Kafka – 2 - 1
TTT
Interviewee: Barbara Kafka
Interviewer: Judith Weinraub
Session #2
New York City
Date: April 6, 2009
Q: It’s April 6, 2009, and it’s Judith Weinraub. I’m with Barbara Kafka. This is our
second interview session.
Good morning. How are you?
Kafka: Good morning.
Q: I thought we could talk about James Beard, how your relationship developed with
him from the time that you met him and going on after that. So if you could just review
how you did meet him and your work with him on The Cooks’ Catalogue progressed.
Kafka: I met him through The Cooks’ Catalogue where I had the job of making The
Cooks’ Catalogue. He was a titular author, which always embarrassed him because he
did no authorship on it whatsoever, not even dictation or suggestions. There was a board
of consultants, among them were George Lane and Joe Baum, and they, in fact, were
helpful with input because of the professional equipment and wide acquaintance with the
field.
I was taken down to meet Mr. Beard at his townhouse on 12th Street by Burt
Wolf, who was the organizer and entrepreneur of the project.
Kafka – 2 - 2
Q: You were telling me about Burt Wolf.
Kafka: He was the entrepreneur and put-er-together of the project.
Q: What was the idea of it?
Kafka: The idea of it was to have a catalogue of all the best light equipment, i.e., not
stoves, refrigerators, and heavy equipment, but light equipment in the kitchen. It turned
out to be extremely influential because it was the start of the cooking boom, and all of the
nascent cooking schools and cooking shops, cookware shops took it up as a bible and
used it. That’s what it accomplished and that’s what it set out to do. It was heavily
illustrated.
Milton Glaser, who was one of the principals, did actually do a lot of work
because it was his company that put the visuals together and made it into a book. As I
said, Mr. Beard wasn’t involved. He had been involved originally because his friend and
sometimes previously assistant, José Wilson, he placed in the editorial position for the
catalogue. That didn’t work out, and I was brought in. So I was taken in to see Mr.
Beard, and we had a terrific fight, but we managed to reconcile it and became friends.
Q: At the panel at The New School, you talked about that fight a little bit. I wonder if
you could just recount it again.
Kafka – 2 - 3
Kafka: I think I did here, too. I went to see him in his townhouse on 12th Street. In those
days, the office was upstairs on the upper of the two floors that he occupied. There was
no spiral staircase, which there was later, connecting the apartment and the downstairs
together. We met in the downstairs area, which was where he used to have students eat
the food that they made. We talked agreeably enough, seemed to have similar frames of
reference, and he asked me what I had been cooking. I said I had made a pâté the night
before, and I rashly included the information that I had used kidney fat to line the pan.
And he said, “You can’t use kidney fat.”
And I said, “But, Mr. Beard, I did use kidney fat. If you cut it and you put it
between two sheets of wax paper.”
He said to Burt, “I can’t talk to this woman. She doesn’t know anything,” got up,
and these great enormous feet, great enormous man, stormed out into the hall to go up the
stairs.
And, shaking, I put on my coat and heard him clomping up the stairs. Just as I got
to the hall when he was halfway up, he turned around and came down, and he said, “I’m
sorry. I’m in a perfectly foul mood today.” And after that, we were able to talk. But he
did have a fierce temper. So I never had it directed at me again, but it was a fierce
temper.
At that time, he was extremely busy. He wrote a syndicated column for
newspapers, which was extremely influential in the sense that there were none of the
television outlets at that point that there are today, and even when they came online, they
were not frequent, and they were epiphenomenona. So newspapers, magazines were the
primary mode of disseminating culinary or whatever information about food.
Kafka – 2 - 4
He had a very talk-comfortable, listener-available style. He did always, as far as I
know, or for most of his life, have somebody, some one woman, who worked with him,
turning the material into printable prose. However, if one reads him in the books and in
the columns, one sees that the voice is unmistakable. Later, he used tape and he would
dictate to the tape, and then whoever the writer was—after José, it was Jackie Mallorca,
on The Pasta Book it was Irene Sax, and then finally, at the end, Richard, his assistant,
took over for a brief period of time. But by that time, the column was winding down.
But it let him introduce the names of important chefs and restaurants that he frequented,
often off the cuff, to the readership. So he was important to the industry and important to
the reader.
Q: And he was doing that while the rest of you were working on The Cooks’ Catalogue?
Kafka: Yes, but I was not involved in the columns. He had written several books by that
time, quite a few. I had actually read one of them somewhat—two. When I went to Dell
Dial, I got a copy of the James Beard Cookbook, and people forget, but it was another
bible for the home cook. And then I bought, actually bought, the Fireside Cookbook, and
that, to me, is a brilliant book. It’s been reissued recently, and it is a model of
intelligence where a master recipe is given and explained in fairly good detail and then
variations are given that may be regional, that may be personal, but it’s very usable and
very good and very logical. I think I said to you, Mr. Beard not only had a fabulous
memory, but he was extremely intelligent, and he really could organize the material in his
head and use it.
Kafka – 2 - 5
Q: Even though he wasn’t working on The Cooks’ Catalogue, did your relationship with
him develop in that period of time?
Kafka: It began to, yes. He gave cooking classes in his kitchen, and he was going out of
town, but he had organized a cooking class with the then important editors, food editors
or personas.
Q: In New York?
Kafka: In New York. Oh yes. This was not yet a multi-city discipline. He asked five
different people to give a course, one-day course, and I gave a one-day cooking lesson.
Clay, his longtime houseman who now works with the Beard Foundation, was there. I
decided to do a bouillabaisse because it’s great fun and it’s a lot of things that you can
say about it in making the rouille and blah, blah, blah, and because doing The Cooks’
Catalogue, I had come across the food processor, and I knew that you could do the
rouille, the mayonnaise, in the food processor.
So I had the wit to check, because he had these strange Corning burners. He did a
lot of advertising work for companies, and Corning was one of his clients. And I must
say he was loyal in the sense that he used this stuff that he talked about using, and I knew
that these were rather strange electric burners. I’d never used them. So I went down and
tested by seeing if the olive oil in the bottom of the pan would get really hot. Well, it did.
But what I didn’t realize in my ignorance was that the temperature was controlled by the
Kafka – 2 - 6
contact, so it was very hard to get anything to boil at the top, especially a large pot of
stuff, which is very hard with a bouillabaisse which is boiling from the base.
So I was doing this class and had a mortifying experience, and when I finally
went to look for the white wine, to put it in, it was all gone because these women had,
behind my back, been drinking the white wine for the cooking. Clay, fortunately, bailed
me out that far. He went and got another bottle of wine. Then, of course, when I made
the rouille, it broke, and I had to remake it. It was not one of the better evenings in my
life.
The next day, I repeated the course for regular people, for I guess what you would
call in those days housewives, and it went perfectly. So you can learn, you can adjust,
but heaven help you.
Q: What was the idea of giving, setting up, classes for those editors?
Kafka: I don’t know. Jim was maybe giving us exposure. I’m not sure he wanted to do
the classes himself for those people who were very critical. I can’t tell you what was in
his head. It certainly kept the income stream going while he was away. He was always
worried about money.
Q: When you say he was away, meaning he was traveling?
Kafka: He was away, he was traveling. I don’t know where. And Burt, who is
something of a bitch, said, “Oh, give Jim $5,000, he’ll do anything,” which was not quite
Kafka – 2 - 7
true and certainly unnecessary about a partner of his, and he was explaining to me also
how important Mr. Beard was to the project because of his name.
