Weekly Travel Feature

When Travelling America, Dine American

Prepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International

There’s an "International Food Summit Conference" coming to Bangkok and it got me thinking. What is the Food Summit going to say about American food? I went to the first food summit several years ago, and I was surprised–– America wasn't invited. Why? America doesn't have a national cuisine, the French director said.

For those visitors who are travelling to the USA, that doesn’t say much. But let me note, these travellers shouldn’t be alarmed. America is more than fast food. So let me tell readers something about American food, other than hamburgers, although hamburgers cooked in America are like hamburgers served nowhere else in the world.

 Let’s suppose our Thai Airways flight lands us in Los Angeles and we decide to motor across the U.S.  From L.A. we head east, through Arizona and New Mexico.  In small towns, let’s stop at Mexican cantinas where the Mexican-American cattle hands and ranchers eat.  Here the food is so hot Thai food would taste mild in comparison. And what food! Wild, spicy tortillas; enchiladas oozing with cheese and stuffed with red chilies; and fjroles; iced Carta Blanca beer, drunk from the bottle. 

From the southwest let’s head northeast, to Middle America—the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, a land dotted with deep forests and tens of thousands of lakes. The settlers here arrived in covered wagons, speaking German and Dutch. Some towns are famous for its cheese, cheeses you never tasted before.
  
Those who live in the Midwest are partial to the cheese from their own dairy farms, and they prove it to you by stuffing you with their products––Edam, Gouda, cheddar, mozzarella, blue and brie.  But they also make cheese you wouldn't find served in Tour D'Argent in Paris––Liederkrantz and Brick Cheese, both Native American.

After the Middle America, let’s go to Pennsylvania to a small farming community where I was born.  Now here, certainly, is American food.  Even James Michener would agree to that. Read his book Centennial, about the Pennsylvania farms a hundred years ago. "At 3 a.m. the heavy bell rang," he wrote, "and the five boys came down to the hearty breakfast their mother had started preparing at two. Scrapple and sausage, a little smoked bacon and some pig's liver and fried chicken, 18 fried eggs with sides of ham, some good German bread and two kinds of fruit pie, dried apple and canned cherry, and quarts of milk . . . ."

Go to the farm where I grew up. My wonderful aunt might invite you to breakfast—sliced ham and sausage and four eggs, five pieces of toasts, home-made jam, a couple glasses of bubbly fresh milk delivered that morning, followed by pots of coffee and freshly baked poppy-seed rolls. My aunt and her mother brought the recipe for poppy-seed rolls with them from Hungary.

From Pennsylvania drive up to New England. I remember visiting friends there. Snow was still on the ground and the fireplace glowed. “How about a good American meal,” they said.  It was an agonizing afternoon, waiting in the living room with the aroma that came from the oven in the kitchen. And an American meal was what they served up that evening, with that fat and fleshy Native American bird they call turkey. Turkey, as American as hamburgers!  Turkey, the centerpiece of Thanksgiving, originally the Pilgrims' ceremony of gratitude for survival in their new and bounteous land.  And what could have been more American than all the trimmings that went with our meal—chestnut stuffing, served with sweet potatoes, corn, Brussels sprouts, squash, succotash, creamed onions and cranberry sauce, and topped off with pumpkin pie.  But it would never sell on the menu at the Tour d'Argent.

Of course you have to drive to New York. Prepare to eat yourself silly in New York and not in fancy restaurants. The town is little more than one big delicatessen. Here great food is served on street corners and in cafes and diners, food that is Italian, Jewish, Chinese, German, Puerto Rican, Hungarian.  Food that is a pastrami sandwich served in a Jewish delicatessen, or corned beef and cabbage, the frankfurter hot dog, sauerkraut, baked lasagna and lox and bagels, all a part of the mid-Atlantic food culture that you would never see on the menu at Maxim's in Paris.

Now it’s time to head down to the Deep South. Who can truly understand American southern food unless they spend time there?  No people in the United States are more conscious and proud of their regional identity than Southerners.
  
