Steal the Menu (10 page)

My new readers hearkened. Fiercely. In the hope of tasting the Shens’ unchastenedly hot Sichuan bean curd, their handmade dumplings and their genuine “Peking” sweet-and-sour pork, they called (201) 329-6896, called it again and again, and if they were lucky enough and persistent enough to get through and book a
table, they crowded into the little dining room on Route 1 in a frenzy of food lust.

Jean tested the Shens’ recipe for eggplant with shrimp, while I watched. With the suspicion I would come to know well over the ensuing months, she told me she thought the recipe called for too much oil—two cups for two medium eggplants—but relented when the dish came together just as I recalled it.

And I was launched.

When word of the crazed response to the piece got back to the
Times
, I was happy and relieved. Charlotte was relieved and, perhaps, happy. She was hard to read, in her nasal and affectless midwestern way. Most important, A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal, the paper’s despotic executive editor, was happy, too, but he did remark that I might have waited a few weeks before sending up this first-magnitude flare. Maybe it would have been better to start off more quietly, Abe suggested. But at this point in our relationship, he had not decided if I was going to satisfy his only criterion for professional acceptability: Would I be good for the
Times
?

He still wasn’t sure, for the most part, because he didn’t know much about food. At our first meeting, the day he hired me, he’d said, “I have more trouble figuring out how we should cover food than I do about reporting on SALT.”
^*

He did, however, confide his relief that “at least you’re not a queer.”

Although we shared an interest in women, Abe and I, at bottom, we were fatally unalike.

He was a tough, up-from-nowhere graduate of City College, no intellectual, a Cold Warrior who’d won a Pulitzer as a
Times
correspondent in Poland, a natural reporter. I had a fancy literary
education, almost zero interest in politics, and a deep suspicion of the basic premises of the Cold War. He spotted me immediately as a dubious prospect. I knew he and I would never understand each other, especially after he told me that my beat was one of the few areas in the paper that made readers feel good about their lives.

Negative critics barely existed at the
Times
. The conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, then the cultural editor of the paper, was a very articulate, well-informed opponent of far-out trends in the visual arts. John Simon, acerb and mandarin, appeared as a freelance naysayer sometimes in the Sunday paper. But the basic tone of
Times
criticism was middlebrow and allrightnik. And that was fine with Abe. He wasn’t running the
Partisan Review
or
Dissent
. And he would never have hired me if he’d suspected that my ambitions as a food critic would be just as anti-establishment and rhetorically flamboyant as those literary quarterlies.

I knew perfectly well that food news at the
New York Times
was an inappropriate perch for an intellectual child of the sixties with a scornful view of the New York food scene and an angry reaction to its class-bound standards. Even in the conventional critical departments, the
Times
had not welcomed critics who threatened received ideas or deployed irony. Instead the
Times
had fought the bad fight against abstract expressionism in its art columns long past the point where sniffing at Jackson Pollock made the sniffer (and his publisher) look ridiculous. This stultifying atmosphere still prevailed in 1971.

So in the ensuing months, I kept up a show of preserving the Claiborne paradigm. On Thursday, I interviewed glamorous cooks, usually well-heeled housewives with modestly original recipes and entertainment tips for my less glamorous readers. My restaurant reviews seemed to follow the reactive pattern of the past: a new place opened and I judged its dishes (too much bay leaf in the
purée mongole
), no radical principles on view. And since
the
Times Magazine
had a backlog of many months of Claiborne recipe pages with expensive color art already shot for them, I was regularly forced to lie low in that area, limited to writing blurbs for dishes I’d never tasted.

As late as December 19, 1971, I was still working off these Claiborne pages. On that Sunday, I concocted a blurb for two pheasant recipes. One I had inherited from a Claiborne favorite, the painter Ed Giobbi; the other, which I stuck in, was adapted from Escoffier. By then, I was thoroughly fed up with being Craig’s anonymous ghost for those leftover magazine pages. Giobbi’s braised pheasant was an innocuous enough thing. But in an oblique and childish swipe, I added the “utterly simple” Escoffier pheasant as a contrast to Giobbi’s, which, I wrote, “calls for more ingredients and more seasonings.”

Did anyone, even Ed Giobbi, notice the barb? Years later at an Upper East Side party, Giobbi’s wife, Elinor, cornered me in order to commiserate with me disingenuously about how unsuited I’d been for the
Times
job.

If I had caused her discomfort with my pheasant blurb, that must have been nothing compared to the embarrassment and fury I’d caused Tricia Nixon, the elder daughter of the president, in my first few days as food editor.

On June 1, a Tuesday when I would have been preparing some routine interview with a cook for my normal Thursday feature, the White House held a press conference to announce its plans for an immense cake for Tricia’s upcoming wedding to Edward Cox. The White House chef, Henry Haller, and its pastry chef, Heinz Bender, had developed a 350-pound, six-foot-tall, six-tiered lemon-flavored pound cake based on a recipe from the bride’s mother. They also handed out a reduced version of the giant wedding cake recipe for home cooks to bake in their own kitchens.

My response was swift and lethal. I saw myself as the nation’s
designated palate, and I thought I ought to taste the cake the White House was proposing for the nation’s domestic ovens. The
Times
would bake the home-cook version of that cake.

I turned the recipe over to Jean Hewitt, and she sprang into action. As she’d predicted after one look at the handout, it didn’t work. The single-layer “cake” erupted from its pan all over her immaculate Garland oven.

I tried a spoonful and retreated to my typewriter. With the mighty web presses waiting to thunder below, I knocked out an account of the debacle. It ran the next morning, next to the Associated Press article about the White House press conference that included the hapless recipe, under the headline “Warning! It May Not Work.”

