Wallflower at the Orgy (3 page)

He takes himself and food very very seriously. He has been known to debate for hours such subjects as whether nectarines are peaches or plums, and whether the vegetables that Michael Field, Julia Child, and James Beard had one night at La Caravelle and said were canned were in fact canned. He roundly condemns anyone who writes more than one cookbook a year. He squarely condemns anyone who writes a cookbook containing untested recipes. Colleagues who break the rules and succeed are hailed almost as if they had happened on a new galaxy. “Paula Peck,” he will say, in hushed tones of awe, “broke the rules in puff paste.” If the Food Establishmentarian makes a breakthrough in cooking methods—no matter how minor and superfluous it may seem—he will celebrate. “I have just made a completely and utterly revolutionary discovery,” said Poppy Cannon triumphantly
one day. “I have just developed a new way of cooking asparagus.”

There are two wings to the Food Establishment, each in mortal combat with the other. On the one side are the revolutionaries—as they like to think of themselves—the home economists and writers and magazine editors who are industry-minded and primarily concerned with the needs of the average housewife. Their virtues are performance, availability of product, and less work for mother; their concern is with improving American food. “There is an awe about Frenchiness in food which is terribly precious and has kept American food from being as good as it could be,” says Poppy Cannon, the leader of the revolutionaries. “People think French cooking is gooking it up. All this kowtowing to so-called French food has really been a hindrance rather than a help.” The revolutionaries pride themselves on discovering short cuts and developing convenience foods; they justify the compromises they make and the loss of taste that results by insisting that their recipes, while unquestionably not as good as the originals, are probably a good deal better than what the American housewife would prepare if left to her own devices. When revolutionaries get together, they talk about the technical aspects of food: how to ripen a tomato, for example; and whether the extra volume provided by beating eggs with a wire whisk justifies not using the more convenient electric beater.

On the other side are the purists or traditionalists, who see themselves as the last holdouts for haute cuisine. Their virtue is taste; their concern primarily French food. They are almost missionary-like, championing the cause of great food against the rising tide of the TV dinner, clamoring for better palates as they watch the children of America raised on a
steady diet of Spaghetti Os. Their contempt for the revolutionaries is eloquent: “These people, these home economists,” said Michael Field distastefully, “—they skim the iridescent froth off the gourmet department, and it comes out tasting like hell.” When purists meet, they discuss each other; very occasionally, they talk about food: whether one ought to put orange peel into boeuf Bourguignon, for example, and why lamb tastes better rare.

Although the purists do not reach the massive market available to the revolutionaries, they are virtually celebrities. Their names conjure up a sense of style and taste; their appearance at a benefit can mean thousands of dollars for hospitals, charities, and politicians. The Big Four of the Food Establishment are all purists—James Beard, Julia Child, Michael Field, and Craig Claiborne.

Claiborne, a Mississippi-born man who speaks softly, wears half-glasses, and has a cherubic reddish face that resembles a Georgia peach, is probably the most powerful man in the Food Establishment. From his position as food editor of the
New York Times
, he has been able to bring down at least one restaurant (Claude Philippe’s Pavillon), crowd customers into others, and play a critical part in developing new food tastes. He has singlehandedly revived sorrel and cilantro, and, if he could have his way, he would singlehandedly stamp out iceberg lettuce and garlic powder. To his dismay, he played a large part in bringing about the year of beef Wellington. “I hate the stuff,” he says.

In his thirties, after too many unhappy years in public relations and the armed forces, Claiborne entered the Lausanne Hotel School to study cooking. On his return—and after a brief fling bartending—he began to write for
Gourmet
magazine and work for Ann Seranne’s public-relations firm, handling
such products as the Waring Blender and Fluffo the Golden Shortening. In 1957 he was hired by the
Times
, and he unabashedly admits that his job has been a dream come true. He loves it, almost as much as he loves eating, though not nearly as much as he loves cooking.