And I said, “Well, Burt, what will you do, he’s old, if something happens to
him?”
And Burt said, “Well, I’ll put on my James Beard fat suit.” So, you know, he was
that kind of person. I don’t know.
I don’t know, we gradually became friendlier. It was always a professional
friendship. I mean, I knew Gino, who was his friend, because Gino lived there upstairs in
his own apartment. Gino had been an architect when Jim met up with him, and then he
had given up and became a dependent, and Jim really didn’t tolerate dependency in that
sense very well, which is why he found so many people jobs, because he didn’t want
them to depend upon him. So Gino then, who was a very good baker, made cakes for
Alfredo Viazzi, who had a restaurant nearby in the Village called Alfredo. He was an
interesting character.
At some point, I don’t know when, we began to occasionally have lunch, and we
would go to Alfredo’s or we would go to the Four Seasons, where he had a special
relationship. He’d been a consultant to the Four Seasons when it was opening.
Mr. Baum, who was equally loyal and decent, kept using him, even to the point
where I was working on Windows on the World and Jim really wasn’t up to being in the
house as a consultant, but he wrote Joe a few long letters, and they seemed to inspire Joe.
But it was Joe’s way of paying back, being there. Joe was also always interested in
learning, as was Jim, which I think it a great connecting thing between Joe and Jim and I.
Kafka – 2 - 8
Things were not taken for granted. We examined them all and tried to learn more about
them.
When I left The Cooks’ Catalogue because they wouldn’t pay the suppliers—
Q: Good reason.
Kafka: I gave you that the last time, they wouldn’t pay the suppliers. Didn’t matter to
Burt at all, he was perfectly happy, and he had a sale when the book was finished. He
had a sale and—
Q: Of the equipment?
Kafka: Of all the stuff. Took what he wanted and still didn’t pay the suppliers. After I
left, he brought in another editor to finish things up. I had, by that time, completed all the
prose and had all the prose written, and the photographs were organized. She was very
good and—
Q: Who was that?
Kafka: I can’t remember the name. It’s in the first edition of the book. I can look for
you.
Q: So how long period of time were you working on that book?
Kafka – 2 - 9
Kafka: Three or four years, something. My projects always seem to take about three,
four years.
But as I said, I had met Joe Baum first through Bob Haas when I was doing Revue
des Vins de France and then at The Cooks’ Catalogue, you know, briefly in passing, and
I had met George Lang there also. I needed a job, and I called them and had interviews
and, fortunately, for me, although they both made me offers, I went with Joe, and that
was one of the great learning experiences of my life, and pleasures.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about him?
Kafka: Yes. Let finish up Jim first.
By the time I was working with Joe, I then had another link with Jim through this.
One day I was working down at the Trade Center, of late lamented memory, and Jim
called me and he said, “Barbara, you’d better get up here.”
So I dashed out the door, telling Joe that Jim had called and he seemed frantic,
and I took a taxi up West Street and went over to his house. I thought he was dying. I
thought he’d had a heart attack. I mean, a man like that, it was not an improbability. I
went in, and he was perfectly fit, took me upstairs, we sat down, and he said, “I had better
show you this.” And he showed me the first copy of The Cooks’ Catalogue. Under my
agreement with Burt, I was supposed to be listed as the author, and neither of us, the two
editors, had title page credit. By the time the second printing came out, and it was very
Kafka – 2 - 10
successful, Helen something, we’re both listed as editors. But Jim was thoroughly on my
side. He was outraged, and very supportive at that point.
Then later, he was going out to California, where he had organized cooking
classes for him to give at the Stanford Court where he stayed in the reign of Jimmy
Nassikas, another wonderful person. He asked me to teach with him, and I went out. I
did not make any financial demands or arrangement, and, unlike everybody else I know,
he was absolutely correct, honest, and generous. He paid me for the class I had given
with him, without him, and he split the take with me 50-50 in California after expenses
were paid. Expenses were fairly moderate because Chuck [Williams] supplied the
equipment and Jimmy supplied most of the food. It was not outrageous, because I was
really doing a great deal of the teaching.
But Mr. Beard had a great strength of personality, and everybody thought that
they had had a class with Mr. Beard, and that was true to the end of his life when he
could do nothing but sit on a high director’s chair and sort of oversee things, and Richard,
Richard Alleman, did the Barbara Kafka job. There, at those California classes, I ran into
Marion Cunningham.
Q: At the Stanford Court classes?
Kafka: Yes. She had taken class with him in California, and she’d taken classes with
him in Oregon at the seashore. She didn’t pay for the classes, these classes at the
Stanford Court, but she was a handmaiden. She even came and bandaged his legs, which
Kafka – 2 - 11
were terrible, because he had clotication, and if you weighed that much weight, you’d
probably have clotication, too. And she hated me.
Q: How startling. I mean, that must have been very difficult to deal with.
Kafka: Well, I didn’t know how much she hated me. She looked like a typical American
lady with her gray hair and whatever. I did not know that she was a recovering alcoholic,
and she was what a friend of mine, who is in AA, calls a dry drunk. She had the very
difficult character, and one can see it in Judith and Evan Jones’ book on Jim, because
there’s material on the California classes, which is on the edge of scurrilous about me,
and it could only have come from Marion. So one knows, you know.
Q: Did you deal with it? Did you confront her with it at all?
Kafka: Oh no. I’m not confrontational, by and large. Maybe more now, but not with
people that I don’t really know. I was not there for ambition, really. Certainly the money
was nice. I learned a lot. I got to know California, part of California which I had not
known before. But I don’t know what would have been accomplished.
She was a good baker, which shows up in her thing of Fannie Farmer, so Jim
would sort of give her the baking to do. And he was rather mischievous and in a not
necessarily nice way. He’d say, “Marion, I think we should do a tomato bread based
on—why don’t you do that with them?” Of course she didn’t know how. She was not an
inventive cook. She managed, she bumbled through, but it was mischievous on his part.
Kafka – 2 - 12
She obviously found out I was being paid, and this enraged her, obviously,
understandably. So it was a complicated time. I taught there for several years.
Q: What was the format of the classes?
Kafka: We taught in Forno’s Oven, which was a restaurant in the basement of the
Stanford Court, and it was Forno’s Oven. Forno’s is a play on word. There was a great
big like pizza oven in the corner, and you could do a lot of things in it. I mean, those
ovens get very hot. They’re very good for cooking meat very quickly and bread, and you
can you use them as a tandoor or what have you. But it didn’t make Marion’s life any
easier.
Mr. Beard would start the class by talking a little about the recipes we were going
to do, which I knew about, and then the students would divide up into groups, and
different groups would make different recipes. They could look and see and so forth.
Then at the end, there were questions, and I would circulate around, correcting and
telling.
At one point, I did what I did every class after that that I did with Jim, was ask
him to knead bread, because it was quite a thing to see. He had huge hands and he would
pick up the dough, slam it down, fold it over, and push it away from him with one hand.
Q: Oh, my.
Kafka – 2 - 13
Kafka: Then he would turn the dough a quarter turn and do the same thing again. And it
was riveting. The students, of course, were amazed.
