By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
David Page had already spent the morning promoting his new book, “Food Americana” when Prime reached him at his home on an island just off the coast of New Jersey.
It had been a false start to the interview – a time mix-up on my part – but the longtime investigative journalist and former producer of the Emmy-award winning Food Network program, “Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives” was gracious about it – and a subsequent computer glitch that led to an additional 15-minute delay.
He’d been in a similar situation himself already that day. On an interview with a T.V. station before our call, Page said he’d just started to joke with the host about how early it was when they “lost their internet,” he shared.
“As I have learned, writing a book is relatively easy as opposed to pitching a book,“ he joked, adding he was in the process of “emailing hundreds of T.V. and radio stations”, trying to get an interview about “Food Americana.”
The book – an examination of 11 of the most iconic foods that make up what is the modern American cuisine – is as personal as Pages’ recounting of learning to make authentic Neapolitan pizza in California and as matter of fact as an examination of the birth of the American hamburger.
If you love ice cream with mix-ins, great barbecue, lobster rolls, Mexican food or any of the other hallmarks of the way we Americans eat , this book is your invitation to a virtual banquet of interviews, observations and more.
A Franklin County fella
The 66 year-old Page knew our area well. He grew up in Western Massachusetts; his father, he said, had been the dean of faculty at Greenfield Community College when he was young. Though he admitted his “nuanced appreciation of food” really developed “later in life,” he shared several vivid food memories from his younger years.
“Western Mass. used to have sugarhouses ... I recall visiting one somewhere in Sunderland,” Page recalled. “Something about that experience - going [there] and getting sugar on snow and a pickle, that is as Western Mass. as you can get.
“The smell of the burning wood … it was just a loaded experience,” he added.
And he remembered how his family developed a love of lobster, which led to annual vacations in Maine.
“In Greenfield, we had Foster’s Supermarket, and I thought their ability to do this was amazing – every morning they drove a truck to Boston and would come back with [fresh] seafood,” Page said. “They would steam the lobster for you; my mom, who worked, would stop
[there] and come home with steamed lobster and I thought it was wonderful.”
Page explained that his initial interest in how a culture was expressed through its food was sparked during his early career work in broadcasting.
“I was lucky enough to work for NBC in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.” Page said, and it was during those tours he “began to understand the importance of local and national and regional cuisine; in parts of that area there are multi regional cuisines.”
That thinking began to permeate how he looked at the world, he admitted.
“My daughter, some 20 years ago when she was about seven or eight, said, ‘Dad, how come every time you talk about a place you talk about its food?’” Page said. “To me, food is the gateway to understanding countries and culture.”
His fascination with America’s melting pot of cuisines, Page went on to explain, was in a way a natural continuation of his work on Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” where he served as executive producer from the pilot episode through Season 11.
It was, he said, not so much an outgrowth of that program but, “an outgrowth of the interest I brought to “Diners” in the first place,” Page noted.
“This [book] is an idea that had been growing in my head,” he continued, admitting “When you’re in the writing business - as much as television is in that business, it is constrained; you are writing in a world of pictures. Those of us who are writing for T.V. harbor the desire to write a book.”
Marrying his two lifelong passions – travel and exploring local food –- his book idea, he said, evolved to become “Food Americana.”
From his initial concept to finished manuscript, Page said, took him two years.
“This was my first book [and] I made a strategic mistake,” Page admitted “It didn't occur to me [that] I could have done a book on hamburgers, or, done a book on lobster.”
In the process of researching the cuisines he felt were most reflective of American culture, Page said he realized he was “doing enough research to write a book on any one food.”
What he did include were dishes that began as local and regional specialties – such as pizza, barbecue, Mexican, wings and the new American favorite, sushi – that you can now order across the U.S.
“We are now at a time when you can get what used to be available only in a regional area anywhere in the country,” Page explained. He cited the example of the ubiquitous lobster roll. “They used to be only available in Maine, but now lobster processing is pretty good [and] you can get a lobster roll, say, in Utah.” But, Page lamented, “It isn't the same as eating one on a dock in Maine.”
And there were some popular American foods Page chose to leave out of this first effort.
Chief among them was the hot dog. That all-American sandwich “will play a role in my next book,” Page said. “But in a book about cuisine, when you’re talking about regional development [of a dish] with hot dogs it is about sauces – not making the hot dog.”
Another new staple that didn’t make this first book, he said, is Thai cuisine.
“Though you find it in large cities, it has not broken through to be a [widespread] food,” Page noted.
Page didn’t just dig into the rich history of our melting pot cuisine, interview purveyors and sample the local fare while researching the book. “Food Americana” is filled with stories of how he got behind the counter – or in front of the oven or smoker – to find out what it takes to create the foods we love.
For example, while researching the chapter on “The Bagelization of America,” Page said he “Got to go behind the counter of Russ & Daughters on New York’s lower East Side – one of oldest purveyors of lox and bagels in the country.
“I was trying to make lox slices, but all I could make, by accident, was lox mush,” Page admitted. Despite his lack of knife skill, Page said his time at Russ & Daughters, “Was just a great experience for a New York Jew, to be able to go behind the counter…it was like being a fly in a 747…”
His experience learning to make pizza at Tony Gemignari’s International School of Pizza – located not in New York but in the Italian North Beach area of San Francisco – takes us on another culinary experience, involving hot brick ovens, metal pizza peels and the art of rotating the crust around the wood-fired oven so it cooks uniformly, but doesn’t burn. Page admitted he didn’t fully understand what it takes to make a great pizza “until I shoved my hand in that oven.”
From taking us behind the scenes at the “superbowl of BBQ” in Memphis at the 2019 May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest to exploring the birth of sushi’s “California roll” (spoiler - the avocado replaces hard-to get fatty tuna) to explaining how we “acquired”
Mexican cuisine with territory along the Rio Grande in the Mexican-American War (and how Taco Bell brought an “Americanized” version of the cuisine across the land), Page explains it all, along with our obsession with our adopted cuisines.
When it comes to Mexican cuisine, for example, Page said, “Right now from coast to coast it’s Birria de res, which is beef stewed in spicy broth and put inside folded tortillas and grilled, and the resulting taco is served with a cup of cooking liquid- called consomme.”
Page said shortly before completing the book, he and his wife “drove an hour and a half from New Jersey to south Philly, where a taco truck had opened up” serving the dish. “It was just extraordinary.”
Fittingly, each chapter in “Food Americana” ends with a corresponding recipe, including one for “Vanilla Custard and Ice Cream” in the Ice cream chapter, provided by Judy Herrell of Herrell’s Ice Cream in Northampton. Page chatted with Judy, her former husband Steve – inventor of the “mix in” concept of ice cream flavors – along with the founders of Ben & Jerry’s and other ice cream icons about America’s favorite creamy dessert for the book.
As tasty a read as “Food Americana” is, Page’s tome still raises a question about our coast-to-coast cuisine, and becomes “a perfect example of a debate I came across when writing the book” he said of the ability to now get a Maine-style lobster roll in Utah. “Is it a good or bad thing that foods that only used to be available regionally now can be available across the country?
”Food is so much more than just the flavor; food is the experience - food is a view into a culture, that’s a lot of it,” he mused.
Dig in, chew on that thought, and decide for yourself.
Published in April. “Food Americana” by David Page is available at Barnes & Noble, through Amazon Books, GoodReads and from Page’s publisher, Mango Publishing.
