The Essential James Beard Cookbook (3 page)

BOOK: The Essential James Beard Cookbook

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In a way, though, it wasn’t until the sixties that some of the jigsaw puzzle of my life came together. That was when I met Joe Baum, president of Restaurant Associates. I worked with him, and the association, on a number of restaurant projects, but most of all on New York’s the Four Seasons. It proved an ideal collaboration: my sixty years of experience, Joe’s enthusiasm, and the excitement of using all-American seasonal products. Our ideas and approach seemed as fresh as the ingredients we sought out. For example, baskets of freshly picked vegetables would be brought to your table so you could pick out the ones you wanted. In asparagus season, there were perhaps twenty different ways you could have asparagus prepared. We had fiddleheads and wild mushrooms and many other things both weird and wonderful.

It was Joe Baum’s premise that this was a restaurant for New Yorkers. Certainly it proved to be a complete change from everything we’d seen before. If for no other reason, the fact that our menus and format were copied so much convinced us we were right. We had an inimitable group, with Joe Baum, of course, Albert Stockli as executive chef, and Albert Kumin as first pastry chef. I worked a great deal at the Four Seasons. Apart from being consultant on the food, I did the wine list and held wine classes for all the captains every week for two or three years. I’ve gone through several beginnings in my life, and this is the one that I am most proud of.

I sometimes wonder if my being just one generation from the covered wagon makes me feel so allied to this country’s gastronomic treasures. The pioneers lived off the land they traveled, and necessity sired invention. I’m always asked what the dominating factor in American cuisine is, and my reply is that it’s the many ethnic groups, each of which brought its own ideas of food to this country. When they first settled here, they often could not find the ingredients they were used to, so they adapted their dishes and invented new ones, using whatever was available.

As people became neighborly and exchanged ideas about all sorts of things, they exchanged ideas about food, too. If you go back into the cookbooks written by the Ladies Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church or the Hadassah, or by any such organization, you can almost trace the history of American food. In some books, you find a recipe done three different ways, and you can pretty well choose the original.

There are many dishes that could be considered completely American. Indian pudding is one, and it’s coming into vogue again. Then we often forget that layer cakes—particularly baking powder layer cakes—are our invention. And while the Europeans have always had tarts, and the English originated apple pie and many deep-dish pies, the cream pies, and what I think of as “gooey” pies, along with a lot of fruit pies, were certainly developed in this country. And we have many hot breads, like muffins, biscuits, popovers, and baking powder coffee cakes.

Every country near an island developed a fish stew, and ours are New England clam chowder and California’s cioppino. And what could be more American than a clambake? I remember splendid ones from my childhood, and you never see them in Europe.

Chili has become virtually an American creation. I don’t think I could possibly choose just one kind, because part of the charm of this dish for me is that I can always make it differently, and it never disappoints. I must not forget to add barbecues either—the real southern kind that are smoke-cooked—for although they were first introduced by the French settlers in Louisiana, they are surely an American classic. The original idea was to feed a large outdoor gathering by roasting an animal, perhaps a whole sheep, goat, or pig, in front of an open fire on a homemade spit that pierced the tail from
barbe à la queue
—literally, from whiskers to tail. Thus the word barbecue came into our language and spread all over the world.

My father was able to tell me something of the pioneer culinary tradition, which he remembered from his trip in covered wagon from Iowa to Oregon. As a child of five or six, together with his brothers and other boys of the same age, he would shoot birds while his elders hunted small animals. These were usually cooked on wooden spits over a wood fire. According to my father, there was invariably a dispute among the members of the wagon train as to how the cooking should be done. I can only imagine that the dispute was settled by dividing the food so each group could cook in its own fashion—in other words, this was regional cooking standing up for its rights.

As outdoor cooking developed throughout the country, there were great chicken frieds for church benefits, and in the South there were the famous fish fries, where the meals were prepared by servants or slaves after a hunting or fishing party returned to the plantation. Those fries were supplemented by enormous hampers of food from the main kitchen. Although lavish barbecues still flourish, outdoor cooking is generally done on a small scale these days. The custom has grown to the point where anyone driving through the suburbs on a summer weekend can smell more beef and chicken being charred, scorched, and burned than in all previous history.

—1983

NOTES FROM THE EDITOR

James Beard was a born cook who literally cooked at his mother’s knee during his childhood in early twentieth-century Oregon. Yet his first book wasn’t published until 1940, when he was thirty-eight years old, giving him plenty of time to soak up culinary experience around the world. His cookbook career spanned over forty years. Even in today’s media-centric world, there are few food professionals who have constantly been in the public’s consciousness for such an extended period. For many years, Beard was the only immediately recognizable face in American cooking. Did anyone know what Irma Rombauer (author of
The Joy of Cooking
) looked like? But Beard, with a figure nurtured by cream and butter, topped off with a jaunty bow tie, was the personification of an outsized chef, straight out of central casting.

