Gathering In the Food of Comfort

If you savor good food, these are wonderful days to be an American. It’s also a good thing for America.

So says me. But, if you wish, you can put a question mark at the end of that thought, and hear it from people with better credentials.

“Hmmm, yes,” answers Patric Kuh, the chef who is cooking me lunch just now. “Something really exciting is happening. Ethnic divisions in food are melting away, and we’re the only country that could do it.”

This is no small matter. Food is a cultural binding. Also a social barometer and, more, a daily expression of our values. The rising interest in food and all it means--family, friends, time well-spent, honest pleasure--is one of those welcome counterpoints to those who fret about our national direction.

Kuh finishes searing two oversized Spencer steaks and tongs them into the hot oven. As he speaks, he is not thinking about the meal he is cooking, however, but about a small tamale with “ancho jus” that he was served the other day. Where else would you find such a thing except in the U.S., where culinary tradition, such as it exists, is a refutation of rules, an amalgam of imagination, a sizzling kettle of energy?

This is not the only reason, of course, that our stomachs are on our minds. Each season seems to bring improved ingredients to our markets. Cooking, and by that I mean real cooking, not the grim reheating of processed nutrients that remains the American stereotype (and often the enduring fact), absorbs millions of us.

Chefs have risen to the ranks of celebrities and moguls. And the literature of food has grown to meet our hunger to appreciate it.

It’s not just armies that advance on their appetites. Societies too. And nowhere else does our affluence offer such ready and harmonious opportunity to fulfill our needs.

It is the subject of food writing that has brought me to the kitchen of Kuh’s home in Los Angeles. The steak is a bonus. If we’re going to work, surely we’re also going to work up an appetite, right? I refer to him as “chef” because Kuh is French-trained and his resume warrants the title. But he modestly demurs. “Call me a cook.... I know what it means to be a chef.”

Kuh, however, is certifiably a food writer--an occupational specialty that enjoys rising stature for helping us understand that if we are not what we eat, perhaps we are doing it badly. A former columnist for Salon.com, he is restaurant critic for Los Angeles Magazine and author of the surprising and yummy history of American restaurants and food culture called “The Last Days of Haute Cuisine.”

Throw in Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and Jim Harrison’s “The Raw and the Cooked” and you have three of my favorite books of the last 12 months. I could extend the list to any of a dozen other volumes that explore the techniques, personalities and philosophy of this simple matter with the overbearing word “gastronomy.” This is escapist literature at its best. What could you expect from an essay on garlic mashed potatoes except a happy ending?

In its own way, Kuh’s is the most unusual of these recent books. Naturally there would be a rich, character-filled, tumultuous socio-history behind America’s food craze. But who would have thought to write it? (I met Kuh through his work, but I mention that his wife is my literary agent as well as his.)

Americans, he explained, “remade the restaurant business in our own image.”

Along the way, food has remade us. The home I purchased last year in Southern California was built just after World War II and embodied the modernized values of that age. The tiny eating area was tucked away adjacent to the washer and dryer. Dinner was meant to be gulped from trays in the living room.

We’ve rearranged things, of course. The centerpiece of the living room now is a dining table. The old kitchenette alcove accommodates cookbooks.

When I feel a bout of the blues coming on, I measure these changes and I am uplifted by the evidence of progress--a step back to the tradition that once a day we collect ourselves and our loved ones, and three steps forward in how we do it. Nostalgia for the good old 1950s? When gummy cutlets went from freezer to gullet with no more soul than 18 minutes at 400? No, thanks.

“If you don’t have an hour to cook your dinner, quit your job,” writes Jim Harrison.

Kuh’s steaks have rested on the counter for the same amount of time they roasted, permitting the fibers of meat to un-tense. I won’t pretend to emulate the food writer’s lapidary vocabulary. Let’s just say lunch was delicious. Another workday accomplished. But I am left wondering. Could I do something with ancho jus in my own kitchen this week?