OF JAMES BEARD AND ENCOUNTERS WITH GODDESSES
I WAS NEVER IN THE INNERMOST CIRCLE OF JAMES BEARD CONFIDANTS, protégés, and sycophants. What with deadlines, the strains of wounded domesticity and later divorce, rebirth, and a devotion to disco dancing, I didn’t have the free time to hang out in his charming Village pad. I adored him mostly from afar. Now I can see that I was also intimidated. He was the founder of our church, the all-knowing wizard. I was grateful that he was very generous in his comments about me for publication. I knew he had a rapier wit and could be bitchy in private. I felt he could see right through me, and I worried that he saw an imposter.
Picasso had to learn to draw before he did those Cubist tricks. And here I was, scolding a two-star Michelin chef because his vanilla cream was too strongly scented with rose petals and chiding André Soltner at Lutèce for a vapid crème renversée au caramel. Yet in my brief years as an amateur cook, I had never tackled sweetbreads or cleaned a squid and had failed utterly in my one attempt at trying to duplicate Le Pavillon’s quenelles de brochet. The stink of abused fish had lingered in our kitchen for two days.
To feel on firm ground when critiquing Chinese restaurants, I had taken a series of Chinese cooking classes. I’d studied with the dowager queen of the wok, Grace Chu, then with sometime actress Lilah Kan and, later, Virginia Lee, coauthor with Craig of The Chinese Cookbook. Mrs. Lee had us endlessly marinating chicken and meat in cornstarch and egg white for her velvety stir-fries, so there were always bowls of abandoned yolks. One day, she tossed three dozen yolks into a puddle of oil in a hot wok and scrambled them for the class. It was the essence of egg . . . eggs on speed. Richer than foie gras. Nobody died that night—as far as I know.
When I tried to sign up for Beard’s advanced cooking class in 1974, I was flatly rejected. “No one can take the advanced class till they’ve done the introductory,” his assistant told me. There was no argument, no string to pull. How embarrassing. The restaurant critic was required to join the novices in his teaching kitchen, struggling with the bizarre burnerless glass stovetop that we all hated. (But Corning was a client, after all, so that’s what we cooked on.) Jim would perch on a tall stool in one of his red or black cotton tunics, tree trunk-like legs splayed for balance as he took our measure, pairing us off—two by two—with an assignment for the evening to put together the various courses of what would be dinner.
One day, he decided we should test whether freezing meat sabotaged the flavor or texture, research for a magazine article he was writing. We would roast and pan-sauté a series of matching beef cuts, half of them fresh, half of them thawed from the freezer. What a shock: Contrary to the epicurean’s innate disdain for the freezer (good only for ice cubes, homemade bread crumbs, and to store bones for making stock), we discovered no difference at all.
The class was all about pleasure and fun, a mad dance dodging one another’s knives in the crowded kitchen, vying for an approving grin or wink. Every once in awhile, Jim would put his gigantic hand on top of yours to correct a knife chop or a whisking movement.
Tasting, endless tasting. Beard was a legend for his extraordinary taste memory, the ability to retain and recapture a dish’s distinct tangle of scents, flavors, and textures, not unlike a great musician or composer’s perfect pitch. And he could convey a sense of the joy of a new discovery with the details of the stories he told. My favorite image from class is that of Jim standing at the kitchen counter in the old house on Patchin Place, carving a slab of seared brisket, slipping a chunk of fat into his mouth, and laughing. “I’m a fat boy myself.”
Garlic was our mantra. I remember one class that called for garlic in every dish except dessert. If an innocent dared to ask, “How much garlic, Mr. Beard?” he’d boom out the answer: “Half an acre.” One evening, I was in the duo charged with rolling a boned leg of lamb studded with garlic into a sling made out of a clean dish towel. It was to be suspended from the handles of a large oval enameled iron cocotte, then steamed over garlicky broth till the thermometer registered rare. After a suitable rest, the roast was unwrapped and sliced. Beard wanted it served with a fast-cooked garlicky tomato sauce and gremolata, the classic garnish of osso buco—grated lemon peel, minced parsley, and finely chopped garlic . . . raw garlic. The turnips Anna, a variation on the French classic potatoes Anna, slathered with butter—crisped and baked in a flat metal pan—were aggressively dotted with minced garlic, too. I forget what got tossed with garlic for a first course. I tried to scrub away the garlicky stickum on my fingers with lemon juice. A faint earthy scent lingered.
I would not have imagined that boiled anything could have been as lush and flavorful as that lamb. I stole the gremolata mix and used it that next summer as a feisty staccato on cubed swordfish that I crumbed and then seared in a black iron skillet. Even though I could measure how much butter it took to melt the turnips into sweet submission, turnips Anna still seemed less fattening than scalloped potatoes, and even now they pop up at my holiday dinners.
Andrew, the boyfriend left over from the magical summer in the house on the bay in the Springs (I continued to share him with his fiancée, his children, his work, and his guilt months later), came by to pick me up after class. Later that night, we were locked in the addictive embraces that drew us to bed long after we both should have known he would marry the all-forgiving “other woman.”