And I met people who became friends, and it was interesting. Danny Kaye came
to the class. Danny was fascinated by cooking and very involved. As he said to me, he
wanted to see what the new cooker in town was doing, that being me, because a little
rumble had started going out, and because a friend of mine, about whom I cared deeply,
Barbara Tropp, younger than I but now dead, unfortunately, of ovarian cancer, had
moved to California, and she had known Danny. She had known Danny, and I think
Danny—and also I had, I think in the litany of things I edited, I did not include the
magazine that I started for the Cuisinart for Carl Sondheimer, which, again, transpired
after I left Beard Glaser Wolf, and we had become somewhat friendly over my support
for the food processor. He was another brilliant man. He could be quite difficult, but he
was absolutely brilliant, fluent in French, which one would expect.
Barbara, on the other hand, spoke Mandarin. She was doing her doctorate on the
poetry of the Sung when she went off to China, to Taiwan, actually, to live with a family
and learn more Chinese. And the man of the house was a fabulous cook, and she learned
to cook Chinese food from him, and then she came back to Princeton, ostensibly to finish
her degree, but she became more involved in cooking, gave some classes, wrote Carl
Sontheimer a letter, and he put her on to me as the editor, and she and I became very
close friends. My last book, I think, is dedicated to her.
Q: I saw that, yes.
Kafka – 2 - 14
Kafka: But she knew Danny, and so, in other words, the food world, at a certain level at
that time, was still a rather small world by comparison with today where you have all
these people who appear on television and who almost nobody knows in the business.
Then you have this burgeoning of restaurants all over the country, and you have
the groups like AIWF [American Institute of Wine & Food] and the James Beard
Foundation that support chefs and promulgate them, and so that world had not existed.
People at a certain level like Jim and Joe all knew each other, and Jimmy, but it was
less—
Q: Well, the people who came to the classes then, were they—
Kafka: They were people.
Q: They were just ordinary people?
Kafka: Well, I don’t know how ordinary. In other words, Jim could be something of a
snob. He saw himself—his mother was English. I don’t think she was upper class. But
he saw himself as something of an upper-class person. And in San Francisco, he was.
He was very courted. He would go to dinner, the Levi Strauss people, and all kinds of
people, and all the high Episcopalians who belonged to the club that was at the top of the
hill that Standford Court was on. So that was a different thing. So the Boeing girls were
in the class, people like that.
Kafka – 2 - 15
Q: It wasn’t advertised? It was an invitational class?
Kafka: I think maybe cards and letters went out. People would tend to take the course
year after year. They enjoyed it.
Q: It was a series, or what?
Kafka: Yes, five days, weekdays.
And then Jim and I became somewhat closer. First of all, he had a suite and I had
a little room. It wasn’t that bad. I’m not trying to knock it. That was basically attached
to his room. I had my own bath. But Jim was always a very early riser, at something like
six o’clock in the morning, which is not my best hour of the day, particularly in
California. He would knock on my door, and we would have breakfast sent up. And I’m
not a breakfast person, although he was. He loved breakfast, and we would begin the
day.
I also met Jeremiah Tower. Jim collected attractive homosexuals. He was
obviously homosexual himself, but he did not have lots of affairs. But he did love the
gossip and the world. Clark Wolf, who was running a shop at that point in San Francisco,
was one. Jeremiah was certainly the most glamorous of them, very good-looking.
That was another instance of Marion. She became very negative about Jeremiah,
because Jeremiah and Alice Waters had a falling-out. Alice had started the restaurant,
but she was basically a home cook. She always wanted to hire people, and she had a
Kafka – 2 - 16
great talent for finding people. Alice Medrich was one of hers. The women who did her
flowers were fantastic. She really had a talent for this.
But Jeremiah basically walked in the door and asked for a job. He was trained as
an architect. What led him to this, I don’t know. Someday I’ll ask him. I still see him.
And he became the chef, and it was his cooking that made the reputation of the
restaurant, and Alice couldn’t tolerate that. Marion became friendly with Alice, and there
was a third one, sort of the witches over the cauldron, was Cecilia Chang, who had a
Chinese restaurant, I think the Mandarin in San Francisco, and who was quite a broad
also. She’d been married to a general. As far as I can tell, all the great cooking people,
the Chinese people, had all been married to generals. Irene Kuo has been married to a
general, or at least they said so. Mrs. Ma, I mean, you know, Pearl of Pearl’s Restaurant
here in New York, certainly an influential restaurant.
And Jim had a firm belief—he liked Cecilia, and I got to meet her through him.
But he had a firm belief that only Chinese people could cook Chinese food. He never
cooked Chinese food. We never did it in a class, and we didn’t even really use Chinese
ingredients, which were available to a certain extent even then in San Francisco. And the
reason, I think, was when he was growing up, his mother, who had run a hotel and a hotel
dining room, the chef, Jue Let, two words, who was the chef at the restaurant or the sous
chef at the restaurant, became their personal chef at their house. So Jim ate a great deal
of this food. And his father eventually left his mother for a woman in Chinatown, and he
had been taken down there frequently. So he was comfortable with Chinese people, but
he just thought it was their thing and not his thing, which was, I thought, fascinating.
Kafka – 2 - 17
We used to go to a restaurant called Le Central, which was a small restaurant that
did very traditional French bistro food, blood sausages and things like that that we both
craved after our classes, and so, of course, eating three meals a day together, except when
he went out with fancy people.
But he moved his people around. Denise, whatever, Hale, who is married to the
scion of Broadway Hale in shops, was a friend, an acquaintance of his. Friend is an odd
word in connection with Jim, though.
Q: What do you mean?
Kafka: I don’t think we were ever friends. We were friendly. It would never have
occurred to me to talk about my personal life with Jim, and I knew about his personal life
because of all these people that I met, and he would talk some about his personal life. He
would talk about his friend, and, as somebody said to me, “nobody has ever paid as much
for a youthful indiscretion as Jim.” He would talk about having wanted to be an opera
singer. I guess he didn’t have much of a personal life, in my sense of the word. And
certainly children were not a usable subject. And I had this other life.
Q: What interests me is that in the things I’ve read about him, you’re often referred to as
a friend or a frequent telephone friend and a frequent person at his lunches and dinners in
New York.
Kafka – 2 - 18
Kafka: Oh, it’s true. I think that within his limits of caring, he cared about me, and even
though I wasn’t an English woman and even though I wasn’t a gay male. But we had a
relationship. It was a good, sound relationship, and I don’t think he had too many of
those. He had the people in the restaurant like Leon Leonidas, and we’d go there for
lunch. He had Joe [Baum], who he almost never saw. Judith certainly was not a friend.
When we started, were going to, Peter Kump had the idea of starting the Beard
Foundation and making it a public thing, and he got together a meeting. We were at 21 in
a private room, not because of Peter, but because of Jim, although Jim was now dead. It
was somewhat problematic because Jim could have done with his money anything he
wanted, and he could have started a school. He had talked at one point to me about a
supra school. He was very interested in school. The fact that the Foundation doesn’t
have a school is, I think, a limitation, and when it started, I thought we were going to.
Q: What did he have in mind for the kind—
Kafka: He wanted history classes, a school, public demonstrations, all of what there is,
but more. But he didn’t do it, and I think it was beyond his energy level.
But at any case, we were seated at this meeting at 21, everybody who’d been,
quote, “friends” of his, and so we agreed to do what we could do. Peter was raising the
money, and he turned to Judith and said, “Of course, this is important to you because it
will help keep Jim’s books alive.”
And she said—and I quote—“I don’t care if they all go out of print.”
Kafka – 2 - 19
Q: My goodness.
Kafka: Of course, now she doesn’t have that reaction, as you heard the other night [at
Andy Smith’s panel at the New School on James Beard].
Q: Yes.
