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Nation and Cuisine. The Evidence From American Newspapers Ca. 1830–2003

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07409710802304143

1542-3484

Krishnendu Ray,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Abstract It has been argued that cuisine happens when cooking leaves the kitchen, in the first instance when it escapes the domestic kitchen, and in the second instance, when it spreads onto the print media to give durability to the talk about taste. This article seeks to measure the talk about restaurants in American newspapers from its first appearance around 1830 up to the present, so as to reach some conclusions on claims about American cuisine. Does it exist? How do we know if it does? This has been a slowly developing project that has taken over three years to come to fruition and has benefited from comments and criticisms by a number of people. First, Anne McBride's work, which is about nation, cuisine, and profession, revived some of the theoretical issues that had lain dormant. I have also received immensely helpful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers for Food & Foodways and its editor Carole Counihan. Over the last year Sierra Burnett has emerged as an intellectual companion of great depth, whose questions and probing research have helped me frame a number of issues in much better ways than I could have on my own. She was also instrumental in editing this piece and shortening it under a stringent deadline. I thank Anne, Damian Mosley, and Sierra for closely reading and commenting on an earlier and much longer version of this in the Identities Research Working Group. Aurora Wallace entered the discussion late but guided me masterfully and yet with a light hand through print culture in nineteenth century New York. Nevertheless, I am afraid that errors of fact and judgment have persisted in spite of their best effort on my behalf. Notes 1. We know relatively little about China, where the evidence is tantalizingly subversive of French claims of singularity, but that is a tale that cannot be addressed here (Chang 1977 Chang, K. C. 1977. Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]; Whaley-Cohen 2006 Whaley-Cohen, J. . Cooking, Consumption and Society in Eighteenth-Century China. Unpublished manuscript. Paper presented at NYU Department of Nutrition. October, Food Studies, and Public Health. [Google Scholar]). 2. The unexplained paradox is how French haute cuisine became canonical in the rest of Europe in the age of nationalism. That points to a persistent tension between the national and the professional in the modern world. 3. The "Revolution is a culinary landmark because of the transformation which it permitted or precipitated in the cooking profession and its theater of operations" (Mennell 1985 Mennell, S. 1985. All Manners of Food. Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, London: Basil Blackwell. [Google Scholar]: 134). 4. Mennell's exemplary work (1985) develops the argument in same directions in explaining the difference between French cuisine and English cooking, which he posits is really a difference produced by differential class structures, and divergent relationship between court and country, in the two national polities. 5. It is probable that the Chinese had something similar from the eighteenth if not from the eleventh century, but that case has yet to be made convincingly. Assuming that restaurants are different from other kinds of eateries enables me to cut off the discussion that might otherwise bloat into a commentary on commodified cooking of all kinds, everywhere. That is worth pursuing in itself but not the object here. 6. From the American Periodicals Series originally digitized by UMI and now managed by Proquest. My object here is to use this database to illustrate the case about the American restaurant without any assumptions of being comprehensive or exhaustive. 7. See Gabaccia (2007) Gabaccia, D. 2007. Inventing 'Little Italy.'. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 6: 7–41. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] for a discussion of the promise of digitized archives in terms of what they allow us to do. 8. At this point in New York City there were about 47 newspapers, out of which 11 were dailies. Before the birth of the NYT the six leading newspapers were The New York Sun, The Tribune, The Herald, Journal of Commerce, Courier & Enquirer and Express (Burrows & Wallace: 289, 440, 677; Henkin 1999: 126). 9. Of the 843 identifiable referents to restaurants in the periodical literature before 1851, most are in literary journals such as The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature (1822–1876); Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Gazette (1827–1830); The New York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts (1823–?); The Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Portfolio (1830–1834); The Bouquet: Flowers of Polite Literature (1831–1833); The Journal of Belles Lettres (1832–1842); Southern Literary Messenger (1834–1845); The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art (1822–1842); Southern Rose (1835–1839); Parlour Review and Journal of Music, Literature and Fine Arts (1838–1838); New York Literary Gazette (1839–1839); etc. 10. What I say about restaurants in NYC in the next few paragraphs is based on preliminary evidence, hence hypothetical. More sustained archival work is necessary to reach firmer conclusions. This began as a sociological inquiry about the present that has been driven further and further back into history and into territories I am unfamiliar with, hence the necessity of extra caution in making claims based on limited exposure to the archival material. My hope is that this will at least provoke a historian to write the still unwritten social history of the American restaurant. 