his downfall, because the minute he got in front of a mike, he’d suddenly be acting. He couldn’t be himself.”
After Beard, the reigning TV cook was Dione Lucas, an Englishwoman who had graduated from the Cordon Bleu and founded her own cookingschool, L’École du Petit Cordon Bleu, in London in the thirties. Lucas moved to New York after the war and started up the Dione Lucas Gourmet Cooking School (so named because the Cordon Bleu in Paris wouldn’t license the name to her), landing her own one-hour program on CBS for the 1948–49 season,
To the Queen’s Taste
(later retitled
Dione Lucas’s Cooking Show).
Lucas was no more charismatic on TV than Beard—she was small, stocky, and dour, with her hair pulled back tightly like a suffragette’s—but she was undeniably a good teacher, and her specialty was French cookery, the field of cuisine that aspirational housewives most wished to learn.
The CBS show lasted only one season, but Lucas resurfaced again in the fifties with a syndicated program and a popular restaurant next door to Bloomingdale’s called the Egg Basket, where she popularized two then exotic egg preparations, the omelet and the quiche. Among Lucas’s students in the fifties was Paula Wolfert, a Barnard student and young bride-to-be from a “boiled-and-broiled” background who later achieved renown, in the seventies, for her Moroccan and Mediterranean cookbooks. “For fifty dollars I took six lessons in her huge kitchen, on the second floor of the Dakota,” says Wolfert. “I flipped. I loved it. I had never eaten food like that—all that cream and butter. I had to go off and have my gallbladder removed after it was over, and I wasn’t even twenty yet.” Nan Robertson of
The New York Times
happened to be writing up Lucas’s cooking school at the time of Wolfert’s attendance; the resulting article captured Lucas complimenting the youngster on her first lobster bisque (“Jolly good, Mrs. Wolfert!”) while also noting, “Mrs. Wolfert then cut her finger and was rushed to the bathroom for first aid.”
“Dione was a bitter woman, not warm or cuddly, like a mentor should be,” says Wolfert, who stayed on for a time as Lucas’s unpaid assistant in the cooking school, helping her teach rich housewives how to make
filets de sole à la meunière
and
soufflé Plaza Athenée
(with lobster and vegetables). Perhaps this bitterness was attributable to the uncertain, catch-as-catch-can life of a cooking guru in 1950s America, even one with a TV show. “She was tremendously talented and worked like a dog,” Julia Child later recalled of Lucas, “but money just slipped through her fingers.” Nevertheless, saysWolfert, “Dione was important in the fifties because at least
something
was happening.”
Indeed, the rising public profiles of Lucas and Beard marked the emergence of a true food establishment in America, a small group of New York–based sophisticates who, via newspaper columns, magazine work, and cookbooks, had national and even international reach. (In 1961, when asked by Judith Jones whom she wanted to meet while visiting New York to promote
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Child named Beard, while her collaborator, Simone Beck, requested an audience with Lucas.) In addition to Lucas and Beard, this group included Helen McCully, the food editor at
Mc-Call’s;
Jane Nickerson, her counterpart at
The New York Times;
Cecily Brownstone of the Associated Press; good ol’ Clem Paddleford of the
Herald Tribune;
and the voluptuous Ann Seranne, who had started out as Crosby Gaige’s mistress and ghostwriter in the forties before moving on to
Gourmet
to be Earle MacAusland’s deputy, eventually assuming the full editorial duties of the magazine while “Mr. Mac” attended to the publishing side. The members of this group kept one another’s counsel, exchanged gossip, and stood united in opposition to the quick-bake, canned-soup mores of the domestic scientists.
McCully, an
After Beard, the reigning TV cook was Dione Lucas, an Englishwoman who had graduated from the Cordon Bleu and founded her own cookingschool, L’École du Petit Cordon Bleu, in London in the thirties. Lucas moved to New York after the war and started up the Dione Lucas Gourmet Cooking School (so named because the Cordon Bleu in Paris wouldn’t license the name to her), landing her own one-hour program on CBS for the 1948–49 season,
To the Queen’s Taste
(later retitled
Dione Lucas’s Cooking Show).
Lucas was no more charismatic on TV than Beard—she was small, stocky, and dour, with her hair pulled back tightly like a suffragette’s—but she was undeniably a good teacher, and her specialty was French cookery, the field of cuisine that aspirational housewives most wished to learn.
The CBS show lasted only one season, but Lucas resurfaced again in the fifties with a syndicated program and a popular restaurant next door to Bloomingdale’s called the Egg Basket, where she popularized two then exotic egg preparations, the omelet and the quiche. Among Lucas’s students in the fifties was Paula Wolfert, a Barnard student and young bride-to-be from a “boiled-and-broiled” background who later achieved renown, in the seventies, for her Moroccan and Mediterranean cookbooks. “For fifty dollars I took six lessons in her huge kitchen, on the second floor of the Dakota,” says Wolfert. “I flipped. I loved it. I had never eaten food like that—all that cream and butter. I had to go off and have my gallbladder removed after it was over, and I wasn’t even twenty yet.” Nan Robertson of
The New York Times
happened to be writing up Lucas’s cooking school at the time of Wolfert’s attendance; the resulting article captured Lucas complimenting the youngster on her first lobster bisque (“Jolly good, Mrs. Wolfert!”) while also noting, “Mrs. Wolfert then cut her finger and was rushed to the bathroom for first aid.”
“Dione was a bitter woman, not warm or cuddly, like a mentor should be,” says Wolfert, who stayed on for a time as Lucas’s unpaid assistant in the cooking school, helping her teach rich housewives how to make
filets de sole à la meunière
and
soufflé Plaza Athenée
(with lobster and vegetables). Perhaps this bitterness was attributable to the uncertain, catch-as-catch-can life of a cooking guru in 1950s America, even one with a TV show. “She was tremendously talented and worked like a dog,” Julia Child later recalled of Lucas, “but money just slipped through her fingers.” Nevertheless, saysWolfert, “Dione was important in the fifties because at least
something
was happening.”
Indeed, the rising public profiles of Lucas and Beard marked the emergence of a true food establishment in America, a small group of New York–based sophisticates who, via newspaper columns, magazine work, and cookbooks, had national and even international reach. (In 1961, when asked by Judith Jones whom she wanted to meet while visiting New York to promote
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Child named Beard, while her collaborator, Simone Beck, requested an audience with Lucas.) In addition to Lucas and Beard, this group included Helen McCully, the food editor at
Mc-Call’s;
Jane Nickerson, her counterpart at
The New York Times;
Cecily Brownstone of the Associated Press; good ol’ Clem Paddleford of the
Herald Tribune;
and the voluptuous Ann Seranne, who had started out as Crosby Gaige’s mistress and ghostwriter in the forties before moving on to
Gourmet
to be Earle MacAusland’s deputy, eventually assuming the full editorial duties of the magazine while “Mr. Mac” attended to the publishing side. The members of this group kept one another’s counsel, exchanged gossip, and stood united in opposition to the quick-bake, canned-soup mores of the domestic scientists.
McCully, an
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