Kafka: So, yes, I’m a bitch. I remember when Judith and Evan’s book was going to
come out, I was finishing up The James Beard Celebration book, which I did pro bono
for the James Beard Foundation, and that was my financial contribution, and not a mean
one, I should add. I pushed Morrow to come out with it in the spring, because I was
damned if Judith and Evan—I liked Evan, incidentally—that Judith and Evan were going
to cut me off at the pass. And it came out that spring.
Q: Good for you.
Kafka: Well, I mean—
Q: Absolutely.
Kafka: —if people are going to start with me and make war—
Q: You’re up to it.
Kafka – 2 - 20
Kafka: —I may not confront them, but I’m certainly going to try and take care of myself.
Q: Let me take you back for a second. You mentioned that Mr. Beard usually had a
woman, often an English woman, to help him with the books.
Kafka: Not with books. Well, with books, too, yes.
Q: Well, talk a little about that and what you think that was about.
Kafka: His mother was English. His mother was very strong. He went into food
because he could not make it in the theater or as an opera singer. But, for instance, he
was very friendly with Jimmy Villas for the aforementioned reasons, but also because
Jimmy was a great opera buff, and they could discuss opera and they both drank. Jim
wrote about wine sometimes, but he was a scotch drinker. He drank the Glenlivet. The
older Aaron brother, Sam Aaron’s brother, had sent him to France to learn about wine,
and he’d gone. And, as I say, he was a learned person.
But he certainly—I don’t think he ever typed. I don’t think I ever saw him, type.
It just occurred to me. He wrote in longhand, and it was not beautiful handwriting. And
besides, he wasn’t very patient. His first two books, The Hors d’Oeuvre Book, which
came out of Hors d’Oeuvre Inc., and they were fancy social people that he was friendly
with, and the man of the two, the brother—whose name, I’m sorry, I cannot remember,
Kafka – 2 - 21
but I’m sure it’s in The James Beard Celebration—he was furious. He felt that Jim had
stolen the recipes. But certainly Jim wrote the recipes, and that’s his book.
I left somebody important out, very important, John Ferrone. John Ferrone was in
New York, John Ferrone was an editor, and John Ferrone at some point, I can’t give you
the chronology, but John Ferrone, who now lives, I think, in Pennsylvania—
Q: No, he lives here.
Kafka: He lives back in New York?
Q: Yes.
Kafka: And John was really devoted to Jim, and he was very important to The American
Cookbook. That was something really he did with Jim, and he had the wherewithal, in
terms of intelligence and knowledge in how to do. After Jim died, he did the
correspondence book. So I don’t know at what time he started. You would have to ask
John. He may have been in on The Fireside Cookbook, for all I know. I know that Jim
was then living on 13th Street, I believe, and they used to wash the dishes in the bathtub.
But at what point John entered in, I don’t know. José entered in after her stint at House
and Garden or maybe before. Before, because I think she did columns.
He would—as I said, later he did tapes. How he started with José, I don’t know,
whether they spoke the material or whether there were tapes, but I heard him make tapes
when I was in California and send them to Richard in New York.
Kafka – 2 - 22
But, obviously, in a work sense, a food sense, he was comfortable around women.
I mean, he didn’t pick me, and he picked me for—
Q: What do you mean, he didn’t pick you and he picked you?
Kafka: He picked me because, you know, there were all these people he could have
asked to teach with him, and all of them would have been flattered and some of them
could have made money, maybe, and he picked me, partly maybe because I was
mistreated at Beard Glaser Wolf. But the kind of conversation we could have, we both
had read French, both read a lot of—we did research. We were serious, in his view. We
knew the stuff. So he picked me. That’s what I meant.
In any case, because he had me—I don’t know the chronology exactly because
there is one kicker in it. It can’t have been after José left House and Garden. He must
have had a relationship with her before, because he got me a job, an assignment, to do
one of the House and Garden cookbooks. I wrote on, I think, steak. Then Jim and I and
José had another one of those discussions because I did a sauce Crécy for one of the steak
sauces, and both José and Jim said, “Crécy is not a sauce for meat.”
And I said, “If you will look at Ali Bab’s [Gastronomie Pratique]on page XXX,
you will see Crécy as a sauce for steak.”
Jim loved that, you see. José, I don’t think, ever loved that. But in any case, the
cookbook appeared. So my time frame sense, you would have to research to get it right.
Where were we before?
Kafka – 2 - 23
Q: Actually, when you mention things like that, when I looked at places like, it’s easy to
see references to you in New York Magazine online, and during this period of time, you
were more and more referred to as a restaurant consultant.
Kafka: I was. I mean, I always did a number of things. But when I worked for Joe, I
became a freelancer. I never was employed. I’m really, as I said—
Q: A freelance what?
Kafka: Anything. I mean, I kept writing. I kept editing. I did the Cooking, which later
became The Pleasures of Cooking. I did The Store for H. Friedman, and I was working
for Joe. But, you know, as you do things, you begin to hire people, and I had Lois
Bloom, who had worked for me on The Cooks’ Catalogue. She was a friend that I had
met at the hairdresser, and, again, like Renie [Sax], I just picked her. You find what you
need, and Lois was the best shopper I knew, and we had to find the stuff. So I hired Lois,
and then Lois came to work for me here. There’s another office in the basement, which
is where I worked in those days, because I had children and they were up here.
Q: How did you prioritize all that, balancing so many different—
Kafka: Oh, I didn’t.
Q: I see. [laughs]
Kafka – 2 - 24
Kafka: Whatever was interesting and would pay me, I managed to get it done. If I
needed people to help, Lois found me a friend of hers who was good at numbers and had
gone to culinary school. I think she had gone to Brooklyn. And she came and worked
here. And before that, I’d had an assistant who came. Well, first, I’d had a secretary, and
I found her through the local newspaper, the Yorkville whatever, the East Side local
paper, which there was in those days. I put in an ad. She was a stay-at-home mother,
obviously intelligent and nice, and she came to work for me, and because I didn’t need
somebody full-time, it was a perfect arrangement for both of us.
Then by the time I was doing cooking, I got a letter from a woman named Susan
Grodnick, who wanted to work for the magazine, and I had said, “Well, come along and
let me meet you,” and she seemed good. She was a food-interested person. She went on
my recommendation to do other things, do other books.
I had people testing. All the testing has always been done here in this kitchen,
unless it was a restaurant where I would work with the chef. But usually the basic recipe
was tested here before I gave it to the chef, because I had to taste it and see it, and also
because being surrounded by all the ingredients and flavors, things would occur to me in
the middle of something that I couldn’t pre-envisage. So these people came, bit by bit.
When I was going gangbusters, I had a woman named Jane Helse, who now lives
on the West Coast and for a while taught and did cookery writing, but I don’t think does
anymore. But she was very good. Then I had my beloved Chris Styler.
Q: I did speak with him, as you suggested. He seems quite terrific.
Kafka – 2 - 25
Kafka: He’s a dream.
Q: And he also described that he thought you had a recipe together, and that you’d think
about something overnight and you’d come out the next day with something he never
would have thought of that changed everything.
Kafka: Yes. I am inventive. Greatest compliment Jim ever paid me was he used one of
my recipes that I developed for class, because it got to the point where I was doing all the
recipe development of new recipes. And he asked if he could put it in his book. He did
not take it, he didn’t pay for it, but he asked if he might with attribution, and he did,
which is the buckwheat noodles with caviar, freshwater caviar.
