Never On Sunday: A visit to one of the Club's antecedants

"The Dinner Party" by Henry Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 27, 2015

A few years ago, Ann and I were wandering through Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when we noticed a handsome painting of a group of 18 men at what was clearly a nineteenth century dinner table, attended by two man servants. We jokingly commented that it looked like an historical version of our Monday Evening Club.

Well, be careful about speculation! Some research showed that the painting was of a dinner meeting of Boston’s Wednesday Evening Club.  The artist was Henry Sargent, a Boston artist who was born in 1770 and died in 1845. The painting was done in 1821.  Sargent’s paintings are known for giving intimate glimpses of Boston’s homes in the early 19^th century and this painting certainly does.

All this, of course, then led to curiosity about the Wednesday Evening Club of Boston – and that is the subject of my talk tonight for it is a fascinating look at our forebears and the similarities with our Club that make for what seemed to me to be a captivating story.

Fortunately, for us, a committee of Club members was appointed in 1857 to “consider all and sundry matters appertaining to the interests of the Club,” and much of the following comes from this committee’s report.  

As originally instituted in 1777, the Club consisted of nine members, all bachelors in their twenties. 

Three were from each of the professions of Law, Medicine, and Divinity.

The founding members in 1777 were as follows (and I include them because several of the names are familiar). The lawyers were Israel Keith, Thomas Dawes and George Minot. The physicians were Thomas Welsh, Nathaniel Appleton, and William Greenleaf. And the clergy were John Eliot, John Bradford, and William Greenough.  John Quincy Adams, Charles Bullfinch, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were later members.

Thomas Dawes, entering the Club as a lawyer, was of particular interest to me because, of course, of Henry L. Dawes, a founding member in 1869 of our Club.  I was not able to trace the family connection but I strongly suspect it exists. Thomas Dawes (and my house is just off Dawes Avenue in Pittsfield) was a patriot who fought in the Revolution.  His house was plundered by the British when they evacuated Boston in 1776. After the war he lived next door to John Adams and he worked primarily as an architect and designed many notable Boston buildings. He also held several state government positions and was a good friend of John Hancock.

The first expansion of the Club was about 1800 with the addition of three Merchants. Then in 1830 or so two or three other gentlemen were added whose occupations did not fit any of the categories.  They were called Gentlemen at Large. In 1836 there was another enlargement by adding one to each of the occupational categories, as well as the at-large, for a total of 20 members. It was noted by the Committee in 1857 that there had never been a strict adherence to the membership rule so that by 1857 there were 23 members.

When it first began in 1777 the Club met year round, but with the introduction of the railroads bringing increased travel and the custom of spending the summer in the country, meetings were suspended in July and August.

The meetings were weekly, starting on the third Wednesday in October and continuing until the Wednesday preceding the last Wednesday in May, with approximately thirty meetings a year.

The assignment of weeks was alphabetical, but hosts could exchange with each other for more convenient dates.  The custom also was that the host could invite one or two friends.

The Committee also noted that graduation from Harvard College was originally a condition of membership and that this condition was once considered “as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.” But the Committee’s report goes on to note “this condition was originally intended to intimate simply that the Club should be composed of persons of education and generous culture; and as Harvard College was at the time of founding of the Club the chief, almost the only, source of this culture to the people of this community, the condition took this form. But this relation between Harvard College and our community no longer exists. Our city has become more metropolitan, the place where a large portion of the talent and culture of New England concentrates. Through the growth of our city there may be frequent inducements to disregard this membership condition in the future.”

The report goes onto say “If in the ranks of professional distinction and literary culture the sons of Harvard cannot hold their own in this community, it is not desirable that they should hold it in this Club by an exclusive condition.  Your Committee therefore thinks this condition should be suffered to sink into oblivion, should, in fact, be considered extinct.” So there! (Yale must have felt encouraged.)

The Committee of 1857 next turned its attention to the question of adding new members since “we can easily name a number of distinguished or agreeable gentlemen (I’m not sure that’s an either/or proposition) whom it would be pleasant to have associated with us.” Furthermore the Committee wanted the Club to be large enough so there would be fifteen to eighteen at every meeting. But there was no interest in making so large as to “lose its harmony of spirit and character, and the feeling of intimate acquaintance and strong personal regard now produced by its limited number.”

The final recommendation concerning membership was to enlarge the Club to twenty-five. Without altering the character of the Club this would enable the adding of two or three gentlemen “in the meridian of life, whom we should be glad to have associated with us, and also to do what is perhaps more necessary – to increase the youthful element in the Club by the election of gentlemen who are, by a score of years or more, the juniors of the present members.”

