Father of Food

"

Lately, I keep seeing James Beard. In Portland’s streets and restaurants, I turn my head and there he is: gossiping with an old friend over a plate of oysters at the Benson Hotel; testing the weight of a tomato at the farmer’s market; climbing the steps to his mother’s Salmon Street home a few blocks from my own.

Never mind that Beard died in 1985. Born 100 years ago this May, the man who came to personify American cooking is alive more than ever here in the state that nurtured his prodigious palate.

Still, not everyone knows of Beard’s Northwest origins. Born and bred in Portland, Beard spent most of his career in New York and abroad, thousands of miles from the landscape of his youth. Yet in his life and his writing, the dean of American cookery returned again and again to the fertile ground that shaped his tastes so indelibly.

“…[N]o place on earth, with the exception of Paris, has done as much to influence my professional life,” wrote Beard in Delights and Prejudices, his nostalgic memoir-cum-cookbook. From the first paragraph, in which the author likens the influence of his first foods to Proust’s evocative madeleines, Beard’s book is an ode to Oregon.

A TASTE OF HISTORY
It’s also a window onto this young corner of the nation at the dawn of the 20th century. Beard describes a young city where mavericks like his mother, Elizabeth — a gifted cook and independent hotelier — could navigate between the worlds of respectable folk and bohemian society, where constant river commerce nurtured a diverse culture, and the nearness of farmland, forest and coast offered a startling array of delicacies:
“When I recollect the taste sensations of my childhood, they lead me to … the great razor clams, the succulent Dungeness crab, the salmon, crawfish, mussels and trout of the Oregon coast; the black bottom pie served in a famous Portland restaurant; the Welsh rabbit of our Chinese cook; the white asparagus my mother canned; and the array of good dishes prepared by them in that most memorable of kitchens.”

On this smorgasbord, the Beards cultivated a precocious child accustomed to the worldly tastes and company of adults. Little James often accompanied his mother to the city’s then-widespread public and ethnic markets, searching for the best local produce and meats. (For more on farmers’ markets in Oregon, see sidebar.) Visits with his father into the mysterious world of Chinatown exposed him to exotic tastes beyond the boundaries of proper Portlanders.

And then there was the coast. The Beards spent long holidays at the popular resort town of Gearhart. If Portland and its flavors informed his memory, summers at the cottage inhabited Beard’s heart and soul for life. At Gearhart, the family indulged in spectacularly generous picnics prepared with ingredients from the sea’s plentiful larder.

“I remember how quickly she would start a fire on the beach with fine kindling, adding split wood and then bits of bark. In no time she would have breakfast going,” Beard wrote of his mother’s feasts, which often featured a dozen fried oysters apiece. Between digging for clams, the sweet pursuit of wild strawberries, and the lure of yet another meal enjoyed outdoors, Beard’s Gearhart days instilled in him a taste for casual dining and an appreciation for fresh, locally available foods — the salmon, the huckleberries, the fresh-picked corn — that could stand on the merits of their own flavors.

“Since my earliest recollections of food, I have fancied picnics and eating out of doors more than any other fashion of eating,” wrote Beard, who authored several cookbooks on outdoor cookery.

Beard eventually moved away from Oregon to try his luck on the stage. But as his career path assumed a culinary direction, he always revisited his home, returning at first for the reassurance of family and friends, later to teach cooking — and always to satisfy his appetite for the tastes of home.

“You can take the man out of Oregon, but you can’t take the Oregon out of the man,” says chef Jack Czarnecki, owner of the Joel Palmer House in Dayton and winner of a prestigious James Beard award for his book, A Cook’s Book of Mushrooms. “His soul was rooted here.”

LEGACY OF GOOD TASTE
In the 18 years since Beard’s death, American cooking has grown up, thanks in large part to the bow-tied gourmand. Beard cajoled a nation into embracing food for the pleasure
of it, perhaps nowhere more palpably than here.

Oregon’s culinary splendor is now the raison d’être for a coterie of chefs who — like Beard — can’t get enough of the good things that grow here. Passionate about good food freshly harvested and simply prepared, these modern interpreters are defining an approach to cooking that would delight the master himself. Indeed, Oregon has produced a half dozen James Beard Award winners in just over a decade. In honor of Beard’s centennial, we asked a few for their thoughts on Oregon’s most famous culinary export.

What is his legacy? And how would he react to what’s happening here now?
“I think he would be smiling,” says Greg Higgins, chef of Higgins Restaurant and Bar in Portland. A fervent advocate of locally grown, sustainable foods, Higgins brings his convictions to the table with fresh ingredients, often from his own garden. Serving the best the season has to offer is an idea that Beard championed in an era giddy with frozen vegetables and gelatin molds. Likewise, Higgins prefers to let the flavors of foods speak for themselves.

“In Oregon, what really drives the food is the ingredient. Too often, American chefs try to do too much with the food. Beard was always preaching against that,” says Higgins, summarizing a key credo of cooking around here: Keep it simple.

Across town, Wildwood restaurant chef Cory Schreiber pays tribute to Beard at the door, where guests are greeted by a glass mosaic of pears, seafood and recipe titles drawn from Delights and Prejudices. Like Beard, Schreiber grew up in Portland to a family of restaurateurs and later worked back east, yet always felt the gravitational pull of home. A central figure in the awakening of local cuisine, Schreiber sees Beard less as a direct influence than an inexorable force.

“When he passed away, we were just getting under way with…this revolution of food in America. [Beard] led it to the threshold,” Schreiber says.

What that amounts to in Oregon is an attitude toward food that reflects the region’s character. Pride in local product is in; flash and trendiness, out.

“We’ve always been kind of fundamentally grounded here. We don’t really pay much attention to the bells and whistles… If it tastes good and looks good, it is good. It just simmers down to that,” Schreiber concludes.

And maybe a little something about lifestyle. Folks in these parts enjoy a connectedness with the outdoors that nurtures their appreciation for local produce, game and seafood.

Credit that to the immediacy of Mt. Hood, where city dwellers can pick their own pears from world-famous orchards; the accessible coast, where Oregonians pull their own crab from the briny depths; or the state’s fabled network of salmon streams. In recent years, this intimacy with edibles has translated into a renaissance of farmers’ markets not seen in the state since Beard was a boy.

Nothing would make him happier. Because in the end, Beard was all about getting people directly in touch with good food, delivered from the earth to the mouth with just enough loving care to enhance its natural assets. Call it luck or legacy, but in a place endowed with food and wine that rivals any other region of the world, is it any wonder that Beard’s relaxed spirit prevails in kitchens across the state?

“He never really left,” says Jack Czarnecki. “There’s a quiet confidence to everything here.”

We can almost taste it.