Read The United States of Arugula Online
Authors: David Kamp
But on the other hand, what was California cuisine, despite its French overlay, if not “modern American” food, as McCarty puts it? Beard, a born West Coaster, was pleased to find young chefs interested in native fish and produce, and, unlike many a skeptical food critic, he did not mind the new penchant for Asian-inspired flourishes, since, from his dress code to his childhood adoration of his family’s Chinese cook, Jue-Let, Beard was himself full of Asian-inspired flourishes. (He is even said to have had a half-Chinese half brother, the product of an affair between his father and a mistress in Portland’s Chinatown.)
Furthermore, the shift in the food press’s attention toward California occasioned more trips west for Beard, who increasingly preferred his roost in San Francisco’s Stanford Court hotel to the chaos of his latest, biggest New York town house, at 167 West Twelfth Street, which always seemed to be in the grips of repair work and the internecine squabbles within his ever-expanding retinue, which included his alcoholic, depressive amanuensis José Wilson (who committed suicide in 1980), an assistant named Richard Nimmo who also drank too much, and the annoying hanger-on Gino Co-facci. “Jim moved from Tenth Street partly to find space for Gino to have cooking facilities,” says John Ferrone. “But it was a great mistake, because it took a great deal of money to put the Twelfth Street place in shape. It was very terribly run-down. He always regretted having moved, because the Tenth Street house was his favorite. It was much smaller in scale, but Jim always seemed to defy space anyway.”
In San Francisco, Beard reveled in the generosity of the hotelier James Nassikas, who had gutted and renovated an old apartment house on Nob Hill and reopened it in 1972 as the Stanford Court. During one of his early stays at the hotel, Beard had mentioned to Nassikas that he was thinking of teaching classes in San Francisco. “And like a bolt of lightning, it occurred to me that our restaurant in the hotel, Fournou’s Ovens, was vacant all day,” Nassikas says. “I said, ‘Jim, I have a perfect setting for you,’ and he said, ‘Indeed, you do.’ And we got Chuck Williams involved, because he saw it as a great opportunity to promote his kitchen utensils.” Starting in 1974, Beard taught classes at the Stanford Court for stretches that lasted weeks and sometimes even months. Nassikas never charged him for his suite or for use of the restaurant. “It was good exposure for the hotel, certainly, but Jim was just a wonderful guy and I enjoyed knowing him,” he says. “I think that in New York, where he was into so many people’s lives, you begin sharing their burdens—the Gino Cofaccis and so forth. You wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve gotta get outta here!’ That’s what I think San Francisco meant to him.”
In his seventh-floor suite at the Stanford Court, Beard presided over a foodie salon of sorts, “sitting on a sofa with no clothes on, just a robe that barely covered him,” Nassikas says. “You know, it was Jeremiah Tower, Alice Waters, Mark Miller, a steady flow of them.” Another regular was Clark Wolf, a new protégé, a young man who ran a little cheese shop at the base of Nob Hill that opened in 1976. “One day I was alone in the shop, and the door darkens—I mean, truly
darkens
—and I look up, and there is this huge person with a floor-to-sky black-leather trench coat,” Wolf remembers. “He lumbers into this 500-square-foot, tiny cheese shop, with the wooden floors creaking, and he says,
‘My doctor says I’m not to have any of this! How’s your Morbier? Do you have some Saint-Nectaire? Do you have any good Appenzeller?’”
Supplying Beard with his furtive cheese fix, Wolf endeared himself to the master, and they became close friends late in Beard’s life, especially after Wolf, who also logged time at the Oakville Grocery, moved to New York to become a restaurant consultant. “That’s what a big piece of the connection between the California and New York food worlds was,” says Wolf.
“It was James Beard living in the Village
and
at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco.”
One of the most important California–New York connections that Beard facilitated was between his editor in the late seventies, Judith Jones of Knopf, and another of his protégés, a middle-aged woman from the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek, Marion Cunningham. Cunningham was a late bloomer, having endured something of a grim first chapter of her life. The daughter of homebound, invalid parents, she grew up in the Southern California town of Glendale, got married when she was just twenty-one, managed a gas station for a while in the forties, and developed a serious drinking habit. One of her few solaces was cooking, an activity she took great pleasure in—though even this was something of a solitary exercise, since her lawyer-husband, Robert, seldom ate her food, preferring a diet of “burned beef and bourbon,” she says. But in 1972, when she was fifty-one and sober, Cunningham ventured out of California—for the first time in her life—to stay in Gearhart, Oregon, where Beard, her favorite cookbook author, was teaching a cooking course in the resort town of his childhood. In Gearhart, Cunningham so impressed Beard that he asked her to return the following year as his assistant. “I actually thought he made a mistake and thought I was somebody else, but I certainly wasn’t gonna call his attention to it,” she says. “Then the classes moved down to Fournou’s Ovens in the Stanford Court, and that’s when it all began for me.”
