Steal the Menu (19 page)

Carol showed me these fulminations with high humor. The column appeared intact, although, mysteriously, many copies lacked the illustration. But then, at lunch, Ternes said, over coffee: “Why don’t you drop the anthropology. It’s not a real science. Try plants instead. That’s what most food is, anyway.”

Alan was always right.

I didn’t know the first thing about botany. Nevertheless, edible plants, their origins, their lore, the incredible ingenuity with which cooks had exploited them—such questions kept me happily occupied over many years. My lack of training in the field was never a real hindrance. The nontechnical material was so rich, and so easily available, that after locating reliable sources, I found it a simple matter to assemble compilations of information about the horticultural conquest of the world by edible flora: by Indian mangoes tended in pots on shipboard until they could be safely naturalized in the Americas or by the many and surprising uses of the invaluable New World cassava plant—toasted grits (
farofa
) in the Brazilian national dish
feijoada
, bread I saw made on open fires in the Caribbean, as well as tapioca Mom had served in pudding.

Every year, I made a summer trip to the Caribbean to investigate
yet another exotic plant.
Natural History
sold travel ads to the islands for a fall issue, and I provided editorial matter to go with them, columns based on sweaty summer interviews with taro gardeners in Monserrat and a lady in Santo Domingo who concocted jelly from the pendulous fruit of the cashew (the more familiar nut, as I pointed out, is a dead ringer for the seed concealed in the pit of the mango, which, like the cashew, is a member of the Anacardiaceae family, as is poison ivy).

I saw these fruits during the summer of 1992, as the guest of the government of the Dominican Republic, a repressive pseudo-democracy run by Joaquín Balaguer, who had gained power as a puppet of the murderous dictator Rafael Trujillo. But I was very happy to cross paths with the amiable Henri Gault, he of the Gault-Millau guide, an avatar of Jean Gabin in his craggy looks and bluff manner.

I discovered evidence of recent Lebanese influence on Dominican foodways in a neighborhood near the hotel, where a sign in front of a house advertised
quipe
, a Hispanic version of kibbeh, the pounded raw lamb–bulgur delicacy of Lebanon.

I spent my last night in the Dominican Republic playing blackjack in the hotel’s dark and deserted casino. Sitting next to me at the table, not gambling, was the California wine writer Robert Finigan, who distracted me from my losses with a story from his former career as a management consultant in Japan, where he had learned to speak the language fluently.

One night in midwinter, he found himself in Wakkanai, the northernmost city in Japan, which, with an annual snowfall that can reach 250 inches, is among the snowiest populated places on earth. Finigan trudged through the snow to dinner in a nearby restaurant, empty except for a table occupied by an elderly couple in traditional garb. From across the dining room, they appeared to be greatly enjoying their meal.

Finigan called over a waiter and said in Japanese, “I’ll have exactly what they’re having.” Minutes later he was startled by loud shrieks. He looked up from the book he’d been reading and saw the Japanese couple fighting to keep the waiter from taking away their plates and bringing them to him.

By 1992 I had long since established myself as an essayist on edible plants in
Natural History
. I often received letters from real botanists all over the world, asking for reprints of my columns. Usually, they addressed me as Dr. Sokolov. I really was operating in a serious academic context, as a kind of functioning botanist, and I came to see that I had a specialty. I was what was called an economic botanist; I studied plants in human affairs. There was even a publication in “my” field, the
Journal of Economic Botany
.

One day, I found a complete run of it in the stacks of the library at the American Museum of Natural History, where my connection to the museum’s magazine gave me a plenipotentiary ID card. I was an “outside contractor” and could enter the museum and all its most guarded places at any hour. I rarely went to that library, since the museum had ceded the acquisition of books on plants to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Yet I particularly loved to poke in when the public couldn’t, strolling early in the morning through the Andean dioramas, alone with the pumas and guanacos, the recorded noises of their snuffling and amorous crashes against each other incessantly looped and relooped, an eerie mammalian aria da capo, da capo.

