Memoirs of a Happy Man

By John Skow

The New York Times's food columnist confesses and celebrates

Never mind the notes, print the napkin, a visiting reporter thinks contentedly, as lunch at Craig Claiborne's eases toward coffee. Claiborne is a cherisher of food, a distinguished feeder who is himself a renowned cook, and since 1957 he has conferred distinction on the New York Times as its food editor. It has been said that this private house of his here in East Hampton, near the eastern tip of Long Island, is one of the best restaurants in the U.S. Claiborne repeats this bouquet in his new memoir-with-recipes, A Feast Made for Laughter (Doubleday; $17.95). But so light and joyous is his touch when he writes about food, and so much of the praise redirected toward his talented colleague, French Chef Pierre Franey, that his self-beguilement seems no more than just.

A bit more of the chicken, please, and another shred of the fish. A splash of the Chenin Blanc ... Perfect: a good, muscular working lunch. Serious but not pompous, the visitor tells himself, a lunch to give shape to the day. Claiborne, a soft-voiced Southerner with a little boy's grin, murmurs encouragement. Franey, a blocky, square-faced Burgundian who was chef at Manhattan's Le Pavilion restaurant during the proprietorship of the great Henri Soule, watches with approval.

The visitor is munching a newspaper column or two, the "60-Minute Gourmet" department on which Franey and Claiborne collaborate. Three or four mornings a week, Franey, who lives near by with his family, phones Claiborne. A menu begins to take shape from what is available in the local stores. Claiborne says that eastern Long Island has the best food in the U.S.

Today Franey arrived with bonito, a fine, 8-lb. or 9-lb. fish filleted to about 2 1/2 lbs. Breasts of chicken for supremes de volatile aux poivrons are at hand on the big, 6-ft. by 12-ft. marble worktable, along with peppers, tomatoes, fresh corn. Franey, who is wearing a tennis shirt and khakis, puts on a blue denim apron that matches Claiborne's. His dogs, a Labrador and a spaniel, array themselves on the red tile floor. He banishes to outer darkness a bottle of strong, dark Italian olive oil, with which Claiborne has been whisking up mayonnaise, and replaces it with a can of clear, rational French olive oil. He is ready. He halves a red pepper, halves a green pepper, skins and trims his chicken, sections his bonito, working with an utter absence of false motion, so that great speed seems unhurried. Claiborne sits at one end of the table, calling out questions (How much? How hot?) and taking it all down on an electric typewriter. There is no salt in the resulting recipes, of course, because Claiborne's doctors have ruled it out, but Franey cunningly lemons his way around the lack.

These friends have been working together too long for mere chaos to bollix up their teamwork, but in another household, anarchy would have triumphed this morning. A dozen riggers are outside, roping up a vast yellow-and-white tent. The phone is ringing. Workmen are running in and out. Claiborne has decided to give himself a big party on the weekend, celebrating his 62nd birthday (Franey is four months younger), his 25th year on the Times, and the publication of his new book. During a break, Franey comes outside to see the splendid tent. He asks where the band is to be. Claiborne says regretfully that he has canceled the band because it cost too much, $1,000. "I'll pay it," says his friend with a huge grin. "A birthday present. Call them back."

Claiborne's book is a bittersweet account, gloomy and flat in its boyhood recollections, buoyant and happy after his middle '30s, when he found food writing and the Times. He was born in Sunflower, Miss., and raised by a smothering Southern mother and an uncommunicative father (with whom he had an emotional relationship colored by their sharing a bed in the Depression years). Claiborne's present happiness is infectious, and this makes his book, on balance, a rare pleasure to read. He can date the moment at which he discovered gastronomy--a trip from Cherbourg to Manhattan in 1949 on the Ile de France--and the sentence with which he describes it lets the reader hear the unmistakable clunk of a man falling in love: "Never again has anything tasted so audaciously good as that young turbot with white wine sauce."

Now, in this memoir, he is so content that when he speaks sharply, it is mostly of the dead: Clementine Paddleford, for years the food editor of the New York Herald Tribune, "would not have been able to distinguish skillfully scrambled eggs from a third-rate omelet." He has no further ambitions. His friend Franey wants to start a country inn with his son Jacques, but Claiborne just wants to go on cooking and writing and eating. He lives in a showplace, and the friends who are coming to his party will have a chance to see it. "Edward Albee is coming. Governor [Hugh] Carey is coming.

Danny Kaye is coming. I love celebrities!" Who's cooking? "Thirty-eight of the best chefs in the country are coming. Paul Prudhomme, the best Creole chef in the world, is driving up in a motor home. [Restaurant Proprietor] Mike Tong is coming from Shun Lee West, the best Chinese restaurant in New York." How much food? "I told them each to bring food for 25.

What's 38 times 25?"

"Um, 25 times 25 is 625, and about half of that again is, lessee, food for more than 1,000 people."

"I've got 400 coming," said Claiborne, grinning his big grin. "That ought to be just about right." --ByJohn Skow

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