CHAPTER 15
“MORE CAKES, MORE TASTES”
1961–1964
IN JANUARY 1961, James sent John Schaffner a slapdash outline for his memoir. It was an impressionistic heap of thoughts and recollections.
1. An analysis of good eating as against fancy eating. . . .
2. My mother and her fabulous food—what her old Chinese cook learned from her—she from him—her professional ability in management—her holiday preparations—winter storage—incredible picnics—preserving ideas. Our beach living and the wonderful raw materials available to us. Recipes, naturally, with nice little bits and pieces of anecdotal prose, I trust.
Above all, it needed to be amusing.
“My feeling,” James wrote, “is that the book should be completely uninhibited without being bitter.”
James was due in Houston for a series of cooking demos for Cognac. He asked Schaffner to write the book proposal for him, based on his jottings. “Make notes,” James told him, “then either dictate a letter to Pat or send it back to me for editing.”
Pat was Alfred A. Knopf Jr., son of the fearsome Alfred A. Sr. and Blanche Knopf. In 1959, Pat left his parents’ publishing house, and with Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn launched an imprint of his own, called Atheneum. As 1960 wore on, Pat Knopf and his partners were building Atheneum’s author list. Meanwhile, sales of Dell’s James Beard Cookbook were exploding. Pat was keen to add James to his list.
In the first week of 1961, Knopf met James and Schaffner for lunch, to talk over possible books. James talked about the memoir he wanted to write. He even had the title: James Beard’s Delights and Prejudices. He and Knopf shook hands. All Atheneum needed to draw up a contract was a book outline.
A week after James sent Schaffner his jumble of notes, Schaffner had a proper proposal for James to review. It began:
to be entitled
JAMES BEARD’S DELIGHTS AND PREJUDICES
by James A. Beard
The book would open with a description of one of James’s memorable luncheons in France, perhaps Auberge du Père Bise in the Haute-Savoie, or Fernand Point’s La Pyramide in Vienne, and go on about restaurants in general. “I could branch out in various directions,” wrote Schaffner-as-James, “allowing myself latitude in time so that I could skip about between past and present to provide anecdotes from my own experiences to bolster my arguments.”
It was to be a book of essays sparked by reminiscences. They would ignore linear time, bouncing from past to present and back again, the way one does in conversation. There would need to be recipes.
“While I do not conceive of this as a cookbook primarily,” Schaffner/James wrote, “a generous index of the recipes would assure the reader that he could easily use it as such.”
James made three changes to Schaffner’s draft. He crossed out a reference to his work “as representative for the Cognac interests”; he added the word much to amplify the “colorful material” he’d gathered from students in his cooking school. For the chapter on James’s mother, Schaffner had written, “I would here give many recipes which I had from her and from her cook and there are of course many happy reminiscences of my childhood which could be included.”
James scratched out the word happy.
: : :
“I NOW HAVE AN OFFER from Pat Knopf,” James told Helen. “It is just the kind of book I’ve wanted to do for ages[,] with plenty of narrative attached and what recipe came from where and . . . why I like it.” He hoped to take two or three months in Europe to rough out the manuscript. Travel almost always revealed to James who he was.
At the end of February 1961, James signed the contract. The manuscript was due on January 1, 1962. He had asked for a $5,000 advance, but that would have necessitated approval from Pat Knopf’s partners, and Knopf was worried they might turn down a book so unusual in scope: not a straightforward cookbook, a standard essay collection, or a formal autobiography. Instead, Knopf gave him $3,500, payable in seven monthly installments—essentially an allowance. James would be able to afford to go to Switzerland to write.
In May, a week after his fifty-eighth birthday, James sailed alone aboard the SS United States, with his typewriter. He would go to Paris and Lausanne, then Venice and Vienna, with detours to Paris, London, and Bordeaux.
In June, James arrived in Lausanne. He had a room at the Hotel Central-Bellevue, with its fine old façade of balconies and shutters, cavernous belle-époque brasserie facing the street, and terrace restaurant at the rear, on the shore of Lake Geneva. From the terrace, he could see the lake recede in the east through a progression of mountains like ivory layers in a Chinese puzzle ball.
