ColumnThe book “Provence, 1970′” documents a moment with America’s culinary greats; but how much has American food really changed since then?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America saw a culinary change. This was the time of people like Julia Child, advocating for mastering dishes at home, eating real food, honoring fresh ingredients instead of the canned phenomenon of the 1950s. It was also the time of the rise in food consciousness, with more and more people making links between what they ate and the effects on the environment. “The Whole Earth Cookbook,” and “Diet for a Small Planet” both came out in the early 1970s.

I recently finished reading “Provence, 1970: M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste“, a book about a singular moment when some of the culinary greats were all in the same place at the same time, a time that also happened to be a turning point.

In the book there is a lot of talk about the changing of American food culture, shifting to better ingredients, more artisan practices and the push to more food consciousness. Reading it you feel as if there is hope for the future. And then you close the book and take a look at reality.

The book is a wonderful read, a moment in history captured in words, images and foods. But what struck me while reading it was how current all the topics in the book were. We’re still having these exact same conversations about food. We still deal with the same snobbery. There’s still a food media that’s largely separated from the realities of the everyday cook. Julia Child wrote a letter to James Beard in which she noted that her audiences on the West Coast “could care less about the East Coast and The New York Times. They have their own lives and own good papers, and we’re not reaching them atallatall if we stay put.” I can’t help but think of the recent response to Mark Bittman’s article on eating and shopping in California.

How much has American food culture changed since the 1970s? Read this book and you can feel the hopefulness. All these culinary greats who changed the way a lot of America thought about food excited about the possibility of better foods in the homes of their readers.

I wonder what they would think looking at food culture now. Processed foods, microwave dinners, factory farm meat. I felt a little despair while finishing the book, questioning really how far we had come from a few decades earlier. Are we any wiser? Have we learned from history? Or are we pursuing a deadly path, with high end gastronomy on one side, and processed food on the other? Have we really embraced the fact that what we eat affects the world that we live in? Or is it something we say while we look the other way and indulge our impulses? Have we found a balance where good ingredients are available to everyone?

Certainly, there’s a widespread push to better eating, but there’s also no denying that we live in a world of extremes, the Michelin stars who drive the food media on one end and the corporate, processed, fast food and food industry business on the other.

Do you have to be well off to eat well? No, but look at any food media these days with their glossy photos and complicated ingredients and it certainly feels like it. Watch your average cooking show and it’s a far cry from promoting anything healthy; there it’s just about being sensational. And look at large food businesses who can spend millions, even billions, getting people to consume their products, even though those food products are fueling the obesity epidemic.

How much has American food changed since the 1970s? It has changed enormously. But I can’t help but wonder if people like Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher were here today, what they would think about our shopping and eating habits. I sure as hell think they’d be concerned about our sugar consumption.

We’ve evolved. We have moved past serving aspics at dinner parties. But are we really at a place where real food is accessible to everyone? We still have a lot of work to do. Maybe it’s time we turned around and looked backwards to pick up a few hints on how to do better. Smaller quantities, fresher ingredients, and a better enjoyment of food. Real food. That’s what Julia would want.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Classic Film

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Where do our favorite dishes come from? In our ongoing series ‘Food History’ we take a look at classic dishes and their roots, this time we step away from a specific dish and look at our all-time favorite food trend: the history of food trucks. 

Creme brulee carts and tacos sold in Airstreams. Nothing has become more synonymous with modern American food culture than mobile food trucks. There are entire festivals devoted to them, reality shows, and many a restaurant has launched a mobile version to supplement their brick and mortar locations. You might think food trucks are a catchy trend fueled by hashtags and the underground food movement (one that even the corporate world loves), but mobile food delivery is certainly nothing new.

Push carts date back to the infant days of the United States; New Amsterdam, now known as New York City, began regulating mobile food vendors in the late 1600s. But as many an American food-related custom does, the modern day food truck finds its roots in the heart of Texas. It was here in 1866 that ranger Charles Goodnight solved the problem of cooking well while out on cattle drives: he outfitted a United States Army wagon with kitchen accoutrements and began dishing out ample servings of fresh meat and coffee. A cowboy’s culinary dream. The chuckwagon – which you could call America’s original food truck – was born.

Beyond its push carts, today’s foodie metropolis New York City was an early comer to the food truck game as well with its Night Lunch wagons. In 1893, in an attempt to better feed the working class, the Church Temperance Society invested in a wagon that served meals from 7:30pm to 4am, giving workers a food option beyond the local saloon.

Much like today, the wagons were a budget friendly restaurateur option: the cost of outfitting a lunch wagon and opening it up for business was around $600. Today Henry Ford’s infamous 1890 Night Owl Lunch wagon is still in service, and believed to be the last remaining horse-drawn lunch wagon of its kind.

