Acquired Tastes

Mary Margaret McBride's Harvest of American Cooking, published in 1956, offers "Recipes for 1,000 of America's Favorite Dishes," and a number of what I am beginning to think of as anti-recipes, rejections of food. This unusual book is divided into two parts. The first contains the food history and contemporary food of each state and territory of the US, introduced by the kind of reductive illustrations typically found on tourist scarves.

The second section provides the 1,000 recipes, many mentioned in the first section. So, for example, you might read in the first section that "Old sourdough pots are as precious to Alaskans as Sheraton and Chippendale to New Englanders," then, intrigued, turn to the second section for your sourdough pancake recipe.


McBride was a famous radio and TV personality who had "eaten my way appreciatively across America, collecting recipes discriminatingly and pounds rather less so."

While she was able to wax enthusiastic about food in all other regions, McBride's culinary patience ran out in the Pacific. "In Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa," she informed readers, "you find a Polynesian food pattern not always acceptable to white visitors." One exception was a chicken and cocoanut stew, which she provided a recipe for. Otherwise, she wrote, Samoans preferred their food "slightly underdone" and their fruit "unripened." By using her own sense of cuisine to define Samoan food, she turned her readers stomachs away from it.


McBride opened her Hawaii chapter with the unappetizing and dehumanizing tale of a giant queen who was fed lying on her stomach, massaged, rolled over and fed some more, then went on to refuse food herself:

“The business of one-, two-, and three-finger poi has been explained to me repeatedly, but the only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t like poi.” American culture had a fascination with Hawaii during the period in which McBride wrote, and she conceded that luaus were fun, but cautioned "the ingredients of a real luau are so distinctly Hawaiian that if you’re anywhere else you might as well forget the whole idea and give a barbecue instead.” Once again, we do not get to eat.

In Guam, we are turned away from the table one last time:

“Tapo is the Guam version of poi, except it is cooked quite hard and served like sliced potatoes. Americans admit this is an acquired taste, and can take quite a time to develop.” Tapo is so unpleasant to her that she can only speak of it from hearsay, and that of Americans, rather than Guamanians. 

And in fact, it would not be necessary for Americans to acquire the taste for tapo.  Because of US occupation the city of Agana "Has neon lighted drug stores where you can get an American hamburger with a double malted, and similar typical delicacies.”  The phrase "typical delicacies" stands out here, almost oxymoronic, drawing attention to expectations of tropical paradise as they exist in tension with the American yearning for the food of home.