The United States of Arugula (20 page)
Read The United States of Arugula Online
Authors: David Kamp
“When I ask for girolles, they send me a can,” Soltner says. “I still remember the can, a half-liter can, yellow and green, from Germany. But we wanted to cook only with fresh, so we didn’t do nothing with girolles. Then, maybe about 1980, some people from Oregon came and offered me fresh girolles. I said to one of these guys, ‘I don’t understand—I’m here fifteen years, and there were no girolles. You’re going to tell me now girolles just started to grow?’ He said, ‘No, André. We always had tons and tons of girolles in Oregon. But we had no market. So we had a contract with Germany for tons of girolles. We packed them up and sent them over.’ The Germans, they were putting them in cans and sending them back to us!”
Though the success of the Big Three had encouraged grocers to stock imported provisions like brie, smoked salmon, niçoise olives, and canned foie gras, the American mid-century was also the techno-futurist period when large corporations successfully posited supermarkets, processed foods, and out-of-season produce as great advances in domestic life. Sales of fresh fruit per person per year dropped from 140 pounds in the 1940s to 90 pounds in the 1960s, and the difference was made up by the purchase of canned fruits, often packed in syrupy liquid. Even when consumers sought out fresh produce, “fresh” was a relative term. New refrigeration technologies made it possible for strawberries and tomatoes to travel long distances from the warm climes of Florida and Southern California to the chilly Northeast and Midwest, theoretically rendering seasonality and regionality moot.
*
But while
these berries and tomatoes looked beautiful for perishables that had journeyed hundreds or thousands of miles from farm to market, it was because they were hybrids developed to stand up to shipping and long display (if not to gastronomic scrutiny). On top of that, these flavorless frankenfruits were often picked underripe (for the purpose of longevity) and gassed with ethylene so they’d turn a lovely, deceptive shade of farm-fresh red, ideal for display on supermarket shelves.
The supermarket itself was a descendant of such chains as the New York–based Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) and the Memphis-based Piggly Wiggly, each of which contributed a crucial innovation to the industry in the early twentieth century—the former buying its wares directly from wholesalers, enabling the chain to undercut the prices of smaller, independent groceries, and the latter pioneering the self-service store where the customer selected goods straight from the shelf, without ever presenting an order to a counterman.
In the years after World War II, the same housing boom that saw farmlands razed and turned into tract-house developments encouraged urban grocery chains like A&P and Piggly Wiggly to build wide-aisled, boxy supermarkets on the new highways that serviced the new suburbs. Factor in the introduction of the shopping cart in 1937, the new affordability of automobiles, and the acceptance of the home refrigerator as a standard piece of kitchen equipment—like the home computer in the eighties, the fridge, over the course of the thirties, went from expensive status symbol to unremarkable necessity—and the result was that large quantities of food could be purchased in one fell swoop, hauled back to one’s split-level ranch, and placed in cool storage, thus eliminating the need for the daily a-marketing-we-go ritual that Beard held so dear. By 1956, according to food historian Harvey Levenstein, 62 percent of America’s groceries were purchased from supermarkets, and a further 28 percent from smaller self-serve “superettes,” leaving only 10 percent of the nation’s spending dollars to the old butcher-baker-greengrocer agglomeration of yore.
As an immigrant from Italy in the fifties, living in Forest Hills, Queens, Marcella Hazan found her local Grand Union supermarket to be at once
disturbingly alien and marvelously convenient. The prebutchered chicken parts in cellophane-sheathed white Styrofoam containers, arrayed in a refrigerator case and illuminated by fluorescent lights, were like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi tableau, “everything strange to me, everything wrapped, the chicken pieces dead in their little coffins,” she says. On the other hand, Hazan, though she was an educated woman with a Ph.D. in biology, was terribly intimidated by the English language and appreciated the fact that she could pick and choose her groceries, however strange and antiseptic, without speaking to a soul. Likewise, Julia Child, during the 1956 to 1958 period of Paul’s USIS career that saw the couple living in Washington, D.C., rather than abroad, was shocked and disturbed upon her return to America to see acquaintances eating Swanson’s frozen TV dinners (introduced in 1954), but she welcomed the new fangled supermarket as a pleasant innovation, informing Simone Beck in a letter that “one thing I do adore is to be shopping in these great serve-yourself markets” where “you pick up a wire push cart” and “just trundle about looking and fingering everything there is.”