So far as meetings went, this diligent Committee carefully specified that “the person at whose house the Club meets shall be expected to be ready to receive at half-past eight o’clock; and the supper, which shall be simple and without meats, may be served at any time after half-past nine, and is always to be served by ten o’clock.”

Thus ends the report of the 1857 Committee, but further research at the Boston Public Library (and a thank you to the librarians there) turned up a report written by the Club’s then secretary, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, about the Club’s Centennial Celebration in 1877.

Lothrop was a noted New England clergyman – a Harvard graduate, thank heavens, pastor for forty-two years of the Brattle Square Church in Back Bay Boston. He was also a member of the Boston School Committee for thirty years.

Incidentally, the Brattle Square Church began in 1698 as Congregationalist. It moved into a new building in 1772 designed by our architect friend Thomas Dawes. John Hancock gave one thousand pounds toward its construction. Early parishioners included John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, and Abigail Adams. (Clearly these instigators of the American Revolution were close acquaintances.) The Church became Unitarian in 1805 and dissolved in 1878.

The connectedness among all these people is fascinating and the temptation to keep researching and digressing goes on and on.

But, back to the Club’s Centennial celebration in 1877.

In thinking about an appropriate commemoration it was found difficult to find a theme because the Club “has not aimed at action or influence outside of itself, and has done nothing but give a large amount of pleasure to its members and no small increase of that intellectual improvement which comes from intercourse with intelligent and cultivated minds.”

It was noted that members, past and present, included one President of the United States (John Quincy Adams), two Ambassadors to the Court of St. James, one Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (Holmes), four other noted court justices, two members of the Senate, and four members of the U.S. House of Representatives – one of whom was speaker, two speakers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and three Mayors of Boston.

One of the first questions to be settled was the date for the celebration. The first meeting of the Club had been June 21, 1777, according to the diary of John Quincy Adams. However, June 21, 1877, would fall on a Thursday which in the Committee’s words would “do violence, so far as the day of the week is concerned, to the whole history, usage, and name of the Club.

It also seemed inconvenient to celebrate in June when so many would be away from the City for the summer, particularly since Harvard’s graduation in 1877 did not fall close to June 21.

So, with marvelous practicality it was decided that there probably had been some weeks of preparation before the first meeting and therefore it would be reasonable to consider May as the real beginning of the Club and have the celebration in that month.

Having imaginatively resolved that weighty question, attention turned to the mode of celebration.

There was thought of a dinner at the Parker House or some other hotel with a prominent member as speaker to furnish the “intellectual and literary treat of the occasion.” That idea was speedily abandoned.

To quote from the report: “A dinner of thirty or thirty-five gentlemen [obviously no women] is of necessity rather stiff and formal, not to say sometimes a very stupid and tiresome affair, affording little liberty or opportunity for any real free, unconstrained social intercourse, and is therefore entirely incongruous and out of harmony with the habits, customs, and usages of this Club at ordinary meeting. It was felt that the members of this Club, if they found themselves seated at a long table with a magnificently variegated bill of fare before them would feel, as a Club, so queer and strange and out of place, that they could not possibly have a good time together.”

So it was decided that the Centennial meeting would be held at the home of their member Nathaniel Thayer, 70 Mt. Vernon Street. (He was a noted banker, railroad developer, and philanthropist – Thayer Hall at Harvard is one example of his generosity.)

Guests were to assemble punctually at eight o’clock. After fifteen minutes for gathering, there would be a member to speak from each of the traditional membership categories in the Club.

Half an hour would be given to each with the understanding that “however entertaining, instructive, or eloquent, the person designated to speak may be, he is not to occupy the whole of the half hour, but much so restrain himself as to leave eight or ten minutes so that others might put in a word if the spirit prompts.”

After the speeches the guests adjourned to Mr. Thayer’s dining room where, our faithful secretary noted, “it was soon determined that the ice cream had not melted, not the oysters grown cold, though it was a full hour beyond our usual time for partaking of these refreshments.”

And so this Club whose existence had spanned that of the United States, and whose members had significantly participated in the major events from the Revolutionary War, to the writing of the Constitution, to the War of 1812, the Abolitionist Movement, through the Civil War celebrated its one-hundred years.

The celebration was summarized by the secretary thusly: “Everyone who had been present felt it had been a goodly gathering, and cherished the conviction that they had been loyal to their ancestry, had done justice to the memories of the founders and fathers of their association, and had launched the Club upon its second century under auspices whose quickening influences would bear it onward to the close of the century, making it in the future, as in the past, an honorable and useful element in the social life of Boston.”

