welcome good evening this is as large a crowded as I think we've ever had in the roughly 15 years of this cuisine and culture series and there at least two good reasons for that for most an extraordinarily distinguished speaker professor Paul Friedman of Yale of whom I'll say more in a moment but also his subject which is the rise and fall of French cuisine in the United States and I've noticed that a very large percentage of the people here are roughly in my age cohort which means they they married and had children in the late 50s and during the 60s and they cooked out of mastering the Art of French Cooking I baywatch Julia Child on TV right after their kids were finished seeing Sesame Street and they saved up for birthday and anniversary really special celebrations so they could eat at La Palma cheer Lebec father the cafe's overall Chambord Caravelle la côte Basque and if it was really a super celebration the tests or lip have young so I think all of what I'm calling us are very excited by this subject professor Friedman though a scholar of culinary history his scholarship in history has a broad sweep he is the Chester D trip professor of history at Yale he's chaired the department he served as director of the of undergraduate studies in history he's an expert on medieval Catalan and Spanish history and has many articles and books that have been published on that subject he edited food the history of taste wrote a marvelous book out of the East spices and the medieval imagination and the next book I understand he will be publishing is entitled ten restaurants that changed America so I think we have reason to invite him back for at least three more presentations well spaced them out but we'll invite him back we we and I should add that he was a member of the school of historical studies here at the Institute from 1986 to 1987 so he's coming home before I invite him up to the podium I wanted to offer a third reason that I think so many of us came this evening which is that his title reminded us that right over there on Wednesday and Friday evenings when the white tablecloths come out we have what maybe probably is the best French restaurant in New Jersey maybe the best restaurant in New Jersey and though it may just be one of the last bastions of a dying tradition we do some of us like to think that it's one of a number of launching pads for a revival and that so next decade when Professor Friedman speaks on this subject some of us are hoping the title will be the rise fall and rise again of French cuisine in America so please welcome professor Paul Friedman thank you for such a kind and flattering introduction I'm gonna talk more about decline than rise because it's it's I think more of a mystery and my other gloss to the introduction is the cafe Chambord I remember as a child my father coming back from a meal there and telling my mother with incredulity that a cup of coffee cost fifty cents of the Catholic john-boy I do want to begin with another story that involves my father who whose 90th birthday was in 2007 and my father loved Omar al American les lobster dish that I'm sure many of you know some people believe that it's Omar al American from Brittany this is not true it's Omar I mean I can because it has tomatoes in it and it is almost unfindable today in the United States not easy to find even in France I should think but we used to go to a restaurant called mom potty in the I think East 20s or 30s near where my mother worked and that's what my father had all the time so for his 90th birthday trying to find a restaurant in New York that had this dish and I thought of making a contest of it to see who could come up with the name of one of the few surviving restaurants that could do this but I never was good at that sort of game it's little petit Gore on I think 59th and 1st so I'm not the first person to have written about I'm you know the the learner tradition is to go through a survey of the literature I'm not the first person to have written about or thought about the decline of French cuisine there is a book called au revoir to all that by Michael Steinberg er it's subtitle is food wine and the end of France and it's too melodramatic as the subtitle indicates it it attributes the decline of French gastronomy 'he's reputation to the malaise of france over-regulation bureaucracy economic decline but that really won't do not only is it not clear that Frances economy is so malfunctioning but Italy has all of these problems and many more and yet its food reputation is flourishing but I'm only really secondarily interested in what has been happening in friends my subject is the decline of French cuisine in America a chapter of the dossier on the waning of France's international gastronomic hegemony in the 1964 edition of Craig claybournes New York Times guide to dining out in New York there were eight three-star restaurants only the coach-house and since we're talking about a generation that remembers places like that only the coach-house had three stars and it was the only American restaurant that's so described itself in New York and not only the top restaurants there were dozens of French restaurants at every level modest neighborhood haunts such as Mon petit where we used to go or Brittany du soir or the cafe Brittany on the west side near the French line modestly elegant places like lahpet Agora of this