The United States of Arugula (11 page)

The CBS show lasted only one season, but Lucas resurfaced again in the fifties with a syndicated program and a popular restaurant next door to Bloomingdale’s called the Egg Basket, where she popularized two then exotic egg preparations, the omelet and the quiche. Among Lucas’s students in the fifties was Paula Wolfert, a Barnard student and young bride-to-be from a “boiled-and-broiled” background who later achieved renown, in the seventies, for her Moroccan and Mediterranean cookbooks. “For fifty dollars I took six lessons in her huge kitchen, on the second floor of the Dakota,” says Wolfert. “I flipped. I loved it. I had never eaten food like that—all that cream and butter. I had to go off and have my gallbladder removed after it was over, and I wasn’t even twenty yet.” Nan Robertson of
The New York Times
happened to be writing up Lucas’s cooking school at the time of Wolfert’s attendance; the resulting article captured Lucas complimenting the youngster on her first lobster bisque (“Jolly good, Mrs. Wolfert!”) while also noting, “Mrs. Wolfert then cut her finger and was rushed to the bathroom for first aid.”

“Dione was a bitter woman, not warm or cuddly, like a mentor should be,” says Wolfert, who stayed on for a time as Lucas’s unpaid assistant in the cooking school, helping her teach rich housewives how to make
filets de sole à la meunière
and
soufflé Plaza Athenée
(with lobster and vegetables). Perhaps this bitterness was attributable to the uncertain, catch-as-catch-can life of a cooking guru in 1950s America, even one with a TV show. “She was tremendously talented and worked like a dog,” Julia Child later recalled of Lucas, “but money just slipped through her fingers.” Nevertheless, says
Wolfert, “Dione was important in the fifties because at least
something
was happening.”

Indeed, the rising public profiles of Lucas and Beard marked the emergence of a true food establishment in America, a small group of New York–based sophisticates who, via newspaper columns, magazine work, and cookbooks, had national and even international reach. (In 1961, when asked by Judith Jones whom she wanted to meet while visiting New York to promote
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Child named Beard, while her collaborator, Simone Beck, requested an audience with Lucas.) In addition to Lucas and Beard, this group included Helen McCully, the food editor at
Mc-Call’s;
Jane Nickerson, her counterpart at
The New York Times;
Cecily Brownstone of the Associated Press; good ol’ Clem Paddleford of the
Herald Tribune;
and the voluptuous Ann Seranne, who had started out as Crosby Gaige’s mistress and ghostwriter in the forties before moving on to
Gourmet
to be Earle MacAusland’s deputy, eventually assuming the full editorial duties of the magazine while “Mr. Mac” attended to the publishing side. The members of this group kept one another’s counsel, exchanged gossip, and stood united in opposition to the quick-bake, canned-soup mores of the domestic scientists.

McCully, an elegant, gray-haired, tartly opinionated Nova Scotia native, presided over a culinary salon in her penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, while Brownstone and Beard hosted more casual get-togethers at their West Village homes. Brownstone and Seranne, like McCully, were Canadian-born, further testament to the outsider makeup of the American food world; and Paddleford, though born and raised in Kansas, lived on a planet all her own, where her kitty cat Pussy Willow slept curled in a ball in her In basket, and spring was celebrated in print as that time of year when “Mr. Merolla at 963 Third Avenue has fresh catnip for puss.”
*

A 1956 photograph captures members of this group gathered at a summertime
reception in Brownstone’s garden on Jane Street: a motley collection of ladies in mumsy frocks and snoods, teeming around a giant, balding man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie who is eyeing a platter of chicken skewers. Beard thrived as the only man in this group, the affable Buddha who remained on good terms with all the ladies even as they feuded with one another (Brownstone had little tolerance for Paddleford, who “didn’t know much about food” and “always wanted to find a man and get him into bed”), and despite his own behind-the-back criticisms (Lucas, Beard confided to his friend Helen Evans Brown, was “a great, great technician who doesn’t know food,” and he resisted her overtures to run a cooking school together). It was in this decade that Beard made his name as “James Beard,” the brand name, the face and belly of American gastronomy. He published eight books in the fifties, including the remarkable
James Beard’s Fish Cookery
(1954), which included recipes for just about every variety of fish that could be taken from American waters (and contained the wonderfully barmy Beardism “Here are grunions at their best”);
The Complete Book of Barbecue & Rotisserie Cooking
(1954) and
The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery
(1955), both of which capitalized on an American craze for backyard barbecues that had grown exponentially in the years since
Cook It Outdoors;
*
and
The James Beard Cookbook
(1959), a comprehensive, generalist trade paperback for beginners that remains Beard’s best-selling work.

