The United States of Arugula (18 page)

All but forgotten today, Field was, for a brief period, as big as the Big Three. Indeed, Ephron’s infamous “Food Establishment” essay alludes not to the Big Three but to the Big Four, with Field ranked alongside Beard, Child, and Claiborne. A Juilliard-educated concert pianist, Field prospered through the forties and fifties as one half of the classical-piano duo Appleton and
Field, all the while nursing an antique-cookbook-collecting habit and an indefatigable urge to prepare elaborate meals.

In 1958, when he was forty-three, Field decided to run a cooking school out of the home he shared with his wife and young son in Scarsdale, New York. Blending French classicism and American eclecticism with a then radical interest in northern Italian food—he was one of the first to teach students how to make pesto, the puree of basil, garlic, olive oil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese—Field attracted a large following and, inevitably, the attention of Claiborne. At the time of Claiborne’s 1962 reportorial visit to Scarsdale (“Michael Field can execute a cadenza or cassoulet, grace note or galantine with approximately the same flourish,” the article in the
Times
began), Field was still performing piano duets with his partner, Vera Appleton. But soon thereafter, he took an apartment in Manhattan and devoted himself to cooking, writing, and teaching full-time. By the mid-sixties, he had a regular column in
McCall’s
called “The World of Fine Cooking” that combined prodigious research with kitchen know-how and an authentic literary voice (very much foreshadowing Jeffrey Steingarten’s later columns for
Vogue)
, and was spending his summers running the kitchen of the Maidstone Arms, an upscale inn in East Hampton, New York. He also wrote two very good cookbooks,
Michael Field’s Cooking School
in 1965 and
Michael Field’s Culinary Classics and Improvisations
in 1967, the latter an inventive pairing of traditionalist recipes with day-after leftover strategies—the excess meat from his “classic” recipe for braised lamb shoulder with white beans, for example, could be applied to his “improvisation” for moussaka.

Wiry, smirky, twitchy, and nerdy-looking, with thick-framed Jerry Lewis glasses and a cap of close-cropped black hair, Field was invariably described by his contemporaries as “tense” or “intense,” a neurotic, tightly wound oddball in the generally loose, cheery, jowly, inebriate food world. “He was a prickly guy, very amused and turned on by his own prickliness,” says Ephron, who interviewed Field for the
New York Post.
He was also a brilliant critic, turning out incisive, cutting essays on the cookbooks that flooded the market in the 1960s for
The New York Review of Books.
Claiborne
could be exacting and snobby in his restaurant reviews and occasional book write-ups, but Field was a different animal altogether, a pit bull who operated more in the mode of Pauline Kael reviewing films for
The New Yorker
or Kenneth Tynan in his heyday as the theater critic of the London
Observer.
“Disastrous examples [of quasi-French recipes] could be cited endlessly” in the latest edition of the
Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
, revised by Farmer’s niece, Wilma Lord Perkins, Field wrote in 1965. “Almost without exception they are technically inaccurate and historically incorrect.” Even Perkins’s straightforward recipe for roasted chicken had been “turned into a fiasco,” Field added. “A 2 ½ pound chicken roasted as Mrs. Perkins suggests—that is, for two hours at 350 degrees F., including 15 minutes at 450 degrees F.—would literally fall apart before it could be carved.”

In a roundup of French cookbooks the same year, Field had high praise for
Mastering
and for Child, Beck, and Bertholle (“Every recipe, simple or complex, clearly shows that these are authors who cook”) but totally dismantled an English-language translation of a book called
La Cuisine de France
, written by the food editor of French
Elle
, who went by the curious name of Mapie, the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec: “Her suggestion that the cook baste roast beef every five or ten minutes with hot water is absurd, and her advice to the cook making mayonnaise to beat into one yolk ‘as much oil as you like’ is even worse. Mapie has evidently never made mayonnaise by hand or she would know that the maximum amount of oil a large egg yolk will absorb is three-quarters of a cup.”

