Broadcast Pioneer There is perhaps no one who has been more influential in the development of American cuisine than James Beard, who is often referred to as "The Father of American Cooking." Born in 1903 in the state of Oregon in America's Pacific Northwest, he became interested in food as a child while helping his mother run a boarding house in his native city of Portland. He spent summers fishing, gathering shellfish, picking wild fruits and berries, and preparing meals with the ingredients he had collected.
Beard became a culinary professional more by necessity than by design, however, when his persistent efforts to break into show business as a singer and an actor were not bringing him a sufficient income. He drew upon his childhood love of food by starting a catering business in New York in 1935. The business specialized in cocktail food—appetizers often served before or in lieu of a sit-down meal—and quickly revolutionized the cocktail catering business by offering more substantial and high-quality fare than had previously been available. His success in this business led him to open a small food shop, called Hors d'oeuvre, Inc., spelling is correct in 1937, and to publish his first book, Hors D'Oeuvres and Canapés, in 1940. From there his culinary interests continued to expand and prosper. He opened The James Beard Cooking School in New York in 1955, and then another cooking school in his native Oregon. He served as the food and menu consultant for New York's famous Four Seasons restaurant, and opened his own restaurant in the chic seaside resort town of Nantucket, Massachusetts. He appeared on television's first cooking show, called I Love To Cook, on the NBC network in 1946, when television was in its infancy, and continued to appear regularly on radio and television over the following decades. Most importantly, he produced dozens of cookbooks on all types of foods, many of which have become classics and which are often said to embody and define American cuisine. Throughout his life he was a tireless traveler and advocate of fine food, prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients. Beard himself summarized his culinary philosophy shortly before his death in 1985 when he told Newsweek magazine, "I don't like 'gourmet' cooking or 'this' cooking or 'that' cooking. I like good cooking." The legacy of James Beard lives on today in the James Beard Foundation, which grants national and regional awards in the culinary arts and strives to promote and celebrate the best in American cuisine. The French Chef Mention the name Julia Child to almost any American above the age of 30 and unmistakable impressions come to mind. It might be the sound of the voice—deep, cultured, elegant, with a bemused lilt. It might be the facial appearance—warm and embracing, with eyebrows raised in curiosity, and surrounded by a corona of soft curls. It might even be the rangy woman's bearing—erect, commanding, yet exuberant, bustling as she pursued the task confronting her.
Julia Child, also known universally as "the French chef," was 91 when she died in August 2004. During her career, virtually single-handedly, she brought neophytes and the hapless into the kitchen and introduced them to elegant cuisine and the means of preparing it. She accomplished this through decades of daily programs on America's public television network, through a series of books and personal appearances, and through an endless string of newspaper and magazine columns and interviews. The title of her best-known book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which she coauthored with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, says it all. Thousands upon thousands of people around the world met that challenge under Child's patient, genial, effervescent, and intelligent guidance. The early phase of her life held few hints of the lofty status she would reach in a very demanding and relatively exclusive world. A California native, she was a graduate of Smith College and served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II in East Asia. She married U.S. diplomat Paul Child after the war and moved with him to Paris for a six-year posting. There she decided to attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school. The rest, as they say, was history. As she herself once observed, "I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate." Her classic volume appeared in 1961, when Child was 49. Within two years, she had her own television program, The French Chef (which still appears here and there on U.S. stations in syndication). Other series—including Julia Child and Company and Dinner at Julia's— followed over the years, accompanied, inevitably, by a wide range of cookbooks. In 2003, she attained an enviable new measure of fame when her television kitchen—direct from the set in Boston—was placed in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., joining such other icons of American popular culture as Judy Garland's slippers from The Wizard of Oz, baseball legend Babe Ruth's bat, inaugural gowns of presidential wives, and various forms of consumer paraphernalia. Lest her menu items—the crème brulees, the quenelles, and the like—appear to place her, and her style and substance, on a lofty pedestal, she evinced a gracious, down-to-earth perspective on cooking, eating, and life itself. "The meals don't need to be anything elaborate," she once observed, soothingly, to her followers looking on, "just something simple to share with your family." Southern Seasons African-Americans have had an enormous influence on every aspect of American culture, society, and history, and cuisine is no exception. No one has done more than Edna Lewis to acquaint the general public with traditional Southern cooking, and to bring it the recognition and respect that it deserves.
