THE FRONTIERS OF FOREIGN FOODS

202
CHAPTER
19
THE FRONTIERS OF
FOREIGN FOODS
When Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) visited Europe in 1878
he complained bitterly about the food, comparing it most unfavorably
with American fare. Before returning home, he composed a wish list
of comestibles he desired upon his return including Virginia bacon,
soft-shell crabs, Philadelphia terrapin soup, canvas-back duck from
Baltimore, Connecticut shad, green corn on the ear, butter beans, as-
paragus, string beans, American butter (he complained that European
butter had no salt); predictably apple pie, and curiously, frogs.
Leslie Brenner (1999)
1
WITH APOLOGIES to Samuel Clemens there was no such thing as
“American fare” north of Mexico when he wrote, nor had there been for
close to two centuries, the remnants of pre-Columbian foodstuffs and cook-
ing techniques notwithstanding. Since the seventeenth century, American
cuisine has been a work in progress, kneaded, shaped, and reshaped by
African, Asian, and European immigrants. The African contribution was in
place by the time of the Civil War, as was that of Northern Europe though
somewhat distorted by Native American infl uences.
But following the war, millions of southern and eastern Europeans,
along with a relative handful of Asians, arrived to take their turn at stir-
ring America’s culinary melting pot. The new immigrants settled on both
coasts in large numbers but some, lured by the promise of free land in the
1862 Homestead Act, spread out into the interior, planting seeds of food
globalization as they went.
The Frontiers of Foreign Foods
203

Railroads were even more effective in scattering migrants about. During
the war, the Lincoln government had authorized the construction of two
railroads One of these, the Central Pacifi c, extended eastward from California
while the other, the Union Pacifi c, ran westward from Omaha. When joined
with a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869, the nation’s fi rst
transcontinental railroad was completed, and by then two foreign cuisines –
Chinese and Italian – had also become transcontinental.
TSAP SUI: CHINESE INFLUENCES
The Chinese had been West Coast settlers since the 1820s. With the begin-
ning of the Gold Rush, many more arrived and some got into the San Fran-
cisco restaurant business to feed hungry miners. They later stayed in busi-
ness by catering to more arriving Chinese: laborers to work in California
canneries and agriculture, and those who laid track for the railroads. This
clientele was mostly male – single men hoping to put together enough
money to return to China, take a wife, and buy some land. Since the con-
struction crews hired by the Central Pacifi c were mostly Chinese who
wanted the same food they had eaten in San Francisco restaurants, Chinese
cooks were employed to provide it.
And still more Chinese immigrants came to California seeking jobs so that
the 7,500 counted in the 1850 census had increased to 105,000 by 1880. As
a rule they were Cantonese, from southern China, whose dishes were based
on rice and vegetables quickly cooked. The art of stir-frying, the use of spices
such as raw or preserved ginger, ingredients like bean sprouts, and dishes such
as fried rice, along with “Americanized” chow mein and chop suey (from the
Cantonese tsap sui meaning “miscellaneous things”) began to move east.
2
However, the infl uence of Chinese food and the Chinese themselves
ran afoul of American xenophobia when Congress yielded to public pres-
sure and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which took effect in 1882 and
was not repealed until 1946. With neither new arrivals nor fresh ideas to

invigorate it, Chinese food in America became an increasingly poor rendi-
tion of the dishes of Canton.
SPAGHETTI AND RED WINE: ITALIAN INFLUENCES
In Omaha, it was European laborers and some Civil War veterans who
began laying track in the opposite direction. The Irish were the most
numerous among them but they were joined by a signifi cant number of
204
A Movable Feast
Italians, who had been arriving in the United States since 1850. Like the
Chinese, the Italians were from the southern part of their country, and
from Sicily, which meant a diet based on pasta, olive oil, cheese, tomato
sauce, and wine; and these foods were furnished by the railroad after the
Italians rebelled at consuming any more potatoes, beans, bully beef, and
whisky, the diet favored by Irish workers.
Some of the Italians never left Omaha, and a “little Italy,” one of the
nation’s fi rst, sprang up with restaurants that served meatballs and mari-
nara sauce over spaghetti, and red wine from straw-thatched bottles of
Chianti atop checkered tablecloths. Other Italians continued west from
Utah to open more restaurants, transform themselves into truck garden-
ers, cultivating cherished old country vegetables like artichokes, zucchini,
and broccoli (California now grows 90 percent of the nation’s broccoli
crop), and become movers and shakers in the burgeoning California wine
industry.
America’s new transcontinental railroad made it possible to ship California
produce to the east in less than a week – lightning fast when compared to
a 120-day voyage around Cape Horn – and immense wheat farms sprang
up in the Livermore and San Joaquin valleys. Their production of 16 mil-
lion tons in 1870, although just a fraction of the nation’s total 1869 crop
(of almost 300,000 million bushels), represented nearly a quarter of its
70 million bushels produced in 1866.

