CHAPTER 9
PHEASANT SOUVAROFF, AN AMERICAN DISH
1950–1952
THE DUKE ELLINGTON ORCHESTRA sailed on the Île de France in April 1950. They were booked for nearly a week in the City of Light, to shake the walls of the stiff and blocky Palais de Chaillot, near the Eiffel Tower. Days before they arrived, Air France flew a Lockheed Constellation from New York’s Idlewild to Paris’s Orly Field in record time: eleven hours, eleven minutes, instead of the usual seventeen. Only four months into the new decade, the heart of the old world palpitated to the kick drums and turbines of the new.
James stepped off a plane not long afterward, descending the airstair to Orly’s tarmac. Also on his flight were Gene Kelly and Hollywood producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., a year and a half before the release of MGM’s An American in Paris. The French capital was already planning celebrations for its two-thousandth birthday in July 1951. James, with a flight bag over his shoulder, his suit jacket flapping open in the wind blowing across the plateau beyond the southern limits of Paris, was toting a sense of mission, a determination to excavate the past.
Brothers Sam and Jack Aaron, owners of Sherry Wine and Spirits on Madison Avenue at East Sixty-Second, had sent James here. The Aarons had toyed with the idea of opening a Sherry store in Paris, a showplace for French wines close to the source. More and more American tourists were streaming into Paris, queuing at the Louvre to gape at the Leonardos and Vermeers recovered from pilfering Nazis. Why not also show them the Montrachets and Haut-Brions in the house of Sherry, where the sales clerks smiled and spoke English and could arrange easy shipping home to Cleveland?
Sam Aaron was a Francophile who needed no excuse for sending one of Sherry’s men to Paris. Immediately after the war, he forged a friendship with the American wine writer and merchant Frank Schoonmaker. He took Sam on a personal tour of France’s wine regions, and for the past few years, Sam and his wife, Florence, had dreamed of moving to Paris, ancient center of wine, art, and joie de vivre. Sending James, the Aarons’ in-house bon vivant, to schmooze with restaurateurs and travel scribes and the wine elite could only build momentum for a Sherry flagship. Anyway, the Aarons weren’t the only ones picking up James’s tab.
After the war, Air France advertised its planes as chic, modern transport for Americans making pilgrimages to the motherland of cuisine. (A 1955 ad in The New Yorker showed none other than America’s original gourmette, Jeanne Owen, her disembodied head floating above a sketch of Nice, endorsing Air France as her favorite carrier to the Côte d’Azur.) When James was able to land a first-class flight to Paris with a tacit understanding he’d describe the food and service in some future piece for Gourmet, the Aarons agreed to put him up at Sam’s favorite small hotel off the rue de Castiglione, near Place Vendôme.
James had neither a checkout date nor a return ticket home, and he didn’t plan to spend a minute more than he had to in his official capacity for Sherry. He had bigger plans.
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ONE NIGHT IN OCTOBER 1949, three weeks before Simon and Schuster published Fireside, James had what he thought was his best idea of all time.
James was in Paris, at the end of a long wine-tasting junket with a group organized by the San Francisco chapter of the Wine and Food Society. They’d assembled a group of members (and a few invited food writers) on a three-week tour of France’s wine regions: Bordeaux, Burgundy, the southern Rhône, Alsace, Champagne. They met up with André Simon in Rheims and dined at Fernand Point’s La Pyramide in Vienne. Louis Vaudable, director of the famous Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, hosted a lavish farewell party for the group. Vaudable wanted to prove to his distinguished and influential American guests that, after war and Nazi occupation, Paris was open for business again, gleaming brighter than ever. Ironically, Vaudable himself had a brooding intensity. His long gangster’s face, tanned and leathery from unshielded terrace time at his villa above Nice, reset to a naturally savage expression whenever he relaxed his professional obsequious smile. Tonight, he orchestrated a theatrical, sensually overwhelming feast with one aim: seduction.
There were huge platters of greenish claires oysters from the Marennes-Oléron beds in Charente-Maritime, served with a riveting 1934 Montrachet. The white Burgundy continued through the next course: rouget en papillote, red mullet baked in parchment. “The red fish made a most dramatic appearance,” James wrote in a long, two-part report for Gourmet, “as they were rushed in encased in their voluminous paper coverings, and the aroma was overpowering as they were torn from their sheaths before eating.” Next course was Pheasant Souvaroff, Maxim’s glory dish with truffles and foie gras, baked in dough-sealed crocks cracked open at the table. Vaudable ensured that delicious smells would waft over the half-inebriated guests in waves. Waiters served a 1919 Château Haut-Brion, decanted from magnums. The taste seemed to reverse time, conjuring a France that existed before the war.
