Review by New York Times Review
NOT LONG AGO, this big, messy country united. Culinarily, at least. We all sat down to our Thanksgiving tables and ate (mostly) the same thing at (mostly) the same time, before retreating to our big, messy corners to cook and eat the diverse, constantly evolving cuisine we call American. The latest batch of narrative food books (not to be confused with strictly recipe-driven cookbooks) explores some of those corners, reminding us how food defines who we are (Patriots? Capitalists? Shameless Worshipers of Celebrity?), where we've been and - perhaps most American of all - who we want to be. IN NINA MUKERJEE FURSTENAU'S memoir, BITING THROUGH THE SKIN: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland (University of Iowa, paper, $19), the author uses family recipes to bridge two worlds: the small Midwestern town of Pittsburg, Kan., where she grew up, and, a universe away, her parents' and grandparents' native Bengal. The book is structured in the format preferred and perfected by Molly Wizenberg ("A Homemade Life"), Luisa Weiss ("My Berlin Kitchen") and food bloggers everywhere: personal story followed by recipe featured in personal story. If one of the metrics of success in this genre is to get you into the kitchen, Furstenau's got that one covered. Her food memoir, though, is less concerned with the proper amount of ginger in the dal than it is with the classic immigrant's search for belonging. "There I was playing softball, riding my 10-speed, and going to the Dairy Queen," she writes, "eyes bright, fingers sticky, all the while losing my identity." Her childhood was one where chickpea flour sat in the pantry beside the allpurpose white, where Huntley and Brinkley read the national news as the family dined on murgi and payesh. These dishes "spelled trouble" to her father, who feared the clingy clove-y aromas would make the house smell of "otherness." He worked out an elaborate venting system for just such occasions. Furstenau's struggle becomes particularly acute in the late 1970s, when she's an angst-ridden teenager suddenly frustrated that her friends don't understand the world she comes from, even as she struggles to understand it herself. In a chapter called "All Our Tupperware Is Stained With Turmeric" (nailed that one) she decides the answer is to be found - where else? - at the dinner table. She will help her mother prepare a traditional Bengali feast for her burger-and-fries-loving pals. "What is this exactly," one of them asks, and in one swipe of her fork brushes both the curry and the author's search for who exactly she is to the side of the plate. It should be noted that the recipe for the keema - a minced meat curry - following this story had me combing the county for cardamom pods. USING THE dinner plate as a mirror of one's identity isn't a novel concept, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. In the engrossing THREE SQUARES: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, $27.99), Abigail Carroll lays down some historical context, reminding us that in America who you are and where you came from are less important than where you are now and where you hope to go - preferably as efficiently and in as well-packaged a form as possible. No era demonstrates this point better than the Industrial Revolution, which bumped dinnertime - traditionally a midday recharging period for men in the fields - to the family-centric evening ritual we now know and revere. During this period, dinner became a signifier of class - midday eaters were seen as lower class and provincial, while those who had white-collar office jobs came home to a meal at night. "Dining together in the evening," Carroll observes, "helped the middle-class Victorian family to understand itself as a family, and this new understanding made the meal so much more than a meal. Now it was a ritual." Beyond covering the evolution of breakfast, lunch, dinner and even the insidious snack time, Carroll also charts how American food has been politicized, signaling not just what social class you belong to but, in some cases, how loyal you are. During the Revolutionary era, corn represented the Colonies because it was a native crop. "Luxury and self-indulgence became politicized as offenses against the state," Carroll explains. "Hardly any breakfast was plainer than milk and maize. Hardly any breakfast was more patriotic." THAT VERY AMERICAN impulse to claim ownership - and to define our separate experiences through food - is on full display in Peggy Wolff's FRIED WALLEYE AND CHERRY PIE: Midwestern Writers on Food (University of Nebraska, paper, $19.95). As with most anthologies, the quality of the writing is uneven, but Heartland natives will embrace the recipes, if not the remembrances of State Fair corn dogs and Lake Michigan fish boils, German kuchen and tamales eaten on Chicago's Maxwell Street, a.k.a. "the Ellis Island of the Midwest." Many of the essayists - including two former Times columnists, Molly O'Neill (Columbus, Ohio) and Peter Meehan (suburban Chicago) - address the Midwest's status as the capital of the industrial food complex. ("You lose more than corn when you lose your cornfields," O'Neill's father said when farmland was razed to create shopping malls.) But it's a moment in Donna Pierce's essay, "The Black Migration," that provides the tidiest resolution to the question of American identity. In the early 1950s, Pierce's parents moved from Alabama to Missouri, where they hoped to raise their children far from segregation. Her mother never stopped serving gumbo and Creole specialties, but also made plenty of room in her repertory for the beef stews and apple