“I’m getting some work done,” he reported to Helen. “Yesterday I worked solidly for six hours. Looking over the lake and having no distractions is a fairly good idea.” The day after arriving in Lausanne, he met up with Alexis Lambelet, a man who worked for Nestlé. They went to the Saturday market that sprouted under awnings in the streets. “Peasanty and fabulous,” James noted in his datebook. His mind was open to the past. “Last Saturday we went to the market and had a whirl,” he reported to Helen. “There were tiny new potatoes such as mother insisted having all her life.” He returned to Alexis’s apartment on the rue du Simplon, across from the train station, and cooked them with sausages for lunch.
In the six weeks James stayed in Lausanne, he saw Alexis often, usually for lunch or dinner at his apartment. They went to the ballet. When James wasn’t at Alexis’s, he often took his meals at the Grand Chêne, an antique brasserie in the Lausanne Palace Hotel. Fancy Swiss cooking had proved disappointing. James preferred simple food: the Grand Chêne’s braised pigs’ feet with Madeira, or grilled kidneys.
Like Portland and the Oregon coast, Lausanne had a setting both rugged and refined, a place with the perennial feeling of a frontier. At the small Saturday market in Lausanne’s Old City, farmers set out marble-size potatoes and kohlrabi the color of jade, cherries so freshly picked they had a dazzling gloss. Fruits, vegetables, and flowers spilled from crates and bins set on steep sidewalks. A little square on the hill above was where butchers and charcutiers, cheese vendors and fishmongers set up. No American city had anything like it. Here was a weekly outdoor food market flowing into the life of an urban center.
In Lausanne, James felt as though he’d slipped into an archetype of the past, where crystalline air sharpened the colors and smells. He moved through a landscape of memory, wiped of the loneliness and emotional ambivalence of his actual childhood. He thought of the characters in his life—his father, Jue Let, Harry Hamblet, and especially Elizabeth—in a new way, as the symbols of an American past gone extinct through forgetting. Gearhart and Salmon Street would serve as the sets for his grand fable of reconstruction.
“I have done about sixty pages of manuscript—and extra size pages so far,” James told Schaffner in early June 1961. “I have not reread any of it. All I know is that some of it flows like water and some is difficult.” James feared that Isabel wouldn’t be up to the task of this book. James needed the right editor to prune and graft his mess of tightly spaced typed legal-size pages into the brilliant book he was so eager to author.
By November, Pat Knopf was demanding to see part of the manuscript that was supposed to be due just two months later, on New Year’s Day of 1962. Knopf had wanted to publish Delights and Prejudices in time for the 1962 Christmas shopping season. Schaffner begged for an extended deadline.
“It depresses me no end,” Knopf told Schaffner. “I don’t see how we’re in any position not to extend the deadline . . . but please consider my incipient ulcers.”
What could Knopf do? James’s name now had national reach—and something almost unheard-of for cookbook authors: the upper hand over a publisher. Knopf gave James a three-month extension, until March 15, 1962, though he doubted he’d see the manuscript then.
: : :
THE WORLD JAMES HAD KNOWN was dying fast. The previous July, he’d eaten again at the place he once considered the best French restaurant in the world: the late Fernand Point’s three–Michelin-star La Pyramide, south of Lyon. Point had died in 1955, but his widow, Mado, kept the restaurant going as a tribute. James found it mediocre and moribund. The old garnitures were gone; the foie gras mousse en brioche and the terrine en croûte were both flabby; everything seemed overworked. It was all rather sad, James reported to Helen, this holding on to dead classics. Paris was as lovely as ever, but the food he loved was all but gone. “The good restaurants are becoming fewer and fewer,” he told Helen. “It is shocking what the Coca Cola age has done to the world!”
That October, Judith Jones, an editor at Knopf who worked mostly with translators of French authors, phoned up West Tenth Street. To her surprise, James answered. “I have a remarkable manuscript,” Jones said, “and you’ve got to look at it.” She described a book Knopf was about to publish, a sort of detailed translation of classic French cuisine for the American home cook: the inflexible rules, plus the ingredients an American cook was allowed to substitute for French ones.
