Eat American!

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Down-home fare is already the subject of several timely cookbooks, including Miss Mary's Down-Home Cooking by Diana Dalsass (New American Library), Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen (Morrow) and Joan Nathan's An American Folklife Cookbook (Schocken). The most impassioned paean to Momma cooking is Jane and Michael Stern's Square Meals (Knopf). In their march down memory lane, the authors celebrate dishes from what many people rightfully consider the Dark Ages of American eating: tuna casseroles sauced with canned mushroom soup, Back-to-Bataan Spam and patently disgusting creations like a cabbage-apple-and-pickle salad with evaporated-milk dressing. The Sterns, who write several columns and report their findings regularly on the CBS Morning News, also offer better choices, such as soups and pot roasts. The trademark specialty of the down-home movement is mashed potatoes with lumps. Never mind that the test of a cook's skill has always been the absence of any such flaws. So important are lumps to the new authenticity, one suspects, that processors of dehydrated potatoes will include a few synthetic solids in each package, to be stirred into the reconstituted mass, just as manufacturers of artificial roses add thorns.

The long-term success of no-frills, down-home cooking will depend upon the public's willingness to pay relatively sophisticated prices for apparently unsophisticated specialties and upon the financial aspirations of the restaurant owners. The lessons from such professionals as Baum, Prudhomme and Abe de la Houssaye, the Cajun proprietor of New York City's excellent Texarkana, indicate that authenticity is not enough. They all quickly realized that native dishes had to be re-created in larger-than-life versions to command top dollar. Says Baum: "Above a certain price, the public wants to see evidence of skill, and dishes they do not think they can make at home." Adds Barbara Clifford, the Texas-born chef partner in Manhattan's Yellow Rose Cafe: "My mother made home-fried potatoes swimming in oil. That's a little too down-home."

Of this new-old cooking, the late James Beard, an early champion of American food, said, "It doesn't matter if it's regional, Momma or Aunt Hattie. If it's good, it's worth saving." But he warned that the conserving must be done with expertise. Many hope that New York Times Food Editor Craig Claiborne is equally correct with his prediction: "I don't think we're going back to plain old pot roast. We're not going back to Jell-O That's ridiculous."

The notion that such food represents going back will be news to Middle America, where it remains the standard fare. Says Jean Hewitt, food editor of Family Circle (circ. 7 million): "It takes quite a long time for a trend to filter into the heartland. The East and West coasts are one group. They have decided what American cooking means to them, but that's not necessarily what the heart of America thinks it is." Certainly down-home food is not new to regulars at such enduring American establishments as Mrs. Wilkes' Boarding House in Savannah, where guests sit at community lunch tables and help themselves from ten to twelve bowls and platters of meats, salads and vegetables. Nor is it at the Virginia Rowell McDonald Tea Room in Gallatin, Mo., where fried gizzards, tomato rosettes and roast chicken with corn-bread dressing are being served as they have been for the past 54 years.