In many ways, Edna Lewis's life is typical of African-Americans of her generation. She was born on April 13, 1916, in Freetown, Virginia, an isolated community founded after the emancipation of 1865 by freed slaves, one of whom was Ms. Lewis's grandfather. She grew up there in an extended family that included three sisters, two brothers, and various cousins and other relatives. It was in this setting that Edna Lewis first learned to cook by watching her mother and other relatives, and by teaching herself. It was also here that she learned the principles that were later to guide her as a professional chef: namely, cooking in the Southern tradition, with fresh ingredients, homegrown produce, and natural flavors and seasonings. Among the ingredients that Ms. Lewis believes are essential to Southern cooking are hominy (hulled and dried kernels of maize which are prepared for food by boiling), lard (pork fat), sugar, and butter. In the 1930s Ms. Lewis left Freetown for New York City. She worked at a variety of jobs there before opening her first restaurant, Café Nicholson, in 1948. The menu included such traditional Southern dishes as pork chops with cranberries, roast chicken, and "Sunday night sheet cake." (Editor's note: "Sheet cake" is a cake baked in a large, shallow, rectangular-shaped pan). The restaurant soon had a devoted clientele that included celebrities, show business figures, and politicians as well as ordinary New Yorkers from all walks of life. She went on to found a catering business and to serve as executive chef at several other restaurants in the southern United States as well as in New York. It was only after breaking her leg and going to the hospital in 1969, however, that Ms. Lewis began jotting down her recipes. This launched what has been perhaps her most successful pursuit, writing cookbooks. Her first cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking, was published in 1976 and was an immediate success. Organized by the seasons of the year, it celebrated the traditions of her childhood and youth, introducing a wide audience to the joys of authentic Southern cuisine. Several other equally successful cookbooks followed in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Ms. Lewis moved to Georgia to continue to promote African-American cuisine. There she met a young chef named Scott Peacock, the owner of the Horseradish Grill in Atlanta. Mr. Peacock was, like Ms. Lewis, a fervent advocate of traditional Southern cuisine. He and Ms. Lewis became good friends and collaborated on another best-selling cookbook, entitled The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations From Two Great Southern Cooks. The popularity of Ms. Lewis's cookbooks among people from all classes and races is ample proof that the love of good food can truly bring people of different backgrounds together. Healthy Artist A generation ago, most Americans were not overly concerned with what they ate. Having lived through the Great Depression and World War II, many believed that rich, abundant, and relatively inexpensive food was a normal byproduct of the post-war "good life," and indulged themselves accordingly. But that began to change in the early 1970's, when Mollie Katzen, and others like her, began to promote the idea of healthy eating. This not only changed the way that many Americans eat, but also raised awareness of health and environmental issues and their relation to the production and consumption of food.
Katzen's approach is defined in her basic philosophy regarding food, which includes aesthetic, environmental, dietary, and psychological considerations in addition to purely culinary ones. "I want people to realize they can have it all," she has explained, "good, nutritious food in their daily lives, without sacrificing on flavor." It is that blending of enjoyable eating with healthy choices that has made this cookbook author, television personality, artist, and musician so popular on the contemporary American scene. "Food is full of contradictions for many people," she observes. "I want to help people cut themselves some slack, to allow themselves some generosity, while still eating well. Most people associate a healthy diet with restrictions. I want to help people rediscover our great capacity for loving genuine, good food that not only tastes great, but also increases our well-being and vitality." As for the preaching that too often accompanies discussions of food on television or in books, she says, "Lecturing people about what they should do just makes them feel inadequate. People's lives are already so pressured and stressed. I'm much more interested in meeting them where they live." Katzen, the mother of two children, was born in Rochester, New York. Her father was an attorney and her mother a social worker. She began cooking before she was in her teens, but first discovered the pleasures to be found in fresh vegetables while pursuing a degree in art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She