The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
(Norton, $35)
Hardly anyone reads James Beard’s cookbooks today, said
Rien Fertel in The Wall Street Journal. But Beard was the food guru that postwar America needed, and John Birdsall’s lively biography of the ebullient homegrown gourmet “makes the case that we should honor the debt we owe him for making us a nation of smarter, savvier, more adventurous eaters.” Beard, born in Portland, Ore., in 1903, failed to make it as an opera singer before turning to catering in his late 30s and building a following that led to cookbooks and a pioneering 1946 TV show. Soon dubbed the dean of American cookery, Beard remained such a towering figure that the awards named after him became the Oscars of the food world. “Big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true,” The Man Who
Ate Too Much feels like “the celebration that Beard deserves.”
“This is not biography as lionization,” said Ligaya Mishan in The New York
Times. Beard often poached other people’s recipes, we learn, and shamelessly recycled his own. But Birdsall also portrays him as a Whitmanesque character who taught Americans to think of their cooking as a team project in which contributions come from every corner. Birdsall has a gift for description, and he helps us imagine Beard as a pale boy hunting for Dungeness crabs in Oregon and as a young man haunted by having been expelled from college for a tryst with a male professor. Later, as
Beard becomes famous, “we lose him in the crowd,” because Birdsall builds out his cast to try to capture an era—an era in which the country was too slowly rethinking homosexuality for Beard to ever leave the closet.
Birdsall too often sneers when assessing people and places, said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Otherwise, though, he tells his story well and makes a persuasive case that Beard was essential because in the 1950s he rediscovered the West Coast’s organic culinary culture and became its champion. “Ever afterward,” great American cooking has blended myriad culinary traditions with the best local ingredients. For the role history offered him, “Beard was perfectly cast.”