Customer Reviews

The Taste of America (The Food Series)

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After reading this book for the first time in the early 1980s, it changed the way I thought about both choosing what to feast upon and how to prepare it. I always wondered why I hated vegetables as a child. Having read the book, I realized that my mother--loving though she may have been--had cooked vegetables to death by boiling everything until it was soft, tasteless and unappetizing. When I began learning to cook for myself, the beauty of this text came through for me. Now I appreciate vegetables because I prepare them simply and let the flavor come through. I recommend this book to anyone who is a "picky" eater (and even to those who are not). Once you know why you don't like a variety of foods, you may discover that it's not the food you learned detest, but the way Mama cooked it for you!

An impassioned, lively, fascinating look at the American table. The Hess' are knowledgeable, erudite and highly opinionated. Many disagree with their negative view of American eating habits, but it is hard to argue with them on the facts. Read it and think!

What a delight to find this amazing classic back in print, in a reprint
edition with new comments by the authors. This will spare thousands
of food enthusiasts the perennial burden of scouring the used-book
market for copies of it. (I ordered several copies of the reprint at once
for gifts and to have on hand.) People who were following food
writing at the time will recall the stir created by the Hesses' book when
it first appeared in the late 1970s. The book is iconoclastic, even

subversive, in the same sense as Prometheus's gift of fire to mankind.

In this case the gift is not fire but perspective, or a sense of history.
Co-author John Hess was himself a senior and very experienced
food writer and editor, but he has a scholar's dislike of pretentious
misinformation being quoted around until it becomes conventional
wisdom. Karen Hess is a food historian noted elsewhere for her
work on the mysterious "Martha Washington" cookbook.
Their book addresses questions like: How did things like iceberg
lettuce and phony "gourmet" products displace centuries of fine
immigrant and indigenous cooking wisdom in the US? Who helped
to "sell" such changes, only to be celebrated later (Orwellian-style)
for contributions to US cooking? Moreover, it is remarkable to see
how many "innovations" in US cooking since about the time this book
was written consist actually of rediscovery of principles widely known
100 or 200 years ago, as the book documents in detail.

The casual reader should be forgiven for not having heard of all
of this in the general media. Journalism in the US about food (and not
only about food) is lately graced with legions of people blissfully
and confidently unconscious of anything that preceded their own words.
Such people will gush uncritically about food pundits like Craig
Claiborne (distinguished on the basis that the gushing writers
have heard of them) without any real research or perspective.

These writers would not do so if they read the Hesses' book.

From the Hesses', and other, evidence it seems that around the
1950s, "gourmet" became a convenience-food-industry euphemism for
"sucker" in the US. "That flabby midget called Cornish game hen was,
next to chocolate-covered ants, the gourmet racket's funniest joke on a
gullible public. It has no more taste of game than a wad of cotton," say
the Hesses. Such game hens are one of several gimmicks Craig
Claiborne is quoted pushing; canned beef gravy and instant whipped
potatoes are others. Claiborne receives especial attention here,
though James Beard, the Rombauers, Fannie Farmer, even JC Herself,
are not spared. Yet this criticism is constructive, at least for the reader,
with positive counterexamples.

It is an angry, or perhaps indignant, book but an informed one,
meticulous in its documentation of sources. The bibliography by itself is
valuable, sort of an annotated miniature of Katherine Bitting's epic 1939
"Gastronomic Bibliography" (also cited; that book is very expensive
on the used market; I know because I own one; even its 1980s reprint is
expensive and I am told, unlike the original, is printed on acid paper).

Cooking and America, not a better subject to be found. Well written and a keeper.