dozens of places there are literally only a handful of survivors in an era in which the number of restaurants in New York has gone up exponentially in which the number of types of cuisines and people now distinguishing between obscure provinces of China orbs provinces of Italy for that matter frankly cuisine apart from bistros and sort of quick move freak kinds of places is in decline and this decline is not in my opinion just a question of a fashion change and I think this is why it has historical interest the long term hegemony of French cuisine is really truly long term it certainly is a phenomenon of modernity it starts in the 17th or at the latest early 18th century it can be argued that it perhaps starts as early as the 14th century with a career of Tai Avant the author of the largest selling nor at least most prominent medieval cookbook I'll come back to the sort of background of the French culinary hegemony but I'd like to set it in a kind of context from the era when the cafe Chambord or of the La Caravelle or lapa beyond were distinguished the first is from 1969 when the second is from 1975 in 1969 an issue of holiday magazine featured the question what is the greatest restaurant in the world and they asked all ego and Christian mio to mull over this question going mio would go on to be very famous for their guidebook to French dining they would also become famous as advocates of nouvelle cuisine which was not quite launched in 1969 but within two years would be but in 1969 they are they assumed in this article published in an American magazine that the only really serious cuisine in the world is French they acknowledge their preconceptions up front and respond to any anticipated criticism Tom P they then proceeded to eliminate most of the world from further consideration the Soviet Union and China had deliberately wiped out whatever possibilities and culinary traditions they had in fact according to go the best Chinese food is not to be found in Hong Kong or Singapore but in San Francisco he loved the Imperial Palace the Middle East save Francophile Lebanon is a wasteland Latin America and Eastern Europe are quote gastronomically underprivileged Africa is a total loss except for Dakar in Senegal oh and Marrakesh in Morocco as for the anglo-saxon world it suffers from a surfeit of pretentious and inauthentic international cuisine but go asks me yo aren't there some good even great restaurants in London Montreal New York of course but the chef's are all French once safely in Europe they're a little happier but they're still contemptuous about the food of Spain and Portugal ordinary and heavy and they disagree about Italy interestingly enough go complains I don't have a single exciting memory except for the scampi at Harry's Bar in Venice mio however defends at least a few restaurants the dough DT Apostoli in Verona sabbatini's in Florence and Giannino in Milan Danish food is of good quality mio remarks and quote children liked it very much Belgium is full of honorable but not quite top restaurants in Switzerland they cook in the French manner adequately but without spark and so now really relieved they turn to France and they then discuss 25 restaurants the rest of the world has maybe three that are Ameri any discussion the you 25 restaurants include the usual Parisian suspects toward our jaw gone before Lucca carton but also chez Denis whose owner they deem mad for his utter disregard of expense $20 per person and lofty indifference to his customers misguided preferences the duck must be served bloody or not at all the final competition comes down to two restaurants nearly on WIC interestingly enough our are both still survived in some fashion Baku's and Quattro so they they they decided that both of them aren't winners row is more traditional the brothers who owned it at the time were working for the sake of art whereas Pabu coos is more of an innovator he's working for fame one represents wisdom the other glory they're complementary we know the path that would be followed that would be the book whose path obviously he is the first modern celebrity chef however arrogant about dismissing the rest of the world however overconfident in assuming the preeminence of France that the critics embody an opinion that is not just happens to be the opinion of 1969 but the opinion of 1869 of 1769 French restaurants French cuisine France is the capital the tastemaker in a literal sense of the world the second vignette just briefly Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franny's meal at chez Denis the madman mentioned by going mio this was in 1975 American Express had a donation to the channel 13 in New York which was a generous but perhaps naive they offered a free meal anywhere in the world for - and Claiborne bid five hundred dollars three hundred dollars and forgot all about it because he selected some high roller to pay in the thousands amazingly he won anywhere in the world they had said the sky's the limit they had said probably they regretted this che Denis was small but ruinously expensive its clientele included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Orson Welles assorted millionaires when millionaire meant something titled heads government ministers Claiborne and brainy started with beluga caviar than three soups wild duck consummation Germany soup and veloute an Tulum then seafood oysters