Apple Pie without a Core

Annual reckonings with the contradictions of American cuisine

If you ever wondered what bicentennial advertising from industrialized food looked like, check out this 1976 ad from the Greyhound Corporation’s Armour Food Division. (Note the hostage eyes down in front.)

Forgive me for not writing last week, but it’s been a little difficult to muster enthusiasm for writing these last few weeks. Not only because it seems like food-related questions currently seem minuscule given *gesticulates wildly* all this, but also because there seems to be something missing in the subject matter of the moment. Since my last post, I’ve found myself in the culinary epicenter of the “New South,” the lush green (and deep red) borderlands of Appalachia, and in the crusty yet comfortable jewel of Massachusetts’ North Shore. Perhaps a few weeks ago, I might have thought of these trips as snapshots from the American landscape, and an opportunity to express an abiding faith in the multitude of origin stories of American cooking. Yet especially right now, each dish has become a prompt to soul-searching, and a somewhat desperate desire to find clarity about exactly what America is and where it’s going. But with the gestures I observed in each locale—fried green tomatoes at a tapas restaurant, a bone-in elk tenderloin drowned in a sticky-sweet blueberry sauce, and even the “stuffies” that locals enjoy at home with plenty of Tabasco—I couldn’t exactly figure out what American food was evolving to, and how, or whether, to celebrate it. In this moment, I’m confronting what countless other food writers have observed: the challenge of identifying a unifying cultural influence, aesthetic principle, or defining characteristic of American cuisine.

In their 1977 masterpiece, The Taste of America, the food writers Karen and Michael Hess questioned whether good food in America was an oxymoron. Once, they bemoaned, “we were one of the best-fed countries in the world,” yet in the present moment we had become, according to them, one of the poorest. “The Founding Fathers,” the critics Hess wrote, “were as far superior to our present political leaders in the quality of their food as they were in the quality of their prose and of their intelligence.” I doubt they were writing with Thomas Jefferson’s macaroni in mind, or even of Abraham Lincoln’s chicken fricassee, but were instead critiquing a culture defined by the banality of its own industrialized tastes. As the Hesses bemoaned, a bread consumer’s preferences would more likely be shaped by the taste of Wonder bread than that of homemade bread, in part because the former had become the norm. According to the Hesses and other culinary conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s (who I discuss at length in my dissertation but won’t namecheck here), at some point our tastes changed so much that we started doing what was easy rather than what was good.

The Hesses had legitimate complaints, and identified a tension in American food that persists to this day, between the dishes that dominated the American mainstream (hello Caesar Salad, now celebrating its 100th birthday) and the highly regional delicacies. (Case in point, wild rice, which grew so much in popularity during the 1960s that it jeopardized the food sovereignty of many Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes region.) But they also seemed to expect a coherent, uniform expression of American cuisine that everyone across the country might simultaneously adopt. What makes studying American food history so interesting is that it constantly challenges us to study around and away from the concept of a core culinary culture—to imagine countless migrations and movements that change how we eat, rather than a single resting place or site of cultivation.

What’s especially ironic is that at the same time that the Hesses were bemoaning the industrialization of American tastes, American food was undergoing a massive revolution. Even as microwaves and food conglomerates were reshaping the American grocery store, restaurants like Chez Panisse and retailers like Williams-Sonoma were opening to massive critical and popular acclaim. European, Asian, and Latin ingredients were finally making their way into the American diet and consumer marketplace, as well as in fine dining establishments. The journalist Clementine Paddleford, who had cut her teeth as a food markets reporter during the Great Depression and World War II, hit her stride as a reporter of regional foodways in the 1960s, as her column for This Week Magazine, titled “How America Eats” ultimately traversed more than 800,000 miles to gather recipes and chronicle innovation in American food. The diffuseness of American food, Paddleford argued, was not a sign that American cuisine lacked cohesion, but rather that our country was the greatest landing pad that the world’s cuisines had ever seen. Paddleford wrote her treatise on American cuisine just a few years before the Hart-Cellar Act eliminated countless race- and nationality-based immigration quotas, paving the way for a new wave of immigrants to find their way to the United States. Had Paddleford lived to see the increasing diversity and richness of American cuisine, she might have rethought her emphasis on the recipes developed by the “pioneer woman,” and instead pontificated a bit more about whether all great food needed to be “delivered with an American accent.”

