CHAPTER 8
THE COUNTRY OMELET OF NEW CANAAN, CONNECTICUT
1948–1949
THERE WERE SNOW FLURRIES when James met Albert Leventhal in the Sandpiper Press offices at Rockefeller Center in late January 1948. Leventhal could warm a room, though. He had ageless varsity bravado, with his short hair and tennis physique, his striped silk ties and Upper East Side tailoring. Leventhal was confident in a way that threw James off, making him feel somehow less than worthy. He was amusing, easy on the eyes, and he spoke James’s language. He told James how much he adored the almond soufflé at Gino and Bruno’s (what regulars called Quo Vadis on East Sixty-Third) and daily martinis at his regular table in the bar at the Restaurant Mayan downstairs, where he could look its mangy, flea-bitten stuffed jaguar straight in the eye. He charmed James and seduced him into signing a contract for the picture book of food Georges and Lily Duplaix had described in Palm Beach: The Fireside Cook Book.
Sandpiper’s The Fireside Book of Folk Songs was a national bestseller for Simon and Schuster in 1947. “Fireside” indicated a book for leisure reading, one you could flip through while lounging before a raging hearth, a radio concert on, as you lost yourself in the pictures. A fireside book on food would have to walk a careful line for a broad audience: practical recipes and informative descriptions for cooks, and lush language with evocative pictures for those who merely liked to eat.
James would write the text and provide a minimum of one thousand recipes, with shopping notes, a primer on wines and spirits, suggested menus, and a chapter all about the deep freeze, then the hottest subject in American food. All this for a flat fee of five thousand dollars (about fifty-two thousand in 2019 dollars)—flat, as in he would forgo all future royalties. He had just under eight months to deliver a manuscript.
It was sheer madness to sign; he could already hear Jeanne Owen’s reasons for why he was a fool. James needed money. Since his television program went bust, he’d been living mostly off what he made at Sherry Wine and Spirits, Jack and Sam Aaron’s shop at Sixty-second Street and Madison Avenue. James began working there as a part-time sales clerk in 1946. Two years later, the Aarons made him the manager of Alanberry’s, a small gourmet food shop they opened next door—a promotion, but still: James wasn’t getting rich. Five grand would see him through most of a year. (God knows he couldn’t live off the dribble of royalties from his existing books.) Besides, perhaps this Fireside book would make his reputation and lead to some future cache of gold. If nothing else, Simon and Schuster’s imprint would give his name luster and the book wider distribution, across all forty-eight states. Barrows couldn’t do that.
James had written books on niche subjects: hors d’oeuvres, outdoor cooking, poultry. This would be his first kitchen bible, a sprawling manual on how to cook everything. The task before him was stupendous and exhilarating. If he managed to get all the recipes tested in his telephone booth of a kitchen, it would be a miracle. He asked Ruth Norman to help.
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IN 1944, GEORGES DUPLAIX hired a deputy to help run Sandpiper Press. Dorothy A. Bennett was a thirty-five-year-old native of Minneapolis with quick eyes, a soap-and-water face, and short, sandy hair she combed simply, free of drama. Back home, she’d studied astronomy and anthropology and received a BA in English. In New York, she landed a job in the education department at the Museum of Natural History. She sat in on Margaret Mead’s night classes in anthropology at Columbia and eventually took a job as curator at the Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West. Bennett was brilliant, loved the outdoors, and had a scientist’s fidelity to order and precision. Also, she was a lesbian.
One day, Bennett and two female friends went to an auction, and, on a romantic impulse, bought a busted old covered barge on the murky Gowanus Canal, a slough of industrial-waste sludge in Brooklyn. They restored the boat with the assistance of Gowanus characters: retired sea captains, winos, junkies, and their assorted bohemian friends from Greenwich Village. Bennett and her friends lived on the canal until a storm sank their houseboat, sending it to rest in the toxic residue of the canal bed. She authored a 1940 memoir of the entire saga, published by Cadmus Books of Chicago: Sold to the Ladies! or The Incredible but True Adventures of Three Girls on a Barge.
At Sandpiper, she authored The Golden Almanac of 1944 and The Golden Encyclopedia of 1946. Albert Leventhal disliked her. He found her prickly and uncompromising, and her insistence on fixing small errors discovered late in the process had resulted in cost overruns.
In 1948, Duplaix let Bennett know she’d be responsible for a new project, another Fireside book, this one a cookbook by an author they hadn’t worked with before but, Duplaix guessed from looking at James’s books for Barrows, would need every bit of patience and precision Bennett could muster. Frankly, he told her, they were une catastrophe, a mess as bad as the Gowanus Canal.