Before the Wine and Food Society trip, all James had had of Paris, foodwise, were aging impressions: memories from his six weeks there as a boy of twenty in the summer of 1923, before his food senses were keen. Then, James was more attuned to the astonishing freedom Paris offered, its indifference to shame in satisfying human appetites in a queer brothel or the nighttime restaurants near Les Halles, where butchermen in bloody smocks demolished plates of tripe and calf’s brains, washing away thirst and the reek of carnage with entire bottles of cool, violet-scented Beaujolais.
The affair with his boxer—his prizefightairr—in the summer of 1923 remained the single most electrifying sexual experience of James’s life. He’d relived hundreds of times in his memory the afternoon they had sex. The recollection was indistinguishable from Paris, the wider city: the strangely delicious blue smoke of buses; the early morning gossip and shrieking laughter of maids echoing down hallways in hotels of every class; the inextinguishable smell of ripened butter on one’s hands after ripping through a basket of horn-shaped breakfast rolls called croissants, a word unknown in the US. Vaudable’s operatic production—this grand fête de séduction—revived the scale of James’s memories.
This Maxim’s seemed a different place from the one he visited in 1923, when the fear of what it would all cost merged with the sneers of the waiters and the disappointment of the food. Tonight the restaurant looked exquisite, a kind of museum piece of the voluptuous grand époque Paris that Americans were suddenly eager to discover. The tracery of the windows and dark mahogany of the walls, so like Guimard; the nymph murals and plants in art nouveau pots.
That night at Maxim’s, James met Alexander Stuart “Sandy” Watt, one of the Parisians Vaudable had invited to mingle with the traveling Americans. Forty-year-old Watt had a face like that of the actor Leslie Howard: long and pale, with brows cocked in perennial bemusement, set in a forehead so high it looked as though his features had all slipped down gently over time and settled in a sympathetic pile just above his chin. He was lean but had a fleshy sensuality James found enchanting. He loved the soft edges of Sandy’s Edinburgh trill, his combination of wit and British public-school grooming.
Watt had spent nearly half his life in Paris. Like the fledgling American painter Richard Olney, the Iowa boy who would settle here in 1951, Watt loved French dishes both rustic and evocative of place—in Parisian terms, cooking expressive of its quartier, the neighborhood it simultaneously nurtured and helped define. He especially loved bistros: small restaurants with a zinc bar and sawdust on the floors and a loose ambiance overseen by a mom and pop, la patronne et le patron, working as chef and waiter. They were restaurants en famille, the sort James had known and felt least intimidating back in 1923. A love for them was one thing (actually the only thing) James and Watt shared.
Watt was born in Edinburgh in 1909, a son of the distinguished portrait painter George Fiddes Watt. Young Watt was restless. With his friend Jack Cowan, Watt took to the road in the late 1920s. They were two dashing young men with no money, just energy and charm.
They lingered in Switzerland and France. In 1930, Watt settled in Paris. He tried to find work as a writer on the gallery beat, as commentator and critic. He befriended artists. He spent long hours in the galleries and studios of the Latin Quarter and Alésia, and in Montparnasse’s quirky, squalid beehive of ateliers called La Ruche, where Modigliani, Léger, and Chagall had lived and worked. Paris was a laboratory of volatile ideas and expression: Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism. In magazines (Art and Industry, The Studio, Art in America) and newspapers (The Scotsman, London’s Daily Telegraph), Watt tried to make sense of these constantly changing movements for Anglo-American readers. And because bistros and cafés were where artists loitered, Watt got to know those, too.
“Before the war,” Watt would write in Paris Bistro Cookery, “it became a fashionable pastime to ‘collect’ bistros, much as one collects postage stamps.” In the 1930s, he began writing for the Telegraph about the places he’d collected, and he even plotted a gastronomic visitors’ map of Paris for the French National Tourist Office. As Paris braced for war in 1939, Watt retreated across the English Channel. In 1944, when the Allies asserted that peace had returned to Paris, so did Watt. In the wake of Liberation, as Paris tried to remake itself as a tourist destination—a center of art, cuisine, and couture—and the boulevards bustled with civilian traffic, Watt chronicled the city’s cultural reawakening.
And so, amid the fragrance of truffles and rouget released from the crimped-parchment balloons at Maxim’s that night, James sniffed opportunity.
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IN 1950, cultured Americans were hungry to taste the real food of Paris and the French provinces, dishes Continental restaurants could only approximate at best, even in Manhattan. Pâté en croûte, tournedos Rossini, bouillabaisse, soufflés: Americans had read about them in Gourmet, maybe even tried cooking one or two, using whatever substitute ingredients they could find (truffles from a can; fresh chicken livers instead of foie gras; good old cod for rascasse, Mediterranean scorpionfish). Americans in 1950 opened their pocketbooks to spend ten dollars (an almost shocking price) for ring-bound copies of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book. Those with refined tastes were also rushing to mail-order another ten for a cookbook from Gourmet weighing more than three pounds.
