A Taste of the USA - CULINARY USA

Culinary USA

American food has had a bad rap for years, perhaps not without good reason. First, it sorely lacks an identity. This huge nation, with as many growing regions as ethnicities, can't (and perhaps shouldn't) articulate itself in any unified culinary language. Pockets of wonderful cooking have always existed. There are the regional specialties of the South, addictive green chiles in the Southwest, solid German and Scandinavian "real-food" of the Midwest, and corn bread and sweet baked beans from New England. Every region, state, county and hamlet pretty much have their own unique styles of cooking and traditional foods.

As Americans became more exposed to and comfortable with the European tradition of cooking as an art (which, according to James Beard, happened after enough men and women returned home from service in World War II with a belly-full of Continental cuisine), American chefs blossomed. Inspired by the traditions of more ancient cooking cultures, while working in kitchens free from the restrictions of those cultures, chefs let their imaginations run. The diversity of regional cuisines and the plethora of local ingredients have become the genius of American cooking.

Immigrant America, too, by preserving old ways and introducing new flavors, provides endless inspiration for the American palate. It creates a demand for unusual produce and imported specialties, which in turn add their charms to this country's skillet. California sunshine and produce revivify French cooking, while Asian and Indian ingredients spice up the mix. And, in the last fifteen years, the simple home-cooked "American meal" has been raised to a high art. "Old-fashioned" foods such as macaroni and cheese, cod cakes, mashed potatoes, and rice pudding have become chic treats. American haute cuisine has become an exuberant hybrid, fishing all the best tid bits out of the melting pot and re-creating them in ever-changing ways.

Cooking in the South

If New Englanders were satisfied with the fruits of their cold sea and rocky land, then the colonial south must have been paradise. The colonists in Virginia and South Carolina were less encumbered by the weight of the long northern winters and the scorn of the Puritan God. Pleasures came more easily and the American south was a cornucopia. Originally entirely under the culinary sway of the British bourgeoisie, influences of the French from Louisiana, and the Spaniards from points west and south, not to mention the Native American presence and African tastes among slaves, all mingled variously, and the South soon asserted its culinary autonomy -- or perhaps autonomies is more to the point. There are several broad "schools" of southern cooking, "classic" southern, Cajun and Creole, and soul. By now, however, southern food has borrowed from itself so thoroughly that these categories are nearly impossible to maintain. They serve rather to give some historical context to the flavors that now mingle together.

Cooking in the West & Southwest

Southwestern cooking includes Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and southern California. Its most salient characteristic is its entirely Spanish and Native American orientation, and, unlike parts of the South and New England, its utter imperviousness to the cooking of England and France. The chile sets this food in its own sphere. First grown in Mexico and Guatemala, the chile had an enormous impact on cooking all around the globe when Portuguese and Spanish traders first exported it. It had virtually no impact on American cooking north of the Mason-Dixon line or, for that matter, anywhere outside of Spanish colonial territory. But within the Spanish territories, chiles, in all their many forms and fires, reigned supreme. Other basic ingredients used in Southwestern cuisine are beans, hominy (called "samp" when made from white corn and "hulled corn" when made from yellow corn), corn and flour tortillas, pork, avocados, pine nuts, cilantro, limes, rice, and, in some regions, cheese. Red beans of the Southeast give way to wonderful black beans. New Mexicans are famous for their green chiles. Green chiles are allegedly (and empirically, if you ask me) addictive, and they have such a power over the palate that virtually no day or dish can escape their fresh and utterly unique flavor. Tostadas, tamales, tacos, burritos, and flautas, the common fare of Mexican restaurants, have equally strong roots in what is now American soil.

Cooking in the Heartland

Germans, Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans and Russians, Brits, and Italians constitute the melange of immigrant peoples who made the U.S. heartland their home. Like nearly all American cuisines, midwestern cooking combines the traditions of Europe, the ingredients of the new land, and some Native American know-how. The grueling nature of work in the northern Midwest and the plains has also been a defining influence on the cooking. Farmers, loggers, miners, and railroad workers eat vast quantities, and cooking in the heartland has always been a grand gesture, matched by a generosity of spirit and a sense of boundlessness. It is simple but hearty -- great roasts and stews, Cornish pasties (meat pies), sarma (Croat cabbage rolls), many different kinds of breads and cakes, trout and whitefish, relishes and pickles, pies and cranberry muffins.

The winters are harsh and long, which determines the kinds of crops grown and has forced cooks to learn the arts of preservation seen in the smoked meats, pickles, canned fruits, and vegetables of all kinds, and cellars full of winter vegetables that become steaming stews. Farming and logging are seasonal jobs, and often farmers would leave home to spend the winters in the mines and logging camps of Michigan and Minnesota. They lived in communal boarding houses where hardworking land-ladies knew that a good table drew a good work crew.

So, what makes up Midwestern cooking? Dairy is central: eggs, milk, butter, and cheese. The Germans brought beer, sauerkraut, sausages and wursts of every ilk, as well as the tradition of serving meals family style, with meat, relishes, soups, pies, and vegetables all on the table at once. Wheat and corn were staple starches: breads, pancakes, cornbread, spoon bread, Swedish limpa rye, German stollen, and black walnut bread don't begin to name the thousands of breads, buns, and cakes that are famous here. Wild rice and wild mushrooms grow in abundance. Scandinavians brought their lutefisk (lye-treated codfish), lefse (potato bread), and meatballs; Hungarians, their goulash, Italians, their cheese cultures. Spicing is mild, fresh herbs from the garden like dill, parsley, sage and the cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and ginger that also show up in New England cooking.

Cooking in New England

A plain Puritan people with a plain Puritan ethic brought a plain Puritan aesthetic to the shores of New England. Like much American cooking, New England has produced a local cuisine that exercises frugality and simplicity in the face of seemingly unending abundance of the New World. For better or worse, English cooking was the model -- boiled meats, casseroles, and puddings -- heavy, filling foods that combat the cold and don't offend God by being too fussy and decadent. Native Americans also had an influence on colonial cuisine, both in the ingredients they introduced, such as corn, beans, and maple sugars, and the methods they used. Their frequent use of maple syrup to flavor foods, nearly as often as we now use salt, may be why American food so tends towards the sweet: yams, honey-roasted ham, sweet relishes with roasted meats. Despite its meager, rocky soil, New England proffered a bounty of raw ingredients, fish of all kinds -- especially cod, which was salted for the winter -- and shellfish. One colonial diarist moans that he is forced to eat lobster for every meal: lobster lobster lobster! Game, too, filled the air and the fields: venison, goose, turkey, and pheasant. All sorts of berries (cranberries, blueberries, strawberries) and nuts covered the hills. Pigs thrive in most every condition, and the harsh New England winters made no exception. Salt pork seems the one ingredient that no recipe lacks.