The letter that opens the booklet
The first frame is a printed Holiday Greetings card — the same sleigh, the same stock code AC 617 CF as the Sedenquist and Jasper booklets — on which Anderson typed in blackletter:1
December 15, 1993
Jay and Betty Culter
I thank you for allowing me to research some history of The Pacific Northwest Chefs de Cuisine Association, which you played a major part in making.
These xerox copies are only a small part of your book.
Thanks so much to both of you, and have some Happy Holidays.
Your Chef friend, Darrell Anderson
Two things follow from it. The book this was copied from belonged to the Culters and was still with them in December 1993, which is the last evidence in the file that either of them was living. And Anderson addressed the man as Jay while labelling the booklet Culter, Clarence — the archival label is on the same frame, at the foot of the page. Both names are his.
Three spellings, one man
The press could not settle on his surname. He is Culter on the certificate and on Anderson's label,21 Cutler in a photograph caption,3 and Coulter in a meeting report and in Culinary Review.45 The engrossed certificate and the compiler's own label agree, so Culter is right and the other two are printers' errors. All three are carried in data/people.json as aliases, because a search that knows only one of them will miss two thirds of the man.
Sioux City to Seattle
The whole of his early life is one paragraph in an undated newspaper profile:76
Veteran baker-chef Culter has been at his profession since his early teens — working his way from Sioux City to Kansas City, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans (as bellhop, pantry assistant and cook). Then he met wife Betty and settled down in Seattle to raise their family.
That is everything. Sioux City is where the itinerary starts, which is not the same as where he was born, and the profile gives no years. It also says he reckoned "about 50 years" in the trade — but against an undated cutting, fifty years from an unknown point fixes nothing. No document in this unit gives a birth date or a death date.
The Hungerford
By the middle 1950s he is chef at the Hungerford Hotel in Seattle, and that is the address the association's press attaches to him every time.38 The hotel had its own bakery, and a cutting kept in the booklet notes a radio appearance for it: "…'s KTNT program was Jay Culter of the [Coffee] Shop and the Magnolia Room. He did… a great job," going on to point out that at the Hungerford the bread "comes out of their kitchen, not only tasty… and fresh and good".6
One frame is a photograph of a chef standing behind a whole roast on a garnished platter with a Hungerford Hotel card propped against it.9 Nobody is named on it.
The best-known thing that happened to him there was a violin lesson in reverse. The Seattle Times photographed Norbert Brainin of the Amadeus Quartet, in Seattle on an American tour, in a hotel kitchen showing "the chef, Jay Culter" how to slice a Wiener schnitzel — a dish of Brainin's native Vienna.1110
Treasurer
He held one office, and held it at least twice. Culinary Review prints the new officers of the Pacific Northwest Chefs' Association for May 1955 — Oliver Hansen secretary, Edward Jasper, and "Clarence Coulter, Treasurer".512 A year later the April meeting at the Top O' The Town returns the whole slate: Dick O'Neil of Von's Cafe president, Edward Jasper of the Bon Marche vice president, Oliver Hanson of Clark's Round the Clock secretary, and "Jay Culter, Hungerford Hotel, re-elected treasurer".313
The treasurer's work shows up in the minutes as the unglamorous half of running a society. At the June meeting at Gerard's Restaurant in the Calhoun Hotel he "reported on the Christmas book advertising and also gave a report on the benefit planned for next year".414 Selling advertising in the Christmas programme is not what anyone joins a chefs' association for. It is what someone has to do.
The party
Once, he ran the big one. More than seven hundred people at the Senator Ballroom, Ken Cloud's orchestra, and the food cooked at Edison Technical School by Paul Muellet, Leo Paulsen and the restaurant-school students. Allied Food & Beverage Magazine — chosen as the association's official magazine at the meeting held just before it — reported that "Clarence Culter, chef at the Hungerford Hotel, and general chairman of the party, did a wonderful job and is to be highly commended for his efforts".815
The menu ran to glazed ham, roast turkeys stuffed with wild rice, salmon, five roasts of beef weighing forty-three pounds between them, veal chop suey, crab salad and molded aspic. Herb Eickman ran the decorations and brought Christmas trees from his own home; Clark Isard did transportation, Quenton Dickinson services, David Hartstein the mixers. Afterwards, the article says, the chefs and their wives "mamboed, be-boped and bunny hopped".
