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Zusatztext “Craig Claiborne was the greatest influence of my professional life in America. Knowledgeable! dedicated! and driven! he was determined to better American eating habits. As Thomas McNamee nicely portrays in The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat ! Claiborne's impact on the culinary revolution of the last forty years cannot be ignored or overstated.” —Jacques Pépin Informationen zum Autor Thomas McNamee is the author of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse . His writing has been published in The New Yorker , Life , The New York Times , and The Washington Post . He lives in San Francisco. Klappentext Originally published in hardcover in 2012.The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat 1 A Sensation Putting a piece about food on the front page of the New York Times was unheard of, but on April 13, 1959, they did it. ELEGANCE OF CUISINE IS ON WANE IN U.S. Two time-honored symbols of the good life—great cuisine in the French tradition and elegant table service—are passing from the American scene. . . . Cost control cramps the enthusiasm and inventiveness of master chefs. . . . Training facilities for cooks and waiters are virtually nonexistent. Management and union officials are apathetic. . . . Menus soon will be as stereotyped as those of a hamburger haven. . . . Americans seem always to be in a hurry. . . . Humbert Gatti, executive chef of the Plaza Hotel, predicts: “Within five years kitchens à la minute will replace haute cuisine in America’s major cities. The public will be offered broiled steak, broiled chicken or broiled fish. Or only sautéed dishes. No more sauce Champagne. No more sauce Robert, no more filet of beef Wellington. Even today, you walk into kitchens that don’t have a stockpot. . . . I know places with a big business where they don’t use ten pounds of butter a day.” The New York restaurant world was stunned. You didn’t come right out and say things like this. It wasn’t just New York, either. Restaurateurs across the country were outraged. There was no such thing as food criticism in those days, no such thing as a restaurant critic. Newspaper pieces about restaurants were written to please the advertisers. Food articles usually relied on recipes sent in by readers or on corporate press releases. And food writers? A few did exist, but M. F. K. Fisher, good as she was, never complained, and James Beard’s judgment was for hire. This was something entirely new. The writer, Craig Claiborne, had been the food editor of the New York Times for a year and a half, but until this moment he had been largely ignored by the brass. Their concerns were more serious than the decorators and couturiers and casseroles touted in the small section headed “Food Fashions Family Furnishings,” commonly known as the women’s page, where Craig’s work had till now always rather obscurely appeared. What nobody realized was that Craig Claiborne was going to become the most powerful force American food had ever known. The editor of the women’s page had always been a woman, and it had always been the custom at the Times to speak only sparingly of restaurants, and always politely. What had been noticed, vaguely, of the new, male editor was that he was a somewhat foppish Southerner with a distinctly literary style and an air of scholarly authority, but nobody high up had paid much attention to him till he pressed forward quite aggressively with his idea for this piece. This was Craig Claiborne’s dream job. New York was...
