Fed, White, and Blue: Finding America with My Fork - Hardcover

Majumdar, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594632154 ISBN 13: 9781594632150

Publisher: Avery, 2015

Synopsis

Simon Majumdar is probably not your typical idea of an immigrant. As he says, “I’m well rested, not particularly poor, and the only time I ever encounter ‘huddled masses’ is in line at Costco.” But immigrate he did, and thanks to a Homeland Security agent who asked if he planned to make it official, the journey chronicled in Fed, White, and Blue was born. In it, Simon sets off on a trek across the United States to find out what it really means to become an American, using what he knows best: food.

Simon stops in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to learn about what the pilgrims ate (and that playing Wampanoag football with large men is to be avoided); a Shabbat dinner in Kansas; Wisconsin to make cheese (and get sprayed with hot whey); and LA to cook at a Filipino restaurant in the hope of making his in-laws proud. Simon attacks with gusto the food cultures that make up America—brewing beer, farming, working at a food bank, and even finding himself at a tailgate. Full of heart, humor, history, and of course, food, Fed, White, and Blue is a warm, funny, and inspiring portrait of becoming American.

About this title

About the Author:

SIMON MAJUMDAR is a food writer, broadcaster, and author of Eat My Globe and Eating for Britain. He has recurring roles as a judge on Iron Chef, The Next Iron Chef, and Cutthroat Kitchen. The fine living correspondent for AskMen.com, he writes regular features for the Food Network website and was one of the voices behind the Dos Hermanos blog, which GQ called “Michelin starred food blogging.” He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

LIST OF IMAGES

Page 1: Leaving my mark on the beach of Cook Inlet, Alaska.

Page 11: With AJ and Reggie Liongson at Salo-Salo Grill in West Covina, California.

Page 23: Supporting “the Bear” at the Wing Bowl.

Page 37: The Bay Rat and the Rebel in their happy place, out on the water.

Page 51: Baron Ambrosia, King of the Bronx.

Page 65: I’m just about to be on the receiving end of three hundred pounds of Wampanoag fury at Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Page 79: I love the smell of lobster in the morning.

Page 91: The honorary captain of the girl’s bed push race team in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.

Page 105: Learning all about the “money muscle” from champion pitmaster Matthew Burt.

Page 119: I’m about to break down a side of beef with Dr. Dennis Burson of the University of Nebraska Animal Science Department.

Page 135: Breaking bread with Yosef Silver and Mendel “BBQ Rabbi” Segal at the second annual Kansas City Kosher BBQ Festival.

Page 147: Cheese maker Andy Hatch of the Uplands Cheese Company showing me why the land and dairy cattle of Wisconsin combine to make world-class cheese.

Page 161: My night out with the Seoul Sausage Company boys. If I had known how I was going to feel the next morning, I might not have been smiling so much.

Page 177: Bill Esparza, my expert guide to the Mexican culinary delights of Los Angeles.

Page 189: With Cynthia Sandberg and my new friends at Love Apple Farms. (Image © Tana Butler)

Page 201: With Skip Madsen and his brewing manager, Dan, enjoying a pint of fantastic beer from the American Brewing Company.

Page 213: With Dr. Terry Simpson, just after our plane landed at Cook Inlet, Alaska. Thankfully no bears in sight. (Image © Katherine Gottlieb)

Page 225: Farmer Matt Romero showing me why New Mexican chiles are the best in the world.

Page 237: At my first University of Texas Longhorns game. I probably shouldn’t have worn blue.

Page 251: Helping in the food pantry at Williams Memorial Methodist Church during my visit to Texarkana.

Page 265: Hunting down in the Delta. No animals were harmed in the taking of this photograph. (Image © Jeff Chao Chao Photography LLC)

Page 279: Riding the pig-mobile with my chum Chef Michele Ragussis as we head to feed the crew of Richard Petty Motorsports (thankfully the beard did not last long).

Page 299: Flying the flag. I may now be a citizen of the United States, but the journey continues. Any ideas?

FOREWORD

Simon Majumdar and I met on the set of a program called Next Iron Chef back in . . . well, quite a while ago. When the producers first suggested him as a judge for the series, I had to admit I’d never heard of the guy, so off to the webbernetter I ran. Interesting fellow, I thought. I discovered that he’d had a serious career in publishing, then went “off-res,” so to speak, to eat everything on the planet. He’d written a book about it called Eat My Globe, so I figured I’d give it a read. After all, what red-blooded male can resist a man/suitcase love story?

