16. Writing

I SERVED my food-writing apprenticeship at a stove in Time/ Life's test kitchen. Craig Claiborne had agreed to write the text for the volume on Classical French Cooking for the company's well-respected Food of the World series. He asked Pierre Franey and me to choose the dishes for the book. Although coming up with a list was no problem, neither Pierre nor I had ever worked with actual written recipes for classic French dishes. We'd learned to prepare them as apprentices through observation and imitation.

Time/Life solved the twin problems of acquiring the text for the recipes and the color photographs that were to illustrate them by hiring me to go into their kitchen studio and cook. While the photographers set up their cameras and lights, I cooked with a bevy of editorial assistants peering over my shoulders, recording every move and measurement on steno pads. There was none of the fakery or shortcuts that food stylists frequently used at the time to get appetizing-looking photographs. Everything had to be real because it was going to find its way into the text of the book, and it wouldn't do to have our readers deploying blowtorches to get the skin of a turkey that perfect hue of brown, using shaving cream instead of whipped cream, or brushing everything with oil to make it shine.

Occasionally, I felt as if I were cooking in a time warp. For the cover shot, we decided to do a chaud-froid of chicken, a complex, highly stylized buffet dish made famous by the great French chef Carême. The last person I had prepared a chaud-froid of chicken for was M. Aicardi under the Félix Gaillard government.

But I dutifully set to work, first poaching two capons slowly in a stock of vegetables and herbs. After they cooked, I removed the skin, carved the four breasts from the carcasses, and sliced them into medallions. I made a mousse of goose liver, whipped cream, cognac, and seasonings and placed it on each side of the breastbone of one capon to re-create its original shape. I spread the remainder of the mousse on the reserved medallions. I clarified some of the stock to create a clear aspic, and I reduced the rest of the cooking stock, transforming it into a velouté with a bit of thickening. A little of the aspic was added to the velouté to make a chaud-froid sauce, so named because although the sauce is prepared hot (chaud), it is served cold (froid). I coated the medallions of chicken and the whole re-formed chicken with the sauce and decorated the surface of the medallions with little daisies made of blanched leek greens and truffle pieces. The next step was to coat the medallions and the chicken with aspic. Finally, the medallions were layered on top of the chicken, and the extra aspic, by then set, was cut into small, diamond-shaped dice and arranged around the capon on a silver platter. From beginning to end, it took two days to prepare my chaud-froid.

The photographer stood over the dish and shot it from above. Everyone oohed and aahed about how beautiful the photograph was.

"What the hell is that?" said the editor-in-chief when he saw the photo. They sent me back to the kitchen for two more days to replicate the dish for another photo shoot.

That time the photographer shot the chicken with a silver bucket and a bottle of Champagne next to it. "For balance," he said.

"Champagne makes the book look too upscale for our intended audience," said the editor-in-chief.

I had to create the dish for the third time, which was fine with me. I was getting a per diem fee.

***

MY METAMORPHOSIS from chef to writer had its roots in one of the many small arguments I had with Helen McCully. It involved, of all things, poaching an egg.

"Americans have no idea how to do it right," Helen announced in her kitchen. "You should show people how to poach eggs, to turn carrots, peel asparagus, wrap a fillet of fish in dough ... and many other of your techniques that you just take for granted."

She devised a format that was tailor-made for a young man who was well versed in cooking technique but deficient in many of the fine points of English composition. The series of articles she proposed for House Beautiful-was going to feature short pieces that relied heavily on step-by-step how-to photographs. The writing that accompanied them would take the form of expanded captions. At first Helen corrected most of what I wrote, but as time went by she gave me pointers and I pecked out my columns on the same clackety manual typewriter that had produced my essays at Columbia. Eventually my name appeared at the top of the page. I was a magazine columnist.

One lunch hour when I was behind the counter at La Potagerie, Diane Harris, an editor at Simon and Schuster who had seen me on What's My Line?, approached me and asked if I wanted to write a cookbook.

