My Life in France Read online

  On the terrace at Bramafam

  Jean and Simca had been spending more and more time lately at their early-eighteenth-century stone farmhouse, Le Mas Vieux, on a Fischbacher family property known as Bramafam (“the cry of hunger”). It was up a rutted dirt driveway on the slope of a dry, grassy hill outside the little town of Plascassier, above Cannes. In front of the house stood a lovely tree-shaded terrace that looked across a valley toward the flower fields and tall, swaying cypress trees of Grasse, an area famous for its perfumes.

  Le Mas Vieux had been inhabited for twenty-nine years by Marcelle Challiol, a cousin of Jean’s, and Hett Kwiatkowska, two women painters who had passed away. Now the house was falling apart. It was extremely rustic, and Simca didn’t care much for it at all. But Jean loved it as a retreat from the pressures of perfumery in Paris. Every morning he liked to putter about his garden dressed in a blue bathrobe, whistling tunes and talking to his flowers. As they slowly renovated, adding more rooms, light, and heat, and updating the bathrooms, the old manse slowly won Simca over. As she oversaw renovations, she discovered a small leather sack buried under the stairs; inside of it were a few Louis XV silver pieces, dating to 1725—“which proves its age,” she liked to say. Once all the work was done, Simca discovered that Le Mas Vieux was the perfect place for her to cook, teach, and entertain friends. Suddenly it began to sound as if the renovations had been her idea.

  Bramafam was gorgeous in November, with lavender bushes and mimosa all about. One afternoon, the four of us shared an idyllic lunch of Dover-sole soufflé with a chilled bottle of Meursault on the terrace. As we sat contentedly in the sun, breathing in the soft, flowery aromas, Paul and I bandied about the idea of buying a simple place of our own nearby. We even took a look at a few properties in the area, but nothing was quite right for us, or quite affordable. Then Jean suggested that we build a small house on a corner of his property. What an idea!

  The more we talked about it, the more excited we became. As I’ve mentioned, Paul and I had long hoped to buy a pied-à-terre in Paris, or to build a little getaway cabin somewhere—perhaps in Maine (near Charlie and Freddie), or California (near Dort), or even in Norway (which we still romanticized). But to be in Provence next to Simca would be a dream come true. I could already imagine spending my winter months here, curing the olives from our trees, and cooking à la provençale, with garlic, tomatoes, and wild herbs.

  Le Mas Vieux sat on about five hectares of land. Jean didn’t want to sell off any of the family property, so Paul and I agreed to lease what used to be a potato patch from them, about one hundred yards away from Le Mas Vieux, to construct a house on. Once we had finished using it, the property would revert to the Fischbacher family, with no strings attached. The agreement was made with a handshake. It would be a house built on friendship.

  Paul and I envisioned a very simple structure in keeping with the local architecture: a single-level house, with stucco walls and a red-tiled roof. Simca and Jean offered to oversee the construction while we were in the States, and Paul opened a line of credit for them at a nearby bank. We found an accomplished local builder, although Paul had to use every bit of his diplomatic training to convince the man that we did not want a palazzo, but a simple, modest, and as-maintenance-free-as-possible house.

  We decided to call it La Pitchoune, or “The Little Thing.”

  Building La Pitchoune

  BY 1964, Mastering the Art of French Cooking—or MTAFC, as we called it—was about to go into its sixth edition (and we were still finding silly errors and making corrections), while The French Chef could be seen on public television in more than fifty cities, from Los Angeles to New York. On the spur of the moment, I had decided to end each show with the hearty salutation “Bon appétit!” that waiters in France always use when serving your meal. It just seemed the natural thing to say, and our audience liked it. Indeed, I found that I rather enjoyed performing and was slowly getting the hang of it.

  The combination of book and TV work, along with the occasional article or recipe, had turned me into a budding celebrity. There were magazine stories about our show, about our home kitchen, about how and where we shopped, and so on. My cooking demonstrations drew larger and larger crowds. “Julia Watchers” began to recognize me on the street, or called our house, and wrote us letters. At first this kind of attention was strange, but I soon adapted (though Paul resented it). I learned not to lock eyes with staring strangers, which only encouraged them. I have always been a ham, but I didn’t care much about celebrity one way or the other.

