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

McNamee, Thomas

 
9781451698442: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451698445 ISBN 13: 9781451698442
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

“A big juicy dish bubbling with scandals and rivalries, thickened with oft-told secrets, chock full of random bits as if a boxful of mementos had been upended into the stew. Dig in, and it is likely to persuade you that this Clark Kent of a food editor really did exert superpowers on the cultural life of twentieth-century America” (The Washington Post).

In 1957, America was a gastronomic wasteland. One man changed all that.

From his perch at the New York Times, Craig Claiborne led America’s food revolution. He took readers where they had never been before, and brought Julia Child and Jacques Pépin to national acclaim. He introduced us to the foods and tools we take for granted today, from crème fraîche and balsamic vinegar to arugula and the salad spinner. And he turned dinner into an event—dining out, delighting your friends, or simply cooking for your family.

But the passionate gastronome led a conflicted personal life. Forced to mask his sexuality, he was imprisoned in solitude and searched for stable and lasting love. In The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat, acclaimed biographer Thomas McNamee unfolds a new history of American gastronomy and reveals in full a great man who until now has never been truly known.

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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...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451698445
ISBN 13 
9781451698442
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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