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active party to the feuds. The feud currently absorbing the Food Establishment is between Claiborne and Michael Field. Field, who burst into stardom in the Food Establishment after a career as half of the piano team of Appleton & Field, is an energetic, amusing, frenetic man whose recent rise and subsequent candor have won him few friends in the food world. Those who are not his admirers have taken to passing around the shocking tidbit—untrue—that Field had not been to Europe until 1967, when he visited Julia Child in Provence.
    “Essentially,” says Field, “the whole Food Establishment is a mindless one, inarticulate and not very cultivated. These idiots who attack me are furious because they think I just fell into it. Well, let me tell you, I used to make forty soufflés in one day and throw them out, just to find the right recipe.”
    Shortly after his first cookbook was published, Field began reviewing cookbooks for the
New York Review of Books
, a plum assignment. One of his first articles, an attack on
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
which centered on its fondue recipe, set off a fracas that produced a furious series of argumentative letters, in themselves a hilarious inadvertent parody of letters to highbrow magazines. Recently, he reviewed
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook
—a volume that was voted winner of the R. T. French (mustard) Tastemaker Award (chosen by one hundred newspaper food editors and roughly analogous in meaning to landing on the Best Dressed List). In his attack on Gloria Bley Miller’s book, he wrote: “It would be interesting to know why, for example, Mrs. Miller’s recipe for hot mustard requires the cook tobring one cup of water to a boil and then allow it to cool before adding one half cup of dry mustard? Surely Mrs. Miller must be aware that drinking and cooking water in China was boiled because it was often contaminated.…”
    Mrs. Miller wrote in reply: “I can only suggest to Mr. Field … that he immerse his typewriter immediately in boiling water. There are many types of virulence in the world, and ‘boiling the water first’ is one of the best ways to disinfect anything.”
    The feud between Field and Claiborne had been simmering for several years, but Claiborne’s review of the Time-Life cookbook turned it up to full boil. “He has a perfect right to dislike the book,” said Field. “But his attack went far beyond that, into personalities.” A few months after the review was published, Field counterpunched, with an article in
McCall’s
entitled “New York’s Ten Most Overrated Restaurants.” It is in almost total opposition to Claiborne’s
Guide to New York Restaurants;
in fact, reading Field’s piece without having Claiborne’s book alongside is a little like reading
Finnegans Wake
without the key.
    For his part, Claiborne would just as soon not discuss Field—“Don’t get me started,” he said. And his attitude toward the Time-Life series has mellowed somewhat: he has finally consented to write the text of the
Time-Life Cookbook of Haute Cuisine
along with Franey. But some time ago, when asked, he was only too glad to defend his review. “Helen McCully (food editor of
House Beautiful
) said to me, ‘How could you be so mean to Michael?’ ” he recalled. “I don’t give a good God damn about Michael.” His face turned deep red, his fists clenched, he stood to pace the room. “The misinformation! The inaccuracies in that book! Imade a stack of notes thicker than the book itself on the errors in it. It’s shameful.”
    Claiborne was so furious about the book, in fact, that he managed to intensify what was, until then, a one-sided feud between James Beard and himself. Beard, a genial, large, round man who receives guests in his Tenth Street house while seated, Buddha-like, on a large pouf, had been carrying on a mild tiff with Claiborne for some time. Just before the first Time-Life cookbook was published, the two men appeared together on the David