A Self-Interview with Author Mark Zanger

Q. How long did it take you to research The American Ethnic Cookbook for Students?

A. About a year. I thought at the beginning that I already had a lot of ethnic cookbooks, but after we decided to have more than 100 ethnic groups, and I decided to use actual recipes from specific American cooks, I realized how much I still had to learn.

Q. Why did you decide to use verbatim recipes?

A. In a book for students, I wanted to have a certain standard of scholarship. Quite a few cookbooks claim to have ethnic recipes, but don't give sources. As I learned more about ethnic cooking, I began to see that these recipes weren't really the way ethnic Americans made the dishes. The recipes were the way the individual food writer made the dishes. A few of the first recipes I worked on, such as the Belgian-American "Booyah" and "Belgian Pies" are composites of several authentic recipes. But once I got rolling, it turned out I could provide almost everything of interest in a published recipe by a member of the ethnic group.

Of course, food writers have an ethnic background, as do most of us. So I felt confident using a recipe for Finnish-American "Pulla" (a delicious, cardamom-scented coffee bread) from St. Paul food editor Eleanor Ostman even though she got most of it from a commercial yeast company. Ostman is a Finnish-American, published the recipe in a newspaper read by many Finnish-Americans, and used her mother's version as a taste memory. The recipe is a little fussier than some, but it's certainly "authentic."

Q. How did you define "authentic" and "American Ethnic?"

A. To be an "American Ethnic" food, the dish had to be used to express group identity in the United States. That ruled out a lot of foreign recipes that are often described as "ethnic food" in cookbooks or on the Internet. In many cases, there was an ingredient substitution or change in technique that showed how the recipe had been adapted for use in the United States. To be "authentic," the recipe had to be published with an attribution to a member of the ethnic group. I also looked for information that the recipe was used to express ethnicity. If the recipe had been served at a folk fair, or donated to a book by an ethnic politician, or was published in cookbook that was also a memoir of an ethnic neighborhood, that was a strong authentication.

Q. How could tell that the person was part of that ethnic group if the source didn't say so?

A. I often went by last names, and I may have made a few mistakes. I know that several recipes in the book, such as the Spanish-American Caldo from Louisiana, are by women of a different ethnic background who married into the ethnic group. I think that counts, since these cooks got the recipes from "born" members of the ethnic group, and serve these old family dishes to prove that they, too, belong.

Q. Were some ethnic groups harder than others to find recipes for?

A. Certainly. But it wasn't the small ethnic groups, which tend to have web sites with recipes. I think small ethnic groups in America are very conscious that their identity is disappearing, so they make an effort to write down the old recipes and distribute them publicly. The Internet is a great thing for small ethnic groups and the smaller Indian tribes, especially as they disperse out of concentrated areas. Some of the hardest large groups were the British Isles immigrants, who arrived speaking English and generally faced few barriers to joining the "majority culture." When do Anglo-Americans think about their British roots and serve English food? One answer that seemed to work was, when they are members of historical preservation societies. English Canadian-American food was hard to pin down, although I was lucky early on to find a family cookbook from Massachusetts where the family thought of themselves as immigrants from Canada rather than Anglo-Americans or Scottish-Americans. Another problem with British Isles groups is that many recipes had already become UK standards before the group arrived in the US. So it's hard to know if a particular "Irish Stew," "Welsh Rabbit," "Cornish Pasty," or "Scotch Broth" is really an ethnic dish.

Q. Why does the book have an index by states?

A. Almost as soon as we decided to use authentic recipes, we began discussing whether we could get recipes from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It turned into a challenge, so that brought up the idea of the index. It's not an index of where ethnic groups are, but it does demonstrate right away that there is no state without ethnic groups.

Q. From which states was it hardest to find an ethnic recipe?

A. Most of the hard states were small-population states. Delaware took some fishing around. I live in Boston, and had a lot of New England material, but New Hampshire was a problem even though I knew it had a large French Canadian-American community. Hawaii and Alaska are quite multi-ethnic. But Wyoming was difficult, even though it has Indian reservation communities, and I finally used a Basque-American recipe. Basque-Americans provide ethnic cooking for several Western states these days, although the old mining towns had enormously diverse populations to feed. Arkansas took a while, and I eventually used an African-American recipe from Little Rock. Kansas, despite a diverse immigrant population and the kind of small towns where people stick to their ethnic favorite foods, was a hard slot to fill. And so was New Jersey, a large coastal state that has always had a lot of diversity. The District of Columbia was hard because even cookbooks published there are full of recipes from people who live in Maryland or Virginia.