But it was on the strength of his fourth book,
The Fireside Cook Book
(1949), that he rose to the top of the heap. The title referred not to hearth cooking but to the name of the Simon and Schuster imprint that published it. Fireside Books specialized in oversize, riotously colorful edutainment tomes on subjects from chess to folk music. For Beard, working with Fireside was his chance to do a big, all-purpose cookbook in the vein of
Fannie Farmer
and
The Joy of Cooking.
His approach was to present a basic recipe—for a “Plain Chicken Sauté,” say—and then offer an array of variations, such
as a Sauté with Mushrooms, a Sauté Provençale, a Sauté Amandine, and so on. Like
The Joy of Cooking’s
Irma Rombauer, who couldn’t help but interject choice Rombauerisms into her recipes (“Why not give the cucumber the benefit of the doubt—at least once—to see whether it has really been maligned?”), Beard infused
The Fireside Cook Book
with his own distinctive voice; in his recipe for Baked Boned Shad, he declared, “A good shad boner is born, or, at the very least, highly trained; not developed at home. If you have no one to bone your shad, have it dressed whole, but be prepared for countless fine bones in the delicious meat.”

The Fireside Cook Book
was not exempt from the culinary unpleasantries of the period—Beard advocated beginning his “American Dinner” menu with fruit cup, and devoted an entire chapter to the joy of frozen foods—but it was fun and user-friendly, its recipes airily laid out for easy reading and decorated with cheery rural-kitsch illustrations (anthropomorphic vegetables, mice in chef’s toques) by the husband-and-wife team of Martin and Alice Provensen, who that same year provided the artwork for the Golden Books perennial
The Fuzzy Duckling.

The Fireside Cook Book
sold well and got good notices, and its publication also marked the moment when Beard first explicitly made his case for an American cuisine, arguing in the introduction that “America has the opportunity, as well as the resources, to create for herself a truly national cuisine that will incorporate all that is best in the traditions of the many people who have crossed the seas to form our new, still young nation.” Riding high, Beard also landed the job as
Gourmet’s
restaurant critic in 1949. But critical writing was not really his métier, and Beard, acting on the wrongheaded assumption that every
Gourmet
reviewer needed to channel the voice of Lucius Beebe, sounded little like his exuberant cookbook-author self in these pieces. He preciously used the royal “we” and larded his columns with overwrought Beebe-isms, as when he indulged in a reverie about restaurants “where one may be wafted to Olympian heights on magic gastronomical carpets.”

In any event, Beard’s time at
Gourmet
was short-lived. MacAusland gave him the heave-ho in 1950 for reprinting one of his
Gourmet
columns almost verbatim in the catalog of the Sherry Wine and Spirits Company, the
upscale vintner on Madison Avenue. Sherry’s owners, brothers Sam and Jack Aaron, adored Beard and functioned as his angels, always providing work and income for him, whether it was writing for their catalog, assisting customers on their sales floor, or—after the
Gourmet
fiasco—embarking on fact-finding tours of Europe as their consultant.
*
On a trip to Paris, Beard got to meet another West Coast misfit who had found her métier as a cook and sparkling
saloniste
, the San Francisco–born Alice B. Toklas, who had been Gertrude Stein’s companion and had late in life made her food-publishing debut with
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
(1954)—a work whose unself-conscious charm as an evocation of Stein-Toklas nuttiness (“The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second, and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair with my hands still unwashed, reached for a cigarette, lighted it and waited for the police to come …”) was overshadowed by its inadvertent inclusion of a recipe for hashish fudge.
†