  Hardly anyone in France had heard of The French Chef, or knew anything about me. I never really discussed the show’s success with Simca: it didn’t seem important, and I didn’t want her to feel overshadowed. I felt that she was such a colorful personality, and so knowledgeable about cooking, that had she been American rather than French she would be immensely well known.

  In February 1964, we flew to Paris, and I dropped in on classes at L’École des Trois Gourmandes, ate out with friends, and visited Bugnard—who was as jolly as ever, though crippled by arthritis. Then Paul and I rented a car and drove south to check on the construction of La Pitchoune. I had no worries about the quality of work, as I knew Simca had been hovering over the project like a mother hen over her nest, and had kept a sharp Norman eye on the schedule and costs.

  The house was still in a rudimentary condition when we arrived, but I was smitten with “La Peetch” right away. We made a few final decisions on the interior: there would be red tile floors, a fireplace in the long living/dining room, a hallway with a smallish kitchen and my bedroom on the left, and a guest room and Paul’s bedroom on the right. (He was a sometime insomniac, and I was known to snore. We decided it was best to spend the nights apart, but we’d put a double bed in Paul’s room so that we could cuddle in the mornings.) My room would have a desk and bookshelf; his would have a little fireplace and French doors that opened onto a stone-and-concrete terrace.

  “Even in its unfinished state,” I wrote Avis, “the house is a jewel.”

  NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE was even more hectic than the year before. Paul and I spent long hours with our production team in Boston, working out the scripts and shooting French Chef programs at WGBH. In this intensive period, I could feel that I was slowly improving my TV presentation skills. But by the end of the year, Paul and I were both itching to bust out of our same old routine. On the spur of the moment, we decided to spend Christmas in France. “La belle F.,” we called it: France was our North Star, our spiritual home. Charlie and Freddie joined us, and we all sailed from New York to Le Havre, then trained it south from Paris to Nice. At the terminus, we rented a little tin-can-type car, and put-putted slowly to Bramafam.

  As we turned in at the gate and bumped our way up the dusty driveway, we saw, with mounting excitement, a new house on the right-hand brow of the hill. La Pitchoune—it was finished!

  The little house was just as we’d dreamed it would be: tan stucco walls, red-tiled roof, two chimneys, wooden shutters, and a stone terrace. The lights were all turned on. The refrigerator was fully stocked. The windows had curtains. The living room had comfortable chairs. The beds were made up with brand-new sheets. It was chilly outside, but the house had plenty of heat and hot water. Best of all, a great potée normande awaited us on the stove. All we had to do was walk inside.

  Simca and Jean had been so thoughtful.

  A week later, Les Childs and Fischbachers celebrated the New Year together at La Peetch, with a feast of oysters, foie gras, and Dom Pérignon. By that time, Paul and Charlie had mounted pegboard on the kitchen wall, outlined my pots and pans, and hung the batterie de cuisine. It did my heart good to see rows of gleaming knives and copper pots at the ready. I could hardly wait to get behind the stove.

  Paul and I stayed in our satisfying little house for three months, slowly settling into the sedate rhythms of Provence. La Peetch was set into a hill that had been terraced with low stone berms and was studded with olive
trees, almond trees, and lavender bushes. The top of the driveway was just big enough to turn around a compact French car in. Our water came from a large concrete tank behind the house. A spreading mulberry tree hung over the terrace. Before Charlie and Freddie returned to Lumberville, they helped us to frame the terrace with olive trees and mimosas. And we partially renovated a small stone shepherd’s hut, the cabanon, to use as a combination wine cave/painting studio/guest room.

  Simca and Jean had returned to Paris in early January, but she and I wrote back and forth constantly, trading recipes and comparing notes. It was high time, we had decided, to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume II.

  CHAPTER 7

  Son of Mastering

  I. THE IRVING STREET BOULANGERIE

  MASTERING WAS A wide-ranging introduction to French cooking, a natural outgrowth of our classes that covered the fundamental techniques of la cuisine bourgeoise; Volume II would extend the repertoire, but in a more focused way. In February 1966, Simca and I prepared a detailed outline of our new book, also known around the house as “Son of Mastering.” We were determined not to repeat recipes that had appeared in the first book, but would occasionally refer our readers back to Volume I for master recipes. As we had generated many perfectly good ideas that did not make it into Volume I, we estimated that Volume II should take us no more than two years to write.