The date is a problem. The article says the party "was December 9" and the booklet is annotated 1956 in pencil beneath the text — but the May 1956 report announces the coming party for Saturday, December 8, and names Oliver Hanson as its chairman.3 The two cannot describe the same evening. The likeliest reading is that Culter chaired the party of December 1955 and the magazine reported it early in 1956; nothing in the file says so, and it is recorded as an open conflict rather than resolved.
The certificate
On 26 January 1957 the Conference of Western Chefs Associations certified that "Clarence A. Culter, an active member of Pacific Northwest Chefs Association, has successfully met all professional and ethical requirements" and presented him the Certificate of Chef de Cuisine.162 Four associations set their seals on it — the Chefs de Cuisine Association of California at Los Angeles, the Chefs Association of Oregon at Portland, the Chefs Association of the Pacific Coast at San Francisco, and the Pacific Northwest Chefs Association at Seattle.
The booklet also contains the announcement of that scheme, nine months earlier. At the same April 1956 meeting that re-elected him treasurer, Paul Muellet showed the members the new certificate and explained the mechanism: chefs in the Northwest would be certified by chefs in Los Angeles or San Francisco, and vice versa, so that a certified chef "would have top professional standing in all parts of the West Coast".313
Reading the two frames together is the most satisfying thing in this small file. The scheme is described in the spring; the certificate is issued in the winter; the man kept both pieces of paper, and one of the signatures on his certificate — Jack W. Meyer, secretary for the Pacific Coast — belongs to the chef the association had dined at the Washington Athletic Club on 24 July 1954.1817
The company he kept
The unit is thin on Culter and rich on the association around him. The same programme frame carries The Fourth Annual Chef's Buffet Supper, Windsor Room, courtesy of the New Washington Hotel, 17 September 1954 — a fourth annual supper in 1954 puts the first at about 1951.1817
A newspaper feature kept in the book, Margaret Marshall's "Too Many Cooks…?!", is the best description anywhere in Box 20 of what the association thought it was.2019 It records Leo Paulsen, secretary of the Chefs de Cuisine from its organisation, over seventy and still teaching at Edison, still winning prizes at the Culinary Arts Exhibit. It records that the trade was "especially free of race prejudice, since fine cooking is international by its very nature". And it records what the chefs did when Charles Blanc, French-born and one of their most revered members, died: they kept a place for him at dinner meetings, and gathered for a good meal in his memory in the European manner, his daughter joining them to pour the champagne as her father had.
A photograph two leaves further on shows Paulsen holding a certificate of his own — "This Certifies that Leo Paulson has been appointed Dean of Chefs".21
His own place
He got out of hotels. The last four content frames of the booklet are all one subject: Betty and Jay's Phinney Ridge Cafe, 6412 Phinney Avenue North, family-priced, known for homemade bread and pies.76 The matchbook has both their names on it. By the time of the profile he had been there ten years.
Then he enlarged it, redecorated, and added a Class-H lounge called the Ridge Room — opened, a notice records with some admiration, sixteen days after the licence came through.6 His daughter Fran Culter-Johnston ran the bar; his grandchildren worked the kitchen; "Jay still handles the bulk of the 'chief chef and pie-master' duties."
The University of Washington student paper's Campus Gourmet broke two of his own rules for it — never write up one restaurant twice, never accept a free meal — and then did both:2322
There's no other restaurant in the city where the weary breakfasteer can have such fare, especially at such prices. The omelette was two bucks. There's no other restaurant in the city where the cook will give you advice on where else to go for dinner, or tell you about the lutefisk he used to have to keep outside of the door.
That is the last we see of him. A man who had come up through Sioux City, Kansas City, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans, who had been certified by four state associations and had run a party for seven hundred, standing behind his own counter on Phinney Ridge telling a student where else to eat.
What is still open
- No dates. Twenty-five frames and not one gives a year of birth or death. The Washington death index and the Seattle Times obituaries, searched under all three spellings, are the obvious next step.
- The book. Anderson copied twenty-five pages out of something he called "only a small part of your book". It was in the family's hands in December 1993 and his daughter is named in print.
- Five undated cuttings. The two meeting reports, the Marshall feature, the Brainin photograph and the Phinney Ridge page were all cut without their mastheads. Dating them would give the second half of his working life a chronology instead of a sequence.
- Fourteen photographs and not one caption. More than half this unit is banquet and exhibit photography with nobody identified. He is presumably in several of them.