cobblers of the Midwest. One morning, when Pierce's father was pining for his days of Gulf Coast papayas and mangos, her mother passed him the apple butter and declared for all to hear: "Bloom where you are planted." I think Nina Mukerjee Furstenau would have appreciated the conviction. PERHAPS NONE OF these new food books personify the American story better than Allen Salkin's dishy, behindthe-scenes FROM SCRATCH: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, $27.95). For those with a keen interest in cable television and how many subscribers the Food Network had in South Bend, Ind., in 2003, this book is your "MobyDick." For everyone else, it's salacious enough to keep you swinging from one good old-fashioned bootstrap story to the next. All the Single Name Celeb Chefs are represented - Emeril, Bobby, Mario, Jamie, Nigella, Rachael, Ina - evolving into superstars (and, eventually, brands) as the Food Network capitalized on America's obsession with cooking shows and democratized the linen-and-lobster world of fine cuisine. It's particularly hard to resist the stories about Rachael Ray, who, Salkin reports, was a natural right from the start ("She was gold - so obviously appealing") and who was plucked from upstate obscurity to become the celebrity she is today. But that almost wasn't the case. After Ray killed her national television debut on the "Today Show," she tried to talk her way out of being hired by the Food Network. "You're Champagne, I'm beer out of the bottle," she supposedly told the suits. "I clearly don't belong here, I'm not a chef." And, of course, that's why they wanted her, mirroring the new mission for the network, "where cooking was less important than the cook." Thus began the meteoric rise of the onetime Macy's salesgirl, with only "filament-thin tethers to the world of fine food," who now reigns over one of the country's largest culinary media empires. Only in America. JENNY ROSENSTRACH is the author of "Dinner: A Love Story," a book inspired by her blog of the same name. on murgi and payesh. These dishes "spelled trouble" to her father, who feared the clingy clove-y aromas would make the house smell of "otherness." He worked out an elaborate venting system for just such occasions. Furstenau's struggle becomes particularly acute in the late 1970s, when she's an angst-ridden teenager suddenly frustrated that her friends don't understand the world she comes from, even as she struggles to understand it herself. In a chapter called "All Our Tupperware Is Stained With Turmeric" (nailed that one) she decides the answer is to be found - where else? - at the dinner table. She will help her mother prepare a traditional Bengali feast for her burger-and-fries-loving pals. "What is this exactly," one of them asks, and in one swipe of her fork brushes both the curry and the author's search for who exactly she is to the side of the plate. It should be noted that the recipe for the keema - a minced meat curry - following this story had me combing the county for cardamom pods. USING THE dinner plate as a mirror of one's identity isn't a novel concept, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun. In the engrossing THREE SQUARES: The Invention of the American Meal (Basic Books, $27.99), Abigail Carroll lays down some historical context, reminding us that in America who you are and where you came from are less important than where you are now and where you hope to go - preferably as efficiently and in as well-packaged a form as possible. No era demonstrates this point better than the Industrial Revolution, which bumped dinnertime - traditionally a midday recharging period for men in the fields - to the family-centric evening ritual we now know and revere. During this period, dinner became a signifier of class - midday eaters were seen as lower class and provincial, while those who had white-collar office jobs came home to a meal at night. "Dining together in the evening," Carroll observes, "helped the middle-class Victorian family to understand itself as a family, and this new understanding made the meal so much more than a meal. Now it was a ritual." Beyond covering the evolution of breakfast, lunch, dinner and even the insidious snack time, Carroll also charts how American food has been politicized, signaling not just what social class you belong to but, in some cases, how loyal you are. During the Revolutionary era, corn represented the Colonies because it was a native crop. "Luxury and self-indulgence became politicized as offenses against the state," Carroll explains. "Hardly any breakfast was plainer than milk and maize. Hardly any breakfast was more patriotic." THAT VERY AMERICAN impulse to claim ownership - and to define our separate experiences through food - is on full display in Peggy Wolff's FRIED WALLEYE AND CHERRY PIE: Midwestern Writers on Food (University of Nebraska, paper, $19.95). As with most anthologies, the quality of the writing is uneven, but Heartland natives will embrace the recipes, if not the remembrances of State Fair corn dogs and Lake Michigan fish boils, German kuchen and tamales eaten on Chicago's Maxwell Street, a.k.a. "the Ellis Island of the Midwest." Many of the essayists - including two former Times columnists, Molly O'Neill (Columbus, Ohio) and Peter Meehan (suburban Chicago) - address the Midwest's status as the capital of the industrial food complex. ("You lose more than corn when you lose your cornfields," O'Neill's father said when farmland was razed to create shopping malls.) But it's a moment in Donna Pierce's essay, "The Black Migration," that provides the tidiest resolution to the question of American identity. In the early 