Interview with Paul Freedman | American Cuisine

Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She’s just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Paul Freedman: I’m Paul Freedman. I teach history at Yale University and my latest book is called American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way.

Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book, you can follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I’m always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. I’m thrilled to have you back on my podcast to chat about this extraordinary followup to 10 restaurants that changed America. Before we start, I have to tell you that after I chatted with you about 10 restaurants, we were driving our send to sleep away camp and I stopped at Bookbinders in Philadelphia to get the Terrapin soup just to see what it was about. So I was like, this is for Paul, the Terrapin soup.

Paul Freedman: What was your verdict?

Suzy Chase: Oh, the broth was amazing, but it’s weird eating turtle, I guess, because I’m not from the 1800s but.

Paul Freedman: Yeah, indeed. Right, right. But you’re not like fazed with a turtle steak or something like that. So it’s not too intimidating I hope. I once had Terrapin the way it was served in the 19th century when it was the height of elegance in America at a club in Wilmington, Delaware. It was in a kind of cream and Sherry sauce, and here it wasn’t steaks either, but little pieces of Terrapin meat, which is sort of pink, and it was absolutely delicious, I have to say. I saw the point of the enthusiasm of two centuries ago.

Suzy Chase: So there’s so much in this new book as you trace the entire journey of American food. Question number one, drum roll, please. Does American cuisine exist?

Paul Freedman: It does. It does in a kind of special sense because when we say cuisine and apply it to things like Italy or India, there are a number of dishes that we expect. So if you were told that you’re going to go to an Italian restaurant, you’d be pretty sure that some pasta dishes would be on the menu. An Indian restaurant in the United States, there would be curries, even if that’s not exactly an authentic reproduction of what people eat in India. This is a set of dishes that meets an expectation of a particular cuisine. For the United States, you don’t have that. So my argument is that cuisine here means three things. One is an inheritance of certain regional dishes. The second is an early and fierce infatuation with processed food. The third is a love of variety.

Suzy Chase: So in the introduction you wrote as far back as the early 19th century, European travelers were appalled at how quickly Americans wolf down their food. 10 minutes for breakfast, 20 for other meals according to one [Hottie 00:03:21] British visitor in 1820. The first thing I thought about when I read that were the American farmers whose days were jam packed with chores and they didn’t have much time for dining unless it was Sunday after church. What is your take on that observation from 1820?

Paul Freedman: I think that these travelers were in cities and they were observing people who were more affluent. I mean there were farmers all over the world. In the early 19th century, the vast majority of people in Europe, Britain anywhere would have been farmers, so they’re under the same constraints. It’s people who have some choice and who choose to get the meal over in a hurry. The other thing that Europeans said was that Americans don’t like to talk. They don’t see the meal as an opportunity for conversation. This is still true today in the sense that many people eat alone, even in families, everybody has their different schedule. People eat with their phone on the table, looking at their phone. Many people regard meals particularly, but not exclusively lunch as a kind of necessary waste of time that they multitask and do other stuff during it.

There was a survey of attitudes in France versus the United States and it really shows that in France the meal is a small pleasure that banishes other preoccupations and that people who have to get something and kind of like eat it at their desk because they’re very busy will say they haven’t had lunch even if they had enough calories because lunch is an actual meal consumed in some kind of fashion that is not part of the rest of the day. That’s in France at least.

Suzy Chase: What’s American culinary internationalism?

Paul Freedman: That’s the kind of syndrome where you say, “Oh, I don’t want to have lunch at a Thai restaurant because I had Thai food yesterday for dinner.” It is the availability of a variety of cuisines and the feeling that you want to experiment among them. This is now international. In Barcelona where I do a lot of my work as a medieval historian, you now can get sushi, panini, pizzas, hamburgers, the whole gamut of Indian bubble tea, international kinds of foods, but this is really recent. For most of my 40 years as a professor going to Barcelona, they just had the food of Catalonia or Spain or the Mediterranean. So Americans, by contrast, started experimenting with foreign foods with the food of immigrants really as far back as the 1880s when chop suey and Italian dishes first became popular among people who were, of course, not just Italian or Chinese.

