Food
Bee Wilson appreciates Danny Kaye as a chef
Published 03 June 2002
"Did you come here to eat or to talk?" Danny Kaye would snap at his guests reports Bee Wilson
Looking back at his films, Danny Kaye does not seem like much of an actor, 50 years on. Bank holiday reruns of Hans Christian Andersen are enough to tip sane people into a suicidal funk. As David Thomson writes, Kaye was "a wonder once but looks frantic and alien now". But it turns out that, after his career fizzled out, he put those manic qualities to better use than acting. Danny Kaye may just have been the greatest American chef of the 20th century.
A new food memoir by the restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, Comfort Me With Apples (Century £12.99), describes the experience of eating at Kaye's house in Beverley Hills sometime in the early eighties. Kaye has already boasted to her that Paul Bocuse and Roger Verger (the two great French chefs) claimed that the best restaurant in California was Danny Kaye's house. When she arrives, Kaye warns Reichl not to "get comfortable" because he wants to show her the theatre that is his kitchen. The entire space is designed so that people sitting at table will be facing the stove, watching the maestro at work, with his expensive hand-made cleavers and hand-picked carrots.
The meal that follows, as Reichl remembers it, is extraordinary. First, bowls of "clear, golden broth that sat steaming at each place" perfumed "intoxicatingly" with lemon-grass. Then, liver. " 'You have not eaten liver like my liver,' he said confidently. 'Just wait. There's only one butcher in the entire city worth buying it from. And then you have to slice it just so, on the diagonal.' " Sure enough, the liver was "like little pillows of velvet between satin slivers of onion, and so sweet it was as if it had been dusted with sugar." Finally, a "high, light, rich and eggy" lemon souffle, served with dark, bitter espresso. Kaye also serves a special dish of home-made noodles, sauced with lemon and cream, just for Reichl - pasta "so thin that it seemed to have vanished, leaving only a memory behind". She loses herself in eating it, only to find Kaye staring intently at her "with such pleasure I knew I didn't have to say a single word". Throughout the meal, Kaye himself does not sit down or eat a bite. "He was a creator, not a consumer, and the only thing he required was appreciation."
Some saw Kaye's obsessive attitude to cooking in a less complimentary light. Apparently, if guests (who once included Prince Philip, Cary Grant and Shirley Maclaine) tried to make conversation during one of his dinners, he would snap: "Did you come here to eat or to talk?" Kaye didn't tolerate any behaviour that interfered with his performance."It was not a social occasion," remembers one guest, who once arrived late to find a locked door and "a note that read: 'You're late. Fuck you.' " Another weird thing was that Kaye's wife, Sylvia, never showed up at the dinners.
What no one seems to have disputed, however, was Kaye's astonishing mastery of the culinary arts, especially Chinese banquets, for which he would make, for example, batter-fried scallops, stir-fried oysters and "lion's head" pork, sometimes affecting a droll Chinese accent as he did so. Those who knew about such things deemed his Chinese food better than at any restaurant in the land, because his talent matched that of the finest chefs and his ingredients were more expensive than any restaurant could afford. Yet Kaye was also said to be America's finest patisseur, a skill quite distinct from mastery of the wok. The Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos once offered Kaye a job as his personal chef. Kaye turned down the offer, alas, on the grounds that he was soon to star in a new Broadway musical, Two by Two. Danny Kaye was that sad thing - a man who missed his vocation.
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