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The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance - Hardcover

McNamee, Thomas

 
9781439191507: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1439191506 ISBN 13: 9781439191507
Verlag: Free Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse comes the first biography of Craig Claiborne, the father of the American food revolution, who introduced the world to the likes of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, and Alice Waters.

In the 1950s, America was a land of overdone roast beef and canned green beans—a gastronomic wasteland. Most restaurants relied on frozen, second-rate ingredients and served bogus “Continental” cuisine. Authentic French, Italian, and Chinese foods were virtually unknown. There was no such thing as food criticism at the time, and no such thing as a restaurant critic. Cooking at home wasn’t thought of as a source of pleasure. Guests didn’t chat around the kitchen. Professional equipment and cookware were used only in restaurants. One man changed all that.

From the bestselling author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse comes the first biography of the passionate gastronome and troubled genius who became the most powerful force in the history of American food—the founding father of the American food revolution. From his first day in 1957 as the food editor of the New York Times, Craig Claiborne was going to take his readers where they had never been before. Claiborne extolled the pleasures of exotic cuisines from all around the world, and with his inspiration, restaurants of every ethnicity blossomed. So many things we take for granted now were introduced to us by Craig Claiborne—crème fraîche, arugula, balsamic vinegar, the Cuisinart, chef’s knives, even the salad spinner.

He would give Julia Child her first major book review. He brought Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Paul Prudhomme, and Jacques Pépin to national acclaim. His $4,000 dinner for two in Paris was a front-page story in the Times and scandalized the world. And while he defended the true French nouvelle cuisine against bastardization, he also reveled in a well-made stew or a good hot dog. He made home cooks into stars—Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, and many others. And Craig Claiborne made dinner an event—whether dining out, delighting your friends, or simply cooking for your family. His own dinner parties were legendary.

Craig Claiborne was the perfect Mississippi gentleman, but his inner life was one of conflict and self-doubt. Constrained by his position to mask his sexuality, he was imprisoned in solitude, never able to find a stable and lasting love. Through Thomas McNamee’s painstaking research and eloquent storytelling, The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat unfolds a history that is largely unknown and also tells the full, deep story of a great man who until now has never been truly known at all.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas McNamee is the author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, Life, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He lives in San Francisco.

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The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat
1

A Sensation

Putting a piece about food on the front page of the New York Times was unheard of, but on April 13, 1959, they did it.

ELEGANCE OF CUISINE IS ON WANE IN U.S.

 

Two time-honored symbols of the good life—great cuisine in the French tradition and elegant table service—are passing from the American scene. . . . Cost control cramps the enthusiasm and inventiveness of master chefs. . . . Training facilities for cooks and waiters are virtually nonexistent. Management and union officials are apathetic. . . . Menus soon will be as stereotyped as those of a hamburger haven. . . . Americans seem always to be in a hurry. . . .

Humbert Gatti, executive chef of the Plaza Hotel, predicts: “Within five years kitchens à la minute will replace haute cuisine in America’s major cities. The public will be offered broiled steak, broiled chicken or broiled fish. Or only sautéed dishes. No more sauce Champagne. No more sauce Robert, no more filet of beef Wellington. Even today, you walk into kitchens that don’t have a stockpot. . . . I know places with a big business where they don’t use ten pounds of butter a day.”

 

The New York restaurant world was stunned. You didn’t come right out and say things like this. It wasn’t just New York, either. Restaurateurs across the country were outraged. There was no such thing as food criticism in those days, no such thing as a restaurant critic. Newspaper pieces about restaurants were written to please the advertisers. Food articles usually relied on recipes sent in by readers or on corporate press releases. And food writers? A few did exist, but M. F. K. Fisher, good as she was, never complained, and James Beard’s judgment was for hire.

This was something entirely new. The writer, Craig Claiborne, had been the food editor of the New York Times for a year and a half, but until this moment he had been largely ignored by the brass. Their concerns were more serious than the decorators and couturiers and casseroles touted in the small section headed “Food Fashions Family Furnishings,” commonly known as the women’s page, where Craig’s work had till now always rather obscurely appeared.