Suzy Chase: Do you miss that in Barcelona having so much variety and not really the “traditional things”?

Paul Freedman: It depends how long I’m there. The easy answer is no, because first of all, the repertoire of the local food is pretty extensive and secondly in the quality is so good. So one of the problems with variety is that it distracts from actual quality. I will say that this summer I was in China for three weeks. There, the variety is infinite. I mean, I seldom had the same dish even though we had like 20 or 25 dishes per meal. On the other hand, after a couple of weeks, I really did start to miss what I was accustomed to, not so much American food in the narrow sense of say burgers or steaks, but food that was not Chinese. I admired it, it was marvelous, but it was kind of overwhelming.

Suzy Chase: Let’s talk about the fascinating 1796 cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. Can you describe this cookbook?

Paul Freedman: Like many cookbooks, it, let’s say, uses the legacy of the past in order to avoid saying it’s a plagiarized affair. It is based a lot on English cookbooks, but it has a certain number of American characteristics. I sort of dismiss Simmons as really not a very American, but it’s mostly taken from other, deliberately it says new receipts adapted to the American mode of cooking is the Hannah Glasse Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy, the US edition of this.

Suzy Chase: I love that you have a whole chapter about community cookbooks and you talk about how these reflect time and class and you wrote that they offer a representation of actually what was being cooked when it was published. When did they first appear?

Paul Freedman: Around the Civil War. So they are cookbooks of recipes by ladies, as they put it, of various communities submitted to form a volume. So they’re like favorite recipes of Zanesville, Ohio or something like that and they were to raise money for veterans or wounded soldiers, and after the civil war they keep often that charitable or institutional purpose.

Suzy Chase: So I think it was kind of like Amelia Simmons. Something I learned was that the community cookbooks often ripped off existing published recipes.

Paul Freedman: Yes, yes. Or they were adaptations, let’s say, of recipes often that were pretty widely circulated in women’s magazines and in other books. If you consider what they’re doing, I had originally thought that such an enterprise would be a wonderful reflection of regional cuisine that a community cookbook in Boise, Idaho or Waco, Texas or Jacksonville, Florida would show you the cuisine of the region. But they really don’t because the women of these communities want to be up to date and modern. They don’t want to be rustic, rural and have recipes for random animals that you could get in the countryside. They want to have if jello salad is the thing or if green goddess salad dressing is the thing and they want to have something that’s up to date. They also want to have something that’s not too difficult for other people to make.

The thing you have to balance, if you’re thinking of what recipe are you going to contribute as if it’s too difficult, if it calls for esoteric ingredients, then you’re kind of breaking the curve. You’re spoiling and you’re a show off. What you want is something that’s convenient, not too expensive, delicious by whatever measurement that means, so you get them a very good view as you said of time and of class. You don’t get such a good view of where this is taking place of regional cuisine.

Suzy Chase: So was there ever a vibrant set of regional cuisines in America?

Paul Freedman: There was, but it starts to be undermined much earlier than anywhere else in the world because of the development of canned, powdered, processed and later on frozen foods which seduced American cooks. It’s fair to say beginning pretty shortly after the Civil War.

Suzy Chase: When it came to desserts until the late 1950s, baking from scratch was expected. I feel like we’ve come full circle on this, don’t you think?

Paul Freedman: I do. In this as in many other things, the convenience products of the past, which you find in the middle aisles of the typical supermarket, the way of the typical supermarket has set up is to make sure that you’ve got to go through everything and to look at everything. So the middle aisles are suffering. Just in today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s all sorts of stuff about Campbell Soup still the soup part of it, despite their proclaimed insistence on better quality, people aren’t using canned soups as much. They’re not using cake mixes as much. That doesn’t mean that convenience products are at an end. In fact, if you expand the definition of convenience to include takeout or delivery or meal kits, we’re using the more than ever so that in the 1950s however different the food was from our taste, however infatuated they were with convenience products, they did almost all their cooking at home, whereas we spend more money dining out or on meals that other people have prepared than we do cooking at home.

