The United States of Arugula (6 page)

What Beard began, in essence, was a new perception of American food and cookery. If there was no going back to the halcyon days of Mary Randolph’s sumptuous feasts of pure goodness—which were laborious to prepare, and, to face facts, made possible by slaves in the South and servants in the North—there was at least a way to reclaim the pleasures of real cooking and unrushed food, even if only as a leisure activity, as outdoor grilling increasingly became in the 1940s. Whereas Irma Rombauer, the author of
The Joy of Cooking
, represented a sane middle ground for housewives of the thirties and forties, urging them to make their own stocks in the early editions of her book
*
but advising that “a can of bouillon should be kept for quick aspics and for use in the place of stock”—and explaining that
The Joy of Cooking
had been compiled “with one eye on the family purse and the other on the bathroom scale,” with “occasional lapses into indulgence”—Beard transcended the very notion of cooking as part of homemaking. To him, cooking and eating comprised a fulfilling cultural pastime, to be pursued as ardently as golf, opera, painting watercolors, or any other activity that aroused one’s passions. In the bargain, with his charisma and approachability, he also made a better case for the preservation of regional foods than the zany Clementine Paddleford
†
or the highbrow Sheila Hibben.

But even as Beard was coming to prominence as a cookbook author,
he saw that the state of American gastronomy would get worse before it got better. Throughout and immediately after the war years of the forties, the big food conglomerates were putting ever-more grotesque packaged products on the market, many of which were by-products of their efforts to produce tinned or freeze-dried field rations for the troops. (However, Spam, George A. Hormel & Co.’s “miracle meat” in a can, predated America’s involvement in the war, appearing on grocery shelves in 1937.) In time, the packaged-food companies would abandon any pretense of claiming their processed and frozen products were superior in taste, instead stressing their convenience. Cannily (and often with canned foods), these companies’ advertising campaigns actually stigmatized the experience of spending hours in the kitchen. As Laura Shapiro puts it in
Something from the Oven
, her history of 1950s American cookery, “During the postwar era, time became an obsession of the food industry and eventually of American homemakers as a manufactured sense of panic pervaded even day-to-day cooking.” Shapiro cites an ad for Minute Rice that sounds like it was written by someone hopped up on Dexedrine: “Baby fussing? Dinner to get? When baby wants attention and Daddy wants dinner, your best friend is
quick-quick
Minute Rice!”

Beard despaired of such developments, and of the nonsensical recipes that were urged upon readers by the women’s pages, such as a popular one for “Flapper Salad,” an atrocity that called for a canned pear or peach to be decorated with carrot slivers and/or pimientos to simulate the face of a 1920s flapper, with the fruit then covered in aspic, surrounded by lettuce, and covered in a sweet dressing. “I showed [the recipe] to someone who took it seriously,” Beard wrote to his friend Helen Evans Brown, a Californian and cookbook author and kindred-spirit food purist. “God, where can their sense of humor be?”

Fortunately, Beard and Brown didn’t have to fight their battle alone. One of the salutary effects of the war was that it caused an influx of talented kitchen workers whose cooking abilities and regard for real food complemented Beard’s nicely. Though William Henry Harrison’s cronies might not have approved, these influential newcomers were French.

IN APRIL 1939, THE OCEAN LINER
NORMANDIE
SAILED ACROSS THE ATLANTIC FROM
Le Havre, France, to New York City. Traveling in first class was Henri Soulé, the thirty-year-old manager of the Café de Paris; in third class was Pierre Franey, the eighteen-year-old second assistant to the
saucier
at the Restaurant Drouant. Both restaurants were owned by the Drouant family, which ran several high-end dining establishments in and around Paris. The family’s de facto CEO, Jean Drouant, had petitioned his government to let him operate a sophisticated, 400-seat restaurant at the French Pavilion at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Once his request was granted, Drouant dipped into his own pool of employees, rounding up the best of them to represent his country. Though Soulé (pronounced, explained
The New Yorker’s
Joseph Wechsberg, “like ‘soufflé’ without the f’s”) was not yet forty years old, he had already made a name for himself as Paris’s most formidable front-of-the-house figure. Short, balding, and stout—a Gallic Alfred Hitchcock—he transcended his physical shortcomings with elegantly tailored suits, a graceful gait, and a general air of owlish imperiousness. He also spoke fluent English and had the grandiloquent habit of referring to himself in the third person, as “Soulé”—making him, in sum, the perfect choice to be the face of French haute cuisine in America, as he would be in his capacity as maître d’ of the Restaurant Français at the French Pavilion.

