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BBC News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
From Tabasco sauce to Taiwanese Tex-Mex: Felicity Cloake's American odyssey
For her new book, Peach Street to Lobster Lane, British food writer Felicity Cloake cycles across the US from coast to coast in search of a definition for its national cuisine. Gordon Ramsay famously credits his success in the US to Americans knowing nothing about good food. Felicity Cloake begs to differ. In her new book, Peach Street to Lobster Lane, the award-winning British food writer sets out to challenge the stereotype of American food as deep-fried and cultureless. "On this trip, I'm determined to find this unicorn, cover it with ketchup and pickles and have it for lunch," she writes. Over the course of 10 weeks and several thousand kilometres, she cycles coast to coast across the US, discovering independent restaurants, fusion cuisine and an attitude towards food she's seen nowhere else in the world. Her food-filled obsession takes her from San Francisco's most refined sourdough to the home of the hamburger in Columbus, Ohio. Along the way, she explores the source of Tabasco on Avery Island and feasts on crawfish on an accidental stop in Houston. Her mission? To discover what, if anything, ties American cuisine together and to celebrate the creativity, history and heart she finds everywhere she goes. We caught up with Cloake to talk about the good, the greasy and the gloriously surprising food that fuelled her adventures. Why did you decide to write a book about American food?I don't think my publisher will mind me saying that they were a bit reluctant, because the theme is a bit tricky. If you don't already love America and its cuisine, it's difficult to see beyond the top-line stereotypes of McDonalds, KFC, ridiculous eating competitions and too much on the plate. It doesn't sound very attractive. But I was thinking about the amazing Mexican food and all the different immigrant cuisines there. There's much more of a sense of possibility, fun and flexibility when it comes to cooking in America. They don't feel so hide-bound to tradition for a lot of things as we do in Europe. And that was so exciting to me; uncovering this really playful attitude to food that manifests in potentially fun but unhealthy things like, you know, a cheeseburger that has doughnuts instead of a bun. There is some fantastic food and fantastic produce in the US, but it just gets sort of swept under the carpet because we only see this cartoonish version. For me, there's always been a glamour about America, which I find hard to shake. It's a sense of "wow, everything's like it is in the movies". And it is! You spent 10 weeks cycling across the US in search of the best food. Why did you decide to travel by bike? I thought: I've cycled in Italy, I've cycled in France. How different can it be? And then when I got closer to the trip, I was more concerned. Everyone I knew tried to put me off. But I actually found that it was a great place to cycle. I did end up riding down a six-lane freeway in LA, but there are lots of little roads too. It's a bit like France in that way; because the country is so vast, the smaller roads tend to be quite quiet. It gave me access to a side of America that I hadn't seen before because I'd always been in a car, passing through at speed. Did you discover a culinary style that is distinctly American? Yes! I think it centres around the idea of playfulness and a lack of concern for tradition and the "right" way of doing things. That's what annoys so many people from the more established and conservative food cultures about American food; that's why they are so dismissive. It's a fun place to eat and they've got some great produce. They don't overcomplicate it either. I had some brilliant farm-to-table food in New England in particular. When American food is good, it's up there with the world's best. People need to look beyond the American businesses that are on their local high streets to find real American cuisine. It's a very fun place to eat. What was your favourite meal? I find mashups of unexpected food cultures really exciting. My best meal was at a restaurant in San Antonio where a Taiwanese American chef was making the Tex-Mex food she had grown up with, under Taiwanese influences. So it was things like an orange chicken fried steak and mochi hush puppies. I found that exciting because it's not something that you would ever find somewhere else. Tex-Mex is seen as a mash up in itself, and to add a third culture to the mix just feels mind blowing. There was so much creativity and fun, but it was also delicious. It was clever cooking but it was light-hearted as well, and I love that. What