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THROUGH THE END OF WINTER and into the spring of 1948, James and Ruth cooked and typed the Fireside manuscript. At the end of summer, Cheryl and Ruth bought a weekend house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a small estate near the country place of Cheryl’s good friend, the actor and Broadway star Mary Martin. Called Eastham, it consisted of two houses built about 1700 on Cape Cod. Someone in the twentieth century had had them shipped by barge to Connecticut and rebuilt as a single house on thirteen acres of garden and woodland. There was a stone-lined swimming pool set away from the house—perfect for skinny-dipping during summer visits from Cheryl and Ruth’s queer friends, including Tennessee Williams and his boyfriend Frank Merlo, the composer Marc Blitzstein, and of course James.
At Eastham, James and Ruth finished the testing for Fireside. They braised ducks with canned pineapple and green bell pepper, others with red wine and canned cherries. They broiled ducks, poached and steamed them, roasted them both stuffed and naked, and made an Americanized, barely sweetened version of duck à l’orange, the famous French dish of roasted duckling with a classic brown sauce flavored with sour oranges.
They cooked three dozen recipes for beef, from minute steaks to braised oxtail, another two dozen for veal, including broiled and sautéed calf’s liver, a blanquette, and a whole poached calf’s head with sauce gribiche. They cooked dozens of recipes for pork in all its fresh and cured forms—from chops and spareribs to boiled pigs’ feet and hocks (James’s favorite), from homemade sausage and salt pork to glazed smokehouse ham.
They waited for vegetables to come in at Walter Stewart’s. And as the frosts weakened and finally disappeared—and Cheryl Crawford’s avant-garde play A Temporary Island closed in March after only six performances, and Brigadoon at last came to an end in summer—Eastham’s vegetable garden (Cheryl’s joy) came to life.
Though Duplaix and Leventhal wanted a recipe bible from James, a thorough compendium of home cooking, vegetables would be the heart of the book, his most expressive recipes.
He invoked the artichokes growing in great coastal fields south of San Francisco. He wrote about chayote, which he came to know in Rio de Janeiro during the war as xuxu—carioca slang, cooed between lovers. He recommended corn by variety, picked and eaten within half an hour: early producing Golden Bantam and Golden Cream; Country Gentleman, a white shoepeg spun with knobby, irregular kernels; and, for city dwellers, midget cultivars to grow in a pot.
Still, Simon and Schuster insisted on a chapter about cooking with frozen vegetables, meats, and fish. “Not since the appearance of the first glacier,” E. J. Kahn Jr. wrote in The New Yorker in 1946, “has there been any phenomenon to compare with the frigid giant that is now looming on the horizon of the American housewife, in the shape of the frozen-foods industry.” In six months of that year alone, twenty-two shops devoted exclusively to frozen foods (some with windows flocked to look frosty) opened in Manhattan. By the end of the year, there were forty.
A 1949 survey revealed that three-quarters of American housewives had purchased frozen foods, and two-thirds of them served freezer food more than once a week. And it was affluent women, the ones who bought cookbooks, who relied on them the most. In 1946, Birds Eye, the company that traced its origins to Clarence Birdseye, inventor of the quick-frozen process, offered more than sixty types of frozen foods, from asparagus spears to mackerel fillets, and forequarter roasts of lamb to rhubarb.
In 1941, General Foods Company, Birds Eye’s parent, published the Birds Eye Cook Book, a thick promotional pamphlet with recipes. It touted the miracle of strawberries in January and corn on the cob year round, a world of industrial marvels capable of erasing the seasons. Despite himself, James worked out recipes for frozen squash with oranges, frozen green bean and ham hash, and frozen three-fruit compote.
James already had a relationship with Birds Eye and the publicity director for General Foods, Marjorie Dean, since they did pick up sponsorship of I Love to Eat! after Borden bowed out. James was grateful to the company, even though frozen cobs of corn were a sad substitute for fresh ones. Besides, he didn’t say that frozen ingredients were superior, only that they enabled “informal living”: the ability to cook up crabmeat salad, for instance, when unexpected guests showed up. As for convenient freezer dishes such as stews, pies, and cakes, James traced a line in the slush. “I am obliged to withhold my enthusiasm,” he wrote.