Lobster and red mullet then partridge chicken filet de boeuf olga pálinka edition beloved by Orson Welles and that that concluded the first service my secret is small portions at Claiborne a non tract of surveys orange lemon and blackcurrant proceeded a second service portal all these tiny grilled Birds eaten Hall followed by wild duck loin of veal with whole truffles puree of artichoke hearts pomme de terre Anna then fresh wild duck foie gras cold Woodcock fillets cooked in Chembur 10 wild pheasant with nuts mushrooms and more truffles and this was the end of the second service and then the third service was pastries candies preserves fruit there were there were 33 dishes served in all took four and a half hours Denis said of the food it's really just things to go with wine and indeed the wines are very very impressive I won't I won't bore you with the Latour 1918 I won't even go into the Moorish a 1969 the Lafitte Rothschild 47 the patru 61 the romanée-conti 19 okay you get the idea the cost was about $4,000 which would be about $17,000 now and while impressive I'm you know you could not get that for 17,000 could get anything near this but this is the last gasp of not a French luxury cuisine but of American adoration of it Claiborne received a lot of adverse publicity for this stunt but he had not expected scorn for the excess and the scorn is not exactly on moral or financial grounds certainly self-indulgence plays into it expense plays into it 1975 was not a great year in the American economy but it's really that it's so Verger to try to see how extravagant a meal you could order in France it has a kind of we don't really do that anymore it seems like wearing a Nehru jacket or something like that and it's the end of a very long tradition of adoration of France in America the invention of the restaurant in its modern form took place in Paris shortly before the Revolution the first restaurant in America and I can you know tell you what I think restaurant means as opposed to ends or shop houses but the first real restaurant in America was Delmonico's a French restaurant established in the 1830s and it was the most acclaimed and most imitated model for restaurants in America throughout the 19th century the prestige of French culinary taste was established everywhere in the nineteenth and most of the 20th century the fanciest restaurant in Mexico City in the this period was the Maison door hey the Hermitage was the leading restaurant in Moscow the Union Hotel served the best of of course French food in Melbourne and you know one can go on and on with every city of the world at the 1861 coronation dinner for King vilhelm the first of Prussia the menu was entirely in French and it includes Pula de Manila to lose tambala talleyrand and foie gras on Bellevue or a meal served in 1910 at the Grand Hotel des and in Batavia now Jakarta Indonesia for seals no concession to the cuisine or climate of Java cosume mamuro C filet de boeuf garni le chatelier's imagine eating this in Indonesia filet de sole Alam Eva a scallop de lis Davao elavil agua sweetbreads ala Villa Wong another distant homage to the prestige of French cuisine comes from Tombstone Arizona in the 1880s own silver mining created overnight a boomtown the hotels and restaurants of Tombstone vied to offer the dishes the same as Delmonico's or the same as Paris though with less confident mastery of the French language so we get chicken saute ala Marengo with white wine and mushrooms vo freakin dough Omid air which i think is with Madeira sauce sliced vo brazier fried with Madeira sauce beef ala mode which is very standard beef which is larded and braised apple fritters with wine sauce a place called the Occidental Chop House featured Sami of duck with olives freaking dough of eel with vegetables and then the menu starts to get out of control glass croquettes de Vivar asparagus plant a vol-au-vent or bombed vom they fritter alle Maryland a Volvo Avant is a pastry shell a fritter is a fried item on a Maryland I don't know exactly what that means in this content but there's no doubt who's setting the standard the high-end standard for the world and the United States however ludicrous some of the manifestations of the supremacy might be and this is not just a phenomenon of the 19th century look papi you know of course was established in the seemingly inauspicious year 1941 universally regarded as the leading restaurant in New York until the late 60s in 2013 by contrast the San Pellegrino ranking of top restaurants of the world has not a single French restaurant in the top ten El Salado con Rocca is number one in Catalonia Noma in Denmark it's number two Austria franciscana in Modena about which king Kramer recently wrote in The New Yorker Mugaritz in the Basque Country of Spain Eleven Madison Park the only American entry do em in Sao Paulo dinner by Heston Blumenthal Arzak a third one in Spain sty Rica in Vienna and Vaughn dome in bearish glovebox in Germany the top-ranked restaurant in France is our page which is a vegetarian restaurant the beginning of the end came as in a way it did in the Soviet Union with an effort at reform nouvelle cuisine and movement to the 1970s and so it's ironic that the rediscovery or efforts to reform French cuisine should have been responsible to some extent for the end of its global power in stein Berger's book steinberger thinks that