Food on the Page by Megan J. Elias

Author:Megan J. Elias [Elias, Megan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, 19th Century, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780812294033
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 9. Subterranean Spudniks, Carl Larsen and James Singer, eds., The Beat Generation Cook Book (New York: 7 Poets Press, 1961), no page numbers. Image courtesy of New York Public Library.

The playfulness of both The Beat Generation Cook Book and The Hashish Cookbook, neither of which claimed relevance to the routines of daily cooking, expressed how little food was part of the alternative cultures of the 1960s. The authors of these books, like those written for men in the postwar period, rejected the notion of family cooking as a meaningful exercise, designating food as an item solely for play. Unlike the soignée bachelors of the postwar cookbooks, however, these three authors, also all male, primarily played with food as a vehicle for or adjunct to the culture of drug use.

Drug culture was at the time extending beyond small subcultures, to a broader range of participants and a broader audience. More Americans both used drugs and became aware of drugs during the 1960s, thus mainstreaming them in the popular imagination. Both The Beat Generation Cook Book and the Hashish Cookbook addressed themselves subtly to an audience outside that drug culture simply by appearing in print. To publish, even on the small scale, was to declare the authors’ comfortable defiance of the law as it related to drugs. Food was not the point in these cookbooks, serving merely as a gimmick to establish an outlaw culture.45

Alice Brock’s Alice’s Restaurant Cook Book represents a transition from these purely playful volumes into a new kind of countercultural cookbook. Written by the woman made famous in Arlo Guthrie’s song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” Brock’s book is also an early example of the celebrity cookbook. Brock ran a restaurant, but her ability to publish her book came from her pop culture fame, not her culinary reputation. Publisher Random House gave the book what one industry insider described as “a publicity-promotion treatment a la Ringling Brothers or Sunset Boulevard,” which included radio and TV performances for the author, cooking demonstrations, “an initial printing of 40,000 copies,” and “eventual tie-ins with Miss Brock’s planned chain” of restaurants. In addition, radio DJs received singles of Arlo Guthrie singing a recipe for “‘My Grandma’s Beet Jam.’”46

As with the Hashish Cookbook, the food in Brock’s book was mostly beside the point. What mattered was the cook’s attitude. Brock advised, “There is no one way to get what you want unless it is to remain open. Keep guessing. There are as many ways as you can think of” (boldface in original). Even the most basic cooking could be reimagined: “No one has ever fried an egg without turning on the gas, but maybe this time if you look that egg straight in the eye and say ‘FRY!,’ it will.” And if that egg should fry, “a whole new world will open up and that’s a gas.” The fried egg was not an end in itself but just something that happened on the way to having a gas.47

Happily admitting that she spoke to her

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