When home economists ran the kitchen, recipes read like laboratory reports, and human voices could rarely be discerned above the instructions for tsp. and tbsp. But that was a generation ago. Today cooking has become a prime medium for self-expression, television has made superstars of once anonymous chefs, and the voices of food writers resound through their works.
Betty Fussell's I Hear America Cooking (Viking; $24.95), for example, carries the sonorous subtitle "A Journey of Discovery from Alaska to Florida -- the Cooks, the Recipes, and the Unique Flavors of Our National Cuisine." The problem is, her self-imposed "time frame" forces her to bypass the major immigrant groups of the late 19th and 20th centuries, among them Italians, Portuguese, Irish, Poles, Hungarians and Russians. What she really hears is a part of America cooking, and that is less than the title promises. And she goes on at great length with quotes from too many old American cookbooks, long in the public domain and too well known to bear repeating.
Fussell's strength is her energy. On her cross-country trek the author covers scores of local cuisines and the locals who make them: "In Greensboro they were talking rice and gravy but I didn't know it because in the Carolinas nobody calls rice 'rice.' Down in Charleston they call it 'perlew' and up in Greensboro they call it 'pie-low' and cook books spell it 'pilau,' to mean 'rice pilaf.' " In Wisconsin, she finds that orange whitefish roe is dyed black and processed into caviar primarily for the Japanese market. She gives us a glimpse of Indian salmon ceremonies in the Northwest that include a song beginning "Thank you Swimmer, you Supernatural One, that you have come to save our lives."
Back at the stove, Fussell provides wise and workable recipes for items as various as cornfield peas and coconut rice, Owendaw hominy bread, chocolate crunch cookies and sweet and sour Christmas fish. And she provides enough lore to divert the amateur; if history is your dish, this is your book.
Jane and Michael Stern, young, humorous and well-educated Easterners, have become the self-styled clowns of American cooking. Where other critics travel haute, they take the low road to diners, cafeterias, luncheonettes and truck stops. Their first cookbook, Square Meals, was a paean to the Dark Ages of American cooking. The authors took culinary pratfalls advocating recipes for molded salads, casseroles based on canned soups and tuna fish, etc. Their new offering, Real American Food (Knopf; $19.95), is another, far more appetizing collection of recipes gathered from assorted low-down eateries. They include few recipes from fancy restaurants because they did not want the book to be a "duded-up fantasy of American cookery." Typical are such humble classics as the original Chicago deep-dish pizza, Buffalo chicken wings and the soothing and improbable scramble of spinach, eggs and beef from New Joe's bar and grill in San Francisco.