“What have you been eating?” he cried from somewhere near my knee. “It’s like garlic is coming out of your skin.” I found my inner arm not far from my nose and sniffed.
“Oh my God, I think you’re right.”
Andrew was not a lover of garlic. But he was a lover of women. That carried him through what must have been quite a challenge.
I regret I was not around for the early rumbles of revolution in California cookery. In the seventies and early eighties, I was always looking east, flying off for a quick fix in France as often as I could get Clay Felker to foot the bill. Fortunately, Clay understood my mouth needed this constant rehabilitating ecstasy. Although I admired their work from afar, I didn’t come to know Alice Waters or Marion Cunningham, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, and Wolfgang Puck till much later. And I never shared an oyster or a confessional cup of tea with the mythic M. F. K. Fisher. Perhaps if I’d spent more time on the West Coast, I might have earned a share of that intimacy and jumped on the grow-your-own-vegetables team earlier. It took a while before I noticed that a fresh bean was superior to a French bean. And it took even longer before a fresh bean was a local bean.
It was Jim Beard—congenitally bicoastal and beloved on both—who introduced me to the goddesses. I first tasted Alice’s food at dinner with Jim and my friend Harley Baldwin in the café above Chez Panisse. I had arrived in San Francisco fresh from worshiping the exquisite finesse and refined complexity of Frédy Girardet in Crissier, outside Lausanne, and Michel Guérard in his remote fiefdom in southwestern France. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much.
“Shall we just cook for you?” Alice asked, relaxed and confident, bubbling with affection for Jim. (Jim brought out a lot of bubbling in his female acolytes and protégés.)
I remember thinking, Okay, show me. And to my astonishment, she did. There was something radically daring in the simplicity of every perfect vegetable, the pristine leaves of baby greens that had not yet hit kitchens in New York, the clarity of an oddly shaped tomato. Until that moment, heirloom meant a hideous vase you dare not send to the thrift shop because it had been your grandmother’s. If there were zealots reviving forgotten species of tomato or twenty strains of heirloom potatoes on the East Coast, I was not yet aware of it.
“I have only three scallops left,” Alice said. “They’re very special.”
We each had a scallop still in its shell—unheard of back east at that moment—slicked with a bit of butter, a drop of lemon, a turn of the pepper mill. It was like eating something just born, hatched a moment before in the sea just for us.
Alas, I definitely came too late to my first audience with the aging and ailing M. F. K. Fisher. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, I walked into the dining room at the Stanford Court in San Francisco and spied James Beard, a huge smiling Buddha in a blue denim mandarin jacket, impossible to miss. I ran over to give him a hug. He was lunching with an elderly woman draped in brown, her face rather dour and unexpressive. I looked at her and nodded.
“You don’t know my friend Mary Frances?” He seemed surprised. “Mary Frances Fisher.”
It took a few seconds before it sank in and I realized this swollen, clearly unwell creature was the famed, beloved, unsurpassed writer of food and love, the sexy siren (as food historian Betty Fussell describes her) . . . M. F. K. Fisher.
“This is Gael Greene,” Jim said. “She is the very enthusiastic restaurant critic of New York magazine.” (Jim had a way of saying something positive about me that could also be negative when you thought about it later.)
That day at the Stanford Court, I imagined I could see M.F.K.’s young beauty from her portrait on so many book jackets, although it was almost lost in the doughy puff of her medication-distorted face.
“I’m having trouble with my New York magazine subscription,” she said.
I bit my tongue and smiled. “Well, if you send me the sticker from your last magazine, I’ll get that fixed for you the minute I get back to New York.”
It was in Jim’s beginner class that I met Jane Freiman, a fine-arts major then in publishing, who would leverage these classes, a passion for food, and sheer chutzpah to become a cookery teacher and cookbook writer when she found herself unemployed in Chicago due to marriage.
Together, Jane and I were formidable. How else to explain where I found the chutzpah to invite James Beard for dinner? The two of us fussed and debated the menu, elaborating and revising, testing and refining. Jim seemed comfortable enough sipping champagne on the cushioned window seat in the back room of my apartment. I’d set up the foldaway aluminum table and draped it in dark blue corduroy cloth to the floor—regal backdrop for service plates and candlesticks from my collection of pewter. We brewed pumpkin soup so I could use my antique pewter tureen and ladle. It took two tries, but I mastered lush ricotta and spinach gnocchi from Naomi Barry’s Tuscan cookbook. The leg of lamb that followed—generously pierced with slivered garlic cloves—was exquisitely rare, perfect with a ’66 Mouton Rothschild from the cellar riches Don had generously left behind in Woodstock.
The climax was my version of Paula Peck’s deeply dark chocolate velvet under drifts of sour cream folded into whipped cream for an approximation of crème fraîche, and meltingly buttery Viennese cookies. Jane’s lush bittersweet chocolate truffles arrived with coffee and cognac.
Jim sipped and looked thoughtful. I guess we all felt some comment was called for.
“This is the richest dinner I’ve ever eaten,” Jim said. All I heard was the superlative. And I glowed with pride. Next day, I chewed over the ambiguity of his statement. I finally decided not to brood about it.