American Cooking:

Introduction - Section 1 of 1 (1 )

Take Equal Parts of Bounty, Diversity and Ingenuity

In three and a half centuries American cookery has developed a repertory of enormous diversity and complexity. Its pattern, established by early settlers - the English, Dutch and French - carried over through the 19th Century and into the 20th. Meanwhile, native cooking traditions evolved, with strong regional overtones. And in the great immigration waves of the last century, the numerous ethnic groups that pushed across the country introduced countless new dishes and brought sophistication to American food. Now, after 350 years of inventions and borrowings adapted to please the composite American palate, we are on the way to establishing a cuisine that can truly be called our own.

In addition to a rich heritage of native and foreign dishes, the country is fortunate in the bounty and quality of its food products. We have developed some of the best meat in the world; we have fine dairylands that produce several great cheeses and many good ones; we have excellent fruits and vegetables - andin wide variety, thanks to the genius of such men as Luther Burbank; we have an abundance of good fish, both fresh and cured; and we have created a remarkably fine wine industry. Our marketing techniques bring fresh foods to us from every corner of the country, extending the season of many fruits and vegetables, and making some of them available year round. Apart from the commercially available foods, we can be grateful for the treasure of food still to be found in the wilds - morels, meadow mushrooms and puffballs; huckleberries and strawberries, fiddleheads and pokeweed; catfish, suckers and crappies.

We are an amazingly versatile nation, producing everything from good caviar to good salted peanuts. Out of our prodigious gastronomic wealth it has been the job of this book to represent American cookery justly. It would have been a partial truth to offer only recipes from Colonial America, or purely regional recipes. Instead the editors have choosen dishes that show the true diversity of American food. Some of the recipes have long histories. A few are nearly as new as this book. Many are traditional - all time favorites found on menus from coast to coast. All of them are in use today in one section of the country or another. They are authentically American.

The recipes have been adapted for the Kelly Family Cookbook kitchen through exhaustive testings, and they have been written - and in some cases, modernized to make them practicable for today's kitchens. Every effort has been made to search out an honest version of each dish, as free as possible of embellishments, although the editors have provided suggestions for preparing dishes in different ways and for creating variations on traditional themes. It is not always possible to track down an original recipe. Some never existed in writing in their original form and may have been transmitted through several generations before a writer in the 18th or 19th Century decided to set them down - in his own fashion. No one knows the exact original recipe for red flannel hash, for example. Some people insist that it is made with codfish, beets and potatoes. This is unlikely, and the version accepted today - with beef rather than codfish - is quite good in its way and is therefore worthy of a place in this book.

Recently I spent several hours checking recipes for as simple a dish as hash brown potatoes. I had seen it made countless times over the years by farm cooks and short-order cooks. I recall, with some delight, how they threw cooked potatoes on a greased griddle, chopped them rapidly with an empty baking powder can as they turned golden brown, and then, with a quick flip of the spatula, turned them crisp side up onto a plate. It would seem that there could be little room for enhancing so modest and so satisfactory a dish, but what an array of improvements one finds in the books. Some call for milk, some for cream; some use butter; other, bacon. One cookbook devoted exclusively to the potato offered five different versions of the dish, each substantially different.

As a consequence, the task of our researchers and editors in sifting through recipes was formidable. No doubt we shall be questioned about the authenticity of some of our recipes, and we are certain to have omitted the favorite family recipes of many readers. But because this is perhaps a more personal and more lived-in book than others in the series, we have felt less constrained to abide by tradition alone. We have had to use our individual tastes in making selections. We believe we have gathered a stimulating collection of recipes. And Dale Brown, the author, inspired by repeated trips through various regions of the country to taste food, talk food and discover food, has complemented the recipes with a text that evokes the American past and takes a fresh look at the vigor and variety of American food today.