The United States of Arugula (3 page)

I feel I should also address those dissenters who, rather less graciously than Cunningham, have condemned as their idea of hell the very climate of ferment and ambition that so excites me. The same James Villas who abounded with optimism in
Town & Country
in the seventies is now an unfettered
(albeit whip-smart and entertaining) crank who proudly trumpets his abhorrence of sushi and salsa, refers to these times as the “era of gastropornography,” and believes that the heyday of American food came and went in the sixties, when fine-dining traditions were still prevalent and chefs kept to one kind of cuisine, in just one kitchen. “Contrary to all the ecstatic proclamations by the ever-gullible food press, the proliferation of trendy cookbooks, and the wildly buoyant Zagat restaurant surveys,” he wrote in his 2002 memoir,
Between Bites
, “gastronomy in America [has] evolved into nothing more than a sick joke” that would mortify the likes of Beard and Claiborne if they were alive today.

Likewise, Robert Clark, at the end of his otherwise impressive and cogent 1993 biography of Beard,
The Solace of Food
, throws a hissy fit about what the food world has become in the wake of its patriarch’s death, blasting it as shallow, trend obsessed, and in suicidal thrall to celebrity chefs and myopic Manhattan tastemakers who delude themselves into believing that “the whole country [is] greedily feeding on chanterelles and mâche.” Like Villas, he imagines that Beard would be horrified by it all, surveying the scene like the weeping Indian in the old Keep America Beautiful ad: “We seem as a people less inclined to gather at our stoves and our tables and take succor in the good things that happen around them … and James Beard would have thought that a tragedy.”

These laments bring to mind the wounded, I-was-there-first bitterness of the early R.E.M. or Nirvana fan who has never gotten over the fact that his favorite indie band got big, and who therefore sees a positive development—the mass acceptance of what was once a small movement—as some kind of unforgivable sellout. There’s no doubt that chefs and food editors do indeed get caught up in risible trends (for example, blackened fish in the eighties, lemongrass abuse in the nineties, foams in the early twenty-first century), and that the celebrity-chef machinery coughs up the occasional vainglorious twit, but these are mere glitches in what has been a remarkable culinary evolution. While the whole country most certainly is not “greedily feeding” on mâche, things are moving fast enough that, in the decade-plus
since Clark launched his gratuitous, unprovoked attack on the perfectly innocent salad green, a Chez Panisse alumnus named Todd Koons has started up a company called Epic Roots that distributes bagged, fresh mâche to supermarkets in thirty states. In the same period, an alumnus of Wolfgang Puck’s kitchen, Nancy Silverton, has rapidly expanded her La Brea Bakery, whose artisanal baguettes and sourdough loaves are par-baked in Southern California, shipped frozen to supermarkets across the country, and baked to completion on the premises the day they’re sold, allowing people all over the United States to enjoy fresh-baked bread of a sort that was once available only in expensive West Coast specialty shops.

Besides, I’m not entirely sold on the guilt trip that some in the food elite like to lay on non-cooks and infrequent cooks. Though I’m an enthusiastic home cook myself, I recognize that this is America, and part of what has made America America is its drive, its impatience, its demand of long hours in the workplace, its two-career couples, its lack of Mediterranean languor. It’s all well and good to pine for the vanished America in which moms stayed home and issued forth three hot meals a day, or to gaze across the Atlantic with envy at Europeans who still take three hours off for a midday meal with wine—and it sure is nice to appropriate the rhythms of these places over the weekend or while we’re on vacation—but that ain’t us.

So maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world that the bustling, everbusy, aromatic home kitchen of yore has been replaced by an ad hoc arrangement of dining out, ordering in, toting home prepared foods, and
occasionally
whipping up something from scratch. And maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible if those who flat-out don’t want to cook never had to, provided they had options and inclinations beyond processed fast food. Indeed, to some culinary thinkers, like the brilliant Chicago chef Charlie Trotter, this represents an exciting new frontier. “From an opportunity standpoint, it’s gonna be an amazing time to be a cook or a chef twenty, twenty-five years from now,” he says. “It’s a weird time at the moment, because you have a massive part of the population that doesn’t cook, maybe doesn’t even know how to cook, and yet is conversant in several food languages, knows its way around a sushi
menu. And then there’s this whole ’nother segment of non-cooks that eats nothing but fast food and processed food, which is part of the reason we have the obesity problem. Either way, you have people who, whether for personal reasons, time-commitment reasons, or financial reasons, aren’t cooking. I think there’s extraordinary potential behind that, to feed people who aren’t feeding themselves, and to do it right. We can’t be afraid of progress in the food world.”