What nobody realized was that Craig Claiborne was going to become the most powerful force American food had ever known.

 

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The editor of the women’s page had always been a woman, and it had always been the custom at the Times to speak only sparingly of restaurants, and always politely. What had been noticed, vaguely, of the new, male editor was that he was a somewhat foppish Southerner with a distinctly literary style and an air of scholarly authority, but nobody high up had paid much attention to him till he pressed forward quite aggressively with his idea for this piece.

This was Craig Claiborne’s dream job. New York was where he was meant to be; his element, he’d felt it from his first moment; the glamour and the gaiety, so many chic women, so many such good-looking men, the dark hum of power unceasing under it all. The voice of the New York Times, the ultimate voice of authority, was now his. And he had more than a dream; he had a plan. He was going to teach America what good food was, and bad. With his intelligent and sympathetic criticism, a new excellence would arise.

He had looked forward to an exploration of fine dining in America’s leading fine-dining city, but New York’s supposedly best restaurants were proving quite a disappointment. Craig had been classically trained in cooking and in service at the best hotel school in the world, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he had learned there just how fine the degrees of excellence were that could be discerned by a well-trained palate and a discriminating sense of taste. He expected to find in the serious restaurants of New York a more than ample arena in which to exercise his critical faculties. The city had, after all, attracted a plethora of French and other European chefs brought up in the rigorous traditions of their homelands. The farms of northeastern America were capable of growing fruits and vegetables as good as those of Europe. The region’s pastures were rich and abundant. The Atlantic and its bays, sounds, and estuaries teemed with fish and shellfish. Jet planes could now bring to these shores fresh European wild mushrooms, truffles, Normandy butter, sole fresh from the Strait of Dover, even the matchless fishes of the Mediterranean—turbot, Saint-Pierre, loup de mer. Money was no constraint in the postwar boom years, and the topmost restaurants of New York charged accordingly.

By the end of his first year and a half at the Times, however, Craig was fed up. His experience of the city’s restaurants—with one exception—had ranged from dispiriting down. Though he longed to celebrate the greatness that he knew a serious restaurant could achieve, time and again he found himself stymied. He really believed in his mother’s old Southern maxim that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything. If a place displeased him extremely, his preference was not to write about it at all. When pressed by his editors, he would comment only with his native strained reticence. Of Maud Chez Elle his faint praise was that “It is to this establishment’s special credit that the beans were cooked properly.”1 One can picture him blinking in prim dismay at Trader Vic’s “Scorpion, a gardenia-bedecked potion served to four persons from one container equipped with four straws.” It seemed to pain him even to mention the Trader’s “Queen’s Park Swizzle and the Doctor Funk of Tahiti.”2 One easily deduces his thrill at covering the opening of a new branch of the Stouffer’s chain in Garden City, Long Island, of which he managed to observe that it had “a capacity for 586,”3 or the Continental Restaurant, in a shopping center in Paramus, New Jersey, where the closest he could come to saying anything nice was that “Opulence and a long menu are very much in evidence.”4

The great exception was Le Pavillon, a grand French restaurant in Midtown Manhattan descended from the French government pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens and now ruled by the tyrannical Henri Soulé. Soulé was a snob to the public and a despot to his staff, but when it came to the classic haute cuisine of France he was an exacting perfectionist, and the food that emerged from his kitchen was superb. Le Pavillon was not only the best restaurant in New York; it was considered among the best in the world. Craig loved everything about the place.

In early 1959, he had persuaded his editors that the extreme contrast between his standards, as embodied in Le Pavillon, and the reality of dining in New York anywhere else was a story he ought to spend some time on. Once he got the go-ahead, his reporting for the piece was exhaustive. Interviewing classically trained chefs, he found nearly all of them institutionally thwarted. They were bitterly angry over union rules, cheapskate owners, arrogant waiters. Some of the restaurateurs, chefs, and dining room staff he talked to were long since hardened to sloth and corruption. But at Le Pavillon he found precision, excellence, devotion, and cooking nothing short of sublime.

Having had so many bad experiences as a diner, and so sharing the anger of the willing but frustrated workers...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1439191506
ISBN 13 
9781439191507
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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