Circular Cruises/Good Food Bad Food

Good Food, Bad Food

9 July 1997

I just got finished rereading Calvin Trillin's Tummy Trilogy for about the umpteenth time.

These are articles about eating, plain and simple. About genuine love for genuine food and about a life spent trying to avoid the dreaded rubber chicken.

They make me hungry.

The Stern's Roadfood makes me hungry. This is the perfect season to go upstate and get fried clams, and I hear them calling me.

My 1970's Time-Life cookbooks with the food porn pictures make me hungry. My Al Sicherman cookbook-of-sorts, Caramel Knowledge, makes me hungry - and now we start to push the envelope, because there are some recipes in there that make people go screaming into the night.

But the items in James Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food don't make me hungry. And neither do the weirder recipes in River Road Recipes, which is the best-selling community cookbook in the country (like, in the millions) and a microcosm of the 1950's Junior League Louisiana housewife.

So clearly there is a line to be drawn in the sand here. I'm just not sure where it is.

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Perhaps we can establish a few guidelines. Although I had an excellent meat glaze/sauce some years back which had Coca-Cola as an ingredient, I'd say that was an exception. In general, recipes designed around commercial, packaged, brand-named goods are likely to be suspect.

Recipes with a single notable odd ingredient are a mixed lot, but I agree with Mr. Sicherman that any recipe with "Surprise" in the name is not something I want to be surprised by.

I have eaten my lifetime quota of recipes which contain canned soup as an ingredient. I was not always a radical on this subject, but as I get older and crankier I get more and more impatient with the use of soup as anything but soup.

Similarly, I don't want any dishes containing fruit gelatines unless they're a plain bowl of fruit gelatin eaten for its own sake - and even then I will not jump up and down for joy.

And, maybe to some readers' surprise considering my stance on bland food, it is definitely possible to over-pepper or over-garlic a dish. If I can't taste anything because I'm overwhelmed by fire, what's the point?

- - -

None of this is really important to anyone else, but it does lead me to wonder yet again why American food is still recovering from the fifties, even in the South, why flavor is apparently banned from the public table, why people like Mr. Trillin had to embark on the same rescue mission for the dignity of humble regional food with taste - local barbeque, country ham and red-eye gravy, good biscuits, cornbread (northern or southern variety), fried clams, oyster po-boys, red beans and rice, tamales, chili, greens and gumbo - that Alan Lomax had to undergo, cruising the country with his microphone and no budget, to rescue American folk music.

Why are we ashamed of what we have? Why will the city fathers eat barbeque but steer strangers to the generic hotel restaurant that Trillin insists on referring to as Maison De La Casa House, Continental Cuisine?

I don't understand it. I really don't.

Copyright © July 1997. All rights reserved.