The United States of Arugula (5 page)

It’s hard to square this bleak picture with the Edenic one painted by Mary Randolph and Thomas Jefferson, and, indeed, the feisty old culinary historian Karen Hess, who edited and wrote the introduction to the facsimile of the first edition of
The Virginia House-wife
, dismisses the work of Levenstein, her rival, as that of a “stupid idiot.” (As she points out, the Randolph cookbook alone presents clear evidence to refute Levenstein’s assertion that in the nineteenth century “herbs were used mainly for medicinal rather than culinary purposes” in America.) Still, it’s possible for an unbiased observer to use Hess’s and Levenstein’s works complementarily and draw the conclusion that while the United States had some terrific cooks, cornucopian markets, and an abundance of wonderful homespun culinary traditions, it also had some serious food issues. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of
The Last of the Mohicans
, spent several years in France as a U.S. consul, living in Lyons, the nation’s gastronomic capital. Upon his return home in 1833, he recorded his horror at the state of American food, calling his fellow Americans “the grossest feeders of any civilized nation ever known,” a culinarily clueless people who subsisted on a diet of “heavy, coarse, and indigestible” fare. The chasm between French and American food was all the more appalling to Cooper because he grew up wealthy in the woodsy hinterlands of upstate New York, where all manner of wild game roamed and edible plants grew, and knew that his country could do better.

But the United States, a country wary of elitism and susceptible to populist, xenophobic demagogues, would always have mixed feelings about taking culinary cues from the French. Long before the age of “freedom fries”
and the efforts by an adviser to George W. Bush to damage John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign by saying the Massachusetts senator “looks French,” the advisers to the Whig presidential candidate of 1840, William Henry Harrison, tried to smear the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren, as a fey monarchist aristocrat—on the evidence that he drank champagne and had hired a Frenchman to be White House chef. The scrappy old soldier Harrison, on the other hand, subsisted on “hard cider” and “raw beef and salt,” and won the election.
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Whether it was a matter of this country’s Puritan origins, its early inheritance of British culinary stodginess, or just a general don’t-tread-on-me stubbornness, America would always have a dysfunctional relationship with the idea of culinary sophistication. A strain of the Harrison campaign’s plainspoken beefy populism persists to this day: in 2004, the CEO of the fast-food chain Hardee’s, Andrew Puzder, touted the company’s Monster Thickburger—a 1,420-calorie sandwich composed of two one-third-pound beef patties, three slices of cheese, and four strips of bacon on a buttered, mayonnaise-spread bun—as “not a burger for tree-huggers.” (Many of whom, presumably, look French.) Similarly, the thickset founder of the Wendy’s chain, Dave Thomas, did a commercial in the nineties in which he addressed a grateful roomful of 300-pounders who called themselves the “Big Eaters Club.” In another spot, Thomas portrayed himself as being trapped at a pretentious cocktail party where a mincing waiter offered him a dainty, absurd-looking hors d’oeuvre and said, “Crab puff, sir?” Cut to a shot of a relieved Dave back at Wendy’s, sinking his teeth into an enormo-burger.
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On the other end of the spectrum were those who shied away from fancy feeding for ascetic or religious reasons. Many preachers, such as the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham (1795–1851), inventor of the graham cracker, inveighed against spicy and heavily seasoned foods because of their
supposed aphrodisiacal qualities. (Despite this, Graham was later embraced as a hero by sex-mad 1960s hippies for his advocacy of vegetarianism and early opposition to refined white flour, which, he sensibly argued, had less flavor and nutritional value than whole wheat flour.) Even when the robber barons of the Gilded Age
did
embrace the sophistication of French cuisine in all its glory, hiring French chefs for their New York mansions and Newport cottages, they were countered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by quack food faddists who were suspicious of pleasurable eating. Among the most famous was Horace Fletcher (1849–1919), a retired businessman with no scientific background who developed a huge following by advocating that all food be “thoroughly masticated”—chewed and chewed and chewed until it became flavorless and involuntarily shushed its way down the esophagus, thereby aiding the digestive system. (In fact, the probable health benefit from Fletcherizing, as this chewing process came to be known, was that it took so long that it made overeaters eat less than they would have otherwise.)

