table talk / By Joseph Byrd

A History of American Cuisine, Part I

And a simple cornbread recipe

(Dec. 27, 2007)  “There is no ‘American cuisine’?” inquired Nero Wolfe. “Have you eaten Maryland terrapin stewed with butter
and chicken broth and Bourbon?”

“No.”

GALLERY >

“Have you eaten a planked porterhouse steak, two inches thick, charred on the outside, but surrendering hot > red juice under the knife, escorted by thick slices of fresh King Bolete mushrooms faintly underdone?”*

“No.”

“Or paper-thin sliced Smithfield ham, baked with vinegar, molasses, cider and spices? Or Kentucky Burgoo,
with chicken, mutton and squirrel sausage? Or Lobster Newburgh? Or Key Islands She-Crab Soup? Or the
Creole Tripe of New Orleans? No? I have eaten ‘Tripe a la mode de Caen’ at Le Trumilou in Paris. It is superb,
but no more than Creole Tripe. I have eaten bouillabaisse at Marseilles, its cradle and its temple, yet it is mere
belly-fodder compared with its namesake in New Orleans, with Atlantic red snapper, Gulf oysters, and
bayou crayfish….”

adapted from Rex Stout’s novel, Too Many Cooks

The late 17th and early 18th century produced the modern intellectual concepts we call the Enlightenment, notably in political theory, mathematics, science and theology. Toward the end of that era, the British colonies that were to become the United States began to be a laboratory for these ideas: for the practical application of science (Benjamin Franklin), medicine (Benjamin Rush), politics (Thomas Paine); for the simultaneous and contradictory appearance of “Deism” (the socially-acceptable agnosticism as practiced by Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and other Founding Fathers) and the “Great Awakening” (the origin of evangelical Christianity); and for bold social experiments like the Shakers.

The colonies were also a first in the culture of food. Unlike societies where cuisine was primarily a product of native horticulture and husbandry (cassava, yams and goat in sub-Saharan Africa; oats, barley and mutton in Scotland; legumes, corn and dog in Central America), the colonies imported grains and beans, fruit trees and berries, sugar cane and beets, honeybees, chickens and dairy and meat animals.

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