The United States of Arugula (17 page)

“Let Julia Child so much as mention vanilla wafers, and the shelves are empty overnight,” said
Time
magazine in the cover story of its November 25, 1966 issue. The cover painting looked almost like devotional art, with Child’s head ringed by a nimbus of copper pots with steam rising out of them. “Amid an avalanche of new cookbooks—206 last year alone—Julia Child’s five-year-old
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
has grown to be the new bestseller in the field, with close to 300,000 copies sold at $10 apiece,” the story declared. “But what really makes her just about everybody’s chef of the year—and the most influential cooking teacher in the U.S.—is that her specialty, French cuisine, is the central grand tradition for the growing multitude of home gourmet cooks.”

The
Time
story, which also tipped its hat to Beard (“today’s king of gourmets”) and Claiborne (“a discriminating one-man
Guide Michelin
to restaurants not just in Manhattan but throughout the nation”), was a watershed for the food establishment. It affirmed that Child, Beard, and Claiborne, food sensualists rather than food scientists, were now at the top of the heap, and that a genuine culinary culture had taken hold in America—even if it still had a long way to go toward matching France’s.

“
WE FRENCH CHEFS
have to thank Julia a lot,” says André Soltner. “I don’t say she was the best chef—she didn’t have to be. It was not her role. I mean, I was surprised a few times, because she could do things on television which we could not do, ever. She dropped something on the floor, she picked it up. If we did that, they would take us to court. But even that was good, because it showed home cooks that French cooking is not always sophisticated.”

As Jacques Pépin had foreseen,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
became an object of fascination among the Frenchmen whose cooking defined
sophisticated New York dining in the sixties. Yet these chefs were by and large appreciative rather than affronted or dismissive. “I’m sure when the book came out, there were some older chefs who thought ‘This is a joke,’ even more so because she was a woman, but come on! Look at what she did for us,” says La Caravelle’s Roger Fessaguet.

Already flattered that Claiborne cared enough to identify them by name in his articles, the French chefs were still more flattered that their nation’s cuisine was now being appreciated in American homes. The
French Chef
phenomenon and the profusion of new “Le” and “La” restaurants fed off each other, and a lot of the surviving old-timers look back upon this era as a halcyon period, their favorite time. The Big Three, Beard, Claiborne, and Child, were at their peak of influence, yet the scene still had some intimacy to it. Many of the French chefs spent winter weekends together skiing on Hunter Mountain in the Catskills—“Saturday evening, close the restaurant at 1 a.m., arrive in Hunter at 4 a.m., on the slopes at 8 a.m., leave Monday morning at 6:30, back at Lutèce by 9:30,” says Soltner. They also hunted deer in season, caught frogs for their own consumption, and foraged for mushrooms, momentarily re-creating the bucolic rhythms of their childhoods.

In the summers, many of these same chefs, most regularly Fessaguet, Pépin, Verdon, and Jean Vergnes, joined Franey and Claiborne at their homes on Gardiners Bay, swimming, boating, playing
pétanque
(the French lawn-bowling game), and assembling feasts in Claiborne’s enormous, glass-walled kitchen with floor-to-ceiling views of the bay. Most of these multicourse meals found their way into Claiborne’s recipe columns for the Sunday
New York Times Magazine.
“We were natural partners,” Franey later wrote of Claiborne in his memoir. “Our tastes in cooking merged … If I liked the shad I saw, I might pick it up and then decide how to prepare it. Perhaps there would be some good cherry tomatoes in my garden. Maybe I would think of making shad and roe garnished with those tomatoes—the tomatoes briefly sautéed with garlic—and I would call it Provençale … I would line up my ingredients in Craig’s kitchen: the shad, its roe, salt and pepper, milk
and flour for dredging, oil and butter for cooking, those tomatoes, some garlic, and of course, the parsley that I can’t resist … I would start to cook things in the logical way, heating the skillet, cooking the fish, setting it aside while preparing the tomatoes and so on. As I would proceed, Craig would sit at a typewriter set up in the kitchen. I would call out weights and measurements: ‘It’s a quarter cup of milk…. Eight tomatoes, no, better make it ten.’”