Published by the magazine, The Gourmet Cookbook was as thick and imposing as the New York Social Register. It had a vinyl binding with the texture of alligator skin, in library-shelf oxblood with gold embossing. You could personalize the cover with a monogram or a complete moniker, to save it from the indignity of being defaced inside with a scrawled name. Golden fleurs-de-lis floated across the endpapers. “Our recipes wear fancy dress,” read an ad for the book in Gourmet, “and they’re proud of it.” The Gourmet Cookbook was unapologetically opulent. To many Americans, opulence was the same thing as Frenchness.
The United States had gone to war to preserve a Europe of independent nations, in which Paris—virtually intact, physically, after five and a half years of war—was the jeweled and filigreed crown. Americans—and not just rich Americans—wanted to take a look at what they’d wrested from Hitler. Trans World Airlines would begin selling tourist-class tickets from New York to Orly in 1952, and crossing the Atlantic by ship had never been cheaper. Most who got to Paris wanted real French cooking, in restaurants that wouldn’t cheat them or try to pawn off horsemeat entrecôtes as beef. For that, they needed a guide. And Watt, it occurred to James that night at Maxim’s, was just the person to write one—naturally, of course, in collaboration, since it would be a guide with recipes, with James Beard, author of The Fireside Cook Book.
The timing seemed excellent. More and more, American travel books were blending practical, on-the-ground information with armchair narrative. Publishers were seeking writers capable of telling entertaining stories, not just dredging up history and listing museum hours. “The fashion in guidebooks is surely changing,” Samuel Putnam, author of the memoir Paris Was Our Mistress, wrote in his 1948 New York Times review of Horace Sutton’s Footloose in France. “Time was . . . when these compilations sounded as if they had been written by near-sighted antiquarians for long-haired esthetes. . . . The trend now is in the opposite direction, away from the dry-as-dust and toward the bright.” If anyone could tell bright stories about Paris, it was Watt, a writer connected to its artists and bohemians, its cooks and patrons who dispensed Pastis and café au lait from behind zinc bars.
So in April 1950, six months after that night at Maxim’s, when James stepped off the plane and walked thickly on the tarmac at Orly Field, technically he was on assignment for Sherry and the Aarons. Sheila Hibben’s stinging review of Fireside in The New Yorker still hurt. This book, James thought, would force them to eat a pointedly lavish dish of crow.
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JAMES’S ENEMIES WERE powerful, and their numbers were growing. Jeanne Owen’s proxy takedown via Sheila Hibben’s pan of Fireside in The New Yorker had been egregious and appalling. Before James left for Paris, Earle MacAusland booted him from Gourmet. His February “Spécialités de la Maison” column (a roundup of old-fashioned chophouses in New York City, including Keen’s and Gage and Tollner) would be his last. It was an outrageous expulsion, almost as painful as James’s exodus from Reed College, and for a similar reason. MacAusland found James too brazenly queer.
One afternoon, James and some members of Gourmet’s staff were enjoying rounds of the Oak Room’s famously stiff and delectable martinis downstairs from the magazine’s offices in the Plaza Hotel. MacAusland wasn’t there. Someone reported to him, though: James had talked too freely about being a homosexual. He lacked the proper discretion. This was ironic, since the Oak Room was well known among gay men as a safe place to gather, albeit with the proper decorum, and even pick up other men, as long as it all happened quietly and nobody touched.
MacAusland had already found James a handful. His copy was atrocious and messy: single-spaced sheets of digressions, personal associations, and the flaunting of proudly held prejudices regarding food that wandered wide before looping back to the ostensible subject. James had personality but no discipline. He gossiped all the time and now this, this . . . acknowledgment of a subject people in decent society should never publicly avow. It could besmirch the magazine and taint MacAusland’s personal reputation. James had to be cut loose.
Gourmet needed a cover story to explain James’s dismissal. It arrived in MacAusland’s mail: the Sherry Wine and Spirits catalog, featuring James Beard’s report of his recent tour through the wine regions of France with members of the Wine and Food Society. James had plagiarized himself yet again, with some material identical to his story running that month in Gourmet! MacAusland had his pretext for firing James literally in his hands.
For James, exile from the magazine merely reinforced what he knew: that MacAusland was a miserable son of a bitch. One of James’s closest gossip girlfriends, whom he spoke to by phone nearly every morning, was Ann Seranne, a bright, perky native of rural Ontario, Canada—James’s equal in gab, likewise discreetly queer—and an executive editor of Gourmet who’d studied food chemistry. Seranne would continue to be his source of intel on MacAusland’s movements: his alcoholism and yearly dry-outs at a dude ranch for reforming drinkers in Nevada; his affairs with women and battles with his wife. James found fresh delight in every report.
