The United States of Arugula Read Online Free Page A

financial reasons, aren’t cooking. I think there’s extraordinary potential behind that, to feed people who aren’t feeding themselves, and to do it right. We can’t be afraid of progress in the food world.”
    But this is getting ahead of the story. There are beans to be shelled, roasts to be trimmed, oysters to be shucked, big fish to be gutted …

INTRODUCTION
A WORLD WITHOUT CELEBRITY CHEFS
    “IF SOMEONE SUGGESTS A ‘PIZZA PIE’ AFTER THE THEATER, DON’T THINK IT IS GOING to be a wedge of apple. It is going to be the surprise of your life.” So began the April 21, 1939, column of the
New York Herald Tribune
food editor, Clementine Paddleford, the doyenne of America’s then tiny contingent of food journalists. Her column went on to promote pizza as a “nice stunt to surprise the visiting relatives, who will be heading East soon for the World’s Fair. They come to be surprised, and pizza, pronounced ‘peet-za,’ will do the job up brown.”
    That Paddleford, in 1939, had to explain how to pronounce “pizza” (in an article sub-headlined ITALIAN PASTRY APPROPRIATE WITH BEER AND WINE) speaks volumes about the gastronomic world Americans inhabited at the time. Dining out was for special occasions, ordering in was nearly unheard of, and most Americans adhered to a diet of what was familiar to them locally and culturally. Italian foods such as “peet-za” were alien to all but Italian Americans and a small minority of urban culinary adventurers. To America’s wealthy elite, eating Italian food was beneath contempt, irredeemably déclassé and stinky—a sentiment that Frank Capra, himself a Sicilian immigrant, exploited marvelously in a scene from his most famous film,
It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946), in which the movie’s moneybags villain, Mr. Potter,chides George Bailey, the big-hearted, immigrant-assisting director of the local building and loan, for “frittering his life away playing nursemaid to a lot of garlic-eaters.”
    Paddleford, to her credit, harbored no such prejudices. A first-rate journalist with an endearingly loopy sensibility, she plunged uninhibitedly into New York’s ethnic markets, where, she wrote, “all the queer fish of the sea are congregated to sell wholesale or retail to Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Chinese, any one who knows the goodness of queer fish.” Paddleford was also shrewd and adventurous enough to recognize that within the 3,000-mile span of the continental United States lay a wondrous variety of homey regional foods, there for the discovering. In her single-engine Piper Cub airplane, she flew low over the land, using the one- and two-lane roads of the countryside as her guide, following their twists and curves to wherever a promising farmhouse or local café appeared.
    But Paddleford didn’t have an audience of well-heeled food sophisticates to applaud her, no pulpit on National Public Radio or the Food Network from which to delight her followers with tales of eating wine-jelly pie in the South or Maine lobster stew in New England. Her work—her life—was relegated to what was then called the women’s page of the newspaper, a home-economics ghetto of recipes, advice columns, and helpful household hints. What’s more, her culinary fearlessness was undercut by her fealty to her role as the
Herald Tribune’s
resident wifey (though Paddleford was actually a divorcée) and the presumed conservativeness of her lady readership. Try as she might to zest up her readers’ lives with exotica once in a while, Paddleford knew that she couldn’t go too far—a frustration that revealed itself in her “queer fish” column, in which she suddenly implored her audience to “Be a kitchen rebel and glory in rebellion. Raise the eyebrows of your friends. Serve sea urchins after an evening at bridge.” She probably knew as she was typing those words that the urchins-after-bridge thing would never catch on.
    James Beard was in a similarly awkward spot in ‘39, having