Europe Tastes the Wild West

...At its center there is a "Main Street" with covered plank sidewalks, double-decker railings and cutout clapboard facades...

...I keep it on the shelf next to a similar oversize publication by Lorenza De'Medici called Italy: The Beautiful Cookbook...

...This was a low blow after a sumptuous meal that had been prepared mainly from homegrown or local ingredients...

...The recipe for lemonade includes a comment from the author that pushes those buttons still further: "Lemonade is probably the most refreshing thirst-quencher I can think of for the hot months of July and August...

...One full-page photo in particular pushes all these buttons...

...Thinking about food, and the perception or ignorance of what Americans eat, prompted me to take a wonderful cookbook off my kitchen shelf and leaf through it...

...Like everyone else, I gather graceful bunches of it when I take the dog on his walks...

...Despite Fast Food Nation, I love to eat in the United States...

...A stockade (Fort Pullman) is at one end of town, and at the other there is a tiny whitewashed church (used today for weddings), a cemetery labeled "Boot Hill," and a covered rodeo arena...

...she was dressed in low-cut black with scarlet flounces...

...This is where hard-core hobbyists hang out, people who spend many hours, much energy and often a lot of money attempting to learn about and live like American frontier archetypes...

...Beyond this built-up area, paths through the woodland lead to a rough-hewn facsimile of a frontier tavern and trading post, situated in what the park calls its "authentic area...

...But Angelo's question reminded me of similar encounters...

...In the distance, children ride bikes down a street, and beyond them stretches a grassy field bordered by big, leafy shade trees...

...Some of the best grapefruits come from the orchards of the lower Rio Grande in southern Texas," reads Idone's comment...

...And then there was the time, here in my village, when I invited workmen over for a celebratory dinner after they had finished some major construction on my house...

...His face painted and his long flowing hair pulled back, he plays soothing music on a Native American flute, leads "Indian meditation" sessions and presents daily programs on Native American culture...

...Their day-to-day life in a small central German town contrasts with the rich combination of fantasy and physical reality they experience during the three or four visits they make each year to Pullman City...

...It was billed as a rendezvous, and the park was crowded with people walking about in homespun cotton or fringed and beaded buckskin...

...We are shaking up this once traditional old Bavarian Gasthof into a German-American place, leaving Schnitzel and Braten on the menu and adding my American pizza, burritos, tostadas, and big burgers," he told me...

...Everyone in my family is a good cook, and we grew up appreciating dishes that reflected a variety of immigrant and local taste...

...This book abounds with moments where Idone presents quick flashes of how food triggers memory, and memory triggers something else, flights of fancy perhaps...

...In the accompanying photograph the meal is served in scarred enamelware, against the dramatic backdrop of sunup on the open range...

...Breakfast at the Gasthof consisted of a typical German buffet—lots of cold cuts, cheese, jam, coffee, and baskets of fresh baked bread...

...An American man I know in Germany has just revamped the menu of the restaurant and pension he runs with his girlfriend...

...Many other times through the years I have had to explain that American cuisine consists of more than the uniform, packaged product of snack shops and fast food outlets...

...It and similar theme parks are important loci for the European Wild West phenomenon—physical spaces where fantasy and reality converge and all forms and nuances of participation, display and attraction can coexist...

...My mother, a Texan, prepares a mean chili and introduced me to the absolute delight of sautéed hominy...

...A movie clich...

...Hot dogs, hamburgers, popcorn...

...After all, most Europeans have a famous aversion to ice in their drinks...

...His "blade was tempered, and so was he," I recalled, "indestructible steel was he...

...People talk about Proust and his madeleine...

...Joining us was a taciturn character with wire-rim spectacles, long hair and a leather vest, who embodied the movie image of a '49er gold prospector and indeed supervises the Pullman City pond where kids can pan for "gold...

...Home...

...At dawn on the day after I arrived in Philadelphia, Dad got me up and took me to the wholesale fish market, where he bought two huge slabs of salmon so that I could demonstrate my new skill...

...But, at least in the parts of Europe I've been to lately, I have found few restaurants that attempt to offer a representative range of "American cuisine...

...When I was a child, I was a big fan of the Jim Bowie television show...

...The table is apparently on the covered porch of a white frame house...

