Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (65 page)

Why would anyone want to escape America? These folks had their reasons
.

T
HE SEEKERS
The concept of
political asylum
—granting protection to foreigners being persecuted for political reasons—has been around for millennia. One of the earliest known cases: In the 13th century B.C., the deposed ruler of the Hittite Empire, Mursili III, fled to Egypt to escape execution. Ramses II, Egypt’s pharaoh, refused Hittite demands that he be sent back. The situation was eventually resolved, leading to history’s first known peace treaty, and rules for
extradition
—the process by which one state asks another to surrender a criminal back to the state in which the crime was committed. Similar cases have occurred through out history all over the world. In more modern times, the United States is the most popular destination for asylum-seekers, but sometimes it happens the other way around: Some Americans actually flee the United States.

Cleaver was a prominent American civil rights leader and the author of the extremely influential 1968 book on “black power,”
Soul on Ice
. That same year Cleaver, then the spokesman for the radical Black Panther Party, was charged with attempted murder after being wounded in a shootout with police in Oakland, California. Facing a substantial prison sentence, Cleaver secretly applied for asylum in communist Cuba, claiming he and the Black Panthers were being persecuted by the FBI (an argument many believe to this day). Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whether because he truly supported the Black Panthers as a “liberation movement,” or simply because he liked annoying the Americans, granted it, allowing Cleaver to live there as a free man. Cleaver soon felt restricted by the Cuban government and in early 1969 applied for asylum in Algeria. The Soviet-backed African nation happily accepted, and Cleaver ran a Black Panther “embassy” there until 1972, by which time he had sufficiently annoyed the Algerian government. From there he went to Paris and in 1975, after having converted to Christianity, returned to the United States and renounced his Black Panther past. He spent eight months doing
community service to clear up his legal troubles and eventually became a Mormon, a conservative Republican, a Ronald Reagan supporter, a crack cocaine addict, and a radio talk-show host. He died in 1998 at the age of 63.

In 1968 Brent—another prominent Black Panther Party member—and two other men robbed a San Francisco gas station and got into a shootout with police in which two officers were severely wounded. Brent and the others were arrested. Like Cleaver, Brent jumped bail and headed for Cuba. Unlike Cleaver, he got there by hijacking a TWA flight from Oakland to New York and ordering the pilot to fly to Havana. Brent was granted asylum by the Cubans—and spent the next 37 years there, during which time he went to college, taught high school English, became a disc jockey, and married American travel writer Jane McManus, who moved to the island nation in 1969. In 1996 Brent wrote an autobiography,
Long Time Gone: A Black Panther's True-Life Story of His Hijacking and 25 Years in Cuba
. He died in Havana in 2006 at the age of 75.

Not all cases are politically based: In June 1994, Collins, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, picked up her two young children from her ex-husband’s house and took them to the Netherlands. She had been hoping to get to New Zealand but was stopped by customs officials in Amsterdam because she didn’t have the proper papers. When they said they were going to send her back to America, she told them she wanted asylum…to protect her children from the harm they’d face in the United States. Her ex-husband had been granted custody of the children, she said, but he had physically abused them (charges the husband denies). The case was in the Dutch court system for three years, and in 1997 the three were granted refugee status. That’s not the same as asylum—it doesn’t protect against extradition, and Collins was now wanted by the FBI for “International Parental Kidnapping.” So they lived in secret in the Netherlands for the next 10 years. Then, in 2007 a neighbor recognized her from an FBI “wanted” poster and turned her in. At that point, she filed for asylum, and in 2008, to almost everyone’s surprise, got it. Collins is currently working to get her charges dropped in the U.S. so she can come home.

Cookbooks are the single most popular segment of the book business. Hundreds of new ones are introduced each year; tens of millions are sold. (Hey, we’ve all got to eat, don’t we?) BRI food-editor-at-large Lorraine Bodger sent us the origins of these classics
.

T
HE JOY OF COOKING
, by Irma S. Rombauer (1931)
In 1931 Rombauer was a newly widowed 54-year-old socialite and homemaker from St. Louis. She was
not
a professional writer nor even much of a cook. That’s probably why her family and friends were astonished when she decided to take the $3,000 left to her by her husband and self-publish a cookbook. She called it
The Joy of Cooking
. In the more than 75 years since its first printing,
Joy
has gone through eight editions, sold more than 18 million copies, and become one of America’s all-time most beloved and relied-upon cookbooks.

Rombauer’s innovation was first to sweep aside the prevailing approaches to cooking—that it was laborious, exacting, an art, a science, and a challenge to the ordinary housewife. The chatty tone of her writing welcomed readers and reminded them that food was supposed to be a
joy
, not a burden. At the same time, she was down to earth: she specified precise weights and measures and correct pan sizes for baking, and used readily available ingredients. She cared about the ordinary homemaker’s food budget and recognized that women cooked both to feed their families and to entertain their friends. They needed simple, speedy recipes (such as applesauce and creamed chicken) as well as fancy ones. And she wrote for everyone: There are recipes for squirrel, porcupine, raccoon, and armadillo, as well as recipes for sachertorte, soufflé Grand Marnier, and lobster thermidor. Third, she had an original approach to recipe instructions: She integrated the ingredients into the recipe steps and made the process of preparation as clear and straightforward as possible. Rombauer spoke to women as they actually were, not as some hoity-toity chef thought they should be. Women loved her book.

