America's Grand Pooh-Bah of Food

By Mimi Sheraton

With his tall and portly frame, his gleaming bald head and jovial, Buddha- like countenance, James Beard was central casting's dream of a food writer come true. Almost until his death last week of a heart attack following a kidney infection, Beard, 81, remained a monumental and genial presence in New York City food markets and restaurants, where his passion for good eating invariably proved contagious. Displaying a grand flair for showmanship refined by early training for the stage, he created dramatic settings for his cooking classes, for his writing and entertaining, and for his superb collection of majolica and antique wineglass rinsers in his handsome Greenwich Village town house. The bold checks he favored for jackets and the inverness Sherlock Holmes coats he often wore accented an epicurean life-style that would have fit grandly in the Edwardian era.

Beard was unapologetically an American of the modern era, however, and in matters of food and drink helped to shape his own time to his own vision. He was the first of the durable food gurus, among them Julia Child and Craig Claiborne. In a career that spanned almost 50 years, he appeared in 1946 on one of the earliest television cooking shows and a decade later opened one of the first modern American cooking schools. The author of numerous newspaper and magazine columns and 23 cookbooks, he best displayed his penchant for simplicity in an early work, The James Beard Cookbook, published in 1959.

Dedicated to basic cooking for beginners, it proves that the simple need not be banal. Typical of his techniques is the use of flavorful herb and spice butters to accent carefully broiled fish and meat. Characteristically, he placed as much importance on a properly cooked and seasoned hamburger as on a delicate blanquette de veau. He practically invented the position of food consultant, advising restaurant owners on their menus and food manufacturers on their products. It was for this consulting role that he was occasionally criticized, especially when the products and menus he endorsed or created were lauded in his own articles.

One of the earliest champions of American food and regional dishes, as well as of outdoor cooking, Beard acknowledged in his autobiographical cookbook, Delights and Prejudices, that a strong influence on his career was his English-born mother. She operated a hotel noted for its fine food in Portland, where Beard was born. There he developed a love and understanding of the best- quality seasonal ingredients prepared with infinite care, no matter how humble a dish might be. Beard had wide and eclectic preferences in foods, ranging from caviar to Cheerios, from elegant Madeira sauces to marshmallows, from French quenelles de brochet to New England codfish cakes. He had a special liking for pork, sausages and sauerkraut, a combination he loved equally in the form of an Alsatian choucroute garnie or a hot dog topped with kraut at a streetcorner stand.

Mentor to dozens of young and would-be food professionals, Beard was just right for the role of pioneering good, honest cooking when fanciness in the U.S. meant Fannie Farmer tearoom aberrations or their equally dismal counterparts, pseudo-Continental conceits. For Americans uninterested in food, he began the process of making its subtle pleasures accessible. For Americans overawed by Europe's haughty haute cuisine, he brought good news of the merits to be found in the U.S. culinary heritage.