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Ilf & Petrov on American Food
Sep. 21st, 2019 07:19 amI had the impression, picked up from I know not where, that the great standardization of American food set in sometime during the 1950s, but if Ilf and Petrov are to be believed, the rot had already set in by 1935. They complain:
“During the month and a half that we had lived in the States we had become so sick of American cooking that we were agreeable to any other kinds of edibles - Italian, Chinese, Jewish - anything but Breakfast No. 2 or Dinner No. 1, anything but this numbered, standardized, and centralized food. In fact, if it is possible to speak of bad taste in food, then Anglo-American cooking undoubtedly is the expression of a bad, silly, and eccentric taste that has brought forth such hybrids as sweet and sour pickles, bacon fried to the consistency of plywood, or blindingly white and utterly tasteless (no, having the taste of cotton!) bread.”
Directly following this tirade, they decide to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant, at which time they discover the Russian palate is not equal to the heat of Mexican cooking: “the very first spoon knocked everything out of our heads except the desire to seize a fire extinguisher and to put out the bonfire that broke out in the mouth. As for the enchilada, they proved to be long, appetizing blintzes filled with red pepper and gunpowder, thinly cut, and covered with nitroglycerin. It is simply impossible to sit down to such a dinner without wearing a fireman’s helmet. We ran out of the Original Mexican Restaurant, hungry, angry, dying of thirst. Five minutes later we sat in a drugstore, the most ordinary American drugstore, and ate (oh, humiliation!) centralized, standardized, and numbered food, which he had cursed only half an hour before, drinking beforehand ten bottles of Coca-Cola apiece to quiet our disturbed nervous system.”
Speaking of Coca-Cola, one of the things they find most fascinating about America (and which I, in turn, find most fascinating about the Soviet perspective on America) is the absolute ubiquity of advertising. Coca-Cola in particular advertised absolutely everywhere, but it’s hardly the only brand that is impossible to escape.
“Here [in Chicago], as in New York, electricity was trained. It extolled the same gods: Coca-Cola, Johnnie Walker Whisky, Camel Cigarettes. Here, too, were the infants that had annoyed us all through the week: the thin infant who did not drink orange juice, and his prospering antipode - the fat, good infant who, appreciating the efforts of the juice manufacturer, consumed it in horse-sized doses.”
I also enjoyed their description of that exotic snack, popcorn: “a roasted corn which bursts open in the form of white boutonnieres. On the counter glowed a gasoline flare with three bright wicks. We tried to guess what popcorn was made of.”
The seller - a Russian expat, surprisingly enough! - enlightens them: it’s just corn heated to the bursting point.
And one last description, of a New York automat: “The walls of the automats are occupied throughout with little glass closets. Near each one of them is a slit for dropping a ‘nickel’ (a five-cent coin). Behind the glass stands a dour sandwich or a glass of juice or a piece of pie. Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats in a show.”
Might come in handy for a Captain America or an Agent Carter fic.
“During the month and a half that we had lived in the States we had become so sick of American cooking that we were agreeable to any other kinds of edibles - Italian, Chinese, Jewish - anything but Breakfast No. 2 or Dinner No. 1, anything but this numbered, standardized, and centralized food. In fact, if it is possible to speak of bad taste in food, then Anglo-American cooking undoubtedly is the expression of a bad, silly, and eccentric taste that has brought forth such hybrids as sweet and sour pickles, bacon fried to the consistency of plywood, or blindingly white and utterly tasteless (no, having the taste of cotton!) bread.”
Directly following this tirade, they decide to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant, at which time they discover the Russian palate is not equal to the heat of Mexican cooking: “the very first spoon knocked everything out of our heads except the desire to seize a fire extinguisher and to put out the bonfire that broke out in the mouth. As for the enchilada, they proved to be long, appetizing blintzes filled with red pepper and gunpowder, thinly cut, and covered with nitroglycerin. It is simply impossible to sit down to such a dinner without wearing a fireman’s helmet. We ran out of the Original Mexican Restaurant, hungry, angry, dying of thirst. Five minutes later we sat in a drugstore, the most ordinary American drugstore, and ate (oh, humiliation!) centralized, standardized, and numbered food, which he had cursed only half an hour before, drinking beforehand ten bottles of Coca-Cola apiece to quiet our disturbed nervous system.”
Speaking of Coca-Cola, one of the things they find most fascinating about America (and which I, in turn, find most fascinating about the Soviet perspective on America) is the absolute ubiquity of advertising. Coca-Cola in particular advertised absolutely everywhere, but it’s hardly the only brand that is impossible to escape.
“Here [in Chicago], as in New York, electricity was trained. It extolled the same gods: Coca-Cola, Johnnie Walker Whisky, Camel Cigarettes. Here, too, were the infants that had annoyed us all through the week: the thin infant who did not drink orange juice, and his prospering antipode - the fat, good infant who, appreciating the efforts of the juice manufacturer, consumed it in horse-sized doses.”
I also enjoyed their description of that exotic snack, popcorn: “a roasted corn which bursts open in the form of white boutonnieres. On the counter glowed a gasoline flare with three bright wicks. We tried to guess what popcorn was made of.”
The seller - a Russian expat, surprisingly enough! - enlightens them: it’s just corn heated to the bursting point.
And one last description, of a New York automat: “The walls of the automats are occupied throughout with little glass closets. Near each one of them is a slit for dropping a ‘nickel’ (a five-cent coin). Behind the glass stands a dour sandwich or a glass of juice or a piece of pie. Despite the shining glass and metal, the sausages and cutlets deprived of liberty somehow produce a strange impression. One pities them, like cats in a show.”
Might come in handy for a Captain America or an Agent Carter fic.
