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Overview
The Armchair James Beard showcases the many roles of America’s first celebrity chef: teacher, culinary alchemist, restaurant reviewer, occasional dieter, visionary, and gourmand. Collected by Beard’s longtime friend and colleague John Ferrone, each essay resonates with impassioned opinions and a distinctly American voice. Beard takes us on a journey from his childhood in Portland, Oregon, to his dining and cooking experiences around the world.
These reminiscences, paired with more than 130 recipes, provide an intimate portrait of a lifetime spent studying, preparing, and enjoying food. Beard fondly recalls his father’s homemade breakfast sausage seasoned with thyme and pepper; bouillabaisse made from fresh fish in the South of France; and a large, buttery baked potato aboard the Northern Pacific railroad on one of his many cross-country trips. Rich with tales of meals shared with family and old friends, Beard ponders not just the importance of what we eat, but how food brings us together, and the role it can play in our memories. Heartfelt, enlightening, and often humorous, these memoir-like selections are an inspiring addition to any culinary collection.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504004558 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 361 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
John Ferrone was born in Morristown, New Jersey, on August 14, 1924, to Italian immigrant parents. He graduated from Colorado College, and then Stanford University, where he earned a master’s degree in creative writing. After serving in World War II, Ferrone went on to work for Dell Publishing and Harcourt, Brace & World until his retirement in 1990. He is best known for his tremendous editing work and collaboration with Alice Walker on her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple. Ferrone has also edited Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Anaïs Nin’s New York Times bestseller Delta of Venus, and Eudora Welty’s National Book Award winner The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. He has also edited many of James Beard’s kitchen volumes. Ferrone died of complications caused by Parkinson’s disease in Old Bridge, New Jersey, on April 10, 2016.
James Beard (1903–1985) was an American cookbook author, syndicated columnist, teacher, and television personality. Designated the “dean of American cookery” by the New York Times, Beard laid the foundations for generations of amateur and professional food enthusiasts. After publishing his first cookbook in 1940, Beard went on to host the NBC cooking show I Love to Eat. In 1955 he founded the James Beard Cooking School, where he taught for many years. Over the course of his career, Beard wrote countless cookbooks, including several seminal works, and he inspired and influenced chefs throughout the world. His legacy lives on through the James Beard Foundation, established in his honor to provide scholarships and awards recognizing excellence in the culinary arts.
Read an Excerpt
The Armchair James Beard
By James Beard, John Ferrone
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1999 John FerroneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0455-8
CHAPTER 1
When I first met James Beard, in 1954, he occupied a second-floor studio apartment in a handsome brownstone on Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village, where he had lived for thirteen years. His improbable kitchen ran neck and neck with bathroom facilities along a corridor, and he had a choice of doing dishes in a tiny sink or in the bathtub with the shower turned on. It was this maddening arrangement, together with cooking by gas, which he hated, that drove Beard down the street in 1957 to an ugly new brick apartment house, where he triumphantly installed an all-electric kitchen. He remained only two years before moving to a charming little house on Tenth Street across from the Women's House of Detention.
Here he was able to have his first teaching kitchen, organized around a U-shaped bank of electric burners and work surfaces, which he called his grand piano. Watermelon-colored Formica panels could slipcover the entire U, making a spacious serving table for Beard's lavish cocktail buffets. Here, too, is where the now-famous black and white wallpaper of colossal pineapples originated. When he outgrew the Tenth Street house and moved to one two blocks north, the kitchen retained the same pattern, with the U of cooking units growing wider and shallower. Beard presided over classes from a high canvas director's chair. It was this kitchen, his "fifth," that Beard was outfitting in the second of these articles, "Tools of My Trade." It is now the centerpiece of Beard House, run by the James Beard Foundation.
The Stomach, Heart, and Spirit of the House
In a house without a genuine kitchen, one of the delights of growing up is lost. No other room can gather the family together with such a feeling of warmth and security. And now, after a long decline, the American kitchen is finally regaining its status as the family room.
What a change has come over its design since the thirties and forties, when that room was all but forgotten. Architects turned it into a corridor — it still exists in all too many houses and apartments — where the sink was too small, the opening of the refrigerator required clever maneuvering, and much of the storage space was up out of reach. There was no thought of a place for sitting and eating unless one balanced on a step stool, and there was surely little incentive to produce good food. No child growing up with such a kitchen could ever know the fun of watching his mother turn out cookies, licking the spoon from a bowl of cake batter, cranking the ice cream freezer. Nor the joys of taffy pulls, making fudge, and many of the rites of Christmas.