...Once, on the way back from Europe on vacation, I stopped to visit a friend in Stockholm who taught me how to make gravad lox...

...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture inEurope...

...No longer does it serve only Bavarian and mainstream German dishes...

...But Glorious American Food affects me in a different way...

...That was preceded by the innards sautéed in a savory sauce, a dish called "coratella...

...A pizza at the best place in the area now costs more than one and a half times what it did pre-Euro...

...All were decked out in creamy buckskin, decorated with fine beadwork...

...the slim shoots poke up amid roadside brush and at the base of olive trees...

...Baking chicken, vegetables and gravy in pastry appeared to be a new concept, and Raffaella looked as if she may have been storing the recipe away for future use...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...

...Raffaella had cooked delicious lasagna, both "red"—with tomato sauce—and "white"—with cheese and wild asparagus...

...American fast food outlets are ubiquitous in Europe (and the rest of the world...

...I stayed at their little place recently for a couple of days, and it is not just the food that is GermanAmerican—or, how shall I put it, part of a German-American dream...

...And there's plenty of other food in America...

...Jim" wears buckskin trousers, a blousy cotton shirt and, sometimes, a three-cornered hat...

...It is a close-up of a tall glass of lemonade, brimming with ice, mint leaves and a slice of lemon, standing at the edge of a white wicker table...

...I visited Pullman City most recently on the opening weekend of the season, April 3-4...

...Live country bands play every night in the music hall of the Black Bison Saloon...

...What about American food, eh...

...But her East European kasha (buckwheat groats) is the best I have ever tasted and beats hands down the kasha I have had in the dish's historic homeland, Poland...

...Produced by Christopher Idone, Glorious American Food is a coffee-table volume—with lush photos, regional recipes and American culinary history—that won awards when it came out some 20 years ago...

...Most of the hobbyists stayed in the "authentic area" of Pullman City, either in their own cabins or in rented log cabins or tepees...

...Down a slope a flamboyant character called Hunting Wolf, described as a half-Cheyenne French citizen, holds forth in a Mandan Indianstyle earth lodge...

...After breakfast one morning, I dredged up the show's theme song from decades of buried memory and sang it for Pullman City's Bowie incarnation...

...Even without the drooping corner of the flag, the scene could be nowhere else but the U.S...

...He was a fighter, a fearless and mighty adventurin' man...

...Pullman City, with more than a million visitors a year, is said to be the second most popular tourist attraction in Bavaria...

...Neither has been to the United States...

...He told me he decided to take on the Bowie persona after his wife gave him the knife as a present...

...Given my defense of the hamburger over Easter dinner, I looked to see if Glorious American Food had a recipe...

...An innocent America of simple truths and honest optimism...

...It is something I associate with summers, laziness, reading a book, or doing nothing—a part of civilized life...

...We had roast lamb for that meal, too, but I noticed that one of the workers didn't touch a thing...

...My record is going 56 hours without sleep...

...There are steakhouses, too, and places that offer Tex-Mex, chicken fingers, good burgers, ribs and similar fare...

...Jim Bowie, Jim Bow-eee...

...One night I sat up playing cards with a heavyset woman who works as a waitress in the Black Bison Saloon...

...Many even take "American" names to suit the personality they choose to inhabit in their hobbyist mode...

...At an open market where I used to shop in Rome, one of the stallkeepers always wanted to know whether I, as a foreigner, knew how to cook with tomatoes...

...It should always be made with pure lemon juice and sugar syrup—tangy and not sweet...

...Now it advertises "Deutsch-Amerikaner spezialitaeten" (German and American specialties...

...I asked him if he felt all right, and the others started to laugh...

...They shun electricity and don elaborate costumes—though a lot hang on to their cellphones...

...Some of them rent plots here and construct cabins to enact, at times obsessively, their version of an 18th- or 19th-century American frontier lifestyle...

...I don't really sleep when I'm at Pullman," Jim said...

...It's a pity...

...My father is the principal chef in their home...

...Nostalgia for I'm not sure what: Childhood...

...Just behind the pillar of the porch droops the lower part of an American flag, slightly out of focus...

...I was visiting a farm in the central Valley of the Roses, and the woman who questioned me simply had no clue...

...I described a humble dish that reeks of Americana, chicken pot pie, and had him and the family murmuring a chorus of surprise and approval...

