Saturday,
November 24, 2007
If Only the Pilgrims Had Been Italian - We Would be Eating Far better
The
ANNOTICO Report
What
is not mentioned, or possibly even known by the writer, French Cuisine is a
derivation of Italian Cuisine, which is called the "Mother Cusine of Europe"
The
change started when Catherine de Medici of Tuscany, Niece of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, Catherine deMedici was the bride of Henry of Orlhons, the future Henry II in 1533; became Queen of
France in 1547,however, Henry died in 1559 and Catherine ruled as regent until
1559. This was an era of intense religious strife and, despite trying to follow
moderate policies, Catherine became associated with, even blamed for, the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572.was to be married to King Louis .
Catherine
brought to France her entire kitchen Staff including but not limited to Appetizer, Salad, Entree, Desert, Gelato, etc Chefs.
Florentine
cooking influenced that of the French because the cooks and pastry makers who
followed her, opened schools; due to this Flammarion wrote: "We must recognise that the Italian cooks who came to France
following Catherine deMedici at the time of her marriage to Henry II, were
the origin of French cooking, for the elements and condiments, for us new,
who took away the cooks (La Varenne, De Masseliet, Valet, De La Chapelle,
Carhme, Escoffier) and inspired them so well that
they were not slow in overtaking their teachers."
The
acknowledged and most important cooks such as Antonin
Carhme who in 1822 wrote: "The cooks of the
second half of the 1700s came to know the taste of Italian cooking that
Catherine deMedici introduced to the French court". And Jean Orieux who in his book dedicated to Catherine affirmed:
"It was exactly a Florentine who reformed the antique French cooking of
medieval tradition; and was reborn as the modern French cooking".
An aside. I can not help but
chuckle that people would consider coleslaw, saurbraten,
boiled potatoes, bagels, and chicken soup, as "cuisine" :)
If
Only the Pilgrims Had Been Italian
The American Spectator
By Thomas J. Craughwell
November 21, 2007
This article appears
in the November 2007 issue of The American Spectator.
I would be willing to bet serious money that
right now in your kitchen you have olive oil, garlic, pasta, parmesan cheese,
and dried basil (maybe even fresh basil!). Nothing exotic
there, right? They're ingredients we take for granted. But their
appearance in our kitchens is a relatively recent phenomenon. Believe me, those
big-flavor items did not come over on the Mayflower. It took
generations, even centuries, for Americans to expand their culinary horizons to
the point where just about everybody cooks Italian and orders Chinese take-out.
Heck, the supermarket in my little
Alas! It was not always thus. American cuisine, like the settlements at
Jamestown and Plymouth, got off to a rocky start. Blame it on our English and
Scotch-Irish ancestors. As a people they possesse
d many admirable qualities; they were tough, they were independent, some of
them could read. Yet the original settlers of the American colonies were not
famous for their discerning palate. Let me give you an example.
When the Pilgrims arrived in
In fact, the English settlers looked upon virtually all fish (sturgeon and
oysters being the exceptions) with scorn -- and this in a land where the
shoreline and coastal rivers were teeming with salmon, cod, flounder, shad,
haddock, and sea bass. As for clams and mussels, the Pilgrims fed them to their
pigs. As if this prejudice against seafood weren't enough, early Yankee
cuisine suffered from a severe disadvantage: The Pilgrims had brought no
livestock with them. The first cattle -- three cows and a bull -- did not
arrive in
THE CULINARY SITUATION in colonial
Yankees are often derided for boiling perfectly good meat. I wish I
could dismiss this as slander, but I am afraid that our anc
estors did indeed boil everything from loins of beef
to the turkeys that were served at the first Thanksgiving. But they had their
reasons. Roasting meat over an open fire took hours, requiring someone to stand
there and turn the spit. Adults were too busy to do the job, and it was hard to
dragoon the children into spending three monotonous hours sweltering over a hot
fire. The simplest solution was to plunk the meat in the boiling pot and walk
away.
This sad desecration hung on among Americans of British and Irish descent well
into the 20th century. I knew a
Then there are vegetables: Yankees didn't like them. The Yankee idea of
a fine meal was several varieties of meat, a heaping basket of wheat bread,
followed by lots of sweets for dessert. If vegetables appeared on the table,
they were boiled beyond recognition. It was the Shakers who first taught
American cooks to undercook vegetables. Shaker chefs also discovered that a
cup or two of vegetable stock went a long way to enriching the flavor of gravy
and sauces.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS a hope-filled era, and not just in terms of
politics. When our French allies arrived in
Although George Washington employed a French chef and Thomas Jefferson
enjoyed French recipes he had collected in
By the 1830s, a large majority of Americans had begun to see their plain
food as a virtue. Cookbooks emphasized simplicity and frugality, not meals that
brought a succession of interesting flavors to the table. Plain cuisine
even became an issue in the presidential campaign of 1836. William Henry
Harrison's supporters managed to convince voters that their man was just
ordinary folks, content to live in a log cabin, eat his corn mush, and wash it
down with old-fashioned hard cider. Martin Van Buren, on the other hand, was
portrayed as a foppish, Frenchified, un-American snob
who sipped champagne from a silver goblet and liked to begin his meals with consomme. The smear worked, and the gourmandizing Van Buren
lost the election.
I DON'T MEAN TO OVERSTATE my case. For all the hide-bound conservatism of Yankee
cooks, they did manage to whip up some pretty tasty dishes. New England
clam chowder may not sound as sophisticated as bouillabaisse
, but it is delicious nonetheless. And then there is
The colonists preferred molasses as a sweetener, and replaced the
strong, nasty tasting bear meat with salt pork. The result was a New England
classic that is especially associated with
Ultimately, it was immigration that proved to be the making o f contemporary
Yankee cuisine. The Italians brought us the good stuff I mentioned at the
start of this article. From the Dutch we learned how to make waffles and
donuts. Thanks to the Hungarians paprika appears in the spice rack
of every Yankee kitchen. From
It's commonplace to say that the
Thomas J. Craughwell writes
and cooks in Bethel,
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