Celebrating Craig Claiborne
The longtime food critic of The New York Times and prolific cookbook author revolutionized the way we cook. This is Mississippi’s story.
by Marion Barnwell

Foodies now have more celebrity chefs to worship than spatulas, yet even the chefs themselves probably do not realize the debt they owe Craig Claiborne (1920-2000). In his time he caused a food revolution in this country.

This was the conclusion of culinary luminaries, Jacques Pepin and David Kamp, panelists at a tribute to Craig on June 12 of this year at Astor Place in New York City, an event masterminded by John T Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) at Ole Miss. Craig raised the bar for excellence in American dining. He introduced the star-rating system for determining restaurant quality. His serious, sometimes scathing, always entertaining reviews for The New York Times could make or break a restaurant. He was the first male food columnist for the The Times and elevated the genre into informed, sophisticated talk about food. Craig was a native Deltan. At a talk I gave in March about him for participants on the Mississippi Delta Literary Tour, sponsored by the Center for Southern Culture, I joked that Edge”s real purpose in planning the New York tribute was to steal Craig back from the Yankees. It was truer than I imagined. At the tribute event, I noticed New Yorkers were talking about him as if he were entirely theirs.

Multiple strategies are afoot to reclaim him. In 2007, on Edge”s recommendation, the University of Georgia Press reprinted Craig”s 1987 cookbook, Southern Cooking. Edge and former student, Georgeanna Milam Chapman, provided a new introduction that emphasizes the importance of Craig”s legacy. Chapman was well-chosen as co-writer for she wrote an excellent and in-depth thesis on him. An SFA exhibit of Craig”s life and works will soon travel to libraries and other venues across Mississippi. In October, SFA will present its first Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award. Who was this man and how exactly do we claim him? Well, he was born in 1920 in Sunflower, Mississippi. He grew up in a cultured family. His father, Edmond, owned thousands of acres of land, a cotton gin, and bought the town”s first car.

“Miss Kathleen,” his mother, was a graduate of Judson College in Marion, Alabama. In his 1982 autobiography, A Feast Made for Laughter, Craig provides a glowing description of her: “My mother had studied Latin and Greek and music. She was intensely well read and a brilliant conversationalist. She could sew a fine seam, play the piano, and was a splendid and inspired cook.”

In the early 1920s, soon after Craig was born, his father suffered financial upheaval and lost most of his holdings. Subsequently, he moved his family to the neighboring town of Indianola, where he secured a job as an accountant. To help out financially, Miss Kathleen opened her house to boarders. Growing up in the boarding house, young Craig was surrounded by interesting people, preachers, teachers, and even a renowned sociologist, John Dollard, who wrote about Indianola in his 1937 book Caste and Class in a Southern Town. It is also possible, but unconfirmed, that anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, author of After Freedom, also boarded there for a short time.

Locals soon joined the boarders for dinner. A wildly popular gathering place, it was rumored that bachelors stopped looking for wives since they could now eat at Miss Kathleen”s table any night of the week. Genteel manners prevailed. Miss Kathleen treated those who ate at her table more like guests than paying clientele, serving meals on her own fine linens, crystal and monogrammed china.

Menus were elaborate. There might be a twenty-pound fresh Gulf red snapper, Brunswick stew, crab or oyster gumbo, beaten biscuits, Divinity fudge, coconut cake, pecan pie, fried chicken, shrimp remoulade, or chicken turnovers in a rich cream sauce. The boarding house gave Craig an introduction to media attention. While living in Chicago, he was asked by a curious reporter to name the best cook in the South. When he answered, “My mother,” a two-page spread followed, appearing in the May 1948 issue of Liberty magazine, complete with recipes and pictures of Miss Kathleen holding court at the boarding house.

The servants, and there were several, doted on the young culinary prodigy and allowed him to help prepare the food. He later claimed his first culinary invention, chicken livers on toast, was created in that kitchen. The boarding house was the bedrock of Craig”s later career. From this distance, his life as a chef and food critic appears destined, although the autobiography indicates the path was circuitous.

After briefly attending Mississippi State, Craig transferred to the University of Missouri, graduating with a major in advertising journalism. He served in the Navy in World War II. After that, on a hunch that he would need it, he studied French at Alliance Française in Paris. After working for a time in radio and clerking in a clothing store in Chicago, he served again in the Navy during the Korean War. After the war, he enrolled in the Professional School of Swiss Hotelkeepers in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the G.I. Bill and was trained in classic French cooking. The classes were taught entirely in French.

While in the Navy, the cuisine he tasted around the world inspired him to envision a career that combined his two passions, cooking and writing. In 1955, he was hired as a receptionist by Gourmet magazine, quickly working his way into an editorial position. In 1957, he was hired as food editor for The New York Times, a career that was to last until 1986. He began reviewing New York restaurants anonymously to inspire better fare and to enhance his already popular weekly food column.