And the odd postscript to this talk tonight is that reasonably diligent research has found no further reference anywhere to the existence of the Club.

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First of all: The terracotta army

Photo by Frank Kehren, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday Evening, May 13, 2013



My topic tonight is one on which I’m certainly not an expert. In fact, some of you may know a good deal to add, so I’m looking forward to our discussion after my talk. But I have been fascinated for several years by the life-size terra cotta warriors that have been unearthed in the last quarter century in China and by the man who ordered them built.



These are four miniatures of them produced by the National Geographical Society that my wife gave me for my last birthday.



Their story and that of the Emperor who ordered their creation – so he could take his army with him for protection after he died – because he clearly believed you could take it with you is one of history’s remarkable tales.



The future First Emperor of China was born in 259 B.C. He was the eldest son and heir of the King of “Chin,” spelled QIN or sometimes Q’in. His mother was a concubine and he was given the name of Zheng which means upright or correct.



His father’s domain was along one of the great rivers in western China, the Wa, spelled Wei, which flows to the east into the Yellow River, which then flows farther east to the Yellow Sea. The kingdom was about 500 miles southwest of today’s Beijing.



The father had expanded the kingdom somewhat, but the principal expansion came in the years after the death of the father when Zheng became king of Qin in 247 B.C. at the age of thirteen.



Over the next two and a half decades, the armies of the young Qin defeated the forces of the neighboring six states so that by 221 B.C. he controlled much of what is today’s China.



Each of the defeated states had a separate history, culture, and beliefs, as well as a king and a ruling class. The land covered was so extensive that there were different climates and agriculture as well – not to mention elephants and tigers in some areas.



When the young Qin completed his military campaign he is reported to have proclaimed – with modesty, of course, Quote, Insignificant as I am, I have raised troops to punish the rebellious princes, and thanks to the sacred power of our ancesters all six kings have been chastised as they deserved. Unquote.



At this point he chose the title of First Emperor to make clear he was far beyond a mere king and was clearly first of all in the realm. Incidentally, that title was retained by Chinese rulers until the 20th century. It certainly had an appeal.



The First Emperor was described by a visitor thusly: "He has a waspish nose, eyes like slits, a chicken breast, and a voice like a jackal. He is merciless, with the heart of a tiger or wolf. When in difficulty he willingly humbles himself, when successful he swallows men up without a scruple. Should he succeed in conquering the world, we shall all become his captives."



This was not an unreasonable judgment. The First Emperor had become known for his ruthless elimination of defeated armies. Even those who had surrendered on a promise of safety were often slaughtered. It was estimated that by the time of unification over a million men had been killed or taken prisoner.



Faced with the challenge of ruling over what was now a vast domain the First Emperor created an innovative plan. The realms that were conquered had each been ruled by an hereditary king who regularly had fought with his neighboring states, leading to years of warfare.



The First Emperor abolished this feudal system and divided the territory into 36 provinces, each with a governor, thus establishing a civil administration system that also lasted until the 20th century.



To prevent further warfare, it was decreed that all weapons were to be brought to the capital where they were melted down. (There clearly was no NRA in the kingdom.) Further, the nobility from each of the subjugated realms was required to move to the capital.



One hundred and twenty thousand wealthy families were brought from all over the empire. They built palaces, gardens and temples so that the capital became a real center of the kingdom.



It might also be mentioned that musical instruments and beautiful women captured during the conquest were also kept in the capital in specially constructed pavilions and courtyards.



Convicts were sent north and south to subdue and colonize border areas. Many free families were sent to colonize and farm underpopulated areas in return for twelve years exemption from forced labor service.



All weights and measures were standardized and all carriages were to have axles of the same size. The script was also standardized as was the coinage.



Massive public works projects were initiated. The Great Wall was expanded into new areas, canals were built to improve irrigation, over 4,000 miles of roads were built with their construction standardized and appropriate for the mandated carriage size.



In the year 213 B.C. the First Emperor decreed that all legal officials who had failed to deliver justice should go north to work on the Great Wall.



And then, in the same year, 213 B.C., the First Emperor held a great banquet attended by 100 scholars. At the banquet, according to legend, one scholar criticized the establishment of a civil administration and also the failure to offer land and territories to the First Emperor’s relatives as had been done in the past. Other changes from past practices were also criticized.



The response to this biting of the hand that was feeding them was a decree to destroy all historical records from throughout the kingdom other than those recording the deeds of the First Emperor. There was to be no keeping of the ancient songs, historical records, or writings. They were to be confiscated and burned.