Unlike Jeanne Owen, who called for Birds Eye frozen raspberries in a recipe in one of her books, James didn’t mention the brand, though he did pack his frozen foods chapter with Birds Eye marketing points (courtesy of Dean). Convenience, lack of waste, true economy, and the year-round blessing: They were all industry concepts, calculated to overcome doubts about quick-frozen foods, which didn’t seem to many shoppers worth their elevated price. James sucked up his own ambivalence and skepticism, waded in, and borrowed freely from the language of the Birds Eye Cook Book.
A former sponsor, one that might prove useful in the future, was hardly someone to piss off. A boy had to eat.
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THE PROJECT WAS almost too ambitious—he was under contract to deliver a thousand recipes! James took a shortcut he considered necessary for survival. He plagiarized himself.
Of the approximately twelve hundred recipes in the Fireside manuscript, more than a hundred were slight tweaks of ones published in James’s three previous books, with perhaps only a single word altered. James cited permission from Barrows to reprint only one, the cheese croquettes from Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés. The others—nearly ten percent of Fireside—were brazen acts of self-plagiarism.
Thanks to Dorothy Bennett’s edits, Fireside’s “Outdoor Cookery” chapter is merely a refined new draft of James’s nearly identical introduction to Cook It Outdoors.
With no acknowledgment, grilled turkey legs and Mabelle’s Turkey Casserole (from James’s Portland friend Mabelle Jeffcott) migrated straight from Fowl and Game Cookery; marinated steak and steak sandwiches from Cook It Outdoors; venison burgers from Fowl and Game Cookery. Fireside’s squab recipes were word for word the same as in Fowl and Game Cookery.
In some cases, James did update or refine previously published recipes, adjusting cooking times or bumping up serving portions of meat, now that wartime rationing was a fading memory. Vichyssoise is identical in Fireside and Fowl and Game Cookery, except that in the latter James spelled it vichyçoise, the way Jeanne Owen did in one of her books. Herb-stuffed broilers were a tweak of Léonie de Sounin’s recipe in Fowl and Game Cookery. He added heavy cream and a pinch of thyme to Fireside’s clam chowder, otherwise it’s identical to his mother’s rustic original in Cook It Outdoors.
Still, why did Bennett and Leventhal turn a blind eye to James’s self-cannibalizing? Surely they heard echoes—at least—from his earlier books.
And yet, in their hands—with recycled material—James was beginning to articulate an original concept, of a new kind of American home cooking built on the bones of French cuisine bourgeoise. Louis P. De Gouy, the French-trained American chef who was Gourmet’s recipe editor, approached something similar in his 2,462-recipe The Gold Cook Book of 1947 (the year De Gouy died at age eighty-eight). But where the chef saw a juxtaposition of French and American dishes—cooks who would master both Brunswick Stew à la Dixie and Coq à la Bourguignonne—James was feeling his way toward a fusion of the two.
James loved the hearty, unfussy traditional cooking of mothers and grandmothers in France: pot-au-feu, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon. With Fireside, he began not only to use English names for some French dishes but also graft American ingredients onto the rootstock of French recipes. So he finessed a traditional French daube into Fireside’s Braised Beef, Peasant Style: in other words, pot roast, though with red wine, Cognac, and thyme.
This new American hybrid seems fully evolved in his Country Omelet: diced bacon fried with potatoes, onion, and parsley, added to beaten eggs and cooked to produce a flat omelet. James’s inspiration was omelette paysanne (“peasant” or “farmer’s wife’s” omelet), made with lard de poitrine salé, salted pork belly, a French staple. With American smoky bacon and an English name to reorient it, James created something new in Fireside: a dish that seemed to have roots with farmers in the Willamette or Susquehanna Valley, not villagers in the Rhône. American food.
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THE MANUSCRIPT JAMES DELIVERED to the Sandpiper offices late in the summer of 1948 was sprawling and chaotic. It was up to Dorothy Bennett to subdue it, to shape it into coherence. She had to ghostwrite most of James’s introduction in Fireside as though she were curating a food-history exhibit for schoolkids. Bennett combed through Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations to find food-themed maxims to sprinkle throughout the book, from Claude Mermet—“Friends are like melons . . . to find a good one you must a hundred try”—to John Gerard’s recycled Spanish proverb: “Four persons are wanted to make a salad—a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a counselor for salt, and a madman to stir it all up.”
It was Bennett, her mind grounded in scientific classification, who built a workable cookbook template for Fireside. It involved a basic master recipe (Plain Chicken Sauté, for example) with detailed technique notes, followed by variations, usually switched-out aromatics, cooking liquids, and garnishes (Chicken Sauté Italian, Provençale, Amandine, Herbed; with Mushrooms, with Paprika, and more).
