// literary & arts //
Winter 2006
From Applebee's to Zabar's
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The United States of Arugula
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A quick survey of nutritionists, physicians, and culinary enthusiasts will tell you that the key to healthy food selection is a diversified palate. In his new book, The United States of Arugula, Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp dishes out a colorful, multi-disciplinary serving of American history, sociology, and consumption over the past two centuries. Through an effective combination of in depth research and charming anecdotes, Kamp, like a modern day de Tocqueville, sends his readers on an exciting transcontinental journey into the roots (and leaves) of America's gastronomic past.
The bulk of Arugula focuses on post-World War II America, the years that brought Kamp's Big Three—Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and James Beard—to the forefront of the nation's culinary history. Child, a woman who came to cooking later in life, was the dominant, if not the only, presence in food television for a good portion of the last century with her hit PBS show, The French Chef. Beard and Claiborne were larger than life characters in their own right. The former was the arbiter of all things proper on the New York foodie scene and is Kamp's "undisputed dean of American gastronomy." Claiborne, the long time New York Times food editor, was the originator of the now ubiquitous starred restaurant review. Kamp details, sometimes too closely, the culinary, artistic, and personal exploits of each of The Big Three in an attempt to convey the way in which their lives translated into their impact on the changing American food experience. In the manner of a Hollywood tabloid, Kamp digs into the sexual relationships of each, particularly the men, and discusses with fascination the young, aspiring chefs who casually entered and exited their lives and residences.
Julia Child, whose distinct voice and accent symbolize French cuisine to legions of Americans, was born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, California in 1912. Her food preferences were simple and unfussy, despite her upbringing in the wealthy social circles of Southern California. Craving adventure, young Julia left the balmy West Coast for the office buildings of Washington, DC, working first as a typist for the State Department and later in the office of William "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forebear of the Central Intelligence Agency. Julia's position and security clearance at the OSS provided her with access to all sorts of classified documents. But Kamp is less interested in her (possible) involvement with espionage and is more concerned with what it was that transformed the "bawdy" and "gangly" girl from the West into the first lady of American cuisine.
As a State Department employee, Julia volunteered to join a delegation solicited by the OSS working on a tea plantation in India. It was there that the United States plotted its attacks on the Japanese and that Julia McWilliams met a black belt in jujitsu named Paul Cushing Child. More gastronomically sophisticated than Julia, Paul, a cartographer, introduced his future bride to local cuisine during their years in Southern China and, effectively, was the one who turned her on to the beauty of food. Thus, it seems America has Paul Child, and not Julia, to thank for their love of French fare. It was in an effort to woo him that she was prompted to learn to cook.
Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written after her Parisian stint at the famed culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, sold in numbers typically reserved for mass-market paperbacks and sparked a national French cooking craze. Kamp notes that Child, in her paradoxically fastidious unfussiness, spent years ensuring that her book would be accessible to all American cooks. Its detailed instructions and easy-to-read style ushered in a new age of cookbook publication. Throughout Arugula, Kamp encapsulates the ever-changing trends in American food consumption by studying best-selling cookbooks. Mastering turned food-related books into a legitimate genre of literature. Kamp maintains that like all other genres of literature, cookbooks provide insight into the societies that read them.
As a magazine writer himself, it is no surprise that Kamp traces the rise of food magazines in America and credits them with holding much influence over today's burgeoning foodie culture. Culinary enthusiasts devour Ruth Reichl in Gourmet the way gossip fiends binge on Page Six. These foodies do not limit themselves to the printed word. They have moved into other media as well. Kamp likens The Food Network to ESPN, essentially labeling Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay the Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods of a very different type of sport.
Today's easy accessibility to organic products does not go unnoticed by Kamp. He waxes poetic on the merits of Bill Niman and Orville Schell's high quality brand of organic beef ranched on the open terrain of Bolinas, California. Once considered a luxury item, organic beef is now available, at only a moderately higher price, at certain fast-food restaurants across the country. In mentioning advances like these, Kamp makes it abundantly clear that America is a nation that has moved beyond the TV dinner.
