Frugal Gourmet's Apprentice Revives Tribute To Old-Time Gluttony

The Mount Everest pinnacle of eating in this country, as opposed to dibbling, dabbling, nibbling and snacking, probably occurred in the America of the late 19th century, through and beyond the year of 1905.

Or as the famed Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, says it: "The menus that were offered in such places as Delmonico's make a first-class restaurant in our time look like a snack bar."

And the Frug, bless his chitlins, wonders aloud in print "how we could have gotten ourselves into this nouvelle, healthy and sprout-covered boring current cuisine."

That's enough to tell you, I hope, that the Frug, whose cooking shows on public TV battle on even terms with the nitwit network fare, is out with a new book.

Well, not so new, either. The Frug's sixth book, with an initial run of 100,000 copies, now is in its third printing. It is based on a classic old cookbook, circa 1904, by a famed chef of that time, Charles Fellows, out of Chicago.

The book's original title is "The Culinary Handbook," a compendium of some 4,000 recipes and definitions, a lexicon of cooking terms as they applied in 1904.

Most of the editing, writing and recipe work was done by Jeff Smith's young assistant, Craig Wollam.

"I actually found the book about 10 years ago in a used bookstore in Spokane," Smith said. "I paid $25 for it. It sat around for all that time until I gave it to Craig one day and told him, `Take this book home and read it.' "

As Jeff tells it, Craig came to work the next morning saying "Wow, this is something else.

"Fine," Jeff said, "you take it over and make a book out of it for us."

Thus it is that Jeff Smith, the most generous of TV stars, gives his young assistant almost complete credit for the adaptation of Fellows' classic.

A word should be inserted here about the eating habits of the 19th and early 20th centuries These were the days when big stomachs on men were a sign of prosperity, of respectability.

As for women, well, those with stout hips and ample bosoms were in fashion. "They looked well-cared for," as Jeff puts it.

It was only later, in the flapperish 1920s, that women were seen as desirable if they starved themselves to the point of emaciation.

One further sidelight: the celebrated food writer, A.J. Liebling, contended that the decline of great - truly great - French restaurants began when slimness came into vogue.

These people, of that long ago period, did not come to snack and run. Dinner was an event, sufficient unto itself. Dining with friends, dinners lasting three and four hours, was entertainment enough.

The role model for men in those days was James Buchanan Brady, a peddler of railroad equipment, who had an enormous belly and awesome staying power.

Wrote a biographer: "Jim started things off in the morning with a light breakfast of beef steak, a few chops, eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, hominy, corn bread, a few muffins and a huge beaker of milk."

A trencherman of this caliber would warm up for lunch or dinner with a few dozen oysters. Then it was Katie bar the door.

As for the famed actress and singer, Lillian Russell, who frequented many restaurants with Brady, she was a beauty of . . . well, of alarming dimensions.

Says the Frug: "As Craig discovered that first night he read it, this was a serious book." It was not meant for amateur cooks; Mr. Fellows assumed that his readers knew how to cook.

Most of Fellows' recipes were done in short, one-paragraph style.

So Craig Wollam worked through this early classic, creating and adapting (indeed, improvising) from this early-day classic. Out of this comes recipes of solid, rib-sticking substance.

Now, you don't have to be a Puget Sound Escoffier to use the "Culinary Handbook." But neither should any young couple, just married, with no cooking background whatever, expect to become proficient with it.

But once you are past the primary stage of learning to cook, this can be a valuable addition to whatever else you have - books by Julia Child, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Women's Day, ad infinitum.

The Frug, by the the way, has always been a solid, down-to-earth teacher. That is why his TV shows are so wildly successful, why his books sell in the hundreds of thousands. And Craig Wollam, because the Frug doesn`t hog the stage, is becoming well-known in his own right.

Says Jeff Smith: "People keep telling me, 'You've got to give that young man more time on the air.' Well, I'm doing it.

"At one of our signings in Cambridge, I introduced Craig. Now, this was at Harvard, the bookstore they call "the coop." I tell you, they shook the window panes, they cheered him until the paint came off the wall.

"My buddy Craig may be the next superstar of cooking."

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.