September 2020: A CENTENNIAL OF CRAIG CLAIBORNE, THE FIRST TRENDSETTER AND CULTURAL PATRON OF FOOD
To be honest, I prefer shuffling the general themes of the website every month because The Kitchen Scholar cannot risk looking like a one-trick pony website from consecutive monthly motifs especially at a time of its infancy. However, I found that 2020 is too good to miss on commemorating another food luminary especially when the fourth of this month marks his centennial birth. This icon is none other than former New York Times food journalist and restaurant critic, Craig Claiborne.
Alongside James Beard and last month’s honoree, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne equally occupies a space in the “Trinity of Modern American Gastronomy”, but the current generation of food lovers has often overlooked him for four reasons. First, Craig Claiborne does not have a humanitarian foundation to posthumously carry the torch of his legacy. Instead, the James Beard Foundation has relegated Claiborne’s association to food and cooking under a single journalism category of “Distinguished Restaurant Review”. Second, Craig Claiborne failed to venture outside the field of newspaper or print journalism and rebrand his name as an independent entity from The New York Times even after leaving the paper in 1988, as opposed to Julia Child and James Beard, who respectively found success in public television and restaurant consultancy in addition to their cookbooks. Third, Craig Claiborne’s struggles with alcoholism in his later years burned bridges with his collaborators and overtook his prolificacy and reputation with his final book being Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World published eight years before his death in January 2000. Finally, Craig Claiborne’s entire bibliography, with the exception of The New York Times Cookbook having a cult following to this day, had no reprints nor reissues since the early 1990s to the point that garnering new disciples to maintain an influence after death is next to impossible.
Craig Claiborne may be unrecognizable to the current generation, but the house he built upon the modern food world is undeniably and indelibly his. In fact, Jacques Pépin once declared Craig Claiborne as the most influential among the aforementioned trinity. The food revolution that Craig Claiborne ushered in, changed the way we eat, according to his biographer, Thomas McNamee, and remains an ongoing movement to this day. Craig Claiborne is the reason why the subject of food and cooking has subconsciously or unconsciously become a part of daily conversations and interactions.
The edge that Craig Claiborne had over his contemporaries is how he turned the subject of food into a newsworthy issue. No English-speaking gourmet will have heard or cared about celebrity chefs or Michelin-starred restaurants, or Gault-Millau reviews or is willing to subject himself/herself to four-hour degustation meals, had Craig not championed chefs or nouvelle cuisine in his articles, nor reportedly enraged the Vatican with the decadence of his American Express-sponsored 31-course dinner for two worth US $4,000 (US $19,200 after adjustment by inflation) at Chez Denis in Paris making the headline page of The New York Times on November 14, 1975. Likewise, modern food fads, such as Cronuts and Avocado Toast have easily captured public imagination because Craig Claiborne had ingrained human amazement with food as a basic instinct a generation prior.
Cultural appreciation of food is perhaps the single greatest impact of Craig Claiborne’s journalism. That is, Craig Claiborne embraced the cuisines from all ethnicities and strata. He did not just write genuine restaurant criticism for The New York Times, but he also reviewed food products and cookbooks. He bridged the gap between restaurant and home kitchens by translating any dish that he and his chef-collaborator, Pierre Franey, encountered. He also shifted the perspective of taste from French dominance to a generalist point of view by elevating Diana Kennedy, Marcella Hazan, Penelope Casas, Madhur Jaffrey, Virginia Lee, Edna Lewis, and Paul Prudhomme to household names as experts in the fields of Mexican, Italian, Spanish, Indian, Chinese, Southern U.S., and Louisiana Cajun cuisines. His interviews with minorities, immigrants, and cookbook writers set a vocal balance between puritanism and substitution without raising eyebrows of cultural appropriation in cookery. The modern food world could not have evolved nor have reached to the point that it is right now without Craig Claiborne’s trailblazing contributions.
In the spirit of Craig Claiborne at 100 years, The Kitchen Scholar will dive into his works as a cookery writer and restaurant critic by visiting and exploring his selected recipes from two sources- my library collection and his newspaper articles from The New York Times and adding a new section to the website called “Dining Gems”, where I will occasionally write about ethnic cuisine from travels or provide a review of some restaurants. Brace for a feast made of laughter.