"A soup book, of course," she said. "Everyone's dying to get your recipes."

Because of the success of La Potagerie, I worried that I was getting a reputation as "the Soup Chef' and didn't want to pigeonhole myself.

"I'd love to write a cookbook," I said, "on any other topic."

"Well, on what, then?" she said.

"How about a book about the type of food I cook at home for my friends and family?" I said. "Simple, familiar French dishes."

In a few weeks, she sent me a contract, which I signed and returned.

I finished the manuscript in six months. It was a tough schedule, but I was determined to meet the deadline, and I did. After a couple of months, I dropped Diane a short letter inquiring about the manuscript's status. She replied neither to that letter, nor the next, nor did she return any of my phone calls. Six months later, I still had no news from Simon and Schuster, which was frustrating, to say the least.

At Craig's house in East Hampton I met Herb Nagourney, president of Quadrangle Books, the New York Times book company. He was spending the weekend at Craig's with Ann Bramson, a freelance editor who would later become his wife. I suggested to Herb that the technique columns and accompanying photographs that I was doing for Helen in House Beautiful could be turned into an interesting new type of cookbook.

There was a complication, however: my contract with Simon and Schuster gave them the right of first refusal on my next book project. Herb suggested that I write a letter demanding that they revert the rights to me, but instead of doing so, they printed the book I had written earlier. A French Chef Cooks at Home reached the bookstores in the spring of 1975.

There was still the issue of their claim to my next book.

"Just send them the proposal. Give them sixty days to respond yes or no," said Herb.

I followed his advice and got a prompt response from Simon and Schuster. They had absolutely no interest in the technique book.

I had not planned to include recipes in La Technique, as it would be called, although I ended up with about one hundred. The book was dedicated to showing each exact step involved in more than 150 basic cooking techniques, and it grew from the battered folder containing my teaching notes. Initially, I had anticipated needing four hundred to five hundred photos, but as I got into the book, the number of pictures grew to one thousand and eventually to fifteen hundred. After I had worked on the manuscript for a good year, Ann Bramson came on board as my editor, and the book was finally published in the fall of 1976. When the time came to sell paperback rights to La Technique, Simon and Schuster, who had so resoundingly turned down the project originally, led the list of bidders. They issued the book in paperback, and it stayed in print for the next twenty-two years.

***

MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE was moving into high gear, and I found myself buried under a growing mountain of detail: editing and recording recipes, making travel arrangements and managing my teaching schedule, and bookkeeping.

"This has to change," Gloria said. "You need an assistant."

We placed an ad in the local paper and received two promising applications. One came from a woman who had just sent her children off to college and was eager to reenter the workforce. She lacked clerical experience but was pleasant, cheerful, and eager, and had the ever-ready sense of humor that is a prerequisite for anyone who is going to spend much time in my company, professional or otherwise.

The other candidate was a woman named Norma Galehouse. She was extremely well qualified in every way. She was interested in food, and her lengthy résumé even included a job as the editor of a company magazine. Gloria and I weighed the two candidates. In the end we decided that Norma Galehouse was just a little too professional to fit into the shoot-from-the-hip atmosphere of our business. Her obvious efficiency was a little frightening. Better to take on someone less set in her ways. We hired the other candidate.

By the middle of the first day, we realized the woman would have to go.

But neither Gloria nor I had ever fired anyone. And this employee was as hardworking and pleasant as she could be. It wasn't her fault she couldn't type, spell, or keep accounts.

"I guess you're going to have to tell her it's not working," I said to Gloria.

"Me? Whose assistant is she?"

A week went by with no improvement in the woman's performance, except that she was getting more friendly and cheerful every day. Her delight in having that job was exceeded only by her incompetence. On Friday afternoon, I handed her some handwritten recipes to be typed for an upcoming class. She took one look at me and burst out in sobs.

Gloria had found the nerve to dismiss her on the spur of the moment, obviously without mentioning it to me.

