Eat American!

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Elsewhere around the country, boutique farms are producing game birds, ducks and free-range chickens (which are allowed to roam and forage for natural food to add flavor and improve texture). Fresh buffalo meat is now regularly supplied to chefs such as Jimmy Schmidt of the London Chop House in Detroit by American Spoon Foods in Petoskey, Mich. As Americans discover that wild mushrooms grow in their woods and ma-che, or lamb's-lettuce, in their fields, they are paying premium prices for such produce at places like the Irvine Ranch Farmers Market in Los Angeles and Balducci's in Manhattan. Says Specialty Food Buyer Louis Balducci: "U.S. products are selling because they are good and interesting. Even American caviar is better than it was. In the beginning you couldn't give that stuff away. Now it's edible because the curing process has been perfected." To many connoisseurs, edible is still the most that can be said for domestic caviar, despite the praise it often receives from the food press and purveyors.

Although recognized across the country, this new wave cooking still sets off discussion when experts try to define it. Child says, "There have been entire symposiums trying to define American cuisine. As far as I'm concerned, it is American food, cooked in America by Americans with American ingredients." The broadest view is expressed by Jan Weimer, food editor of Bon Appétit, a cooking magazine whose circulation has jumped from 300,000 in 1975 to its present 1.3 million. Says she: "The term means any food cooked in America today." Weimer explains the nationwide surge in gastronomic interest this way: "The '50s represented a low point in American cooking. Mothers were more interested in seeing that children got cotillion lessons than in busying themselves all day in front of the Amana range. This new generation went to Europe and Asia, where they tasted real food. When they came back to the U.S., they came back hungry."

As might be expected, a specialized definition comes from the most highly specialized champion of American cooking, Paul Prudhomme, who adapts Cajun and Creole classics at K-Paul's. His dishes of spice-blackened redfish, jalapeño cheese bread, flounder stuffed with seafood, and crawfish "popcorn" have inspired a virtual cult of imitators such as the Ritz Cafe in West Los Angeles, a branch of which will open on Park Avenue in New York this fall, the Atchafalaya River Cafe in Houston, Memphis in New York and Lafitte in Washington. "The food we call Creole and Cajun is the most American of American food because it was absolutely created here," says Prudhomme. "You can't find it anywhere else in the world." To make sure the outside world gets a taste of it, Prudhomme has developed "road shows," taking his restaurant staff to temporary quarters in San Francisco and New York, always playing to packed houses.