“They had something great together, which was funny, because they were so different,” says Franey’s widow, Betty, of her husband and Claiborne. “Pierre was a real down-to-earth person. He liked hunting, he liked fishing, he liked cooking, and he was very basic. Whereas Craig, he liked the arts, classical music, the theater. I took my husband to the opera once or twice and he fell asleep. And Craig couldn’t get up on a ski. I think he tried once and ended up with a bloody nose. Pierre took him hunting once, to Gardiners Island, and it was a joke. He didn’t like holding a gun or shooting an animal.”

Still, Claiborne was never happier than when he was in the kitchen with Franey in the sixties and early seventies, recalling this period as “a golden age of gastronomy in my home.” Around five o’clock each Saturday, the two men would start with Scotch and sodas and the prep work. They’d begin the meal with hors d’oeuvres and a soup, then move on to a fish course accompanied by a white Burgundy; a meat or game course accompanied by a Bordeaux; a cheese course accompanied by a red Burgundy; a dessert accompanied by champagne; and, finally, coffees and stinger cocktails. In the regular rotation of guests (not counting the other French chefs and their wives) were the elder Howard Johnsons, the Joseph Hellers, the Arthur Gelbs, and other
Times
people who had homes in the Hamptons or were visiting. There was even a celebrity groupie, the entertainer Danny Kaye, who prided himself on his adeptness at Chinese cookery and wangled invitations to Claiborne’s house so he could plunge into the kitchen scrum.

Also present for most of these dinners was Henry Lewis Creel, a retired Shell Oil executive and “confirmed bachelor” who was Claiborne’s on-again,
off-again companion.
*
While they never lived together, and, according to Claiborne’s friends, were not necessarily monogamous, Creel brought a measure of stability and comfort to Claiborne, staving off his loneliness and tempering his depressive tendencies. “Craig told us, when we first met him, that he had—at that time he called it a ‘problem,’” says Betty Franey. “But he had Henry, who was just a lovely man who lived by himself in an apartment on Sutton Place, very elegantly.” While the French chefs, all natural men suffused with hairy-chested hetero machismo, were aware of Claiborne’s sexual orientation, they never heard the bizarre sex talk that Claiborne foisted upon more worldly friends such as Gelb and Heller, and more or less operated in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mode around the writer. “Me, I never mind,” says Vergnes. “The question of gay, I don’t have any problem, because Craig respect me. The rest, I don’t want to know.”

The sixties also found Claiborne at his most intrepid, his influence as a tastemaker never greater. In addition to reviewing restaurants, hobnobbing with the Franeys, and providing his readers with recipes for such quintessentially sixties dishes as Spanish paella, that de rigueur centerpiece of Burt Bacharach–soundtracked dinner parties (“One or another version of paella has been among the most requested recipes for several years,” he wrote in 1966), Claiborne was turning on his readers to other cuisines, introducing them to home cooks and cooking-school teachers who, through his exposure, won book contracts and became the authorities in their field. It was he who first wrote about the authentic Mexican cookery of Diana Kennedy, an Englishwoman who was married to the
Times
Central American correspondent, Paul Kennedy. When Paul died suddenly in 1967, Claiborne encouraged Diana to pick up the pieces of her life by opening a cooking school in New York where she could teach the dishes and techniques she’d learned during the Kennedys’ residency in Mexico. “Probably about eight months after my husband’s death, Craig invited me to dinner with Pierre Franey and
told me I should do this,” says Kennedy. “It was a very important moment. And when I did set up the cooking school, he did an article on it for
The New York Times.”
(Wrote Claiborne, “Don’t go to [Kennedy’s cooking school] expecting chili con carne and hot tamales.”) In 1972, again with a push from Claiborne, Kennedy came through with the authoritative cookbook that made her name,
The Cuisines of Mexico.

Claiborne introduced
Times
readers to the Chinese cooks Grace Zia Chu and Virginia Lee, collaborating with the latter on
The Chinese Cookbook
, which came out in 1962. He also convinced Marcella Hazan, a reluctant Italian housewife who could barely speak English to let him profile her after he’d heard she was giving cooking lessons in her New York apartment. “The experience of telephone in another language is a monster, no?” says Hazan, recalling her first contact with Claiborne. “I understood only this: it was from
The New York Times.
Was coming—wanted to come to speak about the lesson. They wanted to come at 12:30. I said that I was sorry, but at 12:30 we had lunch. I said, ‘Look, if you really want to come at 12:30’—because I was getting mad and could not understand the rest of the thing—’come for lunch.’ When Victor, my husband, came home, I said, ‘Someone from
The New York Times
called and he’s coming for lunch Thursday.’ He said, ‘Who is it?’ ‘I don’t know, something like “Crack-Crack”—I don’t know what.’ He said, ‘Craig Claiborne?’ ‘I think so.’ So Craig came, he wrote an article, and the rest is history.” By the mid-seventies, Hazan had published two books with Judith Jones at Knopf,
The Classic Italian Cook Book
and
More Classic Italian Cooking
, and had become known, flatteringly if a bit reductively, as “the Julia Child of Italian cooking.”

