The United States of Arugula (19 page)

Over the years, even as she built a name for herself as the head of the Modern Gourmet cooking school and Chez la Mère Madeleine restaurant in Newton, Massachusetts (and, later, as the director of the School for American Chefs at Beringer Vineyards in Napa Valley, California), Kamman continued to sling arrows Child’s way, deriding her TV shows and knocking Child for not advancing the cause of women in professional kitchens. Child chose not to engage Kamman in a pissing match, keeping a dignified silence. But at a couple of public symposia late in her life, when audience members raised the subject of criticism, Child alluded to a “certain woman” who had antagonized her, “and people who know me know who I’m talking about.” At one of these symposia, Child remarked with a smile on her face that if this woman ever approaches her, “I will grind her alive, piece by piece, in my food processor.”

Kamman, for her part, remains unrepentant about critiquing the beloved Julia, but insists that the matter has been overblown. “As a person, she was a sweet, dear lady,” she says. “As a cook, I had seen better. America has a tendency toward stardom. I never wanted to be a star, and I resisted it very strongly by saying what I thought all the time. I’m not a very popular person. But you know what? So what!”

AS DIVISIVE AS FIGURES
like Kamman and Field could be, there was one figure in the late 1960s about whom everyone in the food world (save the ever-magnanimous Child) could agree they hated: Graham Kerr. Whereas the
entertainment quotient of
The French Chef
was
, a by-product of Child’s goosey charm, Kerr’s TV show,
The Galloping Gourmet
, which premiered late in 1968, committed the cardinal sin
of wanting
to entertain its viewers. Six foot four, handsome, English, prodigiously sideburned, and unable to resist an innuendo-laden wisecrack about a cake pan’s dimpled bottom, the thirty-four-year-old Kerr was part Hugh Grant and part Austin Powers, with a soupçon of Julia thrown in.
*
He opened each half-hour episode of his syndicated daytime cooking program by bounding onto his kitchen stage and hurdling over a chair, often with a full glass of wine in hand. A prefilmed travel clip would then be shown, revealing whichever exciting locale Kerr had visited of late. He’d proceed to prepare some sort of outrageously rich dish—a Brisbane prawn soufflé, for example—and banter with his studio audience of bedazzled housewives, the bouffanted aunties of the girls who’d swooned over the Beatles. Kerr added an extra frisson of naughtiness by periodically raising a crystal goblet to his lips and saying, “I think I’ll have a short slurp!”

“In actual fact, I probably drank less than a half a glass of wine in the entire night of making three shows, back to back,” Kerr says. “That mechanism came about because we had to find a way of being able to call for a commercial break. So when I would say, ‘I think it’s time for a short slurp,’ that would be the cue to the director that I was going to commercial. I would grab ahold of the glass, raise it to my lips, and ‘CUT!’—they would then go through the two minutes of black for the commercial, I would chat with the audience, then they would go ‘5-4-3-2-1,’ I’d lift the glass to my lips again, and I would put it down. But the perception came about that I couldn’t be like I was, having the fun that I was having, unless I was three sheets to the wind. People felt that by the end of the program, I had to be ready to fall into the soufflé.”

An instant hit, Kerr proved that Child’s success on television was not an anomaly, and that America was a ripe market for TV cooking shows,
notwithstanding the fact that
The Galloping Gourmet
was produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company in a studio in Ottawa. But the food establishment regarded Kerr as a vile interloper. When
Life
magazine did a four-page pictorial story on Kerr in 1969, it patched on an extra page in which, under the headline
A BRISK SAUTÉING BY THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENT
, it recorded the opinions of several authorities on the new star. Field, characteristically, was severe: “I think he’s awful—the Liberace of the food world, except that Liberace plays the piano a lot better than the Galloping Gourmet cooks. I don’t think he has any sensibility. I don’t think he’s funny.” Beard chastised Kerr as someone “who has very little respect for food” and “hasn’t done much to increase the cause of good food.” Claiborne professed never to have even seen the program. René Verdon, the former White House chef, said, “From the point of view of culinary arts, I don’t think an American woman can learn from watching him. From my own point of view, he’s sloppy.” Only Child was kind, saying, “I think anyone who is going to interest people in cooking is fine.”

