Read The United States of Arugula Online
Authors: David Kamp
“Delightful. … A serious-minded examination of the flowering of food culture in this country … thorough and engrossing … deliciously entertaining.”
—
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“[A] Rollicking and gossipy history of ‘how we became a gourmet nation.’”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“The depth and breadth of Kamp’s research are clear. The results are impressive. While Kamp is an excellent writer, he set out to do more than turn memorable phrases. This isn’t a tone poem, a travelogue, a memoir…. It’s thoroughly journalistic, built on retrieved facts, discovered anecdotes, and fresh interviews.”
—Frank Bruni,
Diner’s Journal, New York Times
“A must-have directory for any respectable gourmand, a venerable reference that deserves a spot next to Irma Rombauer’s
Joy of Cooking
and Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Kamp has accomplished a marvelous feat in collecting the telling details and anecdotes of those who have helped shape American tastes. Reading him is like gathering around the prep table gossiping with the line cooks—the kind who can really dish and who have seen everything, including that piece of rare tuna dropped on the kitchen floor and served for $28.99. Kamp writes about chefs the way sports reporters write about star athletes—detailing the motivations, training, shortcomings, and conflicts that have made them who they are.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“With admirable lightness of touch, Kamp uses food to suggest a broader history, a tale of tastes and trends embedded in the grand epic of American consumer capitalism.”
—A.O. Scott,
New York Times Book Review
“A comprehensive and dazzling book about the history of food in America … The book is full of encyclopedia-quality tidbits, both in the text and in his particularly entertaining footnotes. However, the primary virtue of the book is Kamp’s insightful sketches of everyone in the food world you have ever admired and quite a few that you probably forgot you knew. If he’s missed anybody, it’s the guy running a bodega at the end of your block….
You will never be able to make up for all the wonderful meals you’ve missed over the years, but now you can find out how good they all would have been.”
—Alan Richman,
GQ
“Kamp chronicles change in the American diet with humor and enthusiasm. … In a nation of fad diets and obesity epidemics Kamp’s history succeeds in provoking pride, understanding, and, most important, appetite…. He relies on exceptional storytelling to weave gourmet figures into generational tapestries, tying together personal and cultural history.
The United States of Arugula
vividly portrays several eras of American culture while leaving the reader genuinely pleased with the changes in our national diet.”
—
American Heritage
“This book is a great read: witty, warm, informative, well-researched. It begged to be written, and David Kamp has done it just right.”
—Mollie Katzen, author of
Moosewood Cookbook
“Kamp’s an excellent writer. He uses his prodigious research, sly humor and storytelling skills to illuminate the back stories of well-known food-centric businesses such as Chez Panisse, Williams-Sonoma and the Zagat guides. He evenhandedly recounts foibles and missteps even as he celebrates the entrepreneurial derring-do that has provided Americans with new cuisines.”
—
USA Today
“Kamp brings a colorful pop-culture sensibility to his portrait of the personalities and places that have helped spread the gospel of good food beyond a gourmand elite and into middle America.”
“A great book…. If you want to know how we got to where we are as a culture, put this on your must-read list.”
—Michael Colameco, WOR radio
“A smart, engaging account of how serious foodies brought fresh, new, and delicious meals to American tables. Kamp’s deep understanding, appreciation, and respect for the key players in this history make his book a riveting read.”
—Marion Nestle, author of
Food Politics
and
What to Eat
TO AIMÉE
INTRODUCTION
A World Without Celebrity Chefs
CHAPTER ONE
America’s Dysfunctional Relationship with Good Food
CHAPTER TWO
Liberté, Egalité, Soulé
CHAPTER THREE
The Food Establishment, Part I
CHAPTER FOUR
The Food Establishment, Part II
CHAPTER FIVE
Radical Notions
CHAPTER SIX
Righteous and Crunchy
CHAPTER SEVEN
The New Sun-Dried Lifestyle
CHAPTER EIGHT
California Nouvelle
CHAPTER NINE
Land of the Free-Range
CHAPTER TEN
All over the Map
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Magic of Thinking Big
CHAPTER TWELVE
Toward a McSustainable Future
MOST OF US HAVE AT LEAST ONE RAPTUROUS FOOD MEMORY FROM CHILDHOOD—OF
fresh-baked Saturday-morning popovers, of sweet little strawberries picked in the wild, of a Cantonese lobster dish unveiled from beneath a dome at some dimly lit place with a name like Jade Pagoda. But I must confess, in defiance of societal pressure to view one’s bygone youth as a magical idyll of unsurpassable delights, that these memories pale completely in comparison to those I have of, oh, last week. Virtually every day of my adult life, I’ve been fortunate to eat something I simply never tasted as a young child. I’m talking not only about fancy foods, like white truffles and aged balsamic vinegar, but about commonplace, nonevent stuff: a tortilla chip dipped in salsa, a handful of picholine olives, a pat of goat cheese on a cracker, a crumble of aged pecorino, a fresh croissant.