Turns out Eat My Globe wasn’t a travelogue or a gastro-journal but something much better. This Simon guy went looking for answers, and big ones at that. He was trying to figure out who the hell he was and where he fit in on planet Earth, using his stomach to mine the mysteries. By the time we met on set I’d already decided he was a kindred spirit. The only problem was that he’s so much smarter than me it was all I could do to keep up. Our first conversation, which, if I recall correctly, concerned the intricate history of chicken tikka masala, solidified my respect for him. Since that big globe head of his seems to retain every fact his being stumbles across, and those jug ears capture every word spoken in a thousand-foot range, Simon is something of an encyclopedia of edibilia. And yet instead of coming across as a know-it-all (nobody likes a know-it-all), he has evolved into an evangelist, a kind of Johnny Appleseed hell-bent on spreading the word of world cuisine.

However, Simon’s not just about the food. Sure, he’s developed the palate of a world-class food critic, and his sharp wit and voluminous vocabulary (not to mention that damned accent) have made him the darling of culinary competition show producers everywhere, but what he really digs are the people behind the food. Simon sees cuisine as the connective tissue that holds humankind together, and he’s dedicated himself to traveling the planet in an attempt to map that tissue. In doing so, he’s collected enough passport stamps to join the exclusive club to which only the Bourdains and Zimmerns of the world belong. And yet his greatest challenge was still to come, because this citizen of the world has decided to become an American.

Even though he hates pizza.

We’ll have to work on that.

Being Simon, he figured that if he was going to join our star-spangled club he should take a little road trip and discover his new country the way he has the rest of the planet: with his stomach. And he came up with an interesting and thoroughly modern way of doing it. Through his website and social media (and good old word of mouth), he invited people to tell him where to go and what to eat. And it turns out plenty of people were willing to tell Simon where to go. The following months had Simon crisscrossing the country, stitching together a fantastical culinary quilt. This book is the story of that journey. Whether hanging out with fishermen, learning the truth of American meat production, roasting chilies, tailgating in Texas (wish I could have seen that), making beer, or freezing his butt off for barbecue, Simon has done here what he does best: eat, talk, write, repeat. In that order.

Did he come back with a better understanding of what it is to be American? To be honest, I think not. I think he came back an American.

Welcome, brother Simon.

Now, about that pizza.

Alton Brown

June 2014

Green Card, Green Light

 

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

The stocky man seated in the immigration booth wore the dark blue uniform of the Department of Homeland Security and a tag on his lapel that declared his name to be Gonzalez. He didn’t crack a smile as he leafed through my documents. The people who greet you at immigration seldom do. I guess it is part of the training, to make people nervous enough to give away clues to their bad intentions. It worked. I stammered through my answer even though I had nothing to hide.

“Er, um, er, I live here,” I replied, pointing to the much-coveted green card that had slipped from between the pages of my passport and onto the desk before him.

He grunted and looked up, giving me a cold, hard stare that convinced me he suspected I was harboring a dozen Indian relatives in my small backpack, intending to free them the moment I stepped through customs.

“So, how long have you lived here?” he asked sharply, adding quickly, “Are you planning to become a U.S. citizen?”

The first part was easy enough to answer. I had moved to the United States in 2010, when I decided that uprooting myself from my beloved London and moving six thousand miles across the globe was a tiny price to pay for the chance to live with the most amazing woman I had ever met. The second part, however, was trickier to answer. I am very proud to be British, and the notion of changing allegiance in my middle years had actually never crossed my mind.

“Er,” I stuttered again, adding, “I’ve never even really thought about it.” It wasn’t the in-depth answer he may have been hoping for, but it seemed to do the trick. He stamped my customs form, thrust my prized burgundy European passport back at me with another grunt, and waved me through to baggage claim to endure the inevitable tortuous wait for a reunion with my bags.

My wife, Sybil, was waiting for me as I emerged blinking into the bright lights of the arrival hall, and after a quick hug we made our way to the parking lot. As we pulled out of the lot and onto the freeway, she turned to me and asked, “Why so quiet, honey?” She was right; apart from a few words when we met, I had barely said a word since I had passed through immigration.

I made some excuse about jet lag and stared out the window, engrossed in my own thoughts and the traffic that was clogging Los Angeles’s notorious I-405. I realized that the immigration officer’s question had struck a nerve, and although it had never even been an issue until that moment, at the back of my mind the first seed had been planted on what exactly it might mean if I did ever decide to become an American citizen.

That night over supper, I explained to Sybil why I had been sucking on such a thoughtful tooth all the way from the airport. Moving to the United States had been challenging enough—if I was actually going to become an American it would be another matter altogether. I was not even sure what that process might entail, practically or emotionally.

I’ll be honest with you, my loving spouse’s initial response to my question, “How does one become an American?” was not as helpful as I would have hoped. She smirked at me over the top of a large glass of good red wine and said, “Well, the first thing you are going to have to do is have an operation to remove that British stick from up your ass.” I sighed and rolled my eyes, but persevered.