I grew up in a kitchen that was the hub of the house and the crossroads of the entire neighborhood. It was enormous in size, and like many kitchens of the previous century, its supplies filled the adjoining pantry — as large as most New York apartment kitchens — and the basement as well. It was a pleasant room with wallpaper of red polka dots on a cream-colored background and with cream enameled woodwork. Unbleached muslin curtains trimmed with red braid piping were hung at the windows. When we ate, we sat at a large round table that accommodated six to eight people. It was a friendly spot in which to enjoy our food, which was prepared nearby on a great range. When I was very young, this was an immense black wood-burning stove that heated the room in addition to cooking our food. A second stove, a gas stove, was tucked away in the pantry. These were later replaced by a giant white stove that burned both wood and gas — a wood oven below and gas ovens and broilers above. It was a joy to work with and as dependable as any stove could be.
One of the kitchen's many doors led to the basement, where the stove wood was stored, together with fruits and vegetables and other items to be kept cool, as well as wine and liquor. During the game season, ducks, teal, and pheasants hung from a rope strung across the basement, and occasionally a ham or two was hung for aging. The mingled smells were wonderful to me — pitchy wood, apples and pears, the strange, gamy scent of hanging birds.
A second door led to the screened back porch, where we sometimes sat to have breakfast or lunch, looking out on the Gravenstein apple trees, whose fruit could be colossal, the towering Bing cherry trees, and the smaller Royal Anne cherry tree. And there was a small herb plot where parsley, shallots, chives, thyme, and sage grew, and frequently basil or tarragon. In spring, a lilac bush at the foot of the porch stairs sent its perfume through the kitchen door.
The pantry was the stockroom for the kitchen. It held rows of plates and hanging cups — a set of blue willow dishes and a set of peach-blossom dishes from China that we were all fond of and generally used for lunch and dinner. At the far end of the pantry was a large, heavy working board for pastry making, cutting and chopping, and general preparation of food. A bin under the worktable held fifty pounds of flour at a time, and sugar and other staples were stored in proportionate quantities. It was a wonderful pantry to wander into. Mouthwatering mysteries were stored away in the meat safe and in jars and drawers, china and glass sparkled everywhere, and there was an intriguing array of gadgetry ready for action.
For years, a sewing machine was kept in the kitchen at the window opening onto the porch. Here a seamstress, who came every three or four months, did bits and pieces of sewing for the family and brought gossip from the neighborhood. The machine was one of the beautiful Victorian models, with a wrought-iron base and a wooden lid, and it was not at all obtrusive in a room dedicated to food.
We were a family of individuals, my mother, my father, and I. Though we were compatible, each had his own life apart from the others, and for each the kitchen played a different role. My father found his greatest privacy in the early morning hours. He made it known that he would prefer fixing breakfast and sending it upstairs on trays rather than have any company. In winter, one could hear him getting the fire going with papers and kindling, and the reassuring rush of air through the damper as the fire caught. In summer, he first opened all the doors to let in the fresh morning air. Then he proceeded with his menu, which might be a traditional combination of fruit, bacon or country ham, eggs, and toast or rolls. On Sunday mornings in winter, his specialty was homemade sausage, deliciously blended with thyme, a bit of bay leaf, and pepper. In the spring and fall — we were always at the beach in summer — he invariably sautéed young chicken, which would be served with country bacon, cream gravy, and hot biscuits.
As soon as my father went upstairs to groom himself for the day, my mother took possession of the kitchen, which was truly her realm. No other part of the house provided so appropriate a background for this warm, independent, sometimes fearsome woman. Here she entertained for lunch — her intimate friends preferred to eat in the kitchen — here she blended teas, did preserving and pickling, and chatted with neighbors, exchanging pungent confidences over tea, scones, and mock macaroons.
The kitchen was mine late at night. I enjoyed having one or several friends in for a drink, a supper of scrambled eggs, or a sandwich. We used to sit up late and talk, comparing ideas that were current during the early years of the Depression. At times like these, the kitchen became a smoke-filled supper club.
When the family gathered at the kitchen table, frequently with an old family friend, the room took on the air of a coffeehouse or a tavern. We were not of one mind politically, and there were heated discussions over the League of Nations, new taxes, Prohibition. Often the talk was simply about food. We disagreed about how certain dishes should be prepared or raved about our favorite foods as they came into season — the first shad roe and shad, tiny new potatoes, white and green asparagus, alligator pears. ... We ate well, and there seemed to be a constant flow of good things into our larder. Once, years after my mother had died and I had long been away, I visited the house where I grew up. When I stepped into the kitchen, I knew at once it had become just another room.
