One Big Table 600 recipes from the nation's best home

cooks, farmers, fishermen, pit masters, and chefs

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 Simon & Schuster
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Copyright © 2010 by Molly O’Neill

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition November 2010

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Designed by Joel Avirom and Jason Snyder

Images edited by Rebecca Busselle

Permissions and acknowledgments appear on page 862.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Neill, Molly.
One big table : A portrait of American cooking : 600 recipes from the
nation’s best home cooks, farmers, fishermen, pit-masters, and chefs / by
Molly O’Neill.
p. cm.
1. Cooking—United States. I. Title.
TX907.2.O54 2010
641.50973—dc22 2010028841

ISBN 978-0-7432-3270-8
ISBN 987-1-4516-0977-6 (ebook)
 For Rebecca Busselle, photographer, writer, cook, colleague, fellow
traveler, and friend, with gratitude as large as the America we discovered,
mile by mile, dish by dish, story by story.
“BAD DINNERS GO HAND IN HAND WITH TOTAL DEPRAVITY, WHILE A WELL-FED
MAN IS ALREADY HALF SAVED.”

—The New Kentucky Home Cook Book, 1884

 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
Nibbles, Noshes, and Tasty Little Plates

CHAPTER 2
Pickles, Salsas, and Other Condiments, Savory and Sweet

CHAPTER 3
Steaming Bowls: Soups, Chowders, and Other Consolations

BREAD: AN UNREFINED HISTORY

CHAPTER 4
Conspicuous Consumption of Cellulose: Salads

CHAPTER 5
From Sea to Shining Sea: Fish and Shellfish

TAMING FIRE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF AMERICAN STOVES

CHAPTER 6
Poultry in Every Pot, Oven, Broiler, and Grill

COOKING FOR CROWDS

 CHAPTER 7
Everything but the Squeal: Beef, Buffalo, Game, Lamb, and Pork

CHAPTER 8
Eat Your Vegetables

CHAPTER 9
Amber Waves of Grain

ICE CREAM FOR ALL

CHAPTER 10
The Sweet Life

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

RECIPE INDEX

CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 INTRODUCTION
HOMETOWN APPETITES

