An imagined gathering
1957 · Greenwich Village, New York
Beard gathers the writers and editors who will define American food writing over the next three decades.
Beard's Greenwich Village kitchen is a salon as much as a kitchen, and tonight it is crowded. Julia Child, in New York between trips to Paris and already at work on a manuscript with Simone Beck, has come up from Washington with a casserole of boeuf bourguignon. Craig Claiborne, food editor of The New York Times since that spring, has been writing to Beard for advice and is here to meet him properly for the first time.
M.F.K. Fisher arrives late, as she prefers to, with a paper sack of oysters and a story about a market in Dijon. The talk runs long past the food: whether American cooking can be written about as literature, whether a recipe can be trusted, and what a food editor owes his readers. Beard, who has been arguing these questions for fifteen years, is delighted to have the argument renewed by people he expects to outlast him.
Host: James Beard
Julia Child — Settling into Washington after Paris and testing recipes for a book.
Craig Claiborne — Newly named food editor of *The New York Times*.
M.F.K. Fisher — Essayist and old friend of Beard's, then living in California.
First course
by James Beard
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.