Steal the Menu (20 page)

By that point in my travels as an inquiring gastroethnographer, I had begun to assume that there would always be surviving examples of a regional food in its historic home, but that I would always be surprised by those foods when I actually saw them in situ. The facts on the ground were almost never what you’d expected as you’d boarded the plane.

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the seemingly simple pasty, a meat pie brought there originally by Cornish settlers, was a focus of melting-pot controversy. The descendants of miners from Cornwall argued among themselves about whether an authentic pasty had to contain rutabaga, or if the chopped meat was un-Cornish without pork, or how fine to chop that meat. Some folks pulled the crust up from both sides and crimped it together at the top; others pulled it over from one side. These were good-natured arguments among kin. But a preponderance of pasty-proud Cornish-Americans around the pasty mecca of Marquette did not take kindly to late-coming Finnish immigrants and their descendants, who had adopted the pasty as their own in the Upper Peninsula and “mongrelized” it, or so it was said, with features of meat pies they remembered from Finland.

Hunting down the Key lime in south Florida, we drove from Miami to Key West, through a fog of disinformation propagated by hucksters for the indigenous Key lime pie. Very few producing trees of this small, spherical, green-skinned citrus fruit had survived the hurricane of 1926, none of them in commercial groves. And the groves had never been replanted.

So unless you knew someone with a backyard tree, the Key lime pie you were eating in Islamorada or Key Largo or anywhere else in this country, we established, had been made with the juice of the Tahiti or Bearss lime, the lemonlike citrus hybrid (sold green
to make it easy for shoppers to distinguish it from true lemons) that is the lime of commerce in the United States.

When you squeeze a lime for a lime rickey or cut a section of a lime for a gin and tonic, it is a Tahiti lime—and, in the terms used by botanists and ordinary people outside this country, it is not a lime at all. The lime we call Key is the lime everyone else on the planet calls a lime, and it is also tastier and limier than the Tahiti.

Key lime pies containing Tahiti juice are, as I demonstrated in a side-by-side bake-off with a genuine Key lime pie, far less deliciously tangy than the real thing. And that real thing, the all-but-vanished Key lime, was in fact, further research showed, not in the remotest danger of disappearing from the planet. Indeed, it was flourishing from Mexico to Asia. Truth to tell, in most places not corrupted by marketing of faux Key lime pies and juice or of Tahiti limes,
C. aurantifolia
is the only known lime.

Such botanically wrong mislabeling is not exactly criminal, but it is as rife as shoplifting, and I did my best in
Natural History
to correct the misnomers that filled supermarket aisles.

Don’t get me started about the yam, a large African root vegetable with white flesh, completely unrelated to and unlike the sweet potato, a usually yellow-fleshed Andean native often served on Thanksgiving tables as candied yams.

Similar confusion has helped keep Americans from enjoying one of the great native fruits, the small delectable persimmon that grows on big, hardwood trees of the ebony family from Florida and Texas to Central Park. But a blitzkrieg of marketing has filled market shelves with big sloppy Japanese
kaki
persimmons, while our superior American persimmons fall to the ground unattended and go smash.

I went to Brown County in southern Indiana, hard by the hamlet of Gnaw Bone, having been alerted to the presence thereabouts of
Diospyros virginiana
by those fellow stalkers of regional American
specialties, Jane and Michael Stern. I roamed until I found the orange fruitlets, some already fallen, others pluckable from low branches, in an abandoned field—abandoned, that is, except by a feral dog, who bit me for intruding on his turf. I even was able to buy the misnamed, brownie-like persimmon pudding, for which Gnaw Bone is modestly renowned.

The renown would be much greater if misinformation—really plain old bad science masquerading as folk wisdom—had not kept this fine fruit from finding a market. It is simply not true that the native persimmon remains unacceptably astringent until the first frost, by which time many of the fruits have fallen from the tree, bruised themselves, rotted or been eaten by quadrupedal scavengers or frugivorous birds. Biology has also been, for the fruit of
D
.
virginiana
, a hampering destiny. The little orange orbs are overly endowed with seeds. The galumphing, often seedless
kaki
is much easier to eat.