For many years I lived in a Hell’s Kitchen loft, and from its windows I
could see a patch of the Hudson River. I liked knowing that the water was
there, keeping the place that I’d chosen to live, New York City, safely apart
from Ohio, the place I’d left behind. But for about fifteen years, I forgot to
look out the window. I was a restaurant critic and I was eating, drinking,
inhaling the city, writing books and stories, living the life that I’d imagined
when I was growing up in Columbus.
But in the mid-1990s, I began to stare at the river. Work was great, life
was good, but there I was, staring at its far shore in the direction I’d come
from. I did not imagine any connection between my reveries and my sudden
mania for transforming my terrace into a small farm. To my mind, the
container garden was an early expression of locavorism. After the garden, a
dog moved in with the boyfriend. And as far as I was concerned, these
creatures and cultivars accounted for my otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm
to follow the river north to find a weekend house.
I had no trouble explaining to myself the difference between my city and
country cooking. My Manhattan kitchen was not all that different from the
restaurants where I’d worked: I imagined a dish, I ordered the ingredients—
et voilà!: Centerfold Cuisine. But there was no such cornucopia ninety
miles up the river from Manhattan. The availability, not imagination,
determined dinner. The best produce that the local farms had to offer was
sold in the city; what was left required long, slow, homey cooking to coax
out its flavor.
Nevertheless, at Manhattan’s restaurants, at dinner parties and charity
events, my colleagues and other members of the food cognoscenti began to
talk about the end of American home cooking. The argument was that the
more people spend on their kitchen range, the less likely they are to cook on
the thing and that the fastest-growing department in grocery stores was the
prepared foods. One survey found that an increasing number of Americans
tuned in to the Food Network on their kitchen TVs so they’d have someone
cooking. In New York City, dinner had long meant eating out, or getting
take-out, which was no longer my experience. But I refused to believe that
this philosophy had crossed the Hudson and infiltrated the mainland.
To reassure myself, I called each of my five brothers in Ohio. Our
conversations were less than comforting.
“How many times a week do you cook dinner at home?” I asked.
“How are you defining cooking?” one answered warily.
I was soon reading reports that somewhere between supersizing and the
current romance of farmers’ markets, Americans had stopped cooking. The
possibility that the results might be true gave me a sense of urgency about
finding true American cooking.
My weekends upstate began to stretch to four days. I cooked more, ate
out less, spent days lurking on food sites chatting with people about what
they cooked and why. A wall of my study was soon covered with historic
maps of the United States: the Armour Company’s Food Source Map (“The
Greatness of the United States is founded on Agriculture”), the hog-shaped
Porcineograph, and Miguel Covarrubias’s Map of Good Eating were soon
joined by contemporary examples like Gary Nabhan’s Regional Map of
North America’s Place-Based Food Traditions, the National Golden Arches
Locator, and Kentfield’s America Eats Organic Coast to Coast. I spent a
year reading American food writing and constructing maps of my own—
what was grown, what was eaten, when, why, and by whom.
I’ve never known a food-obsessed person who did not have someone in a
cotton apron—a grandmother or mother, an uncle, a father, a neighbor, a
teacher—standing behind them who could turn an ordinary meal into an
extraordinary one and make the world seem larger, full of heart, and
bursting with possibility. But these American cooks had been forgotten over
the past several decades as “cooking” morphed into “cuisine.” I wanted to
find them and cook with them and get a taste of their America. I had no idea
that I’d also find a part of myself.
In 2001, I packed my maps and divided the country into roughly twenty-
five geographic patches. I traveled to a particular spot for a few weeks or
months, and then returned home to write and cook. I was aided and abetted
in my search by motley crews of local food obsessives. Comprised of food
cart owners and retired food editors, local dining clubs, slow food
consortiums, gourmet societies and cooking contest winners, grocers,
bloggers, farmers who grow the high quality ingredients that lure fine cooks
and people who live to eat, these advance teams guided me into corners of
the nation where cooking is still something that pulls people together.
Some communities come together around long-established feasts—
Maine’s beanhole dinner and clambake; the St. Pius Barbecued Mutton day
in Kentucky; New Mexico’s horno tamales; the fish boils of Door County,
Wisconsin. Others converge for what the writer Jonathan Gold describes as
Folkloric Food: fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, and French fries, clam
chowder, boiled lobster, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese, which
are as much about cultural identity as they are about dinner. Still others
converge for occasions—family reunions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, coming-
of-age ceremonies in New Mexico, the Blessing of the Fleet in
Provincetown, Indian Diwali feasts, and Iranian No-Rooz. And then there
are the smaller tables that bring families and friends together. I found
melting-pot moments and incidents of “unmeltable” pots, but the nation I
discovered was more like one big table.
Almost as soon as I decamped from one place at this table to another, I
knew that the reports of the demise of home cooking were greatly
overstated. I found a preponderance of grocery stores, markets, and
farmstands with stocks of uncooked food—irrefutable evidence that most
homes still contain working kitchens—and observed many people preparing
dinner.
The more miles I logged, the clearer it became that “Americans don’t
cook” is an updated version of an old slur. From the birth of the nation until
quite recently, Europeans and those Americans who measure culture in
relationship to European society claimed that Americans can’t cook. The
assertion may have been reality-based in the nation’s early days—rare is the
culture that mints a refined cuisine before it clears the wilderness and
establishes communities—but in more than 300,000 miles, I found that my
fellow citizens can and do cook. Some cook badly, some cook well, all cook
to say who they are and where they come from.
Recipes are family stories, tales of particular places and personal
histories. They bear witness to the land and waterways, to technology and
invention, to immigration, migration, ambition, disappointment, triumph,
and most of all, change.
After stalking the country’s best cooks by region, I spent several years in
the home kitchens of recent immigrants. And then I had the good fortune to
spend a year creating potluck dinners across the United States that raised
money for 232 local food banks and brought me recipes and covered dishes
to consider for this book. Hundreds of additional recipes arrived from
magazines, newsletters, and Internet postings, from friends and friends of
friends, from people I’d met, and people who’d heard about my quest. My
tower of recipes began to resemble Pisa’s.
When cooks were conflicted about which of their recipes to offer to this
project, I often said: “Which recipe embodies your life and times and your
own personal America? If you could leave one recipe to your family, which
one would it be?”
In the end, it was the endless highway that showed me the most about
American cooking. Between the tasty tidbits and the occasional stomach-
turner, I experienced the narcotic rumble of the road, the fear (and frequent
reality) of getting lost, the fatigue and tedium. Then, turning a corner, I
would meet someone in a kitchen, or digging a pit on a beach, or stoking
the coals in an oil-drum smoker. American cooks are wacky, idiosyncratic,
and heartfelt. They refuse to bow to time constraints, overwork, and media
pressure, refuse to eat like everybody else, insist on making their dinner—
and often their lives—with their own hands.
Americans don’t have to cook anymore. Those who choose to cook are
throwbacks, the last living cowboys, Huck Finns, would-be Julias,
embracing America’s unbridled individuality. Many are capable of creating
deliciousness. Most cook from the heart as well as from a distinctly
American yearning, something I could feel, but couldn’t describe until
thousands of miles of highway helped me identify it in myself: hometown
appetite.
“We all have hometown appetites,” wrote the cookbook author
Clementine Paddleford in 1960, “every other person is a bundle of longing
for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the
hometown [he or she] left behind.” This book is a journey through hundreds
of the “hometowns” that fuel the American appetite, recipe by recipe, bite
by bite.
Over the past decade, I collected more than 10,000 recipes, tested about
one-third of them, and narrowed the final collection down to around 600. In
the winnowing process, there were many duplicates. Generally they were
recipes that had first appeared in old cookbooks or cooking pamphlets
issued by food manufacturers, became “standards,” and were then passed
from one generation to the next. When their origins were lost, these dishes