(Following up a tirade appearing, please note, in a thread on "acidity.")


--
1. Schoonmaker and Marvel commence their prescient 1941 book (contributions
by Amerine, Olmo, Winkler, Carl Bundschu, and Alexis Lichine) with a chapter
on Wine Hokum:


Wine Hokum, broadly speaking, is all the things people can find out about
wine without ever drinking it. Wine Hokum may be regarded as a parasitic
fungus growth that can gain foothold on its host only where the tonic
lifeblood of experiment, enthusiasm, and enjoyment is absent. The victim of
Hokum exhibits symptoms of nervousness in the presence of wine, followed by
a mounting fever of pretense and snobbishness. In the chronic stages, Hokum
confers upon its unhappy host confronted with wine, the characteristic
demeanor known familiarly as a stiff neck -- a sure sign the parasite has
done its work.

Where wine is abundantly enjoyed, Hokum withers and dies. Thus we find
Hokum most prevalent where wine is least drunk.

[Authors then demonstrate with numbers that the US is far from a
wine-drinking culture by world standards -- then even more so than now.
They address attitudes after the US Prohibition, which loomed large in
memory then, having ended six years before their 1940 writing.]

Whereas, in the days immediately following Repeal we found that curious
creature, the Import Snob, talking airily of French vintage years, of the
bouquet of this and the body of that, and of the hopeless position of native
American wines compared with anything from overseas, today we find his place
taken by the Patriot Snob (who is, often as not, one and the same person),
loudly proclaiming that "American wines are the best in the world."

-- Schoonmaker and Marvel, _American Wines, _ Duell, Sloan and Pearce (New
York), 1941.


--
2. From the Introduction to the extended re-issue (2000) of John L. and
Karen Hess, _The Taste of America_ (ISBN 0252068750, currently in print),
by way of review and recommendation:


[In the quarter-century since 1975,] "Kool-Aid like Mother used to make"
became Kool-Aid like Grandmother used to make, and most Americans are now
one more generation removed from the memory of real food. Sow how did the
taste of America survive that explosion of creation and destruction, of
progress and regression, of ceaseless change and limitless absurdity that
was called the American Century? Well, first the good news. We Hesses are
eating better than in 1975, when we had to bake our own bread and roast our
own coffee. In 1999, real bread is to be found again, here and there. Good
coffee arrived with Starbucks (though at steep prices, accompanied by trendy
folderol and mediocre pastry, and already showing signs of the same
corporate decay that sapped the quality of Chock full o'Nuts and Pepperidge
Farm a generation earlier). We deplored, and James Beard defended, the
ubiquitous iceberg lettuce; today, we are offered a range of salads and
greens that were unknown to most Americans in 1975, though they were
familiar to our forebears (see pp. 12 and 30).
.. . .

Another victory: We excoriated the plague of pop history and appealed for
serious study of culinary history. Though still young, it has become a
respectable discipline. A number of publishers have responded to our call
for the reedition of historic manuscripts and books. Half a dozen are
listed earlier in this volume under "Other Books by Karen Hess." Several of
them have been widely credited with awakening a large public to the enormous
contribution of Africans to the American diet. _What Mrs. Fisher Knows
About Old Southern Cooking,_ for example, is a facsimile edition of what
appears to be the first cookbook written by an African-American woman, an
ex-slave. And a lovely cookbook it is.

Pop history did not go away, however, nor did any of the other high crimes
and misdemeanors we impeached. . . . Our text stands unchanged; by and
large, what has happened to our foodways has followed paths clearly
described therein. For example, admirers of Julia Child (see "Icon Flambé,"
in the appendix) boasted [in 1975] how bad a cook _she_ had been when she
discovered cuisine; today, our most prestigious guides boast how bad their
_mothers_ were. (Ruth Reichl, recently lured by _Gourmet_ from _The New
York Times_ by a reported bonus of a million dollars, calls her mother the
Queen of Mold. Does that make her the Princess of Mold?)

For another generational shift, consider that in the closing year of the
twentieth century, a noble Meals on Wheels program sponsored by New York
chefs and foodies appealed for help with the slogan, "If you can boil water,
you're a cook." Twenty-five years ago, if you could mimic Julia Child's
gestures, you were a French chef; today, if you can boil water, you're a
cook. Actually, the latter definition is closer to reality, for the
reheating of prepared food has become the dominant form of cooking in many
homes and indeed at most public feeding stations.
.. . .

[In 1980 at a food-technology conference in New Orleans] we shared a cab
with a researcher for General Foods (now a subsidiary of something else).
"In five years," she said, "we'll have wonderful things. Everything will be
balanced nutritionally, like pet food. All we need is to educate the
public." After she debarked, the driver said, "I don't want no Alpo
diet." But his was a view not to be heard inside the Superdome, where
another vision of the future was a line of breadings to give "convenience"
foods crisp coatings designed to conceal their lack of flavor. The line was
called Newlywed Foods . . . [On this see also Quinn, _But Never Eat Out on
a Saturday Night: An Appetizing Glimpse Behind the Scenes in All Kinds of
Great American Restaurants,_ Doubleday, 1983, ISBN 0385182201 -- MH]
.. . .

Our final "De Gustibus" column in the _Times_ [Note 1] concluded, "As long
as fashion editors tell us what to eat, we shall eat badly." The line
disappeared on the copy desk. Thereafter, fashion triumphed, totally. In a
favorable report on an expensive restaurant (the only kind she reviewed),
Ruth Reichl remarked that the chef's creations "did not always work," but
they were "never boring." What could better express the ethos of fashion?
In a Reichl review, the first question posed is what sort of people dine
there. At one place, Ruth, the daughter of the Queen of Mold, swooned upon
spying the Queen of Mean, the ex-convict Leona Helmsley, in romantic
congress with an attractive younger male; unfortunately, they were out of
earshot. We're talking glamour.




[Note 1: Clarification for any outside the US, on this long-international
medium, who do not know the custom. The Hesses refer here not to _The
Times_ but as earlier, to the _New York Times._ Many regional US
newspapers respectfully took their names from the classic _The Times,_ the
one for which the honorific typeface was created; and it is traditional for
readers to cite their familiar local version always as the _Times_ whether
in New York City, Los Angeles, Ithaca NY, or wherever. This can be
confusing but is usually resoluble with context. --MH]