It was true, though: James struggled at the typewriter. His natural style was kind of monologist, explaining by accretion rather than paring down to an argument’s salient points. After an editor was through with his copy, there were so many pencil notations (deletion, transpositions, inserted words and phrases) they sometimes resembled worksheets of physics equations. His magazine assignments began to pile up. He needed help.
It came in the form of an old theater colleague from Portland. Isabel Errington grew up in Portland, started performing at Baptist Church suppers, and studied in the theater department of a women’s school, Mills College in Oakland, California. She met James after graduation in 1933, when both worked on productions for Portland Civic Theatre. James was working on costumes, Isabel in the properties department. One day at rehearsals, James fixed a snack for the crew in the backstage kitchenette: fresh peaches peeled, sliced, sugared, and inebriated with red wine (still technically illegal then, due to Prohibition). Isabel was amazed at how good and vaguely illicit the dish was, and how naturally and with what flair James seemed to toss it off. They became friends.
They worked together on several more productions, even had small acting roles in some of the same plays. Later Isabel wrote scripts for Portland radio dramas and directed James in a few performances of the Community Players before James moved east in 1937. Isabel moved to Chicago, where she helped produce a radio series for the Natural History Museum and married Ron Callvert, a writer, who landed a job in New York City, in the publicity department of AT&T. Isabel needed a job, too. When she looked up her old friend in Greenwich Village, James asked whether she might want to help with some magazine articles waiting to be kneaded into shape. He could pay.
If there was one thing Isabel Errington Callvert knew how to do, it was turning rambling rough drafts into scripts ready for the spotlight. She knew James’s voice, his stage voice. She knew and loved who he was in private. (Gay men percolated through the Portland theater scene. Isabel had always been unfazed.) She became James’s editor, which meant being his uncredited writing collaborator, which meant being a kind of stage director in print for the gourmet personality suddenly with a new masculine identity.
In late 1949, as Fireside was poised for release, James got a regular column in a quarterly journal published by the National Brewing Company of Baltimore, makers of National Premium and National Bohemian beers. Company president Jerold Hoffberger had some showy marketing ideas, including trotting out a one-eyed, thick-mustached mascot, Mr. Boh, and creating a coast-to-coast association of male gourmets under a wonky, comically ostentatious French name: La Société des Gentilshommes Chefs de Cuisine. He reached out to James to be a fixture of the society’s journal.
James contributed stories on manly subjects that carried a sense of style: party snacks, pepper mills, sandwiches, chicken sautés (recycled Fireside recipes, of course). National Brewing’s target consumers were reasonably affluent men who cooked as a hobby, their branding angle being that premium domestic beer could hold its own with French wine. This fit James’s emerging profile as America’s unfussy bon vivant, as much in love with a good club sandwich as he was with veal Oscar. The money was good (part of it was Isabel’s now), even though the editors sometimes changed his recipes in ways that embarrassed him. He did like the beer they sent.
James started a column on food and entertaining in Apartment Life magazine. And in its April 1950 issue (same month he touched down in Paris), Argosy magazine published James’s first “On the Fire” cooking column. Argosy had started publishing in the nineteenth century. It was the first pulp magazine, a mix of fantasy and true-crime narratives printed on cheap paper. In the 1940s, the format changed: semi-slick paper, and content tailored for men, with real-life adventure stories welded onto fiction. In 1948, Argosy had a new editor, thirty-four-year-old Jerry Mason, an alumnus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
Other men’s magazines—namely True and Esquire—presented misogyny dressed as wolfish sexual conquest, with a focus on acquiring knowledge of food and drink as a means of seducing women. Even M. F. K. Fisher, in her “An Alphabet for Gourmets” (serialized in Gourmet in 1948 and 1949), wrote in “B is for Bachelors” that few unmarried men “under the age of seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.”
Though its target readership was blue collar, Argosy under Mason had a more refined sense of male motivation. It celebrated masculine accomplishment (hunting, fishing, camp cooking) as a virtue in its own right, not as a source of wiles for vanquishing women. James’s “On the Fire” was a serious, straight-up cooking column, with a lack of gimmicky framing about he-men cooks or the superior male epicurean sense. James wrote about making barbecue sauce and marinades; grilling on skewers; cold broiled chicken for picnics and a green salad tossed on the spot (don’t forget your jar of homemade French dressing); and corn “cooked within half an hour after picking,” he’d write, roasted in the husk over coals.
James’s primary concession to heterosexual manhood would be his byline. At Mason’s insistence, in Argosy he’d be “Jim Beard.” And “Jim Beard” sounded a little like a guy who might tell a rich weasel like Earle MacAusland to go fuck himself.
