Baked One Pot Mac and Cheese – yep, all made in the one pot (no separate pot for pasta cooking)! If you hate washing up and like your Mac and Cheese with plenty of cheesy, creamy sauce then this is the recipe for you. Read the Mac 'n Cheese With Evaporated Milk? Discussion from the Chowhound Home Cooking, Mac And Cheese food community. Join the discussion today.
All hail the 100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time, Epicurious' pantheon of inventors, improvisers, entertainers, and home economists who changed the way we all eat today. Hungry for more of their stories?. In the American cooking pantheon, certain people become guides to certain cuisines: Julia Child helped popularize French cooking; Madhur Jaffrey, Indian; Italian; and so on. Was a neat trick: Beard didn't just popularize American food itself—he helped to invent the idea of it.
Clocking in at a generous 13-and-a-half pounds, Beard was born into a cornucopia of food. His mother owned and ran a hotel in Oregon, where the larder was stocked with the same American regional delights he later taught us to swoon over: wild salmon, choice oysters, wild huckleberries and blackberries, morels and other wild mushrooms, heirloom apples.
His mother, herself no slouch in the kitchen, employed a Chinese cook named Let at her hotel, and he learned at both their sides; later Beard said he had 'the most varied gastronomic experiences any child ever had.' As a young adult, Beard moved to New York to pursue a career in singing and theater, but found he couldn't make enough money, so he and a couple friends started a business to serve hors d'oeuvres at the many cocktail parties then happening in the enthusiastic interval between Prohibition and World War II. 'There were, we gauged, at least 250 cocktail parties every afternoon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,' he wrote, 'and we felt certain that all we needed was a better mousetrap.' His first cookbook was called. The biggest grin (and the best cufflinks) in the business. Beard began to really make his mark after the War.
'By the late forties, in a sprint to recoup all those lost years, people seemed to rush into the future,' he later wrote, 'trying to rebuild their lives, their careers, and their families. Food reflected this sense of urgency.' Often, that urgency (and the popularization of the freezer) translated into the celebration of convenience food over traditional home cooking. In fact, some home cooks who were eager to resume traditional gender roles went wild for like Fiesta Peach Spam Bake or Shrimp Walnut Orange Cocktail. But along came Beard, who, along with Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, comprised a sort of Holy Trinity that redeemed American home cooking from its more neurotic instincts. They convinced Americans weaned on a diet of frozen dinners that cooking didn't have to be a mechanistic chore or an overly elaborate project, but a delicious, everyday art.
In books like, Beard presented a notion of a national cuisine formed by a—ahem— melting pot of who lives here, who has shown up here, and what we can learn from elsewhere., —there are more than 1,500 recipes in this volume, reflecting the breadth and diversity of the national cuisine Beard saw. (As a matter of documentation, he even felt compelled to include things he didn't much like.
About his recipe for Sloppy Joes, Beard wrote, 'This is a product of the modern age, and though it is not a palate-tingling delight, it has a large public.' Fine, then.). In more recent years, since his death in 1985, Beard has been celebrated as an important gay figure in American history—an open secret during his life, and one he admitted publicly toward the end of it.
Home Cook Named For Machine
But it's not mentioned in the foreword to a 2012 book of Beard recipes, despite its author's comparison of Beard to Walt Whitman (talk about low-hanging fruit!), and it wasn't mentioned in Beard's (which also described Beard as a 'college dropout'—in fact, he was kicked out of Reed College for his sexuality.) The Times' Frank Bruni finally in a recently published essay. But writers such as John Birdsall have that Beard's sexuality—and that of other influential queer food writers Craig Claiborne and Richard Olney—was inextricable from the food he championed. Birdsall described a childhood memory, from 1970, of growing up on the same street as two gay men, a couple named Pat and Lou, who liked to entertain with 'crazy shit our mom never fixed, food so rich no adult should ever serve it to a ten-year-old.'
Home Cooks Named For Machine
Don't ask why Beard is hovering over a dish of mac and cheese with a ladle. He knows better than you. The menu often included Lou's Roquefort burgers, about which Birdsall wrote, 'Looking back, I recognize in Lou's burgers my first taste of food that didn't give a fuck about nutrition or the drab strictures of home economics. They were calibrated for adult pleasure, acutely expressive of a formalized richness—exactly the type of thing James Beard taught Americans to eat (for all I know, Lou's recipe was straight out of Beard). I see them now, those burgers, as unflinchingly, unapologetically, magnificently queer.'
It was post-1950s food—food not rote, suburbanized, mechanized, but rather, Birdsall wrote, 'food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture.' There's another word for pleasure, or at least a relative of it: fun. That's another value Beard brought to American cuisine. He disdained the word 'gourmet.' He thought it was fine for people not to cook: 'You might as well warm up something frozen,' he said, if the experience will otherwise be drudgery.
'In my twenty-five years of teaching I have tried to make people realize that cooking is primarily fun,' Beard reflected in 1977. 'And the more they know about what they are doing, the more fun it is.'