...Its pictures and recipes evoke nostalgia and desire as well as gustatorial delight...

...Raffaella also served spring lamb culled from the family's own flock of sheep, spit-roasted over an open fire with garlic and rosemary...

...A few, however, stayed at the "German-American' Gasthof where I was staying, which also served as an after-hours hangout for some of the Pullman City staff...

...Though already married, the couple even had Hunting Wolf conduct an "Indian' wedding ceremony for them last summer, in Pullman City's Mandan earth lodge...

...A tray was slapped on the side of the door, and I had my lunch, and I just thought I'd been to the end of the plastic rainbow...

...I think I toyed with the idea of telling her something outrageous, but in the end I described Thanksgiving...

...Set on 50 rolling acres near Passau, Pullman City is a compendium of mythic iconography ingrained in the global psyche by well over a century of frontier adventure stories, movies, TV shows, and traveling Wild West extravaganzas...

...Embarrassed, Luigi confessed that he had eaten a full meal before coming to my house because he didn't think that I, as an American, would be able to cook lamb in a way that he, an Italian, would enjoy...

...As the meal drew to a close, we discussed the merits of various local trattorie, and complained about how prices had shot up over the last two years since the introduction of the Euro...

...It was the height of Communism...

...I was the guest of neighbors in the small Italian village here where I live...

...So," said Angelo, as we settled back eventually over coffee and fruit...

...The photographs are of the kind that provoke oohs and aahs, and the recipes are sublime...

...As usual in such situations, despite the fact that I have read Fast Food Nation, I found myself springing to the defense of American cuisine...

...The Gasthof is located within walking distance of Pullman City, a Wild West theme park in Bavaria where I have been spending time as I proceed with work on a book about what I call Wild West subcultures in Europe—everything from country music festivals to cowboy saloons to a European rodeo circuit to tens of thousands of Europeans who study or even live like American Indians, trappers, Civil War soldiers or other American frontier characters as a hobby...

...Another table was reserved for a couple I had seen on previous visits to Pullman City: a man who models himself on the Alamo hero Jim Bowie and his wife, who dresses as an American Indian in a beaded buckskin dress she made herself...

...De'Medici herself presented me with my copy after I sat in on one of the cooking courses she gave for years at the family's Tuscan villa, La Badia a Coltibuono...

...In Bulgaria once, I was asked straight out "What do Americans eat...

...At the breakfast table next to mine sat what looked like three generations of hobbyists—a grandfather, his son and a teenaged grandson...

...I doubt any cowboy ever bothered to grill his grapefruit, but halved and sectioned grapefruit smeared with honey and set under the broiler to char makes a warm opening to a meal...

...Out of curiosity, I looked in Glorious American Food to see what it says about Texas—after all, Jim Bowie died at the Alamo—and I actually found a whole breakfast menu: broiled grapefruit with honey, sourdough waffles with creamed dried beef, and coffee...

...A good hamburger doesn't mean something from a fast food outlet," I told Angelo...

...Both are retired from their jobs on disability pensions...

...We are at the peak of the wild asparagus season now...

...I love the adventuresome mix of ethnic input— Chinese, Japanese, "Santa Fe," Pennsylvania Dutch, whatever...

...From the car window all I could see was net stockings on a pair of legs...

...Campfires bumed late into the night...

...Jim and his wife have created a lifestyle that encompasses two very different parallel universes...

...They were, in fact, in a sort of oasis where performativity was the norm, where they, in their costumes and lived-out imaginings, were mainstream...

...He is never seen around Pullman City without his carved powder horn, his Bowie knife slung in its sheath, and a facsimile flintlock rifle...

...He turned seriously to food after he stopped smoking more than 40 years ago, and he operates on the assumption that one only has a finite number of meals to eat in one's life, so they all should be good...

...The tongue should smart with more sour than sweet, and the jaw should squeak a little when you drink it...

...None was listed, but the author did provide a relevant insight, sandwiched (as it were) among the recipes he grouped for the West Coast region: "I had my first drive-in meal in Los Angeles, when I was 17...

...Souvenir shops and concession stands proffer cowboy clothing, Western trinkets, Indian jewelry and enchiladas, as well as local beer and bratwurst...