The Essential James Beard Cookbook (2 page)

Of course, like our other food mavens after the war, Beard spent a lot of time eating and drinking in France, soaking up the pleasures of French cuisine in Paris and Provence. But unlike many, he translated them fully into an American idiom and put them squarely on an American table. He reveled in the riches of America’s cooking tradition when the French sniffed there was no such animal. In 1972, he revealed our riches like a horde of gold in his groundbreaking
American Cookery.
Knowing firsthand the power of women in the kitchen, he attributed the strength of America’s culinary tradition to a trio of strong women in the nineteenth century: Mary Randolph of
The Virginia Housewife,
Miss Eliza Leslie of
Directions for Cookery,
and Mrs. Thomas Crowen of
Every Lady’s Book
. “I would like to have known all three,” he says. Like them, he understood the strength of American home cooking and the power of focusing on fresh ingredients, simply prepared, with flavor and fun first.

To learn from Beard is to toss diet books out the window as dreary and depressing and the wrong way to go about food. Forced into a no-salt, low-cal diet a few years before his death, Beard looked for new ways of flavoring that he hadn’t imagined, just as he discovered new intensities of old friends like strong rooty vegetables, a saltless baked potato, a soothingly creamy yogurt.

To learn from Beard is to learn good cooking, whether its cultural roots are French, Italian, English, Asian, or just-folks American. In his recipes, as in his classes, he shows us the virtues of simplicity and the excitement of discovery. “Be bold,” he tells us. “Taste for yourself. Taste things half-done, done—and overdone, if that happens; mistakes are to learn from, not to pine over.”

Beard’s voice is as American as Whitman’s as he sings the body electric, knocks over old categories, and insists that we improvise, experiment, shake up old ideas to discover and to pleasure our own individual taste. Like Whitman, he celebrated America first. “I can assure you,” he wrote, “that the smell of good smoked country ham sizzling in a black iron skillet in the early morning is as intoxicating and as mouthwatering as the bouquet of a fine Château Lafite-Rothschild or an Haut-Brion of a great year.”

Like P. T. Barnum, he had the gift of gab and a sense of the grand gesture. Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic is an understatement compared to his Game-Stuffed Turkey, in which a turkey is stuffed with a goose, which is stuffed with a capon, which is stuffed with a partridge, which is stuffed with a quail. But his gamey version of “Turducken” is also thoroughly practical: fat birds baste drier ones as they cook, and with all the birds deboned, slicing and serving is a dramatic snap. “Put on a fine show!” he commands us. “Like the theater, offering food and hospitality to people is a matter of showmanship, and no matter how simple the performance, unless you do it well, with love and originality, you have a flop on your hands.” Beard knows that imagination, rather than money, is the secret ingredient of a hit.

When Beard died in 1985 at age eighty-one, he had no idea that his house would be bought by friends like Julia Child and Peter Kump to provide a showcase for chefs from all over America in the continuing food revolution that he pioneered. He had no idea that his legacy would be maintained and honored by the vital work of the James Beard Foundation. But he surely saw that America was coming into its own in the kitchen and that in the twenty-first century cooking and eating and talking about it would connect young and old, celebrity chefs and novice bloggers, sports fans and video gamers, races and genders and classes and kinds as we sit together at the American Table and celebrate real food, food for flavor, food for fun. Thank you, Jim, for this great gift.

—Betty Fussell

INTRODUCTION

AN AMERICAN ATTITUDE TOWARD FOOD

I grew up in a kitchen, and I guess the scent of food is like a perfume. It has stayed with me all my life. My mother ran a small residential hotel in Portland, Oregon, and eating was an experience in our family. We were three distinct personalities, my mother, my father, and I, and we all liked food cooked in a different way. Let, our Chinese cook, spoiled us, really, because he’d take a dish and do it separately for each of us.

Let was originally my mother’s chef when she ran the Gladstone Hotel. At the turn of the century, she had an international approach to food that would be revolutionary even by the standards of the last ten years. She was of English and Welsh background, and the majority of her kitchen staff was Chinese, with intermittent French head chefs. Portland was clearly too small to contain the Gallic temperaments of the latter, so after a few months they’d leave, but their technique and style would have been perfectly mastered by the Chinese. The food was sort of the precursor of our “new cuisine,” a combination of quick sautés, French sauces, and American ingredients.

