Father of Modern Day American Gastronomy

James Beard

American food and cooking expert James Andrews Beard promoted excellence and variety in dining experiences.  A native of Portland, Oregon, he was born on May 5, 1903 to Mary Elizabeth Jones Beard and Jonathan A.  Beard, a shipyard appraiser.  His mother taught him cookery of all types, including informal dishes suitable for picnics, backyard feasts, and barbecues.  In the introduction to The Cook’s Catalogue (1975),  Beard quipped, “I grew up in the Iron Age of American cookery.  We had a cast-iron wood stove.… For stove top cooking we used iron skillets, iron Dutch ovens, and iron stew pots.” He declared iron the king in his mother’s kitchen in Gearhart, seventy miles northwest of Portland, but conferred some culinary credit on “earthenware, tin, some copper, and the ghastly enameled pots known as graniteware.”

After expulsion from Reed College on the grounds that he was a homosexual, Beard studied at the University of Washington. He took up a career in singing and drama, taking roles on radio and on the stage in Othello and Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1920s until nodes on his vocal cords impaired his voice. In 1933, he gave private cooking lessons and worked briefly as a teacher of English, French, and history at a private school in New Jersey.

On an intuition that American cuisine was ripe for a renaissance of its various immigrant traditions, he embarked on a culinary career, establishing an eclectic Manhattan catering business, Hors d’ Oeuvre, Inc., which served French, Italian, and Russian menus at Upper East Side tables. Like other men of his generation, Beard was drafted during World War II.  After a stint as a decoder for the army air corps, he returned home to work at a dairy and truck farm in Reading, Pennsylvania. He followed a trend in world cookery while directing military officers’ clubs in Cristobal, Marseilles, Naples, Puerto Rico, and Rio de Janeiro.

A natural organizer, he adeptly managed kitchen workers and serving staff and published his first food book, Fowl and Game Cookery (1944), which launched his reputation for gourmet cuisine. In the infancy of television, Beard became one of a coterie of pioneer TV cooks. In 1948, he demonstrated kitchen techniques on the Borden Company’s Elsie Presents. He developed a varied career as a public speaker, restaurant consultant, hobby and food festival demonstrator, benefit organizer, and author of a second book, The Fireside Cook Book: A Complete Guide to Fine Cooking for Beginner and Expert (1949), which contained 1,217 recipes and 400 color photos. Chapters covered the usual menu items plus outdoor cookery, frozen foods, pick-up meals, menus for warm and cold weather, and wines and liquors. He stripped food preparation of European pretensions and did away with multicourse feasts served on exquisite china. Primarily American in focus, his presentations returned to the basics but avoided the humdrum by appealing to the senses.

At age fifty-two, Beard opened a cooking school and experimental kitchen, originally at New York’s Lexington Hotel and later at the corporate headquarters of McCall’s magazine with a branch in Seaside, Oregon. He gained further recognition by promoting Green Giant vegetables, Planter’s peanuts, and Spice Islands seasonings. At age fifty-six, he chose New York City’s Greenwich Village as his base and set about boosting America’s confidence in its own kitchens. At a half-moon-shaped workstation, he taught amateur cooks how to create party platters, buffets, crêpes, soufflés, omelets, breads, and sauces. A key to preparation, he taught, was constant tasting to determine how combinations and heat altered flavor and texture.

To maintain a fresh perspective, Beard traveled Europe, studied regional cuisine, critiqued restaurants, and traded in-crowd gossip with West Coast food historian Helen Evans Brown. His correspondence with the latter was the source of his memoir James Beard: Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles: Letters To Helen Evans Brown (1994). He was one of the first food critics to denounce lowered standards in venues that catered to tourists. His touchstone was L’ Auberge de Père Bise, a two-star Michelin restaurant south of Geneva, Switzerland, on Lake Annecy, which he declared the hallmark of discriminating cookery. In the 1950s, America’s golden age of cooking, he wrote columns for Woman’s Day, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue and published works on Parisian foods, fish, barbecue and rotisserie cooking (including the popular 1975 book Barbecuing with Beard), entertaining, patio cooking, and budget recipes. Of his eight books from that decade, The James Beard Cookbook (1958) became a national classic in hardbound and paperback.

Reprising his life’s work, American Cooking (1972) summarized his regard for the nation’s cuisine and earned him an honorary degree from Reed College. Sparkling and witty until his death at age eighty-two, Beard left unfinished his last memoir, Memories and Menus. To fans, he epitomized hospitality and fun. His preference for bold color, prize wines, and new developments in food processors, microwaves, and kitchen gadgetry continued unabated. A link between the prominent chefs of his homeland and those of Europe, he valued regional traditions and fresh produce from local markets.

James Beard Award for Excellence

He admired a melange of American dishes featuring corn and beans, nuts, and strawberries and revived such working-class treasures as fried tomatoes, Indian pudding, and scrapple. Against the tide of Julia Child chic, he spoke the language of common eating pleasures. Friends transformed his home into the James Beard Foundation and established annual James Beard awards for cookbooks and chefs as a tribute to the “Father of American Gastronomy.”

Comments are closed.