In 1990, the acclaimed Los Angeles chef Nancy Silverton cooked at the James Beard House. On the menu was roasted quail salad with hundred-year-old vinegar, potato ravioli with white truffles and sauteed spinach, grilled short ribs with porcini and salsa verde, and a fresh date tart with spun sugar for dessert.
This we know because the James Beard Foundation, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, has archived menus from dinners over the past 40 years at the New York City Greenwich Village townhouse that was home to the chef, author, and TV cooking show host James Beard.
And, thanks to a partnership with Google announced this week, now anyone can look back at Beard House menus over the years at a new website called Bite by Bite.
The archive offers historians and food nerds in general the opportunity to look back in time at culinary trends and how ingredients were used, as well as global and regional influences that have shaped American dining.
Beard died in 1985. But his house became a center for the culinary arts, and is the headquarters for the Foundation that is now known for its annual awards, sometimes called the Oscars of the food world.
For years, celebrated chefs hosted dinners at the house, which became known as a sort of Carnegie Hall of cooking. After the pandemic shuttered the Beard House briefly, it emerged as a training and professional development hub for emerging chefs. Today, the Beard House hosts private events.
But four decades of dining have been carefully documented.
The data includes menus from 1987 to 2018 from more than 3,800 chefs. In the early years, there were only 10 or 11 dinners, but by 2005 that number grew to more than 240 each year.
The menus offer insight into dining trends, like the rise of kale in the 2000s and how Brussels sprouts moved from the butt of jokes to vegetable hero (once chefs began roasting them). There is quite a lot of foie gras over the years.
Users, for example, can search for “eggplant” and find a menu from chef John Folse in 1991, who served eggplant bayou Lafourche medallion of purple eggplant, pan fried and topped with crawfish on twin sauces.
It doesn’t, however, offer context about John Folse, who cooked for the Beard House twice. He was founder of Lafitte’s Landing Restaurant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and hosted a PBS cooking series called “A Taste of Louisiana with Chef John Folse & Company,” as well as being a cookbook author and advocate for Cajun cooking around the world.
The website notes that, because AI was used to read decades of old, handwritten and printed menus, there may be a few “quirks, duplicates or unexpected interpretations” in the data.
Wolfgang Puck, for example, was the first chef to host a dinner to raise money for the Beard foundation in 1987, the website notes at one point. He served grilled salmon with celery cream, venison medallions with black mushroom sauce, and winter greens with duck livers for an all-inclusive price of $65 per person, including wine pairings.
But when you search for Puck’s name in the archive, what comes up is Wolfgang Birk, a Miami chef who cooked at the Beard House in 2016.
Still, menu lovers will find the archives good reading.
In 1994, Emeril Lagasse served smoked rabbit and Andouille gumbo. In 2000, Marcus Samuelsson (then at Aquavit) served Kobe beef with truffle tea and foie gras with rhubarb-curry ice cream. In 2018, Stacy Cogswell (then at Inn at Hastings Park) showcased duck confit donuts.
“This project holds something for everyone,” said Clare Reichenbach, the Beard Foundation’s CEO. “Whether from a research perspective, going deep into the evolution of food trends, or ingredients, or techniques. And, from a food lover perspective, this is a wonderful way of being exposed to the rich history of American food culture.”
