Thoughts on Americanization 1: The Big Picture

A few weeks ago I was immersed in translating a big-name British cookbook, and I decided to make notes on my thoughts as I was working. The English-speaking world has changed a lot in how it cooks over the past few decades, but some things remain the same.

American and British eating habits are more closely linked than ever.

Globalization! It works! The combination of huge global supply chains and the mighty reach of Amazon means that Americans can get golden syrup and Bird’s custard powder with a click of a button. Americans’ understanding of British food is also growing (thank you Great British Bakeoff/Baking Show), and I think its bad reputation Stateside is finally more or less dissipated.

The Internet also facilitates huge information exchange across oceans. Recipes can travel thousands of miles in a second. This speed of communication also makes it possible to do better Americanizations. The fact that my phone is both a camera and a computer makes it possible for me to photograph an ingredient standing in my kitchen or supermarket and send an image to the author to make sure it matches what they’re using 6000 miles away. It’s pretty amazing. 

 But big differences remain.

Measurements - I lived in the UK for six years, and I now am a huge fan of my scale. Using grams and mililitres is very clean (literally – fewer dishes to wash) and straightforward. That said, I have no truck with British cooks who moan about how stupid cups are. It’s like listening to a vacationing red-faced Brexiteer moaning about the natives not speaking English. Volume is just a different language, one that Americans learn to speak from when they begin to learn to cook, the same way that Europeans learn to cook using weights. Leave your measurement bigotry behind, and a whole world of recipes will open to you.

Vocabulary – Culinary words deserve a dictionary all their own, and cause problems even among English speakers from the same country – see JJ Goode’s excellent essay on short recipes versus long ones. For converting between American and British English, there are of course the really well-known ones: cookie/biscuit, zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine. But if you keep digging, more and more differences appear. Cavolo nero crosses the ocean and becomes dinosaur or lacinato kale, snow peas travel and become the high-falutin sounding mangetout. Brits and Americans even mean different things when they say “toffee” – Americans mean a hard candy that will pull your fillings out, while Brits are thinking of something soft and chewy – more like what Americans would call butterscotch. Spring onions run into the same problem – for Brits they’re small and slender, while Americans reserve the term for an older version of the plant with an already-developing onion on one end. 

Ingredients that can’t travel – Despite the globalized world, there are things that are just harder to ship than others - fish is particular is a bugbear. For all our work on refrigeration and preserving freshness, certain ingredients are just really hard to get hold of, if not impossible. More on this in another entry.

Meat – This is category by itself, because butchery traditions vary so much between countries. I have fantasies about holding a conference and inviting a bunch of expert butchers from different countries (have you seen a primal cuts diagram from Brazil? It’s nuts.) to agree on an international standard for cuts of beef, lamb, and pork. It would make everyone’s life easier! But more on this subject another day. 

Resolved

I am not one for big, all-encompassing New Year’s resolutions. I think it’s because I find the timing so arbitrary. The time of year when it’s dark and gloomy and cold isn’t when I want to change my life - I mean, who can bear the thought of eating only salad right now? Big resolutions are more likely to happen on a sunny spring day, when the world is singing, or in September when that back-to-school feeling gives everything a distinct flavor of possibility.

I do think though that January is a good time to introduce small, pleasurable things into my routine and see if they stick. Nothing terribly ambitious, but little tasks that don’t take much time and make life better. Here are mine for 2018.

Goal 1: Read through a cookbook once a week.

I have an embarrassing number of cookbooks that I bought thinking “Oooh, shiny! I’ll definitely use this!” and then have not touched since. But from past experience I know that if I look through a book with Post-Its in hand, I’m much more likely to cook from it, rather than passing it over in favor of old reliables. Also, so many books now are full of amazing writing. I’m particularly looking forward to sitting with The Sportsman Cookbook and Istanbul and Beyond.

Goal 2: Keep a dinner party diary.

This is a throwback to the days of gracious living. Back in the day when my high-WASP grandmother entertained, she would sit down the morning after and make notes about the guests and what was served, marking which dishes worked and which didn’t. It saved her from serving the same dish to guests twice, and also ensured things would go more smoothly the next time. I host enough that dinners and parties tend to run together, and this will (I hope) help me to remember what people like and any adjustments I need to make. At the very least, it will save me from drastically over- or under-catering.

Do Your Fives!

So I got invited to do something simultaneously very fun and very difficult - make a list of my top ten cookbooks for the database 1000 Cookbooks. I hemmed and hawed (and made a total mess of my bookshelves) to come up with my list. But I was forced to leave off the books that are my true love - food books that aren't cookbooks! To remedy this painful omission, here are my top five books of food writing. 

Ruth Reichl - Tender at the Bone

The first food memoir I ever read, and still one of my absolute favorites in this genre. Sad, sweet, thoughtful, and above all it will make you very, very hungry. Fried oysters and devil’s food cake, anyone? 