Though she was raised in poverty and was one-quarter Italian (it was her Italian grandmother, in fact, who cultivated her zeal for cooking), Cunningham, with her patrician beauty and blond-going-white hair pulled back like an equestrienne’s, looked like the ultimate Yankee kitchen authority. Her no-nonsense approach to cooking complemented the look: she was adamantly traditionalist, populist, and home-centered, wary of all that was nouvelle and flamboyant—a trait that Jeremiah Tower says Beard ridiculed behind her back, referring to her as “Cookie” in allusion to her penchant for mumsy biscuit-baking. But it was this very straightforwardness that made Cunningham the ideal candidate, in Beard’s eyes, to fulfill an assignment that
Judith Jones had mentioned to him: Who might be a good person to do a wholesale revision of
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook?
“The candy company up in Boston that owned the rights to the cookbook wanted to see me about doing a new version, but I didn’t want to touch it if we couldn’t revise it from head to toe,” says Jones. “It had become a collection of anonymous home-ec recipes, with nobody there.” The heirs of Farmer—who died in 1915, and, though she subscribed to the home-ec lunacies of her era, at least had a good palate—had steadily desecrated the cookbook over the decades, introducing more and more frozen and canned ingredients and adding nasty recipes for gelatin molds and a guacamole made with ketchup. With the guidance of Beard and Jones, Cunningham painstakingly tested recipes for nearly five years, straining out the gelatin gloop of the older editions and acknowledging that the newfangled food processor was a good mechanism for, say, pureeing chestnuts for Fannie’s cream of chestnut soup. Cunningham also added some new, non-Fannie recipes from her own experience as a lifelong Californian—for tacos, enchiladas, and two dishes indigenous to San Francisco, cioppino, the tomato-based fish stew created by the city’s Italian immigrants, and Little Joes, a humble, pan-cooked hash of ground beef, eggs, and spinach. Adamantly unsnobbish and seemingly oblivious to food fashions, Cunningham even spoke up for things that most foodies considered anathema, like the iceberg lettuce wedge, whose layered crunch she found pleasurable, baby arugula be damned.
*
The twelfth edition of
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
, bearing Cunningham’s name, came out in 1979 and was the fastest-selling edition in the
book’s history—nearly 400,000 copies in its first year alone. In a sense, Cunningham’s
Fannie Farmer
succeeded at the dawn of the eighties in being what
James Beard’s American Cookery
had failed to be less than a decade earlier, the definitive big, fat, friendly, popular, all-American cookbook. As seemingly untrendy as it was, the new
Fannie Farmer
was a product of its time, its reclamation of fresh ingredients and rejection of commercial-food corruption very much in tune with what its author’s fellow Californians were preaching. Alice Waters was a fan, and she and Cunningham—a belated entrant into the food firmament—became the best of friends.
*
Years ahead of Al Yeganeh, the irritable maestro immortalized in
Seinfeld’s
“Soup Nazi” episode, Pépin was dishing out dazzlingly inventive soups-as-meals, among them a creamy veal goulash with spaetzle, a bouillabaisse with saffron, and even a breakfast soup made from oatmeal, chicken stock, leeks, and bacon crumblings.
*
Gault and Millau’s 1981
Guide to New York
, their first foray into the New World, intended for the eyes of their countrymen and written in French, reads like absurdist comic literature. New York, they wrote, is “beautiful and hideous, tender and violent, generous and greedy, fascinating and horrifying.” Visiting it, they promised their fellow Frenchmen, will be “more than a simple tourist trip, it will be a decisive stage in your maturation.” Grazing their way around town, Gault and Millau had high praise for the Four Seasons and Lutèce, but were disappointed by the famous hamburger at P. J. Clarke’s, which they pronounced “both cooked to death and cold and even an English dog would not want to eat it.”
*
Child’s “thick heads” comment was all the more strange since she was more responsible than anyone else for the propensity among status-seeking Americans to stuff themselves full of fat and truffles. Perhaps this was her way of expressing her disdain for Bocuse, whose sexism and roving eye she deplored.