My father loved food, too. His family, over a period of sixty years, had trekked from the Carolinas to Oregon, and he had what I think of as old southern—closely related to Scottish—ideas about food. He felt that spinach should cook for about four hours with a piece of hog jowl and that string beans needed about three hours of the same treatment.

But he also loved game, and among my earliest memories is the row of brilliantly colored ducks and pheasants that would hang in the larder. There were always teal, too, and I developed a great love for them because they are delicate and small enough to eat whole at one sitting.

When we had teal, it was always reserved for the household, never served to guests. These tiny members of the duck family are devastatingly good when roasted simply and quickly—basted with butter and seasoned with only salt and pepper—and like squab, eaten with the fingers. As an accompaniment, we often ate braised celery or tender raw celery, and potatoes cooked in the oven with broth. Several years ago, when I was staying in Yucatán, I had teal served to me—it migrates there from the Northwest—and it was the most sentimental meal I ever had eaten. I relished each bite. In France, too, one occasionally finds teal. It is called
sarelle
and it is as good there as it was in Oregon in my youth.

Little did I think, back in those days before the First World War, that food would become the foundation of my career. I started out wanting to be a singer and an actor—I’m not quite sure what kind of actor—and my family encouraged me to pursue these interests. For the most part, I’d have to say I succeeded. I got in at the beginning of radio, and I did a stint on the New York stage in the late thirties. To make ends meet, I taught at a country day school in New Jersey, where I got the first grade going on bread making.

It was around this time that I had a real identity crisis. I decided I was never going to earn enough money working in the theater and radio to keep my life going in the manner which I would have it. Noël Coward did not seem to be rushing to write plays for me, after all, and the only thing that matched my love of the theater was my love of food. I’d always been exposed to good food. My mother had several friends in the restaurant business who ran really excellent establishments, and I learned early in my life to appreciate them.

And then there was New York. New York in the late twenties and the thirties teemed with wonderful restaurants and restaurant chains—Schrafft’s, Longchamps, and Child’s—where a little bit of money bought a lot. At six foot four, I always had an appetite, and it usually took more than three “squares” to make a whole.

As luck would have it, around this time I met a man named Bill Rhode and his sister, Irma. As we were all in search of a career, we hit on the idea of capitalizing on America’s mania for cocktails. The repeal of Prohibition had set the cocktail party into full swing, and in America the
cinq-à-sept
was reserved for drinks and finger food. Something, we agreed, should be done about the food. We had eaten too many pieces of cottony bread soggy with processed cheese, anchovy fillets by the yard, and dried-up bits of ham and smoked salmon. The ghastly potato-chip dip invention had only begun to spread across the country. So we opened a small, exclusive catering shop called Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.

There were, we gauged, at least 250 cocktail parties every afternoon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and we felt certain that all we needed was a better mousetrap. I remember Mother’s saying that a good sandwich at teatime was hardly to be found anywhere. It would be a fine idea, I thought, to offer New York perfect tea sandwiches, also larger ones for evening entertaining—“reception sandwiches,” I believe they are called officially. We called them “highball sandwiches.”

Now we had to decide on our bill of fare. We discovered the trick of using various smoked sausages and meats as cornucopias and developed a dozen stunning ways to offer stuffed eggs. For the cornucopias, we used salami, bolognas, hams, smoked salmon, and the specially cured pork loin called
lachsschinken.
We also made rolls of salmon, tongue, and the rarest roast beef, and there were sandwiches of veal.

The fillings we created were appetizing and varied. For the most part, the base was a mixture of cream cheese and sour cream. This, with various additions, could be forced through a pastry bag, which speeded the work considerably. The salami filling contained
fines herbes,
with the addition of dill and sometimes a bit of garlic; the
lachsschinken
filling included horseradish and perhaps a little mustard, if customers liked their food piquant; the salmon filling was flavored with a combination of onion, capers, freshly ground black pepper, and a touch of lemon juice. For the rolls, the beef was spread with a very hot kumquat mustard and the ends dipped in chopped parsley, while the tongue was spread with a Roquefort or mushroom butter and sometimes garnished at either end with a sprig of watercress. Our veal sandwiches—two thin slices of veal cut in rounds—were filled with anchovy butter or a herring butter, both of which were tremendously popular.