this was a missed opportunity that nouvelle cuisine had it been successful or have they kept on it would have displaced the Catalan and Basque Van Guardia that displaced France initially in the 1990s I actually think nouvelle cuisine was a failed reform that couldn't work a fateful change that far from rebuilding showed the weakness of the established order this was not the first nouvelle cuisine in French history it had a predecessor in the 1740s with which were so was associated and indeed French cuisine strength has been periodic reforms that rediscover the primacy of the ingredients the importance of quality and that try to get rid of the ornamentation and elaboration that can mask or makeup for inadequate primary ingredients going me yo were eloquent on laser heard la cuisine the old sauces you know sitting on the stove for days - which scraps were added the lack of freshness or distinction the reliance on formula they emphasized you know there are examples of bad food sound like the same things that went on in the United States in the 1970s Coco van made with industrial chicken and sub burgundy wine tornado Rossini Lobster Thermidor heavy and complicated must relized bechamel sauces poor quality or even fake snails in which the garlic butter hides the ingredients their skulls and they're certainly right of the abuse of frozen ingredients the use of farmed ingredients to some extent it reads like a locavore or a seasonal manifesto but it's also a an example of the Japanese influence on modern food which is perhaps the most important beauty simplicity color and high price they actually had a number of sort of points in their manifesto lightness rather than richness so do away with rich sauces that have murdered so many livers and concealed so much tasteless flesh reduced cooking time abolition of Raghu's and other sauces based on thick things like flour small portions on large plates great attention to ingredients and so likely seventeen 18th century reforms simple but not keep a small menu a mission of Asian influences aesthetic as I said in Kappa knees terms as well as gastronomic the most important innovation is the chef as creative auteur not as guardian of true now many of these as I said are reforms that have been incorporated into changes in global cuisine and particularly dramatic King is as in American cuisine the places like Chez Panisse founded in 1971 but many of these could be easily abused you get the sort of Asian influence or the emphasis on ingredients you get odd combinations that nouvelle cuisine became famous for vanilla flavored sweet breads maple syrup on everything chanterelles with pumpkin sauce star anise and ravioli in a pot of these are all real examples nouvelle cuisine of the 1970s had two sides which have actually since gone separate ways primary ingredients simply prepared which has had a tremendous impact on the American rediscovery of local and seasonal food the other is a paradoxical new complexity that results from breaking with tradition all culinary movements of simplification become transformed into culinary movements of complexity partly at the instigation of chefs who get bored and partly because of this notion of the chef as creator once you separate chefs from the sort of artisan idea that they are reproducing as best as possible a tradition and make them creative geniuses then you have created something that is not in the control of any one nation or any one gastronomic tradition and that's certainly part of what has happened to French power in this area so the second tendency in addition to that of local seasonal food primacy of ingredients is what is sometimes called molecular gastronomy at its most avant-garde wing but it also includes things like Asian fusion or fusion cuisine generally new textures transformation of ingredients new ingredients the the visible aspects of Frances decline besides things like the rankings are the triumph of Spain there's an article in The New York Times in 2004 at the height of Ferran adrià zell bui where the author just assumes that France is quote tired I think he has an excessively you know this year we're doing this kind of fashion orientation it's like handbags are big and now handbags are small I think though there is there are several things going on and I don't have a single key to this and it's typical of historians that they like multiple rather than elegant explanations for the decline of French cuisine in the United States the I already mentioned the breakdown of boundaries and the lack of rules not who has the best canals or who makes the best duck a L'Orange dishes with which one is familiar but the inventiveness on the high-end and that includes things I've never had before oh I never had these weird berries and seaweed that I had at Noma it tasted like nothing else I've ever had but also elevating burgers or pizza to iconic status there's a high end and a low end or the obliteration of the difference between high-end and low-end the falling off of taste for richness for butter cream in particular the chefs artists rather than master craftsmen also means that chefs are not trained that are simply gifted and rise of self trained chefs the love of variety over standard standards or rules so America has always been or for 150 years has been distinguished by variety if not by intrinsic quality immigration ethnic restaurants