It was decreed further that, if 30 days after the order was issues, the owners of these books have not had them destroyed; they should have their faces tattooed and be condemned to hard labor at the Great Wall. The only books that could be saved were those dealing with prophesies, medicine, and agriculture.



Thus did the First Emperor try to erase the past and any criticism of him as not meeting past achievements.



But his concerns were not just about the past – or even the present – but of the future.



Our First Emperor tried very hard to avoid dying, and he sampled many different potions created for him by Court alchemists. It is thought these may have included mercury, and that possibly he ultimately died of mercury poisoning. But from the time he became King of the Qin state in 246 B.C., he started the construction of his tomb complex.



When he became Emperor in 221 B.C. the design for his tomb seems to have expanded. Since the military campaigns had ended, large numbers of conscripts were available to work on the project.



And what a project is was!



The tomb site itself had been known for thousands of years both from the Chinese written record and from the tomb mound in the shape of a square that had long been visible aboveground.



But it wasn’t until 1974, about 40 years ago, when a new well was needed in a small rural commune that the villagers digging the well struck something hard and started to unearth the terra cotta soldiers of the Buried Army, part of the First Emperor’s great tomb.



The work of excavation is not completed, and it is estimated it will take decades, as new discoveries are made year by year, and new techniques of conservation and scientific research are introduced and perfected. It is expected it will take longer to excavate the complex than the approximately 36 years it took to build it.



The Buried Army is located about a mile from the tomb mound and the entire complex is now estimated to cover over 19 square miles. One description says the area is about the size of Manhattan.



The terra cotta army is buried in four pits located to the east of the tomb mound and outside the walls of the tomb complex. It is as if it were placed there to guard the tomb from attack from the east, where all the states the First Emperor had conquered were.



The first pit is 252 yards long and contains the main army, estimated at more than 6,000 life-size figures. They were arranged in battle formation in rows of four behind chariots and armed with crossbows, poles, or swords.



Pit number 2 has cavalry and infantry units as well as war chariots, and is thought to represent a military guard. There are figures of both standing and kneeling archers. Again, it is all life-sized.



Pit 3 is the command pit, with high-ranking officers and a war chariot.



Pit 4 was empty, probably unfinished because of the First Emperor’s untimely death.



Together the four pits seem to represent a complete garrison and the total number of warriors and horses is estimated at about 8,000.



The enormous scale of this buried army as well as the quality of the representation and manufacture of its conscripts is astounding. While each figure is unique, the army is a great and early feat of mass production.



A small and quite limited repertoire of body parts was produced using molds. The parts were then joined together in a multitude of combinations, with details worked by hand afterward. Then the whole figure was painted. This made possible the tremendous variety of costumes, hairstyles, hand positions or facial features that can be seen. Warriors were stamped with the name and unit of the foreman in order to ensure quality control.



It certainly should also be noted that the First Emperor could hardly expect to enter the next world without a bureaucracy to run his afterlife empire. There was a group of terra cotta civil officials and scribes found in another nearby pit.



And, finally, there was entertainment provided for the Emperor’s afterlife. Twelve terra cotta acrobats and strongmen (weightlifters) have been found And then in a pit with a diverted underground river there were terra cotta musicians playing music to life-size bronze water birds. The rold of the birds was apparently to dance to the music to entertain the Emperor!



But in the end he died and was buried like all other mortals. No question, though, his story and that of his terra cotta kingdom will have a prominent place in history.

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Food for thought: The Beard-Child-Claiborne-Waters culinary revolution

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 11, 2011



In the last 50 years there has been a revolution in this country. It has been non-violent, but certainly exciting, spirited, and dramatic. It has affected each of us in either major or minor ways, but no one has been immune.

I’m talking about the change in America’s food and eating habits.

Fast food is one branch of this upheaval. But the other direction – and one more interesting to me – has been the enormous increase in the variety of food we now take for granted. An orange in your Christmas stocking (perhaps along with a lump of coal if you had been involved in some misdeeds) was a treat – now we have grapefruit and oranges year round. Salsa and sushi were unknown. Now salsa has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment and sushi is even in Pittsfield, Lenox, and Great Barrington.

Butter used to be, well, just butter. Now it comes in a variety of butterfat contents. And one writer describes being at a salt tasting, of all things. “The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next – one as fine and white as baking powder, another dark and chunkily crystalline.” This is a long way from the all-purpose Morton’s Salt we grew up with.

It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? We often complain that things aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political talk – but food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve.

If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re eating out, we have more options open to us.

