Amuse-Bouche
“There’s too much bay leaf in this soup,” said Craig Claiborne, after sloshing the tomato-pea purée mongole around in his mouth. He and I and Charlotte Curtis, his boss, were having lunch in the cafeteria of the New York Times in the spring of 1971. Craig was retiring as food editor of the Times after fourteen years in the job. He was a self-made legend, trained as a chef and a reporter, who had transformed the newspaper’s food department from a sleepy recipe mill into a broad and lively forum for glamorous profiles of chefs, reports on the city’s ethnic cooks and reviews of New York restaurants. He thought he could privatize his celebrity and his omnivorous yet rigorous approach to food with a personal newsletter about restaurants and cooking. Charlotte, in a huge gamble, had hired me as his successor.
Curtis was another Times legend. A midwestern socialite with hair pulled back tight, she was a newsroom lifer. As women’s news editor, in charge of a big and increasingly important area, she presided over the Family/Style page, where Craig’s articles appeared. In her earlier Times career, as a society reporter, Charlotte had made readers smile with her tart flair for skewering vapid brides in her coverage of big-time weddings.
In an account of a shower for Julie Nixon prior to her marriage to David Eisenhower, Charlotte wrote, “And by afternoon’s end, [Richard Nixon’s younger daughter] was knee-deep in such essentials as sachets made to look like roses, scented candles, bookends and a silver engraving of her wedding invitation.” The article skipped on insouciantly to a dinner-dance at the Waldorf Towers, where President Nixon joined Julie’s young pals during a break from appointing cabinet secretaries. In four impeccably factual words about the presidential drop-in, Charlotte summarized the man himself: “He did not dance.”
Craig, a gentlemanly native of Sunflower, Mississippi, had parlayed a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a diploma from a Swiss hotel school into the Times food job. His shrewd instincts for capitalizing on the new craze for food had transformed a sleepy, creaky woman’s-page service feature into a glamorous star turn. It had also made him rich.
Back in 1960, when Craig had been food editor for only three years and Times management hadn’t yet realized they’d spawned a monstre sacré in their food department, Craig requested permission to use the Times name and its sacrosanct Times logo for a cookbook to be entitled The New York Times Cookbook. According to legend, barely concealing a smirk, the paper’s managing editor, Turner Catledge, waved the young man on—to delirious success.
Harper & Row had never stopped selling the book.
How much did Craig owe to the Times connection? I inclined to the cynical, if unprovable, view that without that logo and the official-sounding title, the book would not have gone anywhere merely on the strength of the relatively unknown author’s name.*
By 1971, however, Craig had made a name for himself, at least among Times readers. He believed he could sail on happily without the Times and without sweating deadlines for four features every week. He could, he believed, continue his reign as New York’s food czar in independent splendor. I took him to think that some lesser being would man the food-beat treadmill at the paper, reinforcing by his jejune mediocrity the myth of the matchless Craig.
And I was going to be that man.
In Craig’s world, I was indeed a nobody. I’d never taken a cooking class, published a restaurant review or written a recipe. My credentials as a cultural journalist at Newsweek, where I was currently working, were honorable; not too long before I’d been on the short list to become the Times’ lead book critic. But in the kitchen, I was a cipher. However, the ego of a child prodigy had kept me from seeing that I had no business at this table, in this cafeteria, with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.
When Craig commented on the bay leaf in the purée mongole, I sneered inwardly. Couldn’t he see how ridiculous it was to play the gourmet with an old-fashioned soup made in a corporate cafeteria kitchen? This was the place the New Yorker’s resident gastronome and press critic, A. J. Liebling, had mocked in a jab he once took at newspaper editors:
… they come to newspapers like monks to cloisters or worms to apples. They are the dedicated. All of them are fated to be editors except the ones that get killed off by the lunches they eat at their desks until even the most drastic purgatives lose all effect upon them. The survivors of gastric disorders rise to minor executive jobs and then major ones, and the reign of these nonwriters makes our newspapers read like the food in The New York Times cafeteria tastes.