11. Herman Melville noted in his short story "Bartleby" (1853), "Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn." 12. This is a variation on the theme introduced by Peter Burke regarding the withdrawal of elites from Early-modern European popular culture (Burke 1972 Burke, P. 1972. The Italian Renaissance, New York: Scribner. [Google Scholar]). The timing here precedes similar claims about cultural bifurcation by L. Levine (1988) and D. Nasaw (1999) Nasaw, D. 1999. Going Out. The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar], but is congruent with the claims of C. Stansell (1987 Stansell, C. 1987. City of Women. Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860, Urbana, II: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar]: 9). The fact that Stansell (1987) Stansell, C. 1987. City of Women. Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860, Urbana, II: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar], Nasaw (1999) Nasaw, D. 1999. Going Out. The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar], and K. Peiss (1986) Peiss, K. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Google Scholar] virtually ignored the restaurant as a site of popular entertainment is indirect evidence of the social confinement of the restaurant to the upper classes. Instead Stansell notes that women of moderate means "owned small food shops of their own. In the census of New York occupations in the 1805 city directory, 18 women were counted among the city's 793 grocers, 5 among 27 fruit sellers, 2 cookshop owners out of a total of 7, a confectioner ('Grovers widow') and 7 tavern or coffee-house keepers out of 113 in the city" (1987: 14). L. Erenberg (1981) Erenberg, L. A. 1981. Steppin' Out. New York and Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] pulls in the other direction. He shows how the Palm Garden at Waldorf-Astoria allowed the public circulation of elites which would eventually lead to the more mixed social class interaction in the cabaret. But that comes between 1890 and 1930. "For women and men of wealth, the public restaurants allowed for the gradual releasing of the hand of convention that tied women to the domestic circle" (1981: 37). He continues, "… the restaurants initiated those with money into a public style that formerly had been exclusively for the ultrarich. On Fifth Avenue, the hotels allowed a large number of widely dispersed wealthy people to meet and mix at a distance, while on Broadway, the restaurants with their imperial architecture, elaborate service, and cosmopolitan traditions of eating and drinking gave prosperous citizens [a more consumption-oriented style in the company of theater stars and chorus girls]" (1981: 55). 13. The popular classes would return to American restaurants. More accurately the people would force their way back into restaurants, through commodification in the wake of post-World War affluence, and through democratization in the post-Civil Rights reconfiguration of urban, public spaces. 14. Exclusive restaurants were integral to the display of privacy that according to Habermas is indicative of the transformation of the public sphere and the decay of its function of "subjecting the affairs it had made public to the control of a critical public" (1989: 140). Critical commentary on public affairs was rarely overheard in the restaurant, or if heard was mostly ignored in print, but as we will see below another form of criticism—Restaurant Criticism—will be born there. 15. "With only 2 percent of the nation's population in the 1850s, New York claimed 18 percent of the country's newspaper circulation, handled 22 percent of its mail, and produced over 37 percent of its total publishing revenue" (Henkin 1998 Henkin, D. M. 1998. City Reading. Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]: 23). 16. Analogously, the Franklin House in Philadelphia advertised itself as conducting business "on the plan of the American and Parisian Hotels conjointly, having both a table d'hote and a restaurant café" in Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (1835–1861), July 12, 1845; 15, 29; APS Online p. 234. 17. Mennell (2003 Mennell, S. 2003. "Eating in the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries". In Eating Out in Europe, Edited by: Jacob, M. and Scholliers, P. 245–260. New York: Berg. [Google Scholar]: 250) notes that Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1838) "was a flâneur half a century before Baudelaire and a whole century before Georg Simmel celebrated the social type." 18. Thus the rise in the usage of the word "restaurant" in Figure 1 may also mean that more and more eating places have come to be called restaurants. 19. It is useful to acknowledge the drift in language and meaning of words such as "tavern," "saloon," and "restaurant" over time, which is symptomatic of a changing reality in terms of the materiality of a place and notions of sociability; the attempt in language to contain and reflect such changes; and the relationship of both, the institution and the linguistic marker, to newly valued places and categories. But that cannot be developed fully here due to considerations of space. 