spent part of her time during college learning about different types of cuisine while working in a variety of restaurants. Soon after graduation, at the age of 23, she and other aspiring restaurateurs formed a cooperative in Ithaca called the Moosewood Restaurant, which became known for its vegetarian dishes. Its popularity boomed, and Katzen, at the request of many patrons, assembled a 78-page cookbook from a sheaf of recipes. The Moosewood Cookbook, assembled and illustrated whimsically by Katzen, was first published commercially in 1977 and has since become one of the 10 best-selling cookbooks of all time. In 1998, Katzen revised and expanded her successful volume. She reengineered the recipes to make them lower in cholesterol and sodium, and she used more standard measures and added directions to make the book more accessible to novice cooks. In 1995, she inaugurated a cooking program on U.S. public television that gave rise to another cookbook, Vegetable Heaven, as well as a collection of "amazing recipes for cooks ages eight and up," such as the one titled Honest Pretzels: and 64 Other Amazing Recipes for Cooks Ages 8 & Up. It was her second children's book, after Pretend Soup. In all, there are more than four million Katzen books in print. Most recently, she tackled breakfast with Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Café, a collection of 350 recipes for everything from raspberry-drenched rhubarb to coconut-rice flour crepes. Urging her followers to understand how fulfilling morning eating can be, she does so fully cognizant of people's time restrictions during those early hours. Katzen's work, a New York Times reviewer said, "is the exemplar of a healthful cooking style that has no dogma and offers no apologies." As far as her inventiveness with recipes, wrote a Washington Post critic, "We are all eating better for it." The Accidental Cook Mexico and the United States have always been linked in many ways: historically, culturally, economically, and demographically. The two nations are also closely linked gastronomically, as the story of chef Zarela Martínez illustrates.
Ms. Martínez was born in Sonora, in northern Mexico. She came from a family of cattle ranchers and frequently traveled to the United States. As a young woman she immigrated to the United States and worked as a social worker in El Paso, Texas, for several years. Her entry into the restaurant business was, as she describes it, more or less accidental. She married a widower with several children and began a second career as a restaurant chef to earn more money. In 1981 Martínez met renowned American chef Paul Prudhomme, who has made Cajun-style cuisine from Louisiana popular throughout the United States and the world. Prudhomme became her mentor and encouraged her to specialize in her native Mexican cuisine. She and Paul Prudhomme gained even more renown in 1983 when they were chosen, along with two other chefs, to prepare the first-ever regional American buffet for seven heads of state, including U.S. President Ronald Reagan, at the G-8 Economic Summit in Williamsburg, Virginia. In that same year, encouraged by her success, she moved to New York City where she became the menu-designer and later executive chef for the Café Marimba, one of the first restaurants in New York to make a serious attempt to prepare and serve authentic Mexican cuisine. Since then, Martínez's career has expanded and diversified even more. In 1987 she opened her own restaurant in New York, Zarela, which has become a culinary landmark in the city. She has also become a best-selling author of cookbooks celebrating the different cuisines of Mexico, including the Mediterranean and African-accented cooking of the state of Veracruz, and the unique cuisine of Oaxaca, which is the product of a rich fusion of Spanish and Native American influences. She has also become a familiar face on television. She hosted a 13 part series for the Public Broadcasting System called Zarela! La Cocina Veracruzana. She also appears frequently as a guest on many cooking programs. Martínez says that she believes that her greatest accomplishment has been to help Mexican cuisine gain greater recognition and appreciation throughout the United States and the world. She pointed out that when she first began her career as a professional chef, she was discouraged by reading well-known restaurant guidebooks that disparaged Mexican cuisine. At that time, according to Martínez, Mexican food was considered to consist of little more than a limited range of adapted, bland dishes. Today, with the help of skilled professionals such as Martínez, Mexican cuisine in the United States is fully appreciated in all its delicious diversity and authenticity. In Under Thirty She is self-effacing about her talent and her depth of knowledge of food and cooking. "I'm way too beer-out-of-the-bottle," she says, brushing off those who would refer to her in champagne terms.