“He seemed intrigued,” Jones later recalled, “saying he would love to see a copy, and hoped he could help.” It was by two French women, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, and one energetic American, Julia Child, and it had a magisterial title: Mastering the Art of French Cooking. James had heard of Bertholle and Beck (everyone called her Simca)—in 1952, the same year as Paris Cuisine, they were coauthors with James’s friend Helmut Ripperger of a sixty-three-page spiral-bound recipe booklet called What’s Cooking in France. The publisher noted up front that the recipes had been culled from a future, more comprehensive work—no doubt this was it. James had never heard of Mrs. Child. Jones sent the manuscript to West Tenth.
Two days later, James called Jones. “He just devoured it,” she recalled. “And he said why it was remarkable.”
The French book was wonderful, he told Helen, “until they get into the chicken and meat department and then I think it falls flat on its face.” French rules be damned. “The idea of cooking a piece of American boiled beef for four hours is insane. Paula [Peck] did a pot au feu for twelve people the other night and the beef cooked 1½ hours and was perfection.” Cooking a filet to 136 degrees Fahrenheit and expecting it to turn out rare? Absurd. And all the chicken recipes were overcooked. “Otherwise it is a great book,” he told Helen. “Nothing new or startling, but a good basic French cookery book.”
James told Jones he wished he’d written Mastering the Art. Was he merely being affable? Jones knew there was a vast difference between James and Julia. “He had a different mindset,” Jones would say of James. “He wasn’t Julia.” Like June Platt, Julia was fussy and inflexible when it came to recipes. James cooked by feel. He was at his best improvising—tasting and adding bits of this and that.
James said he’d do what he could to promote Mastering. He asked what Judith was planning. She seemed unsure about what to do. “I’ve never done a cookbook like this before,” she said. The essential thing, James said, was to get the authors to New York. He’d organize a party. He’d present them to everyone who mattered.
Julia was already in the United States; Simca arrived a few weeks later. (Bertholle remained in France.) James invited Julia and Simca to drop in at West Tenth Street to observe one of his classes.
“Welcome, ladies,” James addressed them in front of his students. “You have written a wonderful book.”
James began to demonstrate a cheese soufflé. As usual, he folded the beaten egg whites into the base with his bare hands. “That’s the only good way to fold in the whites,” he announced. “You’ve got to feel it with your fingers.”
Simca was horrified—this was not how it was done in France, where anything but a spatula and the proper flick of the wrist was unthinkable. Julia was unfazed.
James empathized with Julia—they were both, in their particular way, oddballs. A year later, in 1962, he took Julia to the Culinary Institute in New Haven to speak to the students. No one had heard Julia speak on television yet—The French Chef would debut almost a year later. When the culinary students heard her high, breathy diction, several of them snickered. James knew how it felt to be what they called curious.
James asked Dione Lucas to host the party for Simca and Julia at one of her restaurants, The Egg Basket, near Bloomingdale’s at Lexington and Fifty-Ninth. “Jim personally invited what was then a very small nucleus of food and wine people and magazine editors,” Jones recalled. The party, a sit-down dinner for thirty, teetered on the brink of disaster. Both Henry Sell of Harper’s and Poppy Cannon said they’d come. “Dinner was held a half hour for them,” James reported to Helen. “They never showed!” Craig Claiborne declined to attend, but Clementine Paddleford, June Platt, the wine importer Julius Wile, and Vogue’s Marya Mannes all showed up. Also Julia’s friend Avis DeVoto, and William Koshland of Knopf, but neither Alfred Sr. nor Blanche Knopf.
Jeanne Owen was there. (“The look she gave me,” James said, “would have killed a weaker person.”) Her presence upset Lucas, who had a migraine—“so she said,” James noted in a catty aside (it was rumored that she drank). Lucas cooked sole with white wine sauce. Julia and Simca did braised shoulder of lamb, then came Lucas’s salad and what James called the worst Bavarian cream he’d ever eaten. “Dione told me she had never done such a terrible one!” he reported to Helen. Wile pressed James to get up and say a few words about the Bollinger ’55 Champagne they were drinking; James told him to get Owen to do it. She begged off. Too shy, she said.