The original English, Scott, Irish and French culinary tastes moulded by the skills of slaves from Africa, set the framework of Southern cooking, as did the abundance of corn, fish and fowl. The early settlers found pigs easier to raise than cattle and sheep. The result is a cuisine heavily larded with cured ham, spareribs, sow belly, crackling, fatback and chitterlings. And things like hush puppies and fried cornmeal cakes.

The drive back to California via Texas.  Friends again.  I arrived late at night, and my friends woke me up early with a stack of pancakes soaked in syrup, three fried eggs, a quarter pound of bacon, fresh corn bread and a half pot of coffee. "But you don't get that in China or wherever that is you live," they said.  I didn't tell them Bangkok isn't in China.

"A surprise," they then said. "We're having a few people over for barbecue this evening!'

A small gathering, by Texas standards, was 200 people.  A beefy steer was roasted whole.  But there was also braised pronghorn antelope and roasted wild turkey.  I learned there are more ways to barbecue beef than one and these people know them all.  They spit barbecue, pit barbecue and grill.  How would Maxim's have a Texas barbecue, with bottles of ketchup on the tables?
  
Back to California, where things are done in superlatives.  Unlike in Texas, the diet is fresh from the garden, where all kinds of fruit and vegetables thrive in California's rich soil and excellent climate––okra, kale, shallots, Chinese cabbage, avocadoes, loquats, broccoli, spinach, limes and pomegranates, dates and figs, not to forget the more conventional oranges, lemons, grapefruits, grapes, lettuce and tomatoes.  And from the sea, abalone, salmon, tuna and lobster; and the rich red American wine from Napa Valley. 

America is not all antiseptic supermarkets and chain food restaurants. America still means Fourth of July picnics, church socials, state fairs and cooking contests—baked hams, chicken pies fruit pies, jellies and preserves. I remember those picnics when we kids watched our fathers pitch horseshoes and swill down kegs of beer while we ate tons of hotdogs in fresh buns smothered with chopped onions, oozing with mustard sauce that dropped down the front of our shirts.
  
It only stands to reason that a country as vast as the USA and with such an ethnically varied population cannot have a national cuisine.
  
The national food of a country reflects not only its ethnic background but the country's environment as well.  By environment I mean climate.  In the tropics and hot climates, the inclination is towards hot and spicy food, just as in Scandinavia and Ireland you don't find chilies and curries.
  
In America the country is as varied as the people.  It has rugged, windswept shores; dense, brooding forests; an extensive scattering of cold lakes and streams; great plains and incredibly harsh deserts, a mountainous north where winters are generally long and hard; a semi tropical south that seldom sees frost.
  
I grew up in an environment much like Michener wrote about.  As a kid I ate heavily and I was expected to work hard.  Our farm in Pennsylvania was self-sufficient as a farm could be.  The only things we bought were things we couldn't grow or raise. Survival meant starting in the spring, after the last snow, to prepare for the coming year. It was the time to plant, to set the eggs for hatching, to wean the young calves for grazing.
  
Our cows gave us milk, and from the milk we made butter and cheese.  There were always quarts of buttermilk in the milk house. In the spring we planted, and in the fall we harvested. Autmn was canning time, when the whole family pitched in.  My mother preserved fruit and vegetables. Bushels of tomatoes went into boiling tubs. Cucumbers were placed in huge crocks and turned miraculously into dill pickles and cabbage into sauerkraut.
  
While my mother did the canning, my father fermented grapes from the vineyards and from it came barrels of rich red wine, and from yeast and hops he brewed his own beer.  And far behind the barn, which we kids weren't allowed to mention, was a still.
  
Summer and winter, autumn and spring, once a week my mother baked—hard crusted fresh bread rolls, poppy seed cake, cabbage pie, cheese rolls, and a couple of dozen pies that went into the fruit cellar to keep cold.
  