The Big Three and their allies had woken up America to the possibilities of good cooking and good eating, but they were not by nature oppositional, agitational folk. Thus, while they had no use for Tang instant orange drink (trademarked in 1957 and popularized in 1965, when the Gemini astronauts took it into space) or Cool Whip nondairy whipped topping (introduced in 1966), they offered little in the way of advocacy against such products. In private notes scribbled in 1969, Beard mocked the convenience-food apologists Poppy Cannon and Peg Bracken as, respectively, “the commercialist (Poppy’s putting everything in a can!!)” and “the enemy camp,” but publicly he held his tongue.
In part, this was a matter of pragmatism—Beard was on the payroll of Green Giant, which, while hardly the most culinarily egregious of the big food processors, was by the early sixties pushing not only canned goods but frozen vegetables in “flavor-tight” plastic pouches that also contained butter sauce. Claiborne had no trouble being snippy about bad service and the dress
sense of André Surmain, but he still touted the virtues of Procter & Gamble’s Fluffo shortening (a public relations account of his old friend Ann Seranne), and, eager not to alienate
Times
readers and advertisers, allowed that “chipped beef properly spiced is easily turned into festive fare” and “canned minced clams can be put to dozens of palatable uses.” Even Child, though she stubbornly resisted Madison Avenue’s overtures and sicced her lawyers on anyone who tried to profit off her name,
*
opted to work within the limitations of the American marketplace rather than push its boundaries. She shopped at her local A&P and informed Beck that U.S. supermarkets contained “everything … that is necessary to allow a good French cook to operate.” To the end of her life, Child was reluctant to plunge into any expressly political foodie fracas, gingerly sidestepping the late-eighties debate over the use of the allegedly carcinogenic pesticide Alar on apples, and privately dismissing concerns about the potential dangers of irradiated foods, which she in fact “deeply believed in,” according to her last TV producer, Geof Drummond, “because she didn’t want to see food spoil or get infected with E. coli or whatever.”
There were a few individuals in the food world, such as Beard’s dear friend Helen Evans Brown, who dared to raise their voices publicly against the big food companies, despairing over toast “made from bread that looks and tastes like facial tissue” in her book
Breakfasts & Brunches for Every Occasion
(1961) and cheekily averring in her best-known work,
West Coast Cook Book
(1952), that “if … a dish composed of tuna fish, canned mushroom soup, and corn flakes is in any danger of becoming a dish of the region, I prefer to ignore it.” Even earlier, in 1946,
The New Yorker’s
Sheila Hibben sounded an alarm in her volume
American Regional Cookery
, whose introduction included this surprising blurt of embittered candor:
I say to people that I am writing a cook book and they ask if it will tell how to make a cake with the new better-than-butter shortening and how to use all the latest dehydrated wonders and if there will be a set of rules for balanced meals and charts showing the vitamin superiority of parsnips over nectarines. And when I say, “No, I shall write of none of these things,” they are a little shocked and wonder whether the book will sell. To this, too, the answer may well be no.
Hibben’s prediction proved all too correct: her book didn’t sell well, and for the next twenty years or so, the food establishment uneasily coexisted with “Plastic White Bread Country.” But by the early seventies, out on the West Coast, a group of culinarily minded young radicals had gotten mad as hell about the supermarket state, and they decided that they were not going to take it anymore.
*
Given, like many a food writer, to whimsy, Sailland (1872–1956) fashioned his pen name from the Latin words
cur non
, meaning “why not,” and added the “-sky” because of the vogue for all things Russian in the late nineteenth century.