Of course, on the other hand, I met Dafne Engstrom through him because she was
in San Francisco. She’s with Tsar Nicoulai [Caviar] today, but at that point it was
California Sunshine, and she really has created a good caviar industry in America. But
she came and did a tasting for a class. We had lot of tasting classes.
Q: These were with Jim Beard?
Kafka: With Jim Beard in California. I almost never gave classes on my own. That, I
had too much work to do, and I really wasn’t set up for it.
Kafka – 2 - 26
Q: Could we go back a little bit to Joe Baum? I’d like you to just describe what working
with him was like.
Kafka: That’s hard. That would take a long time. Joe was extraordinary. He was
creative. I told you about the Newarker. I told you about the Hawaiian Room. I
mentioned the Forum of the Twelve Caesars where he had replicas made of the helmets
of the guards and used those as coolers for wine. He was always interested in more,
learning more, doing more.
By the time I really got to know him, which was the second time I met him
through when I went looking for a job, he was already down at the Trade Center as a
consultant. The whole thing of R.A. had exploded. Tom Margittai, who with Paul Kovi
later ran the Four Seasons after Joe left, and also the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, where
he was the first to hire Marcella Hazan. You see how all the links comes together.
Q: First to hire as a what?
Kafka: As a consultant. I mean, there are layer upon layer upon layer. But Tom once
defined a Joe Baum restaurant to me. He said, “Joe has a brilliant idea, and he executes it
brilliantly, but he charges too little.” And he says, “Everybody will love it, and when
they come to love it, we’ll raise the prices.” And he does that, and then he raises the
prices, and people get angry, and the restaurants lose money. So, in any case, it was, by
and large, true. Joe was not—he had studied accounting, and, as I used to say, the most
creative accountant I ever met.
Kafka – 2 - 27
Michael Whiteman worked for him. He’d been, I think, at Nation’s Restaurant
News and had met Joe when he was doing a reportorial job, and Joe needed writers, even
more than Jim. He had great respect for writers, and he couldn’t write worth a damn.
Q: And he needed the writers to do what?
Kafka: There’s a lot involved with restaurants. First, when you’re selling the concept.
Then, for instance, when I was working on Windows, which was not the first thing I did,
when I was working on Windows and had been exposed to the plan, he said, “Write me a
thing on what it’s going to be like, what is the experience going to be like.” And I had to
take all the different rooms there were in theoretical existence and make a long writing
piece about it.
He was asked to give speeches. He was asked for articles. He could not write.
His world was full of things like “hetchafetch” and “You know what I mean.” That’s just
who he was. He also found people. He found Michael. He found me.
When I first went there, part of the plan was that there were restaurants on all the
floors where the elevators stopped, where you changed elevators. There were only two
through elevators in the building, which went up to Windows. So all the others were
staggered. On each of those floors, there was a restaurant, and he gave me the job —
because he thought I knew about buying things—of outfitting the kitchen and mainly to
do the tabletop and the display stuff. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing, but I did
it anyhow.
Kafka – 2 - 28
Q: Were you trying to do freelance writing on your own at the same time?
Kafka: I did. I always wrote. I always wrote. After I finished my stint at Vogue, I was
writing for Playbill. I didn’t know—I mean, I was really dumb in this sense. They called
me from Harper’s Bazaar and asked me to write for them. I went down and met the
editor-in-chief, Carmel Snow, and she commissioned pieces, and I didn’t know you
couldn’t write for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue at the same time. That’s like as if you’ve
been writing for the Sun and the—and I didn’t write for Vogue again for twenty years. I
finally did because of the art world connection. Alex Lieberman was the creative director
of Condé Nast, and we met fairly frequently, and he came here to dinner. He was a very
close friend of Helen Frankenthaler and Bob Motherwell, who were married at the time.
And I would give birthday parties, and he would come here and join.
After one dinner we had out, he said, “You really should be back at Vogue,” and
so he told Leo, who was then the features editor at Vogue, that I should be doing
something.
And Leo called me. As I told you, I’d known Leo before. I’d went to see him,
and he said, “Well, we can either do a piece on you or a piece by you.”
By this time, I was doing a fair amount of consulting, so I said, “I’d rather have a
piece on me,” and there was a piece on me, which is in the Vogue archives someplace.
That’s when I met Amy Gross, who was his assistant, and later, Amy’s assistant,
Dana Cowin, who is now the editor of Food and Wine. I mean, as I say, you know,
claustrophobic world in which we knew each other.
Kafka – 2 - 29
Q: Before you were writing for Vogue and then the other magazines, was there a food
presence in magazines?
Kafka: Oh yes.
Q: Always?
Kafka: Always. I mean, I don’t know always, but in newspapers there was always a
women’s page. It may not be what it is today. The food section has a life of its own. It’s
not linked to birth announcements and weddings, although it may come back to that.
[laughter] So it was considered significant. You have to remember that the Seven
Sisters, not the colleges but the magazines, were all women’s magazines with important
food sections, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s.
Q: That somehow seemed different to me than Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and that sort
of thing.
Kafka: Well, Mademoiselle did not have food pages. It deemed itself a much more
intellectual magazine, although it was a fashion magazine, and certainly the people who
were there, like Leo, were more the intellectuals.
But Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar were in some way competing with the women’s
magazines. Seventeen had food pages. Mimi Sheraton worked there. The newspapers,
the more important ones, the Herald Tribune, had very good food pages. Clementine was
Kafka – 2 - 30
there. When Clay [Felker] went off and started New York Magazine, he had important
food pages, and he found Gail Greene. So that it was not as peculiar as you think. These
were women’s magazines and, in fact, what was cooking. I don’t know if Harper’s
Bazaar had had food pages before me. Vogue had, as I said. Maxine was there. Maxine
was fancy, so she fitted the profile of a Vogue employee, and I just got in because of Leo.
Q: What about your voice? Was it always your own? Did it take a while to develop?
Kafka: Not really. I always wrote in the first person, even when I wrote for newspapers.
The Times made a big exception for me when I started writing for the Times in letting me
write in the “I, me” person, because my feeling about it was not only pride; it was mainly
that what I have to say is personal and is a direct communication with the reader and is
not just about the thing, but it’s about the feeling, tone, the ambiance, and that’s what
came naturally to me.
I think the other reason it wasn’t so hard, if you read me, you’ll see I read pretty
much the way I talk, and since I wanted to be a poet, I didn’t take all this too seriously,
which made it easier. In other words, if I had thought it was poetry, or if I thought I was
[unclear], I might have had a great deal more trouble writing it. But as it was, it just
came out. Unfortunately, there were deadlines, and I had to meet deadlines.
Q: And they were always opinionated?
Kafka – 2 - 31
Kafka: Always. When you read something as dumb as—they’re online, so you can find
them at my microwave columns that I did for the Times. They’ve stolen that material,
incidentally. I did never sign the agreement.
Q: Oh, my.
Kafka: Never signed the agreement. Jacques Pépin didn’t, but he made a statement that
he would not sign. I just didn’t sign, never got around to it.
Q: This was at what time are you talking about?
Kafka: Well, there was a time when the Times asked everybody at the beginning of the
internet really being important.
Q: It wasn’t only the Times; it’s everybody.
Kafka: Yes, but it wasn’t then. That was new to the Times. And at that point—
Q: No, that’s what I meant. At that point, everyone—
Kafka: At the point at which it was new to the Times, they tried to get everybody to sign
these releases.
Kafka – 2 - 32
Q: For past work as well as—
Kafka: It was not that well formulated. All work, I think. But as I say, I just never
signed it. If my estate wants to sue, they can. I don’t have the time for that sort of
nonsense.