Suzy Chase: Well, what we eat is radically cheaper than the past. This stat blew my mind. In 1900, more than 40% of an average family’s income was spent on food, and in 2016 it was 12.6%. How come?

Paul Freedman: This is the best argument for technology and for the kind of a processed food and national distribution networks that you can device. The fact that we don’t have to spend nearly half of our income just to feed ourselves, that’s an historic change. That is all of the rest of human history except for a tiny fragment of an elite, an aristocracy. People had to expend a huge amount of effort and money just to feed themselves so that the reason for this change and the diminution of how much as a percentage of what we earn we have to spend is because of better agricultural yield, better fertilizers, better transport, the ability to freeze, powder or to preserve food more quickly and the industrialization and centralization of the food supply.

That doesn’t mean that that comes free of adverse consequences, environmental consequences, health consequences. But for many people, you could argue very easily that the bottom line is that the average person is spending radically less on food and therefore has much more money to spend on phones, cars, houses, clothes, travel, music, whatever.

Suzy Chase: The Settlement Cookbook was first published in 1903 and the subtitle was The Way to a Man’s Heart. Then a Mademoiselle article from 1990 was entitled Refriger-Dating: Putting Guy Food in the Fridge. Talk a little bit about getting a man with food and the perfect wife.

Paul Freedman: Well, the tradition was that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. That is part of a kind of eternal argument about what are men looking for in women and addressed to women by things like that cookbook, but with more elaboration by things like women’s magazines article, magazines like Mademoiselle, which was by its very title directed to an adult but unmarried woman. But the assumption of Mademoiselle’s history was that it was addressed to an unmarried woman wants to be married real soon. So yes, a lot of these involve strategies to get men in the early 20th century by being a good cook.

In the later 20th century, beginning in the ’50s by seeming to be a good cook because you actually don’t want to spend a whole lot of time cooking because the contradictory advice or the, let’s say, compatible advice, complementary advice of these magazines is yes, men want you to be a good cook, but they don’t want you to be a drudge. They want you to be a good companion. They want you to be sexy. They want you to be fun. So what they’re trying to navigate in the late 20th century especially is the woman as a good sport and the woman as a good provider of meals and that’s tricky, let alone-

Suzy Chase: That’s a lot.

Paul Freedman: Yes, let alone the whole idea of subordination, implicit in the notion that it is you, the woman, who has to please the man. It also assumes that the man is kind of a something of an automaton. He responds to good meals, he responds to sexual allure. He doesn’t do a whole lot of thinking or strategizing about it.

Suzy Chase: My mom, she’s passed away, but she was born in 1929 and she drilled it in my head like, “You should always cook Bob a meal.” I can’t get it out of my head.

Paul Freedman: Right, right. So, I mean, you know what I’m talking about. I think that the chapter on women and food and food and gender and the way cookbooks address women is alien to what many young people think. When I teach this material to my students at Yale, they’re amused, but it’s like I was describing the Crusades in the Middle Ages or something like that. Yeah, okay. I saw this on Game of Thrones but it doesn’t exactly speak to my experience. Was your mom saying otherwise he’s going to be discontent or-

Suzy Chase: Yes.

Paul Freedman: Yeah. So a lot of this is the lore of older women addressing younger women or moms addressing daughters is that you may think that your convenience or your attractiveness is more important than providing a good meal. But, so the extreme, as you will have seen in my book, is someone who wrote to Betty Crocker, the General Mills icon who accepted mail and responded to it. So they had various people who had the job of responding as Betty Crocker. I mean, everybody knew she was a fictional character, but nevertheless, that was their advice kind of a correspondence. One woman wrote in in the 1920s and said that, “I make vanilla cake because I like it and my husband prefers fudge cake and my neighbor I noticed has made fudge cake a couple times. Is she trying to steal my husband?” Here again, it assumes that the guy is just like something that can be directed by remote control, oh, fudge cake. I’m going to go for it.

Suzy Chase: I’m going next door.