Beard won further exposure in the fifties as a food columnist for
Argosy
, America’s oldest pulp-fiction magazine, which had repurposed itself at the dawn of the fifties as a proto-
GQ
men’s lifestyle magazine. Liberated from writing about the Olympian heights of gastronomy, “Jim” Beard, as he was bylined for the occasion, was free to dispense folksy advice on grilling steaks and mixing cocktails.
Argosy’s
editor, Jerry Mason, also underwrote the
publication of
Barbecue & Rotisserie
and two other paperback quickies,
Complete Cookbook for Entertaining
(1954) and
Casserole Cookbook
(1955). And by 1956, Beard had also set up his first cooking school with André Surmain, a flashy, vainglorious entrepreneur who, five years later, would open the restaurant Lutèce with André Soltner, a young recruit from Alsace-Lorraine. The partnership with Surmain lasted only a year, but the James Beard Cooking School persevered in the test kitchens of Restaurant Associates, the hospitality group whose hard-charging visionary, Joseph Baum, had sought out Beard as a consultant for his expanding portfolio of restaurants, which by 1959 would include the Four Seasons.

Though Beard still didn’t reach as many readers as newspaper columnists like Brownstone, Paddleford, and Nickerson, he eclipsed them in fame through force of personality. “Jim was an enthusiast,” says Barbara Kafka, who insinuated herself into the food world in 1957 as a young writer for
Vogue.
“One of the things I learned from him was not to be afraid of all the words we’re taught to eschew as writers: ‘wonderful,’ ‘fabulous,’ ‘divine,’ ‘sublime,’ ‘great,’ ‘extraordinary’—the hyperbole words. People wanted them about food, and they still do.”

There was also something to be said for Beard’s sheer oddball magnetism: people were drawn in by the very sight of him, the Bosc pear body draped in a striped apron, the glint in the eyes set deep in the unusually contoured head, the suave theatricality with which he plunged into his cooking demonstrations. John Ferrone, who edited
The James Beard Cookbook
and remained close to Beard until Beard’s death, recalls that his then employer, Dell, had reservations about the cover of the book’s first edition, a photograph of the bow-tied Beard grinning almost dementedly as he proffered to the reader a serving platter heaped high with pork chops, cold cuts, and sausages—sausages that, in their shiny, bulging casings, somehow seemed to be miniature representations of the shiny, bulging Beard. “A lot of people thought the cover was gross—too much meat, too much fat,
yecch
!
“
says Ferrone. “But I think people loved that about Jim. He looked like a poster boy for good eating. I felt that he wouldn’t have had the same impact if he’d been
short and skinny.”
*
The book, which had an initial print run of around 150,000, sold out almost immediately.

Learning to love the hustle, Beard took his act on the road, signing on as a consultant for Edward Gottlieb Associates, a public relations firm that had the account of the French cognac industry. Simultaneously pleasing his benefactor and his audiences, he finished off his demonstrations of lobster
à l’américaine
—a French dish, despite the name—with a showy dousing of the crustacean with cognac and a flaming finale. (He succinctly concluded this recipe in
The James Beard Cookbook
with the direction “Ignite and blaze.”) Beard also entered into an endorsement deal in the late 1950s with Green Giant, the canned-vegetable company, agreeing to tout its Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes.
†
In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality—on more than one occasion, to more than one acquaintance, he flagellated himself for being a “gastronomic whore”—but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and ghostwriters. By the sixties, he would also be lending his name to French’s mustard and Cross & Blackwell Seafood Cocktail Sauce (the latter owned by Nestlé). Never adept at managing his finances in the first place, Beard swallowed his principles and learned to love Niblets.

Beard could more comfortably reconcile his culinary principles with his work for Joe Baum and Restaurant Associates (RA), which paid him a handsome retainer to be its “hired palate.” RA was a company way ahead of its time, with a varied portfolio of restaurants of different themes and menus.
Significantly, it broke away from the French template for fine dining and was willing to try, well,
anything.
The Newarker, which opened in 1953, was a bravely crazy attempt to lure non-travelers to Newark Airport with whitelinen service, exquisite continental cuisine, and a variation of the word “Newark” for a name. Beard first worked with RA on the Hawaiian Room, a splashy place in the Hotel Lexington that capitalized on the Trader Vic’s–style Polynesian craze with skewered meats and rum drinks.