As if this weren’t a rude enough awakening for the White House, some staffers may have happened to read early editions of the
Times
in which two accidentally (?) reversed linotype slugs in the
Times
version of the AP recipe story stated that the cake “will have the initials of the President’s daughter and her bridegroom, Edward Finch white, decorated with blown Cox, and will be iced in sugar orchids, white roses and pink-tinged cherry blossoms.” The error was emended for later editions to the correct text: “… her bridegroom, Edward Finch Cox, and will be iced in white decorated with blown sugar orchids.”
^†

Few people actually noticed this howler, but my article had a
wider impact. It was a cheap shot heard round the world. It certainly knocked the whisk out of Heinz Bender’s hand.

My article came out on a Wednesday. Within minutes, food reporters from all sides were clamoring for quotes from me. I walked into Charlotte’s little glassed-in office to find out what we’d do for the Thursday paper.

“Nothing,” she said. “Today, we let everyone else scramble and make fools of themselves. Tomorrow, we jump back in. We’re playing newspaper.”

It was just as the lady said. On Thursday, June 3, we stepped back and let UPI, the wire service, carry our water. The official news was that Chef Bender, under huge pressure, had agreed to try the handout recipe himself but had refused requests from a horde of newsmen, including me, to watch. Mrs. Nixon’s press secretary, Constance Stuart, was predictably indignant and stood by the recipe, but there was slippage in her defense. She conceded to UPI that the recipe should have called for a mixer instead of a blender. For his part, farther down in the article, Bender revealed that his recipe had neglected to mention the need to affix a brown paper collar around the pan to prevent the batter from overflowing as it baked.

For the same article, in what may have been an attempt to discredit me by eliciting a negative reaction to my article from my more famous predecessor, UPI interviewed Craig Claiborne. The reporter must have read the recipe to him, and then, to my great pleasure, Claiborne opined, “I’ve seen a lot of bizarre recipes, and I must conclude from this one that obviously the White House means whole eggs and not egg whites in the second step of the recipe.” Then the old snake coiled back and let us have it: “But I shouldn’t comment because I haven’t tried the recipe—I haven’t seen it printed because I no longer read newspapers.”

On the third day, it was our turn again:

The article goes on to describe various other fumbles and errors: corrections of mistakes in the recipe that accompanied the first UPI article, the discovery by Jean Hewitt that the quantities specified in both versions of the White House recipe gave improbable quantities for baking powder; this discrepancy would have helped explain why the batter had erupted in our kitchen. But the White House, our article went on to say, stood by its original quantities, while, nonetheless, increasing the height of the brown paper collar from two to three inches.

All these revisions kept Jean Hewitt very busy through Thursday, baking each new version of the cake, as each emended recipe emerged from the harried Washington kitchen. The final White House text, when cooked at the
Times
, “shook like jelly but tasted like a very soft French lemon soufflé,” I wrote in an article that appeared on Friday, June 4.

“At the other end of The Times’s kitchen,” I continued, “was a very large mixing bowl brimming with nearly 100 egg yolks left from two days of trying to keep up with the evolution of Tricia’s cake.”

This was actually my second chance that spring to skewer the Nixon image in the
Times
. In late May, I’d been sent down to Austin, Texas, to cover the mammoth barbecue at the inauguration of the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library. I was one of at least five
Times
men and women covering this nonevent. There was a man from the Washington bureau, another from the national desk, the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable and Nan Robertson from women’s news, ostensibly because of the fashion angle—or perhaps just because it was a major social event.

I devoted most of my space to enumerating the huge quantities of finger-lickin’ fixins: eighteen hundred pounds of brisket, fifteen hundred pounds of ribs, a half ton each of ranch beans, potato salad and cole slaw for four thousand guests. One of them was Tricky Dick, whom I’d been taught to loathe at Mother’s knee during the McCarthy era.

Mother had brainwashed me with Nixonophobia. In 1951, she introduced California congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas at a meeting of the Detroit chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. Douglas had just been defeated by Nixon in an outstandingly ugly senatorial election in California. Nixon’s campaign had smeared her as a Communist. Douglas invented the nickname Tricky Dick for him and smeared his supporters, in turn, as Blackshirts, still a familiar code word then for fascists. Mother practiced her speech hundreds of times at home. Eavesdropping, I memorized it without trying and imbibed its anti-Nixon attitude like an aural vaccine that would last me for life.

In 1953, when I was in Washington for my second year at the National Spelling Bee, I declined to join the other contestants on a tour that included the Capitol, because I’d seen all of the sights the year before and really wanted to hang out at the spelling bee press office in the Willard Hotel. A couple of reporters were whiling away the afternoon there when I walked in.

“Why haven’t you gone with the other kids?” one of them asked me. Vice President Nixon was going to welcome them to the Capitol. Didn’t I know that?

“I’m a Democrat,” I retorted.

At that, the other reporter, an AP man, got up and went straight to the telex machine on the far wall. Down he sat and typed in two paragraphs about the eleven-year-old spelling bee contestant from Detroit who was refusing to meet with the vice president.

“ ‘I’m a Democrat,’ the lad explained.”

Other boys might have enjoyed the sudden national publicity, having their words sent out on the AP wire instants after they’d uttered them. Boys like that went into politics or show business. To me, the excitement was in the process I’d just observed. Oh sure, I got a chuckle out of taking a poke at Nixon. But what I loved much more and with an almost genetic affinity was the amplification of the poke. I’d just witnessed the creation of news, and I was hooked. A hack was born.

Twenty years later in Austin, I was living the life whose flavor I’d faintly sniffed in the Willard. But I hadn’t lost my distaste for Nixon. And there he was, on the Saturday morning of the dedication, in a hideous aqua sharkskin suit, about to receive the LBJ library for the nation, and he was standing
ten feet in front of me
!