3
In like fashion, California wine pro-
duction, which totaled around 4 million gallons in 1870, increased to over
20 million gallons by 1890.
CHILLIES AND GARBANZOS: HISPANIC INFLUENCES
The real estate acquired through war with Mexico abruptly made Americans
out of many Mexicans, and both Spain and Mexico continued to exert a
vast infl uence over the cuisine in a belt running from southern California
to Texas. From Louisiana to Florida, Spain’s infl uence continued along the
Gulf Coast. Hispanic cuisine is bean based, utilizing New World legumes
like pintos and black beans, along with the Old World chickpeas (garban-
zos).
4
It is also tortilla based, with their preparation (before masa harina
and tortilla presses) claiming many of a woman’s waking hours even before
the tortillas were metamorphosed into tacos, tostados, and enchiladas.
Chilli peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, garlic,
onions, squashes, cheeses, and spicy sausages also fi gured into meals for
The Frontiers of Foreign Foods
205
many in Texas and the desert Southwest, with beef, often barbequed, cen-
tral to the diets of practically everyone. But why not beef, with Texas send-
ing an average of some half-million head of cattle a year up the Chisholm
Trail to Abilene?
5
These were longhorn cattle, descendents of the same
breed still raised along the Guadlaquiver River in Spain. They were fi rst
brought to America in 1493 and, as in Spain, tended by mounted cow-
boys.
6

The fi rst serious cattle drive north of Mexico took place during the
last years of Spain’s tenure in Louisiana, when a large herd was driven from
Texas to help feed Spanish troops during the American Revolution.
Beef also entered the diet in chilli con carne, a dish popular in Texas
while it still was a territory of Mexico. The “Bowl of Red” has suffered from
the allegation that it was a Texas invention and not truly Mexican. But
this is a defi nitional argument. Stews containing chilli peppers, beans, and
assorted bits of animal protein have been eaten in Mexico for thousands
of years. So the charge must be because the Texas contribution has often
been to eliminate the beans and base the dish almost solely on beef, the
one ingredient the Aztecs and their predecessors did not have. Chilli con
carne lies at the heart of Tex-Mex cuisine that is also disparaged in some
quarters, but is a part of a fusion cuisine that represents an early triumph of
globalization, in the case of chilli, Old World animal fl esh and New World
plants with or without the beans.
Given today’s popularity of buttery guacamole, it seems strange that
avocados, until recently, were not a part of the fusion. They were fi rst used
by pre-Columbian Americans, then by the Spanish conquerors of Mexico
and Central America. In 1651, a Spanish priest, Bernabé Cobe, described
three kinds – Mexican, West Indian, and Guatemalan, and a century later,
George Washington, then a nineteen year old visitor to Barbados, tasted
the West Indian variety (he didn’t like it). By 1825, American avocados
were growing in Africa, Polynesia, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), but
it was not until 1871 that the Mexican variety was commercially culti-
vated in California and, later still, that the Mexican and the Guatemalan
varieties were combined to become the Hass avocado.
7
Toward the end of
the nineteenth century avocados were popular in New York, and the West
Indian variety was growing in Florida by the early twentieth century. Yet,

only belatedly did avocados become an integral part of the “Hispanic” food
infl uences.
8
Spanish infl uences, of course, were not limited to Texas and the American
southwest. Much of the cuisine of coastal Florida was Spanish Caribbean
206
A Movable Feast
in orientation, and Cuban cuisine could be found from Tampa to Key West
to St. Augustine on the Atlantic seaboard. Black beans and rice (“Moors
and Christians” when the rice is not yellowed with saffron) are at the core
of Cuban-American cooking. So are soups made from black beans or gar-
banzos (chick peas), chicken and rice, roast pork, fi sh and shrimp, bol-
litos (deep-fried nuggets of mashed black-eyed peas and garlic), olive oil,
Cuban bread, and Cuban coffee.
CREOLE AND CAJUN: FRENCH AND AFRICAN INFLUENCES
In 1533, Catherine de Medici moved from Florence to France to become
the Queen of Henri II. Her love of spinach brought forth the still-used the
designation of spinach dishes as “Florentine.” These dishes were prepared
by the entourage of Italian cooks who accompanied Catherine, and her
cooks profoundly altered French cooking techniques and ingredients, lead-
ing later on to the famous French haute cuisine.
9
In some ways these events
infl uenced Louisiana cookery, but French infl uences also arrived from the
French Caribbean and French Canada, and it is sometimes forgotten that
many other cultures took part in its creation.
Among them were German culinary traditions, thanks to thousands of
farmers, mostly from Alsace-Lorraine, who were lured to Louisiana early
in its history with the promise of free land. Spanish cuisine was well-
established during Spain’s three decades or so of rule and, just before it

ended at the turn of the nineteenth century, Sicilian settlers arrived to be
joined by some 25,000 Irish refugees from the potato famine by the middle
of that century.
10
Arguably, however, the greatest infl uence was that of West
Africa because both slaves and free blacks seem to have been in the fore-
front of fashioning those cuisines that are now called Cajun and Creole.
11
The French Revolution impelled refugees from the “Terror” and its guil-
lotine to Louisiana at the same time that it touched off the slave insurrec-
tion in San Domingue. That revolution evicted thousands of whites, many
of whom relocated in Louisiana along with their slaves and free colored
retainers to continue sugarcane cultivation under old management in a
new locale.
12
But in addition to sugar-making skills, the slaves and free
coloreds carried with them the cuisine that had been elaborated in a now
independent Haiti – a blending of French and African infl uences that relied
heavily on local seafood (especially oysters, shrimp, and crayfi sh), along
with sausages and rice.