Elegy for James Barber, Rebel Celebrity Chef

When James Barber died at 84 at the end of November, while reading a cookbook at his Cowichan Valley kitchen table, most people lost a celebrity chef. I lost a trenchant, reckless, stubborn, impish, insightful, profane, and deeply curious friend who knew how to live. His signature TV program, The Urban Peasant, only hinted at all that. In fact, I was never a huge fan of the dressed-up and watered-down cooking-show James Barber.

I preferred the fellow who came to British Columbia from England in 1952 because of a story he read about a man visiting his friends as he rowed down Shawnigan Lake. I liked the guy who once persuaded an annoyingly persistent Jaguar salesman to give him a car for a long weekend and then drove it to San Francisco and back. I remember the man who described nouvelle cuisine as "children's portions by an interior decorator," who refused to cash his government pension cheques, who kept cooking at a Maillardville public appearance after he sliced the end of his finger off into a pile of chicken cubes, who raised donkeys on his Cowichan Valley farm so he could use the word 'obdurate' and tell visitors about the enormous size of the erect male donkey penis.

Much has been written this week about how James Barber made cooking simple, stripped it of pretension, invited people to take chances, connected eating with other pleasures of the flesh, and showed us how food can bring us together. He did these good things. For me, though, he did two things that matter even more than all that. He embodied the essence of our time and place. And he showed us that we never have to get old.