Lizzie Collingham - Curry

An elegant, engaging history of something we’re all extremely familiar with in the present-day, but whose origins we don’t tend to talk about that much. I read this book for my masters’ thesis and look back at it often when I need to be reminded how good food history is done.

Bee Wilson - First Bite

If you’re like me, and you like to think about food as much as you like it eat it, you must read this book. A well-written, extensive examination of why we eat the way we do, from babyhood onwards. 

Margaret Visser - Much Depends on Dinner

Written in 1987, but it blew my tiny mind when I read it in 2010 and I still think it’s one of the best and most important pieces of writing about what lies behind our eating habits. A thorough dissection of the history and anthropology of the table. 

Laura Shapiro - Perfection Salad

A simultaneously wonderful and horrifying examination of how American cooking transformed into science-driven home economics at the end of the 19th century. White sauces, brutally overcooked vegetables, and Jell-O salads galore. One to make you question whether progress for the sake of progress is necessarily a good thing...

American Spice

American and British culinary dialects are quite different. I’m not just talking about aubergines and eggplant, arugula and rocket, cookies and biscuits. I’m talking about all the different cuts of meat, the types of sugar and salt. Indeed, there are a wealth of examples I could give, but today I am going to talk about one flavoring in particular.

“What is it with you people and cinnamon?” my friend Nicola wrote to me, after I described to her chocolate brownies I bake, to which I add half a teaspoon of the spice. And she has a point – when I think of the classics of American baking, so many of them use cinnamon, either as the dominant flavor (cinnamon rolls) or as a vocal supporting player (apple pie). When I searched for “cinnamon” in the recipe archive of the hugely popular American blog Smitten Kitchen, there were dozens of results, ranging from banana bread to plum torte to espresso chiffon cake.

But when you look more closely at 19th-century American history, the answer to Nicola’s question appears. Sure, the United States began when we revolted against the British, and we still speak the same language. But as the frontiers opened up and America started to move west in the 1800s, our immigrants came from further east. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes settled the flat expanses of the upper Midwest, while Germans, Czechs and other Middle Europeans settled across swathes of what we know as Middle America, ranging from Wisconsin in the north to Texas in the south. Along with their other talents, they brought their beer (we favor lager over ale for a reason), their sausage (they’re why British-style bangers are almost impossible to find), and most of all, they brought their baking, full of flavorings like poppy seeds, cardamom, and cinnamon.

These tastes might have been just a regional quirk if not for The Joy of Cooking. Joy is the American equivalent of Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, if Delia had written the first edition in the 1930s instead of the 1980s. It’s been continuously in print for over 70 years and sold over 18 million copies, and It’s where you look first if you want to know how to make gravy, or a roast, or pie crust. Most importantly, it was written by Irma Rombauer and illustrated by Marian Rombauer Becker, who hailed from St Louis Missouri, and were the descendants of German immigrants. So this Mitteleuropa-inflected Midwestern food became the staple cuisine of kitchens across America.

That said, I put cinnamon in my brownies after years of enjoying Mexican hot chocolate. But that’s a story for another day. 

Champagne (Cocktails) for Everyone!

(Note: this originally appeared a while ago on a previous blog, Tomatoes and Radio Wire. I reposted it because 'tis the season and if you've not had these before, you're in for a real treat.)

What is the ultimate celebratory beverage? If your answer is “Champagne!” you are only half-correct. The real answer is the classic champagne cocktail.

Champagne cocktails are a Chamberlain Christmas tradition – at the beginning of Christmas dinner, you will always find my father and uncles at a makeshift bar concocting these drinks in my grandparents’ elegant champagne coupes. While other people associate Christmas with mince pies and turkey, I think of the spicy fragrance of bitters and good cognac mixed together. I have come to love this tradition so much that when T and I got married, we served champagne cocktails at our reception.

It did take me a while to come around to them, as it is a very grown-up cocktail: booze flavoured with booze and topped with more booze. But they are a great example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts – the bitters and sugar bring out the fruity and aromatic qualities of the champagne and cognac. Be warned though – this is one of those drinks which you need to consume slowly, no matter how good it tastes!

A technical note; when you make this drink, you have a choice of glasses: coupes or flutes. If you are using flutes, you will need to make a batch of simple syrup for your sweetener. It is dead easy – just put equal weights of water and sugar in a saucepan, heat and stir until all the sugar is dissolved (you will feel the difference in texture on the bottom of the pan), then leave to cool. For a party of 15 people I would dissolve 150g sugar in 150ml water. If you have leftovers, it stays good for ages and is ideal for making fresh lemonade.

And lastly – because this cocktail has so few ingredients, please do not use cheap crap. I am not saying this as a snob, but because I want to save you being disappointed. I’m not talking about Cristal and Hennessy, but this is not the time to stint on ingredients. Keep an eye out for name-brand VSOP cognac (supermarkets will put this on sale around Christmastime) and bubbly you’d be very happy to drink on its own. It's the most wonderful time of the year, after all. Why not celebrate it properly?

