5 Food (And Life) Lessons to Live By on James Beard’s 120th Birthday
So, did the kid from Oregon leave Oregon to discover the tastes of the world? No, I say he taught the world how to eat like an Oregonian. Let me tell you why I say that, as an admittedly biased transplanted Oregonian.
James Beard was born on May 5, 1903 in Portland, OR and today is hundred and twentieth birthday. His name has come to be synonymous with the James Beard Awards celebrating the finest in culinary arts. As one of the most beloved people on the American food scene at the time of his death, it is a legendary story how Julia Child suggested and Peter Kump and Wolfgang Puck rallied to start the foundation that does so much good work today.
The unfortunate part of the gastronome extraordinaire caricature is that other aspects of the man are often forgotten. Many of them are firmly rooted in his youth and summers in Oregon. Here’s the 5 that mean something to me.
1. Celebrate Simple Food. “There are few things as magnificent as scrambled eggs, pure and simple, perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned.” In a time when the Swanson TV dinner was celebrated as progress. This reminder was, and is, clarifying that an egg, a berry, an oyster or a tomato is perhaps the most unifying indulgence that humanity enjoys.
2. Love Regional, Seasonal Eating. Beard loved the food wherever he was, but the Northwest was clearly where his heart was. He said, “the raw materials in the northwest are among the finest that you can find anywhere in the country, because the fruits which mature more slowly than some of those in the warmer climates are more flavorful when they are picked you have extraordinarily good fish you have good game you have good meat, and you have excellent vegetables.” John Birdsall captured Beard’s role in transforming the idea of good food being French food into the idea of Good Food being local food in his 2020 book, , “James created something new in Fireside: a dish that seemed to have roots with farmers in the Willamette or Susquehanna Valley, not villagers in the Rhône. American food.”
3. Forgiveness and Grace. James Beard was quietly expelled from Reed College in 1921 for a gay affair with a professor. This badge of shame hung like an albatross on him for much of his life. Finally, in 1976 this injustice reached some kind of closure when Reed College gave him an honorary degree noting his “improvement of the quality of human life” and the author the “definitive work on the evolution of American food.” More remarkably, this reproachment ultimately led Beard to leave Reed the bulk of his assets including his house to Reed College. Only a person who can forgive and live with grace, could do such a thing graceful thing as this.
4. America’s Delicious Melting Pot is a Strength. Beard grew up shopping at the Carroll public market which sat in the place that is now SW Yamhill between 1st and 5th avenue in Portland. He shopped with his mom, known as a gifted cook, and Jue Let her Canton born business partner. He called Chinese food his comfort food. This idea of buying local and using the techniques of your own cultural food tradition unifies us all. Beard’s view was that good food didn’t need to be fancy food. I love the way Adam Gopnik described Beard’s influence in his in 2020 New Yorker article. “It took small, constant waves of novelty a variety of Eastern influences, the new primacy of Italian cooking, the emphasis on localism, implicit but not fully realized in Beard’s food — to change that for good and make American cooking less showily “American” and more unself-consciously itself.”
5. Cooking is Fun. Oh, such a simple gift that Beard, Julia and so many we see today gave us. “I love to eat,” he would say at his cooking school in New York and at Seaside, OR in the summer. Goofy pictures filled with laughter and technique introduced thousands of people to the pleasure of learning knife skills and how to keep your sauce from breaking. The class would always conclude with a celebratory meal enjoying the fruits of the class’s labor. His spirit captured in a single sentence, “”The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you are afraid of it.” That one still makes me chortle like a second grader. Yes, indeed cooking is fun especially for those who got to do it with Jim.
No doubt James Beard had his flaws and maybe received more credit than he was due as some say. But we don’t need to talk about those things at someone’s funeral or on their hundred and twentieth birthday.
Happy Birthday James Beard, from an admirer in Oregon. Originally published May 5, 2023.
