Honoring a Legend

The late James Beard was honored last week at the official opening of what is being called the nation’s first culinary center at the cooking legend’s former New York City residence.

The event also launched a fund-raising campaign to finance the operations of this aspiring headquarters for American cuisine.

Cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child is leading the effort to transform the four-story Greenwich Village brownstone into a showcase that eventually will include a research center, library and meeting facilities. The restoration will also maintain Beard’s specially designed kitchen and the distinctive, glass-enclosed greenhouse dining room.

The project is being undertaken by the newly formed James Beard Foundation, which has appealed to both the food industry and the public for donations. In return for contributions, the group offers selective access to cooking classes, media functions and special dinners.

Beard authored more than 20 highly regarded cookbooks prior to his death in January, 1985. He also appeared frequently on television as a food expert and wrote a syndicated newspaper cooking column for 14 years.

The nonprofit foundation seeks to restore and maintain the Beard home, which, as part of his estate, was willed to Reed College in Portland, Ore. Earlier this year, the group purchased the residence from the school.

The foundation’s plans call for the town house, originally valued at $1.4 million, to serve as a gathering place for the nation’s food professionals, according to Julia Child.

“We are trying to establish gastronomy as a profession such as architecture, law and other disciplines. Now we’ll have a center for people in the wine and food business to meet and exchange ideas,” she said, in a telephone interview with The Times.

“(The Beard home) will be like having Beethoven’s house as a center for musicians because Beard is as important to food people as Beethoven is to the music world,” Child said. “He was somebody unique in this field and I don’t think that anyone could take his place at all. Beard is the great father figure (for American cuisine).”

Among other things, the foundation plans to offer a series of dinners, prepared by some of the nation’s premiere chefs, that will be served in what is now the 66-seat, second-story dining room. The group also intends to reacquire the extensive book collection compiled by Beard, which was auctioned after his death.

“The ultimate thing is to preserve the building because it was his house and Beard was the first truly important man in American gastronomy,” said Peter Kump, the foundation’s president and owner of a Manhattan cooking school. “While Beard was alive his home was like an 18th-Century salon where people were always visiting. And he was very generous with his house. For instance, he would frequently host press parties for unknown cookbook authors so that these new people could meet the food establishment. We’re trying to keep that going.”

Contributions to the James Beard Foundation are processed as annual memberships starting at $50. For more information call (212) 675-4984.

Trouble With Recipes--A Los Angeles-based publishing company that distributes recipes in subscription form recently ran afoul of the Federal Trade Commission. The firm, International Master Publishers, Inc., was accused by the agency of failing to honor subscription cancellations and misrepresenting its return policy.

The company offers a mail-order program entitled “My Great Recipes,” under which consumers receive a selection of 72 different cooking formulas every three weeks.

Problems arose over complaints that the publisher continued to bill consumers who had attempted to cancel their subscriptions. Billings were also sent to individuals who returned the recipe cards under a “no obligation” option.

Additionally, the FTC claimed that International Master inaccurately claimed that failure to pay disputed billings would hurt subscribers’ credit records when such was not the case. The agency also stated that the firm “dunned” consumers, or insistently asked for payment and sent disputed billings to collection agencies.

Last week, the FTC announced that it had reached a consent agreement with the company aimed at precluding any recurrences. However, future violations may result in fines of up to $10,000. In signing the agreement, the company did not admit any wrongdoing nor violations.

Relief From the Deep--A UC Davis study could precipitate a sales boost for less-than-popular cod-liver oil. Researchers have found that a diet high in such fish oils helped individuals suffering from psoriasis, a recurring skin disease.

Patients with the condition reported a mild to moderate improvement after undergoing an eight-week eating plan that included high concentrations of the fish-based oil, the current Archives of Dermatology reported.

The UC Davis School of Medicine researchers attributed the results to two fatty acids found in the fish extract. However, the project was not conclusive because of the small number of people studied--13--and the absence of a control group (a corresponding number of patients who were not fed the concentrate).

Even so, the report stated that the results were encouraging enough to warrant further research on the relationship between fish oil and skin problems.

Shellfish Gets the Blues--In what appears as both a stylistic and scientific breakthrough, a Long Island marine biologist has reported achieving impressive results with experimentally farming lobsters.

Certainly one of the more commercially significant developments achieved by Anthony D’Agostino is that he has reduced the time required to grow the high-price shellfish to market size. But even more interesting is that the Montauk, N.Y., scientist is getting these surprising results with hybird lobsters whose shells sport one of a variety of pastel colors.

The experimental crustaceans are raised in a several designer hues, including tangerine orange, golden yellow, white and blue, according to National Wildlife magazine. The unusual coloration is actually the result of mutations found in the brown lobsters which inhabit the North Atlantic coast.

D’Agostino, while researching lobster migratory patterns, began noticing that offspring of the rare blue shellfish grew much more rapidly than did the traditionally colored variety. Further laboratory study found that a blue lobster could reach one-pound market size in about 20 months as opposed to the five to eight years required for the crustacean to reach a similar size in the wild. Other aquaculture ventures have reduced growing time, but none have come close to duplicating D’Agostino’s results.

Despite his progress, it will be some time before the researcher will be able to commercially produce blue lobsters. He is still determining whether subsequent generations exhibit the fast growing trait. And there is also a shortage of breeding stock because the mutant lobsters are indeed rare in the wild and occur in the species only once out of every 30 million shellfish.

Even so, the enjoyment of having a blue lobster is short-lived: Their shells turn bright red during cooking just like the regular brown variety.