America: The Cookbook has local ties
Patriotic home chefs searching for culinary classics, rejoice! America: the Cookbook is a catalog of cuisine, and an index of regional flavors from sea to shining sea.
With 800 home-cooking recipes compiled by author Gabrielle Langholtz, the cookbook frames itself to be "A culinary road trip through the 50 states."
Commissioned for Phaidon Press by Emily Salkin Takoudes - an editor with family ties to Dover - the exhaustive index of American cuisine highlights contributions from epicurean emissaries in every state, including Delaware's own James Beard award-nominees Sam Calagione, owner and president of the Dogfish Head Brewery and restaurants, and Hari Cameron, chef and owner of a(MUSE.) and Grandpa MAC restaurants.
At more than 700 pages, this cookbook is exhaustive encyclopedia of all-American recipes inspired by immigrant influences and holiday traditions.
As an introduction, Langholtz explained her motivations for researching these classic recipes stemmed from a childhood spent traveling the country with her academic parents, a decade of adulthood dedicated to editing food magazines, and her own desire to illuminate the artistry that has evolved in American cuisine.
"A continent of crab cakes and cracklins, fiddleheads and fatback, huckleberries and huevos, corn and conch, peanuts and peaches had been hidden in plain sight, missed by modern mapmakers of taste," she wrote. "I wrote this book to refute the misconception that American food means homogenized, processed blandness."
The wide-ranging reserve of recipes is comprehensive of every corner of the country from a classic New England Clam Chowder in Massachusetts to Alice Waters' recipe for Meyer Lemon Sherbet in California.
For his Delaware commentary, Calagione recalled the creation of Punkin' Ale for the World Championship Punkin Chunkin while Cameron contributed three recipes he considered true to the history and traditions of home cooking in Delaware.
In a state with more chickens than people, the chef said he felt obliged to submit a savory chicken and dumplings recipe as well as a historic recipe for Delaware potato pie, which Cameron explained as Russett's answer to sweet potato pie, without the winter spices.
He also submitted a cucumber salad inspired by the garden salads his mother, Nina, would throw together on hot summer nights.
"Every summer we would have gardens and my mom would make a cucumber salad, so I took that and brought it out with some of my current style," he said. "It is kind of my favorite thing to eat in the summer, and the same goes for my wife as well."
America: the Cookbook is available on Amazon.com and other book retailers.
