July 2007: American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes

The season-long question of what book to read at the end of the dock, in the park, or on the beach just got a whole lot easier. If you’ve been getting hot in the kitchen this summer, step out onto the porch and sink into American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, edited by Molly O’Neill (Library of America). This wonderful and inspiring collection of food writing offers up a diverse group of prominent food writers, from erudite observers such as M.F.K. Fisher, to legendary recipe divas such as Julia Child, to the modern-day food-obsessed stylemakers such as Ruth Reichl—but the real charm of this book is in discovering the food musings of other American authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes.

O’Neill begins the book with a recipe from the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for ice cream. Uniquely American ingredients, like cornmeal, are showcased in a recipe for Johnny Cake from the earliest known American cookbook, American Cookery.  But while recipes are sprinkled liberally in the book's 700-odd pages—including one from Emily Dickinson, complete with her signature long dashes after each ingredient—this book’s weight comes from the essays about food and eating. from Lewis and Clark’s account of eating wild buffalo to Michael Pollan’s musing on what it means to eat organic.

American Food Writing is a treat for any reader, regardless of their familiarity with the annals of gastronomic literature. Writing about food, whether in essay form or ripped from the pages of narrative fiction, is an intimate endeavor for the writer and the reader.  Everyone eats—everyone remembers their first bite of something exotic, that dinner that brought the family closer together or pushed them further apart. We are all curious about where food comes from and how others see it.

While this book serves as a great introduction to food writing, it also satisfies the hunger pangs for the educated culinary dilettantes. Little snippets, including an early American recipe for “meat flavoring,” illustrate how completely wrong it is to assume the first Americans had bland taste buds; indeed they relished highly seasoned foods. Ray Kroc’s account of opening his first McDonald’s serves as an interesting balance to anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Add a host of international writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri and Jade Snow Wong, and you get a unique perspective highlighting the immigrant impact on American culinary history.

American Food Writing offers something for everyone interested in understanding the depth and breadth of the American food scene.

Buy American Food Writing at Amazon.com.