Sometimes I continued upstairs, where there was a Xerox machine I could use for free in the library stacks, which, for a time, had plastic sheeting over a whole section, to protect the books from a leak in the roof. The reference room was presided over by a fierce woman of Middle European background whose desk was covered with flowering plants I could not have identified if asked. When I
admired them, she responded fiercely, with an unleavened accent, “They say I can make a pencil bloom.”

Then, just as I was settling into my role as the Linnaeus of comestible roots and leaves, Alan uprooted me from the soft bed of economic botany and sent me on the road, like one of those potted mangoes, to hunt down American regional foods, old-fashioned dishes threatened with extinction, like the black-footed ferret. I would spend two years doing it.

We both assumed that corporate agriculture, Big Ag, and all the other soul-crushing juggernauts of modern American life were smothering the last vital signs of regional food. But in almost every case, we found a dynamic revival of foodways, a supposedly vanished dish or abandoned ingredient that ought to have died out from neglect.

I say “we” because I had a partner in those travels, Adelaide de Menil, a photographer who worked much harder than I did, lugging equipment and getting down in the dirt to capture the morels in Michigan and roughing it in the Colorado high desert north of Rifle to record a sheep drive.

When we started out, I thought the way to find endangered foods was to flip through sources like my former colleague Jean Hewitt’s
The New York Times Heritage Cookbook
and then make a blizzard of phone calls to the region, to find practitioners of the vanishing dish and set up appointments with them. This turned out to be a waste of everybody’s time. There were sources you could find that way, but precisely because you could connect with a Pennsylvania Dutch flannel-cake vendor from your desk in New York, it almost guaranteed that she was an inauthentic exploiter of a pioneer dish whose only nexus to its colorful past was cash.

We quickly learned that winging it was the surest way to find the folks we wanted to find. Most of them did not advertise in the
Yellow Pages
or feel comfortable making appointments. Since a great many of them were either active farmers or close to the land, on arrival we would check in first with the local county agent. These emissaries of the federal Department of Agriculture know everything about their bailiwick. They know who grows what crops and, through their work with families in the still great 4-H program, they know who cooks seriously in the old way, or who continues to cultivate crops or grow fruit that’s too old-fashioned and unsalable even to get mentioned in the Ag Department’s statistical publications.

After a while, we would just fly in to a place known, or usually formerly known, for a regional food and drift around the landscape until we found someone eager to cook it for us or show us his carefully tended plants.

These were not media-savvy people, but once we found them, they invariably turned out to be great interviewees, because we were often the first people who’d ever asked them about a passion that filled them with joy—and gave them an outlet for a missionary zeal for keeping alive a message that had all but lost its original audience.

Helen Sekaquaptewa, the mother of the Hopi tribal chairman, queenly at the wheel of a brand-new pickup, took me to her ranch house in New Oraibi, Arizona, to show me how to make
pö-vö-pi-ki
, or blue marbles, an “easy” Hopi breakfast dish. She stirred together a straightforward dough of blue cornmeal and boiling water and rolled it into small blue orbs, which she then poached. Getting the texture right is a matter of exquisite knack, a
tour de main
she learned as a girl in a traditional household.

Part of that same training taught Mrs. Sekaquaptewa how to make piki, the apex of Hopi blue-corn cookery. She told me how, having returned from a missionary school in 1910, she learned to make a stone piki griddle, starting with a granite slab and polishing
it smooth, by hand, with pebbles. She also ground blue corn into flour, working it between two stones, one held in the hand, until she produced a very fine blue flour, much finer than the meal for sale in a nearby grocery.

“We have electric mills now,” she told me. “It was hard work in my time, with stones, but good exercise. No one had a big stomach.”

But the Hopi ritual calendar had kept piki alive among the eight thousand ethnic Hopis—that and their isolation in the high mesas of northeastern Arizona. I saw this in action at the Niman dance. Kachina dancers at Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, moved slowly with the precision of Rockettes, chanting, elaborately masked and feathered, sashed and buskined, consecrating the ground of the plaza with cornmeal, while an eagle chained to a nearby rooftop flapped its wings. When the kachina dancers disappeared into underground kivas, Hopi children passed out rolls of crisp blue paper-thin piki, translucent sheets of blue cornmeal that had started out as a film of dough on a stone griddle.