This was a serious matter. Did becoming an American mean I would have to stop being British? That would never do. I was far too proud of the country of my birth to ever relinquish fully my claims on being a UK citizen, and that burgundy passport had proved useful enough in my travels around the world that I was loath to ever give it up.

Did becoming an American mean I would have to be subjected to American sport? (By the way, even if you were to lay me down on a bed of hot coals and have Butterbean do the Lambada on my chest I shall always insist on saying “maths” and “sport,” not “math” and “sports.”) I really hoped not. Baseball was the only game on earth I could imagine to be duller than cricket. I could live any number of lifetimes before I began to understand American football, and I certainly did not spend my formative years in the industrial heartland of Yorkshire supporting my local team through thin and thinner to demote my beloved “proper” football to a game called “soccer” that is seemingly only played by eight-year-old schoolgirls.

Did it mean I was going to have to change the way I talked? It was already hard enough trying to persuade Sybil that “schedule” should be pronounced “schedule” and NOT “schedule” (that doesn’t come out on the page quite as well as I had hoped, but if we ever meet, I will explain to you what I mean), and there was just no way I was ever going to ask for the “check,” require “aluminum” foil, or ever, ever, so help me God, ever say “to-may-to” without a gun being placed against my temple.

As she reached out to spear the last survivor of a pile of thick pork chops that had been our reunion supper, Sybil finally added something constructive. “If you want to know what it means to become an American, honey, you should go and meet some.” I smiled back at her for two reasons. One was that, as usual, her advice was bang on the button. The second was that, as always, she had used our dinner discussion as a diversionary tactic to ensure she took more than her fair share of food from the serving plate. All I could do was nod in admiration. If I had been quicker or smarter, I would have done the same thing.

Our mutual love of food was one of the many reasons I had fallen in love with Sybil in the first place. She was smart, funny, and beautiful, but most of all she shared my almost pathological obsession with food, a passion she had displayed during our first meal together, after I met her in Brazil, when I tried to take an extra portion from a platter of grilled chicken. She did not even look up as she grabbed my hand and said with cold steel in her voice, “Touch that piece and I will cut you.” I could tell that this was not a joke, and I knew then that I wanted to get to know this woman even more.

Fast-forward to eighteen months of a long-distance relationship that had involved regular commutes from London to Sybil’s apartment in Los Angeles, and I was certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I proposed one afternoon in New York’s Central Park. Almost inevitably, the proposal came after a large lunch and, as we sat in the park basking in the glow of the summer sun and our new commitment, our first discussions were of what food we would serve at the wedding. I knew that it was a perfect match.

My own love of food is one that I inherited from my family. I come from a mixed parentage of Bengali father and Welsh mother, the combination of which not only provided amazing smells from the family kitchen most hours of the day, but also an interest in food that many people have told me borders on an illness. It is an obsession not just for me but also for the rest of the Majumdar clan, who spend most of our time together talking about what we have eaten, are eating, and will be eating in the future. If you doubt the level of our devotion, I offer up in evidence the response of my older brother, Robin, to the text telling him that Sybil and I had just become engaged. His reply simply read, “Good. How was lunch at Jean Georges?” (For the record: It wasn’t great.)

My long-held desire to “go everywhere, eat everything” became so overwhelming that, in 2007, I left my career of more than twenty years in publishing and spent a year and my life savings visiting more than thirty countries to follow my dream. That’s how I ended up first in Brazil, and now in Los Angeles, staring at an empty plate while my beloved happily sucked the last scraps of flesh from the bones of a pork chop.

Sybil wiped her lips with a napkin and turned her attention to a plate of cheese and crackers I had just laid before her. “It’s always about the food with you, honey,” she said as she sliced into a particularly whiffy slab of Reblochon. “You should ask Americans to tell you about their food.” Even though her voice was muffled by crackers and dairy, what she said made absolute sense—and so the idea for the book you are now reading was planted very firmly in my mind.

As Sybil turned her attention towards doing the dishes, I flopped down on our comfortable sofa to do what I always do when an idea takes hold of me and won’t let go. I took out my battered old notebook and began to write. I scribbled the word “AMERICA” in bold letters at the top of the page and, under it, began to place keywords that I thought might help my thought process.

I have had a love affair with America and Americans for as long as I can recall, formed during my early childhood while watching imported TV shows and cemented during my teenage years as songs about cars and girls flowed through the tinny speakers of my Hitachi music center.

America seemed like a magical, mystical place, and I longed to visit as soon as I could. I was fortunate enough that my career in publishing gave me plenty of opportunities to do so, as I took...

About this edition

• Publisher: Avery
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1594632154
• ISBN 13: 9781594632150
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320