How did we get to this point? We learned there is more to the restaurant world than Schrafft’s or Howard Johnson’s and food became part of our popular culture – with even its own TV channel.

The consensus seems to be that it began with James Beard who developed a successful catering company in New York called Hors d’Oeuvres, Inc., starting in 1939. His mother, who ran a boarding house in Portland, Oregon, was a superb cook and he learned from her. He came to New York wanting to be an actor in the theater, but had no success. He did, however, have a highly cultivated palate and was a great charmer of the people he often cooked dinner for and who were able to give him and his catering business significant publicity.

The success of his catering company led to a series of cooking book contracts. Along with the recipes – and probably more important – he defended throughout his books the pleasures of real cooking and fresh ingredients. He wrote a lot about outdoor grilling at home and that men could legitimately be involved in home cooking. His writing was appealing and his considerable girth made him non-threatening to the home-based, non-professional cook. 

To Beard, cooking and eating comprised a fulfilling cultural pastime, to be pursued as ardently as golf, opera, or any other activity that aroused one’s passions. His enthusiasm was contagious and he was read widely.

At the same time in New York the 1939 World’s Fair along with World War Two led to several notable French chefs arriving ultimately to open a remarkable group of top-tier classic French restaurants. Le Pavillion, the Colony, Le Cirque, La Caravelle, to name a few, based on 18^th Century French traditional recipes and techniques to some degree interpreted by Escoffier in Paris and London. Another was the Brussels where some 60 years ago a very indulgent bachelor uncle of mine and his long-legged very glamorous to me lady friend introduced me to smoked eel. To this day I still enjoy it when I can find it. I courted Ann while I was living in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and we frequented a French bistro on Third Avenue in Manhattan where the order of the day was piles of sautéed frog’s legs and match-thin French fries along with a bottle of wine. Each of these restaurants generated others as employees trained at these left to open their own establishments.

Post-war America, partly because of GI’s coming back from Europe, considered classic French cooking to be the highest form of culinary art. Chuck Williams, the founder of the kitchenware store Williams-Sonoma, writes as he completed his Air Force service and built himself a house in the then undiscovered hinterland of Sonoma, California, that "The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us. It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants. It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac. I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop and make it completely French."

Also enthusiastic about all things French was a young, 6-foot, 2-inch, Smith College graduate from Pasadena, California, named Julia McWilliams. She spent the war years working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the CIA) in Washington and then in India on a tea plantation the OSS had commandeered as its base of operations from which to plot attacks on the Japanese. It was there that she met Paul Child a cartographer for the OSS.

Child was a good six inches shorter than she, but he loved to cook and dine out and was very knowledgeable about cooking. Eventually they were assigned to Kunming in China where Julia became interested in food and the various Chinese cuisines.

Back in the United States the couple was married in 1946 and soon left for Paris where Paul Child worked for the State Department implementing the Marshall Plan. During the decade they were in France, Julia set about learning all things French which eventually included enrollment at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. Her teacher had apprenticed under Escoffier himself. At night she often cooked for dinner the dishes the class had made that day.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a young man, and the third member of our founding trio, named Craig Claiborne – also with a mother who ran a boarding house and cooked extraordinarily well – arrived fresh from a stint at a Swiss hotel school. By luck he got himself a short-lived job writing for Gourmet magazine which turned out to be mostly useful for the people he met and the connections he made. One of these led him to an interview at The New York Times which was looking for a food editor but had always had a woman in the position. It had apparently not occurred to the Times that a man could do the job.

He was eventually hired and began a twenty-year association with the paper that was destined to change America’s food culture. He started at a time when post-war Americans were ready to improve their kitchens and cooking. They were ready to go beyond food as “maintenance” and explore new ideas. GI’s brought back familiarity with ethnic cooking as well as French Cuisine. And Claiborne was ready to lead the way by treating food as more than just recipes. It was a journalistic responsibility to discover what was going on in America’s more creative kitchens. He wrote about home cooks as well as professionals. He introduced the idea of restaurant reviews that could make or break a place.

The food world reaction was one of awe. Here was a man writing about food and cooking with the same intellect and rigor that the Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett.

An interesting side note is that in 1961 when Claiborne wanted to do a cookbook using the Times name, the paper thought a cookbook would be so minor that Claiborne was given the rights to use the Times name with no obligation. The New York Times Cookbook became a best seller and sold more than three million copies.

Going back to Julia Child, who we left in Paris at the Cordon Bleu, her next adventure was to open a cooking school in Paris to educate Americans, who were wealthy wives brought abroad by their husbands’ jobs in business or government, about French cooking. Along with running the school with two French collaborators, the idea of a cookbook for Americans emerged.

