THE MAN WHO ATE TOO MUCH

The author of the groundbreaking article, “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” turns a sharp but sympathetic eye on the carefully closeted food writer who celebrated the glories of homegrown ingredients and down-home cooking decades before they were fashionable.

Born in Portland, Oregon, James Beard (1903-1985) told friends later in life that he’d known he was gay since he was 7. During his freshman year at Reed College, he was quietly expelled after being “caught in an act of oral indecency with a professor.” He spent a desultory decade or so trying to make it as an actor and finally hit his stride in New York, where he started a cocktail catering business with an acquaintance made through his prodigious socializing. In 1940, his first book, Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés, With a Key to the Cocktail Party, began a lifelong tradition of not acknowledging collaborators or the sources of recipes that were sometimes lifted from others and, later in his career, reprinted from his earlier books. What sold even the most mediocre of his books was his larger-than-life personality: “playful and unabashedly queer,” Birdsall notes, but only to those in the know. For average Americans, Beard was simply someone who demystified cooking and invited them to enjoy food as he did. The author’s well-written and knowledgeable text doesn’t scant Beard’s cooking and eating—indeed, luscious descriptions of memorable meals make this an appetite-arousing read—but its major secondary theme is the nature of gay life in midcentury America, where discretion was essential and discovery meant professional ruin and very likely jail. Birdsall’s analysis of Beard’s ambivalent reaction to the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969 is one of the book’s many intelligent passages decoding a worldview built on shame and secrecy, one that made Beard frequently unhappy and lonely despite his fame and success.

A thoughtful appreciation of a central figure in the story of American food culture.