His talents were noted; a formal catering company was born; and then came the requests from publishers for cookbooks. The deadlines were impossible, the financial compensation meager, but the name James Beard went out into the world, as did his notion of what an American cuisine could be, when “cuisine” was still a word reserved for the feats of the French. This is not biography as lionization: Birdsall notes Beard’s tendency to crib from his own recipes under the pressure of deadlines and to ignore or improperly credit the contributions of others. But he argues that Beard’s approach was essentially egalitarian, even Whitmanesque, casting American cuisine as a grass-roots “collective effort” of home cooks across the land. In this book, the more famous Beard becomes, the more he recedes.

Source: New York Times October 09, 2020 19:18 UTC