1950s, Pierce's parents moved from Alabama to Missouri, where they hoped to raise their children far from segregation. Her mother never stopped serving gumbo and Creole specialties, but also made plenty of room in her repertory for the beef stews and apple cobblers of the Midwest. One morning, when Pierce's father was pining for his days of Gulf Coast papayas and mangos, her mother passed him the apple butter and declared for all to hear: "Bloom where you are planted." I think Nina Mukerjee Furstenau would have appreciated the conviction. PERHAPS NONE OF these new food books personify the American story better than Allen Salkin's dishy, behindthe-scenes FROM SCRATCH: Inside the Food Network (Putnam, $27.95). For those with a keen interest in cable television and how many subscribers the Food Network had in South Bend, Ind., in 2003, this book is your "MobyDick." For everyone else, it's salacious enough to keep you swinging from one good old-fashioned bootstrap story to the next. All the Single Name Celeb Chefs are represented - Emeril, Bobby, Mario, Jamie, Nigella, Rachael, Ina - evolving into superstars (and, eventually, brands) as the Food Network capitalized on America's obsession with cooking shows and democratized the linen-and-lobster world of fine cuisine. It's particularly hard to resist the stories about Rachael Ray, who, Salkin reports, was a natural right from the start ("She was gold - so obviously appealing") and who was plucked from upstate obscurity to become the celebrity she is today. But that almost wasn't the case. After Ray killed her national television debut on the "Today Show," she tried to talk her way out of being hired by the Food Network. "You're Champagne, I'm beer out of the bottle," she supposedly told the suits. "I clearly don't belong here, I'm not a chef." And, of course, that's why they wanted her, mirroring the new mission for the network, "where cooking was less important than the cook." Thus began the meteoric rise of the onetime Macy's salesgirl, with only "filament-thin tethers to the world of fine food," who now reigns over one of the country's largest culinary media empires. Only in America. JENNY ROSENSTRACH is the author of "Dinner: A Love Story," a book inspired by her blog of the same name.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 15, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
With its acres upon acres of cornfields and orchards, the Midwest ought to have some of the country's best foods. In summer, that's often true. But as with the rest of America, midwesterners have too often turned their backs on their most flavorful foods in favor of an easy drive-through at a fast-food outlet. This anthology of essays on the Midwest's best and most unpretentious foods should go a long way toward regaining the respect the heartland's cuisine ought to enjoy. Jacquelyn Mitchard celebrates the area's most typical summer fare, sweet corn, especially its marvelous new variety, Mirai. Donna Pierce reminds us that midwestern cuisine owes much to the black migration. Lorna Landvik reveals that the institution of state fairs both enshrined local foodways and introduced novel traditions. The national reach of midwestern culinary art emerges in professional chef Gale Gand's feature on a Hoosier cheese maker. For regional collections.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Food writer Wolff, who grew up in the Midwest and still resides there, has amassed a brilliant collection of Heartland food stories. The contents of the book range from essays by novelists (Elizabeth Berg, Jaquelyn Mitchard, and others) to works by newspaper columnists, cookbook authors, and chefs. Some are humorous; others are nostalgic, or are filled with fascinating historical facts and tidbits. The collection is organized into four major parts: "Midwestern Staples" (including an in-depth look at Chicago's Italian beef sandwiches by Michael Stern and an ode to the fried pork tenderloin sandwich by Jon Yates); "Distant Cultures," in which Minnesotan Anne Dimock and others examine the foods that arrived with various immigrants (in her case, rhubarb, a German-Scandinavian dessert essential for pie, kuchen, and kram); "Holidays, Fairs, and Events" (readers will be amply sated by Lorna Landvik's culinary tour of the Minnesota State Fair); "A Full Belly" (including Douglas Bauer's view of his mother's hard work in her Iowa farm kitchen) and "The Midwestern Sweet Tooth" (Bundt cakes, fudge, and beyond, as in "When a Pie Is More Than a Pie" by cookbook writer Jeremy Jackson). The 30 essays and 14 recipes (a portion of which are reprints) bring the flavors of the Midwest vividly to life; but, more importantly, they dig deeply into the universal connections between food, family, time, and place. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Some 30 well-known Midwestern writers reflect on food and family, and their reminiscences provide a feast for the reader in this hearty collection of essays. Jacquelyn Mitchard's "Corn in Heaven" is a joyous celebration of this sweet summer crop, evoking warm and wonderful memories of family gathered around as the corn roasts on an open fire. Writer Elizabeth Berg celebrates her Aunt Lala's meatloaf, recalling her Midwestern middle-class upbringing where "everyone had meatloaf once a week." NPR personality Peter Sagal laments Chicago's 2006 ban on the sale of foie gras, and writer Sue Hubbell offers up "The Great American Pie Expedition." VERDICT A delectable read, sprinkled with recipes and generous helpings of fun and plenty of food for thought.-Graciela Monday, San Antonio (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