“Well, I got the fifth page in
Life
, anyway,” says Kerr. But the condemnations wounded him. “It was something that I found extremely difficult,” he says. “You see, all of the food intelligentsia would write their one book a year or do twenty-six episodes for PBS. And here was I, doing 195 shows a year, absolutely exhausted. The moment we finished a series of sixty-five, which we did in six weeks, we would jump on a plane and fly around the world, visiting places that we had set up through the National Tourist Bureau to be the authentic locations where we could see the real thing. And we would visit up to eight restaurants a day to film those. We would be given those recipes. And then I’d come back and test every single recipe myself, and rewrite them to the degree that I felt they needed to be rewritten, for the U.S. market in particular. That is a tremendous amount to do. And, therefore, to go to that trouble, and to be accused of being a playboy showman—I mean, I hated that side of it.”

In fact, Kerr had more in common with the food establishment’s members than they supposed. He’d spent his childhood hanging around in the
kitchen of his parents’ small hotel in England, soaking up technique from the kindly Provençal chef who worked there. Like Claiborne, he’d attended hotel school on his government’s dime, so impressing his superiors while serving in the British Army Catering Corps that they sent him off to Brighton Tech—“arguably the best hotel school in England,” he says—to learn classic, Escoffier-style cuisine. Upon graduation, he was made a “corporal chef instructor,” a ranking officer whose specialty was fancy French cooking, usually for the top brass at military events. His television career even predated Child’s: having accepted a catering post with the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1958, he was discovered two years later by a producer who worked for the country’s fledgling national TV network. His cheeky cooking demonstrations (initially performed in his officer’s uniform, much to the consternation of the military) propelled him to mid-sixties television stardom in the bigger market of Australia, where, way ahead of the curve, he hosted a program that devoted specific episodes to local foods—“drawing a circle of about fifty kilometers around a certain city or town,” he says, “and only using the produce which came out of the ground, in season, to be able to construct dishes which I would call the ‘new regional cuisine of Australia.’”

For
The Galloping Gourmet
, though, Kerr’s wife and producer, Treena, encouraged him to place an emphasis on comedy—it was she who conceived of the leaping-over-a-chair entrance and cultivated the program’s anarchic, Peter Sellers–movie feel. By the later standards of the Food Network’s
Emeril Live
and
Iron Chef, The Galloping Gourmet
was not particularly assaultive, and, viewed today, it’s harmless fun—certainly Kerr’s enthusiasm for cooking was infectious, even if the instructional value of the individual episodes was dubious. The food establishment’s revulsion at Kerr’s success was a kind of separation anxiety, a realization that the culinary awareness they’d helped raise had taken on a life of its own, beyond the control of a few New York tastemakers. For plenty of future chefs who were children when Kerr’s program first aired from 1968 to 1971, among them his big fans Emeril Lagasse and Charlie Trotter, the establishment’s fuddy-duddy distinction between the acceptable Child and the distasteful Kerr was lost; they simply
saw two tall people who had strange accents, stood behind stoves, and were awesome on TV.

KERR’S ASCENDANCY COINCIDED
with that
of New York
magazine, another manifestation of foodmania’s new reach in the swinging late sixties. Originating as a Sunday supplement in the
New York Herald Tribune
, the foundering paper where Lucius Beebe and Clementine Paddleford had long labored over their rococo sentences,
New York
established itself as a font of New Journalism, the hipster’s clubhouse where Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Jimmy Breslin tried on groovy new writing voices and widgety flights of onomatopoeia.
New York
was also a food-obsessed publication from the get-go, if more in the cause of dining out than cooking in. From the beginning, in its Sunday-supplement days, the magazine featured a column called “The Underground Gourmet” in which two accomplished graphic designers and zealous food hobbyists, Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, alerted New Yorkers to the possibilities of inexpensive gastro-tourism in their own town. Glaser and Snyder were frustrated by Claiborne’s focus on fine dining (in his restaurant reviews, if not his food journalism), and set about canvassing the city’s ethnic eating places on behalf of the “greater-numbered followers of good food” who, they thought, would be better off “getting their money’s worth and perhaps adding a certain measure of adventure to their gastronomic pursuit.” Thus did readers in the greater New York area learn for the first time what intrepid food insiders like Beard and Claiborne already knew: where to find good Syrian pita bread, Southern sweet potato pie, Argentine empanadas, Indian Samosas, Lebanese tabbouleh, and Japanese tempura and negimaki (though even Glaser and Snyder were squeamish about sushi back then).

