The question of whether or not America can lay claim to a bona fide cuisine has been asked since the founding of our nation. Even though the first cookbook published on our shores after the American Revolution—American Cookery written by Amelia Simmons in 1796—is full of recipes that seem French or British, historians generally consider it a publisher’s attempt to use food as a means to fuse a national identity. Almost two centuries later, when James Beard wrote his own American Cookery in 1972, the jury was still out on whether American cookery equated to American cuisine. Today, food scholars, such as anthropologist Sidney Mintz and sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, continue to debate the question of whether America has a coherent national identity as it relates to food.
Though he is often referred to as “the father of American cuisine,” James Beard himself wondered about our preoccupation with identifying an American cuisine during an interview in the early 1980s with food authority Jim Fobel. 1 “Do you think we will eventually develop a cuisine?” Fobel asked Beard. “Well, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Beard replied. “I think we can stay as we are. I think we have good food and we don’t have to label it. We have one important thing that grew up in this country and that is the definition of regional cooking…we have a breadth of view and understanding.” As part of the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America ®, a national food festival orchestrated in 2007 as a celebration of the James Beard Foundation’s 20th anniversary, we decided to take the question of American cuisine to the streets. We wanted to know what and how the growing ranks of food lovers who subscribe to food magazines, watch 24-hour food television, buy cookbooks for their kitchens and their coffee tables, frequent trendy restaurants and favorite dives, and enjoy cooking for family and friends feel about the idea of an American cuisine. To broaden our pool of opinions, we threw a few food experts into the mix. Does America have a cuisine?
we asked. If so, what is it? The answers we received are the data that form the basis of this white paper on the state of American cuisine.
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The State of American Cuisine