I put in a call to Norma, and she agreed to come aboard. We clicked from the first day. Without a competent assistant, I could never have undertaken my grandest and most adventurous book project, The Art of Cooking, in two volumes, acquired by Judith Jones, a well-known editor at Knopf, and serialized in Gourmet magazine.

I wanted each section of the book to feature a beautiful dish first, and through the making of the dish, explain the techniques involved. It was a huge undertaking, and from 1985 to 1988 Norma and I worked flat-out on the book. I cooked everything from roasted woodcock to pommes soufflées (souffléed potatoes), and rarely seen charcuterie dishes such as blood sausage, sweetbread pâté, and cured and breaded pig's feet. I hired and befriended a local photographer, Tom Hopkins, who came to each of the cooking sessions we scheduled, and he photographed me as I worked, taking hundreds of photographs as I cooked through fifteen to twenty dishes a day. I wrote and rewrote the recipes with introductions; Norma made sense out of my scribblings and sent a typewritten mini-manuscript after each session to Judith, who started on the editing.

***

MY WRITING CAREER might have been taking off, but sadly, that of Craig, who had done so much to help me get my start in the United States, was in rapid decline. As a restaurant reviewer, Craig was not only tireless but scrupulously fair-minded, a disciplined professional who was respected by his readers and restaurateurs alike, and rightly so. Craig was the first American to take restaurant reviewing seriously. He invented the vocabulary of restaurant criticism still used in this country. Before Craig, there had been none. It is his legacy to America.

So it's unfortunate that Craig is often remembered as the person he became toward the end of his life, bitter and struggling with a host of mental and physical afflictions, fighting a losing battle against alcohol and innumerable demons of his own making. Craig had one sworn enemy—himself.

I first noticed the change in Craig one night when he, Pierre, and I joined another friend, Ann Seranne, a cookbook author and food consultant for whom Craig had worked, for a car journey out to New Jersey to see about finding a kennel to house the championship Yorkshire terriers Ann owned. Ann was a beautiful, sensitive woman, and for no reason at all, Craig began ranting at her, somehow interpreting her perfectly natural desire to have a first-class home for her dogs as a severe character flaw.

"You're a consummate control freak, Ann," he said. "Everything has to be just perfect for you, doesn't it. You have to be right all the time. Well, people are getting tired of you..."

Several times, I tried to interrupt, but Craig raised his voice and continued his tirade. By then, Ann was crying. If anything, that spurred Craig to greater heights of insult.

This turned out not to be an isolated incident. Everywhere I went in New York, I heard stories of Craig's erratic behavior when drunk. He got mad at the Times and walked out in a snit, under the mistaken belief that his name was more powerful than the newspaper's.

To prove his point, he spent a great deal of his own money to launch a food newsletter. But the fans failed to materialize, and Craig, with a bigger chip on his shoulder than ever, was forced to retreat to the Times, only to stomp out the door a second time.

His lengthy and mutually profitable writing partnership with Pierre also ended badly. Craig expected Pierre to maintain the same workaholic schedule that he did. As book and article projects piled up, Craig and Pierre were spending so much time together that rumormongers began to suggest that their relationship was more than just professional—which, as any attractive woman who had ever spent more than a few moments with Pierre would testify, was totally off the mark.

By that time, Pierre's column in the New York Times, "60-Minute Gourmet," had become a popular fixture; he was writing books with other collaborators such as Bryan Miller; and he was branching out into television, working for PBS. Essentially, he was becoming more successful than Craig, and that created a serious strain on their friendship. Eventually, their collaboration of several decades fell apart, and each went his own way. It surely couldn't have helped Craig's self-image when I started writing a monthly column of my own, "The Purposeful Cook," for the Times.

Craig's life was falling apart in other ways as well. His jovial, long-time companion Harry Creel was struck by a car and killed, a devastating loss. Craig and Harry had met when they served in the navy and had been together ever since. Harry was just the sort of stabilizing force Craig needed in his life. He was a well-padded, Southern good old boy, and about the only person Craig knew who wasn't an accomplished cook. But that didn't stop Harry from lending his particular talents to Craig's dinner parties, scrubbing pots, pans, dishware, and crystal, in his role of "the Dishwasher King."