But this is getting ahead of the story. There are beans to be shelled, roasts to be trimmed, oysters to be shucked, big fish to be gutted …

“IF SOMEONE SUGGESTS A ‘PIZZA PIE’ AFTER THE THEATER, DON’T THINK IT IS GOING
to be a wedge of apple. It is going to be the surprise of your life.” So began the April 21, 1939, column of the
New York Herald Tribune
food editor, Clementine Paddleford, the doyenne of America’s then tiny contingent of food journalists. Her column went on to promote pizza as a “nice stunt to surprise the visiting relatives, who will be heading East soon for the World’s Fair. They come to be surprised, and pizza, pronounced ‘peet-za,’ will do the job up brown.”

That Paddleford, in 1939, had to explain how to pronounce “pizza” (in an article sub-headlined
ITALIAN PASTRY APPROPRIATE WITH BEER AND WINE)
speaks volumes about the gastronomic world Americans inhabited at the time. Dining out was for special occasions, ordering in was nearly unheard of, and most Americans adhered to a diet of what was familiar to them locally and culturally. Italian foods such as “peet-za” were alien to all but Italian Americans and a small minority of urban culinary adventurers. To America’s wealthy elite, eating Italian food was beneath contempt, irredeemably déclassé and stinky—a sentiment that Frank Capra, himself a Sicilian immigrant, exploited marvelously in a scene from his most famous film,
It’s a Wonderful Life
(1946), in which the movie’s moneybags villain, Mr. Potter,
chides George Bailey, the big-hearted, immigrant-assisting director of the local building and loan, for “frittering his life away playing nursemaid to a lot of garlic-eaters.”

Paddleford, to her credit, harbored no such prejudices. A first-rate journalist with an endearingly loopy sensibility, she plunged uninhibitedly into New York’s ethnic markets, where, she wrote, “all the queer fish of the sea are congregated to sell wholesale or retail to Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Chinese, any one who knows the goodness of queer fish.” Paddleford was also shrewd and adventurous enough to recognize that within the 3,000-mile span of the continental United States lay a wondrous variety of homey regional foods, there for the discovering. In her single-engine Piper Cub airplane, she flew low over the land, using the one- and two-lane roads of the countryside as her guide, following their twists and curves to wherever a promising farmhouse or local café appeared.

But Paddleford didn’t have an audience of well-heeled food sophisticates to applaud her, no pulpit on National Public Radio or the Food Network from which to delight her followers with tales of eating wine-jelly pie in the South or Maine lobster stew in New England. Her work—her life—was relegated to what was then called the women’s page of the newspaper, a home-economics ghetto of recipes, advice columns, and helpful household hints. What’s more, her culinary fearlessness was undercut by her fealty to her role as the
Herald Tribune’s
resident wifey (though Paddleford was actually a divorcée) and the presumed conservativeness of her lady readership. Try as she might to zest up her readers’ lives with exotica once in a while, Paddleford knew that she couldn’t go too far—a frustration that revealed itself in her “queer fish” column, in which she suddenly implored her audience to “Be a kitchen rebel and glory in rebellion. Raise the eyebrows of your friends. Serve sea urchins after an evening at bridge.” She probably knew as she was typing those words that the urchins-after-bridge thing would never catch on.

James Beard was in a similarly awkward spot in ‘39, having taken a role as a junior partner in a new Manhattan catering company called Hors
d’Oeuvre, Inc. This was something of a comedown for the thirty-six-year-old Beard, “Jim” to all his friends, who’d moved to New York City a year and a half earlier (having already lived briefly in the city in 1924–25) with dreams of making it in the theater, either as an actor, set designer, or costumer. Talk about a queer fish: the hulking, gay, six-foot-four Oregonian had a head the shape of an upended potato and huge ears that jutted out like pull tabs. He’d grown up as the spoiled, overfed only child of a sexually ambiguous Englishwoman named Mary Jones, who, prior to her marriage of convenience to a man named John Beard, had run a boardinghouse in Portland. Devoted to this mother—a stout, forceful hospitality-aholic who laid out stunning buffets of home-prepared breads, salads, cold dishes, roasts, soups, cakes, and sweets for her friends and neighbors—Beard had become a dab hand in the kitchen at a young age; by the time he was eight, he was baking his own bread. This kitchen precocity kept Beard afloat in New York when that big theater break proved not to be forthcoming. A born charmer with an affinity for bohemian types—two more traits inherited from his mother—Jim Beard made friends easily, and when money was tight, he could always cook for these friends in exchange for a seat at the table with someone else footing the grocery bill.