This became Mastering the Art of French Cooking after a decade of recipe testing and adapting French measurements, methods, and ingredients to the American kitchen. 

The success of the book lies in both its multi-year meticulous preparation and Child’s charismatic publicizing of it. There is probably no other cookbook in American history that better combines breadth, thoroughness of explanation, culinary authenticity, distinctive authoritarian voice, and reliability. Whereas Escoffier’s book assumed the reader knew the fundamentals of French cookery, Julia assumed the cook knew nothing. The recipe for a basic omelet runs seven pages and has six illustrations.

Alfred Knopf published the book in 1961. By this time Julia and her husband had returned to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shortly after the book was published Craig Claiborne gave it a rave review in the Times calling it the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on French cooking and predicting it would endure as the definitive work for non-professionals. James Beard gave the book his blessing and he and Child became great friends. Julia often was a guest instructor at Beard’s school which was at his town house in Manhattan. Beard was often a guest at the Childs’ getaway home in Provence, spending entire days in the kitchen with Julia.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking went through five printings. Its publication coincided with Jacqueline Kennedy’s time in the White House and her hiring of a French chef by the name of Rene Verdon. The Times, now the lifestyle manual of culturally correct postwar upper middlebrows, played Verdon’s hiring on page one with a article by Claiborne that described Verdon’s first official assignment, a luncheon for the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, that included trout cooked in Chablis, fillet of roast beef au jus, and artichoke bottoms Beaucaire – filled with a fondue of tomatoes simmered in butter. French food was now fashionable – and to some extent competitive because now you could really astonish your dinner party guests.

Kitchenware suddenly attained the status of fetish objects in certain American circles. You just had to have a Le Creuset casserole dish and a crepe pan the size of a manhole cover. Williams-Sonoma was now “the source” and was located in the heart of San Francisco.

To add to the excitement, WGBH TV station in Boston started “The French Chef” cooking show starring, who else, Julia Child. For the better part of ten years she was a cooking instructor to America and quickly became the most popular attraction on WGBH. The show was picked up by public television stations throughout the country.

So while Craig Claiborne was dominating the print media with his New York Times columns reviewing restaurants and providing his readers with recipes for such dishes Spanish paella and other ethnic foods, Julia was the television personality keeping America’s cooks (and eaters) focused on whatever was this week’s recipe. She criss-crossed the country for book signings and cooking demonstrations.

But it rapidly became apparent, as attention to food increases, that the quality of American ingredients was sadly deficient.

We had only parsley, no chives, said one French chef. He also pointed out the experience of needing special mushrooms and having them arrive in cans from Germany instead of fresh. It turned out they were grown in Oregon and because there seemed to be no market in the states for them, they were shipped to Germany for canning and then sent back to the U.S. when ordered. By this time they barely resembled the original. So professional chefs were frustrated.

Home cooks were becoming totally dependent on the large supermarket chains that were springing up – particularly in the suburbs, aided by the increase in car ownership, the advances in refrigeration, and even the introduction of the shopping cart. The old butcher, baker, or greengrocer shops were becoming obsolete.

One food columnist wrote that she found her local Grand Union supermarket to be at once disturbingly alien while also marvelously convenient. The pre-butchered chicken parts in cellophane-sheathed white Styrofoam containers, she wrote, arranged in refrigerator cases and illuminated by florescent lights were something out of a science-fiction movie. The chicken pieces lying there were dead in their little coffins. Bread, it was noted, looked and tasted like facial tissue.

By the early seventies out on the West Coast, a group of culinary-minded young radicals had gotten mad as hell about the supermarket state, and they decided they were not going to take it any more.

Many of them had come together on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and had been the prime movers of the radical Free Speech Movement that demonstrated and for a while took over the Berkeley campus in the 1960’s. Gradually their counter-culture philosophy came to include a serious disagreement with the giant agricultural businesses and supermarkets that were determining the American diet. There came to be a feeling that just because you were a revolutionary didn’t mean your idea of a good meal should be Chef Boyardee ravioli reheated in a dog dish – as Alice Waters who went on to fame as the owner of the exemplary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley put it.

She and others encouraged small providers (what we now see as “organic” growers) and co-operative grocery stores throughout the California Bay area. Farmers’ markets, brimming with fresh, local produce became regular fixtures. Interestingly, this winter on Sanibel Island off Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a weekly farmers’ market for the first time. Sanibel has always been deprived of fresh produce, which is silly considering all the agriculture nearby. But it was only this year that the Food Revolution arrived and incidentally included wonderful fresh greens that we don’t get here and marvelous fresh Gulf shrimp that were never frozen. It has been said that the fresh food movement was perhaps the Berkeley counter-cultural movement’s greatest and most lasting triumph. 

