The United States of Arugula (4 page)

The ringleader of this gang was Crosby Gaige, a theater producer who fancied himself New York’s greatest epicure, oenophile, and bon vivant. His offices housed the New York chapter of the London-based International Wine and Food Society, and, when he wasn’t producing plays, Gaige was putting his name to such books as
The Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion
and
The New York World’s Fair Cookbook.
But the foremost public gourmet was Lucius Beebe, the
Herald Tribune’s
top-hatted, extravagantly turned-out
exemplar of the high life, whose columns often detailed his gustatory intake at such hoity-toity spots as “the Stork” and “the Colony.” Beebe found a new outlet for his florid prose in 1941, when Earle MacAusland, a former advertising manager for
Parents
magazine, founded
Gourmet
, a monthly that, at its inception, was more of a primer on fine living and worldly elegance than a place to look for recipes. In a characteristically showoffy-nostalgic piece about a visit to Locke-Ober, the venerable Boston restaurant, Beebe wrote, “Locke’s came into being in a grand era of ornate electroliers, floriated mahogany, and barroom nudes, when Tom and Jerry
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was a standard commodity at all bars during the cold months and when two Southdown mutton chops complete with kidney, bacon, and appropriate quantities of potatoes, coffee, and hot cakes were considered the absolute minimum on which people might safely breakfast.”

Somewhere between the women’s-page ladies and the gourmets fell Sheila Hibben, the food editor of
The New Yorker
, Harold Ross’s literature-and-culture cavalcade for the smart set. As bracingly prophetic and contemporary as her “Markets and Menus” columns read today—visiting a small grocery on the Upper East Side in 1941, she found “a substantial reserve of that good Droste cocoa from Holland” and “a farm cheese from Wisconsin” that was “one of those honest products that prove ours is going to be a great cheese country once the flood of processed stuff subsides”—Hibben had little reach into the mainstream. Cecily Brownstone, who was the food editor of the Associated Press and was one of the few members of the old food brigade to survive into the twenty-first century, living until 2005, recalled Hibben in an unpublished interview with Laura Shapiro as “a very good writer, but not read by the masses. That’s the difference between now and then. You wouldn’t be looked at askance now if you mentioned the food books you like to your friends, but you would have then.”

In a rarefied food-lit category all her own was California’s M.F.K.
Fisher (Mary Frances or M.F. to her intimates), who, in the thirties and early forties, published a series of piquant essay collections with pertinent recipes, starting in 1937 with
Serve It Forth.
Tougher, earthier, and altogether less twee than the waistcoated fops back East—ruminating on her title subject in 1941
Consider the Oyster
, she wrote, “Life is hard, we say. An oyster’s life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation”—she carved out her own niche and was adored by the media intelligentsia:
Look
magazine profiled her, film stars sought her out for meals, and Paramount Pictures gave her a screenwriting contract.
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But Fisher’s was a boutique audience. The general public had no idea who she was, Jim Beard included; he later admitted that he’d not heard of her until a friend presented him with Fisher’s third book,
How to Cook a Wolf.
Fisher wouldn’t have much company in the food-lit stakes until after World War II, when
The New Yorker
journalists A. J. Liebling and Joseph Wechsberg, both of whom had spent substantial amounts of time eating their way through France, started writing delightfully evocative culinary memoirs.

As for chefs, they seldom encountered the phenomenon known as celebrity. Though the Lucius Beebes of the world knew who Charles Ranhofer and Louis Diat were—the former had presided over Manhattan’s greatest restaurant of the nineteenth century, Delmonico’s, and the latter had, since 1910, run the kitchens of the Ritz hotel on Forty-sixth and Madison, where he famously invented vichyssoise—chefs generally toiled in anonymity. Ranhofer and Diat also happened to be Frenchmen, conveniently foreign and “other”—as the whole concept of fancy eating was to most Americans. It simply wasn’t socially acceptable for an American-born man to aspire to a career in the kitchen.

“I would say that any child who told his family that he wanted to be a cook in a restaurant would be sent to his room and told to stay there until he came to his senses,” says Chuck Williams, the founder of the kitchenwares
retailer Williams-Sonoma, who was born in 1915. “The parents weren’t about to have a son who was a fry cook in some beanery.”

It would be decades, in fact, before chefs were even recognized by the U.S. government as professionals. Only in 1977, after years of ardent lobbying by Louis Szathmáry, a colorful, rotund Chicago chef straight out of central casting—with his tall toque and walrus mustache, he looked like he should have been feverishly pursuing a runaway chicken with a cleaver in a Warner Brothers cartoon—did the U.S. Department of Labor elevate the occupation of chef from its “Services” category (lumped in with domestics and dogcatchers) to its category of “Professional, Technical and Management Occupations.”

