Product Description

The wickedly entertaining, hunger-inducing, behind-the-scenes story of the revolution in American food that has made exotic ingredients, celebrity chefs, rarefied cooking tools, and destination restaurants familiar aspects of our everyday lives.

Amazingly enough, just twenty years ago eating sushi was a daring novelty and many Americans had never even heard of salsa. Today, we don't bat an eye at a construction worker dipping a croissant into robust specialty coffee, city dwellers buying just-picked farmstand produce, or suburbanites stocking up on artisanal cheeses and extra virgin oils at supermarkets. The United States of Arugula is a rollicking, revealing stew of culinary innovation, food politics, and kitchen confidences chronicling how gourmet eating in America went from obscure to pervasive—and became the cultural success story of our era.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40387 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-17
• Released on: 2007-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review

“With the sweep of an epic novel, David Kamp takes us behind the scenes and into the sweaty, wacky, weird trenches of the Great American Food Revolution. His reporting is solid, his storytelling magnificent, and his good humor is seemingly inexhaustible . . . . a terrific book.” —Molly O’Neill

“Culturally aware and cleverly written, this anatomy of the French-fried versus sun-dried tension at the heart of American gastronomy is refreshingly non-snooty.”
—Atlantic Monthly

"A page-turner filled with fascinating footnotes, a delicious dish about bold-faced names, and an in-depth look at the ways in which a series of food pioneers touched off a revolution." —USA Today

“Juicy, irreverent, and full of bite.” —Gael Greene

About the Author
david kamp has been a writer and editor for Vanity Fair and GQ for more than a decade. He lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE

AMERICA'S DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOOD FOOD

"Hogs are in the highest perfection, from two and a half to four years old, and make the best bacon, when they do not weigh more than one hundred and fifty or sixty at farthest: They should be fed with corn, six weeks, at least, before they are killed . . . "
--prepping instructions for curing bacon, The Virginia House-wife, Mary Randolph, 1824


SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM / Hormel's new miracle meat in a can / Tastes fine, saves time / If you want something grand / Ask for SPAM!

--radio jingle for Spam, sung to the tune of "My Bonnie," 1937


"In the beginning, there was Beard," Julia Child famously said, in a characteristic display of generosity. But precisely what Beard began bears some explaining. Though she's among the foremost of Beard's protégés, the cookbook author Barbara Kafka can't contain her exasperation at the received wisdom that there were no good meals to be had in America until her mentor reared his enormous head. "It's like there was no food in this fucking city, or this country, until this miraculous apparition came along!" she says. "Or there was no cooking at home until Julia. Don't tell me this kind of nonsense! I think that Le Chambord,* which I went to as a child, was probably the best French restaurant that New York has ever seen and will ever see. And in the West Forties, way over, there were bistros lined up and down. Guys got off the ships right opposite the biggest harbor, practically, in the world--off the Normandie and the Ile de France. And they were French guys."

So, yes, it is wrongheaded to presume that Americans did not eat well until the Big Three became big. The very first American cookbook, American Cookery, written by a Connecticut woman named Amelia Simmons and published in 1796,* demonstrates that there were both cooks and eaters in those days who appreciated fine ingredients and flavorful food. American Cookery is considered the "first" American cookbook because, though several cookbooks had been published before it in the colonies and the young republic, they were adaptations or reprints of European cookbooks, mostly British. Simmons's book, on the other hand, was expressly aimed at born-and-bred Americans who used ingredients not available in Europe, such as the "pompkins" she used in a "pudding" recipe that differed very little from our current ones for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Her "Indian Slapjack," a cornmeal pancake of the sort now found on the menus of upscale Santa Fe bruncheries, would have gone very nicely with her "Beft bacon" (printers had not yet sorted out their use of f's and ornamental s's), which, in a manner that would excite today's aficionados of artisanal foodstuffs, was cured in molasses, sea salt, and saltpeter for six to eight weeks and then smoked over corncobs.

Further evidence of a culinarily attuned America comes in the most celebrated cookbook of the nineteenth century, The Virginia House-wife, by Mary Randolph, a pillar of late-eighteenth-century Richmond society (her brother was married to Thomas Jefferson's daughter), who, after her husband experienced some reversals of fortune, ran a boardinghouse and collected her recipes into a book, published in 1824. Not only was The Virginia House-wife a work of astonishing breadth and worldliness--Mrs. Randolph knew how to cook everything from the expected Ye Olde dishes like roast goose and Indian-meal pudding to seemingly very contemporary offerings like polenta and ropa vieja (Cuban- or Spanish-style shredded beef)--but her respectful use of vegetables was downright Alice Waters-ish. Randolph cautioned against overcooking asparagus, and advised that a perfect salad should have "lettuce, pepper grass, chervil, cress &c.," which "should be gathered early in the morning, nicely picked," and served with a lovely tarragon vinaigrette.

