Summer Weekends
Julia Reed July 22nd, 2010One of my very favorite cookbook authors is the much-loved Lee Bailey, who died in 2003 at 76. Bailey wrote 18 books on food and entertaining, had an extraordinarily chic tabletop boutique in Manhattan’s Henri Bendel (when it was still on 57th Street and very, very cool), and was a sort of lifestyle guru before there was such a thing. He was also the utter antithesis of Martha Stewart. “I really am too lazy to make radish roses, even if I liked them,” he wrote in the introduction to “City Food,” where he also explained why the coconut flan was photographed showing the crack where it had been put back together. “I wanted you to see that it is the overall presentation that is important and that a few imperfections are perfectly acceptable.” I read that those lines in my early 20s, when I first began entertaining in earnest—mostly for Newsweek colleagues, who were much older and far more accomplished than I —and I cannot tell you what a great relief they were.
I loved all Bailey’s books, but “Country Weekends,” his first, became my bible, even though there was very little “country” in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. where I lived. I think I was drawn to his undeniably Southern approach to things, even though his own country weekends were spent on Long Island. Bailey had grown up in rural Louisiana; he wrote that, like Colette, he realized he’d spent most of his life unconsciously trying to recreate the country atmosphere of his childhood. So it was that while most of the world was in the throes of “Nouvelle Cuisine,” Bailey offered up fresh ham with pan gravy and peach cobbler with whipped cream for supper, toted sour cream corn bread to a picnic at the beach, and served drop biscuits with homemade jam for Sunday breakfast. If he could do it, I figured I could too—I fed a famous columnist his steamed okra in tomato vinaigrette at a dinner party in his honor, and it was met with such success it became a staple.
Something of a revolutionary in an era when the overwrought studio photographs of Gourmet were the benchmark, Bailey advocated cut garden flowers loosely arranged in pitchers or simple glass cylinders, and long cocktail hours while he puttered in the kitchen and guests wandered in and out. Long before the nation became obsessed with all things regional and seasonal, he recommended simple dishes like fresh ripe figs for dessert and peaches dressed with lemon juice and cayenne pepper as a main-course accompaniment.
But the stellar recipes and totally relaxed approach to entertaining are not the only things that keep me coming back to the book. In these increasingly fraught times, “Country Weekends” provides a window into an entirely civilized world, one before email, Blackberries, or even cell phones. A world in which a shortened summer week in the city gave way gave way to undisturbed leisure in the country, where you supped on boat docks or set the table for languid lunches beneath backyard trees—two of the many scenes lovingly documented in the book.
These days Bailey’s weekend world seems remote and idyllic, and I have to admit I pride myself in providing my own houseguests with wireless internet and bedroom flatscreens. But I think it’s more important than ever to at least try to make like Bailey and supply a seemingly effortless stream of lovely meals and lively conversation. In the next several weeks on Fetch, we’ll be focusing houseguests, house gifts, and long summer weekends. We’ll also be creating some our own Bailey-like entertaining vignettes, and we hope they’ll inspire you to embrace some of the lost joys of summer before it’s too late.
Elusive Find: Oysterman