“Shy—shit,” James fumed to Helen. “She never had a shy bone in her body. She would have laid someone in the streets if he couldn’t have made it up to her room in her prime!”
The next day, James took Simca and Julia and Paul Child to The Four Seasons for lunch, for a tasting of dishes for the winter menu. They met Joe Baum and Albert Stockli. They ate Cheddar soup, barbecued pork loin, and individual coffee soufflés, and drank wines from California and High Tor, a vineyard forty miles north of New York City and a mile west of the Hudson. Whether or not Mastering the Art of French Cooking was to be a big hit, James found he adored Simca and the Childs (even Paul, whose personality took some time to come to life). Claiborne’s major opus, The New York Times Cook Book was also just out, and Craig had gotten a sweet deal—all the rights were his. In just three months, nearly thirty thousand copies had sold. Claiborne was going to be rich. Some people had all the luck.
The more James existed in his own past that winter, as he tested hundreds of recipes for Delights and Prejudices, the more the world seemed to be hurtling toward a future he didn’t recognize. His book would be about the deepest part of himself—his past—and yet there was so much that would have to stay hidden. But what if he could express the past not as a series of events but as a history of the things he’d tasted?
Not long after the launch party for Mastering the Art, Pat Knopf was irritated—it had been a month since Schaffner answered his last letter, about giving James until mid-March to deliver the manuscript of Delights and Prejudices. “I wonder if some of Jim’s bad habits aren’t rubbing off on you,” Knopf wrote. Schaffner begged for more time. “There might not be much point in pressing Jim for a March deadline, since for all the times I have known him I have observed that while he always eventually meets his commitments, he has to do so in his own time and his own way.” And this book was different. “This is a work that he cannot knock out to order,” Schaffner said, “as he would do with a cookbook.”
Meanwhile, James had some news for Helen. “John Ferrone is doing the book with me and we are beginning to get somewhere,” James wrote. “John senses the idea of the thing at once and I feel confident that it is going to take shape from now on. That is[,] if the phone ever stops.”
: : :
THOUGH HE WAS TWENTY YEARS younger than James, Ferrone was still part of a generation of homosexuals who were careful about what they admitted about their lives, and to whom. To be exposed as queer would destroy your career and your reputation, and of course leave you vulnerable to arrest. Most lesbians and gays who lived in the Village lived with fear. They lived behind walls of discretion, but even there they parceled their lives into separate boxes.
A 1963 front-page exposé in the New York Times aimed to shock readers with the revelation that homosexuals were starting to seep from a depraved underground into the ordinary life of the city. “The city’s most sensitive open secret—,” metropolitan reporter Robert Doty wrote, “the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness—has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders and the police.”
“In Greenwich Village,” Doty reported, “a center for the bohemians of the homosexual world, one real estate management concern estimated that about one-fourth of the 245 apartments in its West Village buildings were rented by homosexuals.”
And yet, like James, a queer could insulate his private box with others like him. “A New York homosexual,” Doty explained, “if he chooses an occupation in which his clique is predominant, can shape for himself a life lived almost exclusively in an inverted world from which the rough, unsympathetic edges of straight society can be almost totally excluded.” The challenge for James was being a public person: to bear his new fame as the Dean of American Gastronomy and the face of the popular James Beard Cookbook, holding a platter of choucroute garnie on the cover—in addition to making at least a dozen appearances a month and keeping his emotional center in the inverted world.
It was John Schaffner, at the end of 1961, when Delights and Prejudices was nothing but a mess of badly typed pages, single-spaced on thin, crackly onionskin paper—“just a clump of patches of writing”—who thought of asking Ferrone to do battle with it.
In Ferrone, James would find the ideal accomplice: an editor who did major sculptural work on James’s copy (and occasional ghostwriting) and who had as much at stake as James did in keeping secrets. Ferrone was cautious by nature. He feared that James, before meeting Gino, took risks (he pursued men a bit too openly, and was indiscreet). Ferrone would use his discretion to help James craft Delights and Prejudices into a memoir “uninhibited without being bitter,” as James’s original prospectus promised—one that elided James’s feelings of ambivalence and depression, emphatically erased his loves, and expressed all emotion in relation to eating. He pulled pages from the top of James’s stack. “Ah,” he said, “this would make a nice ending.” The onionskin paper James used for typing made editorial marks impossible. Ferrone would have to retype everything. As James told Helen, Ferrone had sensed the idea of the thing.
