Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

If you’ve ever made a salad from tender greens picked up from the farmers’ market, slurped an oyster cultivated at a regenerative farm, or sliced into a hearty loaf of rye bread—then raise a glass of California wine to James Beard, the dean of American cooking. For more than 35 years and in nearly two dozen cookbooks, Beard swept aside stuffy imported notions of epicurean haute cuisine on the one hand and processed and freezer food on the other to reveal the real flavors that were available to American cooks: ham from Kentucky hogs, old-world loaves from immigrant bakeries, obscure Washington apples. As John Birdsall writes in the first biography of the chef in more than 25 years, Beard “remembered what food tasted like before supermarkets killed off local butchers and produce stands”—and he spent his whole life trying to share that memory with the public. But while he gave home cooks permission to put pleasure and flavor at the center of the American table, Beard kept his own struggles with self-doubt and hi