In an era when being out of the closet was both rare and not without risk, Craig was always open and casual about his sexual orientation. His memoir, A Feast Made for Laughter, detailing the sexual abuses he'd suffered from his father as a child, was intended as a catharsis, but it failed to enthrall readers and got a mostly negative critical reception, which pushed Craig deeper into his black mood.

All of us were worried about our old friend.

***

WRITING was an extension of my teaching career, in many cases a natural outgrowth of classes that I was presenting at cooking schools on my travels around the country, a productive way to fill the days when I was at home. As the sales figures for my books climbed, I saw that writing was a way of reaching a vastly larger audience than teaching could provide. In a good week, a few dozen students would attend my classes, but a single printing of one of my books would reach tens of thousands of readers. Also, being a published author made me more in demand as a teacher, and face-to-face sessions with cooking students resulted in fresh ideas and increased book sales. Writing and teaching were symbiotic.

But this dynamic pattern of work was nothing compared to what happened after Marjorie Poore, the executive producer at the PBS station KQED in San Francisco, approached me one spring evening in 1988 following a guest appearance I'd made on Martin Yan's show.

"I'd like you to tape a series for us," she said.

Chicken Salad à la Danny Kaye

YIELD: 4 SERVINGS

 

TO MOST AMERICANS, Danny Kaye is remembered as a splendid comedian and actor. I think of him as a friend and one of the finest cooks I have ever known. In every way, Danny was equal to or better than any trained chef. His technique was flawless. The speed at which he worked was on par with what you'd find in a Parisian brigade de cuisine. Danny taught me a great deal, mostly about Chinese cuisine, his specialty.

Whenever I traveled to Los Angeles, Danny picked me up at the airport and took me to his house, where we cooked Chinese or French food. His poached chicken was the best I have ever had. His method was to put the chicken in a small stockpot, cover it with tepid water seasoned with salt, peppercorns, and vegetables, and cook it at a gentle boil for only 10 minutes, then set it aside off the heat for 45 minutes. As an added touch, he always stuck a handful of knives, forks, and spoons into the cavity of the chicken, to keep it submerged. The result is so moist, tender, and flavorful that I have used the recipe—minus the flatware—ever since.

 

CHICKEN

1	chicken, about 3½ pounds
½	cup sliced carrot
1	cup sliced onion
1	small leek, washed and left whole
1	rib celery, washed and left whole
1	teaspoon salt
¼	teaspoon black peppercorns
2	sprigs thyme
2	bay leaves
	About 7 cups tepid water, or more if needed

DRESSING

2	tablespoons Dijon-style mustard
1	tablespoon white wine vinegar
1	teaspoon finely chopped garlic
¼	teaspoon salt
¼	teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½	teaspoon Tabasco hot pepper sauce
5	tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

GARNISHES

1	dozen Boston lettuce leaves, cleaned
2	dozen fresh tarragon leaves

FOR THE CHICKEN: Place the chicken breast side down in a tall, narrow pot, so it fits snugly at the bottom. Add the remaining poaching ingredients. The chicken should be submerged, and the water should extend about 1 inch above it. Bring to a gentle boil, cover, and let boil gently for to minutes. Remove the pot from the heat, and set it aside to steep in the hot broth for 45 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the pot, and set it aside on a platter to cool for a few minutes. (The stock can be strained and frozen for up to 6 months for use in soup.) Pick the meat from the chicken bones, discarding the skin, bones, and fat. Shred the meat with your fingers, following the grain and pulling it into strips. (The meat tastes better shredded than diced with a knife.)

FOR THE DRESSING: Mix together all the dressing ingredients in a bowl large enough to hold the chicken salad.

Add the chicken shreds to the dressing and toss well. Arrange the Boston lettuce leaves in a "nest" around the periphery of a platter, and spoon the room-temperature chicken salad into the center. Sprinkle with the tarragon leaves and serve.