Throughout the book, Kamp spouts little tidbits of innovation that have impacted the lives of even those Americans who do not subscribe to Saveur. To prove that there is life beyond Zabar's and Delmonico's, he details the ascension of the supermarket and the fall of the corner grocery, as the local A&P and Piggly Wiggly have served not only as superstores for food purchase but as transformative locations for both middle-class housewives on the go and adolescents looking for action on a hot summer eve.
Nary a page goes by without a lengthy, irreverent, and juicy footnote from Kamp supplementing the content of his main text. It is as if he cannot stop himself from clueing his readers into the "real" story of what goes on in America's most famous kitchens—the spice and steam emanating not only from the food being prepared, but from the chefs and epicurean diners themselves. The tangled web of power struggles, romantic interludes, and sexual politics at Alice Waters' "iconoclastic" Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant that serves as Kamp's focal point through many chapters, provides enough fodder for a long running and successful soap opera. It is to the credit of Kamp's thorough research that he is able to relay such insider information. He not only traces the path of America's taste transition from Spam to sushi, he maps out the personal struggles and triumphs that guided us there.
The inner workings of Chez Panisse hold a particular fascination for Kamp, as its kitchen served as a launch pad for many of the prominent names on the food scene today. Jeremiah Tower, father of the now legendary Northern California regional cuisine, started out as a thorn in Alice Waters' side, bringing in legions of his drug dealing pals and burning marijuana in the kitchen as a way of bringing a certain essence to the workplace atmosphere. They parted under difficult circumstances, with Tower leaving to start the San Francisco restaurant Stars after Waters allegedly snubbed him in the acknowledgements of her Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. Despite its complications, their relationship led to some of the most innovative cuisine to ever hit California, including those famous little pizzas. Waters' intense vision and Tower's manic creativity were a lethal and damning combination. In fact, as Kamp describes it, what transpired in their kitchen would have been great material for Waters' close personal friend Francis Ford Coppola in his Godfather series.
Kamp's roots in the magazine world--he started out in 1987 as a summer intern at Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen's satirical New York-based Spy--inject a remarkable unpretentiousness to his take on history. He is aware that his readers are not merely reading to discover which farmer planted which seeds to bring radicchio to the masses, but to be entertained as well. His personality infused prose is laden with anecdotes that are at once thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. His marvel and astonishment at his presence at a salt tasting at Thomas Keller's Napa institution French Laundry is a jewel of imagery:
I was soberly presented with a salt tasting--a salt tasting!--as an accompaniment to my foie gras course. The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next—one as fine and white as baking powder, another as dark and chunkily crystalline as the inside of a geode.
Of course, Kamp's book is not all wide-eyed, common folk wonderment. Like many cultural elitists before him, he is coast-centric, focusing much of his book on culinary happenings in New York and California. He does, towards the end of the book, zoom in on the Southwestern Santa Fe and Tex Mex scenes, but in a much more peripheral sense, chiefly ignoring the middle of the country altogether. To be fair, the key players of America's food revolution of the sixties and seventies were logging their time in Manhattan and Berkeley. But a more balanced look at what transpired in Middle America, like the more balanced diets Kamp's heroes were promoting, would bolster a more complete food history.
In addition to his coast-centricity, Kamp makes it clear that he is directing himself to a select socio-economic audience. While thoroughly explained, any reader of Arugula would be well served by a previous familiarity with the names Gael Greene and Jean Georges (chef and restaurateur Vongerichten, for those not in the know). But it is his labeling of the eighty-five dollar per person prix fixe dinner at Chez Panisse as "eminently fair" that gives pause to most readers not on a Park Avenue budget.