During the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, countless newspaper columnists and magazine writers wanted to lock down the “American menu” rather than interrogate their assumptions about exactly what said menu should include. Some waxed nostalgic, focusing on “old-fashioned food” that harkened back to pastoral ideals even as American farms were entering into a decades-long crisis and decline. Others erred on the side of the ubiquitous hot dog and hamburger, made possible by the Irish, German, Czech, and Polish immigrants who built the meat-packing industries of the American midwest. Only a few acknowledged that an American menu was a contradiction in terms. In 1976, the residents of Saddle River, New Jersey, attempted to write their own community cookbook as a way to finance a bicentennial memorial, yet ran up against their plurality of their own tastes. As the volume’s editor noted, “Upper Saddle River teen-agers adore [German] frankfurters, [Italian] pizzas and [Chinese] eggrolls and automatically think of them being as American as apple pie, which, of course, existed long before there was a United States.” Yet she also acknowledged that while “some [recipes] are old and some are contemporary… they are as representative of American cooking as anyone can hope to find.” Even the residents of Saddle River knew what it has taken food writers generations to accept: sometimes the “representative” tastes of the moment tell us much more than any mass-marketed “authenticity” can.

Years ago, long before it was my professional responsibility to do so, I asked friends at a dinner party to identify what they thought of as American cuisine. Certainly hot dogs and hamburgers came up, as did mac and cheese. But others had more esoteric selections. One named General Tso’s Chicken, while another named the California Roll. Another mentioned fried calamari, which many people found slightly laughable until they realized how easy it was to find the dish across countless landlocked states. My choice, meanwhile, leans into what I love most about studying American food: the constant collisions and middle spaces through which cuisines emerge. I chose the Korean taco, a dish served from a food truck that traversed the fusion-forward city of Los Angeles—in short, a food that refuses to stay put or be pinned down. In that sense, I can’t think of anything more American.

Recommended Reading: There were many excellent tributes written recently about the late author Anthony Bourdain (who died just over four years ago). But I’d like to put Becca Schuh’s piece in the New York Times at the top of that queue, a thoughtful and necessarily critical exploration of what Bourdain means to us in the digital afterlife, and how his genuine engagement with the world’s cuisines has been flattened for the sake of a simpler, more hedonistic narrative. Give it a read, then revisit his iconic 1999 piece in the New Yorker, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.”

The Perfect Bite: Despite traveling quite a bit these last few weeks, my favorite bite of note came from a new-to-me local joint, the Northeast Eating Club. You would never know that behind an unassuming brick facade in Brookline, just a few blocks from the overpriced (and overrated) Blossom Bar, is one of the best Chinese restaurants in the city. Specializing in dishes that come from the Northeast region of the country, we sampled grilled chicken and lamb skewers, bowls of stewed eggplant and dry-fried green beans, and even a better-than-expected “instant noodle” stir-fry. But my absolute favorite dish was a bowl of stir-fried chives, richly seasoned and yet still fresh and light. Can’t wait to go back and sample more.

Cooked & Consumed: Here’s a little recipe I created on the fly for a July 4th appetizer, inspired by a recent round of recipe testing from the new cookbook Kismet (which is SO good, I can’t recommend it enough). Open a wheel of Brie or Camembert, score the top in a cross-hatch, and bake in an oven at 350 degrees until a bit oozyaround the edges, about 15-20 minutes. While the brie bakes, chop up some citrus into thin seeded pieces (I used leftover kumquats, but I bet grapefruit or blood orange would be great, too) and simmer with white wine vinegar, honey, and Aleppo pepper, until it reduces down into a lightly jammy consistency. Remove the cheese from the oven, top with spoonfuls of the citrus compote, then return to the oven for another 2-3 minutes to set. Add a few shakes of Aleppo pepper and flaky salt over the top, and serve with your favorite crispy crackers of choice.