James Beard learned to cook in Gearhart’s summer kitchens
Photo: Charles Rear, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
James Beard was born in Portland in 1903, the son of Elizabeth Beard, who ran a boarding house and had firm views on food. Each summer the family went to Gearhart, the beach town just north of Seaside, where they had a cottage.
Beard later described those summers as central to his food education. He wrote about digging razor clams, catching and cooking Dungeness crab, gathering wild berries and eating salmon from the Columbia. His mother and the family’s Chinese cook, Jue-Let, were early influences.
The career
Beard studied briefly at Reed College, tried a career in theater and opera, and eventually settled in New York, where he started a catering business in the late 1930s. He wrote more than 20 cookbooks, including James Beard’s American Cookery, and was one of the first chefs to host a cooking show on television in 1946.
He championed American regional cooking at a time when French cuisine dominated fine dining, and the Northwest ingredients he grew up with were a consistent theme.
Gearhart’s role
Beard returned to the coast in later life and taught cooking classes in Seaside in the 1970s. After his death in 1985, his New York home became the headquarters of the James Beard Foundation, whose awards are among the most important honors in the restaurant world.
Gearhart remains a quiet, residential beach town, and the clamming beds where Beard learned remain popular when the state opens the season. The town and nearby Seaside often note his connection.
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