New York as the culinary capital as the largest city and as the largest recipient of immigrants have forwarded this this is not new but the the blurring of the boundaries in the end of French and Germany has allowed other cuisines and stars like John David Chang is his cuisine Korean is his cuisine and David Chang's cuisine is certainly asian-inspired I would also say the real culprit in this if there has to be a rival cuisine is Italy Italy because it moves from ample low-end what now is dismissed as red sauce Chianti bottle with a candle in it restaurants to high-end and this is a very hard thing to do Chinese cuisine which we all acknowledge has a tremendously elegant tradition it's very very hard for Chinese restaurants to charge more than a rather low price and and to get non Chinese people to go to them whereas Italy has been able to keep a repertoire of neighborhood Italian foods pizzerias and the like and to have the kinds of places where for $150 supplement they'll great fresh truffles on your dish right now even as we speak since it's the season and you can see this in the history of Chez Panisse and I want to end with Chez Panisse because it is both V which is in my little list of ten restaurants that changed America and and people in the food world will doubt some of the other choices but nobody doubts Chez Panisse sure there were French restaurants before it has a French name but it goes from being a French restaurant that emphasizes the primacy of ingredients that emphasizes local cuisine in terms of suppliers and farmers to something that is called California cuisine although Alice Waters herself does not like the term Alice Waters herself says the restaurant is exactly the way it was in 1971 except it's more Italian I don't think that's true I think there is such a thing as California cuisine I don't think the restaurant is that at times but you can see the change if you look at their menus from the late 70s in the early 80s the two influences that come in to undermine a kind of canals and Coco van cassoulet through crude lobster American style are Provence all food and Italian food this is a restaurant that had almost no pasta until the 1980s the Provencal in the Italian influence mean rather simple kinds of cooking grilling marinating and grilling just marinating an emphasis on the primary ingredients more vegetables fewer sauces lighter sauces all of the kinds of things that have been incorporated into what's called new American cuisine the medium it seems to me actually is Italian and that's one reason why Italian food has taken up a lot of the high-end room that was once occupied by French food finally I guess two things one is I think this is an interesting subject as of course the history of cuisine but also the history of culture and the perception of class and of elegance and that's really what got me interested in food is what do upper-class people eat what do lower-class people eat and even more important what do upper and lower class people think that the other classes eat what foods are endowed with prestige and of course when I started teaching at Vanderbilt in 1979 the despised cuisine was that of people like those who lived in Appalachia who grew their own fruits and vegetables canned them had chickens in their backyard and now those same people are condemned for eating processed foods and the well-off have chickens in their backyard and shop at farmer's markets the other thing I wanted to remark is really what I should have said at the opening I was at the Institute as a member in 1986 1989 I cannot express how much of a difference it made to my career to my intellectual formation and the presence of Giles and Pat Constable up Java constable and Pat wolf make me even more conscious of the debt that I owe to the Institute and the pleasure I take it being here thank you very much I would be glad to to respond to questions we have the microphone here to what extent do you think changes in attitudes about health particularly heart health led to people fleeing French cuisine I think as I said the the sense that French cuisine is rich and is certainly part of it I don't think that it is unhealthful or that what people do I mean I think that a lot of perceptions of healthful and unhealthful are inaccurate so fish is regarded as healthful and light but I think it probably is you know more dangerous than many other kinds of food because of pollution so yes of course but I think that that's a question of image and it's it's certainly an American preoccupation that is spreading to the rest of the world but is stronger in America might you comment upon the popularity or lack thereof of French bistro and browser requisite as opposed to the four and a half hour $17,000 right high-end extravaganzas right right so a bistros and brasseries are there certainly are plenty of them and so steak frites mole frites Keef Lauren they all have pasta in their american incarnation they are a kind of Minoan I like them a lot but you know I have a I have some friends in Pelham where I live who opened a restaurant called Bistro rollin five years ago and they now wish they didn't have a friend named even the even the Bistro that this perception of French food as expensive as old-fashioned as maybe not helpful if you look at their menu it's full of now sort of American and local food a lot of Italian things you know