JAMES BEARD

Food’s big breakthrough on television, and the initial successful coupling of gourmet cookery with the medium, was the appearance of James Beard. After some success doing cooking demonstrations on NBC television’s Radio City Matinee and a show called For You and Yours in the mid-forties, Beard got his own regular segment on a Borden Dairy Company variety and talk show called Elsie Presents in 1946. The show began with Harriet Van Horne at a desk giving viewers shopping tips, gossip, and theater criticism. Then a giant puppet of the sponsor’s mascot, Elsie the Cow, appeared and announced, “Elsie presents James Beard in ‘I Love to Eat’!” and Beard spent the last half of the show (fifteen minutes) showing viewers how to cook something. The program was a success because Beard formulated a charming blend of instruction and fun—the pattern for nearly every successful TV chef who came after him. Prior to Beard, no one knew quite how to make a television cooking show entertaining, so recipes were swapped and read aloud and prepared step-by-step, as they had been on the radio, and home economists in pince-nez glasses told housewives how to conserve leftover bacon fat. Beard was no recipe-swapper or home economist. He was a performer: His first career goal had been to be an opera singer; when that failed on the West Coast, he came to New York in 1937 and gained fame not as an actor, but as a caterer, at Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. He remembered coming back to New York after the war and being offered a food show job by NBC: “At last—a chance to cook and act at the same time.”

James Beard, the dean of American cookery, at home with his beloved pug, Percy.

For Beard, serving good food was always more than a matter of sustenance or proper nutrition; it was a performance. “Put on a fine show!” he goads readers of his autobiography Delights and Prejudices. “Like the theater, offering food and hospitality is a matter of showmanship, and no matter how simple the performance, unless you do it well, with love and originality, you have a flop on your hands.” As a cooking teacher, Beard put on that kind of show when he gave lessons in his Greenwich Village townhouse (now home of the James Beard Foundation)—sharing wine with students, eating the mistakes as well as the successes, encouraging them to be original, to not be afraid of trying something new and crazy. “I think if I have done nothing else,” he once told us, “I have taught people to enjoy making food.” That attitude made him terrific on television, where even the most daunting recipes were transformed into enjoyable romps with pots and pans and acres of garlic. Beard loved to be outrageous, once making the rounds of prime-time variety programs with a specially made skillet, six feet long and three feet wide, and cooking crepes in it with a blowtorch.

He was America’s best-known chef throughout the fifties and into the sixties, not only because of his own television appearances but also because he was popularized by the food industry, which found there were profits to be made by associating products with the James Beard brio. He endorsed innumerable foodstuffs, wines, and utensils, and he served as company figurehead in advertisements for Omaha Steaks, Camp Maple Syrup, the French National Association of Cognac Producers, and the Taylor Wine Company. Beard never seemed shy about putting his imprimatur on sponsor’s products, which was another reason he fit so well on television (which, after all, exists to sell products). In the post-Nader years of the 1970s, he took plenty of guff from anti-business critics for being too cozy with big food companies. Some worried that he had become more of a pitchman than a pure-souled culinary artiste, but his relationships with products rarely bothered him. After all, they helped feed his enormous appetites, and he enjoyed the position of authority they conferred. Although there were some endorsements he came to regret privately, Beard always liked being in the spotlight they provided.

More important, Beard’s television persona as willing and eager spokesman for various foods never seemed to bother the millions of home cooks who respected him and learned from him. In fact, the opposite is true. Until the 1960s, most Americans generally liked and trusted big companies, especially big food companies, which had supplied decades’ worth of recipes, free cooking brochures, reassurances from spotless test kitchens, and loveable mythical product mascots (from Elsie and Betty Crocker to California Raisins and cutesypoo M&Ms) and were proud sponsors of favorite television programs. Traditionally, Americans have also respected elected spokesmen for multimillion-dollar food corporations. Because of his lifetime alliance with such a wide variety of people’s favorite things to eat, Beard earned a position that to many consumers and cooks seemed far more important than mere epicure. He became a pop culture icon, the ultimate product pitchman, and, in the eyes of many Americans, the definitive chef.