Field was even less forgiving in 1967 of the 926-page
Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook
, an audacious attempt by its author, Gloria Bley Miller, to do for Chinese cooking what Child, Beck, and Bertholle had done for French. Claiborne had hailed the book, but Field suspected that Miller, in over her head, had neither tested nor fully comprehended many of the recipes she’d found in her research. “It would be interesting to know why, for example, Mrs. Miller’s recipe for hot mustard requires the cook to bring one cup of water to a boil and then allow it to cool before adding one half cup of dry mustard?” Field wrote. “Surely, Mrs. Miller must be aware that
drinking and cooking water in China was boiled because it was often contaminated. To suggest this procedure to a contemporary American cook without a word of explanation makes us suspect that Mrs. Miller is either putting us on or that she really believes in the culinary properties of boiled water.”

When “Mrs. Miller” countered in a letter to the
Review
that her book had received “fifty or so reviews since publication, all but [Field’s] have been unqualified cheers,” Field had at her again: “As for the ‘fifty or so’ critical ‘cheers,’ Mrs. Miller refers to with pride, I have read them and they are indeed ‘unqualified’ in more ways than one. Generally, they consist of enthusiastic comments about the size of her book (one newspaper even mentions its weight—’exactly 4 ½ pounds’).”

Field’s writing appealed to a crossover audience of smart, curious readers who didn’t necessarily cook—the
Times
daily book reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, approvingly mentioned his “intriguing culinary criticism in
The New York Review of Books”
and praised his books on their literary merits rather than their culinary ones—but the food community was wary. “He was a very good teacher, but he was sort of a hysteric,” says Judith Jones, who edited two of Field’s books for Knopf. And yet, for a time, he was tolerated and even embraced because he knew his stuff, his recipes worked, and he was the New Big Thing, there to be investigated, gossiped about, and feared. As Child put it in a letter to M.F.K. Fisher, with whom she became friends in the mid-sixties, “Michael is the glamour boy around New York at the moment, a dabbler, a charmer, a word-monger, a butterfly, and ambitious.” Beard, a music buff impressed with Field’s concert-pianist credentials, was the newcomer’s biggest benefactor. When Time-Life decided to capitalize on the “trend toward better eating,” as the
Time
story on Child had put it, by issuing a multivolume series called
Foods of the World
, Beard lobbied for Field to be the series’ consulting editor. The books, oversize and full-color, part
National Geographic
photo-travelogue and part recipe compendiums, were to be sold by subscription to Time-Life’s built-in readership of magazine subscribers—a surefire moneymaker.

In a professional milieu that didn’t pay well unless you were Julia Child, where even Jim Beard sweated out the wait every month for that check from Green Giant,
Foods of the World
was a godsend, “nothing less than a potlatch at which Time-Life freely distributed its considerable bounty to New York’s food writers, editors, cooking teachers, and recipe testers,” as Beard’s biographer, Robert Clark, put it. The first book in the series was
The Cooking of Provincial France
, and it had a formidable lineup: M.F.K. Fisher was selected to write the text, Beard’s protégé John Clancy was testing the recipes, and Child was retained as a “consultant”—a job that she didn’t particularly need but accepted, she later admitted, because she wanted to be “in the swim” of things and felt she owed
Time
for the cover story.

Field rented La Pitchoune, the Childs’ French country house, in order to do research for the book. It wasn’t long before Fisher and Child started to have their misgivings about him. “M.F.K. Fisher stayed at Julia’s house right after Michael had stayed there,” says Jones, “and she said she opened the refrigerator door and there wasn’t anything in it. She said, ‘How could a person who loves food be in the south of France and not at least have a piece of cheese in the refrigerator?’ With Julia and Jim, it was in their bones. They loved cooking. You’d swing open their refrigerator door and it would be bursting, and they’d say, ‘What would you like for dinner?’ Whereas everything about Michael was nonspontaneous.”