But it was in 1968, after the
Herald Tribune
had folded and
New York
had been reconstituted as a stand-alone weekly by Glaser and the editor Clay Felker, that Gael Greene was unleashed upon the food world. Having gotten her start writing sex-and-the-single-gal pieces for
Cosmopolitan
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
, Greene—a Detroit native from “Plastic White Bread Country … [with]
a cruel addiction to peanut butter,” as she described herself in a dust-jacket bio—was bitten by the gourmet bug in the early 1960s. She soon found herself taking classes with Dione Lucas and joining the ranks of the foodie cult, “attending to the catechism of Craig Claiborne in the forming of our floating islands, warming our bowls and yolks and whisks after the teaching of Julia Child, macerating the livers of our chickens in the style of James Beard.” Felker, having read one of her early forays into food journalism, thought it worth the gamble to try out Greene as
New York’s
restaurant critic.

Inspired by the conversational style of Tom Wolfe, Greene invented her own choppy, unhinged, status-obsessed style: “Dinner at La Grenouille. How gauche.
Nobody
has dinner at La Grenouille. The lunch bunch dines after dark at La Seine or Elaine’s or at their own fiendishly chic little supper parties. The ‘frogpond’ at twilight is mostly a beaded, sequined, no-name crowd.” And: “New York is a tall box. In the summer They put the top on. It is stifling. Here is how we restoreth our cool. Icy white wines. Muscadet. Sancerre. Sauvignon blanc.”

While Claiborne had been the first to apply journalistic rigor to the restaurant beat, coaxing formerly anonymous chefs out of their kitchens to talk about their craft, Greene held up the entire dining-out experience to scrutiny, albeit in a gossipy, most
un-Times
ian way. She carefully evaluated the food, but she also felt her readers needed to know how to impress snobby maître d’s, which society figures ate where, and what kind of cuisine was chic this month. Flaunting a saucy “food = sex” ethos much like the one that Claiborne revealed to intimates but suppressed in print, Greene ladled on the suggestiveness, christening herself “The Insatiable Gourmet” and turning even a trip to the lavish but unglamorous Jewish grocery Zabar’s into an orgiastic reverie: “Imagine that all your modest secret sexual fantasies have suddenly materialized in the living room. Scary? That’s exactly the delicious panic that overcomes a modestly disciplined gourmand upon first inhaling the fantasy of Zabar’s. It’s too much. Disciplined Gourmand has only one mouth, one liver, one life, one slightly used digestive system …”

With her first-person dispatches, obsessive referencing of her male
companion (aka the Kultur Maven or Grape Nut), and nutty, elaborate disguises of wigs, hats, and makeup—ostensibly worn to preserve her anonymity so she wouldn’t receive favorable treatment—Greene established a new, pop branch of food lit that existed in noisy Day-Glo opposition to the fireside contemplativeness of M.F.K. Fisher, A. J. Liebling, and Joseph Wechsberg. Whereas Claiborne gave Lutèce demerits for the loud apparel of its original proprietor, André Surmain, priggishly stating, “One could wish that the owner, Monsieur Surmain, would dress in a more reserved and elegant style to better match his surroundings,” Greene pointedly
dug
Surmain’s threads, writing. “He is not a super butler. He is your host, a zany country squire with his fat lapels, the bluff blend of pinstripe, tattersall, stripe, and Art Deco abstract. It is a highly aristocratic vulgarity, especially those crepe-soled rust suede Hush Puppies.”
*

Greene was equally turned on by chef André Soltner (“a master in the kitchen … driven by good demons”), and grew progressively more aroused over the master’s “mousseline de brochet nantua ($4.75), a mini-mousse of pike in a heady lobster-scented cream sauce,” “the pâté of pike ($4.75) in a pastry crust,” the “mignon de boeuf en croûte Lutèce ($9.50), tender rare slices of beef Wellington,” and the “carré de Pauillac, rack of lamb ($18 for two) … served pink as a howling infant.”

YET EVEN IN THESE
heady times for the food world, shot through with arrogance and possibility, there remained a major shortcoming: the quality of American ingredients was pretty lousy. Soltner, for all his great reviews, was flabbergasted that he still couldn’t get ingredients of the quality he’d enjoyed during his trainee years in war-scarred 1950s France. “We couldn’t work with fresh herbs, because we had only parsley—not even fresh chives,” he says. Soltner
was able to convince one of his milk suppliers, Sol Zausner, who happened to be a gastronome, to take a shot at making crème fraîche—America’s first—but he found it maddening that he couldn’t serve the classic French dish
médallions de veau aux girolles
, veal medallions with chanterelle mushrooms (girolles).