Rachel Laudan

Last week while I was thumbing through some of my books, I came across this lovely passage about whether cooking is a joy, a topic I’ve been kicking around for several weeks.

For the non-Americans on the list, The Joy of Cooking was one of the two or three iconic American cookbooks from the 1930s until the end of the twentieth century. A totally re-written version is still sold but it lacks the verve of the original, written by Irma S. Rombauer, and of the subsequent editions that were under her and her daughter’s control.

A history of the Rombauers and their cookbook is thus close to being a history of American food in the twentieth century and it’s been wonderfully well told by one of America’s most insightful food writers, Anne Mendelson, in Stand Facing the Stove.

Here are some excerpts from the introduction, where Anne Mendelson ruminates on their choice of “such an unlikely slogan as ‘the joy of cooking.’”

“What on earth is joyous about cooking? People who do not know its capacity to bore, weary, and frustrate are people who have never cooked. When Marion Becker (the daughter) came to publish a brief memoir of the book’s first thirty-odd years, one of the mementos of its success that she chose to reprint was a 1944 New York Times Book Review cartoon in which a well-upholstered dowager lies propped on a sofa gracefully perusing The Joy of Cooking while her harassed maid glares from a steaming kitchen. Marion and her mother knew very well that people do not find joy where they do not perceive freedom, control, leisure, or esteem. To put the matter in bald historical perspective, such things were not socially appropriate to cooking in the days when it was done by servants or those too poor to hire them. Ministering to the cook’s morale became the task of cookbooks only when the cook was also the mistress of the household–or sometimes, as life got more complicated, the master.

The Depression did not initiate the departure of hired cooks from American households, a demographic readjustment that had begun at least a century earlier. But it speeded up the process for middle-class families, leaving many people occasionally or permanently responsible for producing meals that they would previously have paid someone else to get on the table. Irma was born into and remained in a somewhat privileged sisterhood who did more of their own cooking than their counterparts of a few generations back but could rely on ‘domestics’ (as some tactfully called them) to see to a good part of the week’s meals. She knew, however, that millions of women who might once have told the cook what to make for dinner now were their own cooks. It was to assure such people that their new responsibility really wasn’t menial that the social implications of cookery could now be enlarged to include ‘joy,’ a discrete rearrangement of necessity so as to make it not only a virtue but a delight.”

Or, more accurately, Italo-porteño cuisine, the Italian cuisine of Buenos Aires.

Just consider the following:

• Argentine cuisine is “Italian” cuisine if you leave aside empanadas (pasties) and parilla (grilled meats) and some regional cuisines.
• Pasta and pizza are the everyday dishes for everybody
• The cheeses of Argentina are overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• The charcuterie of Argentina is overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• The better breads, pastries, cakes and confections are overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• By the 1920s, the Sunday meal for the people of Buenos Aires had ceased to be the puchero (beef vegetable stew) of the Spanish and become a pasta meal. This was apparently true among families and in parts of the country without direct Italian influence. The asado (grilled meats) apparently did not appear until the 1950s.

None of this could be claimed for Italian food in the United States, however popular it now is.

All this raises lots of questions.  What is Argentine-Italian food?  How does it compare to Italian-Italian food, to New York Italian food (and to San Francisco, Toronto and Sao Paolo Italian food)?  Where did it come from? Why the differences?

This series is based on two months in Buenos Aires, one in 2003, one in 2008. I’ve also relied on Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Cornell, 1999) and Los sabores de la patria: las intrigas de la historia argentina contadas desde la mesa y la cocina (Norma, 1998).

Two months scarcely qualifies anyone to be an expert on the cuisine of anywhere.  I’m jumping in because there is so little on the culinary history of Argentina.  But if you know more or can correct me, please jump in.

So there’s every reason to believe that when English speakers began to try “authentic” Indian recipes in their own houses in the 1970s and 80s, the recipes they tried came from wealthy households with servants.

The same is true of other foreign cuisines. Just crack open any of the fine cookbooks that have introduced English-speakers to “ethnic” cuisines and read them carefully. “Awad, the cook, who came from Lower Egypt, lived on the roof terrace, where servants had rooms” says Claudia Roden, famous for her books on Mediterranean and Jewish cookery. The servant Liu-ma, a devout Buddhist, “used to intone to me that I would starve in the next life whenever a grain accidentally dropped from my rice bowl” reminisces Irene Kuo, author of the classic Key to Chinese Cooking.

This is not really surprising. The kinds of people who had the money to travel to England or the United States and the education to write cookbooks were likely to come from this kind of background.

It has, though, I think, had some odd consequences. Just think of two.

1. The recipes thus come from the high cuisine. Indeed because the authors want to showcase the best of their cuisine, they often include the most complex dishes of the high cuisine. This means the American or British cook (me included) trying to reproduce them is not only struggling with a strange cuisine but trying to do alone in his or her kitchen what it perhaps took a bevy of servants to pull off in the country in question. I often hear people wail, “Oh Diana Kennedy’s recipes are so complex, so time-consuming.” Well, yes, (with some exceptions) they are and for just this reason. They are to Mexico as Julia Child’s recipes are to France: the recipes of the top drawer.

2. At the same time, and this does not apply to you, dear readers, I strongly suspect that many English speakers, as they come to terms with these “ethnic” cuisines, assume them to be everyday or even peasant cuisines. What do you think?

If there’s anything to this, then we have massive culinary confusion. Americans and British depreciate their cooking for not having a peasant cuisine base. And when they think of a peasant cuisine base they actually are confusing this with the high cuisines of sophisticated empires like the Ottoman, the Mughal and the Ming. And this, I think, has huge consequences for food politics.

Or am I totally up a gum tree in suspecting this confusion?