My day of international eating

Old-fashioned potato salad

            I’m working on a culinary mystery, and I’ve discovered as I write that one of the themes will be an appreciation for good, old-fashioned American food. In fact, I’ve rediscovered James Beard, who was a terrible food snob but also a proponent of American cooking done well—it’s just that he so often found it done badly. French fries, for instance, which he called limp, greasy, and tasteless. But perfectly cooked cottage fries? Ambrosia.

I don’t think I’m parochial in my food tastes, but when I responded to a question from the New York Times cooking columnist about what kind of food I was interested in, I wrote, as I said above, “good old-fashioned American food.” I guess I must have mentioned potato salad, but I surely did not mean to insult anyone. A woman with a Middle Eastern-sounding name (I sincerely hope I’m not stereotyping) wrote to ask if potato salad wasn’t German and added that it sounded pretty exotic to her. I pondered a bit if her response was sarcasm and I’d offended, but then I decided to go with a straight reply. I told her hot German potato salad is indeed German in origin, but I think the mayonnaise and mustard versions so common on picnics are strictly American.

But the point I’m working around to is that my taste is pretty international. I offer as proof my international diet today: lunch at Righteous Food with bison tacos, black beans, and churros; dinner at Tokyo Café with a marvelous lobster roll (I got a little heavy-handed with the wasabi in the soy and had to blow my nose and wipe my eyes a lot.) It’s not that I don’t like foods from other cultures. It’s just that I am bombarded with recipes for exotic foods and lots of grains and difficult-to-get ingredients. Surely there’s a balance there. I don’t want us to lose American cooking in the swell of recipes from other lands. And I think maybe that’s the point James Beard, for all his bombast, was making. He did favor northern European cooking a lot.

As for my mystery, I’ve had to step away from it to work on edits on the Alamo book, and that will probably take me another two weeks at least. Meantime, I have a tentative title, “Saving Irene.” We’ll see what happens with that.

In Alter family news, my oldest Austin grandson, fourteen-year-old Sawyer, broke his femur skiing yesterday in Colorado. It was a clean break, not near a joint, and they transported him to Vail where his surgeon was a surgeon to the Olympic skiing team. Moral of that story: if you’re going to break a bone skiing, do it near Vail. Sawyer will be on crutches for six to eight weeks, which is a complication because his family is temporarily living in the apartment over their garage. Sawyer won’t be able to do those stairs (which I always hated anyway). I have faith they will work it out.

Sawyer is just a few months free from a broken elbow, incurred on a MBX or whatever bike. His Uncle Colin is sympathetic but crowing—at the same age, Colin broke an arm, then a leg on the ski slopes, then another arm, and finally a finger. Now, almost forty years after his early teen accidents he has not broken another bone. At the time people hounded me to have him tested for brittle bones, but a wise doctor said, “He’s just a growing boy.” Now I’m hearing people says Sawyer must be tested—I’ll be interested in what they decide.

It’s been a long day. I was up for an early doctor’s appointment—okay, 9:15 is early for me—and then lunch and dinner and tiny bits of work in between. I look forward to tomorrow—a long working day at home.