When James finished, he had approximately eight hundred stand-alone or master recipes, with about four hundred variations on the latter. It was a revolutionary way to organize notoriously hard-to-use kitchen bibles. The lavishly illustrated Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, released almost exactly a year after Fireside, in September 1950, would use a system of master recipes similar to the one Bennett created.
Bennett shaped and polished James’s voice, making him sound like a spirited yet pedantic professor, as when Bennett had him quoting the Catholic novelist Ernest Oldmeadow (“Both wine and cheese represent man’s effort to transmute the perishable into the durable”). In his books for Barrows, James’s writing voice had been flamboyant and opinionated, full of rapture, eye rolls, and sass; it captured his speaking voice, which is to say it resonated with queerness (as it did on television in I Love to Eat!). Bennett crafted the professional, carefully filtered writing voice James’s future editors would preserve and continue to shape. For the myth, which would endure, of James Beard as an epicurean bachelor professor, Bennett delivered the rough cut. The cleaning and polishing of James into a commercial entity starts here.
The timing of James’s de-queering in public was no coincidence. Since the end of the war in 1945, gender roles in America had acquired taut boundary lines, and the backlash against queers was sharp. Even in the 1930s, New York City—especially in the enclaves of Harlem and Greenwich Village, and in pockets of Brooklyn—was more permissive of homosexuals, including those who identified as “fairies,” men who moved and talked, dressed and groomed themselves in ways that strayed from mainline American norms.
After World War II, though, the general tolerance for “pansies,” men who read as “effeminate,” withered in the Cold War’s frost, a patriotic adherence to strict gender expectations. James was the male author of a book on everyday cooking, a space reserved for women authors. Men did write cookbooks, but they were assertions of traditional masculinity: cooking as a tool to get women between the sheets, as in Wolf in Chef’s Clothing, a 1950 cookbook by Esquire food and drinks editor Robert H. Loeb.
It was no time to be anything but a sexless bachelor with a crisp, professional voice, too focused on work or the singular pursuit of fine living to think about marrying. And James, indeed, had been far too busy even to think about pursuing anything resembling a sex life. Perhaps when Fireside was all over, and he could travel. Sex was always easier abroad, in civilized places where people tended to shrug about such things. For James, harboring memories of the uninhibited city he tasted in 1923, Paris loomed as a place of release.
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ALICE TWITCHELL MET Martin Provensen in Los Angeles in 1943. She was an illustrator at Walter Lantz Productions, home to Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy. Martin had worked for Walt Disney: drafting character studies for the “Dance of the Hours” in Fantasia, designing a Russian folk-art scheme for an early vision of Peter and the Wolf. Both worked in a pop medium that riffed on high culture, toggling between Americana and classical European motifs. The couple married in 1944 and eventually moved to New York City, where an old friend from Disney, Gustaf Tenggren, was doing contract work for the Artists and Writers Guild. Tenggren introduced the LA transplants to Georges Duplaix, who in 1948 tapped the Provensens to illustrate The Fireside Cook Book. Duplaix also enlisted French art-book designer Guiton Chabance for Fireside, which was to be printed in a large format, on heavy stock with a subtle sheen, and bound in lacquered cloth.
In their New York apartment, the Provensens sketched and painted more than four hundred line drawings and thirty-six full-page illustrations in their Disneyfied style, and they even tested many of James’s recipes from the manuscript pages. For some chapters, they drew anthropomorphized animals as visual leitmotifs to unify the recipes: a dopey-looking turtle for Soups; a cuddly clone of the Easter bunny for Salads; and, for Poultry, a henhouse-raiding fox that looked suspiciously like Duplaix, with a snout as sharp as an awl and a taste for spit-roasted chicken. (The Provensens winked at Dorothy Bennett, too. In an illustration for cold-weather menus, a rainy urban streetscape features a billboard showing a woman rushing to the table, bearing a tureen for her waiting man. “Need a LIFT?” the billboard reads. “Bennett’s Vitamin Enriched Soup.”)
The Provensens also quoted from high art. They drew a leering troubadour composed of squashes, tubers, corn, and cabbages, echoing the creepy fruit and vegetable portraits by sixteenth-century Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. They placed their edible troubadour in a starkly receding horizon that borrowed from the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. They painted Cubist collages worthy of Georges Braque and a Disney cartoon pastiche of Grant Wood’s famous painting Dinner for Threshers. Every visual aesthetic seemed ripe for quoting: Parisian street tableaus from the belle époque, cowboy-film iconography, and Americana with the flavor of Lemuel Ayers’s clapboard-and-windmill sets for the original production of Oklahoma!, still in performance at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan.
