Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Read Free Book Online

throughout Europe, always shopping for products to import. It was a good time to get deals: European manufacturers, their domestic economies destroyed, were willing to front product for the chance to enter a potentially vast American market. Purveyors played the edges. “If it was illegal or not one hundred percent, even the better,” Tim Metzger, Koryn’s nephew, told me. “They loved to press the rules.” Bob Lape, a food journalist who started “The Eyewitness Gourmet” segment on WABC-TV in 1970, met Koryn in the middle of a blizzard, when he persuaded him to come visit his factory. Koryn was one of two men Lape called “the hungry ones.” The other was Murray Klein, the legendary manager and part owner of the New York specialty store Zabar’s, where Koryn sold white truffles and beluga caviar.
    In the 1950s, opening a can of mushroom soup and pouring it over a casserole was a culinary event. “They were putting crap in Jell-O and calling it an aspic,” John Roberts, a veteran of the food business, says. “Change was not valued. Food was not an adventure.” Mario Foah told me, “If you said to the man on the street, ‘I’d like to introduce you to gourmet foods,’ he’d say, ‘Spell it!’” In 1952, Foah, Koryn, and several others decided to form a monthly lunch club that could function as a trade association, lobbying in Washington against tariffs on European products and other issues affecting them. They called themselves the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, or NASFT.
    In 1955, the association put on its first event, the National Fancy Food and Confection Show, at the Sheraton-Astor Hotel in Manhattan. The war had sent a generation of Americans abroad, and the idea was to re-create foreign eating experiences: French mustard, Swiss chocolates, German sausages. The association’s president put a note in the brochure, celebrating the inauguration of a marketplace for novel foodstuffs. “This being our first effort, there may be much to criticize and we beg your indulgence for any shortcomings or omissions,” he wrote.
    One of the omitted would not indulge the oversight. Max Ries, a savvy Chicago-based purveyor, who had been barred from exhibiting—he posed a threat, most likely—ran a limousine from the Sheraton-Astor to another hotel nearby, where he had set up a show of only his products. After a few years, the New Yorkers relented and gave him a booth, which became a major attraction. To his first show, Ries brought an aerosol can filled with liquid cheese spread and a gift basket that cost $300, about $2,500 today. It included a barrel-based table, four chairs, and sixty imported delicacies. Ries came away with sixty-five orders. The next year, he displayed a brightly painted Sicilian cart with an umbrella, loaded with treats. Beautiful models passed out samples. “A lot of people didn’t like him,” Foah told me. “But I admired him. He made people talk about the industry.”
    A few months after Ries’s show debut,
Fortune
named his company the country’s largest importer, estimating its business at $6,500,000 a year, and overall specialty-food sales as high as $200 million, double what they had been in the show’s first year. Commercial jetliners were making international travel, and therefore international eating, increasingly accessible. Suburbanites had money, time, and space to entertain; they needed something provocative and delicious to impress their guests at cocktail parties. Curiosity and snobbism, the piece concluded, were leading the way to “a greater sophistication of American taste.” The
Los Angeles Times
reported on a “gourmet cult which reaches now from lavish Park Avenue apartments to the grass-roots split-level homes of the Middle West.” The country was in the midst of a “great delicacy