Marginally more credible was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), who, in addition to developing a breakfast-cereal empire with his brother, Will, ran a “health resort” in Battle Creek, Michigan. Though he later rescinded his 1902 endorsement of Fletcherizing, Kellogg had his own peculiar thoughts on food, arguing that eating meat encouraged masturbation (a bad thing) and urging his guests to take yogurt enemas, the concept being that the active cultures in the yogurt would provide healing benefits to bowel walls aggravated by a lifetime’s worth of steak-eating and boozing.
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In a sense, the home economists and food-company executives who held sway over the women’s pages at the time of Beard’s move to New York were quacks in their own right. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and as the United States grew more industrialized and urbanized, the sensualism and agrarian seasonality of home cooking gave way to the rise of processed foods and rigorous, supposedly scientific methodologies in the
kitchen.
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Even Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose 1896
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
is still considered a lodestar of honest American home cookery (and was renamed for her in subsequent editions), was a humorless home-ec lady, inordinately obsessed with couching her instructions in laboratory-speak. The first edition of
The 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
kicked off with, “Food is anything that nourishes the body. Thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62 ½%; carbon, 21 ½%; hydrogen, 10%; nitrogen, 3%; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3%”—not exactly a mouthwatering lead-in. Farmer also expressed her hope that the day would come when “mankind will eat to live,” the implication clear that doing the opposite—living to eat—was reprehensible. On and on she went in this dour, lab-coated way, defining ingredients in terms of chemical compounds—for example, sugar as “C12H22O11”—and describing buttermilk, rather disquietingly, as “liquid remaining after butter ‘has come.’”

While Farmer, at least, was well-intentioned in her commitment to nutritionally correct (if not particularly palatable) food, the new wave of big food companies cynically used pseudoscientific claims of healthfulness to appeal to customers. General Mills, the food conglomerate responsible for the creation of the fictional homemaker-sage Betty Crocker, launched an offensive to proclaim the “wholesomeness” of white flour and white bread, even though the very advances in industrialized milling that made white flour possible were the ones that removed the germ and the bran from a wheat kernel—and therefore, most of the nutrition. C. W. Post, the main competitor of the bowel-obsessed Kellogg brothers, plugged his first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, which he called Grape-Nuts, as “brain food”; taking his chutzpah a step further, he intimated that Grape-Nuts were also effective in fighting malaria and consumption. After chemists in the 1910s and 1920s discovered
vitamins—naturally occurring nutrients in foods that aid in metabolic processes—Post’s company seized upon the opportunity to play up the cereal’s calcium and phosphorous content in magazine ads that portentously asked readers, “Are you bringing up your children properly?” Even the Schlitz brewing company got in on the “health” act, boasting, oddly, that its beer was so pure that “when your physician prescribes beer, it is always Schlitz beer.”

James Beard had no time for factory foods, health fads, or pseudoscience. Well before he became a professional food person, he was reveling in the pure, the regional, and the homemade, even as his country’s cuisine, if it could even be called that, became ever-more processed and standardized. His unbridled enthusiasm, his pure love of
taste
, was so infectious that he could excite people even when he was describing eating experiences that, frankly, sound repellent. In his 1964 memoir,
Delights and Prejudices
, he documents his earliest “taste memory”—a phrase he is credited with coining—as he recalls being bedridden with malaria at age three. His family’s male Chinese cook, Jue-Let, who worked in tandem with his mother, Mary, in the kitchen, spoon-fed him a cure of chicken jelly: chicken broth with the white of an egg and its shell mixed in, then strained, then chilled into quivering blobs. To Beard, this icky stuff was “superb … magically good,” and “the true essence of chicken … [with] a texture that was incredibly delightful.” Likewise, the slightly older Beard reveled in shopping with Mother in a fine-poultry shop where “I would come away with two pounds of gizzards and hearts for myself.” Few people today would ever want to eat chicken jelly or chicken hearts—or, for that matter, the raw onions that Beard so adored—but fewer still could remain impervious to the sensual joy he took in eating these things, or to his conclusion that “the flavor of perfectly prepared chicken [has] remained a stimulant to my palate ever since.”

