Food and Drink

I grew up in rural Connecticut, in a remodeled cow barn where my family sat at an antique hutch table for meals. The table with four comfortable Windsor chairs fit into a niche. My sister Christina and I weren’t allowed to join my parents for dinner at the table until we could hold a conversation. For me, that was at five. The rule came from my father, as that was how he’d been brought up. Once, when we were in our early teens, I whispered to Christina, “It’s King Arthur’s round table” — our father’s middle name was Arthur. I must have learned some British history and was probably showing off. My firm but gracious father wasn’t a king.

When I first moved to the country, I was intrigued by the sight of people walking sheep on a leash round and round the front garden of a neighboring farmer. City girl that I am, I wondered if they were receiving some kind of special therapy. Equine interaction is supposed to help with certain anxiety disorders, why not sheep-walking for, say, insomnia? It turned out, however, that the sheep-walkers were members of the local 4-H club preparing to show their market lambs at the fair, an event I was later privileged to witness. But I was put to the blush when the judge, a tall, competent-looking man in a checked shirt and green boots, commented loudly on the fine chops displayed by the winning entrant.

"Snack bar,” “coffee shop” and such phrases once signified small eateries where customers sat on stools at a counter or in simple booths. Their orders were taken and served by waitresses in white aprons, and prepared by a short-order cook in a white paper cap. Hotel lobbies, railroad-station waiting rooms and airports all had them: private enterprises in public spaces purveying a cup of coffee and a donut, bacon and eggs, ham and cheese on rye, a hot dog, a hamburger, maybe a milkshake or an ice cream sundae. Little of this (for most were mom-and-pops) traveled well into the age of industrialized, assembly-line, eat-on-the-go feeding signified by the phrase “fast food.

I have become a pan handler — a handler of cast-iron pans. I can think of few hobbies that are as rewarding as collecting and cooking on cast iron. Skillets, griddles, muffin tins, Dutch ovens, waffle irons, corn-stick pans and much else: there was a time when America produced the finest cast-iron cookware in the world. The iron ore was abundant. So was the coal to melt it. Foundries went up across this great land. American cuisine developed around it. From fried chicken to cornbread, the American menu should still be cooked on cast iron. Southern cooks never forgot this. The same goes for soul food; black America has always prized its cast-iron inheritance. Now I find I have little need to cook on anything else.

Marmite is one of very few manufactured foods to have become an idiom. British people think of the black stuff as a national idiosyncrasy, entirely unknown to horrified foreigners: there are many videos on YouTube in which outsiders have Marmite inflicted on them for the first time. In fact, there are a large number of pastes based on yeast extract in different countries, each with its passionate devotees. British Marmite may have been the first to go into production, but it did not stay unique for long. A German chemist, Justus von Liebig, influential in the propagation of meat essences, discovered that yeast could be concentrated.

However else we may criticize the late 90s and early 00s — its politics, its fashion, its music — this was undeniably the golden age of the celebrity chef. Barefoot Contessa, 30-Minute Meals and The Iron Chef franchises all debuted in the first decade of this millennium, minting stars like Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri and Nigella Lawson. I once found a collection of my brothers salivating over Giada de Laurentiis making meatballs on Everyday Italian, though they’d never demonstrated more interest in cooking than microwaving the odd Hot Pocket. The mid-aughts brought on the glory years of the “hands and pans” videos: the aerial-view clips of disembodied hands assembling cheeseburger pretzel balls or eighteen-layer taco dip.