The 1940s: Cold Dishes

Back door of the Taj Mahal, drawn by Lucey Bowen from her 2009 photograph.

   
    Gourmet was born 5 years before me, in 1941, but predeceased me, in 2009.     As I pursued this Orienting of Gourmet project, I became curious the earliest issues.  Thanks to EBay I obtained a sampling of copies from the first three decades of the magazine.  I found select articles from those years posted in the Gourmet Archive and I found all issues from 1946 forward in the San Francisco Public Library.
     In the early years, print dominated the magazine.  Only the cover and a few illustrations were colored.  The writing was the main attraction. As expected, many of the magazine's sections and columns persisted until 2009, but I found a vast gulf between their the food culture of the 1940s, and that of the first decade of the new millennium.
     Gourmet's presentation of the culture of the 1940s seems to balance American chauvinism with the increasingly cosmopolitan tastes of a generation exposed to the world by war and travel.  Early Gourmet readers could absorb regional American cuisine in the lore of coastal Maine from Robert P. Tristam Coffin, whose family were early colonists of Nantucket.   Hence the issue of October, 1949, contains both Bill Bancroft's "They Don't Know Beans," about slow cooking pork and beans in the Minnesota woods.  Alternatively, Samuel Chamberlain would have them contemplate a return to France, rebuilding after World War II  and "The Cassoulet," concerned the French dish made from white beans.
     In these early issues of Gourmet, there's a sense of loss.  Writing about the magazine, historian David Strauss speaks of the truism that an anti-modernity stance assumes modernity.  Attempts to regain a lost era were happening everywhere.   Some built mansions in the style that is known as colonial revival.  Some acquired multiple old houses and moved them to a single location and opened museums.  Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown.  Even Henry Ford, whose automobile changed everything about the country, had built his homage to by-gone-days in Greenfield Village.  
     In these early issues, Chamberlain's travel narratives attempted to prove that the delights of pre-War France could be discovered once again.  The same nostalgia pervades the treatment of the few mentions of Asia or Asian food, and the comments are dominated by blinders of racism, ethnocentrism and simple ignorance.
     The issues I obtained, one from 1948 and four from 1949 are representative of the 1940s Gourmet.  In "Spécialités de la Maison," Iles Brody reviewed the China Clipper restaurant.  His first complaint is the decor "Why is it that the Chinese always like to furnish their restaurants in the modern manner?  They think of all sorts of ways to display their eagerness in this respect; not that I have anything against naivete, but how nice it would be if there were Chinese restaurants in the heart of the city which were decorated in the real Chinese fashion.  One in the Ming dynasty décor would be a great success.  Of course I can't think of a disguise for the bar, a thoroughly modern instrument, but a long table might do."  Brody admired the food, especially the winter melon soup. He goes on to describe the owner's niece "Leilani Chung, the sweetest girl you ever saw, who could give you a lesson in eating with chopsticks."
     The owner is described as follows: "Mr. Wing A Chin is the owner of the China Clipper. Mr. Chin seems to have multifarious activities ---he's not only a restaurateur and a scholar, but also a leading export-import merchant on Chinatown's Mott Street."  Brody's  story neglects to mention that the original owner of the China Clipper, Watson Choy, had in 1938 raised three million dollars to help fight the Chinese fight the Japanese.  He was the victim of the first recorded airplane hijacking when in July, 1938, rogue Japanese Imperial Navy Officers commandeered a Pan-Am Hawaii Clipper seaplane en route to Hong Kong, and forced it to land in Japanese controlled Micronesia.
     Welcome to the white-male-world of 1940s Gourmet!  In the September, 1947 issue, Idwal Jones, one of the magazine's West Coast correspondents writes about Quon Lim Kee, doyen of Chinese banquet chefs in Sand Francisco.  Situating Quon as an opium smoker, an master of a cuisine "to which a cook must be born, as to a race."  The story claims the invention of chop-suey on the occasion of Viceroy Li Hung Chang's 1896 visit to San Francisco en route to Europe.
     The August, 1949 Gourmet's cover is a painting by Henry Stahlhut.  Titled "India" it shows what's arguably a platter of curry, a large dish of rice, and an array of small blue and white bowls in the foreground. In the background is a rendering of a ersatz Persian miniature of a feast.  Presumably this cover accompanied the issue's essay "Curry Hot, Curry Cold."  This anonymous essay features another of Stahlhut's illustrations, this time of a buxom female in the Nataraja dance pose, bearing in her numerous hands large and small dishes of Indian food.  Beginning with the discouraging assertion that "Hades to India, merely another word for the same thing," and continuing with the observation India is "the land of diamonds as big as pullet's eggs on plump and princely fingers, yet the land of millions of natives who have never tasted a pullet's egg,"  the essay places Indian cooking firmly in the domestic, female space, and India imagined as a land of inequality.
     In these early issues the equation of manliness with the ability to tolerate spicy-hot food is set out in an essay, "Cardamom-and-Coriander," by James Reynolds.  Reynolds travelled through in India between the world wars.  He's a perceptive interpreter of Indian foodways, observing the ties of caste to the rituals of food preparation.    His essay ends admonishing "If your palate does not relish high hot seasoning, strike from your acquaintance the Hindu brothers, Cardamom and Coriander."
     Tao Kim Hai is a different sort of traveller.  Born in Vietnam in 1905, he received two doctorates from the University of Paris.  As an officer in the French Army he was taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1940.  When liberated he came to the United States. His article, "Joie de Vivre," proposes that "the joy of living is one of the secrets of world peace and of personal success."  It's a largely flattering comparison of the philosophies of the Germans and the French, with instructions for making filtered coffee and proper English tea thrown in.  Hai's voice in distinctive.  He's truly a man of the world.  He's one of the earliest of Asian-born writers for Gourmet and he's interpreting American food culture from an international perspective.  He, and his American wife, would continue to write for Gourmet and for intellectual older brother, The New Yorker.
    I'm not dismissive of the world according to Gourmet, 1940s style.  Far from it. It helps me understand who I am, a curious mixture of cosmopolitan tastes and interests layered over a nomad, a gypsy, examining the past in a fruitless search for a single tap-root of identity.

    
    


 

   

   
 
   
   
   
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