I liked this book. Like the author, I was born in the late 1940s, and I remember what food was like before McDonald's when hamburgers were thick with good beef, before the highway system when you drove on two-lane roads through all the towns (and got to read Burma Shave signs), before chain restaurants, when you never knew exactly what you were going to get. I remember eating abalone steaks on the wharf in Santa Cruz on Friday nights for $4, which was very expensive but it was the only seafood I would eat. I haven't had an abalone steak for 50 years, nor have I seen their big shells scattered on beaches. There were no "ethnic" restaurants in Santa Clara, where I grew up, except for one Chinese place where the waitresses wore red kimonos and served fried rice pressed in a round bowl and upended on the plate, and you hated to disturb this smooth dome with your fork. I didn't have pizza until I was well into my teens--it was too foreign for my mother--she pronounced it inedible at the time, and never did come to like it. And the hamburgers--I was in high school when the first McDonald's opened in town. On their sign they showed the actual number of hamburgers sold, and incremented it regularly--it was in the hundreds of thousands then, then the number rolled over a million, and climbed...and eventually they gave up and went to "millions and millions" and now "billions and billions." My friends and I didn't like the hamburgers--we thought they were of poor quality meat and too thin--"nothing to them." But we liked the french fries very much. So this book brought back memories. And it also confirmed a recipe--my mother always made enchiladas stuffed with chopped olive, hard boiled egg, cheese, and raw onion. One never sees an enchilada like that today and people think the recipe is weird...but in the book was mention of enchiladas stuffed with raw onion and cheese. Not weird at the time.
This must have been a really interesting project for the author, and frustrating as well because of the missing bits and unevenness of the material. For example, there is so much about the south and not very much at all from California. Maybe that says something about the different nature of southerners and Californians, about who had time to write about cooking and who did not. California was a very different place before and just after the war, and this book helped me think about it, right down to the strawberries that were sold in little wooden baskets from the acreage just down on the El Camino, under the eucalyptus trees, strawberries that you could smell before you even got out of the car. And the icebox in my grandmother's summer cabin, which had to be stocked with a big block of ice that you bought by putting 25 cents in a slot in a big wooden container the size of the back of a truck, and the block came sliding down a ramp. The expressions, the language of the essays reminded me of the way my parents spoke--a much cleaner language than we hear today, from a society much more concerned with the delicacy of women. I don't know that the book would strike the same chord with younger people who didn't know the U.S. "before," just like it must be difficult to imagine the world without laptops, cell phones, microwaves, and women in the office who are perfectly comfortable with four-letter words.
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culinary culture
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 9, 2014W. DeFelice
Maybe if you're an old-family American
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 19, 2010
