Taste of Place by Trubek Amy

Author:Trubek, Amy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FOUR

TASTING WISCONSIN

A CHEF'S STORY

PERHAPS I AM A NAÏVE CULINARY OPTIMIST. I KNOW THAT WAL-MART, McDONald's, Olive Garden, and Sysco dominate our culinary landscape. I know that many Americans, when confronted with an office party in New Mexico, Illinois, or Kentucky, will as often as not buy a box of frozen prepared appetizers from Costco. How can I possibly believe that in the era of global convenience cuisine there is also emerging a modern cuisine du terroir, with fidelity to place and season?

Appropriately enough, I can believe it because of something I ate in a restaurant. Although we tend to assume that cooking and eating take place primarily in homes, restaurants are a part of our everyday lives: we spend 50 percent of every food dollar on food that has been prepared outside the home.1 Restaurants no longer represent just a traveler's necessity or an anniversary event; now they are the answer to that oft-asked question “What's for dinner?” (or for lunch, or for breakfast). Scholars have linked cafés and restaurants to the increased importance since the eighteenth century of the public sphere in the West, as a new space for promoting dialogue and marking distinction.2 However, restaurants, and the people who labor behind the scenes to transform the raw into the cooked, have also created new ways to experience and think about food.3 It is often assumed that the food prepared in restaurants reflects a culinary tradition, but what if, instead, this food creates one?

Do Americans know how to cook using raw, unprocessed ingredients (the leek yet to be cleaned, the whole chicken that needs to be split) and work with them to create a finished dish? In almost every region of the country cooking from the bounty of the surrounding landscape is difficult and not a cultural priority, and this is most apparent when considering regional cuisines, where the use of locally and seasonally available ingredients is a central assumption. Between 1940 and 1998 the size of the average farm jumped from 135 to 469 acres, while the number of farms decreased nationally, from 6.1 million to 2 million.4 Less than 2 percent of the population is involved in farming, there is a demographic shift away from rural to suburban and urban residence patterns, and our imports of food now exceed our exports. In this context it makes sense that chefs in restaurants are not just cooking but are shaping American cuisine as well.

In well-known restaurants around the United States chefs are selling their use of regional and seasonal ingredients in their dishes. Peter Hoffman at Savoy and Dan Barber at Blue Hill in New York City, Rick Bayless at Topolobampo and Frontera Grill in Chicago, Greg Higgins at Higgins in Portland, Ana Sortun at Oleana in Cambridge, Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café in San Francisco are a few examples, but the list goes on. And the restaurants involved are not just those that Gourmet and the New York Times celebrate, but they are also small, individually owned restaurants in suburban Cleveland and rural Vermont.

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