Since current events have been uglier than ever, I thought I’d give myself a break this week and write about my second-favorite activity next to journalism: cooking. Nothing heavy, right? I mean it’s cooking.
But no. You see, one of the fun things about cooking—certainly from my perspective as a writer and editor—is reading cookbooks. And we happen to live at a time where it’s never been easier or cheaper to acquire them.
Not necessarily for good reasons either. Between huge used book operations selling at scale on online auction sites, the general trend toward reading on screens instead of print, and the proliferation of “little libraries” where people leave unwanted books in wooden boxes on America’s streets for anyone to take home gratis, it’s rare that one has to pay more than a few dollars or wait longer than a couple of weeks to acquire copies of nearly any cookbook ever produced. Even the prices on new cookbooks typically drop like a stone almost immediately after publication these days.
So, it should come as no surprise that I’ve acquired hundreds of them, many during the first year of the pandemic—when there was precious little public activity in and around Boston and walking miles to check out a dozen little libraries in a day was one of the few entertainment options to be had (safely) outside the home—and most for free.
With restaurant options also limited in the first COVID plague months and restaurant prices moving skyward due to inflation ever since, I’ve naturally had occasion to cook more than I have ever done before and delighted in trying at least one recipe from most cookery books I got my hands on. Coming from a family of lifelong home cooks (and more importantly, Greek home cooks), as I do, that’s saying something. I also got some commercial cooking experience back in the day. But that was mainly slinging breakfast hash and lunch burritos, nothing like the vast array of dishes I’ve made since 2020.
And while I love to try foods from around the world, I have a real soft spot for American cooking in all its regional variations. I particularly enjoy cooking from the many older American cookbooks I’ve gotten my hands on recently.
Which is, of course, why this can’t be a lighthearted column. Because this is American history we’re talking about. And a more disturbing and messed-up history, protestations from the many ahistorical racist and fascist fantasists who now have way too big a platform for comfort taken as given, one could not easily find on this planet.
Since American cookbooks, like all cultural works, are snapshots of particular moments in that problematic history and since most older cookbooks were written by white and reasonably (and occasionally unreasonably) well-off Americans, I have run into some pretty messed up stuff in some of them.
Perhaps the most outrageous cookbook passage I’ve ever encountered comes from one of the most famous Americans ever to produce one: Duncan Hines. And I know most contemporary Americans will say “Duncan Hines? That’s a cake-mix brand, not an actual person. Like Betty Crocker, right?
Wrong. The brand was built around a real person—a traveling salesman who created a guide for other traveling businessmen that told them where they could get decent meals in restaurants around the United States in the 1930s. The guide was wildly successful and quickly led to a number of cookbooks of recipes from Hines’ favorite restaurants. The first and most storied of those was “Adventures in Good Cooking and the Art of Carving in the Home,” originally published in 1933. I got a copy of a 2002 reprint from eBay about three years ago and have read it cover to cover many times since. It is definitely a great cookbook. And a highly flawed one.
You see, Duncan Hines, like all of us, was very much a product of his time and place. He was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1880, just a few years after Reconstruction. His father was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. Hines, then, grew up white in the American South in the height of the brutally racist Jim Crow era. And he died in 1959, just as the Civil Rights Movement was growing into an unstoppable force for long-delayed justice. Which doesn’t mean that he had to be a racist himself. But he looks to have become one nonetheless.
I don’t want to say more than that about Hines right now. I do have plans to read his biography at some point and may write about him again should I do so. For now, I just want to share one of the charming little notes he clearly enjoyed scattering around his cookbooks, in this case between a recipe for “Cornbread Truett” and a recipe for “Corn Meal Puffs:”
“South of the Mason-Dixon line, don’t you dare put sugar in cornbread or the night riders may meet up with you some dark night.”
