Dining Through the Decades: 100 Years of American Food
December 16, 1999 posted by David Leite
1970—1979
Tom Wolfe christened the 1970s the Me Decade, and understandably so with the boom in EST, wife swapping, recreational drug use and transcendental meditation–-TM for those in the know. In defense of those long-ago pleasure seekers, there were plenty of reasons for self-indulgence: most notably the Vietnam War, rampant inflation and Nixon.
We also indulged our tastes and developed a ravenous and eclectic appetite. We ricocheted from Buffalo Chicken Wings to Pasta Primavera to Walnut-Encrusted Goat Cheese Salads to homemade Crock-Pot chili in the course of a week. Brunch, replete with quiches of all sorts, became de rigueur. No self-respecting diner would be caught dead eating before 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. By decade’s end, no self-respecting man would be caught dead eating quiche.
The Immigration Act of 1965 opened our doors to millions of Asians and was responsible for the exotic restaurants that were now springing up in even the most homogenized neighborhoods. The first to hit were Szechuan palaces, known for their hot and spicy cuisine. Foodies, whose taste buds until now were accustomed to nothing hotter than pepperoni, were happily chugging glassfuls of water in between searing bites.
Hungry for more, we soon feasted on Hunan, Vietnamese, Korean and, in the 1990s, Thai specialties. Many experts point to the ’70s as the beginning of America’s love affair with heat. It would take only 20 years before salsa surpassed ketchup as the most popular condiment.
The American palate had finally been unleashed, and anything ethnic was worthy of consideration. Italian food, primarily American adaptations of Sicilian and Neapolitan dishes, now turned to Venice, Abruzzi, Tuscany and Milan for inspiration.
“Many Italians from the North had money and came to this country in the ’60s and ’70s to open restaurants,” says Lidia Bastianich, host of PBS’s Lidia’s Italian Table and author of the companion cookbook of the same name (William Morrow & Company, 1998). “What fueled the renaissance of Italian food in this country was the curiosity of Americans,” she adds. “They were willing to try anything.”
Bastianich recounted how during the ’70s she occasionally featured a dish from northern-Italy such as Vitello Alla Bolognese or Fettuccine Alfredo in her restaurant along with more familiar Italian-American dishes. By the end of the decade only a handful of the hybrid dishes remained.
Despite such ethnic fervor, one of the most popular dishes of the day was the very classic, very British Beef Wellington — a fillet of beef tenderloin coated with pâté de foie gras and a duxelles of mushrooms that are then all wrapped in a puff pastry crust. Some believe that Wellington’s popularity had more to do with America’s competitive spirit than with any deep passion for British cuisine.
It began in the ’60s when couples started dabbling in a bit of culinary one-upmanship. Dinner parties with friends became elaborate as complicated recipes appeared on tables with greater regularity. Beef Wellington was considered the height of difficulty and expense because of the preparation of the puff pastry and the price of the pâté de foie gras. Kudos and furtive jealous glances went to the cook who mastered such a bear of a recipe.
Although Beef Wellington went the way of Beef Stroganoff and Boeuf Bourguignon, it did stage a comeback in magazines such as Gourmet in the ’90s, when prepackaged puff pastry and domestic foie gras made it much easier and less expense to make.
The ’70s gave rise to another icon who began her own revolution to rival Julia’s. From her famous Berkeley, California, restaurant, Chez Panisse, Alice Waters reintroduced the notion of cooking with natural, seasonal ingredients–-an almost forgotten concept because of the prepackaged-food boom. Her mantra: fresh food, simply prepared.
To remain faithful to her ideology, she scoured organic farms for fresh, interesting salad greens and vegetables. Through sheer will Waters marginalized iceberg lettuce to make way for arugula, mesclun and chicory. Her passion and respect for food attracted a coterie of young chefs who, under her tutelage, would bring her California Cuisine to the rest of the country — a refreshing counterpoint to the excess of the next decade.
Recipe
Beef Wellington
1980—1989
Think early 1980s and certain images come to mind: the Reagans draped in designer clothes, Trump’s gaudy towers, and, most horrific, oversize restaurant plates cradling an infinitesimally small amount of food. Nouvelle Cuisine, as it was coined in the late ’70s in France, was the hottest thing here. Diners now paid astronomically more to eat significantly less, and loved it. It was a sign of status to wait a half hour for a table, eat a pigeon’s portion of food, and then be the first to foist a platinum credit card on the waiter, loudly declaiming to the table, “This one’s on me!” The stock market was everyone’s best friend, and generosity flowed. But soon diners rebelled and instead opted for plates filled with sumptuous delights.
At home we collected all types of gourmet foods and gadgets. Cabinets overflowed with $65 bottles of virgin olive oil and 50-year-old balsamic vinegars. Countertops were cleared to make way for the new stand mixer and the food processor. And drawers fairly bulged with the newest culinary gizmos, the result of reverent pilgrimages to the Mecca of cooking, Williams-Sonoma.
