Subtitle: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances
Schenone can hold two contradictory ideas at once, which is vital to her project. She writes about the most common and emotional and conflicted food, how everyday cooking was forced to change in the huge waves of migration and innovation that have shaped the US. The three common elements are cheapness, and class-consciousness, and the ties to traditional life through traditional food. This is not a history of the luxurious and thought-out local cuisines of our nation. Still, Schenone can find something good to say about almost everyone and almost every food. (Plantation mistresses don't get a sympathetic word, but JELL-O brand gelatin does.)
The main story is nothing I haven't read elsewhere, but it is a brisk connected introduction to its subjects. To summarize the historical arc: Immigrant women were, first, desperate to find anything to feed their poor families with; second, obliged to cook the old dishes as a duty to keep the old ways alive. Less-recent immigrants got sniffy about the uncouth, smelly food eaten by the new (or native) people; food became an element of indoctrination, more or less benign (e.g. Settlement Houses, more, vs. Indian schools, less). Women's sphere of work got much smaller as manufacture moved out of the house. Women finally moved out of the house, leaving no-one to do thoughtful cooking. How that void will be filled is still not clear—is the anomaly, or are Lunchables?
The best thing in her writing is a willingness to describe the good and the bad that women found in each condition, and a gusto to imagine what it was like and to look at what happened next.
She starts with samp, considers how English and African food traditions had to adapt to the different grains in the New World. (Boston brown bread is an English steamed pudding with New World corn and rye and triangle-trade molasses.) Considers the energy and self-respect of women who went out on week-long gathering trips, as many Native Americans did, or controlled the dairy, as Englishwomen did. She has more sympathetic imagination about what this was like long ago than is pukka scholarly, but her imaginative descriptions are clearly set off with "Perhaps..." or similar. She also found an authentic log-wide hearth to study cooking at, and relished the athleticism of heaving the hot logs and huge pots, kicking the embers, testing heat with a twig or her hand.
A recurring feature of her half-nostalgia is that immigrants were often too poor in the Old Country to eat its cuisine. In the States, they weren't preserving 'the way it was' as much as 'the way it should have been'. It would be interesting to work out how much culinary practice went back from the US to the various old countries, once they'd caught up and the whole world had enough to eat. I need to properly read and cook from A Mediterranean Feast, which goes into alarming detail about the poverty around the Med.
Schenone clearly likes to eat and cook, without pretending that it isn't work. This keeps the last section, on modern food, from coming to a clear conclusion, but it also keeps her from being preachy. She isn't happy about the current US diet or the lack of time that drives it, but after writing the whole dairying-to-war-work history she doesn't assume it's going to stay the way it is forever, as long as we remember that we have to do something about it sometime.
ISBN: 0-393-01671-4
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