January’s first half commanded two punctuation points in time; the birth centenary of the fabled chef and chronicler of cuisine, Pierre Franey, this Wednesday, and the passing of Brian Urquhart, the titan centenarian of the United Nations on January 2. As Franz Baumann of New York University, and a former senior UN official himself, put it, “it was quite like Sir Brian (at 101) to come into 2021 and take a bite of the new year,” before being gently swept into history’s embrace. It is a year which also, on January 10, marked the 75th anniversary of the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London, at which British Prime Minister Clement Attlee spoke of “the task of creating permanent conditions of peace that commanded the same sense of urgency, the same self-sacrifice and the same willingness to subordinate sectional interests to the common good as brought us through the crisis of war.”
Urgency need not suggest the slovenly or slipshod, as both these lives we celebrate attest (and, indeed, a third, that of Martin Luther King on Monday, 18 January, and his emblematic assertion that the time is always right to do what is right.) Brian Urquhart brought, to the many unexpected and urgent demands on the United Nations, strategies and solutions that drew life from its Charter without being specifically mentioned within it, just as Pierre Franey’s concept, in David DuBuisson’s phrase “was to help you produce a first-class meal in an hour or less, instead of spending all day in the kitchen.” Both men had served in national armies in the Second World War ; its aftermath, as Pierre Franey wrote, made it seem “so hard to get trained dining room personnel that it was necessary to finish every dish on the plate before it was brought to the dining room”, an echo of the “endless robotic kind of dialogue” Brian Urquhart saw in the fledgling years of the United Nations which he “had dreamed of (as) an organization where great decisions, and great visions, and ideas would be put into action.”
What I am less certain about is how far either would have envisioned, in that January of 1946, the many areas of then unexpected terrain upon which the United Nations would venture. Would Brian Urquhart have visualized a world, as he was to write sixty years later, where “the shadow of potential disasters, some global in scope, mostly man-made in origin, hangs heavy over the fifth year of the new millennium, (when) the desire for wholehearted international action that could at least slow down a universal catastrophe like global warming is lacking; nonetheless, it seems still to be widely accepted that the short-term interests of the economy and the industrial sector outweigh the need to avert a global disaster that will, in time, blight the lives of billions of people, and animals as well?"
And to bring, in a sense, the international to the intimate, would Pierre Franey have foreseen that the centenary of his birth would be in a year designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables? He may well have found delicious irony in that, surprise as he did a starched and formal UN dinner with an elegant but richly hearty course of spoonbread, the corn soufflé of the US South, which commanded astonished but articulate acclaim, for here was a man who serendipitously but cerebrally celebrated the fruits and flora that graced the earth (and admittedly the fauna that grazed upon it) and conjured alluring alliterations of taste and technique, whether “strawberry soufflé in a strawberry sauce” or “carrots and cucumbers in cumin”. The last transformed familiar elements of kheera, gaajar, zeera summer salads of my Indian childhood into a warming winter dish, reflecting truths Brian Urquhart was to adapt to the United Nations, that identical ingredients can be adapted to completely different, but equally effective, results and the essentiality of a global organization being present in the field, accepting in the process that the tidiness of phrase and aspiration in adopted resolutions may not always command the same “order and method” when implemented; as Pierre Franey wryly wrote, “there are many ways to skin and remove flesh from a mango. All result in a wet and sloppy mess at the end, so work near the sink.”
Pierre Franey would have been proud that the cost of tickets to a 1997 dinner in his memory at New York’s Tavern on the Green, went to fund scholarships for students at the Culinary Institute of America, a valued member of UNAI, whose annual “Menus of Change” conferences unite producer and consumer in shared joys and responsibilities just as the sustainable development goals, simultaneous with those conferences in their evolution, sought to do. Pierre Franey saw the education offered by institutions of culinary adventure, as much as that he proffered in newspaper column and television show, as central to the fashioning of food he described as “efficient, accessible and refined,” the larders of canned goods that sustained the postwar kitchens of 1945 supplemented by fresh produce and fresh ideas, much as the sturdy tins that protected the principles of the United Nations Charter proved inspiration, and not finality , for international civil servants like Brian Urquhart who seized the lonely impulse of imagination and improvisation to sustain life and the dignity and worth of the human person. A United Nations, to adapt Pierre Franey’s lyrical description of the Loire Valley, which was the garden of the world where all things were and are possible.
History, an ocean and time separate East Hampton in the United States, where Pierre Franey lived, less than a hundred miles from Lake Success, the original home of the United Nations in New York, and Southampton in the United Kingdom, where he died. Common to them is the idea of “hampton” in its original meaning of a farm at the bend of a river, a farm he so tenderly tended from trough to table as the running river by its side gently changed its course as surely as the tastes and expectations of an increasingly adventurous and innovative population. A metaphor true of the United Nations that Brian Urquhart tended, a venture where every bend in the river offered opportunities to harness the innovation and invention without which the story of the past 75 years , dulled by an indifferent relationship with our Charter, would have been little more than Pierre Franey’s description of seemingly “nouvelle” cuisine as a “concoction of garnishes.”
Ramu Damodaran
Chief, United Nations Academic Impact