James Beard

James Beard (born May 5, 1903, Portland, Oregon, U.S.—died January 23, 1985, Manhattan, New York) was an American culinary expert who championed regional eating and simple American cuisine using fresh products. In 1946 he became a television pioneer as the first chef to demonstrate cooking on network television and was later proclaimed the “dean of American cookery” by The New York Times. Through his more than 20 cookbooks and the James Beard Cooking School, opened in 1955 in Greenwich Village, New York City, Beard influenced a generation of future chefs and home cooks. In 1986 the James Beard Foundation was established; its scholarship program played an important role in helping culinary students and professionals continue American culinary traditions. Since 1991 the annual James Beard Foundation Awards—the food industry’s equivalent of an Oscar—have recognized “exceptional talent and achievement in the culinary arts” and honored those who have made outstanding contributions to the restaurant industry.

Early life and influences

Beard was born in Portland, Oregon, to John and Elizabeth Beard. John Beard was a customs officer, and English-born Elizabeth Beard ran an upscale boardinghouse. James Beard was an only child, raised mostly by his mother and in the kitchen of Jue Let, the family’s Chinese-born chef. In reminiscing about his youth in his 1964 memoir, it was Beard’s food memories—Let’s recipes, his mother’s opinions about ingredients, exposure to Portland’s regional dishes, and eating food caught and foraged while on trips to Gearhart, Oregon—that stood out and had lasting impact on his professional life and career.

Beard enrolled at Portland’s Reed College in 1920 but was expelled the following year after he was caught having sexual relations with a male professor. Reed subsequently removed all references to Beard—who was well known on campus and had served as treasurer of the freshman class—from the college yearbook. He was left shamed by the experience, and although those close to him, including his mother, knew that he was gay, Beard’s sexuality was private and not publicly shared.

In 1922 Beard traveled to Europe to study voice and acting. After stints in Portland and Hollywood, he settled in New York City in 1937 to pursue a career in the arts. Success did not come, and Beard began supplementing his income by cooking for friends and then working in catering. He later described his transition to cooking this way:

I know I had a lot of talent. I really feel—I’m convinced of it. But I was large. I was scarcely beautiful. I had ability, but I felt that there was quite a lot of doubts that I would be the greatest star that ever trod Broadway. So I began to think of a profession that I’d fun doing, and that’s what led me into the food business.

Beard’s pivot not only changed his professional prospects but also the United States’ culinary landscape.

Career and impact

In 1937 Beard and Irma Rhode and her brother William (William Rhode would later be an editor at Gourmet magazine) opened a small catering shop, Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. Beard’s first cookbook—Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés: With a Key to the Cocktail Party—soon followed in 1940, the first major cookbook in the United States dedicated solely to appetizers. In 1942, during World War II, Beard was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he trained at a cryptology school before being released from service in 1943. He then served in the U.S. Seamen’s Service setting up canteens in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Panama, and France.

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When Beard returned to New York City in 1945, he jumped back into cooking and writing. In 1946 he made television history with his appearance on the United States’ first nationally televised cooking show. A 15-minute segment that aired for two seasons on NBC, the program was sponsored by Borden Foods and called I Love to Eat. At the same time that convenience foods were gaining traction in American kitchens, Beard counseled his television viewers and cookbook readers to take the time to source locally grown ingredients or grow their own. Through his appearances, writings, artistry, and promotion of regional cooking, Beard soon established himself as an authority on American food—in the mid-1950s The New York Times declared him the “dean of American cookery.”

Beard opened a cooking school—the James Beard Cooking School—in 1955, which he ran out of his Greenwich Village townhouse. A second school was later added in Seaside, Oregon. A 1972 profile of Beard in Life magazine reported that the waitlist for Beard’s intimate classes (enrollment was capped at 12 students) numbered 500 students and that some of those enrolled commuted from as far away as Indiana to attend the weekly classes. Beard continued to teach and write until he died of cardiac arrest in 1985—at the time of his death, he was at work on a cookbook with the planned title Menus and Memories.

Cookbooks and publications

In addition to Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés, Beard’s more than 20 cookbooks include Cook It Outdoors (1941) (one of the first serious books on outdoor cooking), The Fireside Cook Book: A Complete Guide to Fine Cooking for Beginner and Expert (1949), The James Beard Cookbook (1959), James Beard’s American Cookery (1972) (which Beard referred to as an ode to “the gastronomic voices of the hinterland”), Beard on Bread (1973), and Beard on Pasta (1983). A memoir, Delights and Prejudices, was published in 1964. He contributed writing to numerous magazines, including Gourmet, Women’s Wear Daily, and House and Garden, and wrote a syndicated newspaper column—“Beard on Food”—during the 1970s. A compilation of those essays was published as the monograph Beard on Food in 1974.

The James Beard Foundation and Awards

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Following Beard’s death, friends, including Julia Child and Peter Kump, one of Beard’s students and owner of his own cooking school, began discussing ways to honor Beard’s legacy. In 1985 the group held a fundraiser to buy Beard’s storied townhouse (the proceeds were then donated to Reed College), and there they established the James Beard House and the James Beard Foundation, with the mission “to provide a center for the culinary arts, and to continue to foster the interest James Beard inspired in all aspects of food.”

In 1990 the Foundation established the James Beard Awards. Given out annually since 1991 (with the exception of 2021), the awards recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the restaurant industry and are considered the food industry’s highest honors—the culinary arts equivalent of the Oscars. Past winners have included Sean Sherman, Anthony Bourdain, Thomas Keller, Madhur Jaffrey, Marcus Samuelsson, Alice Waters, Emeril Lagasse, Grant Achatz, Bobby Flay, and José Andrés.