System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Pierre Franey, Cook of Record
Pierre Franey was a great chef, an Escoffier's Escoffier, dammit. And yet he was an evangelist who sought to teach America that fine food could be prepared without destroying one’s financial future or evening hours in front of the tube de la boob.
He was best known as the 60 Minute Gourmet of the New York Times, from which post he weekly provided simple, excellent recipes. “There is a notion that all the dishes that go from stove burner to table top are intricately involved, endlessly complicated dishes, any of which requires the better part of a day and night to bring to the proper state of perfection,” he wrote. “It simply isn’t true.”
A generous cook, he fondly quoted a saying of the French King Henry IV: “Je veus qu’il n’y ait si puvre paysan en mon royaume qu’il n’ait tous les dimanches sa poule au pot,” “I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom to be so poor that he cannot have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.” Hey, in America it's two chickens in that damn pot, Frenchie...
Franey grew in the French countryside in Northern Burgundy and by age 6 was known by his family as Pierre le Gourmand. In 1934 he was apprenticed to a restaurant in Paris and soon was working in some of that city’s most famous kitchens. He was lucky to escape France in 1939 by working at the French pavilion at the World's Fair. After refusing an invitation to work as MacArthur's cook, he served as a machine gunner in WWII in the U.S. Army, then returned to become head chef at Le Pavillion, widely considered the finest French restaurant in the United States.
It was while working at Le Pavillion in 1959 that Franey met Craig Claiborne, newly appointed to the post of food editor of the New York Times. Claiborne described himself as “scared to death” at meeting the chef of the only “first rate establishment” in New York. The two struck up a gastronomic partnership which lasted until this October. They collaborated on several cookbooks.
When Claiborne published his Gourmet Diet cookbook in 1980 he reported that Franey was “not in the beginning particularly amused at the thought of cooking without salt.”
When the Times initiated the Living section in the 70s, Claiborne brought Franey along and they initiated the “60 Minute Gourmet” column.
In 1976 the pair caused a minor scandal by cashing in a prize dinner sponsored by American Express at a Parisian restaurant. The dinner included 31 courses featuring all sorts of decadent fare. The tab: $4,000.
The friendship cooled in later years as Franey elected to cook fewer than seven days a week. Pierre Franey died Oct. 15, age 75, shortly after giving a shipboard cooking demonstration aboard the QEII.