President Jefferson was himself quite the epicure and procurer of exotic foodstuffs, importing seeds from Europe to plant in his garden and cultivating Mediterranean fig, olive, and almond trees at Monticello. In his personal "Garden Book," he kept records of what produce was available at Washington's vegetable market during the years of his presidency, 1801 to 1809, and the sheer variety sounds much like what a latter-day foodie might gush over at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on a bountiful summer day: sorrel, broccoli, strawberries, peas, salsify, raspberries, Windsor beans, currants, endive, parsnips, tomatoes, melons, cresses.

All this said, not for nothing is the United States known as a meat-and-potatoes kind of place. In the early years of the republic, it wasn't uncommon for Americans to have beefsteak not only for dinner, which was consumed at midday, but for breakfast--a habit only exacerbated as the country expanded westward, opening more land for ranching. Foreign visitors to the United States in the nineteenth century routinely expressed their shock at the huge, meaty smorgasbords set out on groaning boards in the public rooms of hotels at all hours of the day, not to mention the joyless, gluttonous dispatch with which the natives went about the business of eating. Charles Dickens declared that Americans ate "piles of indigestible matter." Thomas Hamilton, another Englishman, wrote an account of his journey to the United States in 1833 called Men and Manners in America, in which he observed, "In my neighborhood there was no conversation. Each individual seemed to his food down his gullet, without the smallest attention to the wants of his neighbor." The food in these places wasn't of high quality, either, with vegetables boiled to a fare-thee-well and starchy potatoes and puddings served in great quantities. The Canadian historian Harvey Levenstein, in a droll study of early-American dietary habits called Revolution at the Table, notes that "the enormous amounts of meat and starch and the short shrift given to fresh fruits and vegetables made constipation the national curse of the first four or five decades of the nineteenth century in America."

It's hard to square this bleak picture with the Edenic one painted by Mary Randolph and Thomas Jefferson, and, indeed, the feisty old culinary historian Karen Hess, who edited and wrote the introduction to the facsimile of the first edition of The Virginia House-wife, dismisses the work of Levenstein, her rival, as that of a "stupid idiot." (As she points out, the Randolph cookbook alone presents clear evidence to refute Levenstein's assertion that in the nineteenth century "herbs were used mainly for medicinal rather than culinary purposes" in America.) Still, it's possible for an unbiased observer to use Hess's and Levenstein's works complementarily and draw the conclusion that while the United States had some terrific cooks, cornucopian markets, and an abundance of wonderful homespun culinary traditions, it also had some serious food issues. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, spent several years in France as a U.S. consul, living in Lyons, the nation's gastronomic capital. Upon his return home in 1833, he recorded his horror at the state of American food, calling his fellow Americans "the grossest feeders of any civilized nation ever known," a culinarily clueless people who subsisted on a diet of "heavy, coarse, and indigestible" fare. The chasm between French and American food was all the more appalling to Cooper because he grew up wealthy in the woodsy hinterlands of upstate New York, where all manner of wild game roamed and edible plants grew, and knew that his country could do better.

But the United States, a country wary of elitism and susceptible to populist, xenophobic demagogues, would always have mixed feelings about taking culinary cues from the French. Long before the age of "freedom fries" and the efforts by an adviser to George W. Bush to damage John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign by saying the Massachusetts senator "looks French," the advisers to the Whig presidential candidate of 1840, William Henry Harrison, tried to smear the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren, as a fey monarchist aristocrat--on the evidence that he drank champagne and had hired a Frenchman to be White House chef. The scrappy old soldier Harrison, on the other hand, subsisted on "hard cider" and "raw beef and salt," and won the election.*