Grandfather Chamberlain's Classic Champagne Cocktail (AKA Turbo Champagne)

Place 1 sugar cube (coupe) or a half-tablespoon simple syrup (flute) at the bottom of the glass.

Add 4-5 dashes Angostura bitters.

Add 1 tablespoon cognac.

If using the sugar cube, use a spoon or a small muddler to crush it into the cognac.

Top with champagne. (If using flutes, you will need to tilt the glass and pour slowly to ensure all ingredients combine.)

Sweets to the....oh, you know.

Sweetness gets a bad rap. And for good reasons too – in an age where you’ll find sugar in tomato sauce, bread, and canned soup, in the same supermarket where you can buy practically infinite variations on cheap cookies and candy, we are overwhelmed to the point of literal sickness by all things sweet.  And we keep going back for more – to paraphrase the excellent First Bite by Bee Wilson, the effect of sweetness on our brains means that even if sugar isn’t love and happiness, it sure feels like it.

But this isn’t a reason to dismiss sweetness entirely. I feel something like pity for those people who claim not to like sweet things, the same sentiment I have for people who say they don’t like pop music or glitter. Taking pride in obscure and difficult pleasures (atonal music, conceptual art) may make you more sophisticated, but you don’t win prizes in life for being hard to impress.

I think this tug-of-war is why I like dessert wines so much. A little glass of really good sticky wine has a world of flavors in it. Tawny port conjures handfuls of nuts and dried fruit by a cozy wood fire, while late harvest Riesling makes me think of Hawaiian holidays, the creamy scent of sunblock meeting tropical fruit. But a bottle of Tokaji I had recently sticks out in my mind the most. I opened it after Thanksgiving dinner, passing around little cups of it to friends and family. It tasted like ripe apricots and fresh black tea, with the tanginess of the fruit meeting the floral intensity of the tea to make it refreshing.  But these flavors of their own might have been too astringent – it was the sweetness, in the end, that both highlighted the flavors and tied them together. I can still taste it now. 

Dinner Theatre Stage Fright.

In the strange ways of the modern world I have become Instagram friends with the terrific Scottish novelist Kerry Hudson (her books are great and you should read them). In a post I made about cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 15 she commented that she admired me because her attempts to cook Christmas dinner for two have ended in tears.

This comment made me pause. I am naturally an anxious person, so why doesn’t this kind of cooking faze me?  I’m not a professional chef, but I have cooked for big groups – I have cooked for 60 people in a co-operative house and 35 people in a homeless shelter. I also cook at home at least four nights a week. But it’s not just that I know how to cook. I have learned over time that all special occasion cooking boils down to a few key principles.

The Chamberlain Rules for Cooking for Special Occasions Without Losing Your Godd*mn Mind (with thanks to Kerry for the inspiration)

Don’t get too creative. My rule of thumb is that if I’m hosting a dinner party, I don’t cook anything I haven’t made before. For something like Christmas dinner, which has multiple dishes, I might relax the rule and make one or two new things, and keep everything else the same. But it’s always a better idea to make something straightforward but delicious rather than stretch for something really fancy and have it end in your total meltdown. Remember, it’s your house and you make your own traditions. Just because everyone else makes a roast dinner does not mean you have to! If you know you can make a delicious spaghetti with meat sauce, serve it up on Christmas with some garlic bread (everyone loves garlic bread) and top-notch Italian red wine and enjoy not being stressed. I guarantee you no one will complain.

Plan ahead.  Sit down a week in advance (more like 3 weeks for Christmas and Thanksgiving if you’re doing the full roast dinner) and collect all your recipes together. Decide on a time that you want to serve the meal, then subtract 30 minutes so that you have wiggle room in case something goes wrong or is taking longer than you thought. Write this second time at the bottom of a sheet of paper, and then use the recipes to write a reverse schedule. If you do this you’ll be able to see if too many dishes are piling up at the last minute. Don’t forget to include time to preheat the oven (30 minutes) and to bring joints of meat up to room temperature (usually an hour). While you’re sitting with the recipes, you can also check your cupboard supplies and write your shopping list.

Make dishes ahead as much as you possibly can.  If you’re making multiple dishes, avoid things that need last-minute attention as much as possible. Aim for dishes that can handle reheating, and even dishes that taste better after a few days’ rest like stews and curries. I would not have more than one of these (e.g. sautéed vegetables), and even then some vegetables which we eat steamed or sautéed work just as well roasted (e.g. asparagus or broccoli). As a rule: the oven is your friend, the hob not so much.

Ask for, nay, demand help if you want it. You’re the chef and you’re in charge, so you can get away with bossing people around. Guests can set the table, put cheese and crackers on plates, and pour drinks (especially for you). You’ll enjoy cooking more if you delegate where you can.

Last, but not at all least: if it doesn’t go the way you want this time, don’t give up! As they say in baseball, there’s always next year.