Gordon Ramsay famously attributes his US success to Americans ignorance of fine cuisine. Felicity Cloake pleads different.
Award-winning British food writer Peach Street to Lobster Lane aims to subvert the myth of American cuisine as deep-fried and culturally devoid in her latest book. “On this journey, I’m determined to find this unicorn, cover it with ketchup and pickles and have it for lunch,” she says.
She travels coast to coast throughout the US over ten weeks and several thousand kilometers, discovering independent eateries, fusion cuisine, and a way of eating she has never seen anywhere else in the world. Her food-obsession drives her from San Francisco’s most sophisticated sourdough to the hamburger house in Columbus, Ohio. She visits the origins of Tabasco on Avery Island and feasts on crawfish during an unintentional stop in Houston along the route.
Her assignment is To learn what, if anything, links American cuisine together and to honor the inventiveness, history, and heart she finds all around her.
Given the theme is a bit complex, I doubt my publisher would be receptive to my stating that they were a touch slow. If you do not already adore America and its cuisine, it is tough to see beyond the top-line cliches of McDonald’s, KFC, outrageous eating competitions and too much on the plate. It does not sound really appealing.
But I was considering the fantastic Mexican cuisine and all the many immigrant cuisines available. Cooking in America offers many more possibilities, entertainment value, and freedom. For many things, they do not feel so bound to custom as we do in Europe. Finding this very playful attitude to eating that shows out in very entertaining but harmful things like, you know, a cheeseburger with doughnuts instead of a bun excites me greatly.