Franey, in time, would be every bit as important a figure in American gastronomy as Soulé, if not more so. But on the
Normandie
voyage, his first trip to America, he still looked like the provincial Burgundian peasant he was,
a stocky little fellow with a moon face and raccoon eyes set deep beneath a thick, charcoal-dark monobrow. Just four years earlier, he’d arrived in Paris from his village of St. Vinnemer in short pants (much to the mortification of the cosmopolitan older cousins who received him) to begin his apprenticeship at a restaurant several notches in stature below the Restaurant Drouant. Starting at the bottom of the ladder, with the female vegetable-peelers and the rheumy-eyed dishwasher drunks with no aspirations to chefdom, Franey plugged away at a series of ever-more reputable joints until he landed at the Drouant, where he worked his way up to the rank of first
commis
, or assistant, to the fish cook—no small feat in a restaurant especially renowned for its seafood. Shortly before the World’s Fair, having mastered the fish station, Franey was rotated to the more prestigious
saucier
station, where he began as second
commis
with the expectation of again working his way up.
*

But in Queens, his reputation as an excellent fish cook preceded him: he was tapped to reprise his old role as the
poissonier’s
lieutenant, in which he would put to good use his skill at preparing such challenging Drouant dishes as the turbot soufflé, which called for the fish to be carefully deboned and butterflied; filled with a mousse of ground fish, egg yolks, and beaten whites; folded back together; and baked in white wine until the stuffing inside rose soufflé-style, theatrically inflating the turbot back to its live-fish dimensions.

As elaborate as preparations like this were, the chefs and
commis
who prepared them were anything but
haute
characters themselves. Many came
from dirt-poor families and grew up in conditions that bordered on the feudal—indeed, it seemed that every French chef who came to define luxe New York dining in the fifties and sixties had some sort of heartbreaking story to tell of childhood privation and hard knocks. Jean Vergnes, later to become the chef at the Colony and Le Cirque in New York, was just thirteen when he left his little village in the southeast of France to apprentice at a restaurant in the nearest city, Grenoble. So ruthlessly demanding were his kitchen superiors that even on the rare occasions when Vergnes got to see his mother—when she appeared at the screen door at the back of the restaurant, having taken the train to Grenoble to drop off some clothing and a few francs for her son—young Jean was allotted only a few seconds to touch her fingers longingly through the wire screen before returning to his potato peeler.

Jacques Pépin, who emerged on the American scene a bit later, arriving in 1959 to work for Franey, began his apprenticeship at thirteen. And when he was only six, he had been literally farmed out by his parents for the summer, sent from the comfort of his family’s apartment in the town of Bourg-en-Bresse to a farm in the countryside. There, he lived with an unfamiliar family and worked as a junior cowherd in exchange for room and board, since his parents couldn’t afford to keep him fed and occupied during the summer-vacation months. When he
was
at home, young Jacques and his brother, Roland, were saddled with the unenviable task of chasing after the horse that pulled a delivery cart through their town’s streets, shoveling up the horse’s droppings so that the Pépin family would have fertilizer for their modest plot in the community garden.

If there was any advantage to growing up in such penury and rusticity, it was that the French cooks were rooted in the earth. As America was marching inexorably toward processed, manufactured, packaged food, the French still felt the pull of the seasons and lived off food they grew and raised themselves. From a young age, Franey knew how to trap and dress rabbits, catch and clean pike, kill and bleed chickens, and forage for dandelion greens for salad, choosing the leaves that sprouted from molehills rather than the ones that grew out in the open because the stalks of the sunlight-deprived,
molehill-cosseted dandelions tasted sweeter. Like the Virginian Mary Randolph more than a hundred years before them, the Franeys lived without refrigeration, waiting until fall to slaughter their pigs so that their spare ribs and hams would cure in the cool months without fear of spoilage, and letting no part of the animal—not the blood, the lungs, the caul fat, nor the intestines—go to waste.

In this regard, the French chefs who established themselves in America in the forties and fifties would prove surprisingly simpatico with the California foodie counterculturists who embraced French cookery in the sixties and seventies: both camps were underwhelmed by the quality of the ingredients offered by the big suppliers in America, and the Frenchmen appreciated the hippies’ efforts to make America hospitable to artisanal cheese makers, boutique farmers, paid foragers, and organic ranchers. But the French would never warm to the very American concept of the self-taught chef. Franey and his contemporaries were rigorously put through their paces by martinet bosses, repeating the same techniques thousands of times, earning only grudging respect from their be-toqued superiors, and rotating from one kitchen station to the next in order to learn the repertoire of classic French cuisine in all its nuance and variety. Nothing would ever convince the Frenchmen of Soulé’s brigade that there was a better way than their way to learn how to be a professional cook. “Young cooks today with culinaryschool diplomas may view it as somewhat anachronistic,” Franey wrote in the 1980s, “but classic French cuisine is without question the mortar upon which all of today’s cooking is based.”