The New James Beard was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, and it is Beard’s valedictory — a comprehensive cookbook that represents the accumulated wisdom of sixty years of cooking, eating, teaching, and writing about food. The book was a response to the revolution in American cooking that had occurred since his earlier books: the California cuisine movement, the new emphasis on fresh and local ingredients, the lighter cooking styles influenced by nouvelle cuisine, and the expanded range of ethnic influences available to the American cook.
Beard incorporated these changes while maintaining his essential principles: that cooking should begin with the best ingredients available; that technique serves flavor rather than the other way around; that simplicity is usually superior to complexity; and that the purpose of cooking is pleasure — the cook’s pleasure in the process and the diner’s pleasure in the result.
The book covers the full range of home cooking, from the simplest preparations (roast chicken, green salad) to ambitious dinner-party dishes, with the same combination of authority and accessibility that characterized all Beard’s writing. At seventy-eight, his palate was still sharp, his opinions were still strong, and his enthusiasm for good food was undiminished.
Collecting The New James Beard
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1981): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$12
- Signed copies: $30–$80