*
Daniel Boulud credits the Japanese with creating a market for lucrative consultancy positions for name French chefs. “In the seventies,” he says, “the biggest group we had, in terms of wanting to learn the movement of France, was the Japanese. Every kitchen had two or three Japanese cooks inside, and Bocuse and other big chefs were spending a lot of time in cooking schools in Japan. It was very interesting and very strange.” Indeed, Bocuse supplemented his income handsomely by teaching at a hotel school in Osaka, and in the early seventies was already a partner in Tokyo’s Renga-Ya restaurant. The crucial difference between the Japanese and American apprentices, Boulud says, is that “the Japanese learned, went home, and then replicated the French cooking, whereas I think for the Americans it was more about getting an understanding and then creating their own thing.”
*
The Troisgros brothers were the nouvelle chefs hippest to the possibilities of American food. Not only did Pierre send his son Michel to work at Chez Panisse, but Rodgers recalls that Jean adored McDonald’s french fries “back when they were cooked in beef tallow.”
*
Vergé’s restaurant was so named—
moulin
means “mill”—because it was on the site of a sixteenth-century olive-oil mill.
*
Perrier, based in France, started selling to the American market in 1976. By 1988, it accounted for 80 percent of the imported water sold in the United States, but its market share suffered significantly two years later, when traces of benzene, a carcinogen, were found in bottles of its water, prompting a massive recall. One result of the recall was an uptick in the popularity of a rival sparkling water, San Pellegrino, from the Italian Alps. Since the 1990s, both Perrier and San Pellegrino have been owned by Nestlé.
*
The only serious reservations about Spago came from Caroline Bates,
Gourmet’s
intrepid California correspondent, who tut-tutted that, having enjoyed the “fugal complexities of Puck’s dishes at Ma Maison,” she was “just a little disappointed to find him composing the culinary equivalent of one- and two-part inventions, which must be real child’s play for someone of his abilities.” Still, she couldn’t help but rave over dishes “so honest and pleasurable and admirably mated to the Southern California climate and spirit,” and presciently predicted that “at age thirty-three, Puck surely hasn’t reached his pinnacle with pizza.” Indeed, the current incarnation of Spago in Beverly Hills, which opened in 1997 (concurrent with the shuttering of the original Sunset Boulevard location), more adeptly balances haute complexity and California simplicity under the direction of Puck, who still cooks there when he isn’t traveling, and his executive chef, Lee Hefter.
†
Shindler later achieved fame as the best-known radio food critic in Los Angeles, while Perry not only writes for the
Los Angeles Times
but is America’s leading expert on medieval Arabic cookery. The latter’s articles about his attempts to re-create
murri
and
kâmakh ahmar
, medieval condiments made from rotted barley, are small masterpieces of out-there food journalism. Following procedures from the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Perry systematically let barley rot on his porch for weeks in Los Angeles, discovering that
“kâmakh ahmar
has the sharp aroma of a blue cheese (in the beginning, of a very strong blue cheese; I have emptied rooms by opening a container of it).”
†
In a screwball twist on the screwball twist, Reichl and Andrews, long after they’d broken up, ended up editing rival magazines in the late nineties, with Reichl taking the helm of
Gourmet
and Andrews running
Saveur.
*
Wayne Nish, who owns the restaurant March in New York, was so blown away by the meal he and his wife had at Girardet during their 1980 honeymoon that he made a decision then and there to sell his successful printing business and start his training to be a chef.
*
The watershed moment for California wines came in 1976, when the young English wineshop owner Steven Spurrier arranged a blind tasting of French and California wines in Paris. To the shock and evident dismay of the nine judges, all of whom were French, they selected a Napa Valley Chardonnay as the best of the whites and a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon as the best of the reds. It would be another decade, though, before a wide selection of California wines were available outside of California.
*
The only drawback of mesquite in those days, says Jeremiah Tower, was that sometimes, prankster Mexican baggers would slip unspent .22 bullets into the charcoal pieces, resulting in potentially lethal explosions.
*
But this didn’t mean that Cunningham was aligning herself with such kitsch enthusiasts as Jane and Michael Stern, a married couple who started their own cottage industry in 1977 with the first edition of
Roadfood
, a brilliant book that flew in the face of foodie orthodoxy by celebrating, state by state, the nation’s best greasy spoons, drive-ins, and truck stops. Cunningham told an interviewer that “greasy hamburgers” were a “sad reality about American life,” while the Sterns, to quote Beard’s biographer, Robert Clark, “fawned with Warholesque camp enthusiasm over dishes that members of the food establishment considered beyond the pale, lavishing on unpretentious and unassuming juke joints the same fevered attentions that gourmets once reserved for
Le
Pavillon.”