Spoiling the Broth

By R.Z. Sheppard

EATING IN AMERICA by WAVERLEY ROOT and RICHARD DE ROCHEMONT 512 pages. Morrow. $16.95.

In France, cooking has been described as the art of making leftovers taste good. In America, cooking is usually considered a chore, not an art, and leftovers are to be swallowed with one's pride. But 400 years on the alimentary canal is not a long stretch for the development of a national cuisine. Europeans had more than twice that long. The Chinese have had millenniums. Instead of time, Americans have had abundance--and a level of consumption triumphantly buoyed up by waste. In Eating in America the authors offer ample evidence of the relationship between waste and taste.

Buffalo Tongue. The book is a social history of New World food from Indian pemmican and succotash to the TV Dinner. Its basic approach is a soup-to-nuts chronology, including chapters on restaurants, drinking habits and "The Great American Sweet Tooth." Sweetness, the authors argue, is a dominant flavor on the national palate, partly traceable to England where treacle tarts are frequently washed down with heavily sugared tea. The Pilgrim forebears sat down to Thanksgiving dinners that were liberally drenched in maple syrup.

The staggering abundance of the American continent invited squandering--and it was not necessarily a paleface invention. Indians of the Pacific Northwest conducted potlatches--orgies of eating, gift giving and the willful destruction of their own property. The more a man could part with, the greater his status. The prairies and the plains were once horizon-to-horizon bison. The animals were obliterated partly to feed railroad workers but mostly for sport or to furnish the rich with carriage robes and the novelty of nibbling on buffalo tongue. Great clouds of passenger pigeons were peeled from the sky with shotguns or simply captured by hand on their nightly roosts. The last of the species, once estimated to number 9 billion, died at the Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

A plenitude of wild game, the authors point out, gave Americans their insatiable meat tooth--they average nearly 200 lbs. a year per person. Even the once numerous Hudson River sturgeon were called "Albany beef." With woods and waters full of food, many early settlers found little incentive to farm. Besides, farms were fixed targets for marauding Indians. Pigs, which foraged for themselves, were easier to raise. As a result, by the 19th century salt pork became a staple at breakfast, lunch and supper. With the exception of Indian corn and potatoes, fruits and vegetables tended to be shunned as unhealthful, the principal cause of gastroenteritis.

The invention of the icebox in 1803, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and the development of the vacuum-sealed Mason jar in 1858 widened the variety and availability of foodstuffs. Still, little was known about nutrition. Food was food, "one universal aliment," a generalized fuel for the body. The first reformers were not dietitians but moralists who seemed to harbor some squeamishness about the sensuous pleasures of eating. Believing that meat made for hot tempers and sexual excess, the Rev. Sylvester Graham urged the eating of raw fruits and vegetables, food not "compounded and complicated by culinary process." Man should eat food the way God grew it, untouched even by salt and pepper, which, Graham claimed, could cause insanity. For that reason he opposed removing the bran from wheat and, for reasons that had more to do with conscience than science, became one of the first modern health-food faddists, the advocate of graham flour who gave his name to a cracker.

Alimentary evangelism had many well-known preachers. In the mid-1800s the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters Catherine and Harriet sermonized against bread made from bleached flour. "What had been the staff of life for countless ages," said Beecher, "had become a weak crutch." Bad morals went with a bad diet, according to Mrs. Horace Mann, who in 1861 published her cookbook Christianity in the Kitchen. A fruitful wedding of faith, faddism and free enterprise was not long in coming. As early as 1866, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, manager of a Battle Creek sanatorium, was prescribing generous doses of bran, which he claimed "does not irritate. It titillates." Kellogg and his family went on to make it big in cornflakes, while one of his ulcer patients, Charles Post, invented the coffee substitute Postum and a dry breakfast cereal he called Elijah's Manna. The name was later changed to Grape-Nuts.

Ardent Spirits. Yet to most Americans good eating continued to mean an abundance of meat and strong drink. Early European visitors to America noted that "whiskey was the American wine," drunk diluted with all meals and in between by adults and children alike. Excessive, indiscriminate tippling eventually led to the passage of Prohibition, which the authors argue set back the development of American wine. Yet the nation's most famous glutton spurned ardent spirits for orange juice and lemon pop. Tales of Diamond Jim Brady's Gay Nineties gorging at Delmonico's in New York are not only legendary but hard to believe. Is it possible that one man could have eaten at one sitting the following: two to three dozen giant oysters, half a dozen crabs, two bowls of green turtle soup, six lobsters, two portions of terrapin, two ducks, one sirloin steak plus vegetables, and a tray of French pastry (size unknown)? It is difficult to know if this was breakfast, lunch or supper, for Brady reputedly ate six times a day.

Authors Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, both experienced food writers (De Rochemont is also a movie producer), are primarily interested in quality rather than quantity. Their bias is clearly Continental but they are not snobs. They can generalize that American cooking is basically overcooked and underseasoned, but they also discriminate between cuisine and good cooking--especially food with ethnic influences like Tex-Mex, creole and soul.

Different regions have their own special flavor or lack of it. "Gastronomically," say the authors, "the United States gained little when it hurried Nevada into the Union in 1864." But they are not sanguine. The essence of good cooking--and good eating--is fresh ingredients. But as food production continues to be industrialized, the use of additives, artificial flavors and totally synthetic foods will undoubtedly continue to rise. To quote Andy Warhol, whose own work has provided so much junk food for thought: "Progress is very important and exciting in everything but food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, 'An orange what?' "

Yet Root and De Rochemont are seasoned enough to realize that all generalizations about the nation's eating habits tend to melt in the great American maw. With Mom and Dad reading Julia Child and James Beard, and the kids hankering to pop down to the local fast-food franchise, would there be anything strange about mousse grand vefour on Saturday night and boeuf grand mac on Sunday?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.