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GRETE WAS AN AU PAIR when she met Sandy Watt. She’d come from Denmark on the wave of migration that washed uprooted Europeans and disaffected Americans into Paris after the war. Grete married Watt and moved into his apartment, a cavernous suite overlooking the Seine at 68 quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité. On the ground floor was the cluttered bookshop publishing house of Austrian refugees Martin and Karl Flinker. It was a quick walk to the Palais de Justice and the police headquarters that, hauled there in 1949 on a suspicion of theft, the expat writer James Baldwin called “the great, gray Préfecture.” When so many cities were bomb-rutted and shattered, Paris after the war seemed an island of calm and unbroken tradition. In fact, it was a nervous place, desperately trying to make itself into a modern tourist capital.
As spring turned to summer in 1950, the book for which James had an impressionistic vision at Maxim’s began to take shape. Over long lunches with wine in the Wattses’ high-windowed rooms, gazing at clouds whipped to soufflé heights drifting above the river and the Pont Neuf, the trees and slate-roof blocks of the Left Bank, they made rough sketches. The book would capture for the English-reading world the depth and movement of postwar Paris, the excitement of food in a place with a rooted culture refreshed by immigrants (Russians, Algerians, Poles). Together they’d write sketches of sixty restaurants, ranging from Maxim’s to the grubbiest sawdust-floored bistros, with recipes they’d flatter out of chefs and wheedle from rougher cooks. In the next six months, James would explore Paris in a way he’d been unable to do as a young man, using Watt’s entrée to bistros and his own Sherry connections, including wine expert Alexis Lichine, Claude Terrail of La Tour d’Argent, and of course Vaudable, for grander research.
And at night, on his own, James would explore a different city.
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PARIS AFTER THE WAR was a place where homosexuality was said to have been “rasait les murs”—literally, shaving the walls, creeping in shadows. After five years of German occupation, aided by French collaboration, the prewar openness to queer presence in certain bars and cafés and on the streets had mostly vanished. Like America under Truman and Eisenhower, France under De Gaulle adhered to strict gender roles as an act of patriotism, a display of moral strength in the ideological battle against the Soviets and Communism.
As De Gaulle’s minister of cultural affairs, the novelist André Malraux would direct a massive scouring of Paris’s great structures to make them clean for tourists, washing beautiful old patinas of grime from the sculpted reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe, even from the Gare du Nord. So, too, would French politicians scrub away things that smacked of prewar decadence. Though drag shows of French and North African queens persisted in Pigalle, it was a shadow of what had been. De Gaulle’s wife, a family-values firebrand nicknamed Tante (Aunt) Yvonne, oversaw the removal of the city’s vespasiennes, the circular metal stalls—semiopen street urinals—that harbored male cruising. Queer life in Paris went deeper underground.
In the 1950s, fashionable gay life centered on Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court in two famous cafés, Flore and Les Deux Magots. “Capitale du non-conformisme,” the magazine Futur called the quarter in 1952: the capital of nonconformity. “Le seul lieu de Paris où l’on peut se distraire selon ses goûts,” Futur wrote, the only place in Paris where one can carry on according to their tastes.
“The art quarters of Paris house people of every kind and nationality,” wrote the American radio host Osborne Putnam Stearns, in his 1952 guidebook with recipes, Paris Is a Nice Dish, “students, models, and a generous sprinkling of young Americans, many of them brilliant but erratic.” From Thursday to Monday, the public baths of the Left Bank were jammed with university students, some of them Americans studying under the GI Bill of Rights, who lived in cheap pensions that lacked tubs. “It doesn’t take long for even the serious student to lose his identity in that vitiating atmosphere,” Stearns wrote, “because the odds against him are overwhelming, no matter how talented or earnest he may be.”
James gravitated to Chope Danton, a Saint-Germain bistro with sawdust on the floors, a perennial throng of students from the nearby École de Médecine, carafes of Sancerre and Beaujolais on the tables, and solid bourgeois cooking. You could order chunky slabs of smoked ham warmed in cream sauce tinged pink with tomato paste, or pauchoise, a buttery stew of freshwater fish from Burgundy.
Most of all, James adored Brasserie Lipp, a fixture since 1871. Open until two a.m., it bustled with actors, university students, and the fashionable of Paris. Boys in blue jeans moved between Lipp and nearby Reine Blanche and Flore cafés. The crowd was neither obviously nor exclusively queer, but suggestively so.
James acquired a small circle of queer friends with whom he sometimes shaved the walls, or dined with, or with whom he visited Les Puces, the rambling weekend flea market at Porte de Clignancourt: Jan Barnes, an acquaintance from New York stationed in Paris for UNESCO; and André Quaintenne, who worked in publicity for the automaker Renault, which occupied an entire smokestack-covered island in the Seine in Paris’s western suburbs.
James could wander alone in the early morning hours through the massive central market Les Halles, observing men: sex-starved farm boys arriving from the countryside along with the cabbages and leeks; rough-edged butchers and fishmongers and fromagers. As dawn approached, he’d remove to a nearby bistro, order an omelet or choucroute garnie, the sprawling Alsatian dish of sauerkraut baked with layers of cured and smoked pork and sausages, then return to the market to watch the buyers arrive. James was alert to the promise of eroded edges in the wee hours, the sexual charge in an exclusively male realm, the exaggerated performances of muscle and bravado followed by ambiguous glances.