Misnomer and its evil cousin fraud have also undercut the careers of two celebrated hunters’ ragouts, Brunswick stew and burgoo. I was able to run down a 1907 recipe for Brunswick stew that allegedly preserved a dish invented by a black servant, Jimmy Matthews, on a hunting expedition into the woods of Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1828. Matthews served his white masters a squirrel stew. The heirloom recipe is clear on this point.

But you will basically never get squirrel in Brunswick stew today unless you shoot the squirrels yourself. The same is true of burgoo, an Ohio River valley specialty, whose name, derived from “bulgur,” was originally applied to porridge by sailors who had encountered bulgur on shore leave in the Levant. In Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois on the other bank of the Ohio, burgoo once contained squirrel, but hasn’t for many decades.

I tasted the peppery meat (chicken and beef) soup in the plain-faced river town of Owensboro, Kentucky, where serendipity led
me to Hardman’s, a very unpretentious restaurant at which burgoo is a sideline. At Hardman’s, as at fifteen other places in a city then claiming fifty thousand inhabitants, mutton barbecue was the draw. Two dressed ewes hung in a cold storage locker in back. The ewes were stand-ins for the bison that had led the menu at Catholic parish barbecues in the region in the nineteenth century. When they ran out, the organizers of Owensboro fund-raising barbecues substituted old ewes, whose flesh is thought to stand up as nicely to open flame as the flesh of American buffalo.

The only other time I’d eaten mutton was as a
Times
reporter in the cell block at the Brooklyn House of Detention. The slow-cooked, smoky mutton in Owensboro was a huge improvement, although the little restaurant was really a dump, with piles of old newspapers filling a couple of the ten or twelve seats. The dead ewes in the cooler added an eldritch touch, as did a third ovine sizzling away in an open fire, which the place’s sole employee kept under control with a garden hose. A defunct Philco twelve-inch television from the Eisenhower era watched over the scene like an evil eye, lacking only a test pattern or an episode of
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
or
Captain Video
to complete the time warp.

Seedy mise-en-scènes were often a backdrop to research into regional American foods. What was the nadir of these expeditions to the hinterland?

It was the coat closet (officially the evidence locker) in the grim stone jail in Franklin County, Virginia, where I tasted seized moonshine from repurposed plastic soda bottles at the invitation of Sheriff W. Q. Overton. Franklin was said to be the leading bastion, and one of the last, of untaxed hooch distillation in America.

On the basis of this
dégustation
, I opined that moonshine was a first cousin of grappa, then beginning its rise to chic, with the same distinctive sour flavor, the result of a similarly thrifty, rustic style of production. Unlike manufacturers of politer forms of
distilled spirits, grappa makers and moonshiners did not throw out the initial spurt from the still (“the first puke,” in Appalachian argot). This contains aldehydes, chemical components of alcohol that give both drinks, as well as their French (marc) and Spanish (
orujo
) cousins, their defining taste (“sourheads”).

But moonshine got no respect, while grappa and marc graced fancy menus in Europe and increasingly in the United States.
^c
I lamented this state of affairs and called for a national movement to encourage the legal manufacture and sale of moonshine. I also, unwisely, quoted a local newspaper editor who’d accused the publisher of a rival paper of fronting for the moonshine interests. Perhaps under the influence of the homemade booze in the jailhouse, I’d neglected to give the accused publisher a chance to defend himself. He, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, sued me and
Natural History
for libel. The magazine, which carried no libel insurance, settled the case by paying a modest sum to the ex-prosecutor and persuading me (with the threat of leaving me to defend myself in a Virginia court) to sign a humiliating and false retraction published in
Natural History
.

