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| From Dishes Mother Used to Make, 1941 |
TAKE TWO CALF’S FEET
by Terri Griffith
(This essay originally appeared in Connotation Press)
Like art, pornography,
and love, everyone knows the meaning
of the term “from scratch.” And just like these other words, when pressed, the
definition is as hard to wrangle. The term is contextual, shifting meaning
depending on who says it and when. I’m an adept cook, but I’ve never made puff
pastry. I don’t know anyone who has. Even The Barefoot Contessa uses frozen,
but I’m certain someone out there has a French grandmother who would rather
starve than pull a box of frozen dough from her freezer. You can often find a
big copper pot on my stovetop simmering chicken stock. I make salad dressing. I
soak beans.
The meaning of
“from scratch” was perfectly clear to me until one day when I was browsing the
Culinary Arts Institute cookbooklet Dishes
Mother Used to Make (1941). I wasn’t reading, just paging through looking
at pictures. There was a photo of what I at first thought was
dessert—star-shaped, gelatinous. The caption read: “This pretty mold of
nourishing calf’s foot jelly is made by the same recipe as the one mother
carried when she visited the sick.” It then became clear that I was looking at
aspic. The revelation came not from the ingredient list or attendant photo, but
somewhere in the middle of the directions when I realized that the calf’s foot
in “Calf’s Foot Jelly” was the source of the gelatin. It was stupid not to
understand this immediately; earlier cooks would have.
But I’m not an
earlier cook. To me, gelatin in its virgin state comes from a small orange
package of Knox or if I’m lucky, a professional cook’s box of gelatin sheets. I
should know better. Still, I find it difficult to imagine the average
contemporary home cook rendering gelatin “from scratch.” Then again, what
recipe from the last hundred years would have us boiling calf’s feet?
Effectively, a box of Knox is from scratch, in that it is the least processed
version of the ingredient available.
In the I Love Lucy episode (1952) entitled “Pioneer Women,” after figuring out that Lucy has
washed more than 200,000 dishes in the ten years since her marriage to Ricky,
Lucy and Ethel decide they want automatic dishwashers:
Ricky (to Fred): Isn’t it amazing how spoiled modern women
are?
Lucy: Spoiled?
Ricky: Yes, spoiled. You think you got to do a little work
and you’re hysterical.
Lucy: A little work!
Ricky: Why honey, this is the electric age. All you have to
do is flip a “swish.”
Lucy (to Ethel): We flip a “swish.”
Ricky: Your grandmother didn’t have none of these modern
electrical conveniences and they not only washed
the dishes, they swept the floor, and churned the butter, and baked the
bread…they made their
own clothes.
Lucy: Sure and where are those women today? (pause) They’re
dead!
So Lucy and Ethel
bet Ricky and Fred that they can all live as people did in their grandmothers’
time. They choose the date 1900 as the cut off and if the women can keep to the
“Gay 90s” then they can have the money for dishwashers. Although their
conversation is framed around the idea of technology, the show comes down to a
parsing the concept of “from scratch.”
You don’t even
have to watch this episode to know what happens—Lucy and Ethel spend the rest
of the show trying to make bread and butter. As you’ve probably guessed, they were unsuccessful. Lucy is unfamiliar with bread making and relies solely on a
cookbook to guide her. At one point she describes to Ethel what kneading is.
Precisely because she has no idea what she’s doing, she finds that she’s used
thirteen cakes of yeast instead of three.
It
is Fred’s grandmother who churned butter, so we know from this that she must
have lived somewhere rural with access to large quantities of cream. Making
butter from store-bought cream doesn’t make good economic sense. As Ethel says
sarcastically of the half or so pound of butter she has just churned, “Imagine,
all that butter and it only cost me twenty three dollars and seventy-five
cents.” And that was in 1952.
Ricky’s
bread-baking grandmother lives in Cuba, and as he mentions on another episode
that his family are farmers. This is a significant difference not in era, but
in culture. Lucy and Ethel live in New York City, in apartments. They are show
people: the Mertzs, retired vaudevillians, and Ricky Richardo, a bandleader. In
later episodes, the Richardos own their own nightclub. Both the Mertzs and the
Richardos are childless, at least in this episode. Even in 1900 it seems unlikely that these women would
have baked bread, much less churned butter. Neighborhood markets were abundant,
bakeries close, fresh dairy delivered daily. Judging by Lucy’s complete lack of
knowledge about bread making, no woman in her family ever baked a loaf of bread
anywhere in her vicinity. For women like Lucy and Ethel, meals comprised of
fresh bread from the bakery and milk-man delivered butter were from scratch.
On the Food
Network show Semi-Homemade Cooking with
Sandra Lee (2003), our hostess schools us in the assembly method of
cooking. Her website states: “Sandra Lee’s trademark 70/30 Semi-Homemade
philosophy combines 70% ready-made products with 30% fresh, giving everyone the
confidence to create food that looks and tastes from scratch.” For Sandra Lee
the definition of “from scratch”
is rather generous. Lee asks us to reassemble food that has arrived in her
kitchen already in varying states of readiness. The “homemade” in Semi-Homemade Cooking often does not
point to what serious cooks would refer to as “from scratch” ingredients. In
her recipe for “Mexican-Style Macaroni and Cheese,” Lee has the cook combine
boxed macaroni and cheese with “Mexican” seasoning, finally topping the whole
thing with packaged, pre-shredded Mexican cheese blend. In this recipe, I can
only imagine that the fresh ingredient would be the cheese.
