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More Than Hot Dogs and Apple PieHow The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink falls short.

By Paul Levy
Posted Wednesday, May 9, 2007, at 2:41 PM ET
The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.

The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, edited by Andrew Smith, comes with an impressive pedigree, being one of several volumes spawned by the late, great Alan Davidson's million-word, bet-settlingly definitive Oxford Companion to Food. So it was with high hopes that I began reading Smith's book, hoping he'd offer a similarly decisive look at American cuisine.

Thumbing though the 650-page tome looking for the food tie that binds, I became increasingly convinced that, apart from the obvious regionalism of cuisines that span the United States, the common thread of immigration defines American food. Not Spaghetti-Os and chop suey, but the tens of hyphenated cuisines—Italian-American, German-American—lovingly preserved by immigrants and handed down through generations. The other candidates Smith posits as defining American food—dishes connected with national holidays, such as turkey and apple pie, or fast food, like hamburgers and hot dogs—are too simple and restricted to serve as the core of the national diet. What needs explaining is not Thanksgiving dinner or the Big Mac, but the universal availability of bagels, beer, and sushi. And there's no way of understanding our appetite for pizza and fried chicken unless we look at the hegemony of hyphenated cuisines.

Smith realizes the importance of these hybrid foodways, for they are featured in his encyclopedic work, and some boast substantial entries. But while each possesses a good, if necessarily brief, outline of the history of the immigrant group concerned, the book never substantively grapples with the big questions: What, broadly, defines American food and drink, and what is the essential role of immigration in the making of this American cuisine?

Our roots in hyphenated cuisine stem from the greatest process in food history—the Columbian Exchange, or the ongoing transfer of goods between Old World and New World that began with Columbus' first voyage, when Europeans brought over goods like wheat, cucumbers, cattle, horses, and wine grapes, and took back with them American plants like tomatoes, potatoes, and maize. (A Columbian Exchange entry is conspicuously absent from Smith's book, though there is a two-page table explicating it under "Native American Foods.") Successive waves of immigrants generally brought their own ingredients with them, though they sometimes employed tricks to recreate their native food from American foodstuffs.

Most immigrants settled in cities, clustering in neighborhoods with others who shared their ethnic background. This made provisioning easier, and it perpetuated the taste of the young for their parents' food, while limiting their exposure to outside food. Because about 1 million people immigrated here yearly from 1905 until 1914, immigration retained its cultural significance in the United States until the start of World War I. And the steady influx of Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and German-Americans, in particular, reinforced their importance in our culinary history.

Joan Nathan's Jewish-American food entry succeeds because it's unified by the concept of kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, and how American immigrants accepted and then rejected them. Nathan starts by informing the reader that in the half-century between 1830 and 1880, the most important center of American-German-Jewish "commerce, culture and cuisine" was Cincinnati, the American birthplace of the kashrut-disdaining Reform movement. Baking was the most prized kitchen skill of its huge German-Jewish population, so, she remarks, "[S]urely it was no coincidence that Cincinnati became the home of Fleischmann's yeast and Crisco, a vegetable-based [and thus kosher] shortening." The entry also benefits from Nathan's own curiosity about her subject. In her discussion of crossover foods, for example, we learn how the unlikely knish has "gone mainstream." Of course, Nathan has it easy in that the consolidating theme of kashrut makes it unnecessary to define "Jewish food."

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Paul Levy writes on the arts for the Wall Street Journal Europe, co-chairs the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and edited The Penguin Book of Food and Drink.
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