The Man Who Hated Eating Alone

Table for One is a column by Senior Editor Eric Kim, who loves cooking for himself—and only himself—and seeks to celebrate the beauty of solitude in its many forms.

“As a boy in Portland, James almost always ate by himself,” says John Birdsall, author of the forthcoming The Man Who Ate Too Much, on American cook and food writer James Beard. Birdsall and I are both self-quarantined, in San Francisco and New York City respectively. I’ve just reached out to him because I’m writing about Beard’s asparagus, and I figured, as someone who’s just written the man’s biography, Birdsall might have something to say about it.

The recipe—though hardly a recipe—is nested within a clause at the end of Beard’s 1964 memoir, Delights and Prejudices, on the foods he likes to eat when he’s alone:

… if it is in season, I will have asparagus, either boiled quickly till tender but still crisp—and this with no embellishment save salt and freshly ground black pepper—or cut in paper-thin diagonal slices and tossed with butter and soy for two or three minutes in a hot skillet, which gives it a delightful texture.

The second preparation (“cut in paper-thin diagonal slices and tossed with butter and soy”) piques my interest most—especially these days, as I’m cooking for myself more than ever and looking for inspiration anywhere I can. Tonight, this asparagus feels not only doable, but stupidly simple. Surely just butter and soy sauce couldn’t possibly make anything taste that good ... right?

But of course it does.

First, I slice up my bundle of asparagus as thinly as I can, all on the bias—but three ways, because “diagonal slices” could mean anything: 1) short little oval coins, 2) oblique, one- to two-inch slivers, and 3) long, dramatic stem-to-tip shavings along the vegetable’s entire length. Next, I heat up a skillet, melt a pat of butter, and sauté the asparagi for barely a minute, then splash in some soy sauce and watch as it bubbles up and creates a sticky glaze around the vegetables.

“The soy sauce must come from Jue-Let’s influence,” I write to Birdsall, referring to the Canton-born chef who worked alongside Beard’s mother and served as a surrogate father figure for the lonely boy.

“James grew up in emotionally difficult circumstances,” Birdsall tells me, “the only child of parents who despised each other and so cultivated separate lives. But that recipe isn't from Jue-Let.”

Apparently, Birdsall says, this paper-thin asparagus is a variation of a dish that Helen Evans Brown—author of Helen Brown’s West Coast Cook Book, not to mention Beard’s friend and collaborator—made often, called Tin How Asparagus. “Helen's version is more elaborate,” Birdsall tells me. “It calls for chicken stock, garlic, and a cornstarch thickening—and very thin asparagus cut either across the stalks into pea-sized pieces, or on the oblique in the Chinese manner.”

As I eat my buttery, soy sauce–slicked asparagus with a side of leftover white rice, I’m surprised at how something so simple could taste so complete, so nourishing. Though Birdsall is able to confirm that Beard’s wording (“paper-thin diagonal slices”) does indeed most likely mean cut No. 2, there’s something pleasurable about eating various shapes of the same vegetable, all with slightly different textures. As for the sauce, I feel silly for not having come up with the combination myself: butter and soy sauce. That’s it.

“James's use of soy sauce would, in his mind, identify him as a West Coast cook (he'd grown up in Portland and coastal Oregon), and he wore his western identity proudly,” Birdsall says. “He and Helen were constantly battling what they saw as a snobbish and inflexible elite of New York food editors, who insisted their writers address a Northeastern U.S. audience—cooks presumably unfamiliar with West Coast ingredients like avocados, abalone, tortillas, and soy sauce, though of course the latter was available on the East Coast in many markets. (James even became a pitchman in magazine ads for Kikkoman soy sauce.)”

The main thing I learn in my conversation with Birdsall is that “the bow-tied bachelor gourmand” I had fallen in love with while reading Delights and Prejudices may not have been the actual man. A quote I’ve referred back to often in this column is: “Somehow I have never minded dining alone. Instead, I find it is a rare opportunity for relaxing and collecting my senses, and I have always made each occasion something of a ceremony.”

But Birdsall tells me otherwise: “By the time James wrote Delights and Prejudices, when he was 60, he'd altered the narrative of his childhood to make it sound rosier, more idyllic. As an adult, he hated to eat by himself, hated being lonely, even as he waged a lifelong battle with depression.”

As I’m in my apartment, alone for another day, I actually find comfort in this new portrait of Beard. Neither rosy nor idyllic, this version of the Man Who Ate Too Much shows all sides of what it’s really like to dine alone—not just when you want to, but when you have to.

At the end of our correspondence, Birdsall adds an important note of hope: “The periods in James' life when he shopped, foraged, and ate by himself were also some of his most creative, including when he was finishing the writing of Delights and Prejudices.” I love hearing Birdsall talk about his subject like this, filling out those empty spaces—in and out of the kitchen, but also on the page—proving yet again that history is nothing without context, and the giants whose shoulders we stand on were once alone, too, and survived it just fine.

The other day, our Genius Recipes columnist, Kristen Miglore, took this little sliver of Beardian advice I shared with her during one of our water-cooler talks before the office shut down—and ran with it. Alone with her family and just a few pantry staples, her work-from-home lunch included a side of “green things very quickly cooked in butter and soy sauce.” In her case, not asparagus, but close: snow peas.

And the texture, she confirmed, was delightful.

To read more, you can preorder John's book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard (W. W. Norton, 2020). Please take care of yourselves, and let us know if you need anything at all.