I liked the milk house.  It was stone and always damp.  Water trickled down from a fresh spring and filled the crystal-clear cistern. In the summer the house was cool and in the winter an escape from the bitter cold outside.  Five-gallon cans of whole milk were half submerged in the water and blocks of cheese rested on shelves on the walls.  A crock with a wooden lid, filled to the brim with apple cider, stood in a corner.
 
Auyumn was also the time to butcher. The predominant scent that lingered over the farmlands was that of burning hickory from the smoke houses.  Here in these black wooden shacks hung hams and slabs of bacon.
  
Winter set in, with heavy snow, and both Thanksgiving and Christmas were great feast days.  On both days fat turkeys were stuffed into the oven.  But on the farm, any day that visitors or relatives arrived was feast day.  A ham came from the smoke house, apples from the barn, canned vegetables and preserves from the fruit cellar and, if the occasion called for it, a fat rooster was chased down in the chicken yard.
  
The autumn also meant hunting.  Wild pheasant, rabbit, venison.  There was always wild game to add a different touch to the table.
  
When you travel across America you understand why the country's pilgrim fathers were austere and frugal.  New England itself is an austere place, cold and damp, on a windswept coast.  Nevertheless, here is where Thanksgiving originated.
  
To these frugal American forefathers, the rest of the year was not the time to be wasteful.  To them a meal was simply intended to provide sustenance and nourishment.  Unlike the French with all the added flavours just to disguise and make a plate savoury, New Englanders and the people along the mid-Atlantic coast did not tinker much with their food.  The easiest way to prepare a meal was to put a pot over a fire and fill it with whatever was immediately available—fish, vegetables and meat which was often so tough that prolonged boiling was required.  When huge pots of beans, for example, were put on the stove and left to simmer, out of it came a specialty—New England baked beans.
  
In most countries around the world fish is a main sustenance. But nowhere except in New England is there such a variety and an abundance of both sea and fresh water fish.  There is bass, lobster, herring, turbot, sturgeon, cusks, haddock, mullet, eels, crabs, oysters and mussels.  From this we get New England boiled lobster with butter sauce and the inimitable New England clambake.
  
And maple syrup.  It was from the American Indians that the early pilgrims learned how to tap maple trees and collect sap.  The Indians taught them to boil down the sap to make maple syrup.  What would a pancake house in Paris be without true maple syrup?
   
And where and how did they originate—clam chowder, pepperpot soup, jambalaya, red flannel hash, sour milk pancakes, Kentucky burgoo, shoo-fly pie, Caesar salad, buckwheat flapjacks, cherry cobbler?
  
And I almost forgot the Hawaiian meal, where whole pigs and chickens are cooked for hours in an underground oven lined with banana leaves and corn husks and then served with various other delicacies, like poi, that thickish paste made from ground up and cooked roots of the taro plant.  How could you cook like this at Maxim's?
  
To enjoy travelling is to enjoy eating the food of the country we are visiting. When I arrive in America I don't go looking for a Chinese restaurant. I look for turkey, and stuffing, and cornbread, and flapjacks with maple syrup, and hamburgers, and everything American—in America.  But such dishes will never make it to the Food Summit Conference. If you don’t believe me, drive across America. Royal orchid Holidays will help you arrange your trip.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q. Dear ROH. I am very interested in your Fly-drive programme. I see that there are many different types. Would it be possible to rent a car in Bangkok and drive all the way through Malaysia to Singapore? Thanks you. Jane Samson, Seattle, WA,

A. Dear Jane, I am sorry but that is impossible. Both Avis and Budget vehicles are licensed only for Thailand. It is possible however to drive to Hat Yai, drop your rental car off there, and catch a shuttle bus to Penang and rent a car there to drive to Johor across from Singapore. Singapore these days has some tough restriction on vehicles entering the country. Rental cars cannot enter but once you are in Singapore you can rent a car there. You can leave your car in Johor and get a bus across the causeway into Singapore. It is a bit more complicated but it is possible.  Good travelling. —HS

Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)

Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited.