commentators as an angry taunt during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the French government opposed.
* Claiborne also never forgave his mother for withholding from him for six months the information that his boyhood friend and biggest crush, Gordon Lyon Jr., an air force pilot, had been shot down over the Solomon Islands in 1943. Like Gore Vidal’s great teen love, the baseball prodigy Jimmy Trimble, who was also killed in combat in the Pacific theater, Lyon was a handsome, sensitive jock with a unique tolerance for “dear boys,” though he didn’t have an affair with Claiborne, as Trimble did with Vidal.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENT, PART I
James Beard (left) converses merrily with the ladies of the old-line food world at a Greenwich Village garden party, 1950s.
It began with curry. Curry with fifteen little condiments and Major Grey’s mango chutney. The year of the curry is hard to pinpoint, but this much is clear: it was before the year of quiche Lorraine, the year of paella, the year of vitello tonnato, the year of boeuf Bourguignon, the year of blanquette de veau, and the year of beef Wellington … It was the beginning, and in the beginning there was James Beard and there was curry and that was about all.
—Nora Ephron,
New York
magazine, 1968
JIM BEARD RETURNED FROM FRANCE AFTER THE WAR FEELING “ROOTLESS AND WITH out purpose.” He’d written three cookbooks, catered his share of parties, and dished out Provençal stuffed eggplant to the boys in Marseilles, but in mid-1940s America, there was simply no lucrative niche for a jolly male culinary authority to fall into. Fortunately, the National Broadcasting Company, which had started out in the twenties as a radio network, was in desperate need of ideas and programming for its upstart television operation, and it contacted Beard in 1946 to see if he was interested in doing cooking demonstrations on a new TV show.
Elsie Presents
, as the show was called at first, was a hodgepodge of household hints and stilted interviews with radio and theater celebrities, with segments introduced by a puppet version of Elsie the Cow, the spokes-mascot of the Borden dairy company, the program’s sponsor. * (Elsie wasoperated by Bil Baird, the great puppeteer who later did the “Lonely Goatherd” sequence in
The Sound of Music.)
Beard was given a fifteen-minute segment at the end of the show called “I Love to Eat!”—in its modest way, the first cooking program ever on TV. The face Beard presented to the public was that of the manly man who’d written
Cook It Outdoors
, the big fella who built barbecue pits and roasted enormous birds.
Elsie Presents
ran on Fridays, fight night at Madison Square Garden, and, in its short run, immediately followed NBC’s boxing telecasts. In that era, TV sets were less likely to be found in private homes than in public gathering places, and the throngs that convened in taverns and hotel lobbies to watch the fights stuck around to watch Beard, too. Charlie Berns of the 21 Club, the exclusive restaurant on Fifty-second Street in New York that began its life as a speakeasy (known colloquially as Jack and Charlie’s), called Beard to tell him that one night his diners had refused to leave the bar to go to their tables until they’d finished watching Beard make spare ribs.
Though
Elsie Presents
helped Beard achieve greater name and face recognition, the show lasted only through 1947, by which time Borden had pulled out and Birds Eye Frozen Foods had assumed sponsorship—incidentally beginning Beard’s long, uneasy relationship with corporate sponsors whose products and methods ran counter to his culinary values. And, for all his ability to charm a live audience at an in-store cooking demonstration, Beard was curiously stiff on TV, not his ebullient self. “Jim wasn’t much good on television for some reason,” says Judith Jones of Knopf. “He started out to be an actor, and I think that was probably
* Claiborne also never forgave his mother for withholding from him for six months the information that his boyhood friend and biggest crush, Gordon Lyon Jr., an air force pilot, had been shot down over the Solomon Islands in 1943. Like Gore Vidal’s great teen love, the baseball prodigy Jimmy Trimble, who was also killed in combat in the Pacific theater, Lyon was a handsome, sensitive jock with a unique tolerance for “dear boys,” though he didn’t have an affair with Claiborne, as Trimble did with Vidal.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENT, PART I
James Beard (left) converses merrily with the ladies of the old-line food world at a Greenwich Village garden party, 1950s.
It began with curry. Curry with fifteen little condiments and Major Grey’s mango chutney. The year of the curry is hard to pinpoint, but this much is clear: it was before the year of quiche Lorraine, the year of paella, the year of vitello tonnato, the year of boeuf Bourguignon, the year of blanquette de veau, and the year of beef Wellington … It was the beginning, and in the beginning there was James Beard and there was curry and that was about all.
—Nora Ephron,
New York
magazine, 1968
JIM BEARD RETURNED FROM FRANCE AFTER THE WAR FEELING “ROOTLESS AND WITH out purpose.” He’d written three cookbooks, catered his share of parties, and dished out Provençal stuffed eggplant to the boys in Marseilles, but in mid-1940s America, there was simply no lucrative niche for a jolly male culinary authority to fall into. Fortunately, the National Broadcasting Company, which had started out in the twenties as a radio network, was in desperate need of ideas and programming for its upstart television operation, and it contacted Beard in 1946 to see if he was interested in doing cooking demonstrations on a new TV show.
Elsie Presents
, as the show was called at first, was a hodgepodge of household hints and stilted interviews with radio and theater celebrities, with segments introduced by a puppet version of Elsie the Cow, the spokes-mascot of the Borden dairy company, the program’s sponsor. * (Elsie wasoperated by Bil Baird, the great puppeteer who later did the “Lonely Goatherd” sequence in
The Sound of Music.)
Beard was given a fifteen-minute segment at the end of the show called “I Love to Eat!”—in its modest way, the first cooking program ever on TV. The face Beard presented to the public was that of the manly man who’d written
Cook It Outdoors
, the big fella who built barbecue pits and roasted enormous birds.
Elsie Presents
ran on Fridays, fight night at Madison Square Garden, and, in its short run, immediately followed NBC’s boxing telecasts. In that era, TV sets were less likely to be found in private homes than in public gathering places, and the throngs that convened in taverns and hotel lobbies to watch the fights stuck around to watch Beard, too. Charlie Berns of the 21 Club, the exclusive restaurant on Fifty-second Street in New York that began its life as a speakeasy (known colloquially as Jack and Charlie’s), called Beard to tell him that one night his diners had refused to leave the bar to go to their tables until they’d finished watching Beard make spare ribs.
Though
Elsie Presents
helped Beard achieve greater name and face recognition, the show lasted only through 1947, by which time Borden had pulled out and Birds Eye Frozen Foods had assumed sponsorship—incidentally beginning Beard’s long, uneasy relationship with corporate sponsors whose products and methods ran counter to his culinary values. And, for all his ability to charm a live audience at an in-store cooking demonstration, Beard was curiously stiff on TV, not his ebullient self. “Jim wasn’t much good on television for some reason,” says Judith Jones of Knopf. “He started out to be an actor, and I think that was probably
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