surprised you most about the trip? America is expensive! Ten years ago, travelling in America was very cheap. Food was cheap, motels were cheap. But that is no longer the case – and it was a bit of a shock to the system. I bought a grapefruit in Ohio that cost $2.99 – it would have cost 60p in the UK, and it had surely been grown in Florida. So that was extraordinary. Then the whole tipping culture thing… it's just a really expensive place to struck you most about the differences between English and American food culture?It was difficult getting food that wasn't processed in some way. It's not that people aren't health conscious, it's more that the stuff being marketed as health food is at odds with what I would regard as healthy food. It's very processed, it's packaged. I found it hard to find an unprocessed fruit or vegetable. More like this:• The truth about the US' most iconic food• Is the future of French cheese at stake?• Tucson: The US's ancient, underrated culinary capital Then the throwaway nature of everything really bothered me. It's hard to recycle there. And I don't get the same enjoyment from eating from a plastic plate. There are a few issues surrounding food that made me proud of how much British food has changed. What was your biggest learning from the trip? I hadn't appreciated that all stereotypes of American food in my mind – the hotdogs, burgers and ice cream sundaes – were all imports as well. I had thought about Mexican food and Korean food, and then the rest was American food. But I realised that no; all the food bar Native American food heritage – which is being reclaimed these days – all of it is an import. I would love to go to the Lakes region and learn more about that food culture. There's popcorn, jerky and wild rice, although that's more of an ingredient than a dish. Overall, it's a much more exciting cuisine than I imagined it would be. As different waves of people come in and mix, there's more to see and try. It's evolving and changing – it feels like boundless possibility. Is there anything you'd do differently if you had the chance to do it again?I do slightly regret that I didn't eat any really trashy fast food that we don't get here yet. There is a lot more that I could have found. Another odd regret is that I didn't eat more. I was obsessed with the idea that I was going to die if I didn't eat enough vegetables. I ate a lot of salads out of the bag. I think I might have been a bit overanxious with that, looking back. And if it wasn't for my dog, I would have gone for longer. I would have liked to have spent more time in Texas, for sure. There's so much more to explore. Peach Street to Lobster Lane: Coast to Coast in Search of American Cuisine by Felicity Cloake, is published by Mudlark and is released on 5 June 2025. -- For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
I love cooking for my dad. This Black Forest cake is all about him.
When you've been in the food-writing world long enough, it's easy to fall into the same traps and tropes, especially for those special occasions that come around every year. One of the most common for Mother's Day or Father's Day is the homage to a special dish one of your parents would always make for you.
Wall Street Journal
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Food Person' Review: A Ghostwriter With Taste
Isabella Pasternak, the frumpy, dumpy, 25-year-old protagonist of Adam Roberts's very appealing debut novel, 'Food Person,' is uncomfortable everywhere but in a kitchen, unsure of herself except when at a stove and consumed by a desire to become a cookbook author. When Isabella loses her job as a staff writer at a digital food magazine after panicking and making a hash of a chocolate-soufflé demonstration live on Instagram, it's a devastating blow. 'If she were to give up food writing, what else could she do? She had no talent for fiction, as she'd learned in college. Her imagination was limited to what her characters ate. 'Can we go a little deeper here?' her creative-writing teachers would nudge. 'What does your main character want besides unpasteurized Brie?'' Salvation seems to come in the form of a job ghostwriting a cookbook for one Molly Babcock, the beautiful former star of a prime-time soap opera and a onetime 'it girl.' For assorted reasons—mortifying viral photos, a reputation as a diva—she has made the transition from famous to notorious. Now she is seeking rehabilitation and rebranding. As her manager explains, 'Molly's pivoting into the food space.' It's a curious pivot to be sure. Molly, who is nasty, narcissistic, endlessly hungover and unreliable (if occasionally charming), doesn't cook and is calorie-averse. Never mind 'The Devil Wears Prada.' This is 'The Devil Eats Nada.'
