Mark Twain swore by American food as he did by the American flag. When
he got as far as Italy, on the trip which resulted in "A Tramp Abroad,"
he became discouraged, wrote a homesick panegyric on the good things he
could not get in Europe, and made a list of viands to be ordered by the
steamer preceding his, to await him on his return. Among these dishes
were fried chicken Southern style, Saratoga potatoes, baked apples and
cream, hot biscuits, buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, toast, oysters
in various styles, softshell crabs, terrapin soup, wild turkey,
cranberry sauce, canvasback duck, prairie hens, bacon and greens,
catsup, green corn, hot corn-pone, stewed tomatoes and pumpkin pie. As
he lived for years thereafter, it is not likely that he carried out his
program.
These gastronomic specialties certainly are not to be sneered at;
European epicures envy us most of them. It must be admitted, also, that
American cookery has made considerable progress in the last decades,
and that there has been an improvement in eating habits since Dickens,
in "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), described the "violent bell ringing";
the "mad rush for the dining-room"; the "great heaps of indigestible
matter" which "melted away as ice before the sun"; the "dyspeptic
individuals" who "bolted their food in wedges, feeding not themselves,
but broods of nightmares."
Such scenes still occur, but they are no longer typical. Nor, perhaps,
would Emily Faithful have occasion to-day, as she had in 1884, to
comment on the "joyless American face," due to chronic dyspepsia. We
are still made unhappy, however, by the "indigestible hot bread" and
"tough beefsteaks hardly warmed through" to which she referred, and by
other gastronomic atrocities.
We must not overlook the fine cooking done in many American private
families, hotels, clubs, and restaurants, and we have some good old
Maryland, Virginia, New England, and San Franciscan traditions to
boast of. Moreover, there are not a few who have reason to think that
the culinary low-water mark is to be found on English steamships and in
English inns. On the whole, however, what Pierre Blot wrote forty years
ago is still true: "American cookery is worse than that of any other
civilized nation." Our great national food expert and reformer, Dr.
Harvey W. Wiley, put the matter in a nutshell when he said in a lecture
before the General Federation of Women's Clubs, that "there is no
country in the world where food is so plentiful, and no country in the
world where it is so badly cooked, as right here in the United States."