*
Beck, who died in 1991, never achieved the level of fame and adulation that Child enjoyed, though her first solo outing,
Simca’s Cuisine
(1972), was well-received. “I think she was envious and could never quite understand why she couldn’t acquire the same reputation,” says John Ferrone, who worked on Beck’s cookbooks as well as James Beard’s. “She didn’t understand that television was the magic ingredient.” Child, for her part, grew agitated at what she perceived as Beck’s Gallic intractability and refusal to deviate from culturally prescripted cooking formulas, and was relieved to be free of their collaboration after
Volume Two
was published. Nevertheless, the two women remained friends for the rest of Beck’s life and continued to cook together at their neighboring homes in the Provençal village of Plascassier.
*
Then as now, the White House struggled to find a chef who was willing to sacrifice the bustle and lucre of a commercial kitchen for the “prestige” of preparing state dinners for visiting dignitaries and Sunday-football munchies for the First Family. The Kennedys, loyal Pavillon customers from day one, had a falling out with Henri Soulé in 1960 and switched their allegiance to La Caravelle when it opened that year. When John F. Kennedy was elected, his father, Joseph, asked one of La Caravelle’s owners, Robert Meyzen, to recommend a French chef. Meyzen put the question to his chef, Roger Fessaguet, who recommended Jacques Pépin. But Pépin, having already served as Charles de Gaulle’s cook, was eager to stick with his mentor-protector Pierre Franey and followed him to Howard Johnson (Pépin recalls the choice as “Camelot versus HoJo’s”). Instead, the job went to Verdon, who had previously worked at the Carlyle and Essex House hotels in New York. In preparation for his new job, Verdon spent a few weeks in La Caravelle’s kitchen with Fessaguet, getting a crash course in Kennedy food preferences.
*
In fact, Child was anything but sauced on the show. Due to budget constraints, she and the program’s producers couldn’t afford drinking wine for her closing toast of
“Bon appétit!
” She saluted her audience not with a real glass of wine but with a glass of water darkened with GravyMaster, a coloring agent.
†
Child could also be counted on to enliven that most dreaded of public-television events, the pledge drive. “Hello, I’m Julia Child. If this goose could lay golden eggs, then we’d all be sitting pretty,” she said in one WGBH fund-raising appearance in the mid-sixties, propping up a plucked, headless bird. “But it
c-hhan’t!
And that’s why we need your help …”
*
Creel was himself a gifted home cook, and, with Claiborne’s help, got two cookbooks of his own published, the poignantly titled
Cooking for One Is Fun
(1976) and
Cooking on Your Own
(1980).
*
Before Cofacci, Beard had a boyfriend about whom little is known, except that he was a Dutchman and his name was Ate de Boer. Evidently, de Boer broke up with Beard, leaving him brokenhearted and reluctant to ever again enter into a serious relationship.
*
A few stray Fisherisms did manage to make it through untouched, though, such as her dark, out-of-place anecdote about the only French village she had ever known to lack its own local bread, the reason being that its baker had committed suicide. He “was felt to have betrayed his trade and his village by leaving so unexpectedly, with nothing edible in his ovens,” she wrote.
*
One ungentlemanly reviewer of
The French Chef
described Child as “two parts Broderick Crawford to one part Elizabeth II.”
*
Claiborne and Surmain clashed personally, says André Soltner, who notes that Lutèce, for all its reputation as the best and most expensive French restaurant of the post–Le Pavillon era, didn’t receive its fourth star from the
Times
until 1972, the year Soltner bought out Surmain’s share and took sole ownership of the restaurant.
*
While the advent of the refrigerated rail car in the nineteenth century had gone a long way toward eradicating regional limitations on produce sales, the invention in the 1930s of an automatic refrigeration system for long-haul trucks made America’s food supply more mobile than ever—now meats and produce could be delivered directly to the markets where they were to be sold. A self-taught black inventor named Frederick McKinley Jones developed the first reliable refrigeration unit for trucks in 1935. He used the same technology to create a portable refrigeration unit that was used during World War II to transport blood serum and medicines on the battlefields.
*
In 1974,
The New Yorker
reported that the Childs’ lawyer had put a halt to a TV commercial that featured “Julia Chicken, a fowl who spoke in the French Chef’s unmistakably rich and breathy accents.”
RADICAL NOTIONS