The glossy book jacket pays homage to nineteenth-century American trompe l’oeil painter William Harnett. Against the grain of a wooden cutting board, the Provensens designed each letter of the words COOK BOOK as a still life of twisted herbs, vegetables, or fruits anchored to stiffer props (a cinnamon stick; olives on the branch). A leaf ravaged by aphids clings to the stem of a bruised and burnished little delicious-looking apple. Cover lines ramble across what look like torn slips of paper.
The jacket opened to reveal a poster-size illustrated chart, the flap copy explained, “to decorate your kitchen or game room.” It shows a lace-curtained window, through which a woman in a sunbonnet broadcasts feed to her chickens. In the foreground, fruit spills from bowls and baskets. All around them were lists of food categories: Meats, Vegetables, Pastry, Herbs and Spices, and more, an entire taxonomy displayed like a needlepoint sampler with quotes from English poet Matthew Prior and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Both sayings are about finding joy through eating. Embedded in so much Americana, they imply that pleasure at the table is critical to American identity.
James found the book very pretty. It gave him a new public face. He was now a leading American authority on cooking and the good life.
When he wrote a piece on carving for Gourmet’s Thanksgiving issue of 1948, James felt emboldened to call out the phony gentility of the gourmet crowd—“those whose first idea is elegance rather than function”—and the idea that one should never touch food with bare hands. He gave readers permission to grab and steady small carcasses; to snip through bones with carving shears. James was in control now. He gave his readers permission to take off their jackets and roll up their sleeves. He was eager to flee old rules.
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SIMON AND SCHUSTER released The Fireside Cook Book on October 28, 1949. Albert Leventhal splurged for a celebration lunch at Jack and Charlie’s “21,” with Georges Duplaix, the Provensens, Dorothy Bennett, James, maybe a dozen in total. They crowded around two pushed-together tables, in a haze of cigarettes, with the light flashing off the old silver trays and baronial tchotchkes propped on the shelf above the dark paneling. Black-tied young waiters in epauletted Eton jackets hovered around Leventhal, holding lit matches to cigarettes and pouring seven, maybe eight different wines, each in its own glass. They all drank themselves silly. James was ecstatic. His euphoria didn’t last.
Six weeks later, on December 10, The New Yorker published a devastating capsule review, unsigned but clearly by Sheila Hibben, the magazine’s food writer and a powerful friend of Jeanne Owen. The review called Fireside “as beautiful and elaborate a picture book . . . as the season is likely to provide.” That was the bright note; the rest was catastrophic.
She called it “enormously pretentious, repetitious, padded with bits of women’s-magazine anthropology.” It used bombastic language to cite platitudes about wine. The menus were absurd, mixing up hot- and cold-weather dishes. “The truth is,” Hibben concluded, “Mr. Beard simply doesn’t know enough.”
Who else but Jeanne could have poked at Hibben to spew such venom, and to strike James so personally? She knew better than anyone the extent of his recycling and plagiarizing, the knowledge he’d faked, copied, or just made up. She’d even spotted Dorothy Bennett’s rare mistake (the hot buttered rum and jellied broth business), when she didn’t catch the transposed page headings for warm- and cold-weather menus. Someone had to have sifted through Fireside minutely. This was an orchestrated takedown—in the magazine read by anyone who mattered in New York. The author of The Fireside Cook Book was no better than an amateur, a man who could cook but didn’t rise to the status of true gourmet: a poseur.
Hibben’s proxy hit for Jeanne hurt, because James knew there was truth in it. Maybe he didn’t know everything he claimed to know, but pretending was the game. The day after Fireside’s publication, the New York Times ran an interview with James by its food editor, Jane Nickerson. “Mr. Beard said that he came by his interest in cooking quite naturally,” Nickerson wrote. “ ‘My mother operated a hotel, so even at an early age I felt very much at home in even a huge kitchen,’ he explained.” James hadn’t lied. Elizabeth did operate a boarding hotel, though of course it was several years before he was born.
This business of being an authority was about acting the part. Jeanne and Hibben could go to hell. Besides, James was already onto something new, a stupendous project in Paris that would leave no one in doubt about his taste or expertise.
Although in truth, he’d be happy if it just paid his expenses to stay away from New York for a good long while.