—tinned vegetable cocktails and tinned fruit salads, for example. Surely, said I, you weren’t required to eat them. You could have substituted other dishes. Not, said he, when you were a guest.

  At this time there was staying with us at Bilignin an American friend who said he would send us a menu from the restaurant of the hotel we would be staying at when Gertrude Stein lectured in his home town, which he did promptly on his return there. The variety of dishes was a pleasant surprise even if the tinned vegetable cocktails and fruit salads occupied a preponderant position. Consolingly, there were honey-dew melons, soft-shell crabs and prime roasts of beef. We would undertake the great adventure.

  Crossing on the Champlain we had the best French food. It made me think of a college song popular in my youth, Home Will Never Be Like This. If the food that awaited us at the Algonquin Hotel did not resemble the food on the French Line it was very good in its way, unrivalled T-steaks and soft-shell crabs and ineffable ice creams.

  Mr. Alfred Harcourt, Gertrude Stein’s editor, had asked us to spend Thanksgiving weekend with Mrs. Harcourt and himself in their Connecticut home, and there we ate for the first time, with suppressed excitement and curiosity, wild rice. It has never become a commonplace to me. Carl Van Vechten sends it to me. To the delight of my French friends I serve

  Wild Rice Salad

  steam ½ lb. wild rice

  ½ lb. coarsely chopped mushrooms cooked for 10 minutes in 3 tablespoons oil and 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 hard-boiled eggs coarsely chopped, 1 green pepper finely chopped, 1½ cups shelled shrimps, all lightly mixed and served with aïoli or aïlloli sauce.

  Press into a mortar 4 cloves of garlic, add a pinch of salt, of white pepper and the yolk of an egg. With the pestle reduce these ingredients to an emulsion. Add the yolk of an egg. You may continue to make the sauce with the pestle or discard it for a wooden fork or a wooden spoon or a wire whisk. Real Provençal Aïoli makers use the pestle to the end. With whatever instrument you will have chosen you will commence to incorporate drop by drop an excellent olive oil. When the egg has absorbed about 3 tablespoons of the oil, add ½ tablespoon lemon juice. Continuing to stir, now add oil more briskly. When it soon becomes firm again add 1 dessertspoon tepid water (I repeat, tepid water). Continue to add oil, lemon juice and tepid water. The yolk of 1 egg will absorb 1 cup and 2 tablespoons oil, 1½ tablespoons lemon juice and 2 dessertspoons tepid water.

  —from The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, 1954

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Germans

  TACITUS ON GERMANS

  Cornelius Tacitus was born in A.D. 56 or 57 and held numerous high offices in the Roman government. While pursuing a political career he also produced many important works as a historian, the first of which was his portrait of his father-in-law, Tacitus, the most famous Roman governor of Briton, and The Germania, a portrait of the warlike German people.

  —M.K.

  Their drink is a liquor made from barley or other grain, which is fermented to produce a certain resemblance to wine. Those who dwell nearest the Rhine or the Danube also buy wine. Their food is plain—wild fruit, fresh game, and curdled milk. They satisfy their hunger without any elaborate cuisine or appetizers. But they do not show the same self-control in slaking their thirst. If you indulge their intemperance by plying them with as much drink as they desire, they will be as easily conquered by this besetting weakness as by force of arms.

  —from The Germania, A.D. 98,

  translated from the Latin by H. Mattingly

  JOSEPH WECHSBERG ON AUSTRIANS

  It was customary to have five meals a day. Breakfast was at half past seven in the morning. At ten o’clock, children had their déjeuner à la fourchette, sandwiches, sausages, hard-boiled eggs, fruit. Many men would go for half an hour to a beerhouse for a goulash or a dish of calf’s lungs, and a glass of beer. Between ten and ten thirty little work was done in offices and shops; everybody was out eating. Two hours later, people were having lunch—at home, since eating lunch in a restaurant was unknown—and afterward they had a nap. Then to the coffeehouse for a demitasse and a game of whist or bridge, and back to the salt mines for an hour’s work.

  It was a strenuous life and around four thirty in the afternoon most people were hungry again and had to have their Jause. A genuine, central-European Jause consists of several large cups of coffee, topped off with whipped cream, of bread and butter, Torte or Guglhupf (the bizarre Viennese variation of a pound cake shaped like a derby on which several people have been sitting), and assorted patisserie. It is a feminine institution; my mother didn’t mind skipping lunch and dinner but she had to have her Jause. She would often complain that she gained weight “practically from nothing,” but it couldn’t be the Jause, she said; you didn’t gain weight from the Jause.

  What with appetizers and hors-d’oeuvres and a sumptuous dinner, many people had to go to Karlsbad once a year to take the cure, lose fifteen pounds, and get in shape again for another year of arduous eating.

  —from Blue Trout and Black Truffles, 1948

  KARL FRIEDRICH VON RUMOHR ON TEACHING GERMANS TO COOK

  The art of cookery itself presents no problems when people are learning to cook. This is amply demonstrated by my book. The basic rule could not be easier to grasp: make the very best of every edible substance. No other sphere of man’s knowledge and activity contains so many connections and logical progressions. Even if he is not very experienced, a cook can easily progress from one step to the next. The difficulty does not therefore lie with the art itself, but in our ability, or rather inability to learn it properly.

  Many boys and girls who set out to learn the art of cookery are not truly dedicated to it. Their thoughts are on the respectable financial reward when they should at first be concentrating on the skill they are learning. Once mastered, the skill will soon bring its rewards, as a tree bears fruit. No-one is likely to do well in a subject if he did not have a basic feel for it in the first place.

  Infected with an excessively servile veneration of his master, a young cook will often lose himself in the maze of unnecessary complications left over from outdated styles of cookery. He will not be receptive to new views and will be unable to learn from his own experience and thoughts. I have actually seen young cooks spending entire days practising the art of sprinkling salt over dishes but I very much doubt whether the food would have tasted any better.

  Then
we come to the real spanners in the works: the pushy upstarts and young know-it-alls. There is nothing to be done about these. At the age when I was still cheerfully washing dishes and basins, picking over spinach and undertaking other elementary duties, no kitchen boy today can be seen for dust. He wants to be at the front line, bungling the skilled jobs and pushing ahead of his master before he has even a basic grounding in hygiene and orderliness, before he has learnt the basic principles by watching and listening. This situation should not be tolerated any longer. Nature has turned on her head and history gone into reverse.

  Female cooks are totally lacking in basic training. Their minds are so full of cleaning, fashions and other idle notions that there is no room for a proper understanding of principles. Their hearts are rarely in their cooking. This makes them all the more obstinate—they will not be diverted from their familiar path. I have tried in vain to improve the ways of hundreds of German cooking women. Whenever I have poked my nose into a German kitchen run by women, the early morning scene has resembled a washhouse, despite my attempts to enlighten them by my words and deeds. Here would be a basin of pot herbs, swimming in water, there would be the day’s salad, similarly inundated; here the soup meat would be steeping in cold, or even lukewarm, water, there the roasting meat and fish in the same state. I am amazed at the power of German pedantry, its lack of sexual bias, even if it does stem from our old tradition of integrity. Cooking women seem to believe themselves entitled to dispense with all such traditions, however. Unfortunately the order of the day is cheating over the shopping because housewives have grown too lazy, too ignorant and too falsely refined to keep proper storecupboards. This means that every day of the year brings its necessary expenditure, and the women will always think of themselves when spending money, resulting in chaotic penny-pinching in bourgeois households. The high drama and domestic battles are causing unprecedented restlessness among the kitchenmaids in our German towns.