Despite this, Kamp has crafted a well-seasoned, informative dish, wafting the aromas of both the sensational and the practical. While providing transformative details such as the 1937 invention of the shopping cart and the post-World War II appropriation of trucks used to carry blood serum for use in refrigerated food transport, Kamp never bogs down his readers with facts and figures. Utilizing the (food)stuffs from which legends are made, he nourishes with grains and protein and excites with a bit of schmaltz, creating a meal that leaves his readers both full and hungry for more. What more could a diner ask for?
The bulk of Arugula focuses on post-World War II America, the years that brought Kamp's Big Three—Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and James Beard—to the forefront of the nation's culinary history. Child, a woman who came to cooking later in life, was the dominant, if not the only, presence in food television for a good portion of the last century with her hit PBS show, The French Chef. Beard and Claiborne were larger than life characters in their own right. The former was the arbiter of all things proper on the New York foodie scene and is Kamp's "undisputed dean of American gastronomy." Claiborne, the long time New York Times food editor, was the originator of the now ubiquitous starred restaurant review. Kamp details, sometimes too closely, the culinary, artistic, and personal exploits of each of The Big Three in an attempt to convey the way in which their lives translated into their impact on the changing American food experience. In the manner of a Hollywood tabloid, Kamp digs into the sexual relationships of each, particularly the men, and discusses with fascination the young, aspiring chefs who casually entered and exited their lives and residences.
Julia Child, whose distinct voice and accent symbolize French cuisine to legions of Americans, was born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, California in 1912. Her food preferences were simple and unfussy, despite her upbringing in the wealthy social circles of Southern California. Craving adventure, young Julia left the balmy West Coast for the office buildings of Washington, DC, working first as a typist for the State Department and later in the office of William "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forebear of the Central Intelligence Agency. Julia's position and security clearance at the OSS provided her with access to all sorts of classified documents. But Kamp is less interested in her (possible) involvement with espionage and is more concerned with what it was that transformed the "bawdy" and "gangly" girl from the West into the first lady of American cuisine.
As a State Department employee, Julia volunteered to join a delegation solicited by the OSS working on a tea plantation in India. It was there that the United States plotted its attacks on the Japanese and that Julia McWilliams met a black belt in jujitsu named Paul Cushing Child. More gastronomically sophisticated than Julia, Paul, a cartographer, introduced his future bride to local cuisine during their years in Southern China and, effectively, was the one who turned her on to the beauty of food. Thus, it seems America has Paul Child, and not Julia, to thank for their love of French fare. It was in an effort to woo him that she was prompted to learn to cook.
Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, written after her Parisian stint at the famed culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, sold in numbers typically reserved for mass-market paperbacks and sparked a national French cooking craze. Kamp notes that Child, in her paradoxically fastidious unfussiness, spent years ensuring that her book would be accessible to all American cooks. Its detailed instructions and easy-to-read style ushered in a new age of cookbook publication. Throughout Arugula, Kamp encapsulates the ever-changing trends in American food consumption by studying best-selling cookbooks. Mastering turned food-related books into a legitimate genre of literature. Kamp maintains that like all other genres of literature, cookbooks provide insight into the societies that read them.
As a magazine writer himself, it is no surprise that Kamp traces the rise of food magazines in America and credits them with holding much influence over today's burgeoning foodie culture. Culinary enthusiasts devour Ruth Reichl in Gourmet the way gossip fiends binge on Page Six. These foodies do not limit themselves to the printed word. They have moved into other media as well. Kamp likens The Food Network to ESPN, essentially labeling Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay the Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods of a very different type of sport.
Today's easy accessibility to organic products does not go unnoticed by Kamp. He waxes poetic on the merits of Bill Niman and Orville Schell's high quality brand of organic beef ranched on the open terrain of Bolinas, California. Once considered a luxury item, organic beef is now available, at only a moderately higher price, at certain fast-food restaurants across the country. In mentioning advances like these, Kamp makes it abundantly clear that America is a nation that has moved beyond the TV dinner.