But to be fair to
Lee, it is not food that purports to be healthy or nutritious. Lee is selling
something else. She is selling love. We can see this from the cocktails and
tablescapes she constructs each week. The subtext of every episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking is, If you take
these ingredients and fabricate them into something recognizable as food, you
will demonstrate to your family how much you love them. In this way, Sandra
Lee’s recipes, however misguided we may think them, are successful.
Famed cookbook
author and former owner of The Barefoot Contessa gourmet food store from which
she takes her nickname, Ina Garten makes a living cooking mostly from scratch and
showing us how to as well. Her cookbooks are slick and appealing. Hardcover,
with big, beautiful pictures, of healthful, lovingly prepared dishes. Although Barefoot in Paris is one of my favorite
cookbooks and contains recipes for “French Lentil Sausage Soup” and “Palmiers,”
it also contains recipes for things like “Roasted Beets,” which is simply…well,
roasted beets. In her other cookbooks you can find similar recipes for “Roasted
Winter Vegetables” and “Roasted Carrots.” These are fine recipes and suggest
things like the addition of thyme or a splash of vinegar, but they are
essentially recipes for dishes that don’t need recipes. These are simple foods,
which is exactly the point Garten is trying to make—That wholesome ingredients
and simple preparation are all that are needed to create an outstanding meal.
Even in the picture of the humble roasted carrots, the carrots are seductive
and slick with olive oil. The photo is pornographic in its detail and explicit
availability, the shards of fresh cracked pepper and grains of kosher salt
large enough to see.
Like
Lee, Garten is a contemporary cook. She does not expect her readers to make
puff pastry, nor does she expect us to make our own mayonnaise, though she does
recommend specific brands. Whether this is intended or not, this recommendation
of store-bought products reminds home cooks that we are not making every
element of this dish from scratch. What she does is strip away the layers of
processed food that we have grown so used to eating that they have become
nearly invisible. This has the effect of throwing the few remaining processed
items into stark relief against their elemental brethren: carrots, beets, a
whole roast chicken.
How
do we define what is from scratch and what is processed? Is flour processed?
Cheese? Sausage? Canned chickpeas? Organic free-range chicken stock?
Unprocessed sausage is just meat and where’s the fun in that? And what’s the
difference between the bag of pre-shredded, “Mexican” flavored cheese blend,
and a ball of goat’s milk cheese from my local natural cheesemonger?
This cultural move
to deconstruct food into recognizable components is central to both The Slow
Food and Localvore movements. But we see this idea reflected in the general
consumer market as well. In a Tostitos ad, a woman (played by a youthful Meghan Markle) who is shopping for her upcoming party is perusing the chip isle while her thoughts
run as a voiceover. She thinks about chips and how much she doesn’t like one of
the potential party guests. The ad ends with her looking at a brown, natural
looking bag of corn chips, which contains thirteen ingredients. She then picks
up a bag of Tostitos and the voiceover says, “White corn, vegetable oil, salt.
Yeah, three ingredients is good.” Suddenly these Tostitos Scoops are
recontextualized as wholesome solely because they are simple, made of
ingredients we can all understand. In the 1990s “white corn, vegetable oil,
salt” would have read as a list of foods to avoid.
I
am sure there are those who mill their own grain, as I am sure there are those
who make puff pastry from scratch, still for most people a bag of flour is an
elemental ingredient. It’s our renewed desire to know what we are eating—where
it comes from, the quality of ingredients, how it was produced—that makes a
short ingredient list a selling point. Whether or not home cooks will return to
rendering gelatin from hooves has yet to be seen. But with the ways things are
going, it seems likely.
WORKS
REFERENCED:
Berolzheimer,
Ruth. ed. Dishes Mother Used To Make.
Chicago: Culinary Arts Institute, 1941.
Print
Garten,
Ina. Barefoot Contessa Back to
Basics. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008. Print
—The
Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.
New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Print
—Barefoot Contessa Family Style. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002. Print
—Barefoot
in Paris. New York:
Clarkson Potter, 2004. Print
“I Love Lucy.” The Museum of
Broadcast Communications. Web. 11 Feb. 2010. .
“Knox Gelatine.” Kraft Food. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.
.
“Pioneer Women.” I Love Lucy: The Complete First Season.
Original Air Date, 31 Mar. 1952.
Paramount, 2005. DVD.
Semi-Homemade
Cooking with Sandra Lee. The Food Network. Web. 12 Mar.
2011 http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sandra-lee/mexican-style-macaroni-and cheeserecipe/index.html.
“Unwanted Guests.” Goodby
Silverstein & Partners. Web. 18 Mar. 2012.
http://www.goodbysilverstein.com/#/work/tostitos_dips_and_chips_unwanted_guests_broadcast.