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson review – what the contents of our kitchens says about us
Two months after her husband left in 2020, Bee Wilson was startled by the clatter of a baking tin falling on to the kitchen floor. In one way this doesn't seem particularly remarkable: Wilson is an esteemed food writer who presumably has a surplus of kitchen utensils crammed into her bulging cupboards. This tin, though, was different. For one thing it was heart-shaped. For another, Wilson had used it to bake her wedding cake 23 years earlier, taking care to leave out the cherries because her husband-to-be loathed them. (This now strikes her as ominous: 'Maybe a man who was so fussy about cherries was not the man for me.') Lurking at the back of Wilson's mind had been the thought that she would soon be using the heart-shaped tin to bake a cake for their silver wedding anniversary. But now here it was, lying dejectedly at her feet and, she couldn't help noticing, spotted with rust. In this delightful book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation, food writer Wilson explores the way that kitchen objects have the power to move, soothe and even reproach us. There's the plate you feel compelled to eat off because it makes everything taste nicer, or that bowl you keep but can't bear to use because it reminds you too much of the person who gave it to you. In the maelstrom of her new living conditions, Wilson worries that she is overdoing the anthropomorphism: there is a big cast-iron knife that she can't bear to pick up because it is the one her ex-husband always used and 'to touch its smooth handle would have felt like holding his hand'. It turns out that Wilson need not have worried that she was, in her words, going 'mad' by ascribing personalities and human meaning to bits of wood and stainless steel. Magical thinking, the textbooks reassure her, is a universal aspect of human cultures. It also provides the propulsion for this engaging collection of 30-odd short essays organised around ordinary people's complicated feelings for egg whisks and apple corers. Among the kitchenalia that Wilson sets before us is a much-loved pressure cooker belonging to a Tuscan diplomat's wife which saw service after the second world war in Senegal and Mumbai (pressure cookers, incidentally, turn out to be ancient bits of kit, going all the way back to 1679). There's also a silver toast rack that Wilson's mother, slipping into Alzheimer's, is convinced has been stolen by a burglar who wants it for a particularly fancy picnic. Closer to home is a humble red, plastic washing-up bowl. It was a gift from a thoughtful neighbour who spotted that the newly single Wilson was now in charge not only of the cooking for her three hungry children but all the washing up too. The bowl had a cheerful, purposeful look to it, as if urging Wilson to look on the bright side. And it worked: 'Every time I looked at it filled with hot sudsy water, I felt that washing up might actually be cool and Danish rather than tedious and mildly oppressive.' A book concerned with rummaging in other people's kitchen drawers might start to feel claustrophobic, but Wilson is careful to let the light in. She interviews Sasha Correa, a Venezuelan who recalls how for 60 evenings in a row in 2002, her family – five sisters plus their mother and father – went out on to their balcony in Caracas and banged pots for an hour to protest against the authoritarian policies of the country's president, Hugo Chávez. These 'casserole protests' have become a feature throughout Latin America, though recently they have been seen in Europe, too. During the 'Kitchenware Revolution' of 2009-2011, Icelandic citizens clashed and clattered in protest at their government's dire handling of the country's financial crisis. It is no surprise to learn that Wilson's obsession with kitchen vernacular has a genetic element. Her grandfather, Norman Wilson, was the production director of Wedgwood during the middle decades of the 20th century. Under his auspices, thousands of dinner plates and gravy boats sailed out into the world in a variety of patterns from the classic Willow to Summer Sky, a beautiful pale pearlescent blue with a white trim. By far and away Mr Wilson's personal favourite, though, was Kutani Crane, featuring a turquoise crane set against a multicoloured floral arrangement. Although extremely popular with customers, Norman Wilson's descendants found Kutani Crane fussy and clotted, and competed to offload unwanted heirlooms on each other. Consequently, Wilson admits that she has developed ambivalent feelings about the family china. Recently, she opened another little-used cupboard only to find two Kutani Crane vegetable tureens squatting, dusty, unloved and vaguely malevolent. Despite feeling 'strangled' by them, filial obligation had so far stopped her from sending them to the charity shop. Looking at them now, Wilson has a revelation: 'What if I had become the Kutani Crane in the marriage?' – in other words, something that her ex-husband felt a grudging duty towards, but not quite enough to keep. In the end, the tureens, unlike the marriage, get a last-minute reprieve. Bundled up into the attic, they are biding their sulky time until Wilson's children are old enough to decide whether a clean break is in order. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