Whether it was a matter of this country's Puritan origins, its early inheritance of British culinary stodginess, or just a general don't-tread-on-me stubbornness, America would always have a dysfunctional relationship with the idea of culinary sophistication. A strain of the Harrison campaign's plainspoken beefy populism persists to this day: in 2004, the CEO of the fast-food chain Hardee's, Andrew Puzder, touted the company's Monster Thickburger--a 1,420-calorie sandwich composed of two one-third-pound beef patties, three slices of cheese, and four strips of bacon on a buttered, mayonnaise-spread bun--as "not a burger for tree-huggers." (Many of whom, presumably, look French.) Similarly, the thickset founder of the Wendy's chain, Dave Thomas, did a commercial in the nineties in which he addressed a grateful roomful of 300-pounders who called themselves the "Big Eaters Club." In another spot, Thomas portrayed himself as being trapped at a pretentious cocktail party where a mincing waiter offered him a dainty, absurd-looking hors d'oeuvre and said, "Crab puff, sir?" Cut to a shot of a relieved Dave back at Wendy's, sinking his teeth into an enormo-burger.*
 
On the other end of the spectrum were those who shied away from fancy feeding for ascetic or religious reasons. Many preachers, such as the Presbyterian min...

Customer Reviews

absolutely worth it
I came to this book from an angle that many potential readers possibly share--I'm interested in food but am not a hard core "foodie"; I enjoy revelatory profiles of people but am not a gossip maven; I know some but by no means all of the characters, events, restaurants and so on addressed in this book. "Arugula", for me, is a compelling, spirited, and illuminating story, which Kamp tells with an eye ever on the parallel unfolding of the American character throughout the 20th century. Specific decades and regions are brought to life in ways not accessible to the survey of music or politics. What should be a dizzying amount of detail is delivered with a clarity and judiciousness that propel the tale forward. I came away from this book surprised and grateful that it had never been written before.

A mix of "good, bad and ugly"
On the positive side: Kamp provides a focused account of fine dining and cooking in America - World War II to present. He keeps the "story-line" moving by concentrating on interesting and influential characters rather than trying to cover the whole scene. One follows the Euro-centric cooking (Europe consisting of France and later Italy) through it's transformation to Ameri-centric cooking - local, natural, organic ingredients. This history is traced primarily through New York City and California chefs and restaraunts.

In the negative, this simplification of culinary history ignores the culinary practices in the hinterlands - growing up in rural Eastern Washington in the 1950's I was familiar with roasting your own coffee beans, salmon sold from the back of cars 3-4 hours from the river, raising my own basil from seeds from the local hardware store, ... Sushi entered my vocabulary in 1970. While Kamp correctly attributes much of the Americanazion of ingredients to James Beard, he fails to recognize that Beard's culinary education at Portland's Farmers' Market was repeated on a small scale in all the roadside fruit and vegetable stands throughout the region. History as described by David Kamp may be accurate regarding the urban fine-dining scene but is not representative of the "total American scene."

The ugly - while it is useful for Kamp to provide insight into the personalities and ideological tensions among the various key players in the evolution of American taste, knowing who slept with whom and who engaged in crude and/or psychotic behavior doesn't particularly interest me nor does it add essential information for following the historical changes.

However, with the exception of the attempt to summarize the future in the final chapter, the book is a fascinating read. It provides a useful overview in which to see one's personal culinary experiences. Recommended with reservations.

Brilliant
David Kamp sets his treatise, THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA, at that precise moment in time when America came of age culinarily -- when this nation amalgamated a discrete cuisine of its own, no longer looking to France for inspiration.

Kamp focuses on the many elements which combined to form what we have come to call American cooking. This ranges from the types of ingredients we now take for granted, such as sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, through the concepts of regional and seasonal produce, and on to the foreign influences of Asia and Europe.

He explicates the theories of organic foodstuffs and sustainable farming and he pays tribute to those who gave life to these movements.

He also acknowledges the cookware stores which literally brought us the tools of fine cooking, such as Williams-Sonoma. He explains in detail about the gourmet shop Dean-&-DeLuca, which first showcased many imported ingredients we take for granted today, and prepared some of the first dishes those ingredients created: For example, pasta salad in balsamic vinaigrette with sun-dried tomatoes and basil -- and, of course, arugula.

Along the way, Kamp could not fail to pay attention to the brigade of writers who fed this new interest by bringing pertinent information into every kitchen, especially mentioning Julia Child, James Beard and Craig Claiborne.

Also included are the chefs and restaurateurs who originally popularized -- and often created -- these new trends, people who now are household names, such as Wolfgang Puck, Michael McCarthy, Thomas Keller, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Towers and Danny Meyers.

THE UNITED STATE OF ARUGULA is a must-read for anyone with interest in modern American gastronomy. And it's a fun walk down memory lane for anyone who participated in those first days of America's adventure in codifying the elements of fine dining.