I may have reached an even lower point as
Natural History
’s plant sleuth at the sloshed, sunbaked chili cook-off in the Texas ghost town of Terlingua, near a desolate stretch of the Rio Grande, where Texas Rangers waited for the drunk, self-appointed saviors of the U.S.-Mexican border’s signature dish to weave into the night and fail a Breathalyzer test.
^d

A tall Humpty Dumpty kept flashing his Vietnamese driver’s license to catch my attention long enough to try to sell me a box
of his own commercial chili mix. And then there was the young man in a T-shirt that promoted a regional dish that had hopped the river from Mexico. The illustration made no sense until you read the caption under it on the shirt: “If God didn’t want Man to eat pussies, why did he make them look so much like tacos?” While noncooking young women competed in a wet T-shirt contest and some young men took their pants off for a hairy leg competition, other very serious chiliheads stirred their pots. I watched the chili cooks closely and ended up admiring their dogmatic efforts to preserve the purity of a popular but often misunderstood regional dish. Texas chili, by the rules of the cook-off and according to the universal belief of Texas chiliastes, may contain no vegetable other than the onion. This exclusionary principle focuses the dish on its essential ingredient—beef—and segregates it from other regional chilis, such as New Mexico’s, which contain beans.

So the wild, red-faced revelers at Terlingua, like the downmarket mutton-barbecuing Catholics in Kentucky and the Dogpatch, Virginia, moonshiners, were doing their part to uphold honorable food traditions, even if it meant risking trouble with the law in locations you wouldn’t want your daughter to visit. I quite enjoyed the seediness and kept out of trouble with the law, although I was anxious about that libel retraction in
Natural History
, since it appeared soon after I had been hired to create a daily Leisure and Arts page for the
Wall Street Journal
.

Apparently, none of my new colleagues at the
Journal
read
Natural History
, or cared about the retraction if they did notice it. For the next nineteen years (1983–2002), I ran an eclectic page with articles that ranged over pretty much anything that wasn’t economic or political news.

For twelve of those years, until I retired from
Natural History
in 1994, I continued to write that magazine’s food column. At the
Journal
, I made it a practice not to write about food, thinking that it was wiser to keep my arts journalism as separate as possible from my lingering career in food. I was concerned about diluting my authority as a cultural editor with a confusing presence in the paper as a food writer.

This policy, it seems, was not important to anyone but me. My boss, Robert L. Bartley, the neoconservative editor of the
Journal
, who ran the paper’s three opinion pages (the editorial page, the oped page, and my page), never complained about my outside food column or the cookbooks I wrote while working for him. In fact, I think it increased my value in his eyes that I had a separate identity outside his world.

The
Natural History
column got written on weekends, and it continued to evolve in new directions through the 1980s and early 1990s, until I decided I’d done whatever I had it in me to do with it. I wouldn’t have been able to put a succinct label on what I’d been doing, until the summer of 1981. That July, I flew to England to participate in the first public meeting of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a weekend conclave of food historians, journalists, cooks and foodies from Britain and the rest of the world. I didn’t know it then, but I would continue going to the Symposium almost every year thereafter, presenting papers, making friends and shaping this new intellectual force in the world of food as it shaped me.

In Oxford, for the first time, I found colleagues with a passion for studying food—and I found myself.

The Symposium had started out as a series of seminars on the “impact of science on the kitchen” at St. Antony’s College, a relative upstart in Oxford founded in 1950 up the Woodstock Road from the medieval center of the university. The Symposium’s original subject derived from the research of a highly unusual fellow, in both senses of the word. Alan Davidson, a retired British diplomat
who had invented the field of gastroichthyology with practical guides to the seafood of the Mediterranean and Asia (including
Laotian Fish and Fish Cookery
), was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St. Antony’s for the academic year 1978–79.

Davidson’s sponsor in this unorthodox intrusion upon the college’s normal diet of graduate research in the social sciences and international relations was Theodore Zeldin, a social historian of France. Davidson was not only intellectually eccentric in his focus on food but eccentric in the normal way, given to turquoise vintage sports jackets, an antique Bentley, Laotian string bracelets and the American screwball comedies of his youth, with which he was utterly besotted.

From their start in May 1979, the seminars attracted a diverse group of “students,” from the physicist Nicholas Kurti to Britain’s leading food writer, the literate and opinionated (“I hate people who eat duck at lunch”) Elizabeth David.