The emphasis on high quality ingredients spread rapidly throughout the country.

The Spartan, traditional health foods stores were supplemented by colorful, bountiful markets with organically grown produce and fresh baked goods. Whole Foods market became a national chain. The ranks of specialty coffee companies grew, such as Starbucks, which started in Washington. Coffee and activism were a good fit; most coffee beans came from Third World countries where poverty and human-rights violations were problems, and many specialty coffee drinkers were college students who were eager to be politically engaged. 

But it wasn’t just the politically conscious, back-to-mother earth foodies who discovered the power of upscale, high quality food, it was also the next generation Italian grocers and Jewish delicatessen men who saw a world beyond the small markets of their fathers. Balducci’s, Zabar’s, and DeLuca’s in New York are examples. They set out to re-educate the American palate. The stores became destinations for specialty foods. Guido’s here in the Berkshires is part of the same trend.

The food revolution is here and it is continuing. We can watch Price Chopper supermarket on Route 7 and Guido’s virtually next door expanding to go head to head to capture not only the shopper’s dollar but also his or her participation in this new world of food.

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The Center of the world: Frederic Church’s Olana

View of Olana

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, March 23, 2009



The year was 1859 and the subject of our paper tonight, the artist Frederic Edwin Church, was exhibiting his latest painting, “Heart of the Andes,” in New York City. His exhibition of this very large painting — 5 1/2 by 10 feet in size — was unusual — actually unique.



He charged 25 cents admission (the equivalent of about $5 today) to people who wanted to see it. And people came in droves — about 600 a day came into a strategically darkened room with spotlights on the painting. Opera glasses were provided to examine the painting's details. It was a dramatic experience, very successful and well publicized. Church was 33 years old at the time and considered to be America's most notable painter. He was at the top of the new country's artistic echelon and an interesting man in many respects.



Church was born in 1826 in Hartford, Connecticut. His father, Joseph Church, was a wealthy silversmith and watchmaker who subsequently became an official and director of Aetna Life Insurance Company. Church's grandfather, Samuel Church, incidentally, founded the first paper mill in Lee, Massachusetts.



In 1844 at the age of 18, Church became the only pupil of Thomas Cole, who was a well known landscape artist at the time, and who lived in Catskill, New York. Church and Cole roamed the nearby Catskills and the Hudson River environs making hundreds of sketches of the landscapes of the area. One year later, in 1845, Church had his first painting exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York. His work was widely acclaimed.



During the next 20 years Church traveled the world extensively — from the Arctic to the tropics. His South American travels in the 1850's which eventually resulted in the earlier discussed painting, “Heart of the Andes,” was financed by Cyrus West Field who wanted to use Church's paintings to lure investors to his South American ventures. “Heart of the Andes” was sold shortly after its exhibition in New York for $10,000 — the highest price paid at that time for the work of a living artist. (The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum where he was a trustee for almost 20 years.)



Church's meteoric rise in the 1840's and 1850's, as one critic has said, was fueled by the tumult of the times. His landscapes gave pictorial voice to the political, social, and cultural issues that concerned many who saw his paintings. His construction of ideal American landscapes and dreamy South American acadias spoke of the seemingly infinite riches of New World nature at the same time as they reaffirmed man's right to use and enjoy those bounties. Church combined intricate, precise details with sweeping compositions. His firm faith in the rightness of American national identity and its foundation in Protestantism resonated deeply with the admirers of his paintings. He and his art were perfectly suited to the moment in American history. As was said of Thomas Cole, his teacher, he depicted nature, especially American nature, as the “visible hand of God.” But, aside from the high price that his art commanded, the New York exhibition was notable for another reason, too. One of the visitors was a young lady by the name of Isabel Carnes.



Church told a friend that on seeing her he “glimpsed a ravishing vision, a star illuminated with a light never before seen on land or sea.” He married her the following year.



By this time, in 1860, Church had a studio on 10th Street in New York, but he wanted a place in the country that would be suitable for raising a family, and his thoughts turned to the Hudson River area near Catskill where he had wandered as a pupil with Thomas Cole years before.



And so, shortly before his wedding, Church purchased 126 acres of fields and woods overlooking the Hudson — just south of where the Rip Van Winkle Bridge now crosses the river near the city of Hudson. He built a small house, called Cosy Cottage, and then in 1867 he acquired additional acreage that included the adjacent hilltop with sweeping views for miles around. He engaged the noted architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a French chateau for the summit.