Ferrone understood that what James had pounded out on his portable typewriter in Lausanne wasn’t a typical memoir but rather a fable, a kind of bildungsroman, the story of a character’s artistic and psychological growth. Only James’s was a narrative about his burgeoning awareness of taste as a force that anchored him in the world. James’s favorite bildungsroman, one of the novels he loved best, was Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, featuring a young woman—Thea Kronborg—who, convinced of her own genius, leaves a dusty town in Colorado to become a great opera singer in Chicago, and eventually New York.
: : :
“AS I TOLD JIM over the phone,” Pat Knopf wrote to Schaffner in March 1962, “those two chapters are miraculous.” John Ferrone had shaped James’s thoughts into the first two chapters of Delights and Prejudices: his family’s history, his mother’s boardinghouse, her stormy relationship with Jue Let, and the memory of the feel of cold chicken jelly on James’s throat. “They’re beautifully done, full of marvelous material, and if they begin to represent what the rest of the book will contain, I could only be happier if the entire manuscript had come in December.” All Knopf wanted was for James to turn it into a real memoir: to note the dates when everything happened—“the placement of the exact years,” he wrote.
James and Ferrone added three or so date markers to the first chapters, most of them vague. Then, in April, before James departed for a monthlong tour of Asia and the Middle East, they delivered the manuscript to Atheneum. Knopf had objections. James’s original proposal had listed chapters devoted to his school, on his experiences doing cooking demos across the country, and on wine, but they were missing from the book on his desk. Besides, Knopf complained, the latter part of the book, in which James shared his thoughts on the proper way to barbecue, and the best way to throw a party, strayed from the memoir angle of the book’s beginning. They were, Knopf said, “involving themselves too much in advice and too little in reminiscence.” What he was looking for was the kind of charming memento Atheneum was getting ready to publish in fall 1963: The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook.
That book was to be Rudkin’s sweet and conventionally nostalgic account of growing up in late-Victorian New York City, before adapting to country life on a Connecticut farm, from which she launched her famous commercial bakery. Children’s book illustrator Erik Blegvad would decorate it lavishly, with whimsical sketches: an old stone grain mill, cats in a rambling country kitchen, pilgrims arriving to the first Thanksgiving, and plush loaves of white bread. It was a fake, really, a shameless plug for the Pepperidge Farm Company stuffed into a gingham frock and tied with ribbon. It was reminiscence with one purpose: to sell a brand. James and Ferrone had delivered to Atheneum a subtle bildungsroman about discovering taste.
James, writing to Schaffner from the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, was furious. “I certainly feel that he has a book,” James wrote, “and if he doesn’t like it we can peddle it somewhere and give him another.” He might consider adding one more chapter, “but I’m not going to make it the Complete Biography of James A. Beard.”
Schaffner again tried to placate Atheneum. “Your objection is, I know, that he has skimped on the life of James A. Beard,” he wrote Knopf. “His reply is that he was not writing an autobiography but a series of reminiscent essays about his experiences in his chosen field.” Schaffner suggested the compromise James had floated: an added chapter or perhaps several new passages inserted into existing ones. If Knopf didn’t like it, James would have no choice but to pull the manuscript, return the advance, and look for another publisher.
Knopf stood firm.
“Pat Knopf insists on more and more material for the book,” he reported to Helen, “but he offers more money, so I am thinking it over. . . . He will not give it up and says he will publish it as is if I insist, but begs for one or more chapters.”
James relented. “Going to extend the book about three chapters,” he told Helen. “It won’t be out now till spring of 64 or fall of same year. I don’t care—I’ll get another trip out of it this way.”
: : :
LOU BARCARÈS WAS a long, low house—an old Provençal country house, or mas—of thick stone and a tile roof, with a stable at one end and seven acres of farmland. It lay just outside the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, twelve miles from Avignon and fifty-five miles from Marseille. It was here, in early May 1963, that James came to finish Delights and Prejudices. He found the mas through friends, Bill and Donna Fifield, who lived nearby. Lou Barcarès’s propriétaire was Yvonne Baudin. She lived onsite in her own quarters with her eighty-six-year-old mother and twenty-year-old son. James’s apartment had two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen with an ancient gas stove.