So, yes, I just wrote all that. I edited this magazine, Cooking, and I wrote for it. I
wrote The Cooks’ Catalogue. Not all the entries, those were written by Renie and other
people. Some I wrote, but the history pieces, the general introductions to what a given
kind of group of implements might be, have developed and what they might be for, I
wrote.
Q: When did you want to start to write your own cookbooks?
Kafka: I didn’t. I didn’t want to write a cookbook. I thought that there were plenty of
cookbooks already, and I had thousands of them. I’ll take you downstairs and show you
the rest. But I had a tenant. I have an apartment in this building that I rent out, and,
oddly enough, the person who rented it at that point was Irena Chalmers. Irena had
started a series of paperback cookbooks, and she wanted me to write for her on California
wine with a cookbook. So I churned out this book American Food and California Wine,
and I knew what I was talking about, about California wine by then. I’d had a lot of time
to learn and good grounding. I did my typical recipes. Buckwheat noodles are in there.
Q: Yes, I was looking at it this morning, actually.
Kafka – 2 - 33
Kafka: The recipes that I’ve done over the years were in there, and I thought I was going
to be criticized, not for the wine information, but somebody would say, “Why are these
American?” And, of course, there, you see, Joe and I had the same thing, which was
American was what we did. I’m very American. Although I know French cooking, I
speak French. I know Italian cooking, I speak Italian. I know Central American cooking,
I speak a little Spanish, not a lot. I speak some German. I was exposed to Russian food
growing up, as my father was Russian. So I knew all these things, and certainly my base
was French. Ali Bab is probably the most important cookbook I’ve ever owned, and
Jim’s The Fireside Cookbook was second, probably, in importance. But I never wanted
to copy anybody in anything. That was never what I did and still not what I do. I’m
doing another cookbook, and it gets harder and harder because I don’t want to repeat
myself, either.
Q: I want to go into that, but the reason I was leaning over was to look at the dates of
American Food and California Wine and Food for Friends, with regard to when Jim
Beard died.
Kafka: Jim died, well, obviously, before The James Beard Celebration Cookbook. He
died like three years before that. While, as I say, I wouldn’t call us friends in the usual
way, I was at the hospital with him when he died.
Q: Yes, I’ve read that. I was going to ask you.
Kafka – 2 - 34
Kafka: And the only person that was there was Larry Forgione, who sort of worshipped
him, not by knowing him but because of his American books. By then, American was a
big thing. And Larry would just sort of sit in the room.
Two or three days before he died—I went over every day—Jim looked at me, he
said, “I can’t anymore,” and he turned his face to the wall. And that was the last time I
think he ever spoke.
His doctor was a man named Denny Cox, who had taken class with us in New
York, and Denny came in, and Jim had basically stopped breathing, I think. Denny and I
literally wheeled the bed over to intensive care to try and resuscitate him, which didn’t
work.
So we had a very strong relationship, and I am very loyal. Just as I do not forget
insults, I do not forget friendship and people who have been good to me. If Jim had ever
called me after I left there, left him when he left himself, I would have gone and done
anything for him. These people were special people, and I owed them.
Q: How did you find out that he was in the hospital that last go-round?
Kafka: I think he called me or Denny called me. I don’t remember. But Carlo, his friend
upstairs, couldn’t bear hospitals, so he never came. Judith came once, to give you the
picture. Larry came very day, and I was there every day. And he wanted to hear things
and know things, and we told about things.
Kafka – 2 - 35
Q: But did a lot of people come?
Kafka: No. I don’t think he would have welcomed a lot of people. He did not
particularly like to expose himself in weakness.
Q: Yes, who would.
Kafka: But it’s interesting, the people who didn’t, and some people probably didn’t
know. I think Peter came a couple times. He was close with Jimmy Villas, but I don’t
think Jimmy came or may have come once, twice. It wasn’t like it was a long, long stay.
But Judith was shocking to me, even though I should not have been shocked. If
you interview her, I have something you can ask her in her book.
Q: What would you like me to ask her?
Kafka: Because it’s—I’m mean.
Q: Feel free.
Kafka: She says that when she was in Paris and she and Evan rode around the country,
they rode around in a Citroen Quatre Chevaux.
Q: Yes.
Kafka – 2 - 36
Kafka: There was no Citroen Quatre Chevaux. There was a Renault Quatre Chevaux,
and a Citroen Deux Chevaux, which I know because I—
Q: I love it that you remember so precisely those things.
Kafka: Ernie and I, my husband, drove around France in a Quatre Chevaux, and the
Deux Chevaux was that thing with the—
Q: I remember the Deux Chevaux. [laughs]
Kafka: Right. Then at one point she has herself going to Spence, and another she has
herself going to another fancy women’s school in New York.
[Interruption]
Q: Let’s talk about the development of your own cookbooks, because they—I don’t want
to use a word like standard, in terms of the early ones, but then with Microwave Gourmet,
it becomes an almost encyclopedic style that is fascinating to me.
Kafka: I’m an autodidact and a pedant, my husband would be glad to tell you. I take
nothing on somebody’s say-so. If somebody tells me that water boils in so many
minutes, I’m going to do it myself.
Kafka – 2 - 37
Having written American Food and California Wine, which had a respectable
little sale in soft-cover it then was, I wrote as a consultant/editor, writer for the Four
Seasons. I wrote the Four Seasons Cookbook. That had been started. Paula Wolfert had
started putting down the recipes. I’m very fond of Paula, but she has limitations as a
writer and as a maker of books, and I think it’s no mistake that Couscous is still her most
successful book. But she’s a good cook.
I didn’t know about it at the time, but Tom and Paul—I’m sure they paid her off
for whatever she had done, but Tom and Paul, primarily Tom, with whom I’m still
friendly—Paul, of course, is dead, so I can’t be friendly with him, but I was never as
friendly with Paul. I was always much more friendly with Tom.
[Interruption]
Kafka: The Four Seasons book, when I did that, there, again, Milton Glaser was involved
in the design. Yes, these things go around. The editor at S and S [Simon and Schuster],
who was the editor on the book, I think she inherited it, too, and that was Ann Bramson.
Now, speaking of loyalty, I have been with Ann ever since the Four Seasons Cookbook.
I was with her at—where was the first place? And then Morrow, Simon and Schuster,
Harper Collins, and whatever, and I’m still with her at Artisan. So when I say I’m loyal,
if you’re good to me, I stick with you. It doesn’t mean that I haven’t had other
propositions. Take that however you want. [laughter]
Q: But Microwave Gourmet, that was a major big deal and huge.
Kafka – 2 - 38
Kafka: Well, at the time. Well, first, before that, I wrote Food for Friends for Annie,
and should you bother with it, much of what I write later is germinal in that. I wrote a
thing on roasting a chicken, which is not a recipe, and I had more people come to me and
say, “Your roast chicken recipe is the best roast chicken I’ve ever made.” I guess I
decided to turn it into a “real recipe.” Anyhow, but that was the next book and it was a
very personal book.
To show you about editors and style, the introduction that I write is about a
dialogue about what I’m going to cook, sort of with myself, what I’m going to cook for
dinner. And Ann wanted to get rid of it. And I said, “No. That’s who I am. They need
to know why this is the way it was.” So that was the next book, and then I was looking
around for something to write.
Q: Let me ask you about that a bit, because I couldn’t find my copy of it. It was large,
wasn’t it? Or certainly not slim.
