Check out this book review on James Beard’s “most personal book,” Beard on Food. The recipes at the end are great too!
“In the beginning, there was Beard,”Julia Child famously declared about the paterfamilias of American cooking, an opinion echoed in one way or another by almost all of her contemporaries. And while James Beard is often criticized for having ended an otherwise exemplary career in a blaze of corporate sponsorship — his ample pear-shaped frame and zealous grin on perhaps too many food labels — his legacy remains largely undiminished. As David Kamp writes in “The United States of Arugula,” Beard, along with Child and Craig Claiborne, transformed the notion of cooking from a homemaker’s chore to a cultural pastime. Without Beard, it’s doubtful that cooking today would be considered an American art.”
