January 2021: FINDING PIERRE FRANEY
The Kitchen Scholar had never featured recipes by an actual chef as an actual monthly theme since its inception. Julia Child was a television personality and cookbook author, and Craig Claiborne was a newspaper journalist and dining critic. Although both food revolutionaries underwent training and immersed in culinary or hospitality schools in Europe to gain expertise, neither one of them nor James Beard were professional chefs and toiled inside actual restaurant kitchens. On the other hand, a chef, especially an extremely talented one, is no background figure. Without a chef to conceptualize and create a dish through his or her craft, a gourmet has nothing to rave about no matter how the latter possesses an encylcopedic knowledge or a discriminating palate. Hence, a great and esteemed chef deserves reverence as reciprocity for his or her labor of love.
Long before I honored Craig Claiborne in my website last September 2020 out of a last-minute realization of his hundredth birthday, I already set sights on Pierre Franey as the recipient of my January 2021 theme under the same centennial reason, which falls on the 13th of this month. Pierre who? Pierre Franey, the 60-Minute Gourmet column writer of The New York Times and host of the public television show, Cuisine Rapide. Still unfamiliar?
To the current generation of food writers, food bloggers, and enthusiastic home cooks like myself, the name, Pierre Franey, does not strike a loud clang on a bell because his untimely death almost 25 years ago was premature. By that, I do not mean that he passed away at a young age without living at his fullest, but rather Pierre Franey departed this world too early to surpass the previous century and thus, was deprived of the opportunity to harness the technological advances and trends in online media and communications such as Youtube, blogging, and wireless Internet. At the same time, he only had four public television series- a number I find scarce and wanting more myself due to how vastly educational his cooking shows are. His books have also been out of print for almost two decades so chancing upon them in bookstores and used book sales can be rare. Thankfully, his children, Claudia, Diane, and Jacques Franey launched a website that honors the life and continues the legacy of their father in 2013. I encourage my readers and visitors to check out the site by clicking on this link and test the recipes they may consider exploring.
Beloved and adored by his family and colleagues for his humility, patience, generosity, and unpretentious demeanor, Pierre Franey’s professional career and imprint into the grand tapestry of food and cooking, I believe, can be divided into two remarkably triumphant phases. The first phase covers his years of working for Henri Soulé and Howard Johnson and collaborating with Craig Claiborne. This era was Pierre Franey at his prolific peak despite being a veiled figure behind the success of these brands and personalities. Under Soulé, Pierre brought class and prestige to haute cuisine outside of France by elevating Le Pavillon into one of the most influential and elite dining spots in the United States during the 20th century. At Howard Johnson’s, Pierre, along with Jacques Pépin, showed how better-tasting food products can also be economically attainable even from a centralized and regulated commissary system. With Craig Claiborne, Pierre impeccably reverse-engineered dishes that he and Craig previously tried and churned out foolproof recipes for food section readers of The New York Times to try on their own, thus blurring the lines between restaurant dining and home-cooking. By headquartering at East Hampton with his family, Pierre stamped the Hamptons as “America’s national getaway”, a distinction earned from elaborate feasts and fancy parties filled with bountiful and delicious food.
Pierre Franey’s second career phase is somewhat a gradual metamorphosis, which, I think, is more definitive in his overall legacy because he becomes fully fleshed out and confident on his own terms with regard to his placement in the food world. His unconditional love and loyalty to his wife and children allowed him to break free from Craig Claiborne’s shadow and reinvent himself as The 60-Minute Gourmet, a title in the food and cooking section of The New York Times devoted to low-calorie flavorful dishes made from fresh ingredients and prepared under shorter cooking times, making him one of the first French chefs in the field of English print journalism. At that point, Pierre was able to establish a new network of cookbook co-authors like Bryan Miller and Richard Flaste and unfailingly brand himself later on as a public television icon independent of his former employers and affiliates, beginning with Cuisine Rapide until the posthumous Pierre Franey’s Cooking in Europe. On a sidenote, I am inclined to believe that if Pierre Franey was not tragically struck with a fatal stroke on October 1996, he would and could have done Asian or North American follow-ups of his TV shows, which he can effortlessly execute given the utmost respect and adulation his colleagues in the industry have conferred upon him.
According to an interview by The Chicago Tribune, Jacques Pépin called Pierre Franey an unsung hero of the food revolution, and the latter’s career did reflect that title. He started as a covert figure and fledged out of the darkness as a publicly known maverick whom his contemporaries, ironically, have not bestowed enough laurels for him to reap on. My generation of food writing, food blogging, and home cooking colleagues can do better in rediscovering and celebrating an important icon whose star must shine on within the Internet age or this century alone. The Kitchen Scholar can initiate the culinary wave at the beginning of 2021 by revisiting the recipes and reproducing the dishes from all cookbooks where Pierre Franey takes lead authorship during the second phase of his illustrious career- a few of which I own a copy of and others adapted from the official website.
Without further ado, a hundred cheers and toasts to Pierre “Le Gourmand” Franey! He cooked to live, and he lived to cook! May we do the same from rediscovering his life and his work!