Paul Freedman: I’m going next door. See you. The whole situation comedy TV era was predicated on the notion that the woman actually thinks about stuff and the man just kind of like goes to work, comes home, eats his meal, watches TV, says, “Did you have a good day?” and that’s about all he’s good for.

Suzy Chase: Gosh, we’ve come a long way.

Paul Freedman: Maybe. So I do include this New York Times tongue and cheek to be sure piece of a few years ago about advising women to, or at least saying that women themselves spontaneously on first or at least early dates, dinners with guys they’ve just met, will order steak in order to show that they’re not a food faddist, that they’re not too health conscious, that they’re not going to insist that he changed his diet, that he started eating kale or quinoa or something like that because that’s what he fears. So again, she shows she’s a good sport by ordering the steak.

Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, the difficulty of defining American cuisine makes it hard to identify a typical American restaurant serving typical American food. Talk a little bit about the term ethnic in terms of restaurants.

Paul Freedman: Well, ethnic is not a popular word for the good reason that it implies that that’s the foreign or the strange and that there is a kind of normal or normative, let’s say, generic white person’s American cuisine or restaurant. So I use the word ethnic nonetheless in the book because that foreignness or that exoticness is the appeal of such restaurants. Because the fact that you patronize restaurants does not make you necessarily more tolerant or more inclusive, it’s perfectly possible to have a hard or paranoid attitude towards immigration and eat at Mexican restaurants all the time. There are people in many states who are doing this even as we speak.

Suzy Chase: So true.

Paul Freedman: So the ethnic though, the ethnic restaurant as a category, you can really see this as an American phenomenon if you compare say a guidebook to New York restaurants from the 1960s when the New York Times in particular started publishing its series of guidebooks and the Guide Michelin for France. The New York guide books divide the book into categories. Some of the categories may just be things like steakhouses or elegant restaurants, but most of them are Chinese, Indian, Italian and so forth. They’re divided by international country or ethnicity. In Paris, in the 1965 Guide Michelin I bothered to count the restaurants. I can’t remember now, but it’s something like 300, roughly 300 restaurants are listed for the Paris Guide Michelin 1965 of which only half a dozen are not French. There’s like two Chinese restaurants, a Vietnamese restaurant. Basically dining out in France might mean great variety of regions, for example, an Alsatian restaurant, an Alsatian restaurant, Provencal restaurant, but they’re all within France.

Suzy Chase: It’s interesting that you wrote Jonathan Gold preferred the term traditional.

Paul Freedman: Yes, because I don’t agree because traditional like if you go to Louisiana, traditional means Cajun or Creole according to some old tradition. So traditional can mean anything. If I had to choose a word, I’d say maybe international. But the problem with that is that if you look at the, and this gets back to your earlier question, what is a typical American restaurant? If you go to a typical American restaurant, often it has pasta dishes on it, it has Crudo or Sashimi of some sort or it has empanadas or small plates like tapas, it could have all sorts of foreign influenced and unacknowledged elements.

Suzy Chase: You said that diversity actually blurs the culinary authenticity, for example, chicken fajitas in Vermont.

Paul Freedman: Right. You get these things like in guide books where they have pecan pie as a specialty of Vermont or Iowa or all sorts of places that are outside the South, which is what people normally think of as pecan pie’s natural home. But this is genuine. You got chicken fajitas everywhere. The contrast that I try to draw may be most obvious in an anecdote about an experience I had in Italy where you have the reverse kind of fanatical devotion to local and regional identity. So the meal I had in Bologna with a professor of medieval history and her husband, so I’d been invited to give a talk at the University of Bologna and they took me out to dinner. Bologna is a famous food capital of Italy and one of their specialties is tortellini.