The Joy of Cooking
was a family business. Rombauer’s daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, illustrated the first edition and joined her mother in the production of later editions. After Rombauer died in 1962, Becker took over the next few
Joys
, including the 1975 edition—the most popular ever. After Becker died in 1976, there was no new edition of the book…until 1997’s
All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking
. For that one, the publisher and the supervising editor made substantial changes to the original, generating a storm of criticism over what had been eliminated (whole chapters on ice cream and pickling) and how the book had lost its unique character. Marion’s son Ethan Becker was reportedly very unhappy with the 1997 edition, but got the chance to repair the damage in 2006: The 75th-anniversary edition (based on the 1975 edition) restored traditional recipes…and popular approval.

THE MOOSEWOOD COOKBOOK
, by Mollie Katzen (1977) Ithaca, New York, is the home of the Moosewood Restaurant, started in 1973 by the Moosewood Collective, a group of idealistic friends who wanted to create imaginative vegetarian meals using natural ingredients. Mollie Katzen was one of the founding members. Vegetarianism was a new and intriguing concept to many Americans, and when the restaurant prospered (even in that small college town), Katzen began to compile and adapt its recipes for home cooks. The first edition of
The Moosewood Cookbook
, hand-lettered and illustrated by Katzen, was privately published in 1974; in 1977 a small publisher, Ten-Speed Press, brought out the next edition—and had the good sense to keep the hand-lettering and illustrations that gave the book its uniqueness. Suddenly this “new” kind of cooking was accessible and even fun (not to mention health-oriented and Earth-friendly), and Katzen was largely responsible for making “vegetarian” a household word.
Moosewood
was followed by
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
, and somewhere along the way Katzen had to fight a legal battle with the Moosewood Collective for the right to use the Moosewood name. (They wound up with the right to use the name too; they don’t sell her books at the restaurant or on their Web site). But Mollie Katzen isn’t complaining: she has more than six million books in print, she’s been host of several PBS TV cooking series, and in 2007
The Moosewood Cookbook
was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame.

MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING
, by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (1961)

Almost everyone knows Julia Child. But how did she get to be a culinary icon? In 1948 Julia and Paul Child went to live in Paris when Paul was posted to the American Embassy there, and Julia fell passionately in love with French food. She started taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, the world’s premier cooking school, and spent her days mastering the recipes that comprised the basics of classic French cuisine. It seemed to her and her two close friends, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, that they could write a cookbook that would demystify French cooking for Americans. Convinced that they had a valuable contribution to make, they tested recipes repeatedly, refined techniques, wrote extensive information on equipment and fresh ingredients, and suggested menus and appropriate wines. The huge manuscript took 10 years to complete.

The three women had many difficulties with prospective publishers until the manuscript reached the hands of Judith Jones, a young editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who “got it.” At a time when popular American cookbooks were mostly of the
Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook
variety and the use of convenience foods (canned, frozen, and packaged) was standard practice, Jones felt that Americans might be ready for this groundbreaking book. She threw her full support behind it, and it was finally published in 1961. Jones was right. The first printing sold out immediately; within a year there were 100,000 copies in print.

A year after the book’s publication, Child became public television’s
French Chef
—giving her (eventually) national exposure and a dedicated following. She wrote 16 more cookbooks, won Emmy awards, and received the French Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Declaring Child a “national treasure,” the Smithsonian Institution transported her entire Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen to Washington, D.C., and reassembled it in the National Museum of American History.

THE I HATE TO COOK BOOK
, by Peg Bracken (1960) When advertising copywriter Peg Bracken showed her husband (also a writer) the manuscript of
The I Hate to Cook Book
, he said, “It stinks.” Their marriage didn’t last, but the book did—and went on to sell more than three million copies.

It all started in the 1950s, when Bracken and a group of Portland, Oregon, women friends who called themselves “The Hags” used to meet after work to down martinis and do a little griping about their lives. “At that time,” she wrote, “we were all unusually bored with what we had been cooking and, therefore, eating. For variety’s sake, we decided to pool our ignorance, tell each other our shabby little secrets, and toss into the pot the recipes we swear by instead of at.” What struck people most about about
The I Hate to Cook Book
was that it was witty, funny, and totally irreverent about the sacred subject of cooking. Bracken hated spending time in the kitchen and wasn’t afraid to say so—and it turned out that thousands of other women felt the same way. The recipes relied on the use of convenience foods (her recipe for “Sweep Steak,” for example, was pot roast cooked with a can of cream of mushroom soup), avoided complicated techniques, and took very little preparation time. She told women—in a tone both friendly and unapologetic—that it was time to stop feeling guilty about dinner and get on with their lives.
That
was revolutionary for the 1960s. Sales of
The I Hate to Cook Book
topped 3 million copies, which encouraged Bracken to write other books, including the equally irreverent
I Hate to Housekeep Book
(1962) and
I Try to Behave Myself
(1964), an etiquette manual. And in keeping with her motto of “keep it simple” she became the spokeswoman for Birds-Eye frozen vegetables in the late 1960s.