Q. Did you try all the recipes?

A. I tried quite a few. I tested every recipe that was new to me to make sure they would work. The recipes in ethnic cookbooks are quite good. The only one I couldn't get to work was a French Canadian-American maple candy recipe from Florida. I loved the idea of homesick French Canadians in Florida making maple sugar candy with imitation maple flavor, but the recipe must contain a typing error, because I couldn't get it right in three tries.

Q. Were there any surprises?

A. I was very surprised by the Finnish-American air pudding, because I didn't know you could get a foam-like dessert from farina and fruit juice. I tested the Shawnee "Chimee" recipe because I would afraid a sweet corn bread without any baking powder would be as hard as a rock. It turned out to have the consistency of brownies, and is one of the most delicious desserts in the book!

Q. What is your ethnic background?

A. My grandparents were born in four different countries. In general, they were East European Jews. One interesting thing is that the three who were born in Europe were all born in places that aren't part of the same country now as when they emigrated. My father's father was born in a part of the Russian empire that is now in Poland. My father's mother was born in a part of Romania that is now in Moldova. My mother's mother was born in a part of Hungary that is now in Romania. My "American" grandfather was born in Denver, but his father was born in a part of the Austrian Empire that is now in the Czech Republic.

Q. Did you learn more about your own background as you wrote The American Ethnic Cookbook for Students?

A. One thing I learned is that I am very picky about Hungarian-American recipes that were different from my grandmother's, and not at all about other foods I grew up with, such as Jewish-American matzo balls or my father's Rumanian cooking. At least in the kitchen, I'm more Hungarian than than anything else.

Q. What are your favorite ethnic restaurants?

A. Among the restaurants I review, I have a bias for southern Chinese food, and for Italian food over French. I also have an unusual attraction to Greek food -- maybe there are similarities to Rumanian and Hungarian dishes.

Q. What is the best recipe in the book?

A. The one I've made the most often is the Filipino-American adobo. I've probably made that 200 times since my sister-in-law Judith Music learned it from a neighbor in 1979. I've also made quite a lot of chili con carne along the general line of "Kiko's Rio Grande Chili Beans."

Q. Is there anything disgusting in the book?

A. In writing for students, I stuck to supermarket ingredients. Most of what is unusual in other people's food tends to be at the ingredient level. "Do French people really eat frogs and snails?" we used to wonder. When I first ate in a French restaurant, I had chocolate mousse, and that wasn't strange at all. It was really good chocolate pudding. On a radio program I was asked about cows tongues in Mexican food and seal oil in Eskimo food. I didn't know tongue was popular among Mexican-Americans. (I'm not sure I know that now; I'll have to ask.) Since we sometimes eat cow's tongues in my own Jewish-American culture, I don't find them that strange. But there aren't any in the book, because you can't usually get them in the supermarket. Same thing with seal oil, although some traditional Eskimos use it as a condiment (like ketchup) on almost everything. The book has three entirely authentic Eskimo recipes without seal oil, two written down by school children in the 1950s.

Q. Are there any unusual ingredients in the book?

A. Very, very few. There are a couple of recipes with plantains and coconut that are too important to recent-immigrant communities to leave out. There is a gumbo with dried shrimp from the Cane River Creoles, a mixed-race ethnic group in Northern Louisiana. I had to get the dried shrimp in an Asian grocery store, but it was worth it. However, I was able to find Hopi and Zuni recipes without blue cornmeal. Quite a few Native American recipes involve wild game and wild plants, but there are also lots of traditional dishes involving corn and beans, and many new traditions of dishes like bread puddings or macaroni and cheese made from government-distributed surplus foods.

Q. Did you have to change many things so the book would be suitable for students?

A. I couldn't use recipes with caffeine or alcoholic beverages as significant ingredients. (Often the ethnic cooks themselves suggested substituting for caffeine or alcohol in the original recipes, and so some recipes do list optional use of small amounts of alcoholic beverages or extracts.) The directions are written in a very precise and detailed way. There are some very easy recipes, some without cooking, as well as some that have a great many steps. Very few of the steps require tricky techniques, however. On the whole, writing the book for students required a higher standard of accuracy than you will see in most cookbooks for "adults."