Incidentally, I wrote my first cookbook,
Hors d’Oeuvre & Canapés
, during this time, and thirty years later, when I went back to revise it, I was surprised to see how little needed to be updated and by how many of our selections had become caterers’ standbys. Not infrequently, when I’m at a cocktail party, a tray of canapés is passed before me, and I see old friends.

At this time, too, Americans were becoming more exposed to foreign foods, through luxurious ocean liners and the grand hotels that dotted the country. It was with the dawning of the New York World’s Fair in 1939 that food in all its extraordinary variety was set before the American public in ways they had never seen before. A window opened on the food world that even the dreadful war could not close. The scents from those international kitchens—the Swiss Pavilion, the Belgian, the Italian, the Russian (where caviar cost practically nothing), the Swedish, and, of course Henri Soulé’s French Pavillon—would eventually lead us to what we’ve come to know as the American attitude toward food. Even now it’s not fully realized.

Well, when the war came I had to give up the catering business because rationing made it impossible. We couldn’t buy enough butter or enough meat, but the incredible exposure to all those cuisines I’d sampled at the Fair sustained me through the bleak years until peace returned.

I have to say I was lucky, though, because I spent the war years working for the United Seamen’s Services. Basically, we provided the same duties as the USO and the Red Cross, but entirely for the Merchant Marines. We had clubs all over the world, and given the circumstances, we served really top-notch food. I traveled a great deal for the USS, starting in Puerto Rico and going to Brazil, Peru, and the Canal Zone, then on to Morocco, Italy, and France. I never ceased to marvel at how people could make do. They learned to conserve and substitute—for example, making eggless, milkless, butterless cakes. Those were the years, too, when frozen foods began to take hold. They seemed like a miracle. (Mr. Birdseye, who had very particular ideas about food, would set his freezing equipment right out in the middle of acres of strawberries and freeze them on the spot.) And of course, all the meat and poultry that was served in Europe was shipped in refrigerated containers.

By the late forties, in a sprint to recoup all those lost years, people seemed to rush into the future, trying to rebuild their lives, their careers, and their families. Food reflected this sense of urgency. Along with frozen foods, there were fast foods in nascent form. Pizza was beginning—there were about three places in New York that were very good. Soda fountains everywhere produced milk shakes and malteds. Another staple of this time, still popular today, was the clubhouse sandwich, a meal in one course. I have particular ideas myself about this dish. To me, it’s two slices of toast, not three; sliced breast of chicken, not turkey; bacon; sliced ripe tomato; and mayonnaise.

When you look back, you see periods of time inextricably linked with some person, some place, some thing. For me it was often food. The twenties, for instance, were the era of hot dogs and speakeasy food, some of it very good indeed. Hamburgers really didn’t become popular until the forties and fifties, although I can remember being in Los Angeles around, oh, 1930, when there was a string of absolutely sensational hamburger stands. They would put everything on the burger, wrap it in a diaper of paper, and put it in a little bag. This magnificent construction cost fifteen cents. It was a full meal, because in addition to the hamburger, lettuce, tomato, onion pickle, mustard, and relish, this would be followed by a serving of hot apple pie with melted cheese. Deadly, when I think about it now, but good it seemed to me then.

By the fifties, there I was right in the midst of this burgeoning interest in food. People were taking the time to cook complex dishes, international dishes. Don’t get me wrong—people had always taken the time to cook good food, but it was only now that the general public began to realize the varieties and possibilities of food. With this sophistication came a quest for diversity. No longer was eating simply a necessity; it became a pleasure. It seems at this time I found material for cookbook after cookbook and—wonder of wonders—people were buying them. Suddenly I was in demand to teach cooking classes (I was one of the first to do it—for NBC—on the infant medium television), and corporations sought me out as a consultant to elevate the quality of their goods for consumers who were more demanding than ever before. All this, combined with the boom in technology, helped to channel as well as unleash my own attitudes toward food in America.