For many years I lived in a Hell’s Kitchen loft, and from its windows I could see a patch of the Hudson River. I liked knowing that the water was there, dense as the arms of Atlas, the river keeping the place that I’d chosen, New York City, safely apart from Ohio, the place I’d left behind. But for about fifteen years, I forgot to look out the window. I was a restaurant critic and I was eating, drinking, inhaling the city. I was writing books and stories, living the life that I’d imagined when I was growing up in Columbus. There was no time—and perhaps more to the point, no reason—for river-y moments of yearning or homesickness, what-ifs or what-nows.
But in the mid-1990s, I began to stare at the river. Work was great, life was good, but there I was, staring past its perimeter, beyond Manhattan and out toward where I’d come from. I did not imagine any connection between my river-staring and my sudden mania for transforming my terrace into a small farm. To my mind, the container garden was an early expression of locavorism. After the garden, a dog moved in with the boyfriend. And as far as I was concerned, these creatures and cultivars accounted for my otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm to follow the river north to find a weekend house.
I had no trouble explaining to myself the difference between my city and country cooking. My Manhattan kitchen was not all that different from the restaurants where I’d worked: I imagined a dish, I ordered the ingredients—et voila?!: Centerfold Cuisine. But there was no such cornucopia ninety miles up the river from Manhattan, where availability, not imagination, determined dinner. The best that the local farms had to offer was sent down to the city; what was left required long, slow, homey cooking to coax out its flavor.
It was not, however, as easy to understand why I shivered. My colleagues and other members of the food cognoscenti began to talk about the end of American home cooking. Over tables in the citadels of fabled cuisine, at dinner parties and charity events, the food cognoscenti presented their evidence and debated its significance. The more people spend on their kitchen range, the less likely they are to cook on the thing. The fastest-growing department in grocery stores was the prepared foods. One survey found that an increasing number of Americans tuned in to the Food Network on their kitchen TVs so they’d have someone cooking. In New York City, dinner had long meant eating out, carrying in, or delivery, but I refused to believe that this behavior had crossed the Hudson and infiltrated the mainland.
To reassure myself, I called each of my five brothers in Ohio, but our conversations were less than reassuring.
“How many times a week do you cook dinner at home?” I asked.
“How are you defining cooking?” one answered warily….
My weekends upstate began to stretch to four days. I cooked more, ate out less, spent days lurking on food sites, chatting with people about what they cooked and why. A wall of my study was soon covered with a collection of historic maps of the United States: the Armour Company’s Food Source Map (“The Greatness of the United States is founded on Agriculture”), the hog-shaped Porcineograph, and Miquel Corriabus’ “Map of Good Eating” were soon joined by examples of contemporary food mapping like Gary Nabham’s Regional Map of North American’s Place-Based Food Traditions, the National Golden Arches Locator, and Kentfield’s America Eats Organic Coast to Coast. I spent a year reading American food writing and constructing maps of my own—what was grown, what was eaten, when, why and by whom.
I’ve never known a food-obsessed person who did not have someone in a cotton apron—a grandmother or mother, an uncle, a father, a neighbor, a teacher— standing behind them, someone who turned the ordinary meal into an extraordinary one and made the world seem larger, full of heart, and bursting with possibility. These American cooks had been forgotten over the past several decades as “cooking” morphed into “cuisine.” I wanted to find them and cook with them and get a taste of their America. I had no idea that I’d also find a part of myself.
Ten years ago, when I embarked on this odyssey, GPS wasn’t commonly available to the ordinary person. I packed my maps. I divided the country into roughly 25 geographic patches, traveled to a particular spot for a few weeks or months and then returned home to write and cook. I was aided and abetted in my search by motley crews of local food obsessives. Comprised of food cart owners and retired food editors, members of local dining clubs, slow food consortiums, gourmet societies and cooking contest winners, grocers, bloggers, farmers who grow the high quality ingredients that lure fine cooks and people who live to eat, these advance teams guided me into the quieter corners of the nation where cooking is still something that pulls people together.
Some communities come together around long-established feasts….Others converge for what the writer Jonathan Gold describes as Folkoric Food—dishes like fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs and French fries, clam chowder, boiled lobster, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese, which are as much about cultural identity as they are about dinner. Still others converge for occasions….And then there are the smaller tables that bring families and friends together. I found melting-pot moments and incidents of “unmeltable” pots, but the nation I discovered was more like one big table.
Almost as soon as I decamped from one place at this table to another, I knew that reports of the demise of home cooking in the United States were greatly overstated. I found a preponderance of grocery stores, markets, and farmstands with stocks of uncooked food—irrefutable evidence that most homes still contain working kitchens—and observed many people preparing dinner.
Home cooking has changed, but it has not gone away. The more miles I logged, the clearer it become that “Americans don’t cook” is an updated version of an old slur. From the birth of the nation until quite recently, Europeans and those Americans who measure culture in relationship to European society claimed that Americans can’t cook. The assertion may have been reality based in the nation’s early days—rare is the culture that mints a refined cuisine before it clears the wilderness and establishes communities—but in over 300,000 miles, I found that my fellow citizens can and do cook. Some cook badly, some cook well, all cook to say who they are and where they come from.
Recipes are family stories, tales of particular places and personal histories. They bear witness to the land and waterways, to technology and invention, to immigration, migration, ambition, disappointment, triumph, and most of all, change. Living things change, American cooking—fine and silly, real and fake, wonderful and wonderfully awful, heartfelt, homemade and factory-issued—is very much alive….
Americans don’t have to cook anymore. Those who chose to cook are throwbacks, the last living cowboys, Huck Finns, would-be Julias, embracing America’s unbridled individuality Many are capable of creating deliciousness. Most cook from the heart as well as from a distinctly American yearning, something I could feel, but couldn’t describe until thousands of miles of highway helped me identify it in myself: hometown appetite.
“We all have hometown appetites,” wrote the cookbook author Clementine Paddleford in 1960, “every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown [he or she] left behind.” This book is a journey through hundreds of the “hometowns” that fuel the American appetite, recipe by recipe, bite by bite.