Claiborne is happiest in his Techbuilt house in Springs, East Hampton, which overlooks an herb garden, an oversized swimming pool, and Gardiner’s Bay. There, he, his next-door neighbor Pierre Franey—whom he calls “my arm and my dear friend”—and a number of other chefs go fishing, swap recipes, and whip up meals for fifty guests at a time. The menus are logged into a small leatherbound notebook in which Claiborne records every meal he eats throughout the year. During the winter, Claiborne lives in Greenwich Village. His breakfasts often consist of Sara Lee frozen croissants. His other daily meals are taken in restaurants, and he discusses them as if he were serving penance. “That,” he says firmly, “is the thing I like least about my job.”

Six years ago Claiborne began visiting New York restaurants incognito and reviewing them on a star system in the Friday
Times;
since that time, he has become the most envied, admired, and cursed man in the food world. Restaurant owners decry his Francophilia and can barely control their tempers while discussing his prejudice against large-management corporations and in favor of tiny, ethnic restaurants. His nit-picking constantly irritates. Among some of the more famous nits: his censure of a Pavillon waiter who allowed his pencil to peek out; his disapproval of the salt and pepper shakers at L’Étoile, and this remark about Lutèce: “One could wish that the owner, Monsieur Surmain, would dress in a more reserved and elegant style to better match his surroundings.”

Surmain, a debonair man who wears stylish striped shirts, sputters when Claiborne’s name is mentioned. “He said in a restaurant of this sort I should wear a tuxedo,” said Surmain. “What a bitchy thing. He wants me to act like a headwaiter.”

The slings and arrows of outrage fly at Claiborne—and not only from restaurateurs. Carping about Craig is practically a parlor game in the food world. Everything he writes is pored over for its true significance. It is suggested, for example, that the reason Craig criticized proprietor Stuart Levin’s clothes in his recent review of Le Pavillon had to do with the fact that Levin fawned over him during his two visits to the restaurant. It is suggested that the reason Craig praised the clothes of Charles Masson of Grenouille in the same review had to do with the fact that Masson ignores Craig entirely too much. It is suggested that Craig is not a nice person; and a story is offered to support the thesis, all about the time he reviewed a new restaurant owned by a friend after the friend begged him to wait a few weeks. His criticisms, it is said, drove the friend to drink.

But the fact of the matter is that Craig Claiborne does what he does better than anyone else. He is a delight to read. And the very things that make him superb as a food critic—his integrity and his utter incorruptibility—are what make his colleagues loathe him.

“Everyone thinks about Craig too much,” says cookbook author and consultant Mimi Sheraton. “The truth is that he is his own man and there is no way to be a friend of his. He is the only writer who is really honest. Whether or not he’s reliable, whether or not you like him, he is honest. I know
Cue
isn’t—I used to write for them.
Gourmet
isn’t. And Michael Field is just writing for Craig Claiborne.”

Whenever members of the Food Establishment tire of discussing Craig they move on to discuss Craig’s feuds—though in all fairness, it must be said that Claiborne is usually the less active party to the feuds. The feud currently absorbing the Food Establishment is between Claiborne and Michael Field. Field, who burst into stardom in the Food Establishment after a career as half of the piano team of Appleton & Field, is an energetic, amusing, frenetic man whose recent rise and subsequent candor have won him few friends in the food world. Those who are not his admirers have taken to passing around the shocking tidbit—untrue—that Field had not been to Europe until 1967, when he visited Julia Child in Provence.

“Essentially,” says Field, “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.”

Shortly after his first cookbook was published, Field began reviewing cookbooks for the
New York Review of Books
, a plum assignment. One of his first articles, an attack on
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
which centered on its fondue recipe, set off a fracas that produced a furious series of argumentative letters, in themselves a hilarious inadvertent parody of letters to highbrow magazines. Recently, he reviewed
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook
—a volume that was voted winner of the R. T. French (mustard) Tastemaker Award (chosen by one hundred newspaper food editors and roughly analogous in meaning to landing on the Best Dressed List). In his attack on Gloria Bley Miller’s book, he wrote: “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? Surely Mrs. Miller must be aware that drinking and cooking water in China was boiled because it was often contaminated.…”

Mrs. Miller wrote in reply: “I can only suggest to Mr. Field … that he immerse his typewriter immediately in boiling water. There are many types of virulence in the world, and ‘boiling the water first’ is one of the best ways to disinfect anything.”