Did Craig think he’d give me a bad moment with his bay leaf gambit? Actually, I now think he was just surrendering to the reflex of commenting expertly about the food in front of him, just as he had in print for seven hundred Fridays. In any case, I knew that my palate couldn’t have detected a heavy hand with bay leaf in that soup. And from now on I’d be expected to uncover serious chefs’ omissions and commissions, to unmask them with confidence for an audience of demanding Times readers. If I had truly understood the meaning of this moment, it would have been that the prospect of all the meals I would consume for the Times—and the need to judge them—ought to have made me cut and run.
Instead, I asked Craig if he had any advice for me as a restaurant critic.
“Steal the menu,” he said. “If you ask for it, they might give it to you or they might not. But if they don’t, they’ll be watching you and counting them when they take them away after you’ve ordered. So just put it in your lap, fold it up and slip it in your pocket. You might look like you’re playing with yourself under there, but no waiter is going to bother you about that.”
FORTY TUMULTUOUS YEARS in the world of food have passed since that lunch at the Times. The other day, I thought about the changes that had revolutionized and mostly improved what we can eat now at a bistro in Manhattan across from Lincoln Center called Bar Boulud.
No one could have imagined such a spot in the placid, static, mediocre dining world of 1971. Today, we take for granted a lineup of star chefs transmuting remarkable ingredients of the highest quality into novel dishes tangentially based on the dusty classics still in faded vogue when I covered New York restaurants for the Times. The closest America had to a TV top chef then was Julia Child performing coq au vin for an audience of home cooks eager to learn to make French dishes correctly. Julia’s breezy, offhand manner enticed a generation away from the stultifying distortions of the home economists who ruled at most food magazines and newspaper food pages. She was also an authentic counterforce to “continental” menus pushing fancy food with no roots anywhere except possibly American hotel kitchens, flaming steak Diane and butter-oozing veal francese.
Forty years later, after the ancien régime in French cuisines gave way to the nouvelle cuisine of Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers and Paul Bocuse, and then passed its baton to a global network of master chefs, Daniel Boulud, a classically trained French pro, presides with star quality over a small empire of inventive restaurants that bear his name. The meal I ate in 2010 at his informal Bar Boulud was a model of a modern meal, of a cosmopolitan way of eating that has spread from Paris all across America, and to Lima and Manila as well.
That lunch at Bar Boulud was typical of the radical sophistication of our bustling creative food scene, with its nonclassic ingredients (arugula), lighthearted plating (boudin noir—blood sausage—sculpted into three squat cones), the non-French waitstaff of both sexes, wine from what General de Gaulle might have called “all azimuths.”† And yet each of these radical departures can be traced to changes in French restaurant kitchens that radiated around the world and have now been absorbed by “native” cooks from Iceland to Patagonia.
You could even say that Boulud has returned to his roots in a way that would have been impossible in the naive New York of 1971. When I did a feature with a New York–based French charcutier for the New York Times forty years ago, the man had been forced to abandon his trade, because New York couldn’t support even one artisanal sausage maker. He showed me how to make a batch of blood pudding (with veal blood, because pork blood couldn’t be sold legally in New York), an everyday favorite in France that was then unobtainable in New York. So the boudin casually reinvented at Bar Boulud in 2010 was not only a sign of postmodern creativity but also an example of the spread of authentic culinary practices from the French center to formerly unsophisticated peripheries like New York.
My personal intersection with this historical arc has not been casual. I was in the middle of various revolutions in food, recording them as a journalist, participating in them as a cook and eater. I had a front seat for all the action: the nouvellisation of French and then other cuisines; the role of television, starting with Julia Child on PBS and exploding into the era of the “top” chef; the emergence of the foodie, educated by cheap jet travel and ever-more-reliable cookbooks; the globalization of food ideas (fusion) and ingredients; the rise of politically correct notions of proper nutrition and ecologically sensitive food production and transport.
My life in food encompassed all of these developments, with a privileged three years of residence abroad, and very extensive gastronomic travel from 2006 to 2010, while I was writing a biweekly restaurant column for the Wall Street Journal.
So, in this memoir, I’ll be filtering the unprecedentedly fast-moving history of food since World War II through my direct encounters with it. However, I cannot and would not want to claim to have been a primary actor in the making of these events and trends. I was there, and I ate what was put in front of me.
