Eat Drink Man Woman

At no point in human history have so many known so much about something that was once considered a dark art practiced by mustachioed tradesmen in funny hats. No, I'm not talking about cowboys. What we're dealing with here is professional cookery, that once-cloistered, near-priestly enterprise that, like so many professions these days--drive-time radio DJ, personal trainer, rebellious skateboarding entrepreneur--has seen its practitioners elevated to the level of rock stars.

Three recent chef-centric books--a tender Francophile memoir, a frisky collection of quick-hit essays and a lengthy exercise in participatory journalism--ascribe a neat arc to the fraught American relationship with food. It's true, we used to be a nation of shoot-it-skin-it-burn-it-eat-it folk. But sometime in the 1950s, we started to get ideas, based largely on the burgeoning postwar travel industry. Suddenly, middle-class rubes who had subsisted on brown bread and chipped beef during the Depression, and on K rations, Hershey's bars and (when in uniform) Lucky Strikes during World War II, discovered haute cuisine.

There are those who would argue that this was when America lost its way. It was a slippery slope from sole meunière to oral sex, marijuana, campus protests, all-night raves and, inevitably, Wolfgang Puck. Certainly, a rightward-leaning Protestant establishment, tossing back a few G&Ts before enjoying a plateful of flavorless slow-stewed chicken, reeled in the face of all that French puffery (forget Italian food, which was the 1952 equivalent of today's Mexican, a subaltern cuisine eaten by a swarthy, sweaty, oversexed breed). And it was decisively French, this initial revolution in American taste. They may have gotten manhandled by the Nazis on the battlefield, but the citizens of Gaul--with their finely calibrated ability to distinguish between subcategories of butter and salt, to turn a snail into something appetizing and to transform goose torture into foie gras in a loving gourmet exercise--came roaring back in the kitchen.

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