Amazingly, these things were either unavailable in my youth or sufficiently scarce that my family didn’t know about them. I remember attending a wedding in 1984, when I was in my teens, at which a cousin from San Diego, where they were more food-forward than us East Coasters, grimly surveyed the restaurants and markets of the dire Pennsylvania town where we’d gathered, and said, “Dude, you people need to learn about salsa.” My response: “What’s salsa?” I remember my mother, in 1978, returning from a business trip to Palo Alto, California, and telling us that her associates had taken her to a Japanese restaurant where they served something called sushi, and that when some of this sushi was placed before her, the restaurant’s watchful Japanese proprietor, somehow sensing that my mother was a sushi novitiate, sped across the room, and, like a Secret Service agent taking a bullet for the president, inserted himself bodily between my mother and the table, crying
“Raw fish! Raw fish!”
Suffice it to say, salsa, if I may toss out an oft-cited food factoid, has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment, and sushi has become so unthreatening that Schnucks, the St. Louis–based supermarket chain whose eminently Midwestern, howdy-do slogan is “The Friendliest Stores in Town,” now features a sushi bar in many of its locations. In other words, I’m not the only one who has come a long way culinarily. Judy Rodgers, whose San Francisco restaurant, Zuni Café, was named the Outstanding Restaurant in America at the 2003 James Beard Foundation Awards, and who herself won the foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award the following year—the food-world equivalent of winning Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars—was originally a St. Louis girl, and she recalls that in her youth in the 1960s,
white corn
was considered outré. (“I didn’t like it,” she says. “I liked yellow corn.”) Today, as you might expect of a chef whose restaurant is named for a Southwestern Indian tribe but whose primary influences are country French and rustic Italian, Rodgers has gotten a lot more adventurous. Her menus feature items as varied as house-cured anchovies, homemade spaetzle, short ribs braised in ale, pasta alla carbonara, grilled meats marinated in the Argentinian chili-vinegar mixture known as
chimichurri
, roast chicken with bread salad (her signature dish), and
esqueixada
, a pungent Catalan salt-cod concoction.
The very fact of such cornucopian variety buoys me. I love the speed with which the food world moves, ushering forth new taste sensations and better ideas with the let’s-top-ourselves alacrity of Apple Computer and the anything’s-possible ambition of 1960s NASA. I love the way each new month brings with it some strange, unexpected, or simply delicious new edible to try, whether an artisanal Kentucky bacon whose down-home producers have just figured out e-commerce, an unfamiliar peach variety that some small-time farmer has grown from heirloom seeds, or the utterly bizarre “bubble tea” drinks that leapt from Taiwanese street stalls to American cities a few years ago, replete with giant tapioca balls that are slurped through an extra-wide straw.
I love the way that even the seemingly mundane staples of our daily life
are being tapped for all the depth and complexity they can offer—to the point of ridiculousness, but benign ridiculousness. Butter is now something you can get in a variety of regional pedigrees and butterfat contents: 86 percent for the artisanal “cultured” version made by the Vermont Butter and Cheese Company, 85 percent for the butter from California’s Straus Family Creamery, 82 percent for the commercially manufactured but high-end Plugrá, and 80 percent for your basic supermarket Land O’Lakes. Sugar, too, is making a play for our attention, its enthusiasts arguing that there’s a whole world out there beyond the yellow Domino box, a world populated by varieties with such Dr. Seussian names as jaggery, piloncillo, muscovado, and demerara. What about salt, then? Well, at the restaurant widely regarded as the best in the United States, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, in Yountville, California, I was soberly presented with a salt tasting—
a salt tasting!
—as an accompaniment to my foie gras course. The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next—one as fine and white as baking powder, another as dark and chunkily crystalline as the inside of a geode.
It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? Nowadays, it’s all too common—and, alas, valid—to complain that things just aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political discourse, ladies’ millinery, what have you. But food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve. If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re dining out, we have more options open to us, and a greater likelihood than ever that we’ll get a good meal, no matter what the price point. Our culinary elites—the chefs, cookbook authors, cooking-school instructors, purveyors, and food writers who lead the way—are suffused with feelings of boundless possibility, having liberated themselves from the old strictures and prejudices that hemmed in their predecessors. It’s okay for the traditions of peasant cookery to inform those of haute cuisine, and for haute flourishes to inform regular-guy food.
I daresay we’re in the throes of an American food revolution! Well, I
would
daresay, were it not for the fact that the national media have been declaring the advent of the American food revolution for decades, since way back in those primordial dark ages before people knew what salsa and sushi were. In November of 1966,
Time
put Julia Child on its cover, an acknowledgment of the huge following she’d acquired via her program on public television,
The French Chef
, and the best-selling cookbook she’d co-written in 1961,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The story inside declared, “If 1966 is the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia, this is partially because Julia is just right for the times … Supermarkets have found that their gourmet counters are their handsomest profit earners, and are rapidly expanding them … [The] Bon Vivant supermarket in San Diego stocks more than 3,000 kinds of fancy foods, from kippered sturgeon and kangaroo tails to pickled rooster combs and 4–1b. tins of Caspian Sea caviar.”