After earning my doctorate, I had the honor of presenting at a conference I helped organize for the Humanities Institute at University of California, Davis. I delivered the following paper for a panel on "California Cuisine," which included Deborah Madison and David Mas Masumoto.
In the 1970s, many of the political and social ideals that took root in the 60s began to materialize in California cuisine. The social activism fermenting in California was tempered with French attitudes toward the table to create the California flair for showcasing local ingredients, simply prepared to emphasize natural flavors. By using locally grown and produced ingredients in their kitchens, San Francisco Bay Area restaurants like Deborah Madison's Greens and Alice Waters' Chez Panisse forged relationships with small farmers and nurtured connections between growers and consumers. They also helped educate Californians about the homegrown products and flavors of their state. These restaraurants materialized the essence of the California table at its best—simply prepared dishes composed of local ingredients, a devotion to the pleasures of good food, and a deep respect for the connections nourished by these pleasures.
While California soil has long produced an abundance of luscious fruits and vegetables that need little or no coaxing to taste their best, their natural flavors were drained for decades by the popular treatment of food as a thrice-daily necessity and of pleasure in eating as a wasteful indulgence. This attitude prevailed among America's middle class from the nineteenth-century up through the 1960s, when moral restraints on physical pleasures were considerably loosened. As women explored newfound freedoms, they initiated a shift in restaurant culture. Not surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area, which stood at the cultural avant garde, would become the epicenter of a culinary revolution led by women.
While California's food revolution would not gain momentum until the 1970s, it was given a public voice decades earlier in the prose of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, whose devotion to the pleasures of the table marked her as a radical in the American food writing tradition. Born in 1908 and raised in a household where her grandmother’s ‘despotic bowels’ governed the dinner table, Fisher was well-versed in the debilitating aspects of denial and control by the time she was an adolescent. Following a code of “late Victorian asceticism,” Fisher’s grandmother preached the denial of the body and of bodily pleasure, equating moral and intellectual strength with physical abnegation. Raised in a household dominated by this attitude until her grandmother’s death in 1920, Fisher found herself irrepressibly drawn to food that fell beyond the bounds of her grandmother’s culinary dictum: "Take what God has created and eat it humbly and without sinful pleasure.” (11). Growing up in California, Fisher learned first-hand the pleasures of savoring fresh fruits and vegetables straight from the garden.
While Fisher delighted in eating fruit plucked straight off the tree, she spent decades trying to understand why these outdoor treasures suffered so miserably when brought indoors. Why, she asked, were their flavors drowned in a pot of boiling water before their sodden remains were buried in a pasty white sauce? She began to write, in part, driven by the need to ease the tension between her desire for fruits and vegetables respectfully treated and their thrice-daily humiliation at her family’s dining table. Decades later, Fisher would begin to understand that the tenor of the table talk and the flavor of the dishes were governed by a puritanical repression of the body and its pleasures—a repression especially aimed at women and children. At the age of sixty-three, Fisher recalls her childhood meals:
in a period when all food was boiled for hours, whatever it was boiled in was thrown out as being either too rich (meats) or trashy (vegetables). We ate turnips and potatoes a lot…. We seldom ate cabbage: it did not agree with [Grandmother], and small wonder, since it was always cooked according to her mid-Victorian recipes and would have made an elephant heave and hiccup. We ate carrots, always in a ‘white sauce’ in little dishes by our plates….[T]he flatter a thing tasted, the better it was for you, … And the better it was for you, ... the more you should suffer to eat it. (To Begin Again, 53-54)
The overcooked vegetables, pasty white sauces, and disdain for the physical pleasures of eating would haunt middle-class American tables well past the mid-twentieth century.
Fisher grew up to rebel wholeheartedly against the repression of her palate. This rebellion led her to France at the age of twenty. In France, Fisher learned the true difference in flavor between food prepared as a sheer necessity and food treated as an artful medium through which pleasure can be captured and conveyed. For example, in her own home, potatoes “were mashed, baked, boiled, and when Grandmother was away, fixed in a casserole with cream sauce.... It was shameful, I always felt, and stupid too, to reduce a potentially important food to such a menial position...and to take time everyday to cook it, doggedly, with perfunctory compulsion” (51). Because Fisher equated the treatment of food with the treatment of the self, reducing potatoes to a “menial position” was “shameful” because it likewise reduced the people who prepare and ate the potato to a “menial” stature. Rebelling against her grandmother who treated food with “perfunctory compulsion” and dined “humbly and without sinful pleasure,” Fisher insisted on treating food as a source of intellectual and physical fulfillment.
While the potato’s treatment as “shameful” and its position as “menial” belie a pleasureless conception of food and cooking as well as a pleasureless conception of life, Fisher encountered quite a different attitude on her arrival in France, where her husband, Al, worked for his doctorate at the University of Dijon. As newlyweds just arrived in Paris, Fisher and her husband were on their way to settle in Dijon when they stopped to dine at a restaurant. As Fisher recounts:
I forget now what we ate, except for a kind of soufflé of potatoes. It was hot, light, with a brown crust, and probably chives and grated Parmesan cheese were somewhere in it. But the great thing about it was that is was served alone, in a course all by itself. I felt a secret justification swell in me, a pride such as I’ve seldom known since, because all my life, it seemed, I had been wondering rebelliously about potatoes.... I almost resented them, in fact...or rather, the monotonous disinterest with which they were always treated. I felt that they could be good, if they were cooked respectfully.... And now, here in the sunny courtyard of the first really French restaurant I had ever been in, I saw my theory proved. It was a fine moment. (Gastronomical Me 51)
Fisher’s pride at witnessing the potato artfully prepared came from her knowledge that even the most fundamental components of life can and should be treated with care and imagination. At the age of twenty, Fisher understood that respect for the food one takes into the body is equivalent to respect for oneself.
A large part of Fisher’s gastronomical growth came from watching the French gather, prepare, and eat “natural products, nurtured by man” (Cooking of Provincial France 30). By letting the land inform their regional specialties, the French nurtured a form of cooking that reflects the climate and geography of their region. So the cuisine of Normandy “has evolved during the centuries, based on jewel-like apples and cream from the little pink cows” and the Bretons eat vegetables that “taste of the ocean in Brittany, for seaweeds gathered along the beaches at low tide are used for fertilizer in the farm gardens” (Cooking 14-15).
Fisher’s relationship to cooking and the home kitchen was transformed by the French market. While living in Provence, she found herself often passing the evening thinking
of what [she] must buy the next day, and load into the baskets, and then sort and store and serve forth in the order of Nature itself: first freshness, then flavour and ripeness, and then decay. And always there were the needs of the people who must live from Nature, and learn to do so to the best of all their powers…. It was a good way to live. (Measure 318)
While California first taught Fisher to taste the natural order of freshness, flavor, ripeness, then decay, France taught her how to harness this natural order in the kitchen. She also learned to prize the intellectual and physical pleasures of eating dishes that capture the essence of this natural progression.
After she returned to the States, Fisher no longer ate the “basically midwestern cuisine” she was fed as a child in Whittier, California. Instead, she imported the French emphasis on regional ingredients prepared to taste of themselves back to California. So whether living in Hemet, St. Helena, or Glen Ellen, Fisher brought the ripened flavors of the local countryside to her table, eating “California cuisine” well ahead of its time.