I’m a little too young to have watched Julia Child do her French Chef on PBS. I am actually too young to have watched the French Chef on SNL. My mom always had a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but other than that, I was not very aware of the canon of American cookery. My mom was was and is a very good cook, but we lived in midsized cities in the 90s, so it wasn’t like Alice Waters was opening restaurants in our neighborhoods.
But I ended up getting my master’s degree in foodways, and these names became my life. The United States of Arugula is a family album of sorts that brings together all these biographies and styles and shows you how they fit together to inform each others’ recipes and restaurants.
David Kamp has written a lot of books about popular culture (food, wine, rock music), and he has a very direct way of saying what he thinks. I kind of liked that with The Rock Snob’s Dictionary, but…okay, we’ll get back to that.
What’s cool about Arugula is spelled out in the first pages of the preface, namely that the last forty or so years have been a sea change in the way Americans eat. I can vouch for that: people are more interested in knowing where you source your sorrel than they were five years ago. People know what sorrel is, which was not the case five years ago. My mom has a friend whose grandfather introduced broccoli to America. Let me run that by you again: no one was eating broccoli in 1925 in America. It was not something available for purchase. Isn’t that wild?