The United States Army started feeding its troops with mobile canteens in the early 1900s, and in 1936 Oscar Meyer rolled out its first portable hot dog truck, The Weiner Mobile. About the same time, Good Humor hit the streets with its first truck selling “ice cream on a stick.”

In a culture that quickly grew to love drive-thrus and fast food, it’s no surprise that mobile food took off in the way that it did. Even waffle carts were a thing before Portlandia was ever born, as witnessed in New Orleans in the 1940s.

Lunch carts and ice cream trucks soon became a standard occurrence–you know exactly what that chime on infinite repeat means when you hear it out your window–and in 1974 Raul Martínez founded King Taco, repurposing an ice cream van to start selling mobile lunch food, purportedly the first taco truck in the nation. Nowadays you’ll find food truck offerings everywhere from Anchorage to Austin in everything from Airstreams to Smart Cars.

It’s a business that isn’t always easy, but combine a slow economy with the appeal of buying creative fast food and there’s no doubt that food trucks are here to stay.

Check out more of our Food History series.

Image: Robert Neff, The Henry Ford, Louisiana Division/City Archives, New Orleans Public Library

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Where do our favorite dishes come from? In our ongoing series ‘Food History’ we take a look at classic dishes and their roots, this time with a focus on the world of blue cheese. 

Someone once told me a joke about the French and cheese:

“Put a plate of smelly cheese in the middle of the table and everyone will pull back, scrunching up their noses and saying, ‘eww.’ Except for the Frenchmen. He will lean in and say ‘ah….'”

Appreciating blue cheeses takes time, and it certainly isn’t everyone’s favorite. But some of us just can’t get enough of the mold. How did this obsession start?

Let’s start by breaking down the term: “blue cheese.”

Blue cheese is in fact a general classification of cheeses–from cow, sheep or goat milk–that have cultures of the mold Penicillium in them. Yup, the same stuff that’s in the antibiotic Penicillin. Because it’s a general term for a variety of individual cheeses, we can’t talk about the specific history of blue cheese, but one of the most well known blue cheeses is Roquefort, and because of its story, it is an excellent place to start.

Roquefort is actually one of the oldest known cheeses, being praised as far back as 79 A.D. It is said that it was the favorite cheese of Charlemagne, and that he himself called it le fromage des rois et des papes – the cheese of kings and popes.

But how did people start eating this pungent cheese decorated with green mold?

Legend has it that a young sheepherder eating a lunch of ewe’s milk curds and bread left his lunch in a cave while he left for more interesting pursuits; in this case pursuing a lovely maiden. When he returned to the cave months later, he found his cheese moldy, yet delicious.

Whether that’s true or not, we can only imagine the first person that looked at a molding cheese and thought the themselves, “sure, I’ll try that.” But good thing they did.

Roquefort is, not surprisingly, one of France’s most popular cheeses, and it has eve been said to help guard against heart disease. Yet another reason to get on the Parisian diet.

It is still produced in caves, and in France you can even visit those caves. To highlight it’s importance to French cheese culture, Roquefort was the first cheese to receive a Appellation d’Origine Controlée, a French certification that protects various regional products and their production. Champagne for example is regulated under the Appellation d’Origine Controlée as well, any sparkling wine that isn’t from the Champagne region isn’t champagne, and on the off chance that you’re ever eating a cheese labeled Roquefort that isn’t from the region of Aveyron it’s not actually real Roquefort.

But not everyone is a Roquefort fan. For other blue cheese lovers there’s Gorgonzola, Cambazola, Bleu d’Auvergne, Stilton, and several others. In the U.S., however, many of us have grown accustomed the the generic, industrialized form of blue cheese, but if you’re a real cheese connoisseur you’ll know that it’s important to choose the good stuff.

A good blue cheese variety should be creamy and moist, the more pungent the better. Crumblier varieties will be stronger – hello Roquefort – with that distinctive “bite.” If you’re a novice to the blue cheese family, this might not be the place to start. Kick things off with Gorgonzola or a Danish Blue instead to get yourself initiated.

Find a plate, serve up a few varieties and have a tasting to find your favorite.

And don’t let the mold scare you.

Check out more of our Food History series.

Image: milstan

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Where do our favorite dishes come from? In our ongoing series ‘Food History’ we take a look at classic dishes and their roots. 

Puffy, sweet and light, marshmallows are good all year round, from being used in hot chocolate to making s’mores over a summer camp fire. But it wasn’t always a sweet treat.

Marshmallow happens to be a plant, and what we know as a marshmallow today is actually a modern version of a medical confection made from that plant.

The physician Hippocrates in Ancient Greece was a fan of its benefits, and if you had a sore throat during the Renaissance, a marshmallow may have been prescribed. But even before that the Egyptians were mixing the plant’s sap with honey for a confection that was worthy of the gods.