The prime mover at Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. was the well-connected man-about-town William Rhode. Beard had met Rhode at a party, and the two men developed an instant rapport over their mutual love of food. The catering company they dreamed up together, with assistance from Rhode’s sister, Irma, and Beard’s friend Mack Shinn, was a success from the outset. Rhode was well acquainted with the sorts of Upper East Side ladies who needed canapés for their cocktail parties, and he was a gifted self-promoter, adept at planting items about himself in the papers; among the first to tout Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. publicly was Rhode’s friend Lucius Beebe, the
Herald Tribune
society writer, who, in his “This New York” column, described the company as “a brand new sort of gastronomic agency [that] already shows signs of being a minor Klondike.” While Rhode’s tastes in edibles skewed fancier, more in the caviar-and-foie-gras direction, Beard’s kitchen creations drew
upon his mother’s straightforward American repertoire. Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.’s most popular item was a miniature sandwich of sliced Bermuda onion served between little rounds of fresh brioche that were spread with homemade mayonnaise and then rolled along the edges in minced parsley—essentially, a gussied-up version of a Mary Beard snack.

Beard didn’t know in 1939 that he’d found his calling, nor was he yet aware that he was in possession of a preternatural gift, a highly cultivated palate that was every bit as special, in its way, as the extraordinary eyesight of Ted Williams, the rookie Red Sox left fielder who claimed he was able to see the stitches of a speeding baseball as it spun toward home plate. On the precipice of middle age and bereft of any theater prospects, Beard was just happy to have a steady job. No one thought of a food career as prestigious, and few even entertained the concept.

Julia McWilliams certainly didn’t; by 1939, her experiment in New York City life was already well behind her, and food hadn’t even factored into it, apart from the occasional trip to the lunch counter at Schrafft’s. After graduating from Smith College in 1934, she found a job as an advertising copywriter for a Manhattan furniture company, W. & J. Sloane. Though she flourished as a career gal, by 1937 she had quit Sloane’s and returned to her hometown of Pasadena, California, because she was approaching age twenty-five, and, unlike most of her Smith friends, had failed to hook a man. And so, while Beard was rolling his onion sandwiches in parsley, the wellborn McWilliams was living with her recently widowed father, attending Junior League functions, golfing, dating, halfheartedly pursuing new jobs, and not knowing what the future held for her. It wouldn’t be until the late forties, after she’d married a sophisticate named Paul Child and moved to France, that she even began to cook seriously.

The third future member of the food elite’s original Big Three, Craig Claiborne, spent the late thirties flailing miserably through college in his home state of Mississippi, unable to abide the premed program at Mississippi State University or the paddlings of his putative fraternity “brothers.” Claiborne wound up transferring to the University of Missouri with vague thoughts of
becoming a journalist, and would endure an inept tour of duty in the navy, a stint at a Swiss hotel-management school, and a few years scrapping around New York as a freelancer before he would emerge, in the late fifties, as
The New York Times’
, and therefore America’s, foremost food journalist.

As ragged and itinerant as the Big Three’s pre-food careers were, it wasn’t as if there was a coherent food world that was excluding them, keeping them from their destinies. While the women’s pages plied their readers with recipes for butterscotch squares and “Lacy Valentine Salad,” a terrifying concoction of marshmallows, apricots, maraschino cherries, dates, celery, and canned grapefruit suspended in gelatin and garnished with curly endive and mayonnaise piping,
*
the “gourmets” of the time occupied their own, equally perverse little universe. Mostly male, they dined at fine old hotels like the Biltmore and the Astor in New York, and made a habit of lamenting the fast-vanishing ways of the previous century’s Gilded Age, when mustachioed men of means gorged themselves gouty on endless feasts of oysters, crabs, canvasback duck, prime rib, and terrapin.
†