These gastronomic specialties certainly are not to be sneered at; European epicures envy us most of them. It must be admitted, also, that American cookery has made considerable progress in the last decades, and that there has been an improvement in eating habits since Dickens, in "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), described the "violent bell ringing"; the "mad rush for the dining-room"; the "great heaps of indigestible matter" which "melted away as ice before the sun"; the "dyspeptic individuals" who "bolted their food in wedges, feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares."
Such scenes still occur, but they are no longer typical. Nor, perhaps, would Emily Faithful have occasion to-day, as she had in 1884, to comment on the "joyless American face," due to chronic dyspepsia. We are still made unhappy, however, by the "indigestible hot bread" and "tough beefsteaks hardly warmed through" to which she referred, and by other gastronomic atrocities.
We must not overlook the fine cooking done in many American private families, hotels, clubs, and restaurants, and we have some good old Maryland, Virginia, New England, and San Franciscan traditions to boast of. Moreover, there are not a few who have reason to think that the culinary low-water mark is to be found on English steamships and in English inns. On the whole, however, what Pierre Blot wrote forty years ago is still true: "American cookery is worse than that of any other civilized nation." Our great national food expert and reformer, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, put the matter in a nutshell when he said in a lecture before the General Federation of Women's Clubs, that "there is no country in the world where food is so plentiful, and no country in the world where it is so badly cooked, as right here in the United States."
One need not go to France or Austria for a humiliating contrast. In one of his books of travel Charles Dudley Warner declared that after leaving Philadelphia the tourist "will not find one good meal decently served" until he reaches Mexico. In a southwestern railway restaurant a miner once said to me he had not eaten such an abominable meal in all the years he had spent in the wilderness. To tell the unvarnished truth, he used a stronger word than abominable. One of the details I remember was that the tough steak had apparently been fried in the drippings from a tallow candle.