Bistro lion burger so I think that these these are bistros all right and they have some French dishes but they're they're succeeding by taking advantage of the coolness remaining in French culture and getting rid of most of the culinary parts of it because of your obviously very educated interest in food what would you say is the most popular cuisine in the US and thereafter what would you say is the best restaurant for that cuisine I think Italian or Chinese mmm and within a more narrow circumscription a kind of cuisine that might go under the name of Brooklyn or Bay Area so Italian for reasons that I have mentioned I am I don't actually live in New Haven but I will say that the New Haven pizzerias are still still the best and at the high end you know it's hard to it's hard to choose I think I'll punt on that one or solicit your opinions and then the third New American or sort of Brooklyn I think here too it's kind of it's kind of hard French Laundry pretty obvious Alinea in the sort of molecular category which I don't think is going to endure but nevertheless in Chicago this is a splendid example of high-end restaurants of international quality yeah I would just like to recommend a low-end restaurant in New York City it's a French bistro no pasta absolutely fabulous low-priced wines shame Napoleon on 50th Street it is a really old-fashioned Bistro the family's been there for 50 years it's been a Shayna polla hey Napoleon yeah Welsh a Napoleon is one of those survivals certainly that I have mentioned and it's more than I would say it's even more than a bistro it's informal but it is a real restaurant because the dishes mentioned all of them anything but okra zine Coco van any cuisine so standards well okay there are two movements that one is the late 19th century discovery within France of provincial cuisine so suddenly dishes supplement the oat cuisine traditions as late as the time-life cookbooks you may remember there is a a volume of oat cuisine of what are already in 1971 unreproducible at home dishes you know that take four days or that you know begin with making gloss to beyond out of whole animals and then a cooking of provincial France but the and so if you look at 19th century American menus like that of Delmonico's they have no Coco van they have no cassoulet they have no recruit absolutely not they have lots of things in champagne sauce or you know things with Alice ooby's or really or and these are the repertoire of classic French cuisine but if you look at the menu of lapa vo it's a kind of combination and sulla would introduce a certain number of what he regarded as the treasures particularly of the south so you're quite right but it is it is partly a question of the steps of a transformation of what cuisine at one time was indeed indeed but the the movements that get most attention are things like these very little restaurants that have a tiny staff there's a there's a name this sort of economical restaurants and more artisanal restaurants and unfortunately the grand tradition the Tour d'Argent kind of tradition well it has an international tourist wealthy tourist right but even tie Avant let's say right and they still are guarding the traditional I'm not saying that the flame is out I'm just saying that that's a guttering indeed indeed I totally agree I don't think it's justified I'm just telling you a phenomenon about the United States when I was growing up in New York City there was a Eastern European Jewish style delicatessen practically in every corner and now I don't think there are more than four right what do you attribute this terrible loss right I think what I'm trying to point out is that in an era in which we celebrate the diversity and you know people are food crazy there are many wonderful cuisines that have either disappeared or are near to disappearing in the case of Jewish delicatessens part of it has to do with the idea that the food is not healthy again part of it has to do with the children not going into the occupations of their parents some of it has to do with the same reason why Koreans don't run fruit markets anymore in New York the new generation aspires to something different there is a movement to save this there's a book called save the deli actually and then there's a an autobiography by the guy who runs Russ & Daughters who got a law degree but then who went back into the family business Russ & Daughters a store on Houston so I'm glad you raised that point because it shows that there are a number of different tradition gehrman cuisine at one time common in the United States in fact arguably the first so-called ethnic cuisine as far back as the mid 19th century there are even fewer German restaurants than classic French restaurants in New York so yeah there there there are a number of these they all do share an image of you know high fat high richness but there are other paradoxes for example there must be 10 times as many Filipinos immigrants to New York as Thai yet there are like two Filipino restaurants in New York City that that anybody who is not Filipino knows about and and how many time restore restaurants claiming to be time why is that perhaps this is an unfair question to ask a historian but would you be willing to project or take some speculation about 20 years from now or 50 years yeah I think a lot has to do will depend on ecology and the future of the food