MY COUSIN LIZZIE BORDEN

The first gourmet in my family was Lizzie Borden.

Photo Courtesy of www.quora.com

No one else in our Fall River family of Calvinists had ever given in to passion that wasn’t between the sheets. She, on the other hand, was passionate enough in 1892 to chop up her parents because they fed her in the heat of August three day old left-over mutton soup. That was before refrigeration, and since her rich parents were too cheap to buy late summer’s expensive ice, the soup had gone badly off. They made her eat it anyway.

Theirs was a thrifty god.

As was the reputation of American food in the years after Lizzie, as expressed in the always inspiring The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1950) and the chapter “Food in the United States.” Alice’s question when in 1934, about to go on tour of the USA, whether the food there would “be to her taste.” Her being Gertrude Stein. They had had a report from a young Frenchman just back from the States that the food was good “but very strange indeed – canned vegetable cocktails and canned fruit salads.” Another American friend and houseguest of the couple had replied that those canned cocktails and salads occupy a preponderant position on the menus, but there were also “honey dew melons, soft-shell crabs and prime roasts of beef.”