He was a favorite figure in The New Yorker cartoons and often made the society pages of the newspaper that employed him. His house in East Hampton on Long Island became a gathering place for professional chefs to try out recipes. He held lavish dinners on New Year”s Eve with impressive guest lists that included Jean Stafford, Joseph Heller, Lauren Bacall, and Arthur Miller, among others. He was fast becoming an American icon. His most extravagant dinner made headlines around the world when he won an American Express dinner for two, a meal that cost $4,000. With co-author Pierre Franey, Craig feasted on thirty dishes, accompanied by costly wines with each course, including a 1928 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild.

In the early 1960s at his request, The New York Times began to publish Craig”s cookbooks—nearly twenty in all. The first one, The New York Times Cookbook, has sold well over three million copies.

Craig was a man torn between his extraordinary life in the fast lane and his devotion to his Mississippi family. For years, he was unable to reconcile the two. A rift between him and his mother further alienated him from the South. In 1981, Craig returned to Mississippi for the funeral of Bob Barnwell of Greenwood, husband of his sister, Augusta. He was finishing his autobiography at the time, and his reminiscences must have played a part in his return.

Craig was my uncle by marriage—I am married to his nephew, Claiborne Barnwell, son of Craig”s sister, Augusta. Like him, I grew up in Indianola, though some years later. But he would have intrigued me without these connections. When he came to see us that first time after the long absence, he was at the top of his game. The idea of cooking for him was daunting. Although my husband inherited the cooking gene, even he was not sure he could pull this one off.

The first report of his arrival came from Claiborne”s sister, Craig. (Names in the family are unapologetically redundant.) “Tripe,” she said. “He”s brought tripe. He made me try it, and I almost spit it out. He”ll make you try it so I thought I”d warn you.” Boy, was I happy, not about eating tripe, which as predicted, I didn”t like a bit, but it changed any idea I”d held of a formidable New York sophisticate. Soon enough, I found him to be warm, charming, funny, and yes, sophisticated, but never formidable.And we didn”t have to cook for him after all. Instead, he volunteered to cook for us. The menu was his rendition of Labella hamburgers. Revered all over the Delta, they were made by an Italian family who started out passing food to passengers through the windows of the daily train during the Depression. Their specialty was a “floating hamburger,” so named for the heavenly sauce lavishly ladled from their meat-laden spaghetti sauce.
In his autobiography, Craig claims the Labella hamburger was “unreproduceable outside that one kitchen.” He must have forgotten he said that when he tried to recreate it in ours. “Piece the french bread,” he commanded me, “and mix it with the meat. I need black pepper, salt, and...” He named about six other spices as I ran in circles to gather them up. “A garlic press, please.” “Get me a two-cup saucepan. Measure out two tablespoons of oil. One onion, finely chopped.” Finally, I looked at him, standing in the middle of the kitchen shouting orders from his cookbook and joked, “Damn. I could cook too if that”s all you do.”

The hamburgers were good in a gourmet kind of way, though they bore no resemblance to Labella”s. My candid outburst, however, had won me to him. He liked being taken down a notch or two from time to time. Craig was as graceful in the kitchen as Baryshnikov, with no wasted motion. I loved watching him cook just as he”d loved watching the servants prepare food in his mother”s kitchen. When chopping vegetables or whisking a cream sauce, he gave it a zen-like concentration.
On one trip home, we went with him to a certain catfish restaurant he was to review at the height of that craze. At the table, a silence fell over him as he savored his first bite. Time passed. Then, he plucked a tiny gold pen and a well-worn notebook from his breast pocket and jotted something down. After few moments, he put away pen and notebook and resumed the conversation. I never knew what he had jotted down, but the restaurant received a favorable review.

Once, when we visited him at his home in East Hampton, he cooked a fabulous crawfish étouffée for us. We have made the dish many times since then. We have learned over the years, to rethink his recipes before we begin. Otherwise, Craig, who always had a large kitchen staff, would have us use every pan in the kitchen. When he visited us, he seemed delighted in our provincial celebrations and activities. He enjoyed our picnics, ballgames and birthday parties. He pronounced floating down the Sunflower River on our handmade pontoon boat a grand adventure. In 1985, he came home to help celebrate the opening of our winery, Claiborne Vineyards.

He was a complicated man, his personality a paradox. He could be utterly charming one minute, out of sorts the next. He was full of fun and sometimes terribly sad. He loved to tell a joke or story, but often couldn”t finish for laughing, the tears streaming down his face. He enjoyed his celebrity status but liked good-natured teasing about it. He was a self-proclaimed hedonist and a highly disciplined professional. He reveled in his New York experiences, yet could not deny his deep connections to the South.
His frequent trips to Mississippi that began in 1981 continued as long as his health permitted. These visits seemed to finally bring together the two halves of his life. In his preface to the 1987 Southern Cooking, Craig praises Southern food and rates it superior to any other region in America. His autobiography, dedicated to fellow Mississippian, Willie Morris, pays homage to his homeland.

Even as John T Edge and company are reclaiming him for Mississippi, Craig has already reclaimed us. If he were here to witness his Mississippi renaissance, Craig, the perpetual critic, would probably look up from his chopping block, peer over his half-glasses, and ask, “What took you so long?” DM