The feud between Field and Claiborne had been simmering for several years, but Claiborne’s review of the Time-Life cookbook turned it up to full boil. “He has a perfect right to dislike the book,” said Field. “But his attack went far beyond that, into personalities.” A few months after the review was published, Field counterpunched, with an article in
McCall’s
entitled “New York’s Ten Most Overrated Restaurants.” It is in almost total opposition to Claiborne’s
Guide to New York Restaurants;
in fact, reading Field’s piece without having Claiborne’s book alongside is a little like reading
Finnegans Wake
without the key.

For his part, Claiborne would just as soon not discuss Field—“Don’t get me started,” he said. And his attitude toward the Time-Life series has mellowed somewhat: he has finally consented to write the text of the
Time-Life Cookbook of Haute Cuisine
along with Franey. But some time ago, when asked, he was only too glad to defend his review. “Helen McCully (food editor of
House Beautiful
) said to me, ‘How could you be so mean to Michael?’ ” he recalled. “I don’t give a good God damn about Michael.” His face turned deep red, his fists clenched, he stood to pace the room. “The misinformation! The inaccuracies in that book! I
made a stack of notes thicker than the book itself on the errors in it. It’s shameful.”

Claiborne was so furious about the book, in fact, that he managed to intensify what was, until then, a one-sided feud between James Beard and himself. Beard, a genial, large, round man who receives guests in his Tenth Street house while seated, Buddha-like, on a large pouf, had been carrying on a mild tiff with Claiborne for some time. Just before the first Time-Life cookbook was published, the two men appeared together on the David Susskind Show, and in the course of the program, Beard held up the book and plugged it on the air. Afterward, Claiborne wrote a letter to Susskind, with carbon copy to Beard, saying that if he had known he was going to appear on the same show with the Time-Life cookbook, he never would have consented to go on.

(That Julia Child has managed thus far to remain above the internecine struggles of the food world probably has more to do with the fact that she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, well away from it all, than with her charming personality.)

The success of the Time-Life cookbook series is guaranteed, Claiborne’s review notwithstanding. Offered by mail order to subscribers who care not one whit whether the soufflé on the cover is actually a meringue, the series rapidly signed up five hundred thousand takers—for all eighteen books! (The
New York Times
Cookbook, itself a blockbuster, has sold only two hundred thousand copies.) “The books, whatever their limits, are of enormous quality,” says Field. “Every recipe works and is honestly conceived.” Yet a number of those intimately connected with the books have complained about the limits Field parenthetically refers to, and most particularly
about the technique of group journalism that has produced the books: apparently, the text, recipes, and photographs of some of the cookbooks have been done independently of each other.

“It’s a joke,” said Nika Hazelton, who is writing the text for the
Time-Life German Cookbook
. “First there is the writer—me, in this case, but I have nothing to do with the recipes or illustrations. Then there is the photographic staff, which takes recipes from old cookbooks, changes them a little, and photographs them. Then there is the kitchen, under Michael Field’s supervision. I think Michael knows about French and Italian food, but he doesn’t know quite as much about other cookery. The cook is John Clancy, a former cook in a short-order house who once worked for Jim Beard. I’m the only person connected with the project who knows languages besides French. There is a consultant who hasn’t been in Germany for thirty years. My researcher’s background is spending three years with the Morgan Bank. It’s hilarious. I’m doing it only for the money.”

The money that is available to members of the Food Establishment is not quite as much as they would have you think, but it is definitely enough to keep every last one of them in truffles. James Beard—who commands the highest fees and, though a purist, has the most ties with industry—recently turned down a hundred-thousand-dollar offer to endorse Aunt Jemima mixes because he didn’t believe in their products. Retainers offered lesser stars are considerably smaller, but there are many jobs, and they suffice. Nevertheless, the impression persists that there are not enough jobs to go around. And because everyone in the food world is free-lancing and concerned with putting as many eggs into
his basket as possible, it happens that every time someone gets a job, the rest feel that they have lost one.