The dinners he prepared for his bohemian friends in New York in the 1930s were every bit as sensual and always made from scratch, with none of the canned foods or “ready mixes” such as Bisquick (which General Foods had introduced in 1931) that were proliferating on grocery shelves. Even if Beard was just making a poor man’s repast of mushrooms on toast—a
favorite snack of his—he bought his mushrooms fresh from an Italian corner grocer and used good bakery bread. Earlier still, while knocking around the Portland, Oregon, theater community in his twenties, he cooked unpretentious backstage meals for appreciative casts and crews with ingredients he’d procured from the city’s open-air farmers’ market on Yamhill Street, where he and his mother shopped when he was a boy. The Yamhill Market was crucial in shaping his culinary sensibility, as were the meals he and his family ate outdoors in Gearhart, the coastal Oregon resort town where the Beards kept a modest summer cottage. Right on the beach, Mary Beard boiled crabs and grilled razor clams that she and Jim had caught and dug themselves; Beard also picked the strawberries and the huckleberries that appeared in the pies and tarts the family and their guests ate for dessert.

So by the time Beard finally recognized that cookery was his vocation as much as it was his avocation—the success of Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. led to a contract for his first book,
Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés
, in 1940—he realized that part of his mission was to defend the pleasures of real cooking and fresh ingredients against the assault of the Jell-O-mold people and the domestic scientists. His second cookbook, published in 1941, was called
Cook It Outdoors
, and while it didn’t have an exhortatory exclamation point at the end of its title like the one at the end
of Awake and Sing!
, the social-realist play written by the leftist playwright Clifford Odets six years earlier,
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it might as well have. By the time of his fourth cookbook, and his first attempt at a comprehensive masterwork, the 1,217-recipe
The Fireside Cook Book: A Complete Guide to Fine Cooking for Beginner and Expert
(1949), Beard was pointedly telling
The New York Times
that what he’d written was no “laboratory manual.”

The opportunity to write
Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés
arose through the good graces of a social butterfly named Jeanne Owen, the secretary and day-to-day manager of the International Wine and Food Society chapter that
operated out of Crosby Gaige’s office. The American-born but Paris-raised Owen saw promise in Beard and took him under her wing, educating him about French cookery and securing him the book contract. The book, however, was the undoing of Beard’s partnership with Bill Rhode, who resented Beard’s solo effort to profit off the business and his references in the text to “my shop”; upon joining the staff of
Gourmet
as an editor in 1943, Rhode saw to it that Beard didn’t write for the magazine, and this blacklisting lasted until Rhode’s death in 1946.

While
Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés
was a minor work, it sold well enough to prompt its publisher, M. Barrows & Company, to commission
Cook It Outdoors
, Beard’s paean to grilling. The book had sixteen different recipes for barbecue sauce and twelve for hamburgers, but it was no Dave Thomas–style sop to dumb, torpid lugs; it included, audaciously for the time, a recipe for a “Pascal Burger” of ground lamb and lamb kidneys and a “Bagdad
[sic]
Burger” served between two slices of grilled eggplant. There were also elaborate instructions on how to build one’s own backyard barbecue pit, and a recipe entitled “If You Should Run Over an Old Hen” that began, “Such things happen, this running over a farmer’s hen …” Clearly, Beard was eager to get the fellas involved in the dying art of home cookery, too, by appealing to their machismo. The jacket copy, if anything, protested too much: “It is a man’s book written by a man who understands not only the healthy outdoor eating and cooking habits, but who is an expert at the subtle nuances of tricky flavoring as well … A good workable book that will take a heck of a lot of wear and be a darned good companion to the outdoor cook.”

“It’s very important that Jim was a man,” says Barbara Kafka. “That’s how he made a difference. Historically, you had cookbooks and cookery writing by two groups of people, women and chefs. And, as in so many things, Jim was a crossover person. Also, because he wasn’t afraid to be enthusiastic, he went right to the heart of people. His real talent was for the American voice.” Beard’s considerable girth, far from turning people off, abetted his crossover appeal, because he wasn’t some fussy schoolmarm or a flaming gadabout like the tails-wearing, Rolls-Royce-driving Lucius Beebe.
“He was not seen as gay by the public,” Kafka says. “If they’d met Jim in person, they might not have been so sure, but he was just seen as a big man, and big is good, in terms of cooking.”