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taken a role as a junior partner in a new Manhattan catering company called Horsd’Oeuvre, Inc. This was something of a comedown for the thirty-six-year-old Beard, “Jim” to all his friends, who’d moved to New York City a year and a half earlier (having already lived briefly in the city in 1924–25) with dreams of making it in the theater, either as an actor, set designer, or costumer. Talk about a queer fish: the hulking, gay, six-foot-four Oregonian had a head the shape of an upended potato and huge ears that jutted out like pull tabs. He’d grown up as the spoiled, overfed only child of a sexually ambiguous Englishwoman named Mary Jones, who, prior to her marriage of convenience to a man named John Beard, had run a boardinghouse in Portland. Devoted to this mother—a stout, forceful hospitality-aholic who laid out stunning buffets of home-prepared breads, salads, cold dishes, roasts, soups, cakes, and sweets for her friends and neighbors—Beard had become a dab hand in the kitchen at a young age; by the time he was eight, he was baking his own bread. This kitchen precocity kept Beard afloat in New York when that big theater break proved not to be forthcoming. A born charmer with an affinity for bohemian types—two more traits inherited from his mother—Jim Beard made friends easily, and when money was tight, he could always cook for these friends in exchange for a seat at the table with someone else footing the grocery bill.
    The prime mover at Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. was the well-connected man-about-town William Rhode. Beard had met Rhode at a party, and the two men developed an instant rapport over their mutual love of food. The catering company they dreamed up together, with assistance from Rhode’s sister, Irma, and Beard’s friend Mack Shinn, was a success from the outset. Rhode was well acquainted with the sorts of Upper East Side ladies who needed canapés for their cocktail parties, and he was a gifted self-promoter, adept at planting items about himself in the papers; among the first to tout Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. publicly was Rhode’s friend Lucius Beebe, the
Herald Tribune
society writer, who, in his “This New York” column, described the company as “a brand new sort of gastronomic agency [that] already shows signs of being a minor Klondike.” While Rhode’s tastes in edibles skewed fancier, more in the caviar-and-foie-gras direction, Beard’s kitchen creations drewupon his mother’s straightforward American repertoire. Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.’s most popular item was a miniature sandwich of sliced Bermuda onion served between little rounds of fresh brioche that were spread with homemade mayonnaise and then rolled along the edges in minced parsley—essentially, a gussied-up version of a Mary Beard snack.
    Beard didn’t know in 1939 that he’d found his calling, nor was he yet aware that he was in possession of a preternatural gift, a highly cultivated palate that was every bit as special, in its way, as the extraordinary eyesight of Ted Williams, the rookie Red Sox left fielder who claimed he was able to see the stitches of a speeding baseball as it spun toward home plate. On the precipice of middle age and bereft of any theater prospects, Beard was just happy to have a steady job. No one thought of a food career as prestigious, and few even entertained the concept.
    Julia McWilliams certainly didn’t; by 1939, her experiment in New York City life was already well behind her, and food hadn’t even factored into it, apart from the occasional trip to the lunch counter at Schrafft’s. After graduating from Smith College in 1934, she found a job as an advertising copywriter for a Manhattan furniture company, W. & J. Sloane. Though she flourished as a career gal, by 1937 she had quit Sloane’s and returned to her hometown of Pasadena, California, because she was approaching age twenty-five, and, unlike most of her Smith friends, had failed to hook a man. And so, while Beard was rolling his