This was also the time when many chefs stepped out from behind their stoves and found celebrity. Wolfgang Puck became a household name as his much-touted gourmet pizzas attracted the new Hollywood glitterati to his restaurant, Spago.
Paul Prudhomme, a sizable man with an equally sizable talent, started the Cajun trend at his New Orleans restaurant, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, with Cajun Popcorn and his now famous blackened redfish. It took no time for others to follow, blackening everything from chicken to, yes, spaghetti. A worthwhile trend, it unfortunately was taken to ridiculous extremes and petered out by decade’s end. It took the flamboyant Emeril Lagasse on cable’s Food Network to revive it in the 1990s.
Although French food had fallen out of favor, Jean-Georges Vongerichten began serving such delicacies as L’Oeuf au Caviar — a shirred egg served in its shell, topped with caviar and crème fraîche — at Restaurant Lafayette in New York City (where the author was one of two front waiters). Even the most jaded foodie was seduced back.
The late ’80s saw Charlie Trotter open his self-named restaurant in Chicago. Leading the charge away from culinary excess, Trotter turned instead to infused oils, vinaigrettes and light meat and fish reductions. The combination still makes critics gush. Later Vongerichten orchestrated a similar shift with his famous vegetable and fruit essences.
Besides celebrity chefs, it seems as if nearly every style of food had its 15 minutes of fame. Ethiopian cuisine, Tex-Mex, southwestern cooking and Spanish tapas tempted us. The only true winner: Tex-Mex. The others enjoyed flashes of fame (mostly in larger cities) but eventually faded from menus.
On the dessert front, chocoholics swooned when faced with decadent flourless chocolate cakes, truffles and chocolate crème brûlée. Desserts also grew skyward as pastry chefs, taking cues from architecture, built towers of sweetness that rose from the plate. Diners often wondered whether to use a fork or a sledgehammer to eat.
History repeated itself when, on October 19, 1987, the stock market once again plummeted — this time 508 points. As with the crash of 1929, spending skidded to a halt and we ran for cover. Haute restaurants began emptying out as more down-home eateries began filling up. Simple comfort food such as chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, meat loaf (again), pot pies, pasta, and chili became the rage. “Anything that was reminiscent of childhood was welcomed,” comments Bronz.
A beloved dish at the end of the decade was Risotto Milanese. It was so popular that diners ordered the creamy, saffron-infused rice dish without even opening their menus. “I think risotto’s popularity has to do with the fact that it’s the kind of food that embraces you and holds you tight,” coos Bastianich. “It comforts the soul.”
One problem: All that comforting added up to a lot of extra pounds that had to come off.
Recipe
Risotto Alla Milanese
LC
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LC to your 
This marvelous gem, almost as brilliant today as when new, needs to be updated.
When can we expect you to add the last decade? Perhaps you should update this piece with more recipes and offer something like a CD with all of the recipes bundled with the article.
Thank you. Adding to this piece is a very, very good idea, but I think I’ll wait until the first decade of the 21st century is over so that it could be comprehensive. (That’s not too long from now!) And adding more recipes is a wonderful idea. And a CD? Are you LC’s unofficial sales manager?
Rather than your sales manager, I am more of a greatly appreciative reader with as much of an appetite for satisfying writing as for, well, the rest of what makes this site valuable.
Your article surveys the 100-year term with brisk writing that touches on unarguably salient points. It should benefit from an update in two senses: certainly the decade that will end with this year (as in counting 2000 as the first year of the decade and this year as the last) is ripe for a comparable summary, which will update this 100-year essay; the next update would be to extend your article to book length, with lots more recipes and photos and…(but, alas, you know the challenge of writing and putting together a good cookbook), and coverage of more of the less salient points.
Let’s see. M. F. K. Leite? Only after you give us recipes for how to cook a wolf (the ones which happens to be at the doors of many would be wonderful). Perhaps Elizabeth David Leite? Nawh. There is no fat lady to write an intro.
When James Dickey (he of ‘Deliverance’ and much good poetry) spoke with Bill Moyers about culture, Mr. Dickey honed in on cuisine as integral to culture. He claimed that the only indigenous cuisine is Southern, all else being imported. “Dining through the Decades” seems to collect evidence that suggests Mr. Dickey’s judgment might have been a bit clouded. It would be wonderful to read an expanded version of “Dining” and what I suspect is many and sundry examples of a cosmopolitan cuisine…with recipes.
Sales manager? Nawh. More of a long silent consumer of your work who is now yelling into the kitchen for more.
F.M., Your reply had me laughing so hard I scared both cats. Thank you for your vote of confidence, but I don’t think I could write a book like this. It’s not my forté. The article, written so long ago, nearly had prone on the floor and panting with anxiety. But thanks for the comments. (Of course, if you could persuade my publisher to give me a six-figure advance for the book, I’d reconsider.)