supply one of the things that is the most striking looking at 19th century American menus is the number of prestige dishes that now could not be reproduced because the species is either gone or are threatened the two most prestigious dishes 3-months prestigious dishes in the United States in the 19th century our oysters we have a fighting chance of coming back canvasback ducks and Terrapin and the two latter are you know hard or impossible to procure so a lots going to depend on whether the oceans still have fish for example having said that it's always hard not to be enamored of the trends that are taking place now I think that the change towards seasonality and respect for local ingredients for respect for the ingredients and quality is the most dramatic change because it goes against American tradition American tradition in food has been to emphasize variety rather than quality you have 40 kinds of ice cream it's not all that great but it does come in 40 different kinds the reason that it's not all that great is because it's very hard to do on an industrial level industrial production of stuff like orange juice or ice cream or soo or anything pastries the yogurts the the producers offer you a lot of distractions so that you won't actually look at the or experience the the basic quality anything that goes against that really revolutionizes American taste and the extent to which it is not just an elite phenomenon but one where and I would argue that it's not strictly late you can see this in the rise of farmers markets in the percentage of organic food that is sold in the US and in things like you know places like Columbus Ohio have wonderful restaurants whereas before it would have been this sort of Casa de la maison house environment that that that Calvin Calvin Trillin memorably so called continental French at home today they would start preparing a Sunday lunch in bourgeois homes where the cooking was superb I mean the mothers shopped everyday in the markets but Sunday was out cuisine the meals were quite elaborate and I wonder does that still go on in France today has there been a decline in in the cooking in the home I think if you measure it against 1960 yes because people for the same reasons as here they don't have as much time together they don't have as much time period they don't regard spending time cooking as necessarily very creative on the other hand I think that France and Paris in particular remain superior to the United States for reasons that have to do with culture people like to talk about food not just in terms of where they have been but what they have made the enthusiasm for food in America coincides with the continued decline of cooking home New York is the absolute capital of dining out and of low percentage of people actually use their kitchen for anything other than you know storing stuff and I think that's not true in France now it's not true in France in part because it's possible to shop on your way home the car doesn't dominate it's not still a suburban eyes one of the problems you know if you tell people you ought to cook at home more you know it's it's much easier than you think it's much more healthful it's spiritually enriching it doesn't have to take a whole lot of time but then you have to really be able to shop more than once a week or once every other week and many people don't live in places where it's easy to pick something up on the way home I mean you know something serious in the way that getting off the metro and most neighborhoods of Paris you will find charcuterie switchers fish places and so forth as an historian I would like to relate to you an interesting a side that I experienced as a child I grew up in a home that was heavily infiltrated by gastronomy my mother was a cookbook collector and also in the late 70s wrote a book that the New York Times judged as one of the ten best of the year was called the delectable past and it was a conversion of recipes from around the world from his farm south as the 1450s her name was Esther arrestee and one evening or one day she was friendly with Craig Claiborne you know he used to come down occasionally and spend the day cooking with her in our kitchen I never witnessed it I was ushered out of the house or I may not have been living at home at that point but I remember that the meal that emanated from the kitchen that was the most famous was what one might consider to be very mundane it was a beautiful roast with roast vegetables and roast onions and roast potatoes and it was thoroughly enjoyed by him it was not anything fancy or French or Italian or anything else to remember but roasting is one thing that people don't do anymore um this is this is the Thanksgiving problem right many people many people only use their oven for Thanksgiving and you know NPR has stopped just swatting away calls on I'm sorry like how do I turn my oven on or or do I need to put this in a metal pan or you know so yes yes I think I think we are rediscovering certain aspects of food as pleasure and satisfaction both creatively and of course most of all sensually but there are some things that we still don't do oh that people did routinely in for better or worse in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when people dined out maybe 20% of the time on average instead of 60% as it is now I think we're called to dinner I hope you're hungry