For me, piki was the most unadulterated example of all threatened American regional foods, enmeshed in the same civilization that had invented it centuries before Columbus. That culture had survived under constant threat, first from the Hopis’ Navajo neighbors, then from white settlers, and, by the time I came to their mesa villages, from electric flour mills and supermarket blue cornmeal. But piki, because of the difficulty of making it, would never be the centerpiece of a Hopi-themed fast-food chain.

You might think that other First American foods would be just as difficult to assimilate into the American way of life, but the recent history of Navajo fry bread teaches a different lesson, as I learned in Salt Lake City. I hadn’t intended to investigate Navajo food in the capital of Mormonism. Indeed, I went to some trouble to get invited to lunch at the official cafeteria in the headquarters of
the Church of Latter-day Saints in the Lion House, once the home of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young.

In
Lion House Recipes
, the cookbook I acquired there, I found almost no purely local dishes, just an unreconstructed expression of mainstream middle-American food: Jell-O salad, pies, meats and potatoes. The sole exception was the anomalous Utah scone, a deep-fried bread fashioned from a sweet yeast dough cut in two-inch squares. They were nothing like the muffiny scones of Britain, which are usually baked and never deep-fried.

It was not hard to sample homegrown scones in Salt Lake City. Usually served with butter and honey, they popped up on breakfast menus and at a fast-food chain called Sconecutter. But where did they come from? They had clearly not arrived with the Mormon emigration. No, these New World scones reminded me of puffy deep-fried Navajo fry bread and even more of New Mexican sopaipillas, which are similar to fry bread but are also usually served with honey, like the Utah scones.

Lacking any hard evidence for their origin, I speculated in
Natural History
that the archetype for all these fried breads was a sopaipilla documented by Diana Kennedy, the English-born authority on Mexican food, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which shares a border with New Mexico. This primordial sopaipilla lacked yeast, a sign of its earliness. Mormon women, I argued, likely adopted this bread and assimilated it to their baking style with yeast and other raising agents, sugar and eggs, and further appropriated it with an English name.

I backed into yet another Anglo variation on First American food traditions at a convention of wild-rice growers in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Wild rice, which is not a rice but a native grass that springs up in northern lakes, used to be very expensive because it had to be hand-harvested in the immemorial method devised by
Ojibwas, who would bend it over a canoe with a paddle and whack it until the seeds fell into the hull.

That picturesque harvesting method was about to disappear almost completely. Horticulturists had finally succeeded in hybridizing a nonshattering variety of wild rice that could be grown in paddies and harvested by combines, just like real rice and other grains. As excited lecturers pointed out at the Grand Rapids conference, wild rice had until then been left genetically unaltered by human ingenuity. Its seeds, maturing at different rates, would then fall off the seed heads into the lakes where the plants were growing, and therefore couldn’t be harvested all at once. The Ojibwa method accommodated this naturally erratic biology: paddlers knocked down the mature seeds, which were about to fall of their own biological momentum into the lake. The unripe seeds clung to their grass tops and continued maturing. Paddlers had to keep returning for them until they had whacked down the whole crop.

The jubilant horticulturists at Grand Rapids had searched and found strains of wild rice that didn’t shatter, didn’t drop their seeds whenever they separately ripened. The nonshattering seeds clung to the plant so that they could all be harvested in one sweep. This made it possible to collect them like wheat or sorghum seeds.

Prescientific grain farmers had gone through a similar process of selection with rice and wheat and all the other grains in the dawn of human life, making way for an efficient harvest, the single most basic requirement of agriculture and for the settled form of life we call civilization. Now modern science had performed the same miracle with wild rice.

Not long after that meeting, commercial wild-rice paddies were established in California. The retail price of
Zizania aquatica
plummeted. Wild rice’s future as a normal grain was secure, and
only hobbyists and Ojibwa traditionalists continued to gather it in canoes.