Kafka: Yes, but not huge. It’s next to that Microwave Gourmet.
Q: What was the task you set yourself in Roasting?
Kafka: Writing a book. Literally. They were not programmatic. American Food isn’t
programmatic. It uses American ingredients, some things that go with wine. It has
Lindy’s-type strawberry shortcake. I mean, it has American ingredients, but that was the
closest to a spine it had. Food for Friends was literally about what I serve at this table
Kafka – 2 - 39
and food that I thought people would like to make and do. After Food for Friends, they
do become more specific.
When I was working with Jim doing the recipes, Sharp approached Jim and they
wanted to send him a microwave. Well, typical of Jim, like the Corning and whatever,
that he should use it and whatever sponsor, he said, “Well, if you are going to send me
one, you have to send Barbara Kafka one,” because at that point I was doing all the
recipes.
Well, it sat on my kitchen floor under a table in there for years, because neither he
nor I could make any sense of it, and, as I told you, I don’t take anybody’s word for
granted, and the cookbooks that came with it were just appalling. So I, when my
daughter—and this gives you a date in my life—went to medical school, she had an
apartment, and I thought, “I’m never going to use this thing,” so I drove it over to her
house, and I carted it up four flights of stairs. There were the four flights of stairs. I was
a lot stronger in those days. I thought all she’ll ever do is reheat, but she buys, and that’s
what I thought it was good for in those days.
She came home, and I was bringing a big pot of water to the boil, and it had flour
in it and it had lemon shells, and there was lemon juice, so obviously I was going to make
artichokes, and I was trimming them. She came in and she said—we get on very well
now, but she said in a way that only one’s child can say to one, “Oh, I make one of those
in six minutes in the microwave oven.”
I continued making my artichokes, and the next day I went out and bought a
microwave oven. I thought I cannot be so dumb and so old and so stupid that I can’t
learn to do this. So I made an artichoke in the microwave oven, and it converted me. It
Kafka – 2 - 40
was certainly the best artichoke I’d ever made. You know how the water stays in an
artichoke and you burn yourself, and they get soggy, and the color turns revolting?
Q: Yes.
Kafka: Well, it doesn’t do that in a microwave. I don’t say it becomes jade green. This
is important about a microwave, because a woman up at Cornell in the food
department—now dead and whose name I can’t remember, which I should—did a study
of the vitamin retention, and the vitamin retention in microwaved vegetables is just
incomparable. Because if you look at the color, you can tell. And even if you steam
something, people say if you steam it, but the water turns color. So the water in beta
carotene is carried in the carotene, right, the orange and so on and so forth.
So that night or the next night, I was having six people to dinner. I thought, hey,
what a great trick this is. I had no more idea how to get from one artichoke to six
artichokes than flying to the moon. But I managed it, and we had them, and everybody
agreed they were very good.
So I kept on playing with it, because, as you said and I say, learning is the
pleasure, and I just kept on learning and learning and learning. It was all new to me.
At some point, Annie was looking for me to do another book. I said, “Annie, you
know, I think there might be a small book in microwave cooking.”
“Microwave cooking?”
I said, “Yes, really, there are things it does very well, it does better. It does
sugars,” you know. And she trusted me, and she gave me a contract, and that was
Kafka – 2 - 41
Microwave Gourmet. And like Topsy, it grew, and the reason it grew so big was I didn’t
want to slow down the flow of the book by putting every timing for every quantity in the
major recipe. So I created this back section of the book in order to have a place, a
reference guide, that people could turn to.
Well, Annie went off to have it set, and this is when having been a linotyper and
all of this came into play. She said, “Barbara, you have to cut out the glossary. The
whole thing isn’t going to fit.”
I said, “You take it down two points and it’ll fit,” and it did.
So that’s how Microwave Gourmet came into being, and I have never been so
assaulted as I was when that book came out. You can go into the files. Those were the
ladies pages of the newspapers, they were all being written by home-ecs, and I had
known Helen McCully when she was at, I guess, Ladies’ Home Journal or McCall’s, and
she had been fiercely attacked by the home-ecs because she didn’t wash her chicken. It
was important to them that she was the first editor of one of those big magazines,
women’s magazines, who was not a home-ec, and they were protecting their turf.
I started writing in March. Who was it came to see me and spoke to the woman
who was then editor of the food page, and she’s now the editor at Consumer Reports?
Slade. She queried me about writing a column for them on microwave cooking. It was
before the book appeared. It was in March of that year that I started writing that column.
The fall of that year, the book came out. There’d been not a peep out of the microwave
people.
Q: You started already in March, and in the fall it came out?
Kafka – 2 - 42
Kafka: No. I’d been writing for a long time. It may have been Barbara Costikyan who
made the connection; I don’t remember. And they got twenty-two letters the first day of
that column after the book came out, so obviously it was a concerted thing.
Q: Campaign.
Kafka: And they basically all said, “I’m a home economist and what she does is not what
we do and it’s incorrect and she’s going to kill people.” Oh, yes, dear.
Q: How would following those recipes have killed people?
Kafka: Well, first of all, I deep-fat fried small amounts of things in the microwave. In
fact, I mean, it took several years for me to recover from this. In fact, you can get hurt
deep-fat frying if you put something wet on top of the stove. It’s going to spatter and
burn you. I was only doing small quantities, and the heat doesn’t continue to go up and
all kinds of technical things. But that was a no-no to them.
Then I tightly covered the containers with cling film, as the Brits would say. And
that was a no-no. They all vented the cling film, theoretically, I suppose, so it wouldn’t
explode. No reason why it should, because it stretches and it makes a balloon and you
can prick it and what have you. It was actually much safer, because when you pricked it
and then you took the container out of the oven, you were much less liable to burn
yourself than you were the other way.
Kafka – 2 - 43
And also, but this only turned out later, I was prescient without knowing it, that
the thing that is not good for you in plastic are the plasticizers. They migrate. And by
making this tight covering, they didn’t start out touching, and when the balloon came up,
it held the plastic totally over it, away from it, so that it never touched it. The problem is
usually in the presence of fat.
But in any case, the last laugh was mine. But all over the country—now, you
understand that these women did not have microwaves when they became home-ecs.
Q: Of course.
Kafka: Because there were none. Period. But they had a society. I mean, it was ghastly.
I went out to California. I was doing the book tour and I got a telephone call from
the New York Times editor saying, “You’d better get back here,” and that was just after
the book had come out.
I came back on the red eye, instead of civilized, and I was scheduled to speak that
evening at the Campbell Microwave Institute. And I went in to—let’s see. I don’t know
why her name is leaving me. It will come to me. And she took me in to see Ms.
Newhouse, who was editor of all the what I call soft porn sections, you know, travel,
whatever, whatever, whatever, and she then went on to do the big travel section for the
Times on Sunday.
Q: You mean Nancy Newhouse?
Kafka – 2 - 44
Kafka: Nancy Newhouse, yes. And she was lovely. She said to me, “This is what’s
happened. What’s it about?” And as quietly and as rationally as I could, I told her and
gave her my side of the story. And she said, “Okay.” Do you know that people in the
Times stopped her in the hallway and thanked her, not food section people, that it was so
rare for an editor to take the word of an author and support them. It helped that my
column was extremely popular by then. I’ve always had very popular public exposure.
When I wrote for Gourmet, Jane Montant told me they had readership surveys. I
was the most-read column, most-read thing in Gourmet. Because this voice makes
people think that they know me, and they do to a certain extent.