The Essential James Beard
celebrates this truly unique pioneer of American cuisine through more than four hundred of his best recipes, from the dishes that were served at his mother’s Portland hotel to the ones that he shared with his coterie at his Greenwich Village row house. They are eclectic—French, Italian, Chinese, American, and even Persian—because Beard’s curiosity about food was as insatiable as his physical appetite.

Imagine how much cooking evolved during the four-decade span of his cookbook writing, and then consider the enormous changes that have occurred since his death in 1985. In collecting the recipes for this book, the goal was to retain Beard’s voice, exuberant and authoritarian in equal parts. However, I also made some changes for today’s cooks. Chickens were much smaller then (just try to find a two-pound chicken at your local supermarket today), so some of the poultry recipes required adjustments. A meat thermometer was an oddity in many homes, and recipes gave other ways to test meat for doneness; I have provided temperatures where helpful. When the food processor was in its infancy, Beard was an early and quick convert to its conveniences. [My Editor’s Notes to the reader are in brackets.]

Beard’s Gargantuan life force of a personality illuminated everything he wrote, but he changed the format of the recipe depending on the venue. Teaching recipes, such as the ones in
Theory and Practice of Good Cooking,
were necessarily long and detailed, and reflect the influence of his good friend Julia Child’s precisely tooled cookbooks. Especially when he was writing what one might call autobiographical recipes, Beard used a narrative form, and the formula is relayed as if he were speaking directly to the reader, without the benefit of an ingredient list at the beginning of the recipe. And there were recipes that were necessarily brief when he was writing for a newspaper or magazine article with limited space. Rather than force a universal style on all of the recipes, an effort was made to keep them as intact as possible, with a few words here and there to gently update, embellish, or clarify. Editor’s Notes are there to give historical context or to elaborate when need be.

The historical reference is an important one. The James Beard Foundation confers awards of excellence to American culinarians in many fields from cookbook author to food writer to television cooking show host. Beard was all of these things, and more (you can add restaurant consultant and cooking teacher to the list), and whatever he tackled, it was with a joie de vivre that lives today in these marvelous recipes.

A Note on Ingredients

When Beard was writing, cooking oil was usually vegetable oil of some kind, flour was always bleached, and there was no such thing as reduced-fat milk (although skim milk was around, only the most desperate dieters bought it). We have many more choices today, and, based on Beard’s opinions found in his books and anecdotally through his friends, the following ingredients are recommended.

OLIVE OIL:
Extra-virgin olive oil was not readily available, although Beard certainly cooked with it during his many visits to Provence and would have been able to buy it around the corner from his house at that Manhattan bastion of midcentury gastronomy, Balducci’s. Use high-quality French, Italian, or Spanish oil, but taste it first to choose one with a fruity flavor and not-too-heavy body so it can be used for a variety of cooking chores, from sautéing meat to making vinaigrette.

HERBS:
Fresh herbs, beyond parsley and dill, were just beginning to be sold in specialty markets at the end of Beard’s career. Until then, fresh herbs had to be grown in your backyard or on your windowsill. If you want to use fresh herbs, a general rule of thumb is to use twice as much chopped fresh herbs as dried herbs. But remember, dried herbs have their place, as the dehydration does intensify flavor. Basil, cilantro, and parsley, however, are always better fresh (although Beard does find a place for dried basil in some recipes). He preferred flat-leaf parsley, sometimes called Italian parsley, to the curly variety.

CANNED BROTH:
Beard rarely (if ever!) uses canned broth in his recipes. During his lifetime, canned broths were clearly inferior, and just a step away from artificially flavored bouillon cubes. There are many good canned broths sold today, so if you want to use a brand that you like, go ahead. However, Beard also knew that there is something very satisfying and fun about simmering up a big pot of homemade stock, and Beard was all about having fun in the kitchen.

SALT:
Beard lived in New York, and with its large Jewish community, he had easy access to kosher salt, which he appreciated for its purity and clean, unadulterated flavor. For most cooks, kosher salt was an oddity and most kitchens used iodized table salt laced with anti-caking agents. (Plain salt is fine-crystallized table salt without the added iodine.) In doughs and batters for baked goods, you may choose to use plain or fine sea salt, another additive-free salt, because these dissolve more readily than coarse kosher salt.