TastingVertically
A salumeria in Siena, where cinghiale (wild boar) is a local specialty.
Wine tastings can be informal gatherings or they
can be highly structured events designed to teach us to recognize the
subtle differences between closely related wines. Typical examples of
the latter might consist of comparisons between several wines of one region
or varietal -- such as the latest vintage of wines from Bordeaux, or Pinot
Noirs from the Pacific Northwest. These are called “horizontal tastings.”
Tastings can also be arranged vertically-- perhaps comparing all the vintages
of Chateau Haut Brion for the last fifty years. The two methods reflect
different kinds of learning and differing degrees of sophistication.
Everyone knows that, over the last forty years or so, there has been a
rapid and worldwide rise in interest in cooking and eating. This has led
to an incredible expansion of choices of foods, cookbooks, restaurants,
cooking equipment and ingredients-- representing an ever-growing list
of ethnicities and cultures. In a sense, we have all been involved in
the broadest of possible horizontal tastings.
It sometimes seems that no corner of the world-- no matter how remote
or obscure-- has already been explored for (or looted of) its culinary
treasures. In our insatiable quest for new tastes, and textures, and aromas,
we rush from one ethnic market (or continent) to another, always imagining
that somewhere-- in a place no other foodie has yet traveled-- there is
a magical dish that will transform our lives forever.
The problem with this approach, of course, is that, in our haste, we don’t
experience the depth of connection that indigenous peoples have with their
own foods. Our broad, but shallow, tasting experiences-- by their very
nature-- deprive us of the fulfillment we seek.
Perhaps that is why we’re beginning to see a different approach
to the search for culinary meaning, one that promises to provide the depth
of understanding, the depth of flavor we’ve been craving. Having
gone as far as we can -- horizontally -- in all directions, we have but
one choice: taste vertically.
We do this by acquiring a taste for history. When we know where our food
comes from -- not just in the fashionable sense of eating locally-grown
foods, but in understanding how it got to be the way it is: when a dish
was created, under what technological, ethnic, geographical, political
and religious circumstances -- we begin to develop that “depth of
connection” we missed during our earlier “horizontal”
explorations.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in vertical tasting.
It can be seen in several forms: culinary historical societies, websites
devoted to food history, libraries devoted to historic culinary collections,
historical cookbooks, and countless articles in food magazines like this
one.
Serious foodies, in almost every major city in the US, have formed culinary
historical societies. Important ones include the Chicago Culinary Historians,
the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor, the Culinary Historians of Boston,
the Culinary Historians of New York, the Culinary Historians of Washington,
DC, the Historic Foodways Society of Delaware Valley, and the Houston
Culinary Historians. Similar groups, like Oldways
and Slow Food, study
and try to preserve ancient food practices, ingredients and dishes before
they are lost to commercially-motivated “progress.”
The
Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is not specifically about food,
but when its members re-enact medieval events, they are particularly careful
to produce all their meals as authentically as possible-- and they have
been responsible for a number of translations of early cookbooks (both
in printed form and, incongruously enough, as web-based recipe databases).
Similar groups re-enact Revolutionary War battles (such as the annual
Burning of Kingston) and Civil War events. These groups meticulously reproduce
the dishes and preparations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
respectively.
There are, literally, hundreds of websites devoted to food history. Here
are a selected few:
American Brewery History Page
Clifford A. Wright
Food History
Food History News
Food History Yellow Pages
Food Timeline History Notes, and
History and Legends of Favorite Foods.
A few that are specific to our area (New York's Hudson Valley) include:
Brooklyn Brewery and
Research Resources.
Libraries with significant historic culinary collections include:
Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard University),
The Culinary History Collection at Newman Library (Virginia Tech),
the Connecticut Historical Society,
Johnson and Wales College Library,
the Public Libraries of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee,
Nestlé Library (Cornell University School of Hotel Administration),
Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress,
Special Collections (University of California, Davis), and
the Department of Special Collections: Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center (University of Pennsylvania).
In our area, New York Academy of Medicine Library has an excellent collection of very old and rare cookbooks, as does the New York Public Library and the Bobst Library (New York University). The Conrad Hilton Library at The Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, has one of the biggest and finest collections in the country.
A few periodicals are dedicated to food history, such as Food History News and Foodtalk, but mainstream magazines, like Saveur, routinely carry articles on food history.
So many historical cookbooks have been published in recent years that it would be impossible to list them all. A few that can tell us something about how we got to eat the way we do here, in the Hudson Valley, are worthy of mention.
Two years ago, our own Peter
Rose, together with Donna Barnes, curated an exhibit at the Albany
Institute of History and Art. It was called Matters of Taste: Food
and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life. The exhibit
has closed, but the beautiful and informative catalog (that contains a
small recipe book) is still available. Regular readers of The
Valley Table know that Ms. Rose specializes in the study of Dutch
foodways and their influence in the Hudson Valley.
Ian Kelly, an actor and food historian, has written Cooking
for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, the First Celebrity Chef.
French cuisine may, at first seem unrelated to the way we eat today, but
virtually all serious restaurants (and restaurateurs) draw on the organization
and techniques of the classic French kitchen. Further, it is almost impossible
to imagine a world without celebrity chefs, and Carême was the model
for all of them.
Sandra Sherman, an historian (formerly) at the University of Arkansas,
has given us Fresh
from the Past: Recipes and Revelations from Moll Flander’s Kitchen
--a detailed look at the foods and lifestyles of eighteenth-century England,
a time when cookbook-publishing was booming. In fact, the first cookbook
published in America (1742) was a reprint of Eliza Smith’s 1727
book, The
Compleat Housewife; or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion; the
first American cookbook wasn’t published until 1796: Amelia Simmons’
American Cookery; or The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables,
and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards,
and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain
Cake, Adapted to this Country, and All Grades of Life. Sherman’s
book gives us a very good idea of what our Founding Fathers would have
expected to see on their tables.
Last year, Francine Segan published Shakespeare’s
Kitchen. She looked at the kind of dishes prepared in England
four hundred years ago-- the dishes our earliest colonials would have
known well-- and updated them for modern tastes. This year, she’s
done the same with even older ancestors of our cooking in The
Philosopher’s Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for
the Modern Cook. In both books, she includes the original recipes,
so we can compare-- in a perfect example of the vertical tasting.
Of course, if you really want to go back as far as possible in your search
for the roots of our cuisine, you might want to read Jean Bottero’s
The
Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. Carefully
examining and analyzing the inscriptions on three five-thousand-year-old
clay tablets, Dr. Bottero is not able to recreate actual recipes, but
many of the ingredients and methods are oddly, and reassuringly, familiar.
This slightly altered article (the links have been added for the web version)
was first published in the March/May 2005 issue of The
Valley Table, and appears here by permission of the publishers.
Copyright 2006 by Gary Allen