James Villas, Sharp-Tongued Food Critic, Dies at 80

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/obituaries/james-villas-dead.html

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James Villas, an author of numerous cookbooks and magazine articles who staunchly defended his homegrown Southern cooking and waged an uncivil war against voguish gustatory gimmickry, died on Aug. 17 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 80.

His death was confirmed by Betty Anderson, his niece and closest surviving relative.

After a brief stint as a scholar and professor of French Romanticism, Mr. Villas (pronounced VILL-as) switched careers in his early 30s.

In 1972, with only a few articles in his portfolio, he accepted an offer to become food and wine editor of Town & Country magazine, where he remained until 1999. He also wrote 12 cookbooks, won four James Beard Awards for his prolific and tart commentary in books and magazines and produced three novels.

His midcareer course correction was less incongruous than it might seem. Growing up in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Villas had been steeped in gastronomy — he once recalled that he had been devoted to family, church and food, in that order.

His grandfather ran a Greek diner. He frequently accompanied his parents to fancy restaurants in New York and abroad and dined on luxury ocean liners. And while he never lived in his home state after college, he remained an unabashed champion of Southern food.

“Our style of cooking has served not only as a focus of our lives but as a veritable symbol of survival,” he wrote.

Appearing perhaps a little defensive, he argued that his book “Southern Fried: More Than 150 Recipes for Crab Cakes, Fried Chicken, Hush Puppies, and More” (2013) proved that “Southern cooks approach every aspect of frying very seriously and intelligently, and that we have little patience with those who might blindly condemn a style of cooking that, when handled with a bit of know-how and lots of common sense and respect, is altogether as disciplined, sophisticated, refined and, indeed, healthy as any other.”

His taste was egalitarian. “James was someone who was as interested in the latest three-star restaurant in Paris as he was about how to achieve the proper ratio of sweet and tart in a perfect peach cobbler,” said James Oseland, his former colleague and the editor of World Food, a book series.

“Southern Fried” was one of three cookbooks that emerged from his mother’s battered black loose-leaf recipe binder. (She shared a Beard award nomination with him for one of them.)

Mr. Villas reserved his venom for newfangled gastronomic contrivances. He eschewed “raw fresh tuna, blue potatoes, apricot mustard or Parmesan ice cream.”

At dinner parties, he wrote, “I much prefer the company of an expert pig breeder or hungry whiskey distiller to that of a fatuous foodie waxing ecstatically about Peruvian peppers or some young hot-shot chef’s latest fusion concoctions.”

Mr. Villas was equally uninhibited about how he was perceived by others. In his book “Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist” (2002), he described himself as “a frustrated teacher and scholar, a feisty food journalist and iconoclastic writer, a soi-disant gay blade, and an overall fop.”

He was accustomed, he wrote, to being called a “snob, arrogant dilettante and cad,” characterizations he was inclined to dismiss as “so much hogwash.”

He added: “Of course, some labels I gladly take on. Elitist, proudly. Hedonist, assuredly. Both describe not only my wanton, unbridled approach to gastronomy in general but the way I’ve cultivated lasting relationships only with those whom I consider to be extraordinary people.”

James Milton Villas was born on Feb. 10, 1938, in Charlotte. His father, Harold, ran a printing company and was the son of a Swedish mother and a Greek father who owned a diner. His mother, Martha (Pierson) Villas, came from Georgia and was an exacting cook who methodically devised her own recipes and faithfully mingled local ingredients exclusively.

His younger sister, Patricia Villas Royal, died in 2016.

When Mr. Villas’s mother spent summers with him in East Hampton, she would drive there so she could bring a full season’s supply of White Lily or Red Band flour, made with Southern wheat, which she said made for more tender biscuits in her son’s modest kitchen. (“For him to have a professional kitchen would be rather tacky,” the celebrated chef Jeremiah Tower, a friend of Mr. Villas’s, said in a telephone interview.)

Mr. Villas graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages and comparative literature. He went on to earn a master’s and a doctorate, and won a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Grenoble in France.

While in France, he later admitted, “I spent many more hours in bistros and brasseries than in libraries.”

When he returned, he taught at the University of Missouri and Rutgers University. But, he said, at that stage he was “unwilling to make the enormous sacrifices necessary to test my worth as a novelist.”

“When a certain moment arrived in life that demanded making a career choice,” he wrote, “I opted for Lucullus” — the Roman consul famous for his banqueting — “over Flaubert.”

After several of his freelance articles were accepted by food and travel magazines, he was hired as an assistant editor at Esquire on the basis of a critique of the magazine that the editor, Harold Hayes, had solicited from readers.

After he persuaded the three-star Michelin chef Paul Bocuse to prepare a private lunch for a dozen guests while Mr. Villas played fly on the wall in the kitchen for an article in Town & Country, he was, as he characteristically put it, offered the dream job as an editor at the magazine “on a silver platter.”

Among his other books were “My Mother’s Southern Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences” (1994), “Pig: King of the Southern Table” (2010) and the novels “Dancing in the Lowcountry” (2008), “Hungry for Happiness” (2010) and “Love Dog” (2015). Despite his prolific oeuvre, he said he was not endowed with a special calling.

“I’ve never believed that food writing is any more of an art than eating and cooking,” he wrote.

Mr. Villas’s culinary heroes were James Beard, Julia Child and Craig Claiborne. Except for Mr. Tower’s recipes, he derided the saucy cuisine that California chefs and restaurateurs began exporting in the mid-1970s. He said he was repelled by Alice Waters’s “fatuous hype about organic foods” and considered Wolfgang Puck’s “contrived creations” to be “a national disaster.”

He was not against improvisation, he wrote. But, he explained: “Like my mother, I still knead bread properly with my hands, dice onions to the exact size with a heavy knife and produce a satiny smooth purée with a food mill. Like my father, I would never corrupt a Greek salad by including sun-dried tomatoes, cilantro and any goat cheese other than feta.”

Nor, he explained, was he against natural ingredients. But he explained: “Just the thought of going more than a few months without nourishing my belly and soul with genuine pork barbecue, bowls of she-crab soup and gumbo, fried okra and catfish, and baskets of hush puppies is still enough to provoke panic.”

The family’s diet and its credo — “believing firmly in the hedonistic philosophy of living half as long and seeing twice as much,” Mr. Villas said — seems to have been belied by their longevity. He died at 80. His mother lived to be 93.