The Cooking of Provincial France
was attractive in a coffee-table kind of way, but many of its recipes were more restaurant-haute than rustic and provincial (for example, a very fancy
coquilles Saint-Jacques à la Parisienne
, scallops with mushrooms in white-wine sauce), and the region-by-region approach of Fisher’s introduction wasn’t repeated in the text, which never explained any dish’s geographical origin. Overwhelmed by the scope of the
Foods of the World
project, Field appears to have panicked and just thrown together a bunch of French and quasi-French recipes, including some lifted more or less straight from
Mastering
, without attribution. Child, embarrassed by her association with the book, privately conceded that many of the
recipes were “AWFUL,” while Fisher grumbled that the Time-Life people had neutered her spiky prose.
*

Though he had been the first to give Field wide exposure, Claiborne had grown to resent what he perceived as Field’s uppitiness and panzerdivision treatment of cookbooks that he himself had liked, such as
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook.
So when
The Cooking of Provincial France
came out early in 1968, Claiborne teed off with the most bilious Michael Field imitation he could muster. “It is said that the popularity of Americans in France is at its lowest ebb in history,” he began. “After the Gauls read
The Cooking of Provincial France
by Time-Life Books, things are very likely to get worse. They might even start a small war in Normandy, Alsace, or Provence, and I might very well join them.” Claiborne argued Fieldishly that the dessert recipes had nothing to do with provincial France and probably came from “somebody’s files,” while the sauce for a sole recipe called for so little liquid that it would end up “something like mucilage.” Of Field himself, Claiborne icily commented that he was “a former concert pianist who might be excused on the grounds that he never played in the provinces.”

The review came out the very day of the book’s publication party at the Four Seasons, driving up Field’s already-high blood pressure. To cub reporter Ephron, he spluttered, “Essentially, the whole food establishment is a mindless one, inarticulate and not very cultivated. These idiots who attack me are furious because they think I just fell into it. Well, let me tell you, I used to make forty soufflés in one day and throw them out, just to find the right recipe.” The situation also caused a frost in the relationship between Claiborne and Beard, who thought the
Times
review unreasonably harsh and was busy consulting for Field on other books in the series.

None of this skirmishing prevented
The Cooking of Provincial France
from earning the money it was expected to earn, nor did it prevent Time-Life
from hiring Claiborne and Franey to oversee the
Classic French Cooking
volume, a book for which Beard and Pépin were also retained as consultants. (It was the first time Franey was acknowledged in print as Claiborne’s collaborator.) Field, fortunately, did not have to deal too much with Claiborne directly—Claiborne was charged with writing the narrative text with Franey, while Field handled recipe instructions—but the experience took its toll on a man who was a bundle of nerves on his best day. Field managed one more solo-effort cookbook for Jones and Knopf, the appealing
All Manner of Food
, before dying of a massive heart attack in 1971, when he was just fifty-six. “In a way, he became his own worst enemy,” says Jones. “He overexplained, overwrote, over-everythinged. He just was compulsive, and he didn’t know how to let go.”

CHILD SQUEAKED OUT
of the
Foods of the World
situation untarnished, as she generally would in these internecine food-establishment skirmishes, a credit to her integrity both as a cook and as a human being, as well as her geographical remove from New York. Her occasional indiscreet, eye-rolling references to the “fairies” of the food world, meaning Claiborne, Beard, and such gay Beard lieutenants as John Clancy, weren’t appreciated, but no one mistook Child, a political ultraliberal who socialized in Harvard circles and had seen her own husband smeared as a suspected Communist during the McCarthy era, for a bigot.

Yet even Child acquired her own tormentor, in the form of Madeleine Kamman, a Parisian who had studied at the Cordon Bleu and, briefly, under Simone Beck at L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes before moving to the United States in 1960. Though she initially taught French cooking classes in Philadelphia, Kamman had by the late sixties settled with her American husband in the Boston area, Child’s turf. Child was initially welcoming to the newcomer. Kamman was a brilliant teacher with an uncanny knack for adapting French techniques to whatever fresh ingredients were available in the American marketplace, and her 1971 book,
The Making of a Cook
, became,
and remains, a lodestar for preprofessional cooks who want to understand the scientific underpinnings of French cookery rather than just follow step-by-step instructions. But before long, word got back to Child that Kamman was bad-mouthing
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
to her students and deriding Child as a charlatan who was “neither French nor a chef”—this, even though Child took pains to note that she did not consider herself an actual chef and resisted all attempts by magazine photographers to make her pose in a toque.