Birdsall’s biography is very different in tone from the largely serious and admiring biographies that have been written about Child and Fisher. Without actually saying that Beard was a fraud, Birdsall suggests that he was something of a figurehead, one of those people who represent a field rather than remake it. By Birdsall’s not particularly unkind record, Beard often borrowed other people’s recipes, frequently recycled his own, and generally relied on other cooks for his innovations and, not infrequently, on editors and assistants for his prose. Still, Beard emerges from the inevitable biographer’s bath of debunking as an essential figure in the emancipation of American cooking. Perhaps his abilities were those of the actor he had been in his youth, someone impersonating a gourmet more than actually knowing how to be one; Birdsall shows us a young Beard learning that all you have to do is swirl the wine around and sniff to pass as an oenophile. But the role that Beard invented and played was vital in creating a new idea of what American cooking was. In 1980, in the best restaurant guide in New York, all the four-star places were classic French ones. Four decades later, that type of restaurant has vanished, or has only been clinging to life (even before the pandemic), while places that share Beard’s tastes, if not his food, are taken for granted as the best in show. Beard, having little to do with what they serve, has everything to do with what they’ve accomplished.
Beard, we learn, played a suggestively ambiguous role in capitalizing on the American abundance of the fifties and sixties, and then mediated a dialogue between the country’s West and East Coasts that helped shape American cuisine. Born in 1903 and raised in Portland, Oregon, Beard was really a member of the Liebling-Hemingway generation, imprinted as he was by his experiences of France in the twenties. After a largely peripatetic childhood and a year at Reed, then a new liberal-arts college, he spent time in London and in Paris, studying voice, and then dove into performing, without great success, in London and New York and even silent Hollywood. His ambition to be an actor never really vanished. His move to food occurred, as much out of desperation as purpose, in the late thirties, under the influence of a couple of now forgotten New York socialites, Bill Rhode and James Barlow Cullum, Jr. Beard, his biographer tells us, “started the night wanting to go to bed with Bill; after hearing him talk for a couple of hours in Cullum’s living room, he wanted to be Bill.” Rhode showed that cooking could be a form of theatre. “His storytelling—the bravado behind the invented anecdotes—breathed life and drama into the recipes,” Birdsall writes. It was the central lesson that Beard absorbed: not merely selling the sizzle more than the steak but selling the story of how the sizzle came to be, even if the steak was not actually sizzling.