American Food in American Literature
and coffee….
For lunch and supper you can have: fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish, chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, and your drink and dessert….
…the vegetables are: creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.15
Later in the novel, the items in a particular meal served to a customer are described as “fried chicken, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and iced tea.”16
The fatness, abundance and purity of meat in the American diet have also been used by some writers as a counterfoil to other kinds of scarcity and impurity. Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a large meat meal on Sunday, as a once a week special gathering for American families, that often features a large, oven-roasted turkey, to give stark contrast to another kind of oven:
Mary’s Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity…
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany,
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.17
One of America’s most gifted and enigmatic of contemporary poets, the Pulitzer Prize winner John Ashbery (1927-), turns America’s abundance into a counterfoil not of impurity but of scarcity as a lack of certainty:
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?18
Besides the prominence and priority of meat, the Plath poem and the lists from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café foreground an important continuity and discontinuity in American food. The important continuity stems from the fact that the early colonists and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land before it had been developed for agriculture, made their bread primarily from locally available grains, especially corn. Wheat and other related grains were too hard to grind by hand and required a heavy, complicated mill that the early settlers could not carry with them. Corn became a staple food as important to the early European colonizers as it already was to the indigenous people:
Young, ripe corn was eaten as roasting ears. In winter the husks of the kernels were soaked off with lye to make hominy. For breakfast and supper there was boiled corn-meal mush. Sometimes the mush was fried and served with butter or pork drippings. The most common dish, however, was hot corn bread. Baked on a hoe blade before the fire, this was called hoecake. Mixed with water into a stiff batter and covered with hot ashes, it was ash cake. From the Dutch oven it emerged as corn pone or corn loaf. Small cakes of corn pone were called corn dodgers.19
In the passage from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter both fish and turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken. The fish and turkey were most likely caught and shot in their natural habitats. The pork and chicken were most likely raised and butchered in a domestic animal keep. This combination of wild and domestic meat began with the first colonists and continues to the present day. Indeed, the pioneers who traveled by foot, wagon and horse from the east westward on the American continent found a great abundance of wild game for meat. Still they tried to carry enough familiar, nutritious foodstuffs to last them for the journey to their new homestead and to carry them through periods when wild game was unavailable. A typical load for one adult traveling by oxen-drawn wagon westward was:
“…200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of rice, 5 pounds