20. But the problem is not so easily circumvented with the word "hotel" which was a synonym for "restaurant" for a while (Sandoval-Strausz 1999 Sandoval-Strausz, A. K. 1999. Why the Hotel? Liberal Vision, Merchant Capital, Public Space, and the Creation of an American Institution. Business and Economic History, 28: 255–265. [Google Scholar]; Burnett 2004 Burnett, J. 2004. England Eats Out 1830–Present, London: Pearson (Longman). [Google Scholar]: 7). For instance the earliest reference to Delmonico's in NYT (cited earlier), identified it as a "hotel." If we assume that the word "hotel" was used interchangeably with "restaurant" in the NYT then the incidence graph would look quite different from Figure 1. But that interchangeability of "hotel" and "restaurant" does not hold for the whole period under discussion, and the correspondence died out mostly by the Civil War. Since most of the NYT data comes after that, the rising trend in the use of the word restaurant identified in Figure 1 holds, in spite of the fact that Delmonico's is referred to as a hotel again from about 1910 to the 1970s. That does not interfere with Figure 1 because this time (1910–1970) the word "hotel" is really referring to the hotel that Delmonico's built along with others such as Rector's, Hoffman House and Knickerbockers, separate from the eponymous restaurants. A good test of that assumption is to search the NYT archive for a famous restaurant that never built a hotel—a place to sleep in—of the same name and see how it is referred to in the articles. Lüchow's fulfills that criteria. The NYT record shows just one reference to "Lüchow hotel" in 1896 and 212 references to "Lüchow restaurant" from 1882 to its closing in the 1980s. Furthermore, "Delmonico's hotel" drops out of the record after the last one on November 13, 1868, to re-emerge again once a hotel is built with that name in 1911. I have also checked references to other "hotels" in the NYT archive to confirm that assertion. I think we can safely assume that the rising discourse shown in Figure 1 is about restaurants and not about hotels by a different name. 21. According to Erenberg (1981) Erenberg, L. A. 1981. Steppin' Out. New York and Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar] class mixing and hence the cultural proliferation of NYC restaurants begun in the 1890s, but has been discussed most avidly since the so-called Roaring Twenties. 22. As an anonymous critic pointed out it is important to note that the talk about "American cuisine" is not limited to how American cuisine does not exist, or questions such as "when will it come into being?" There is some of that in the articles but most of the commentary that I have looked at is not limited to such refrains. 23. The data points 2001–2003 and 2004–2007 May 16 are used in Figure 7 because of the way documents are archived in Proquest. Until 2003 "articles" can be identified. After that it is no longer possible to identify articles as a separate category, thus all documents are included from 2004–2007 May 16 and that is why they are broken up in the graph. As I have said before, where ever possible I have only included articles, because they are a better measure of acceptability of restaurants over classifieds. 24. It could be argued that since there is almost no discussion of American cuisine in the French media (I am guessing here) it shows that American cuisine does not exist. That is a weaker alternative to my argument because that will only show that American cuisine has little or no legitimacy outside its boundaries, which is not Mintz's point about why he thinks American cuisine does not exist. For him the relevant discussion is endogenous. 25. For long Times Company stationary carried the following slogan, "In many thousands of the best homes in New York City and Brooklyn, THE NEW YORK TIMES is the only morning newspaper admitted." By the end of the nineteenth century, "The Times readers were already distinguishing themselves as a class separate from those of the other one-cent papers, drawn to Och's expanded literary and cultural coverage in the new Saturday Review of Books and Art" (Wallace 2005 Wallace, A. 2005. Newspapers and the Making of Modern America. A History, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [Google Scholar]: 158; also see Shepard 1996; and Tifft & Jones 1999). 26. The area includes the following counties: In New York—Bronx, Dutchess, Kings (Brooklyn), Nassau, New York (Manhattan), Orange, Putnam, Queens, Richmond (Staten Island), Rockland, Suffolk, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester. In New Jersey—Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union, and Warren. In Connecticut—Fairfield. In Pennsylvania—Pike. 27. As a restaurateur astutely suggested to S. Zukin (1995 Zukin, S. 1995. "Artists and Immigrants in New York City Restaurants". In The Cultures of Cities, Edited by: Zukin, S. 153–185. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]: 179) "we started with the people in the neighborhood, typical Queens middle to lower middle class. They were very New York Post type of people, Daily News people… Now what we have evolved to is what the neighborhood has evolved to. A lot of people that are [New York] Times readers, affluent people, people who read the Wall Street Journal for financial purposes." 28. This also affirms the anthropological impulse to assume that something like race or ethnicity or a particular linguistic culture exists because sufficient numbers of people say so. In that perspective we don't need any more validation for such a claim. 29. It is important to underline that no nation is ever imagined unanimously by everyone who happens to be included in its juridical boundaries. Nor is it imagined with the same degree of intensity, or legitimacy, in every field.