Over the better part of the year he was wedded to Fireside, James’s romantic life had wilted. Before he left New York in April, he’d met a Dutchman named Ate de Boer, a bar steward on transatlantic passenger ships for Holland America Line. De Boer was in his thirties. He had a lacquered swirl of light brown hair and surprisingly full lips set in a narrow face. He passed through New York occasionally, whenever his ship was docked. In Paris, James hoped to find a less fleeting connection.
In the spring of 1950, Horace Gibson, on vacation from his job at the Doubleday bookshop on Fifth Avenue, was making his first trip to Paris. Horace and James had met a decade earlier, when James was living with Jim Cullum near Washington Square; when Horace heard that James was in Paris, he sent him a note. James arranged an evening together at the Opéra Comique.
Horace spent his days sightseeing and his nights cruising for men, trolling the vespasiennes Tante Yvonne hadn’t ripped out yet. He had a morning tryst in the Bois de Boulogne with a young priest in a long black cassock and nothing underneath. And with an introduction from another friend, the editor Bill Raney, Horace called on Alice B. Toklas at 5 rue Christine. In her salon stacked with Picassos and Matisses, they sipped tea and nibbled scones Toklas baked for the occasion.
James and Horace heard soprano Janine Micheau in Gustave Charpentier’s verismo opera Louise, set in working-class Paris. Despite the presence in the audience of the seventy-six-year-old diva soprano Mary Garden, it was a less than magical performance—both preferred Grace Moore’s version at the Met in 1943. Afterward, James took Horace to Brasserie Lipp, to see the mirrors and leafy old botanical wall tiles and electric chandeliers of filigreed brass. James ordered his seduction dish: choucroute garnie à l’alsacienne. It appeared on an enormous platter, a mound of hot sauerkraut melded with pork fat, smelling of juniper berries and smoked ham hock. It was piled with porky meats: lean bacon and half a dozen types of sausage. They drank cool pints of beer, Kronenbourg from Strasbourg.
Gibson found it delicious. He did his best to keep up with James but failed. They met once again over Brasserie Lipp’s choucroute, the night before Gibson was to sail home on the Liberté. This time James ordered champagne and they drank to Gibson’s last night in Paris, and to seeing each other again in New York.
Meanwhile Ate de Boer, whose passenger liner had docked at Le Havre, took the train to meet James, who’d sent a telegraph to Ate aboard ship, inviting him to look him up in Paris.
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JAMES TRAVELED HOME in the first week of November 1950, on an Air France flight with a son of the deposed shah of Iran and the socialist French cabinet minister Daniel Mayer. James had spent six months in Paris. The Sherry Wine and Spirits store had gone nowhere, thanks to the certainty of implacable French bureaucracy and James’s inertia. James was determined, however, to see his Paris book take form.
From Paris, James had written to his friend Wendell Palmer, an editor who oversaw cookbooks in the New York office of the Boston publishing house Little, Brown and Company, with a brief proposal. It landed on the desk of Angus Cameron, a senior editor. Cameron thought the timing might be right for a Paris cookbook. French travel guides were selling, and James was a rising commodity—first-year sales numbers for The Fireside Cook Book were decent. Still, even with a million American tourists expected to flood Europe in 1951, there wasn’t the market for a food-focused travel book. The book with the working title Paris Cuisine would have to appeal to buyers as a cookbook, not a city guide.
Sandy Watt wrote almost all sixty restaurant entries; as a journalist writing about the city’s bistros for twenty years, the gig was baked into his bones. And since he was already friends with some of the owners, he was able to collect the bulk of the recipes. No surprise that James wrote the entries for his nighttime haunts in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Chope Danton and Brasserie Lipp) and for the food on Air France, the price of his flights. (He toured the airline’s kitchens at Orly and adapted three recipes from the corporate chef, Monsieur Chemery, all to be cooked and sealed in vacuum containers, just like at an airline commissary.)
As 1951 arrived, James’s focus was on the 158 recipes he and Watt (mostly Watt) had collected for the book. James’s task: to translate, interpret, and test them for the American kitchen. His apartment at 36 West Twelfth Street was mostly useless, of course, what with counter space no bigger than a coffee-table top and dirty pans and dishes piling up in the bathtub. (He drew the curtain and blasted the shower to spray away grime, but the drain was always backing up, leaving the dishes to stand in greasy water.) Fortunately, Wendell Palmer, his editor, lived nearby with his boyfriend, thirty-three-year-old piano teacher Paul Burke-Mahony (“Burki” to James), to serve as tasters and depositaries of leftovers. Ann Seranne was a frequent guest for trials.
