It can hardly be said that America has developed a culinary art, because so many phases of our cooking are not, as yet, common to all parts of the country. In the southeast south you have fried chicken and gravy, cornpone, corn pudding, biscuit, and Virginia ham, southern style; in the southwest south you have broilers, chicken tamales, chile con carne, and all the nuances acquired from a proximity to Mexico. In New England one encounters the baked bean, the cold biscuit, pie for breakfast, and codfish cakes. In the great hotels and best restaurants of the large cities, especially in the east, the French cuisine dominates. In the smaller cities of the east and west, where no French chef would deign to waste his days, German, Italian and Greek—to say nothing of Jewish—and purely American restaurants (the dairy kitchen, for example) now contest with each other for patronage. We have never developed a single, dominating system of our own. The American “grill” or its companion in dullness, the American “rathskeller,” boast a mixture of everything and are not really anything. In all cities large and small may be found these horrible concoctions which in their superficial treatment are supposed to be Flemish or Elizabethan or old German combined with the worse imaginings of the socalled mission school of furniture. Here German pancakes, knackwurst and cheesecake come cheek by jowl with American biscuit, English muffins, French rolls, Hungarian goulash, chicken à la Maryland, steaks, chops, and ham and eggs. It’s serviceable, and yet it’s offensive. The atmosphere is deadly—the idea atrocious. By comparison with a French inn or a German family restaurant such as one finds in Frankfort or Berlin, or even an English chophouse, it is unbelievably bad. Yet it seems to suit the present day spirit of America.
All restaurant forms are being tried out—French, Greek, Italian, Turkish, English, Spanish, German—to say nothing of teahouses of all lands. In the long run, possibly some one school will become dominant or a compromise among them all. By that time American cooking will have become a complex of all the others. I sincerely trust that in the internecine struggle fried chicken, gravy, fresh hot biscuit, blackberry pie and fried mush do not wholly disappear. I am fond of French cooking and have a profound respect for the German art—but there! Supposing that never anywhere, any more, was there to be any fried mush or blackberry pie!!!
CHAPTER XI
THE MAGIC OF THE ROAD AND SOME TALES
Our particular breakfast consisted of a choice of several “flake” breakfast foods, a hard fried chop, an egg or two, fried, some German fried potatoes, and all done as an American small town hotelkeeper used to dealing with farmers and storekeepers and “hands” would imagine they ought to be done. Where did the average American first get the idea that meals of nearly all kinds need to be fried hard? Or that tea has to be made so strong that it looks black and tastes like weeds? Or that German fried potatoes ought to be soggy and that ’all people prefer German fried potatoes? If you should ask for French fried potatoes or potatoes au gratin or potatoes O'Brien in a small country town hotel you would be greeted with a look of uncertainty if not of resentment. French fried potatoes, pray—or meat medium or broiled? Impossible! And as for weak, clear, tasteful tea—shades of Buffalo Bill and Davy Crockett! “Whoever heard of weak, clear tea? The man has gone mad. He is some ‘city fellow,’ bent on showing off. It is up to us to teach him not to get smart. We must frown and delay and show that we do not approve of him at all.”
While we were eating, I was thinking where our car would take us this day, and the anticipation of new fields and strange scenes was enough to make a mere poor breakfast a very trivial matter indeed. Clouds and high hills, and spinning along the bank of some winding stream, were an ample exchange for any temporary inconvenience. After breakfast and while Franklin and I once more tightened up our belongings, Speed brought about the machine and in the presence of a few residents—a young girl of fifteen for one, who looked at us with wide, wishful eyes—we strapped on the bags and took our seats. I could not help feeling as I looked at some of them who observed us that they were wishing they were in our places. The car was good to look at. It was quite obvious from the various bags and wraps that we were en route somewhere. Someone was always asking us where we were from and where we were going—questions which the magic name of New York, particularly this distance away, seemed to make all the more significant. The night before in the garage at Scranton a youth, hearing us say that we were from there, had observed with an air: “How is old New York anyway?” And then, with a flourish: “I’ll have to be going over there pretty soon now. I haven’t been over in some time.”
Leaving Factoryville, we ran through country so beautiful that before long I regretted sincerely that we had done any traveling after dark the night before. We were making our way up a wide valley as I could see, the same green Susquehanna Valley, between high hills and through a region given over entirely to dairy farming. The hills looked as though they were bedded knee deep in rich, succulent grass. Groups of black and white Holstein cattle were everywhere to be seen. Some of the hills were laid out in checkerboard fashion by fields of grain or hay or buckwheat or great thick groves of trees. Before many a farm dooryard was a platform on which stood a milk can, or two or three: now and then a neighborhood creamery would come into view, where the local milk was churned wholesale and butter prepared and shipped. The towns for the most part were rarely factory towns, looking more as if they harbored summer boarders or were but now starting on a manufacturing career. Girls or women were reading or sewing on porches. The region of the mines was far behind.
And what a day! The everchanging panorama—how wonderful it was! Tr-r-r-r-r-r and we were descending a steep hill, at the bottom of which lay a railroad track (one of those against which we had been warned, no doubt), and in the distance more great hills, sentineling this wide valley; the road showing like a white thread, miles and miles away.
Tr-r-r-r-r-r, and now we were passing a prosperous farmyard, aglow with strident flowers, one woman sewing at a window, others talking with a neighbor at the door. Tr-r-r-r-r-r, here we were swinging around a sharp curve, over an iron bridge, noisy and shaky and beneath which ran a turbulent stream, and in the immediate foreground was an old mill or a barnyard alive with cattle and poultry. I had just time to think, “What if we should crash through this bridge into the stream below,” when T-r-r-r-r-r-r, and now came a small factory or foundry section with tall smokestacks, and beyond it a fair-sized town, clean, healthy, industrious. No tradition, you see, anywhere. No monuments or cathedrals or great hotels or any historic scene anywhere to look forward to: but Tr-r-r-r-r-r and here we are at the farther outskirts of this same small town with more green fields in the distance, the scuff and scar of manufacturing gone and only the blue sky and endless green fields and some birds flying and a farmer cutting his grain with a great reaper. Tr-r-r-r-r-r—how the miles do fly past, to be sure!
And T-r-r-r-r-r-r (these motors are surely tireless things), here is a lake now, just showing through the tall, straight trunks of trees, a silvery flash with a grey icehouse in the distance; and then, Tr-r-r-r-r-r, a thick green wall of woods, so rich and dark, from which pour the sweetest, richest, most invigorating odors and into the depth of which the glance sinks only to find cooler and darker shadows and even ultimate shadow or a green blackness; and then—Tr-r-r-r-r—a line of small white cottages facing a stream and a boy scuffing his toes in the warm, golden dust—oh, happy boyland!—and then, Tr-r-r-r-r—but why go on? It was all beautiful. It was all so refreshing. It was all like a song—only—Tr-r-r-r-r—and here comes another great wide spreading view, which Franklin wishes to sketch. He has a large pad of some peculiarly white porous paper, on which he works and from which he tears the sketches when they are done and deposits them in a convenient portfolio. By now Speed has become resigned to not getting to Indiana as fast as he would like.
“Shucks!” I heard him say once, as he was oiling up his engine, “if we didn’t have to stop this way every few minutes, we’d soon get into Indiana. Give me half way decent roads and this little old motor will eat up the miles as good as anyone....” But when you have two loons aboard who are forever calling “Whoa!” and jumping up or out or both and exclaiming, “Well now, what do you think of that?—isn’t it beautiful?”—what are you going to do? No real chauffeur can get anywhere that way—you know that.