The kitchen where I now cook and teach, forty years later, is a world apart, but it perpetuates some of the ideas of our family kitchen. Naturally, I was opposed to a purely functional laboratory. Thus, I planned with Agnes Crowther, an interior designer and friend of long standing, to make this a functional kitchen with beauty — again, a kitchen to live in. In every respect, it has triumphed. It is without question the center of the house. Whenever there are guests, whether few or many, the kitchen draws them. Even sixty or seventy people manage to stuff themselves into the kitchen, leaving the overflow rooms empty. It is a huge kitchen by normal standards, but its elements are so harmonious that one is unaware of its size. Its walls are covered with paper (treated to make it spotproof) in three different designs. The major equipment was planned for teaching as well as for household use. The central piece is a U-shaped unit mounted on legs, outfitted with ten electric burners and with shelves below. Four chopping boards are set in at convenient places between the burners. Formica covers trimmed with rosewood fit over this unit, converting it into a buffet table, a demonstration table, or a combination of buffet and stove.
Elsewhere in the room is a high worktable on wheels that is useful for cutting, display, and demonstration. Two sinks, one with a swan's-neck faucet for washing vegetables and the other for washing dishes and pots, are near the double ovens and broilers and the refrigerator-freezer. On one side of the room are racks that hold jars of staple items, and beneath are hooks for skillets and pans of varying sizes. A wine rack for spirits and liqueurs is attached to the wall. (Storage for wine is in the basement.) Shallow cupboards hold quantities of bowls and dishes. Two rosewood chests of drawers contain small equipment. A fine old Swiss painted wooden rack, faded in color, holds glassware, and a pine cabinet stores herbs, spices, and additional glassware.
Between the windows is a small marble table, whose wrought-iron base is from an old sewing machine — an echo of my childhood kitchen. And above the table is a handsome French copper lavabo of the type used in kitchens and dining rooms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
To dine in this kitchen is ever a satisfying experience. My preference for kitchen dining never seems to wane. It is not nostalgia but a natural expression of my love for food and its preparation. It seems to me that the pleasure of eating is heightened if one is there amidst the delightful smells to witness the moment when the finished dish comes out of the pot or the oven. And usually the less time lost between stove and table, the better.
Wherever old kitchens are being renovated and new ones designed, the trend is toward spaciousness and familial warmth. Kitchens are getting bigger, better equipped, more efficient, less laboratorial, more fun, more lived in. Antique utensils sit side by side with sleek modern appliances. Tiffany lamps spotlight cozy corners. It is fashionable to own an old butcher's block and yards of maple work surfaces. The uncomfortable overhanging oven, the poorly insulated oven, and the stove top crowded with burners are on the way out. On the way in are Pyroceram stove tops, smooth and glowing; auxiliary broilers; and electronic ovens for instant cookery. Everywhere there is evidence of sturdier equipment, more intelligent design, and greater beauty.
The cause of it all is the pursuit of good food. Since the midforties, Americans have become more adventurous and more sophisticated in their food habits. Cookbooks by the dozens are published and bought each season, cooking schools are burgeoning throughout the country, the service magazines feature kitchen design in nearly every issue, and the New York Times devotes columns to culinary matters. On television, Julia Child has brought French cooking within reach of adoring amateur cooks of both sexes, young and old. And from coast to coast, shops devoted exclusively to the kitchen offer wares from France, England, Spain, Italy, and Mexico.
As a result of the proliferation of what I like to call "pot shops," the new kitchen has a batterie de cuisine that would have baffled a housewife thirty years ago — omelet and crêpe pans, unlined copper bowls for beating egg whites and batter, fish broilers large enough to hold ten- and twelve-pounders, electric mixers capable of kneading dough and puréeing, electrically run ice cream makers, chef's knives, boning knives, slicing knives.
In many families, both husband and wife enjoy the pleasures of cooking, and in this event the kitchen is sometimes planned to provide two separate working areas — occasionally, different stoves, too — for the pair of cooks. I know of a remarkable kitchen in a house in Syracuse, New York, that boasts three stoves, each producing a different type of heat: a professional electric stove and an electric wall oven, a gas stove with a Pyroceram top, and an indoor charcoal grill with a blower and exhaust system of its own. All are in use. The kitchen embraces a large dining area furnished with an enormous table and handsome eighteenth-century-style chairs, and it has a work surface as large as the whole kitchen in some city apartments. A relatively large family flows in and out of this room, and everyone from the adults to the tiniest child loves it above any other part of the house. Recently I attended a dinner party there. We were thirty-eight guests at table — all in the kitchen.
Other kitchens like this one are being built these days on a scale that lets them serve as a dining room, and in many vacation houses the kitchen is so open to the rest of the house that the cook at work can stay in constant touch with family and guests. Frequently, too, the kitchen portals open on a terrace, where the family takes its meals according to the season. A kitchen in Southern California that uses the indoor-outdoor principle was created by Philip Brown, a fine cook and food writer, and his late wife, Helen Evans Brown. While the kitchen itself is cozily small and functional, its cheer extends to the adjacent garden in an almost magical way. The garden was incorporated as part of the kitchen through the Browns' experimenting with charcoal cookery over the years. They have done as much as anyone in this country to change backyard cooking into an art as carefully executed as indoor cooking. The other rooms in the Browns' household serve as a library, containing one of the largest cookbook collections in the country. It could be said that this entire house and garden are one great kitchen.