James had begun Delights two years earlier in Lausanne, with a view across Lake Geneva to the French Alps. Now he was in this old Provençal mas looking onto Les Alpilles, a chain of low limestone mountains—bleached and rounded, worn by the mistral—with patchy stands of pine at their feet. There was a gravel terrace where James could grill, ringed with a rock wall where lizards scrambled when you passed. The air in June smelled like sun on lavender, serpolet (wild thyme), and scrubby weeds. James tried to capture the essence of the scent by steeping lavender flowers in alcohol, but it was poor cologne. It was as if James had lost the ability, or maybe just his appetite, for the distilling experience. “I go struggling on blindly,” he wrote to Schaffner.
His struggle with Delights and Prejudices, his immersion in a past that sometimes seemed too heavy to resurrect, had left James raw. His life in New York—the classes, his consulting for Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia, and regular deadlines for House & Garden and others—had made James’s life more reckless and chaotic than ever. His relationship with Gino had changed: Increasingly, their lives ran on parallel tracks. In December 1963, James’s emotional paralysis worsened. “My mood is becoming more and more depressed,” he’d confessed to Helen, “and I don’t even want to live much any more. And I suppose I’m just getting into an emotional bath of some kind—but I sure don’t give a shit.”
Finishing Delights in a place without a telephone was one reason for this trip. Another was simply to get away.
Yet James had worked diligently since arriving. On Saint-Rémy’s weekly market day, he rose early and walked to the Place de la République for asparagus, tiny potatoes, and strawberries. As always, food was James’s restorative.
He found dark-crusted levain, rice from the Camargue, and green-gold olive oil from a mill near Les Baux. He bought white and rosé wines in refillable ceramic-topped liter bottles from a maker in the Alpilles, a Monsieur Pol. Madame Baudin and her son raised free-range chickens that delivered eggs with yolks of a rich orange color; they grew tomatoes, peas, and garlic, still green and mild in June. “Ate like a nut five pieces of garlic bread!” James recorded in his datebook, meaning he smeared five slices of levain with moist green young garlic from Madame’s garden and devoured them for supper with hunks of tomato and sausage.
On his portable typewriter, James banged out a rough draft on eating in Provence for House & Garden. He mailed it to Isabel and began another draft on English food. He wrote the extra pages for Delights.
By the middle of his second week at Lou Barcarès, James’s typewriter ceased clacking. “I think I have finished the book,” he recorded in his datebook. The next day, he was certain he had. “Sonnez la trompette!” he wrote—sound the trumpet! “Weeeeet!” He celebrated by going to Arles and enjoying a lunch of roast fowl and a Gigondas 1959 he noted was superb. James saw the Fifields and went to a party at the house of Jean de Beucken, who’d written a new biography of Cézanne.
And yet it was a summer of disappointments. He found three-Michelin-star La Baumanière overrated. “The gigot is beautiful and good but not three stars,” he noted in his datebook. He cooked a pot-au-feu but found the local beef lacking. “Our meat is much better for it really,” he jotted. “The marbling is best to keep it juicy.”
At the last minute, William Templeton Veach, James’s American expat friend who lived on an old farmhouse estate in the Loire valley, decided he couldn’t come south after all. It was the same with Elizabeth David. In May, she suffered a breakdown, James told Schaffner, “and was sent to the hospital for two weeks and then made to stay in bed for another fortnight.” (In fact, David had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, probably brought on by stress. “She does a great deal of overworking,” James noted to his agent, “and getting upset with editors—this is her great downfall.”)
James had so wanted David to visit him in this part of Provence, a landscape she knew well. “However,” he told Schaffner, “there has been so much change in some things I am afraid she might have been saddened.” Even here, supermarkets and factory-made baguettes were obliterating the past, remaking the world in shiny plastic.
