Happy Birthday, James Beard

He was born in Portland, Oregon, on this day (May 5) in 1903. My biography of Beard, The Man Who Ate Too Much, comes out in October. Yet here in California—sheltering in place against COVID-19, with cooking at home as a nightly imperative—he’s constantly on my mind. Beard is the ghost I can’t seem to banish from my kitchen.

Even more than Julia Child, Beard was a source of knowledge and inspiration for American home cooks in the twentieth century. Though Beard produced nearly two dozen cookbooks before his death in 1985, recipes weren’t his greatest achievement. Instead, he was the champion of fearless improvisation, who tried to make American home cooks so confident in learning a few basic techniques they could take on any challenge: turning leftovers into a soufflé, or making epic hulking sandwiches with the remains of a steak or a roast, and doing it all with a sense of pluck and bravado.

At a time when recipes were supposed to be practical and commercial, appealing to some women’s-magazine stereotype of the anxious, unskilled housewife, Beard tried to make his recipes expressive in a way that’s now commonplace. The irony is—and this is the heart of The Man Who Ate Too Much—Beard couldn’t express anything true or unvarnished about his own life. Queerness was the granite yoke that weighed on Beard’s shoulders. He carried it everywhere—his closest circle of friends were almost all lesbian or gay—and yet it made being a public person in the searing homophobic culture in America after World War II a challenge. He devised dodges and workarounds. He forged parts of his life story.

And yet, Beard came to embody American cooking and more. The story of James Beard is one of rising above the troublesome limits of America’s cultural and political life in the heart of the twentieth century: the conformity and dominance of large food corporations; the gender and family strictures of the Cold War; a hollow patriotism that sought to control sexuality and personal expression.

So, as I grapple with the paradoxes of America in the twenty-first century—heightened in the face of this terrible pandemic—I pause to wish happy birthday to James Beard. Sitting down with my husband to a simple dinner of hamburger patties—good ground chuck sourced from the butcher, turned crusty in searing cast iron, seasoned simply with the Maldon flake salt he loved—I think about the complexities behind the face of simple things.