Tuesday, December 9, 2014
I Hate American Food
By Joan M. Baril
I hate American food. No, pass the grain of salt. Of course, I don’t hate all
American food. In New York, we had wonderful meals. The Minnesotan village of
Grand Marias, just south of Thunder Bay, boasts excellent restaurants. New
Orleans, and the entire state of Louisiana, dishes out one heavenly meal after
another. For three days running, I went back to the same restaurant in Grand
Isle for the shrimp etouffe. I still remember the mussels cooked in wine in San
Francisco. And so on.
But driving through a Kansas small town I
saw a sign that said Thai Restaurant. I ordered pad thai. It was an unusual pad
thai. I considered it. Certainly there must be various regions of Thailand with
their own regional cooking and even their own types of noodles. But macaroni? I
looked for the shrimp mentioned in the menu but could not find it. The
waitress, using my fork, pulled open the pile of macaroni to reveal one canned
cocktail shrimp.
“One?” I said.
“It says shrimp, not shrimps,” she replied.
You can’t argue with that.
“This is not a croissant,” I said.
“It isn’t?” said the waitress in genuine surprise.
“And there are no vegetables as mentioned
in the menu. Just a slice of melted process cheese.”
“They are under the cheese,” she said and
sure enough a finger paring of red pepper, a strip of tomato and a flake of
something else, perhaps zucchini, lurked beneath.
You would think I would learn. The name of
a dish has no relation to the traditional dish. Alice in Wonderland, who
learned that “a word means
just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," would understand.
A risotto was a pile of plain white rice. A
mixed salad was a dinner plate (!) of chopped iceberg lettuce with a bottle of
Kraft to mix in. The tea was made by holding a cup with the teabag in it under
the hot tap. None of these places, except the last, were cheap. I paid 30$ for fish
and “risotto.”
“Have some refried beans,” said the church
lady at the church dinner. I put a couple of tablespoons beside the water
seeping out from under the mashed potatoes. The beans gave pause. They had been
cooked in chocolate.
I do not malign true American food. I have
tried alligator. I have tried crawfish.
On a Rio Grande canoe trip I ate white bread dotted with hot peppers,
beans mixed with hot peppers, chili made with an inordinate amount of very hot
peppers.
I actually like biscuits and gravy even
though the gravy is white and thick as paste. I am one of the few Canadians I
know who enjoys grits and boiled peanuts.
biscuits and gravy - I like it.
The owner of a diner explained to me how
difficult it is to skin a turtle, and even though he raised them in a special
pond and catches them too, he takes them to a professional turtle skinner. A
Louisianan showed me how to stake a chicken leg into the swamp to catch
crayfish. At a near-by campsite, I met Grandfather Frog, who, his family told
me, was famous for catching frogs and cooking them. I turned down the invitation to dinner. A
line has to be drawn somewhere.
“A Greek salad is made
with spinach or romain,” I said. “Not iceberg lettuce.” Actually I did not say
it. I no longer tell the restaurants of the Midwest how a dish is traditionally
made and so I no longer sound like a show-off foodie. Also all the salads from North Dakota down to Arizona are made of iceberg
lettuce. I just eat them.
“Vinaigrette is not thick
red glug from the Kraft bottle.” I did not say this either.
“A spanakopita should
have four or five crisp filo sheets on top, not a single soggy thing. And there
should be a bottom crust also.” Another unsaid comment.
“Would you like to join
us for Thanksgiving dinner?” said the woman at the next campsite. “I’m boiling
the turkey now.”
This was in the panhandle of Florida. Her
husband and sons were squirrel hunters. Luckily they had not shot any.
Inside the trailer, I
watched the hostess peel and chop hard-boiled eggs and add them to a bowl of
hot water. “This is how I make gravy,” she said and sure enough she spooned it
on the boiled turkey slice.
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