James Beard's Menu's For Entertaining

Entertaining is another sub-genre in cookbooks that we just love. Now to be totally fair, we have never, ever cooked a menu, nor set a table based upon anything in one of these books, but we do love to watch other people entertain. One of the best loved books on entertaining is James Beard's Menu's For Entertaining.  There are tons of copies out there, and though we have no firm facts, it seems to be one of Book-Of-The-Month Club's best sellers, making the hunt for a nice First Edition a daunting task.

These days, James Beard is known more for awards than recipes, but in the 50's and 60's, if Beard cooked it, it would likely find its way onto a table near you. Of entertaining he wrote:

"Entertaining is my main pleasure, my forte;and beyond that is essential to my livelihood. I do it frequently with little help and often with none at all. It is not unusual for me to arrive home at 5:30 after a full day's work, with eight guests due for cocktails and dinner two hours later."

In moving things around, I picked up Menu's For Entertaining and found it to be beyond charming. Beard cooked before the proliferation of take out, specialty shops, sous vide, and molecular gastronomy.  What would he think today?

As chef's and their restaurants tout their recent listing on the James Beard awards pages here is our favorite recipe from Menu's For Entertaining.

Whole Hominy

Open and wash two No. 2 1/2 cans whole hominy. Heat with 6 tablespoons butter in a covered pan over medium heat. Salt and pepper to taste and add 1/3 cup of sour cream.

Now you, too, can entertain like James Beard.  And don't you feel better about it.

Delights and Prejudices

Delights and Prejudices was written by James Beard in 1964. The book is filled with over 250 recipes, but each of them is sandwiched in the context of a larger work of memoir. On can never truly extricate themselves from their first kitchen and Beard is no exception. He grew up in the kitchen of his mother who cooked for several hotels in Portland, Oregon. While Beard fell in love with French cuisine, he never strayed from the locally grown produce and fresh ingredients that filled his mother's kitchen.

A newer edition of this title was published in 2001 with an introduction by Julia Child and a foreword by Charlie Trotter. James Beard has fallen out of fashion a bit in recent memory, but this is just the book to bring him back with a vengeance. What makes this book so marvelous is the way the talks about the food. Yes, the recipes are important, but they merely lay a framework for a larger story -- the story of a man who truly loves food and the people who grow it and cook it and sell it and share it.

Huckleberry Cake was a Beard favorite. He adapted his recipe from an old family recipe of Mary Hamblet, a lifelong friend to whom Beard dedicated the book. In some circles it is still referred to as the Hamblet Huckleberry Cake. Huckleberry Cake often has an asterisk stating that blueberries will make a fine substitution. If you believe that then you desperately need to read Delights and Prejudices. Beard makes it clear that only the tart, elusive huckleberry will give this cake the true flavor of the Northeast. (That being said, many of the blueberries that hit the supermarket from foreign lands are picked at a point that they are almost as tart as the precious huckleberry. On rare occasions, huckleberries turn up in the freezer case at a supermarket. If you want huckleberry cake, you need the huckleberry. But feel free to make a Blueberry Cake if you must, Beard won't mind.)

This edition of the book features recipes written like I like to read them -- with the ingredients incorporated into the method.

Huckleberry Cake

Cream 1 cup butter and 1 cup granulated sugar together until the mixture is very light. Add 3 eggs, one by one, beating after each addition. Sift 2 cups flour and save 1/4 cup flour to mix with 1 cup huckleberries. Add to the rest 2 teaspoons baking powder and a pinch of salt, and fold this into the egg mixture. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and, lastly, fold in the floured huckleberries. Pour the batter into a buttered, floured 8-inch-square baking tin. Bake at 375º for 35 to 40 minutes or until the cake is nicely browned, or when a tester inserted comes out clean. Serve the cake hot with whipped cream, or cold.

On the James Beard foundation website, they have the recipe converted to a modern layout.

Huckleberry Cake

Ingredients:

1 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
1 cup huckleberries
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:
Preheat oven to 375º.

Cream butter and sugar together until the mixture is very light. Add eggs, one by one, beating after each addition. Combine 1/4 cup flour with the huckleberries. In a bowl, mix the remaining flour with baking soda and then fold this into the egg mixture. Add vanilla and, lastly, fold in the floured huckleberries.

Pour the batter into a buttered, floured 8-inch-square baking tin. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until the cake is nicely browned, or when a tester inserted comes out clean. Serve the cake hot with whipped cream.

Give this one a try and if you have never read James Beard, this is the place to start, and that is my prejudice.

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Judith Jones is probably the most famous foodie who didn’t spend her life in a kitchen cooking. Well, actually, she spent a lot of time in a kitchen cooking, but her claim to fame in not cooking, but publishing people who did cook. Judith Jones is the editor who brought Madhur Jaffery, Marcella Hazen, Ed Giobbi, and Edna Lewis to the reading public, but there were more.

She brought Elizabeth David to America, a feat that proved to be quite difficult. It seems, Jones wanted the stuffing set to fill zucchini, to fill just the zucchini and not make triple the amount needed. She wanted them to be zucchini and not courgettes, after all, it was America. David didn't see the problem and she knew courgettes were much more pleasant sounding than zucchini. She wrote to Jones:

“Inconsistencies are inevitable in a cookery book and preferable, I think myself, to the absurdities brought about by overzealousness in the matter of liberal renderings.
I don’t think one does any harm in crediting one’s readers with a little imagination and knowledge of their own.”

Is it any wonder I love Elizabeth David! Knopf told Jones to reject the book if David refused her changes, but Jones realized what a wonder it was and she published it with all of Elizabeth David’s “inconsistencies.”

There was someone else she edited … let me think… oh, yes, Julia Child. If you went to the movies this month you know this story by heart.

James Beard, Judith Jones, and Julia Child

Jones was a bit of a cookbook writer on her own (and with her husband, Evan). So when Jones set out to write a biography, it was destined to be a winner. The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food is just that. Part biography, part love story, part cookbook and all totally fascinating.

As for the cookbook part, Judith Jones first tasted this sauce in a bistro on the Left Bank. It was spread on sliced cold meat. She loved it and searched around for a recipe. She never found one she truly liked, so she devised her own.

Sauce Gribiche for Cold Lamb or Other Meats

1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon capers
2 cornichons, chopped in small pieces
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped fine
Freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

Mix all the ingredients together. If you’re not using the sauce right away, hold back on the parsley, and mix that in at the last. This is a sauce you have to taste so you can adjust the seasoning to get the balance right. Adjust accordingly to what your palate tells you.

See the movie if you must (you must) and while you are out, pick up a copy of The Tenth Muse.