November 1990: The Slowly Evolving Great American Cuisine Machine

Ah, the mills of progress grind slowly, sprinkling peppercorny clichés about American cookery over the salad bars of our minds, already cluttered with a confusion of combinations, most implausibly comical. “Like what?” you ask. Well, like calves brains and raspberries or grilled salmon and blueberries. It is to laugh. No?

It is to weep. After an hiatus of a year (or was it two?), the Symposium on American Cuisine resurfaced in Kansas City (MO) as a co-sponsor of a conference billed as “The American Restaurant of the ’90s.”

Together with co-sponsors The Culinarians and The Culinary Institute of America and hosted by The American Restaurant (see October 1990: The Ethnification of American Cuisine), it was hoped the three-day conference and its gathering of egols would squelch the clichés and muffle the giggles. God knows it tried: it flexed a muscle or two, but what bubbled up from the debate was a potboiling of dialogue, bland to the palate, no more a tasty blend than, say, calves brains and raspberries. 

Sincere in their patter, celebrity chef panelists (Coyote Café’s Mark Miller one of them) and speakers (generalists and philosopher pundits)—with one or two exceptions—dazzled attendees with their knowledge of the obvious and their grasp of the banal.

What was most maddening came to light during a panel I moderated. Several of the panelists, each representing a regional cuisine and trying to define it, defended the uniqueness of their menu, believing defiantly that nobody could duplicate it no matter how hard he or she tried; and, furthermore, stubbornly refusing to admit their menu could migrate successfully from its birthplace to an adopted location or foster home.

Never mind the conference’s belaboring the obvious, it was the panelist’s obsession with a territorial imperative that I found most disheartening; and it was at that point, towards the middle of my panel, I concluded that that sort of argument, rife with a naïve yet indefensible chauvinism, was partly responsible for stifling the emergence and fusion of American cookery as a legitimate world class cuisine.

This sappy/sloppy debate, for the most part, fell upon deaf ears; yet, in this wilderness of mutes, a sane voice, the New York Time’s Florence Fabricant, did rise up and demand to know what it was, say, about Southwestern cuisine, that could not possibly travel to New York or anywhere else. What was so peculiar about its flavors, she wanted to know, and its ingredients that would fall flat in Manhattan?

Somebody mumbled something about the environment, the natives, even the landscape of coyotes and cacti and how all of that affected the invention of dishes and frustrated their reiteration elsewhere.

Wrong, I thought: we are talking food, ingredients, preparation, recipes, a menu, and someone in the kitchen who knows how to cook. If the end result in a restaurant in Manhattan duplicates the original prepared and plated in Santé Fe, so be it.  What’s so hard? What’s so precious? We were not debating the differences in baking time at the Dead Sea or atop Mount Everest. So, I jumped in and wanted to know, since ethnic foods such as Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Greek, had influenced American cuisine (even the variety cranked out in the Southwest) after traveling thousands of miles from abroad to get here, why was it so hard for one regional cuisine here to migrate to another region here and exert a similar influence? No one had an answer, at least one that made any sense. Or, maybe, no one cared. So, I continued (unabashed) and said maybe, just maybe, that was where American cuisine was heading: a commingling of ethnic with regional American foods that one of these days (after years of cross-breeding and scrambling) would establish one all-American cuisine unlike any other in the world.

One other matter that mattered was pointed out by Ferdinand Metz, president, The Culinary Institute of America (Hyde Park, NY). 

“It’s important,” said he, “to understand food and its values. A lot of what is going on today with American cuisine leapfrogs the ‘understanding’ part; chefs get caught up in the hype of cooking, leaving behind the basics, the very foundation of a system that supports whatever follows, which is why you get every so often concoctions with ingredients that don’t make any sense.

“American cuisine is often as simple as chicken à la king or a beef Wellington. But what makes these dishes great—or any dish great, for that matter—is how you prepare them. Whatever it is that you cook,” Metz reminded us, “you must cook exceptionally well. A lot of chefs forget that. American cuisine comes down to good cooking, good preparation just like any other cuisine.”