Yeah. Meaning, in the American South of the 1930s when Hines wrote those words—toward the end of the decades-long period when “night riders” from racist vigilante groups (ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to a Kentucky-based group literally called the Night Riders) were brutally torturing and murdering thousands of Black Americans in a terror campaign aimed at denying Black communities their hard-won civil rights. As a New Englander myself, it’s also worth noting that we’re the region of the US most known for putting sugar in cornbread. We were also the region with the strongest abolitionist movement that played the biggest role in turning the Civil War into a war to liberate enslaved Black Americans.
Hilarious, right? What a clever fellow. How droll.
And ok, here’s this racist dude in a super racist time in what was then an ultra racist part of the country, writing this hateful stuff thinking it to be a cute joke. But that was then and this is now, yes?
Yeah, here’s the punch line that I know you all knew was coming: Racism is still very much a malign and destructive aspect of American culture. As was certainly the case in 2014, one year after the initial explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement to push back hard on that racism, when a now-disgraced chef-entrepreneur released one of his many cookbooks.
A cookbook I just found in a little library last weekend. “America—farm to table: simple, delicious recipes celebrating local farmers” by Mario Batali and Jim Webster.
The latter being a former Washington Post editor. The former being best known for having been accused of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching in workplace and social settings by several women, resulting in he and his business partner Joe Bastianich (son of the famous/infamous chef Lidia Bastianich) and their New York City restaurant company paying $600,000 to settle a related civil suit without admitting any wrongdoing. Which caused him to leave his company and step away from the public eye.
All that after Batali and Bastianich had to pay $5.25 million to settle a class-action suit by a group of workers at their New York restaurants who accused them of stealing part of their tips for serving wine. Nice guys.
“America—farm to table” is very much the kind of nice-looking coffee-table cookbook that is still in vogue today. It plays to the popular notion that the best way to eat is by sourcing the freshest ingredients from local farms. A questionable notion, true, but one not without its merits. Problem is, doing that on the regular is more expensive than most Americans, myself included, can afford. So, right away I knew that this book was aimed at the aspiring middle class who might be willing to cook meals they could not afford to buy very often and the people above them in our economic pecking order who can actually afford to eat out frequently at fancy restaurants that feature locally-grown food and would like to own such a book as a marker of their status.
But it was the large number of beautiful photographs that caught my eye as a photographer when I started poring over the cookbook. And after flipping through the first half of the book, I noticed something odd. “America—farm to table” is one example from a well-established genre of cookbooks that tries to capture American cooking in its entirety. And this is an incredibly diverse country with all kinds of people in it, all of whom have interesting foodways. And the book is built around the stories and recipes of local chefs and farmers from several major American cities across several regions of the nation.
And I stopped reading and thought: I’m halfway through this book and every single portrait of human beings has shown only white people. So I went through the rest of the book. Then I went through it again. And once more for good measure. And here’s what I found: Aside from a single page with photos of refugees from countries including “Liberia, Burma, and Nepal” working on a farm in Cleveland set up to help them get established in the US and photos of one Latino chef, Matt Molina (who helmed one of Batali’s restaurants in LA at the time), all other photos of people in the book are of white people.
Of the 27 chefs and farmers featured in the book, Molina looks to be the only person of color. In a 352-page cookbook—purporting to represent the work of chefs and farmers in America.
Word on the street is that many, many chefs and farmers hail from Black, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American backgrounds here in the “land of the free.” Even in the kind of elite restaurants and farms overrepresented in “America—farm to table.”
Hard to believe the book was produced in the 2010s, a decade that the hard right claims was “too woke.”
But if that was the case, given what’s transpired in the years following, I’d have to say that in some respects it wasn’t woke enough. How else to explain that a major imprint, Grand Central Life & Style, of a major publishing house, Hachette Book Group, could release a cookbook that—intentionally or not—shares some unfortunate DNA with an openly racist cookbook from the 1930s. If mainly by sins of omission rather than sins of commission.
And what do I conclude from all this: We have a long way to go, folks, in cookbooks as in every walk of life, before this nation really deals with its racism.
Now I need to go cook something from one of my kinder cookbooks to clear my head.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
