Commonplace Vol. 4 Issue 5

In which the writer encounters American food, and thinks about it a lot.

Hello. I spent two weeks in the USA earlier this summer, and about four days of that was in the modern world. The rest was at Pennsic, which is not the modern world, and shouldn’t really be considered in the same regard (but did have modern food). This issue contains thoughts on the food and food culture I encountered, both in the modern and the (very) pseudo-medieval. Broadly, they’re more observation than conclusion; I’m still mulling over a lot of what I saw and ate.

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First up, I got to try a whole load of foods that I have never eaten before, or only eaten once before when I wasn’t really paying attention. That was excellent, and I really enjoyed it. Also, it turns out that contrary to the expectations of anyone ever, I really like grits, and bought a container of it? them? on the way home.

Above, you’ll see a menu from Waffle House, which is a chain of eateries that operates in 25 states across the US, and has about 2000 branches. It has a distinctly Southern feel about it, to my mind, although I’m willing to be educated on that. It’s also noted for the Waffle House Index, which is a crude measure of exactly how bad conditions are in disaster areas in the US. Because it’s open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, its state of function is a reliable metric. If it’s operating normally, the situation is not that bad (green). If it has a limited menu, or is operating from a generator, things are rough (orange). And if the local Waffle House is closed, you have a full-blown disaster on your hands (red).

I enjoyed the food there a lot, partly for novelty value and partly because it’s the kind of stick-to-the-ribs food I like in general. I’m not convinced that it’s good food by almost any measure, but that’s a theme I’ll be returning to. Everything I ate there had a sweet side-taste, which was expected in the case of the waffles, less so in the case of the bacon, and frankly a bit weird in the case of the toast. “Sausage” in the US doesn’t come in actual sausage shapes; it’s more a sausage-meat patty, which was remarkably uniform in taste no matter where I had it. It’s definitely not like the Irish breakfast sausage, and now that I’m thinking about it, it might have more in common with white pudding.

I am very much a fan of the ever-refilling coffee mug.

We got to Pennsic four days before the kitchen and the cook for our camp. The cook is one of those people who can cook anything and have it turn out glorious. She has a bunch of food sensitivies herself, but she’s been working around those for years, and knows how to do a wide range of things. I will note that two of her sensitivies, eggs and beef, were perfectly ok for her when she was in Ireland, because there’s little or no soy in the animal feed here. I have pictures of some of her recipes, and will be looking for more. However, the four days before she got there, we ate from the food providers on-site. I found the providers fascinating, because while they had thematic names (“The Beast & Boar”, “Medieval Munchies”, “Delights of Cathay”, and so on), there wasn’t as much as an attempt to provide anything even medieval-ish. The food was described by some people as “State Fair Food”, and while I don’t have the experience to compare, it was widely agreed upon. The deep fried Oreos were a contributor to this, it seems.

Two of the stands seem to have been run by the same people, and they provided an “infinite mug” - $33 for a mug that holds around 500ml, and which you can fill from various taps - coffee, lemonade, pink lemonade, fruit punch, sweet tea and unsweetened tea. The coffee was hot, everything else cold. Apart from the coffee, none of these were very familiar to me (I think I’ve had sweet tea once before, in the house of an American friend living in Ireland in about 2004), and honestly, it was a thing I’m going to have to replicate here, because it was stunningly good at keeping me cool(er) in Pennsic’s sweltering heat and humidity.

We took a day in the first week to go north as far as Niagara Falls, which gave me a look at some more of America, and also got some more traditional food. We visited the Anchor Bar (well, the one in Niagara Falls, not the one in Buffalo), the home of Buffalo wings, of which one of the travelling party is a dedicated fan, and I got the west-New-York state local sandwich, beef on weck. The “weck” is a kummelweck roll. It was straight-up excellent, and I’m fascinated by the way in which local food specialties have developed in the US. There’s none of the semi-mythical attribution of European dishes; foods can be pinned to specific names and places, sometimes to the day.

I also got to poke around in some American retail outlets - two branches of Walmart, a Dollar Tree, a suburban mall, and a few other places. There are a lot of differences between American shops and here in general, but I’m going to focus on the food. First, there’s a lot more variety in packaged goods. Anything that can have variation - coffee, tea, biscuits/cookies, soft drinks, flour, breakfast cereal, and especially snacks of any kind, where we have dozens, there’re a hundred different kinds there. This is less so in the Dollar Tree (the local equivalent of Eurosaver or a pound shop) or a drug store, but they still have the kind of variety that you’d expect in a full supermarket here. My father remarked after a visit to the US a number of years ago that he found the level of choice disconcerting; sometimes what you want is just black coffee, and having to make six choices to get to that felt to him like a waste of time.

There were a few things I was kind of surprised not to see in great profusion, mostly in dairy. In Ireland, and anywhere in Europe I’ve been, supermarkets have several bays of yogurt and cheese. In France, you’ve sometimes an entire aisle of each. In both Walmarts I was in - which I think were pretty big ones - there was an extremely limited selection of both.

Package sizes are bigger. The smallest packages of anything you can get, from flour through sweet tea, are the size of medium-to-large ones here, and there were soft drink containers on the shelves that I would have had some trouble lifting down. I did try to assess the idea of ingredients vs packaged foods, since that was a thing other writers had remarked on, but I don’t feel I was able to give that a fair shot - there were so many kinds of everything that assessing flour vs. bread, for instance, was just not doable.

And then there’s the sugar content in everything. This has been written about extensively, and I’m not going to belabour it, but I have had cake on this side of the Atlantic that was less sweet than white bread in the US.

There was a time when I thought that food culture in Ireland was converging on that of the US, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. American food is very definitely its own thing, and I am very interested in the city-level local food specialities, which I’d really only thought of in much older European contexts before. I brought home samples of a few things, and there are some others I may end up requesting to be brought over by friends coming this way.

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