Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Reichl’s memoir is set in the 1960s and 1970s, and her attitudes toward food—as well as many of the recipes she includes—reflect the perspective of this era. For much of American history, the average person had few options about what to eat. People cooked the traditional recipes they learned from their elders using seasonal ingredients that happened to be available in their local area. Food was seldom abundant, and specialty ingredients were not generally available. Only those with the resources to travel or hire cooks from other places were exposed to a variety of cooking styles and ingredients. For these people, French cooking was often highly prized because of the prestige many Americans associated with French culture.

In the early 20th century, the widespread availability of refrigeration and commercial trucking meant that for the first time, ingredients could be transported easily from place to place and stored for longer periods in the home. The rise of factories and commercial foods created a tremendous number of new potential ingredients. Large waves of immigration and a trend toward urbanization exposed Americans to a wider variety of cultures. Just as Americans began to explore the abundance of foods made possible by these changes, however, the Great Depression and World War II created serious privation.

After the economy and food production recovered during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans were ready to celebrate and indulge. At first, this largely took the form of consuming more and more processed commercial foods, which were still something of a novelty. At the end of this decade, however, commercial air travel became more accessible—and travel exposed Americans to new possibilities. Most of the early overseas routes were to Europe, and Americans acquired a taste for European foods.

This was especially true of French cuisine, which by now was firmly associated with the American upper classes that many middle-class families longed to emulate. When new President John Kennedy and his wife installed a French chef in the White House, French cuisine became even more fashionable. At just the right cultural moment, a charismatic American chef who had trained in Paris—Julia Child—brought French cooking techniques to the American public through her bestselling book Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). In Tender at the Bone, Reichl explores this shift toward more sophisticated—and more French—foods in her description of L’Escargot, a fictionalized restaurant based on her real-life experiences working at Ann Arbor’s La Seine, a restaurant that opened in 1965 and failed just over a year later.

Political upheaval and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s made Americans more conscious of non-European foods and of the variety of foodways within their own nation. Young people also grew interested in growing their own produce and making more foods from scratch. Reichl’s descriptions of her time in Berkeley and at The Swallow, as well as her exploration of New York’s neighborhood food scene, capture these shifts toward greater diversity and higher quality foodstuffs.

Some books that explore the changes in American food culture over time are Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table (1988), Sherri Machlin’s American Food by the Decades (2011), Sylvia Lovegren’s Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (1995), Elizabeth Aldrich’s Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O: American Food and the Cold War, 1947-1959 (2023), and Daniel Stone’s The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats (2018).