An essay in today's New York Times Magazine muses on the cookbooks of James Beard, the pioneering American chef and food writer.
There seem to have been two Beards, writes Aleksandra Crapanzano - the sophisticated gastrophile with a taste for sea urchin mousseline, who awakened mid century Americans to the pleasures of fresh, high-quality ingredients, and the shameless crowd-pleaser and businessman, writing recipes for tomato soup cake and signing countless endorsement deals for kitchen products.
A new edition of "Beard on Food" loses the bad Sloppy Joe recipes found in Beard's seminal "American Cookery," and is instead full of the exuberant eater's musings - tales dining of pheasants in Provence, a digression on the history of fondue in Switzerland, Crapanzano writes.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-16-2008 @ 2:23PM
Shayna Glick said...
From what I've been reading lately, James Beard was not good with money and his large number of projects needed financing. That's why he needed to take the corporate sponsorships. He knew he was prostituting himself and hated it, but he needed the money. I (or the book I'm reading "The United States of Arugula") could be wrong, but that's how I understand the situation.
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