table talk / By Joseph Byrd

A History of American Cuisine, Part I

These they supplemented with local foods like chestnuts, corn, game and eels, and ultimately Latin America’s cornucopia (potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, peanuts). By the turn of the 19th century — a generation before Darwin — farmers were genetically modifying on a large scale, selectively breeding plants and animals to flourish in the Ohio Valley, a verdant watershed encompassing 14 states, with the richest soil yet known to agriculture.

Thus, the nation became a flourishing source of agricultural wealth long before industrial raw materials such as cotton, coal and iron were viable exports.

The fact that there was no single state, but a group of independent royal English charters, allowed diversity in diet from the start. A mid-day dinner in rural Pennsylvania would be very different from that on a Carolina plantation, or from street food in The Bowery.

To the initial presence of British, Dutch, French and Spanish food, successive waves of immigration added culinary influences from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy. Meanwhile, the underground but pervasive influence of slavery played its role in the South. Following the annexation of Texas, Mexican border states developed their own regional cuisine. Jews brought Baltic and Slavic influences to the urban Northeast, and coolie laborers in California added Chinese. By the early years of the 20th century, the United States was repository to a staggering legacy of foods.

But that legacy was not a literal one. The differences that evolved over time and distance were substantial. There were also critical differences in ingredients, preparation, and indeed, differences of life and culture. There is no such thing as “chop suey” in China, “chili” in Mexico or “french fries” in France, and a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza would be considered an embarrassment in Naples. American food forged a unique path, ignoring the entreaties and scoffs of purists, collecting — like a magpie — shiny bits of metal and pieces of string, seemingly random things. But in the end, it is not random. It is a kind of genius. It is its own thing.

Today I want to begin a series of journeys through America’s culinary past. It would be interesting (and often amusing) to share early recipes, or “receipts” as they were called. But instead I want to select useful ones, ones I’ve actually tested. Obsessing about the past is as bad as ignoring it.

My first subject is cornbread. There are not many dishes the New World can claim sole credit for, but this is one. Native Americans learned early to dry and grind corn into corn meal, the basic component of cornbread. The first cornbreads were simple mixtures of cornmeal, salt and water. Cornbread is unique because instead of yeast or other leavening agents, it is caused to rise chemically. This is due to natural properties of cornmeal and corn flour.

> The best corn bread we ever ate was from meal well-kneaded, with nothing but water and a little salt, and then made into lumps about the size and somewhat the shape of a man’s foot, and raked in the embers just like potatoes to roast, and there allowed to remain and cook all night. Remember the three grand secrets about baking good corn bread: Never grind your meal very thin, always have it fresh-ground, and never fear baking it too much.

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