Ferrone then arrived, to finish Delights. “John seems to feel that we have found the additional material for the book and has cut some and let some remain,” James reported to Schaffner. “I hope to God Pat is satisfied this time for I think we have given him all that should go into that particular book—and more!” And then they thrashed out material for James’s next book for Dell.
: : :
DELIGHTS AND PREJUDICES is a book about James finding his authority in the world, his artistry and sense of mission. James shaped memory to serve the narrative. Gearhart and the garden at Salmon Street became romantic sources of the world’s immanent beauty and wisdom. Taste is the revelation of a delight that exists within things: Dungeness crab, oysters, butter, huckleberries, corn, strawberries, peas, all in a perfect state. They all had spiritual force for James, one only he—with his gift of taste memory—could feel.
Before, James had used the term taste memory to mean simple recall—the thing, like hearing a song on the radio and being transported to the past, or overcome with feelings you’d put away: nostalgia charged with emotion, like the zap of electrical current from a faulty cord. (“For an art as transitory as gastronomy,” he wrote in his appreciation of M. F. K. Fisher in her 1954 omnibus The Art of Eating, “there can be no record except for a keen taste memory and the printed word.”) But in Delights and Prejudices, taste memory takes on the status of a rare gift.
“The ability to recall a taste sensation, which I think of as ‘taste memory,’ ” James wrote in Delights and Prejudices, “is a God-given talent, akin to perfect pitch, which makes your life richer if you possess it. If you aren’t born with it, you can never seem to acquire it.” And he says that growing up on food that had no particular feeling attached to it is crucial for being able to taste properly. “Not all taste memory is accurate,” James writes. “Many people think of Mom’s apple pie or Grandmother’s dumplings as delicacies that cannot be equaled today. These memories are associated with happy times, and to the untrained palate the pie or the dumplings seemed delicious.”
But since James grew up largely a stranger to happiness, at least at the table, “I think I developed an accurate taste memory early in my life. I was not sentimentally attached to the cooking of any one person at home, and we ate in restaurants a good deal.” It’s a sad revelation, the opposite of nostalgic platitudes in books such as Margaret Rudkin’s. There, learning to make biscuits or a chocolate layer cake is an act of intergenerational bonding, if not love, as a grandmother reveals her precious secrets to a child.
Years later, Ferrone would write that, “For Beard, food was autobiography.” No wonder Pat Knopf was frustrated with the manuscript for omitting the usual elements of memoir: It isn’t one. The beginning of Delights and Prejudices was like an orchestra tuning up before a majestic overture. “When Proust recollected the precise taste sensation of the little scalloped Madeleine cakes served at tea by his aunt,” the text goes, “it led him into his monumental remembrance of things past. When I recollect the taste sensations of my childhood, they lead me to more cakes, more tastes: the great razor clams, the succulent Dungeness crab, the salmon, crawfish, mussels and trout of the Oregon coast; the black bottom pie served in a famous Portland restaurant; the Welsh rabbit of our Chinese cook, the white asparagus my mother canned, and the array of good dishes prepared by the two of them in that most memorable of kitchens.” In Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator’s taste of Madeleine crumbled into tea reminds him of an act: his aunt Léonie, on Sunday mornings when he went into her room to say good morning, giving the boy a taste of tea-soaked cake. It was a treat, a kind of benediction—an act of love. For James, remembered tastes conjured not acts of human connection but a seemingly endless chain of other tastes.
With Ferrone’s literary help, James built a myth of himself as a man so focused on eating that nothing else mattered. So many of the actual people in his life—like Gino, or Ferrone, or any of the half-dozen of his closest friends—would have to be stripped out, beyond the inverted world of open secrets the Robert Doty article revealed. It was easier to paint himself as a single man intent on solitary conquests of food.
For the dust jacket of Delights and Prejudices, illustrator Earl Thollander painted an image so apt it became an indelible rendering of James. The setting is the beach at Seaside, with a view to the waves and tree-covered Tillamook Head. We see James from behind, seated alone at a table on the sand. It’s been laid with a white cloth. James is holding open a menu and ordering from a white-jacketed waiter without even making eye contact. The sheer volume of space and the landscape dwarf James. You imagine him enduring a lavish and lengthy meal with only the scenery for company. There is no one in James’s life to share his moment of rapture.