Right now they’re in the midst of their 14th publicity tour, cheerfully assembling cheese balls in front of cameras from coast to coast in honor of their latest compendium, American Gourmet (286 pages. HarperCollins. $25). The book is an affectionate tribute to the dishes, chefs and restaurants that flowered from 1946 to 1971, a period the Sterns prize because, they say, that was when food finally became fun. After decades of meat and potatoes, after years of war, Americans were ready for a new world of exotic eating. Souffles, Caesar salads and coquilles Saint-Jacques began showing up on middle-class dinner tables, and people who had never fore struck a match to anything more festive than a birthday candle were flambeing everything from Rock Cornish hens to coffee. Less ambitious gourmets wrapped meat loaf in ready-to-bake dough and presented it as meat loaf Wellington. The Sterns locate the end of this era in 1971, when Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant opened and the new culinary icons became goat cheese and arugula, preferably produced on small farms adjoining one’s home or favorite cafe.
As in their other books, the Sterns are content to skate gleefully over the surface of this enticing material, circling round and round the ‘5Os and ’60s, exclaiming over a toaster oven here, a baked Alaska there. “We don’t want to kill it by overacademicizing,” says Jane; small danger. “American Gourmet” is lite history and for all their charm the Sterns are adamantly superficial. They’ve given us the Cool Whip without the chocolate pie. It’s not enough-it’s not interesting enough–to say that home cooks in the ‘5Os enjoyed putting together bizarre combinations of packaged foods because it made them feel creative. Those cooks added cream-of-mushroom soup to frozen string beans and scattered canned onion rings on top for a reason, probably a whole complex of reasons. Real explorers of this era would have looked more deeply into that dish and discovered the food industry, the changes in the American palate, the peculiar notion that frozen foods are more convenient even when they take longer to prepare than fresh and the belief that novelty and creativity amount to the same thing. But the Sterns aren’t explorers here, they’re tourists.
The best way to read “American Gourmet,” then, is to skim the text but sit back and linger over the recipes. Crabmeat dip, chicken cordon bleu, sangria, moussaka-you don’t have to cook it to bask in it. This is the stuff that grown-up dinner parties were made of, back when the dining table loomed large and grown-ups were giants.