Throughout the book, Kamp spouts little tidbits of innovation that have impacted the lives of even those Americans who do not subscribe to Saveur. To prove that there is life beyond Zabar's and Delmonico's, he details the ascension of the supermarket and the fall of the corner grocery, as the local A&P and Piggly Wiggly have served not only as superstores for food purchase but as transformative locations for both middle-class housewives on the go and adolescents looking for action on a hot summer eve.
Nary a page goes by without a lengthy, irreverent, and juicy footnote from Kamp supplementing the content of his main text. It is as if he cannot stop himself from clueing his readers into the "real" story of what goes on in America's most famous kitchens—the spice and steam emanating not only from the food being prepared, but from the chefs and epicurean diners themselves. The tangled web of power struggles, romantic interludes, and sexual politics at Alice Waters' "iconoclastic" Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant that serves as Kamp's focal point through many chapters, provides enough fodder for a long running and successful soap opera. It is to the credit of Kamp's thorough research that he is able to relay such insider information. He not only traces the path of America's taste transition from Spam to sushi, he maps out the personal struggles and triumphs that guided us there.
The inner workings of Chez Panisse hold a particular fascination for Kamp, as its kitchen served as a launch pad for many of the prominent names on the food scene today. Jeremiah Tower, father of the now legendary Northern California regional cuisine, started out as a thorn in Alice Waters' side, bringing in legions of his drug dealing pals and burning marijuana in the kitchen as a way of bringing a certain essence to the workplace atmosphere. They parted under difficult circumstances, with Tower leaving to start the San Francisco restaurant Stars after Waters allegedly snubbed him in the acknowledgements of her Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook. Despite its complications, their relationship led to some of the most innovative cuisine to ever hit California, including those famous little pizzas. Waters' intense vision and Tower's manic creativity were a lethal and damning combination. In fact, as Kamp describes it, what transpired in their kitchen would have been great material for Waters' close personal friend Francis Ford Coppola in his Godfather series.
Kamp's roots in the magazine world--he started out in 1987 as a summer intern at Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen's satirical New York-based Spy--inject a remarkable unpretentiousness to his take on history. He is aware that his readers are not merely reading to discover which farmer planted which seeds to bring radicchio to the masses, but to be entertained as well. His personality infused prose is laden with anecdotes that are at once thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. His marvel and astonishment at his presence at a salt tasting at Thomas Keller's Napa institution French Laundry is a jewel of imagery:
I was soberly presented with a salt tasting--a salt tasting!--as an accompaniment to my foie gras course. The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next—one as fine and white as baking powder, another as dark and chunkily crystalline as the inside of a geode.
Of course, Kamp's book is not all wide-eyed, common folk wonderment. Like many cultural elitists before him, he is coast-centric, focusing much of his book on culinary happenings in New York and California. He does, towards the end of the book, zoom in on the Southwestern Santa Fe and Tex Mex scenes, but in a much more peripheral sense, chiefly ignoring the middle of the country altogether. To be fair, the key players of America's food revolution of the sixties and seventies were logging their time in Manhattan and Berkeley. But a more balanced look at what transpired in Middle America, like the more balanced diets Kamp's heroes were promoting, would bolster a more complete food history.
In addition to his coast-centricity, Kamp makes it clear that he is directing himself to a select socio-economic audience. While thoroughly explained, any reader of Arugula would be well served by a previous familiarity with the names Gael Greene and Jean Georges (chef and restaurateur Vongerichten, for those not in the know). But it is his labeling of the eighty-five dollar per person prix fixe dinner at Chez Panisse as "eminently fair" that gives pause to most readers not on a Park Avenue budget.
Despite this, Kamp has crafted a well-seasoned, informative dish, wafting the aromas of both the sensational and the practical. While providing transformative details such as the 1937 invention of the shopping cart and the post-World War II appropriation of trucks used to carry blood serum for use in refrigerated food transport, Kamp never bogs down his readers with facts and figures. Utilizing the (food)stuffs from which legends are made, he nourishes with grains and protein and excites with a bit of schmaltz, creating a meal that leaves his readers both full and hungry for more. What more could a diner ask for?