The Churches had had two children — a boy and a girl — who both died of diphtheria when very young. Looking for a change of scene to assuage their grief the couple embarked on a long journey to Europe and the Middle East. The fascinating result of this trip was a complete change of plans for the house. Instead of a French chateau to be built overlooking the Hudson, the Churches changed architects and became determined to build and furnish a Persian feudal castle. And that is what is there today.



Church essentially was his own architect, getting help primarily with structural and mechanical issues. He designed the building and all its ornamentation. His and Isabel's three months in the Middle East led to a plan for a traditional Damascus house with thick fortress-like stone walls and a courtyard with rooms radiating from it. The rooms are stenciled in colors, some metallic and some pastel, with mirrors on walls and ceilings that are highly decorated and placed to reflect light to great advantage.



Church designed and drew stencils on the archways dividing interior spaces of the house debased on Persian patterns and colors that he sketched whileabroad. Completion of the woodwork and painted decoration of the first floor took at least four years. No aspect of the decoration was left to chance. Mixing pigments on his palette, he prepared color swatches for the walls and ceiling of each room. The Arabic calligraphy over the entry door translates as “Welcome.''



In furnishing the house, one of Church's first aims was to create a repository for the objects of civilization. (This man had no small goals.) The house became a museum of fine arts, rich in bronzes, paintings, sculptures, and antique and artistic specimens from all over the world. The rooms are filled with exotic objects: painted tables from Kashmir, rococo revival furniture inherited from his father, and furniture built to Church's own designs are intermingled with Persian and Syrian metalware, Mexican religious statuary, and Turkish rugs.



Church conceived this collection and began to collect it while he was in the Middle East. He sent at least 15 crates of goods home from his trip.



But not only did he build his Persian fortress on the hill 600 feet above the Hudson, h set out to transform the property from an agricultural landscape into an ornamental farm. He developed the landscape as consciously as he created a painting. Over a period of thirty years he transformed his property. It was still to be a working, profitable farm, but a part of its bounty was to be beauty. Orchards and fields of corn, hay and rye joined the flower and vegetable gardens. There were livestock and buildings to house them. He planted thousands of trees set out on the slopes. A swampy stream became a lake with edges carefully sculpted to echo the shape of the Hudson River beyond. He had five and a half miles of carriage roads put in that were strategically placed to show views of open fields, dark hemlock forests, sun-dappled woodlands, and serene bodies of water. (He had, incidentally, sent three white donkeys back from Syria to pull pleasure carts on the paths.)



After the American Civil War and as the 1870s progressed, American taste in art changed dramatically. Fewer and fewer people, including Church himself, looked to the natural world as an affirmation of divine order and wisdom. His large paintings showing the grandeur and perfection of nature declined severely in popularity. Younger painters like Winslow Homer became popular, painting more intimate scenes of American citizens as soldiers, farmers, school teachers, and so on. There was much more interest in all things foreign.



In 1876 Church had his first attack of inflammatory rheumatism which led him to paint with his left hand. By 1880 his painting activity declined markedly. His interest in his estate on the Hudson, however, continued strong. There Church was creating a world — in his Persian fortress — that was a safe and perfect place for himself and Isabel and the four children they now had.



It wasn't until 1880 that the Churches settled on a name for their property. It was, after much discussion, to be called “Olana'' — a variation on the name of a fortress house in ancient Persia. Church called his house and its 250 acres of romantically designed grounds “the Center of the world,” By 1891 one visitor called it “a perfect Eden of picturesque beauty.” By that time Church had spent 30 years creating it. It was truly his “Center of the world.”



Frederic Church died in 1900. His wife had died the year before. The estate was left to their son Louis who had managed it for several years for them. He and his wife Sally lived there, modernizing it a bit, but essentially leaving it and the furnishings unchanged. Louis died in 1943, and Sally lived there until her death in 1964 — again with a keen interest in preserving it intact.



After her death, David Huntinton, an art history professor at Smith College, worked to save the property from being sold and the contents auctioned off. An energetic fund raising campaign ensued. And in 1966, with both private contributions and funds appropriated by the New York State legislature under the leadership of Governor Nelson Rockefeller (who had been enlisted because of his long-time support of the arts), the house and property were purchased and the title was conveyed to the State of New York. It is now a New York State Historic site — and well worth a visit to Church's “Center of the world.”



Photo by Orlando's World of Photos, used under Creative Commons Attribution License.

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