In many families, of course, kitchen dining has always been taken for granted. The breadwinner, home from a hard day's work, and the children, in from play, feel more comfortable at the kitchen table. The dining room is reserved for Sunday dinner and state occasions. Here, fashion plays no part, but the kitchen is, in a completely honest and basic way, a gathering place for the family.
It should come as no surprise that Julia Child shares my euphoria about kitchens. She says, "It's the most important room in the house; not only is it the stomach, but the heart and the spirit as well. In addition to the kitchen, a house needs only bathrooms and bedrooms. Besides being a workroom and a studio, the kitchen should also be a family room. So it should be utterly efficient, beautiful, and comfortable." She and Paul Child have been true to this ideal in their two kitchens — one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the other near Grasse in the South of France. Both of these kitchens have great space and work surfaces, fine equipment, comfort, beauty, and an abundance of personality. Anyone who walked into either of Julia's kitchens would immediately recognize it to be the stomach, heart, and spirit of the house.
Today's kitchen, which evolved from the fight to emancipate women from drudgery, has now reached a standard of push-button efficiency that Catharine Beecher and her successors — Marion Harland, Mrs. Rorer, and Fannie Farmer — never dreamed of. We have self-cleaning ovens, waste disposals, exhaust fans, dishwashers, automatic timers, ice-making units, rotisseries, and small appliances for every culinary operation. Combined with this is the introduction of an old-world touch — cabinetry in the French or Spanish modes, eye-catching tiles, and handsome light fixtures, making a setting that calls for shining copper, utensils of interesting shapes, exotic oddments and whimsical bits of Americana. And it was high time we softened our sterile space-age look with the mellowness of Europe, whence came our most important cooking traditions.
For many housewives, it is true, the glorious modern kitchen only provides a backdrop for the reconstitution of quick convenience food and a congenial spot where the family can eat it. Fortunately, in increasing numbers of families, the kitchen is where the heart lies, and everybody, including Dad and the teenage children, is finding food a creative pursuit, a favorite indoor sport, a passion. It stands to reason that a beautiful, well-equipped kitchen is an incentive to good cooking, and a family will always rally around a good cook.
[1968]
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Armchair James Beard by James Beard, John Ferrone. Copyright © 1999 John Ferrone. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Contents
- Foreword by Barbara Kafka
- Introduction
- Editor’s Note
- 1
- The Stomach, Heart, and Spirit of the House
- Tools of My Trade
- To Grind or Not to Grind
- 2
- Whatever Happened to Breakfast?
- Hearty Luncheon Dishes
- In Search of Cassoulet
- Tea and Crumpets
- Dishes to Fight Over
- Summer Food
- Outdoor Chefmanship
- The Art of Picnicking
- Christmas in Provence
- 3
- A Stock Is a Broth Is a Bouillon
- What Is a Salad?
- Watercress: More Than a Garnish
- All-American Cheese
- The Delectable Oyster
- The Pleasures of Lobster
- Who Invented the Hamburger?
- Corn It Yourself
- The Wondrous Artichoke
- Belgian Endive: The Elegant Vegetable
- Tabitha Tickletooth’s Way with Potatoes
- Baked Potatoes
- Hominy
- Chess Pie
- Apple Pie
- Cream and Schlag
- Quince, a Forgotten Fruit
- Rhubarb, American “Pie Plant”
- Marmalade, Bittersweet Treat
- Praline Puzzle
- Talk About Bread
- Pickling Time
- A Taste for Sauerkraut
- Even Vinegar Has a Mother
- I Love Mustard
- Garlic
- 4
- The Vogue for Vodka
- Gin
- The Rare White Brandies
- Champagne: Bottled Gaiety
- Mint Julep
- New Year Remedies
- 5
- Hotel Dining in the Grand Manner
- Eating and Drinking in Ireland
- Falling and Rising Stars of Gastronomy
- Eating My Way Across the Atlantic
- Good Meals on Wheels
- Send It Back
- 6
- I Am on a Diet
- Dieters’ Secret
- Hold the Vinaigrette
- The Friendly Egg
- Hospital Food
- 7
- A Salute to Women
- Chinese Cuisine
- Indian Cooking
- Swiss Culinary Contrasts
- The Food of Provence
- In Praise of English Food
- “American” Cooking
- 8
- An American Attitude Toward Food
- Berrying
- Life at Its Best
- Index of Recipes