![]() ![]() This does not mean middle class as the term is now understood, but people who existed somewhere between satiety and starvation. ![]() ![]() In all three groups that come under her microscope, those who immigrated to America were not the very rich or the very poor but the vast middle. It would be a far better (and more digestible) book had its author been able to resist academia's clotted prose and fashionable pigeonholes - she actually writes at one point about "gendered eating"! - but her thorough research and interesting analyses almost, if not quite, overcome these lapses. So the aptly named Hasia Diner argues in "Hungering for America," an inquiry into the culinary lives of the Italians, the Irish and Eastern European Jews before and after they came here. If this was the result of misgivings on the part of the native-born population, it was also because each immigrant group came to the New World with different expectations about the food that awaited them there. Assimilation may have been taking place in other aspects of American life, but there was little evidence of it in the kitchen. If they opened restaurants or groceries, it was mainly to serve themselves. A citizenry that was still predominantly Anglo-Saxon in origins looked with as much suspicion on the food the newcomers brought as it did on the newcomers themselves. This is the precise opposite of the American response to the cooking styles and food traditions of the millions of people who came here during what is commonly known as the age of migration, the century between 18. We assume now that when people move to this country, they will bring along culinary adventures in which we would like to participate. Not so long ago the American household rarely ventured beyond steak and fries or chicken and slaw now it ventures confidently (if not always competently) into variations on Chinese or Italian or Pakistani or Mexican or Thai or. Not merely do our restaurants offer an astonishing variety of foods and cooking styles from all over the world - in provincial cities and small towns as well as in such established culinary nirvanas as New Orleans, San Francisco and New York - but the food we cook at home has taken a sharp turn toward the international. $39.95 Surely there is not a nation on Earth whose citizens enjoy a more heterogeneous cuisine than do Americans early in the new century. Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration ![]()
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