As American as Olive Oil and Wine

Roze, of the blog MorelsAndMore (www.morselsandmore.blogspot.com) started a discussion a couple weeks ago of just what constitutes American food. It got me thinking about the history of our cuisine, including recent changes in how we eat. I personally couldn't imagine surviving without olive oil and wine, but these are recent arrivals on many American tables. Here's my take on how they got there. Apologies to Fussell and Pollan.

America is a frontier nation that turned middle class aspirant after the Industrial Revolution and never looked back. The frontier mentality viewed any attention turned toward refining cuisine as effete. How could anyone possibly do better than a steak and a piece of pie? There was a time in our history where if you weren't a farmer or a member of the gentry you were probably living on beans, fatback and corn bread (and corn whiskey). That was American cuisine, and if that wasn't good enough for you, you were a snob! When we finally grew into an affluent nation capable of turning it's attention toward cuisine we'd developed a deep class anxiety. Everyone was out for the comfort and constraint of a middle class lifestyle. This reached its height in the postwar boom.

The definition of "classy" in America mostly came from Anglophilic Northeasterners. They ate bland food, and a nation aspiring to better themselves took the cue from them. (Think of those bland warhorse dishes that were the height of American cuisine until the latter part the last century: Beef Wellington and Lobster Thermidor). After all, who was eating spicy, boldly flavored food? Poor people, mostly immigrants and the descendants of slaves. Ethnic foods were spicy. Prejudice against bold flavor has only recently begun to unravel in American cuisine. We still have a way to go.

But we've made progress, as evidenced by our choices of wine and salad dressing.

Ranch dressing is incredibly popular in America. What is it, really? A buttermilk riff on German yogurt dressing. Mayo based dressings have been equally popular here. The default in most of the Western world is vinaigrette. Why is it only recently catching on in America? First, vinaigrette has a sharp flavor. Sharp flavors traditionally don't do well with us unless they're offset by sweetness, like in ketchup or BBQ sauce. (When vinegar was used to dress American salads it was often offset with sugar, hence my lack of surprise over the recent popularity of balsamic vinegar). Also, vinaigrette contains a ethnic ingredient that Americans have only very recently embraced: olive oil. Not very Anglophilic stuff. C.E. Edgar naming Popeye's love interest Olive Oyl sent a very clear class signal about her: she was the daughter of immigrants - a woman from the lower rung of society. A perfect fit for his free-swearing sailor character.

Wine is equally telling. Until very recently who in America was drinking wine? The elite, drunks, Italians, Jews and those wacky Californians. American wine was sweet (much of it still is). Makes sense, as both the Germans and the English traditionally had an affinity for sweet wine, and our food culture owes more to them than we realize. (The American affinity for sweet drinks was unparalleled, though. In the past only the most dirt poor would drink water. Summertime soft drinks were lemonade or sweet tea. It's no surprise that Pemberton's temperance era creation has become as much a symbol of America as our flag). The elite may have been drinking dry wine, but it was, of course, imported. And they were considered snobs, so their opinion didn't count, anyways. I'm old enough to shudder over the memory of wine coolers and white zinfandel.

How did both olive oil and drier wines lose their stigmas and gain American acceptance? In a uniquely American manner: food fads. As a nation with shallow food roots we're given to food fads. As a capitalist country there's incentive to encourage such fads because there are pots of money to be made from them. 1970's lipophobia transformed olive oil from an ethnic novelty to a mainstay of the American kitchen, but only here would we market "lite" olive oil for those who found its flavor too bold. More recent studies that showed the health benefits of wine led to it becoming commonplace on the American table. Still, most American wines are fruity and less than dry. But drier wines that pair well with food can now be found just about anywhere in America. I think that's a good thing.

There you have one benefit of our current obsession with eating our way to health; we're starting to get over some longstanding food prejudices. (Of course this obsession is ironic, given how much of our food is anything but healthy). We even seem to be on the edge of spicy food losing its stigma, which is exciting, but that will be a later post.