"Craig Claiborne" news and stories

"First let me introduce myself. I'm Craig Claiborne, and this is Julia Child." Photo: Scanned from A Feast Made for Laughter

"And to tell the truth, I was bored with restaurant criticism. At times I didn't give a damn if all the restaurants in Manhattan were shoved into the East River and perished. Had they all served nightingale tongues on toast and heavenly manna and mead, there is just so much that the tongue can savor, so much that the human body (and spirit) can accept, and then it resists. Toward the end of my days as restaurant critic, I found myself increasingly indulging in drink, the better to endure another evening of dining out. I had become a desperate man with a frustrating job to perform." -- from 'A Feast Made for Laughter' by Craig Claiborne, New York Times Dining editor and restaurant critic, 1982

While there have thus far been no reports of departing New York Times restaurant critic and newly-minted memoirist Frank Bruni tipsily pressing ham against the windows of the Second Avenue Deli, rolling members of the Cipriani family for spare change and Bellini drippings, or skulking through the catacombs at Ninja New York, randomly alarming the goofily hooded servers, it's not as if he's going silently into that last bite.

They rarely do.

'Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking'
Craig Claiborne with foreword by John T. Edge and Georgeanna Milam
University of Georgia Press -- 2007 (originally published in 1987 by Clamshell Productions, Ltd.)
Buy it on Amazon

"It is not a question of chauvinism, but I have always averred that Southern cooking is by far the vastest and most varied of all traditional regional cooking in this country," wrote Craig Claiborne in the foreword to this pan-Southern paean to the cuisine of his childhood.

While Claiborne fled the physical South -- and his legendarily smothering mother, Miss Kathleen -- in favor of a stint in the Navy, hotel school in Switzerland and a multi-decade tenure as food editor of the New York Times, his palate remained staunchly attuned to the servant-cooked colloquial fare he'd enjoyed at his mother's boardinghouse.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

Just like last year at this time, I'm out in Portland, OR, visiting my parents for the holidays. One of my favorite Portland activities is to hit a variety of thrift stores, searching out interesting old cookbooks (for some reason, Philadelphia thrift stores don't seem to have the same wealth of cookbooks). Today I picked an assortment of cookbooks from the sixties and seventies, including The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet, by Pierre Franey.

Franey was a New York Times food writer during Craig Claiborne's reign and wrote a column entitled The 60-Minute Gourmet for the paper. He was a highly trained French chef who once ran the kitchen at Le Pavillon, which during its day, was considered the best restaurant in all of New York City. This book was originally published in the fall of 1979 and while it has been revised over the years, the copy I have is from the initial printing run.

I've spent a bit of time reading through this volume and it seems to be quite ahead of its time, as far as the attitude towards fresh herbs, good cheeses and oils go. Franey recommends keeping a hunk of Parmesan in the fridge, saying that it is best when freshly grated (and this was in the days when the green canister of shaking cheese was the preferred Parm). I've already marked several pages with appealing recipes, including Poached Chicken with Bourbon Sauce (page 42), Asparagus with Nutmeg Butter (page 81) and Cannellini Beans with Tuna (page 312).

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Craig Claiborne started as the editor of the New York Times Dining and Wine section in 1957 spent the following 25+ years changing the way that the American people thought about food. He took a section of the newspaper that had once focused helping upscale ladies throw dinner parties and transformed it into the resource of record that we know today.

The Best of Craig Claiborne collects 1,000 recipes from his days at the Times, as well as recipes he tested and published after he left that paper. The book came out just a year before he died and it was his last major culinary work. It includes stories of his dining experiences, notable encounters with other foodies of import and anecdotes about his years as a chef and food writer. If you are a fan of the New York Times Dining and Wine section, this is definitely a book to check out.

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