Yet over the past five years or so, Rachael Ray has zoomed into the U.S. popular culture spotlight in more ways than one, thanks to her personality, her television presence, and - not the least of it - the inventiveness with which she's carved out a niche for herself. The niche - or gimmick, if you like - is the 30-minute meal. Almost everyone faces that urgent need - for one reason or another - to prepare something quickly, often unexpectedly. What works? What doesn't? That's where Ray, , a fixture on America's 11-year-old, cable-based Food Network, comes to the rescue. When the network's executives - looking for something offbeat that would cater to the average person, rather than to the gourmet or connoisseur - came to Ray, she was skeptical. "I really don't belong here," she said, citing names of famous cooks who she thought did. "Food is for everyone," countered network president Judy Girard. "No matter who you are or where you're from, you have a relationship to it. Everyone eats." And most people, as a rule, seek simplicity and speed. Primavera orzo, for example, takes ten minutes to prepare and 15 minutes to cook. Sorbet eggs take another 10 minutes. That repast comes in under the 30-minute preparation limit that Ray has set as her goal. Her perspective is eclectic and global - ranging from fish tacos in lettuce wraps to tomatoes stuffed with tabbouleh salad. Her selections can border on haute cuisine (smoked trout canapés with crème-fraiche and herb sauce) or be decidedly down to earth (double-dipped spicy chicken). Personally, she might lean to a basic minestra—beans and greens with garlic in broth, one of her grandfather's favorites. "I could live on this soup all winter and never tire of it," she said recently in an interview. Thirty-minute meals aren't the equivalent of what's familiarly known as fast food. As she has noted and reiterated, on television and in the growing number of cookbooks she has written, her approach runs counter to fast food, in that she offers balanced menus; she demonstrates how to move swiftly from one preparation to another to accomplish the entire meal preparation in a half-hour. Ray is a product of a family rooted in cooking, from her maternal grandfather, who grew and prepared whatever he needed for his family of 12, to her father's family, which emerged from the food-rich Creole culture of Louisiana. Her parents owned a family restaurant on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and later relocated to New York, where her mother supervised food preparation for a chain of restaurants in the Adirondack region upstate. Ray began her career in a New York City department store, Macy's, first at the candy counter and later managing the fresh foods section. From Macy's she went on to a job managing and buying for a gourmet marketplace before returning to the Adirondacks to manage pubs and restaurants. Hired away to be a food buyer and chef at a gourmet market in Albany, the state capital, she began a series of cooking classes to boost grocery sales during holiday seasons. The classes were labeled "30-Minute Meals," and their popularity sparked local media coverage, which led to a weekly segment on an evening news broadcast. Next came a cookbook, which sold 10,000 copies in the area alone. Before long, Ray's success spread, and her name and her niche became known nationwide. Despite her newfound fame, Ray insists that she be seen as someone who is no different than her viewers and readers - in her words, "a busy person with no extra time and a good appetite for those who belong to the same category in life." East Meets West One of the Food Network's best-known personalities is Ming Tsai. Young, personable, and handsome, Tsai (whose last name is pronounced "sigh") was born in Newport Beach, California and grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He became interested in food and cooking at an early age when his mother (who, like his father, was born in China), opened a Chinese restaurant in Dayton. By the age of 14, Tsai was already preparing meals at his mother's restaurant. He studied engineering at Yale University, as his father had done, but his real love was always cooking. Consequently, he spent two summers in France studying at the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, and then pursued a graduate degree in hotel management at Cornell University.
After working at several different restaurants, including Natacha in Paris and a sushi restaurant in Osaka, Japan, Tsai signed on as the executive chef at Santacafe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When the Food Network's Dining Around program featured Santacafe, Tsai made his television debut. After this, he appeared on many other Food Network programs, including Ready, Set, Cook and Chef du Jour. In 1998, Tsai was given his own program on the Food Network, entitled East Meets West with Ming Tsai. This program, one of the first to feature Asian cuisine, was an immediate critical and popular success, winning a Daytime Emmy (an award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) in 1999. Tsai's cuisine, featured on television and in his cookbooks, and at the Boston restaurant that he owns and operates, the Blue Ginger, is sometimes called "fusion cuisine." Fusion cooking combines Asian and Western ingredients in innovative and exotic dishes. Tsai prefers the term "East-West" cuisine, which seems appropriate given his Asian heritage, American upbringing, and European culinary training. No matter what it is called, Tsai's cuisine exemplifies how a wide range of rich and diverse influences have shaped the contemporary American culinary scene.
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