Still, some recipes were too involved, or needed too much space. Since Cheryl Crawford was spending most of her time in New York, overseeing rehearsals for Paint Your Wagon (opening at the Shubert in the fall), James moved into her kitchen at Eastham in New Canaan, as he had for Fireside. Ruth Norman, quietly seething that James had paid her nothing for work on that book—he didn’t even acknowledge her assistance in print—stayed in the city with Cheryl. Isabel carried on with James’s pieces for Argosy, Apartment Life, and the National Brewing Company journal.
James tested and wrote through the summer, working with a typist, Inman King, a music-teacher friend of Burki’s. James made and perfected tripes à la Niçoise; puff paste and brioche; Brasserie Lipp’s choucroute garnie; pieds de porc St. Menehould (pigs’ feet poached, crumbed, and crisped under the broiler); even Pheasant Souvaroff, from that formative night at Maxim’s, adapted with canned truffles and fresh chicken livers instead of foie gras. James included a Souvaroff variation with chicken instead of pheasant—Poularde Souvaroff—and with mushrooms instead of truffles, cautioning, “You will not get the same flavor.” For a chocolate and hazelnut nougatine (actually a layered petit-four) from the bistro Chez l’Ami Louis, James had the chef and owner, Monsieur Antoine, air-ship samples to New York so he could taste them side-by-side with his adaptation and make adjustments.
Testing of the nearly 160 recipes for Paris Cuisine took seven months—about the same time it took James and Ruth to test more than 1,200 for Fireside. James had something extra to prove this time. He needed the recipes not just to work; he needed them to astound.
Making the recipes workable was harder than it seemed, since chefs’ directions were almost always sketchy. And French ingredients were either not available in New York or tasted radically different.
Foie gras and truffles were available only as canned imports. American cream had a butterfat content adequate for sloshing into mugs of coffee, not turning pan reductions into silken sauces. Concentrating veal stock into demi-glace was practically its own métier in France. French butchers had their own ideas about how to take down a side of beef (grass-fed, not corn-plumped), and the chasm between a fat American duck and a lean French one seemed as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.
“The fresh butter has another taste,” James would tell Jane Nickerson about trying to approximate Parisian ingredients in New York. “Vegetables and fruits, because they are grown in different soil and travel shorter distances, may be fuller flavored. The small, small peas the French so like are not offered in our markets.” He knew these dishes at the source. The transformation that happened to them on another continent—the degree to which even nominally identical ingredients, carrots or salt or wheat flour, changed because of where and how they grew or formed—was a revelation to James. It was the beginning of the winemaker’s notion of terroir extending to more than wines—indeed, to all the things the land produces in a defined region.
In later years, James would remark about how wrong it was for Americans to borrow French rules for the timing of meats, for instance. Authenticity was tricky; trying to duplicate another country’s food in America was impossible. Wasn’t it better to adapt a cuisine, as he’d begun to do in Fireside with French cuisine bourgeoise? To give it an American identity and make it something new?
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THE PHONE SOUNDED in Horace Gibson’s apartment in a graceful and decrepit old brick mansion at 21 Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of Washington Square. James was on the line. “I’m giving a birthday party tonight for a neighbor,” he told Horace, “and it just occurred to me that you might like to join us.”
It was the last day of January 1952, three months before Little, Brown would publish Paris Cuisine and more than a year since James and Horace faced each other across their second platter of choucroute at Brasserie Lipp, sealing with Champagne the promise of a future date. James’s affair with Ate de Boer had cooled. They saw each other whenever Ate’s ship docked in New York and he was bored enough to phone. With the call to Horace, James was excavating a flirtation from the past.
That night, Horace rang the street door at 36 West Twelfth, dashed up the stairs, and came to a stop. James was standing in the hall in front of his open door, poised to faire la bise, deliver a trio of Parisian greeting kisses on Horace’s cheeks. In the apartment behind James, however, Gibson caught a flash of shapely bare legs. They belonged to the birthday boy, Paul Burke-Mahony—“Burki”—originally of Boston (and first cousin to the handsome congressman of that city, John F. Kennedy). He was wearing shorts, never mind that the temperature outside was below freezing.
Burki lived with his boyfriend, James’s Paris Cuisine editor, Wendell Palmer, but, after James’s dinner and the birthday cake Ann Seranne made, he left with Horace, not Wendell. James poured himself and Palmer another round of Cognac.
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JAMES HAD NEVER SEEN a cookbook like the one in bound galleys before him. Of course, there were other Pacific Coast books. Lane Publishing, the people who put out Sunset magazine, pushed out titles for a regional audience with the frequency of Sears, Roebuck catalogs: what to do with abalone, Dungeness crabs, loquats, loganberries—things available in markets and from backyards only in states where the sun dipped below an ocean horizon. Then there was Genevieve Callahan, who left Sunset and wrote The California Cook Book of 1946. That book was nice. It was nothing like this.
Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, which Little, Brown would publish that spring, two months before Paris Cuisine, was unique. It featured historical research, by an author with a relaxed and confident expertise; a crisp, droll voice; and a zeal for eating. It had sensuousness and a polish that no fussy home-ec magazine editor could even get close to. Not Sunset’s editors. Not even Callahan.
Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, thought James as he pored over galleys Wendell Palmer delivered to his apartment, possessed style and a point of view. Like Elizabeth David, the English author who wrote of Mediterranean food as an expression of place, elevated above mere utility, Helen Evans Brown so completely understood. Browned scrambled eggs with avocado, Mexican roast loin of pork, and strawberries macerated in California Gamay wine: James had a wistful sense of kinship with this Mrs. Brown of Pasadena, California.
He wrote a jacket endorsement for the book, declaring himself a native son of the Northwest and therefore a natural ally of Helen Brown. He said he’d read her manuscript “with real delight and no little nostalgia.”
By March 20, 1952, publication day for Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, Helen hadn’t yet sent James a thank-you note for his kind blurb before a whole gushing letter from him arrived in Pasadena. He had to know everything about her.
: : :
PARIS CUISINE APPEARED in bookshops on May 15, 1952. Little, Brown hadn’t skimped on design or production. Well-known illustrator Vladimir Bobri did the dust jacket illustration in modern cartoon style: an architectural dish bristling with garnishes threaded on attelets (ornamental metal skewers), a throwback to Carême, posed on a waiter’s tray-stand draped with the tricolore, the French flag. Inside the book were more than a hundred Bobri drawings. James thought it was pretty, though with a price of five dollars (most cookbooks that size cost three), its sales were doomed. It didn’t help that Little, Brown was terrible at marketing. By 1957, five years after its release, they’d managed to sell only a bit more than 8,600 copies; it was still $3,300 in the hole for production costs. James had received an advance and was entitled to royalties, though it didn’t seem likely its sales numbers would generate any.
At the end of May, James presided over a book-release party in New York. Forty press and promotions people showed up at the Café Continental in the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel at Lexington and East Sixty-Third. Guests ate puff-paste turnovers filled with lobster à l’américaine, followed by roast chicken with cream and truffles à la Maxim’s, both recipes from the book. Waiters kept glasses filled with Tavel rosé 1945.
A few days later, the New York Times published an interview with James by Jane Nickerson, “The Flavor of Paris.” A month after that, the Times published a review of the book by Charlotte Turgeon. She liked it, though she thought James overestimated the shopping resources of the average American. “The transcription of the recipes is done with a masterly touch,” she wrote, “but a bit of Paris still mists Mr. Beard’s eye when he blithely suggests having the local butcher bone a chicken or duck or provide a piece of fresh pork skin.”
The review annoyed Osborne Putnam Stearns, author of the competing Paris Is a Nice Dish. He sent Turgeon a five-page letter objecting to her praise for Paris Cuisine. Turgeon told James privately of Stearns’s letter. “Such bitchery I cannot put up with,” James complained to a friend. “Hell, life is too short.”
Turgeon offered a capsule review of Paris Is a Nice Dish in her year-end cookbook roundup for the Times. She said it was full of “Osborne Stearn’s [sic] rather naïve impressions, culinary and otherwise,” which she found “in sharp contrast to James Beard’s sophisticated and exciting tour through restaurants which he describes in Paris Cuisine.” It was nice to have friends at the New York Times, James thought. The New Yorker was still enemy territory.
In August, Sheila Hibben rendered her judgment of Paris Cuisine. “A very reliable, if uncommonly pompous, guide to Parisian restaurants,” she wrote. She found the recipes accurate and easy to follow. It was everything else she hated. “It’s not the authors’ fault that they can’t write and that their kitchen French is shaky.” She compared the book unfavorably to a 1929 guide by Julian Street, Where Paris Dines. Though Street’s book was filled with restaurants that no longer existed, Hibben still found it “full of the humor, easy erudition, and broad knowledge that Paris Cuisine so depressingly lacks.”
It was an infuriating review, even more searing than Hibben’s roast of Fireside three years earlier. James knew that Jeanne Owen had a hand in it (both hands, judging by the number of knife cuts). That dig about the kitchen French: Who but Madame Jeanne would have noticed?
“Dear Sheila Hibben,” James wrote sarcastically to a friend. “Such a display of personal malice I have seldom seen since she reviewed the Fireside. She must love me with a fiendish passion.”
They could both rot in hell, along with Osborne Putnam Stearns and Earle MacAusland. James was proud of Paris Cuisine. There was nothing overtly autobiographical in it, yet it was his most personal book since Fowl and Game Cookery, eight years earlier; he’d lived every page. Besides, little did anyone—including Sandy Watt—realize James had assembled, at heart, an American book.