James Beard

His mother ran a Portland hotel and his father worked the customs house, but the cook who raised him was Jue-Let, the family's Chinese employee, whom Beard later called his second father and credited for teaching him to eat and to cook. He was three, sick with malaria, when Jue-Let first nursed him through it. Reed College expelled him in 1922, after one year, for relationships with a professor and other male students. He sailed for Europe, joined a theatrical troupe to study voice, and fell for Paris and its bistros. He drifted through failed acting ambitions for another decade before returning to New York in 1937 with no career and no plan.

What he built instead had no name yet. With a friend he opened Hors d'Oeuvre, Inc., a catering company that rode the 1930s cocktail-party boom, and the lectures and writing it generated turned into his first cookbook in 1940. In August 1946 he hosted I Love to Eat on NBC, the first cooking show ever broadcast on American television, seven years before Julia Child. He wrote more than twenty cookbooks, ran a cooking school out of his Greenwich Village townhouse for thirty years, and taught a generation of American cooks to trust fresh, seasonal, unfussy ingredients over French formality — all while quietly taking endorsement money from Green Giant, French's Mustard, and Old Crow bourbon to keep the school solvent.

He knew he was gay, he said, by the time he was seven, and he spent most of his public life not saying so. The endorsement deals he needed money from directly contradicted the food philosophy that made him famous, a contradiction he admitted to and never fully resolved. His most enduring relationship, thirty years with Gino Cofacci, went unacknowledged in public for almost all of it; Beard came out in print only in 1981, revising his own memoir at 78 to finally include the fact. Reed College, which had thrown him out for exactly that fact fifty-nine years earlier, gave him an honorary degree in 1976, five years before he could say in his own book why he had left.

Beard died January 21, 1985, of heart failure at 81; his ashes went to the Oregon beach where his family had summered. His Greenwich Village townhouse reopened the next year as the James Beard Foundation, now the closest thing American cooking has to an academy, handing out the industry's most contested annual awards and, since 1991, more than 4.6 million dollars in culinary scholarships. The foundation nearly did not survive a 2004 embezzlement scandal that saw its president imprisoned, prompting Anthony Bourdain to call it a benevolent shakedown operation; new leadership rebuilt its credibility afterward. The house itself, at 167 West 12th Street, is preserved as the only landmark culinary center of its kind in North America.

James Beard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés book
  His first cookbook, built out of his catering business 1940
• I Love to Eat television
  The first cooking show broadcast on American television, on NBC 1946
• The James Beard Cooking School company
  Ran for thirty years out of his Greenwich Village townhouse 1955
• Delights and Prejudices book
  His memoir, revised in 1981 to finally state that he was gay 1964
• James Beard's American Cookery book
  His argument for a distinct American culinary tradition 1972
• Citymeals-on-Wheels company
  Co-founded with Gael Greene to feed New York's homebound elderly 1981

• 1920 aged ~17 Enters Reed College in Portland
• 1922 aged ~19 Expelled from Reed College for homosexuality
• 1937 aged ~34 Moves to New York City
• 1940 aged ~37 Publishes Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés, his first cookbook
• August 1946 aged 43 Hosts I Love to Eat, the first American TV cooking show Ran on NBC through May 1947.
• 1955 aged ~52 Opens the James Beard Cooking School
• 1976 aged ~73 Reed College awards him an honorary degree
• 1981 aged ~78 Publicly states he is gay in a revised edition of his memoir
• January 21, 1985 aged 81 Dies of heart failure in New York City, age 81

• Julia Child 1912–2004
  Cookbook author and television host who transformed American home cooking and popular attitudes toward food. contemporary and rival
• Alice Waters b. 1944
  Chef and activist who popularized farm-to-table dining, seasonal ingredients, and food education in the United States. shaped the food philosophy she carried forward
• Ray Kroc 1902–1984
  Businessman who transformed McDonald's from a single restaurant into the world's largest fast-food chain. opposite pole of American food