In today’s context of Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse, this seems shocking, as belated a delivery of justice as the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. But the very unprestigiousness of America’s food culture was what left the door open for people like Beard, Child, and Claiborne to come in and make it their own. The Big Three didn’t fit into conventional mid-century society: Beard and Claiborne were gay men who had endured the pain of feeling “other” their entire lives, and Child was six foot two and unpretty, on a perilous path to becoming, in her own future husband’s words, “an old maid.” In their stumbling, halting efforts to figure themselves out, Beard, Child, and Claiborne found their salvation in cooking and eating. Their sheer joy in this discovery set them apart from the existing food establishment. Bound by neither the conventions of the Jell-O-abusing women’s-page ladies nor the froufrou affectations of the terrapin-eating boulevardiers, the future Big Three simply appreciated food as a source of pleasure. Funnily enough, this was a novel concept in America at the time.

“IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS BEARD,” JULIA CHILD FAMOUSLY SAID, IN A CHARAC
teristic display of generosity. But precisely
what
Beard began bears some explaining. Though she’s among the foremost of Beard’s protégés, the cookbook author Barbara Kafka can’t contain her exasperation at the received wisdom that there were no good meals to be had in America until her mentor reared his enormous head. “It’s like there was no food in this fucking city, or this country, until this miraculous apparition came along!” she says. “Or there was no cooking at home until Julia. Don’t tell me this kind of nonsense! I think that Le Chambord,
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which I went to as a child, was
probably the best French restaurant that New York has ever seen and will ever see. And in the West Forties, way over, there were bistros lined up and down. Guys got off the ships right opposite the biggest harbor, practically, in the world—off the
Normandie
and the
Ile de France.
And they were French guys.”

So, yes, it is wrongheaded to presume that Americans did not eat well until the Big Three became big. The very first American cookbook,
American Cookery
, written by a Connecticut woman named Amelia Simmons and published in 1796,
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demonstrates that there were both cooks and eaters in those days who appreciated fine ingredients and flavorful food.
American Cookery
is considered the “first” American cookbook because, though several cookbooks had been published before it in the colonies and the young republic, they were adaptations or reprints of European cookbooks, mostly British. Simmons’s book, on the other hand, was expressly aimed at born-and-bred Americans who used ingredients not available in Europe, such as the “pompkins” she used in a “pudding” recipe that differed very little from our current ones for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Her “Indian Slapjack,” a cornmeal pancake of the sort now found on the menus of upscale Santa Fe bruncheries, would have gone very nicely with her “Beft bacon” (as her “Best Bacon” recipe seems to read in its antiquated ornamental typography), which, in a manner that would excite today’s aficionados of artisanal foodstuffs, was cured in molasses, sea salt, and saltpeter for six to eight weeks and then smoked over corncobs.

Further evidence of a culinarily attuned America comes in the most celebrated cookbook of the nineteenth century,
The Virginia House-wife
, by Mary Randolph, a pillar of late-eighteenth-century Richmond society (her brother was married to Thomas Jefferson’s daughter), who, after her husband experienced some reversals of fortune, ran a boardinghouse and collected her
recipes into a book, published in 1824. Not only was
The Virginia House-wife
a work of astonishing breadth and worldliness—Mrs. Randolph knew how to cook everything from the expected Ye Olde dishes like roast goose and Indian-meal pudding to seemingly very contemporary offerings like polenta and ropa vieja (Cuban- or Spanish-style shredded beef)—but her respectful use of vegetables was downright Alice Waters–ish. Randolph cautioned against overcooking asparagus, and advised that a perfect salad should have “lettuce, pepper grass, chervil, cress &c.,” which “should be gathered early in the morning, nicely picked,” and served with a lovely tarragon vinaigrette.

President Jefferson was himself quite the epicure and procurer of exotic foodstuffs, importing seeds from Europe to plant in his garden and cultivating Mediterranean fig, olive, and almond trees at Monticello. In his personal “Garden Book,” he kept records of what produce was available at Washington’s vegetable market during the years of his presidency, 1801 to 1809, and the sheer variety sounds much like what a latter-day foodie might gush over at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on a bountiful summer day: sorrel, broccoli, strawberries, peas, salsify, raspberries, Windsor beans, currants, endive, parsnips, tomatoes, melons, cresses.

All this said, not for nothing is the United States known as a meat-and-potatoes kind of place. In the early years of the republic, it wasn’t uncommon for Americans to have beefsteak not only for dinner, which was consumed at midday, but for
breakfast
—a habit only exacerbated as the country expanded westward, opening more land for ranching. Foreign visitors to the United States in the nineteenth century routinely expressed their shock at the huge, meaty smorgasbords set out on groaning boards in the public rooms of hotels at all hours of the day, not to mention the joyless, gluttonous dispatch with which the natives went about the business of eating. Charles Dickens declared that Americans ate “piles of indigestible matter.” Thomas Hamilton, another Englishman, wrote an account of his journey to the United States in 1833 called
Men and Manners in America
, in which he observed, “In my neighborhood there was no conversation. Each individual seemed to
pitchfork
his food down his gullet, without the smallest
attention to the wants of his neighbor.” The food in these places wasn’t of high quality, either, with vegetables boiled to a fare-thee-well and starchy potatoes and puddings served in great quantities. The Canadian historian Harvey Levenstein, in a droll study of early-American dietary habits called
Revolution at the Table
, notes that “the enormous amounts of meat and starch and the short shrift given to fresh fruits and vegetables made constipation the national curse of the first four or five decades of the nineteenth century in America.”