Craig Claiborne

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Craig Claiborne (born September 4, 1920 in Sunflower , Mississippi , † January 22, 2000 ) was an American restaurant critic, cookbook author and journalist. Together with MFK Fisher , Julia Child and James Beard, he is considered to be one of the personalities who significantly influenced American culinary art and food culture between 1930 and 1970.

Life

Craig Claiborne's mother ran a guesthouse where the guests were also cooked. Claiborne served in the US Navy during World War II and the Korean War, and during that time found that his passion was cooking. He used the money that was available to him from the GI Bill to train in a hotel school in Lausanne. He then returned to the USA. He wrote for a number of gourmet magazines and worked for the New York Times , for which he was responsible from 1957 for the pages that dealt with food culture. He is considered to be the first man in the United States to do this job for a major newspaper. In the 1950s, newspaper articles dealing with the art of cooking and eating culture were mainly aimed at a female readership and were limited to topics dealing with the role of a hostess and recipes for a somewhat more sophisticated kitchen. A passionate gourmet, Craig Claiborne succeeded in conveying his passion for good food to his readers, discussing restaurants with innovative cuisines in particular, and was instrumental in making the New York Times a leader in these topics in the US market. Craig Claiborne's columns, restaurant reviews and cookbooks introduced his readership to a wide variety of ethnic cuisines - especially Asian and Mexican cuisine . In the 1950s, American cuisine was still very conservative in the way it was prepared. The few gourmet restaurants that could be found in big cities like New York only served French cuisine of - according to Craig Claiborne - not particularly high quality. Basically, he tried to hold restaurants responsible for what they served their guests. To rate restaurants, he introduced a four-star system that is still used by many other restaurant critics to this day.

The $ 4,000 dinner

In 1975, Claiborne had bought a dinner for two at a television charity for $ 300 at American Express's expense . Together with his friend Pierre Franey, he chose the Parisian restaurant Chez Denis , one of the most famous restaurants in the French capital. The local chef Claude Mornay put together a menu of 31 courses for his guests. Over a period of five hours, foie gras , truffles , lobster , caviar , ortolan , oysters and fine wines such as a 1918 Chateau Latour and a Mouton Rothschild from 1928 were served, among other things . The bill for the menu, which American Express took over, was around $ 4,000. When Claiborne described his meal in his New York Times column shortly afterwards and described his lobster as rubbery, among other things, the newspaper received thousands of letters from readers calling this luxurious meal obscene, scandalous and inappropriate in a world where so many were starving . Pope Paul VI was one of the critics of the meal .

Publications

  • The New York Times Cookbook
  • Craig Claiborne's The New New York Times Cookbook
  • The New York Times International Cookbook
  • A Feast Made for Laughter (autobiography)
  • Craig Claiborne's Kitchen Primer
  • Craig Claiborne's The New York Times Food Encyclopedia
  • Craig Claiborne's Gourmet Diet (with Pierre Franey)
  • The Master Cooking Course (with Pierre Franey)
  • Cooking with Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey
  • Cooking with Herbs and Spices
  • Veal Cookery
  • Classic French Cooking
  • Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World
  • Craig Claiborne's Memorable Meals Menus, Memories and Recipes from over Twenty Years of Entertaining
  • Craig Claiborne's Favorites from The New York Times

literature

  • Betty Fussel: Masters of American Cookery: MFK Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child. University of Nebraska Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8032-6920-X .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Lint, pp. V-VII.
  2. ↑ Lint, p. 39.
  3. ↑ Blow out! History's 10 greatest banquets. In: The Independent. February 10, 2007, accessed November 14, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Claiborne, Craig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American restaurant critic, cookbook author, and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th September 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Sunflower , Mississippi
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 2000