**Why American food avoided garlic early in the 20th century **
The Vampire-American community complained.
There are plenty of other personal testimonials in this thread, but mine is that, although my parents are both native born Italians, they didn’t use near as much garlic in their cooking as I’d learned to use in the 80’s. And as the '90’s wore on, I’d put even more in out of pure garlicy delight. THEN I’d get sassed by (excited by possible health benefits) African-American friends, “Jeez, can you at least put enough garlic in? Why hold back, you’re Italian.” I’m guessing this builds on what Kyla: said, people just became more open-minded on strong tastes in their food recently.
There where some people just had to have the plainest food possible. The sort of person who went to France on a class trip with a supply of peanut butter and jelly, and ate just that. They became rarer as time went on, but there were always a few. Like when we went out to work for sushi. And the place did have tempura and other cooked fish. But one guy just ate cookies.
You know, there’s a subplot in the beginning of Vanity Fair that revolves around eating Indian curry that’s way too hot for the typical 19th century English palate. I was startled to read that bit because I wouldn’t have assumed that spicy Indian curry was even available at the time. But apparently it was.
What, it had a bit of black pepper in it?
Ha. Sadly, Thackeray did not provide us with a recipe. I wish he had, that would be fun to recreate.
Mexican food is considered pretty lower or middle class nowadays (in the US) - not to the point that people avoid it, but it’s not generally a cuisine that’s considered “fancy”, in the sense that you might go to a fancy French or Italian restaurant. As the Mexican-American community assimilates and becomes more successful that might change, and we might see Mexican food getting more respect. Ditto Puerto Rican cuisine, which I’ve heard is actually among the most sophisticated cuisines in the world, though you’d never guess it for the little attention it receives.
This isn’t actually too weird. Quite a good chunk of Italy, basically north down to the center, uses only onions or garlic in their sauces, but not both. (for example, bolognese traditionally is onion-only.) So there’s nothing inherently un-Italian about a pasta sauce without garlic.
There’s a few nice Mexican places around here, quite good enough for a casual date. There’s also a couple of them where all the servers wear all-black outfits, right down to the necktie that both male and female servers wear. These places aren’t quite fancy enough to have mouthwash in the bathrooms (which is one of my ways to tell how fancy a place is), but they are definitely upper class in both food and prices. And we have a lot of places that are just Mexican diners, the sort of place where you will find a lunch menu offering something like 20 lunches priced for $5.99 each (NO substitutions, the menu will clearly say). Of course, we have a pretty large Mexican/Hispanic population here, and even folks who are not Hispanic descended frequently grew up eating a lot of Mexican or Tex-Mex, either in restaurants or over at a friend’s house.
Thanks. It occurred to me after hitting “submit” that the situation might be different in states like Texas or California with already long-established Mexican-American populations, and you’ve given me an answer. I think (?) it’s fair to say that in much of the rest of the country “Mexican food” and “high class” still seem a bit at odds, but I don’t doubt that will begin to change in the coming years.
I recently read in this article about Joe DiMaggio in relation to attitudes toward garlic:
Still, an ostensibly admiring 1939 profile in LIFE saw fit to highlight what the writer imagined to be DiMaggio’s Italian heritage: “Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic…”
Yes, it’s quite different in other parts of the country. In my own city, Hugo’s has fine Mexican food. Armando’s offers upscale Tex Mex for the monied crowd. Not that the prices are astronomical–but there are white tablecloths, etc. I even hear that Rick Bayless offers fine Mexican food up in Chicago.
At the beginning of the last century, “American” food was a combination of English, German & Scotch Irish cuisines. Hearty, filling & pretty bland. Immigrants from Italy & other Mediterranean countries knew about garlic, but they were considered not quite American, yet. Down South, New Orleans offered a whiff of the exotic & Tejano cooks spiced things up a bit. Eventually, more “Americans” decided that blandness was dull; WWII & travel to Europe helped.
Rodgers01 writes:
> Mexican food is considered pretty lower or middle class nowadays (in the US) -
> not to the point that people avoid it, but it’s not generally a cuisine that’s
> considered “fancy”, in the sense that you might go to a fancy French or Italian
> restaurant. As the Mexican-American community assimilates and becomes more
> successful that might change, and we might see Mexican food getting more
> respect. Ditto Puerto Rican cuisine, which I’ve heard is actually among the most
> sophisticated cuisines in the world, though you’d never guess it for the little
> attention it receives.
I think you’re ten years out of date here in regards to many large American cities. There are now a few fancy Hispanic restaurants in nearly every large American city. Furthermore, it’s strange when you cite French and Italian restaurants as prototypical examples of fancy restaurants. Yes, forty years ago they were, but they haven’t been the cutting edge for forty years now.
Perpetuating stereotypes without knowledge. I won’t get into it because it makes me so annoyed. However.
In terms of British cookery, garlic has been in use and indeed one of the main vegetables, both cultivated and gathered from the wild, for many hundreds of years. Never mind the Empire and its influence, way before that two of the most influential invasions these isles underwent were the Romans and the Normans.
Reasons why it may have fallen somewhat out of favour at times are various, ranging from simply changing tastes to contretemps we may at times have had with our European neighbours. More visceral reactions may have been produced by the fact that garlic was used as a prophylactic during plagues, or more recently it was apparently used as an anti-bacterial agent during both wars. If that was what you associated the smell/taste with, I can see why you might not want to eat any more of it afterwards.
My parents are two examples of that kind of person. They’re not quite so bad that they’d bring along their own peanut butter and jelly when traveling internationally, but they would want to go to restaurants that they have at home where possible, and would want foods they were familiar with. We have to take their unadventurous tastes into account any time we’re trying to find a restaurant to eat at.
It gets interesting, because we keep kosher. We’ll eat vegetarian or kosher fish meals in a non-kosher restaurant, but no meat, poultry, or non-kosher seafood. Unfortunately, the kind of restaurant that serves the familiar foods my parents like doesn’t tend to also be the kind of restaurant with a good selection of fish and vegetarian dishes for me and Mr. Neville.
This issue has popped up again recently. My mother-in-law is having an adult bat mitzvah in January, and my parents are coming for it. I just found out she’s having a dinner afterwards at a Thai restaurant. I’ll be shocked if my parents agree to go to the dinner- I may be eating somewhere else with them instead of at the dinner that night.
It’s not fancy, but it is mainstream. McDonalds used to own Chipotle, a burrito chain (and, coincidentally, where I got my lunch today). Taco Bell was mainstream 15 years ago, IIRC.
I could actually see white bread coming back someday.
I could see that. And I could see myself refusing to try it, like my parents are with sushi.
Feast is one of Houston’s more interesting new restaurants. And it’s even got good press on a national level.
The menu offers many of the less high class animal parts…
Feast is so freaking good. I am someone who barely eats meat except an occasional cheeseburger, and I went here and chowed on pork belly skin, pancreas, and pigtail. It was totally delicious, and I am NOT one you would think would be chowing down on offal. I would eat those sweetbreads right now if I could, they just melt in your mouth.
I…