So anyhow, after that, with Microwave Gourmet, I said to Annie, “You know,
Annie, you don’t have to use fat in a microwave oven to cook, and these vitamins retain
all of these vitamins. It’s a very healthful way to cook and an easy way to lose weight.”
So she went back. She was at Morrow by this time. The editor-in-chief at Morrow, not
the food editor, who was Narcisse Chamberlain, but the editor loved the idea, and she
came up with a great title, Micro Slim Gourmet. Great title.
God preserve us from success. Everybody had an idea what the book should be
called, the sales reps, the bookstores, the chains, and came out with the world’s worst
title, Microwave’s Health Style Cookbook. Turgid, heavy, not Barbara.
Q: [laughs] Not going to sell either.
Kafka: Not going to sell. And of course it sold into the bookstores because Microwave
Gourmet had been such a success. I mean, I had experiences. They only printed, I think,
Kafka – 2 - 45
5,000 or 10,000 copies of Microwave Gourmet, and I had people calling me as they used
to do when I was at Windows. People would call me at seven o’clock at night and say,
“My aged mother is dying, and her last request is to go to Windows on the World.” Or,
“I went to kindergarten with you. You may not remember me.” Well, I had the same
sort of thing with Microwave Gourmet. “I must have a copy for a Christmas present for
X, Y, or Z, who is important in my life, and I can’t find one.” Of course you couldn’t
find one. They ran out before Christmas.
Q: But they reprinted it, didn’t they?
Kafka: But not before Christmas. Oh, no, it went on to sell many copies. As I said to a
friend, I’ll never have such a successful cookbook again, in terms of sheer numbers.
Q: It was the most successful?
Kafka: It was the most successful. So, Health Style. I’ve never not made back my
advance, but Health Style was not what you would call a winner.
Ann was still at Morrow, and she had been with Food for Friends with me, and I
had told her the story about the chicken. She said, “Oh, Barbara, there might be a book in
roasting, because people need the information.” Hmm. So that’s how Roasting came
into being. Well, as I say, I’m hideously thorough, and I want to do my research and I
want to get it done, but I also wanted food that people would want to eat. See, you have
the seduce people. The recipes are seduction, and the style of a recipe is rather
Kafka – 2 - 46
stereotypic today. And it has to be. This is the next conversation I’m going to have with
Ann. Gourmet, for instance, used to, in the magazine—there was no list of ingredients.
“You take two cups of butter.”
Q: Oh, a long time ago, yes.
Kafka: Yes, a long time ago. Now, the standard is list the ingredients, they must be
listed in the order in which they’re going to be used, which is ridiculous, because you
ought to list the main ingredient first, in the order in which they’re going to be used, and
then you write flaccid prose. But, in any case, that is not my style, and I had, of course,
learned something, even I, from Microwave Gourmet, which is everybody loved that
back section of the book. People would tell me, “It’s the only book I have in my
kitchen,” meaning “I have other cookbooks, but I have to keep that one in my kitchen for
the thing.”
So I thought, “Don’t be a dummy, Barbara.” That’s why Roasting has all those
timings for different quantities and amounts in the back of the book, and, again, it helped
sell the book because people used it as a reference. And if it was a food, maybe I could
roast it. [laughter]
Q: So Microwave Gourmet sold more than—
Kafka: Anything.
Kafka – 2 - 47
Q: —Soups or Vegetable Love, which I like a lot, Vegetable Love. I see Party Food.
Kafka: I did Party Food, and I thought it was a needed book, and Annie wanted a color
book. Those were the days when publishers could afford color. And it’s now OP [out of
print]. It just went OP because they can’t afford to reprint it with the color.
Q: Oh, my.
Kafka: That book was madly successful with caterers. I mean, more parties I’ve been to
and found my recipes, which is fine. You want to be useful. Really, since Jim, there had
only been Martha Stewart, and she’s done very well, but hers were not my style, so I did
my own, and I did all the styling of the food and all the props came out of this house and
my house in Vermont. Nothing was borrowed. Nothing was bought specifically. And
that was Party Food.
And then, as I say, I was at Morrow, and after Health Style and after—if Roasting
was still at—I guess Roasting was at Morrow, too.
Q: Could you tell me what you’re working on now?
Kafka: Yes. Oh, and we left out the Opinionated Palate, which I had done.
Q: The collection of recipes, yes. I mean of columns, right.
Kafka – 2 - 48
Kafka: Right. I am working on a book where once I got the title, which will not change,
I had to write the book. It’s called The Intolerant Gourmet. It not only describes my
character, but the fact that I was celiac as a young child, and in my dotage, it has come
back to haunt me and I can no longer eat wheat or lactose.
Q: Wow.
Kafka: Well, you know, Eastern European Jew, I can’t eat lactose. But I’m very tired of
people thinking it’s so awful and so difficult. It’s not, and so I’m doing that cookbook.
Q: So, what else will be in it? I mean, how do you see the book developing?
Kafka: Spottily. I never know with a book how it’s really going to be organized till I do
it. In other words, when I wrote Soup, A Way of Life, I had all the recipes and I had them
organized in the usual—or I suppose usual for most people—fashion, vegetables and this
and that and the other, and it was all right. Then I thought, you know, it’s going to stop
people to start with vegetable soups. It’s not seductive. So I said, what is the most
seductive soup? Chicken soup. And every part of the world that I know of, except for
South India, makes a chicken soup. But I didn’t want to write about it as a technical tour
de force, so I wrote about it as a family memoir, and that’s when I created that whole
section, because that, to me, is what soup is about in people’s lives. It’s not about fancy
clarified bouillons, but about family soup.
Kafka – 2 - 49
And it was fascinating when I told Zarela Martinez, and she said, “What’s the
new book?”
And I said, “It’s called Soup, A Way of Life.”
She said, “Soup? But that is Mexican.” In Ecuador, they don’t say, like they do
in China, have you had rice today? Instead of have you eaten, they say, have you had
soup today?
So it reified my point of view, and that’s what that is, and members of my family
had things that they liked that were in that section. But I couldn’t have told you that
before I wrote the book than fly to the moon.
So a typical thing that I do is I write a recipe and then I organize the recipes into
chapters, usually in rather conventional ways, and then I write introductions to the
recipes, separate introductions, which I suppose could be summarized into two sentences:
why you want to make this recipe and what you need to know to make this recipe.
Then I look at the damn thing and I see what feels wrong or what it still needs or
where there are holes. Yes, I did lots of vegetable soups, but I don’t have anything with.
Or I have to address the fact that I don’t put rutabagas in this book. Well, then I have to
tell people I don’t like rutabagas. The new book has a rutabaga recipe and I think the
recipe is called Taming the Rutabaga. It’s one recipe.
So the new book, in a sense, aside from its subtext, I don’t know that it will have
as much general information on eating as Health Style did. That was fun learning all that
traditional information, and I appeared on panels at the FDA in Washington.
Then when it’s gotten as formed as I can make it, then I write the introductions
and the introductory material, or I take—I mean probably not in this book, but take what I
Kafka – 2 - 50
do and slam it into a thing in the back. So each of those things happens as a result of
what the thing is. So it’s an ongoing procedure.
Q: When is this one due?
Kafka: It isn’t. When it comes, it comes. I mean, my feet have taken a chunk out of my
life.
Q: In any case, we will all look forward—
Kafka: Thank you.
Q: —to the next one, and let me thank you so much for speaking with me.
Kafka: My pleasure.
[End of interview]