So we had tortellini at this restaurant and without a doubt, these were the best tortellini I’ve ever had and it was obvious. My host’s husband said, “In other places in Italy, other towns, they make tortellini with different fillings like spinach or cheese and these were actually meat tortellini.” I asked the normal American question, which was, “Oh, do you ever get tired of meat tortellini and just have cheese tortellini instead just for variety?” He looked at me like I was crazy, like I suggested putting maple syrup on red snapper. He said, “No, no. In Bologna,” we’re in Bologna, “In Bologna, we eat meet tortellini,” and it turns out that the blend of what kind of meat it is in the tortellini is fixed also. It’s very different from Modena where they also eat meat tortellini and Modena is maybe 70 miles away, but there’s a different kind. There’s more prosciutto or more mortadella whatever the difference is.

So it’s not as if people are competing to see what kind of tortellini you can come up with. In America, you can go to the supermarket and buy 10 different kinds of tortellini no problem. Pumpkin squash tortellini, porcini mushroom tortellini, sun dried tomato tortellini, but they’re not as good. So here the emphasis is on a very narrow dossier of variation, but on a fanatical attention to making it as good as possible. That is something that we’ve started to do again and it’s something where you see in things that people don’t cook at home.

So I teach in New Haven, a city famous for pizza, and so people really have an idea of how pizza is supposed to be made. Or you get this with barbecue in the South. In North Carolina, they’re not going to say, “Oh, maybe I’ll have some Texas barbecue just for variety,” smoked beef rather than that kind of vinegary shredded pork that they go for. But apart from such exceptions, the American tendency has been to prefer variety to intrinsic quality.

Suzy Chase: In chapter nine you wrote about how the 1970s marked the total eclipse of regional cuisine. I would love, these are two people who I love, I would love for you to talk about Jane and Michael Stern.

Paul Freedman: So actually I just published an article in the Wall Street Journal that is in their series, each weekend they have five best books or most important books in various topics. So it might be in warfare or the five best books on sleep and mine was the one they assigned me was on American food. I mentioned the Sterns’ road food guide, which has gone through 10 editions, I believe, the first was in 1978. So yeah, Jane and Michael Stern in the 1970s set out to find restaurants, not so much of regional authenticity, but simply places where they didn’t use frozen food, where they made their own pies, where they made their own chili, where they didn’t just dump a Campbell Soup thing into an institutional pot, but actually made their own soup.

So it’s not intended originally as a guide to regional specialties as just to rescue the traveler from the necessity of depending on a fast food and it’s very dear to my heart personally because I taught at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in the 1980s and traveled a lot to New York because my wife lived in New York city, as did my parents. So going from Nashville to New York, I depended on the Sterns’ guide to find barbecue places for example, or just lunch counter kind of places that had pot roast that they’d actually made in their kitchen rather than some kind of a food delivery service that they’d clawed out. So pre-GPS, finding some of these places was really hard, but it certainly was worth it.

Suzy Chase: Yeah, that’s what I thought about with them. They didn’t have Google Maps. You could see them sitting there with the big map splayed out front of them driving. They’re so good.

Paul Freedman: There’s a de-skilling. It did take, there was a place called the Ridgewood Barbecue, one of the best barbecue places in the East and it’s in Eastern Tennessee, very near the Virginia and Kentucky borders and in a place called Bluff City. I would go to that maybe once a year and that was just enough time to forget how to get off the highway and find a place. But I actually knew how to read a map, a skill that I am slowly losing.

Suzy Chase: So on page 281, you have a list of food fads and fashions from the late 19th to early 21st centuries. In the 1980s section, you included ranch dressing invented by Steve Henson who marketed it as Hidden Valley Ranch. I didn’t realize ranch dressing is a relatively new thing.

Paul Freedman: I think this is true of so many of these. I’m glad you asked me about that list because that’s my very favorite thing in here. We think that a lot of dishes just have gone back since, have been around since time immemorial. I mean some of them, it’s not that they were invented in the way that a ranch dressing, really you can point to a date when it was invented, but say quiche. I mean quiche Lorraine, you could get at French restaurants before the 1970s. But it completely takes over certain kinds of entertaining and cookbooks in the 1970s. Squid [inaudible 00:31:06] was available in Italy but unknown in the United States until the 1980s. So I’m fascinated by the way in which things that are pretty new turn out to be regarded or get dressed up as age old things. Key lime pie for example, people think it goes back to the origins of Florida, the first hearty settlers in the Florida Keys, but in fact it’s based on Borden’s condensed milk recipe from the end of the 1940s.