PAUL AND JULIA CHILD
,
meanwhile, were enjoying a new chapter of their life that they never could have imagined in their itinerant USIS days, with the fiftysomething Julia experiencing rock-star-like celebrity as she crisscrossed the country for book signings and cooking demonstrations, and the sixty-something Paul happily serving as her pot-scrubber, factotum, bodyguard, and de facto manager, schlepping her all-important “sacred bag,” a black
satchel that held Julia’s favorite knives, scoops, and other indispensable equipment. At La Pitchoune and in Cambridge, she worked with Beck on volume two
of Mastering
, which was published in 1970 and included Child’s legendary nineteen-page, two-years-in-the-testing recipe
for pain Français
, or what Child called “plain French bread, the long crackly kind a Frenchman tucks under his arm as he hurries home to his family lunch.” (Paul tested his own versions and was instrumental in developing the alternative “Simulated Baker’s Oven” method offered in
Mastering II
, which involved using a flat piece of asbestos cement as a baking surface and dropping a stove-heated brick into a pan of water in the oven to steam the baking dough.)

Beard’s sixties were more complicated. His entourage of helpers and staff at West Tenth Street grew ever-more burdensome, particularly because he had taken on the dead weight of Gino Cofacci, a ne’er-do-well architect with whom he’d been briefly involved in the fifties and somehow ended up supporting in perpetuity, with Cofacci living in Beard’s house as a nonpaying boarder, “like an orphan child,” says John Ferrone, who found the architect unbearable.
*
Beard’s health also began to suffer, all those years of gorging catching up with him. His legs were ravaged by the circulatory ailment phlebitis, and, on doctor’s orders, he was regularly hospitalized for spells of restricted diets and “reducing,” which were, at least, marginally successful. “The fat Jim we know today, that you see pictures of, is after he’d slimmed down,” says Barbara Kafka. “Jim
really
looked like a stuffed pig when he was younger.”

All that said, Beard was pleased with his elder-statesman status, as “kind of a Buddha that you went to to get a blessing,” as Nora Ephron puts it. By the decade’s end he’d been welcomed back into the fold at
Gourmet
, for which he wrote a column called “Cooking with James Beard,” and he’d also secured a lucrative deal to do a syndicated column that appeared in more than a hundred newspapers, dictated to and polished by José Wilson, a
former food editor
of House & Garden
, who, despite the spelling of her first name, was not a Latino man but an Englishwoman who called herself “Josie.” Beard’s 1960s cookbooks were not particularly noteworthy, but the decade did bring his one true attempt at memoir in 1964,
Delights and Prejudices
, which, while slender and afflicted with a slight touch of the twees, was a charming evocation of his culinary coming-of-age in Oregon. Ferrone, who edited the book, recalls Beard spiriting himself away to a rented farmhouse in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the spring of 1963 to complete the manuscript. He blissfully made the most of the setting, Ferrone says, “cooking a rump steak over a fire of vine cuttings, fig-tree twigs, a branch of dried bay, the root of a rosemary plant, and two thyme bushes, which gave off a heady perfume and delicately flavored the meat but left no char.” It’s no wonder that, in the next decade, he would get on like a house afire with the young Americans Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, who couldn’t fathom why Americans thought such lovely culinary experiences had to be restricted to France.

AS COZY AND INTIMATE
as the food world was in the late sixties compared to what it would become by the turn of the twenty-first century, it nevertheless began to suffer some of the consequences of success: competitiveness, power struggles, bitchery. No member of the food establishment stirred up more trouble than Michael Field, alluded to in
Time
magazine’s Julia Child cover story as “a relative newcomer who gave up a successful career as a concert pianist to conduct socialite cooking classes in his Manhattan apartment,” and as “the consulting editor for
Life’s
forthcoming 16-volume series,
Foods of the World.”