Read Online Best Food Writing 2014 by Holly Hughes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Holly Hughes
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York Times Cookbook when I was a kid, stopping on a black-and-white photo of what the caption called a âtypical brunchâ: glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice sunk into bigger glasses of crushed ice, near a silver basket of shiny, bump-topped brioches. I wanted that life: waking up in a sunny apartment to face the day, the taste of butter and orange sweetness on my tongue like a meditation. Claiborne gave us permission to respect pleasure in eatingâeven small pleasuresânot as something guilty, but as the received wisdom of culture. Bitch, weâre eating brioche.
Beard did something similar, though with a particularly American slant. In an era when McDonaldâs Ray Kroc was shrinking the hamburger into something you could squeeze with your weak hand into a golf ballâsized lump of grease and starch, Beard convinced us that American food is something ineluctably large, hewn from ingredients as pristine as virgin forest.
In the 1930s, Beard was booted from Reed College in Oregon after someone busted him for making out with another man. Beardâs cookbooks have the whiff of sublimated desire: the open-air fantasies, stout flavors, abundant fats, and tons and tons of gorgeous meat. Beardâs public persona was the bow-tied bachelor gourmand with an unquenchable appetite, and he remade American food in his own triple-XL image. Even before McDonaldâs mass-produced them, burgers had always been cheap lunch-counter food. Beard made them seem as monumental as an Abercrombie modelâs torso: three-inch dripping slabs of sirloin youâd ground yourself, grilled over charcoal, and hoisted onto thickly buttered homemade bunsâtheyâre the burgers on menus of serious restaurants across America. Beard convinced us that burgers had always been that way, a reinvention that made the pursuit of pleasure seem like some timeless American virtue.
Beard made it okay for Americans to be hedonists at the table. Even in his paid endorsements for brands like Birds Eye and Omaha Steaks, Beard convinced us there was no shame in aspiring to be gourmets, the way most of us aspired to drive Cadillacs. James Beardâs American Cookery (1972) was quietly subversive, a revisionist theory of American food traditions that argued we had always been a nationthat embraced the pleasures implicit in scrapple, Boston baked beans, and cheeseburgers.
Beard was called the âdean of American cookery,â as if this new doctrine of pleasure had the weight of scholarship behind it. He occupied a curious persona that combined decorum with total self-indulgence. On one of his regular trips to San Francisco in the 1980s, Beard ate at a restaurant where I worked, though on a night I was off. One of the bussers working that night was a young gay guy with boyish American looks. He mentioned to Beard that he wanted to be a baker, and the great man invited him to stop by his hotel the next morning to talk pastry. When the busser arrived, the dean of American food was seated in a chair in the hotel suiteâs bedroom, wearing a silk robe; Beardâs assistant left the room. The aspiring baker told me he looked away at some point in the conversation, and when he looked back Beard, still talking pies and layer cakes, had opened his robeâunderneath he was naked. The flustered kid looked away, kept his eyes averted. When he looked back, Beard had closed his robe again, still talking, like nothing had happened. That was the essence of Beardâs food: draped in a respectable Sulka robe that was always threatening to drop to expose unashamed hedonism.
That embrace of pleasureâit set the stage for the luxury that defined American restaurant food in the 1980s and â90s, when ahi tuna and caviar and foie gras, crème fraîche and mascarpone showed up on menus in even midpriced restaurants. I think it helped America embrace Slow Food, a movement that values taste over corporate expediency, and argues
Beard did something similar, though with a particularly American slant. In an era when McDonaldâs Ray Kroc was shrinking the hamburger into something you could squeeze with your weak hand into a golf ballâsized lump of grease and starch, Beard convinced us that American food is something ineluctably large, hewn from ingredients as pristine as virgin forest.
In the 1930s, Beard was booted from Reed College in Oregon after someone busted him for making out with another man. Beardâs cookbooks have the whiff of sublimated desire: the open-air fantasies, stout flavors, abundant fats, and tons and tons of gorgeous meat. Beardâs public persona was the bow-tied bachelor gourmand with an unquenchable appetite, and he remade American food in his own triple-XL image. Even before McDonaldâs mass-produced them, burgers had always been cheap lunch-counter food. Beard made them seem as monumental as an Abercrombie modelâs torso: three-inch dripping slabs of sirloin youâd ground yourself, grilled over charcoal, and hoisted onto thickly buttered homemade bunsâtheyâre the burgers on menus of serious restaurants across America. Beard convinced us that burgers had always been that way, a reinvention that made the pursuit of pleasure seem like some timeless American virtue.
Beard made it okay for Americans to be hedonists at the table. Even in his paid endorsements for brands like Birds Eye and Omaha Steaks, Beard convinced us there was no shame in aspiring to be gourmets, the way most of us aspired to drive Cadillacs. James Beardâs American Cookery (1972) was quietly subversive, a revisionist theory of American food traditions that argued we had always been a nationthat embraced the pleasures implicit in scrapple, Boston baked beans, and cheeseburgers.
Beard was called the âdean of American cookery,â as if this new doctrine of pleasure had the weight of scholarship behind it. He occupied a curious persona that combined decorum with total self-indulgence. On one of his regular trips to San Francisco in the 1980s, Beard ate at a restaurant where I worked, though on a night I was off. One of the bussers working that night was a young gay guy with boyish American looks. He mentioned to Beard that he wanted to be a baker, and the great man invited him to stop by his hotel the next morning to talk pastry. When the busser arrived, the dean of American food was seated in a chair in the hotel suiteâs bedroom, wearing a silk robe; Beardâs assistant left the room. The aspiring baker told me he looked away at some point in the conversation, and when he looked back Beard, still talking pies and layer cakes, had opened his robeâunderneath he was naked. The flustered kid looked away, kept his eyes averted. When he looked back, Beard had closed his robe again, still talking, like nothing had happened. That was the essence of Beardâs food: draped in a respectable Sulka robe that was always threatening to drop to expose unashamed hedonism.
That embrace of pleasureâit set the stage for the luxury that defined American restaurant food in the 1980s and â90s, when ahi tuna and caviar and foie gras, crème fraîche and mascarpone showed up on menus in even midpriced restaurants. I think it helped America embrace Slow Food, a movement that values taste over corporate expediency, and argues
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