Suzy Chase: What?

Paul Freedman: Yeah, I know. Disappointing in a way but originally it was for some kind of ice box quick lemon pie and then some clever person thought of applying it to these admittedly regional Key limes. But the actual recipe, it’s not as if people in 1900, when Key West was first developed as a resort were talking in Key lime pie, they had no idea of what it was.

Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called my favorite cookbook. What is your all-time favorite cookbook and why?

Paul Freedman: The choice is narrow. I would say my all time favorite cookbook is Pierre Franey’s 60-Minute Gourmet.

Suzy Chase: Yes.

Paul Freedman: So on the one hand it’s amusing because it’s idea and it dates from, what, about 1980, late ’70s, early ’80s then it was followed up by More 60-Minute Gourmet. So on the one hand, the notion that 60 minutes is fast is now amusing. So for Pierre Franey, a French trained master chef, nobody could dream of wanting to produce a meal in less than 60 minutes. Less than 60 minutes, you might as well put something in the microwave from his point of view. But it is actually exactly what it says it is. These are wonderful meals. They’re easy. They’re easy in the sort of Julia Child sense. Of course, like everybody else, I admire her because all you have to do is follow the instructions. The instructions may be a little bit extensive. They’re not as extensive as Julia Child’s recipes, but each step is pretty simple and it produces lovely meals.

There are a lot of cream sauces. There’s a lot of stuff with scallops. My wife, when we were just married, made fun of these recipes and have my producing meals based on them by saying, “What will it be today? Scallops or scallops substitutes?” But I’d say that my second choice, I mean, you didn’t ask me for a second choice, but my second choice is called Cucina Fresca. Point of it is that it’s Italian food, but it’s food to be served at room temperature, which allows you to make it in advance so that you can greet and entertain your guests without frantically checking things on the stove.

Suzy Chase: The guys at Kitchen Arts and Letters here in the city.

Paul Freedman: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Suzy Chase: That’s one of their favorite cookbooks.

Paul Freedman: Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s good to know. That also my copy is in lovingly cherished bad shape because it’s been used so much.

Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Paul Freedman: I’m at Mornayphf, Mornay like the sauce, M-O-R-N-A-Y-P-H-F on Twitter, and I have a website that’s available through the Yale history department. So if you Google Yale University History, you’ll see under faculty my name and my sign.

Suzy Chase: Now to the very last line of American cuisine, it’s in the what’s in and what’s out section. Okay. Here it goes. Microgreens, it has been discovered that they have no flavor. Thank you.

Paul Freedman: It’s in what’s out.

Suzy Chase: Amen. I’ve always hated microgreens.

Paul Freedman: Yeah, well, I’ve developed more dislikes or phobias as I’ve gotten older, which may be because I started out pretty eclectic and ecumenical. But if I may mention another pet peeve, it’s wraps and this is brought up by we have a lot of candidates for jobs in our department this semester and the lunch is so often served at their talks to accompany their talks. The candidate has to give a job talk based on their research. Our wraps, I go to these, this free food is set out and I don’t like any of it.

Suzy Chase: But they see you coming.

Paul Freedman: Well, people will say other things like, “Oh, well. You choose the restaurant. I wouldn’t dare choose the restaurant for a meal with you,” as if I have some real expertise in New Haven restaurants that they don’t, or as if I’m someone who can’t stand to eat an ordinary meal, which is totally untrue. I am not in my own picture of myself a foodie, a food fanatic, a gourmet, a gastronome. I just happen to be interested in food.

Suzy Chase: That’ll be your next book. It will be entitled I Like Ordinary Meals.

Paul Freedman: Right. No kidding.

Suzy Chase: So thanks for writing yet another thought provoking book. I could talk to you for hours and thanks so much for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Paul Freedman: Thank you for having me, Suzy. It’s always a pleasure talking to you.

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