Foods Of All Stripes

- David Kamp

James Beard, the paterfamilias of America-first gastronomy, was evangelical in his zeal to awaken the U.S. to its culinary riches, to remind the nation that it’s so much more than burgers and Velveeta.

As a cookbook author and consultant, he transmuted his happy Oregon childhood grilling razor clams on the beach into a busy adulthood advocating the embrace of native ingredients and local foodways. In 1959, at Manhattan’s new Four Seasons restaurant, he helped devise a menu that included Amish ham steak, Hudson River shad roe, and stone crabs from Florida. Years later, Beard worked with the young chef Larry Forgione at Brooklyn’s River Café to develop a bill of fare that, in the words of the critic Gael Greene, “mimicked a Rand McNally road map: Peconic bay scallops, Smithfield ham, morel mushrooms and wild huckleberries, and farmed buffalo from Michigan.”

This gastronomic litany is echoed by Gabrielle Langholtz in her introduction to America: The Cookbook, in which she urges Americans to consider the good eatin’ they may be missing out on by simple virtue of geography: “crab cakes and cracklins, fiddleheads and fatback, huckle berries and huevos, corn and conch, peanuts and peaches.”