The Return of Tamale Pie (which never did go away)

Several years ago, I noticed that Ruth Evans Brown, a well-known cookbook writer in the 1950s, had something against tamale pie. She mentioned it, but she wouldn't give a recipe because she didn't think anyone should make it. It seemed a strange stance to take in a cookbook. Especially because many of her contemporary writers did include tamale pies. Two versions appeared in the California Cook Book: An Unusual Collection of Spanish Dishes and Typical California Foods for Luncheons and Dinners which May be Quickly and Easily Prepared, published in 1925, but this certainly wasn't the earliest appearance of the dish, which became popular in the early twentieth century and was included in an "Emergency Leaflet" issued in 1917 by the Iowa State Extension Agency to help cooks deal with food shortages during the First World War. It appeared in the Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book, one of the most popular cookbooks of the 1950s.
Even M.F.K. Fisher ate tamale pie--in Paris of all places! Sure, she forever afterwards associated the dish with a bout of severe melancholy she experienced soon after eating it, but she didn't blame the tamale pie.
Then just this week, I discovered another food writer with a strange relationship to tamale pie. In the New Yorker, famed/adored/revered American food writer Calvin Trillin wrote that in Greenville, MS, he ordered "something called tamale pie." Something? Something called tamale pie? Has the man never heard of such a thing? Does he think his readers have never heard of such a thing? The internet, of course, if full of recipes for and pictures of tamale pies, in all their variety and glories, existing in spite of what some people think. Tamale pie is a perfect American food in some ways, blending not cultures so much as ideas (and stereotypes) about cultures, existing in multiple versions--some with chips, some without, some with olives, some without, some with tamales, some without. It's very forgiving in the way that messy recipes can be. And yet it's somehow also invisible.

The Joy of Never Cooking That Recipe Again

I have just discovered one special feature of online recipes when they team up with the old technology of printing--you can throw out a recipe if you don't like the results. The act of tossing out (into the recycling pile of course of course--although maybe those safflower oil stains make it un-recyclable?) an unsatisfying recipe is very satisfying. It's something you could never do with a cookbook. You might like other recipes in the same book. We all know how interesting annotations can be in old cookbooks, reminding the home cook about what she didn't like, but you seldom see anything like a big x across a page. If you just read your recipe from a computer screen, you could vow to never use that site again, but it might still pop up next time you went looking for a coconut squash curry noodle soup…
But if you print it out, you can crumple it up and let it go, quite the little kitchen catharsis. 

Great panel at NYU--lots of talk about memory and food and cookbooks as a way to distill experience, as Alex Prud'homme phrased it. There wasn't enough time (or maybe inclination) to talk about the cookbook as product-for-sale. I am very interested in how people now talk about the beauty of cookbooks without wondering if that beauty gets in the way. The gorgeous photo, after all, can seldom be replicated in our own kitchens and the prettier they get, the more obvious that becomes. I argued for cookbooks as domestic status markers, objects to authenticate our class cultures, tchotchkes, essentially… Christopher Idone gave us one of the very first beautiful cookbooks, his 1982 Glorious Food

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be talking about cookbooks at the Fales Library at NYU. Come one, come all. In preparation I have been thinking about whether cookbooks still matter. They matter to me as a historian these days much more than they matter as cooking helpers. I need people to keep writing cookbooks so that I can keep writing about them. Is that like demanding that people keep producing some obscure form of pottery just so anthropologists can study the sherds? 

Piquancy

Right now I'm putting the finishing touches (I hope) on the manuscript for Taste of the Nation: American Coookbooks and Culture. When I wrote these first few posts back in 2010, I was in an early stage of the research. Three years and hundreds of cookbooks and food magazines later, I am at that stage when I really should not be doing new research.

But nonetheless I find myself  immersed in the 1953 Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book. Looking at it from the vantage of my research, I see it as representative of everything that critics have attacked in American cuisine since the 1930s--love of convenience foods, emphasis on calories and vitamins, disinterest in wine. Most of all,  it is jam packed with flavors that make contemporary food critics shudder. These flavors are haunting me. One flavor in particular: sauerkraut juice. Those imaginary denizens of better  homes & gardens suggest serving sauerkraut juice as an appetizer. In a way this shouldn't be surprising, since I am used to reading menus that begin with pickles or glasses of cold tomato juice. These "cocktails," sometimes fruity, sometimes vegetal, were popular starters in cookbooks of the first half of the twentieth century.

But this one I just can't imagine. Which I suppose means I am going to have to try it. Stay tuned. It's supposed to precede a dinner of cranberry Waldorf salad, flank steak with sweet potatoes and succotash, and nutmeg feather cake. The panoply/riot of flavors in this menu challenge accusations that "50s food" was bland. It's like reading something in dialect, though--it won't make sense to me till I try it on my tongue.

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. 

 

Ever Evasive Evans Brown

Today I am looking at another Helen Evans Brown cookbook and again find her refusing to eat.

In an earlier posting Brown refused to tell readers about tamale pies. In California Cooks, a collection of articles she published in The Californian, she rejects persimmons, but in the most alluring way:

"At last I've come to them. They're an autumnal rite with me. I watch them change their color, soften, reach that stage of transparency and utter ripeness when they are at their very best, I'm told.

 And then, when they've become of more than passing interest to the fruit flies, I throw them, ever so reluctantly, into the garbage can. But don't listen to me. Listen to the gourmet who says they are best eaten directly from the skin, scooping out the flesh with a spoon." Why does she tease us this way? Brown is introducing her readers to a new way of thinking about food, one that values knowledge about food that goes beyond "just" cooking or even just eating. Her oblique relationship with the persimmon introduces the personal, emotional mood into her food writing. She isn't giving tips on fruit cookery, she's giving insight into her own aesthetics.

Brown was one an early promoter of the idea of California cuisine, writing that "it won't be long now" before California cuisine would be recognized as "the greatest cuisine in all the world." The recipes in California Cooks emphasize ingredients grown in and associated with California.

"Almonds are High Style in the Culinary Circles of California," she assures us. 

Brown provides recipes for curried almond toast, california chicken saute, and English almond-butter toffee, while also subtly letting us know that there is something going on out west. We aren't part of it yet.

She writes of ranch life "free and easy--that's the ranch life in California" that does not seem to involve rustling up anything more than dinner. Even that might be done by a movie star:

Lee Bowman, Columbia Star, does the Barbecue Chores for a Patio Ranch Supper

Despite her emphasis on pleasure and her advice to "play at" cooking in order to improve your skills, Brown also includes a section titled "Eat, Drink and be Slender." It's a section that fits perfectly with national stereotypes about Southern California prevalent in her era as well as our own. The stars have to stay slim, so they must have secrets to share with the rest of us... Brown promised that "you can enjoy your food and still trim yourself down to bathing suit size if you'll eat things that are not too high in those insidious calories." 

Her prescriptions do not differ much from those of other diet advisors: "More about breakfast: Do have fruit, a piece of whole wheat toast without you know what, and an egg." And for lunch the usual "salad or a vegetable plate, and either a glass of skimmed milk or some yami yogurt." She also includes the peppy/recriminating advice that "losing weight is 90 per cent the desire to lose it."