Despite its noble roots, don’t think that the modern marshmallow is a puffy piece of vegetable goodness. Although its ancestors were made from Althaea officinalis, today’s marshmallow is most often a combination of sucrose and proteins derived from gelatin or egg white, a process that came to be in the early 19th century when the French decided to whip up the sap from marshmallow roots and sweeten it.

But the plant sap soon gave way to easier ingredients – whipping the plant’s roots was hard work – and egg whites or gelatin were soon used to create that chewy consistency that marshmallows are known for. Then in 1948, an American by the name of Alex Doumak came along and developed a process that allowed for the mass production of marshmallows – basically a process that manually produced the cylindrical shapes that we know today.

Thanks to their sweet taste and mass-marketing, we’ve come to love the marshmallow. Americans are said to purchase about 90 million pounds of marshmallows a year–and more than half of those are sold during the summer months, otherwise known as s’more season. (Speaking of which, the largest s’more ever created was made with 20,000 marshmallows. Chubby bunny anyone?)

Which brings us to Peeps, the brightly colored marshmallow candy, of which over 70 million are sold at Easter time every year. First made in 1920, the candy didn’t become popular until the ’50s, right after the time marshmallows started being mass produced. It’s said that in 1953 it took about 27 hours to make a Peep; today it’s only six minutes.

But as you might have guessed, our modern marshmallows have no trace of their namesake plant; you’ll often find them made with much more processed ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, delightful gelatin made from meat by-products and chemical flavorings. Yum.

Not to worry, if you love the puffy, light taste of marshmallows, they’re easy to make at home, and without a trace of gelatin. Thanks to a blog that was once devoted to the art of the vegan marshmallow, there’s a crowd-sourced recipe that many people stick to. Check it out here. You can also get creative and cut your marshmallows into various shapes like in this recipe.

Let s’more season begin!

Image: poppet with a camera

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Where do our favorite dishes come from? In our ongoing series ‘Food History’ we take a look at classic dishes and their roots. 

At a few cocktail events over winter I discovered that hot chocolate was a sought after drink, set out each time complete with an array of fancy additions like cacao nibs and gourmet sprinkles. Always nice to know that the comfort drink of winter has hit a certain level of chicness.

Hot chocolate has always been the drink of cold days. A warm up after a day of skiing or a pick me up after you get stuck in a downpour. A good (and big) cup of hot chocolate can do wonders for the soul. If it’s made well – thick, creamy, full of dark chocolate – it’s a bit of happiness in a mug.

You’ll find hot chocolate in many parts of the world, and although it seems to be a drink more destined for cold weather locales, its roots actually go back to a warmer region. Archeological evidence suggests that people in Mesoamerica (otherwise known as modern-day Mexico) were cultivating and drinking chocolate as far back as 4,000 years ago. The Aztecs and Mayans both made it into a beverage known as xocolātl, a Nahuatl word meaning “bitter water.”

The Aztecs actually associated chocolate with Xochiquetzal, the goddess of fertility, so chocolate beverages were often used as sacred offerings. In fact, blood and chocolate were both very sacred liquids to the Aztecs, and cacao seeds were used in religious ceremonies to symbolize the human heart.

When Europeans came to the New World, they too were seduced by the warm, chocolatey drink. Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with the first cocoa beans. (Maybe the reason for a recipe for Moctezuma’s Hot Chocolate, a much spicier rendition of the winter classic.) Spanish conquistador Hernam Cortes was so infatuated with the drink, that he wrote a letter to Charles V of Spain calling chocolate: “The divine drink which builds up resistance & fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink permits man to walk for a whole day without food.”

From the Americas to Spain, the Spanish began adding in sugar and making the drink their own. It eventually made its way up the continent, although at the time was more expensive than coffee, equating chocolate with more southern, Catholic and aristocratic roots, while coffee was seen as more northern, Protestant and middle class.

Even in the early days of the United States chocolate played a role. Thomas Jefferson once said, “The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.”

In 1828 Dutchman Coenraad Johannes van Houten developed a method for extracting the fat from the cocoa beans and in turn made powdered cocoa. This allowed for a new wave of chocolate, and the ultimate distinction between hot cocoa (made with powder) and hot chocolate (made with solid chocolate).

Today the hot chocolate trend is back, allowing for artisan chocolatiers to play with flavor combinations and rigorously sourced cocoa beans. Think small-batch, gourmet and sometimes served in the oddest of ways, like with oysters.

I prefer to go classic.

On a very cold February evening, I was walking in the Marais in Paris and freezing. My fingers were on the verge of numb, and even though in a neighborhood known for its bars and restaurants, a cocktail or a glass of wine wasn’t going to cut it. So at the sighting of a brasserie, I walked in and ordered a chocolat chaud à l’ancienne. A mug arrived, one third of the way full with melted chocolate. A small pitcher of warm milk was served on the side. I was left to mix the two as I pleased.

Now that’s how hot chocolate should be made. I am sure the Aztecs would have approved.

Image: Anna Brones

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