  (Louisette did not collaborate with us on Volume II. Now remarried, to Comte Henri de Nalèche, she lived in the beautiful hunting country near Bourges, and had mentioned that she might write her own book.)

  The audience we hoped to reach with Volume II would include everyone from amateurs to experienced cooks and even professionals. Unlike Volume I, the new book would embrace the advances in cooking technology that had recently sprung up. In retrospect, we had taken a rather holy and Victorian approach to the virtues of elbow grease in Mastering—implying that “only paths of thorns lead to glory,” etc. But France had by now stepped into contemporary life, and as teachers intent on reaching a wide audience, so must we. If we made it difficult for people to learn how to cook—insisting, for example, that the only way to beat egg whites was by hand in a copper bowl—then we’d automatically lose much of our potential audience. That made no sense at all. And so we set out to develop our own ways of using labor-saving gadgets—how to beat egg whites or make pastries with a machine, say. And why not? If we could show readers how to make a perfectly delicious apricot mousse with the aid of an electric mixer, then so much the better!

  Back when Mastering was first published, I was of the opinion that “good breeding” meant never having one’s name in print. But now I had learned a bit more about how the world worked. If one wanted to remain gainfully employed as a writer and TV personality, one had to keep one’s name in circulation. As a result, I had become shamelessly willing to expose myself—or Simca—to any number of things that would have appalled me just a few years earlier.

  At Thanksgiving, 1966, my face appeared on the cover of Time magazine (in a painting by Boris Chaliapin) for a story titled “Everyone’s in the Kitchen.” It was a nice long article about the growing popularity of cooking in America, although I was dismayed that the magazine downplayed Simca’s many contributions to our book and did not run a photo they had taken of her teaching a class at L’École des Trois Gourmandes. But the story had a happy effect on sales of Mastering. Instead of the usual ten thousand copies for its next printing, Knopf ordered forty thousand this time. We celebrated this lucky boon over turkey with Charlie and Freddie in Lumberville. The other effect of the Time cover story, however, was to increase the pressure on us to complete Volume II as quickly as possible. It was time to light the stove and get back to work!

  Sitting for Boris Chaliapin

  After moving around the world for so long, I was able to work in most places, but nowhere was I more productive than in our little kitchen at La Peetch. From mid-December 1966 through mid-June 1967, Paul and I holed ourselves up there, far from the noise and distraction of the U.S.A. Bumping up the rutted driveway, we were struck, once again, by what Paul termed “the Reverse Hornet-Sting” of the place—the shockingly fresh and inspirational jolt we got from our lovely hideaway. It was the cool, early-morning layers of fog in the valleys; Esterel’s volcanic mountains jutting up out of the glittering sea; the warming Provençal sun and bright-blue sky; the odor of earth and cow dung and burning grapevine prunings; the colorful violets and irises and mimosas; the olives blackening; the sound of little owls talking back and forth; the sea-bottom taste of Belon oysters; the noisy fun of the marketplace; the deeply quiet, sparkling nights with a crescent moon hanging overhead like a lamp. What a place! The very opposite of a hornet’s sting, indeed.

  Simca and I had beaten a dirt path across the little field between our two kitchens, as we dropped in on each other several times a day to compare notes and taste whatever was on the other’s stove. Our work patterns on Volume II were much the same as they had been on the first Mastering. Simca was a veritable fountain of recipes and ideas, which she constantly changed or refined. My job was to be the authority on American habits and ingredients, to retest Simca’s recipes, to write the text, and (ugh) proofread.

  Simca was terrifically productive and inventive. But as I had learned on our first book, I couldn’t really trust her on the details. The measurements, precise list of ingredients, and notes on timing that are so important to a successful cookbook were not Simca’s forte. In Volume I we had included three recipes that I didn’t think worked well, and they galled me every time I saw them. In this book, I vowed, there would be no clunkers!

  In order for Volume II to succeed, I was convinced that it had to not only stand on its own two feet but be better than Volume I. Part of my concern was that when a recipe failed to produce the desired results I was the one on the spot in the U.S.A. who got blamed for it. Simca didn’t really understand this, or perhaps she wasn’t sympathetic. At any rate, I went over every single recipe for Volume II myself, sometimes testing dishes ten or fifteen times, to make sure they withstood the operational proof. Sometimes they did not. Once, for instance, Simca suggested a chocolate-cake recipe; I had brought some American chocolate to Plascassier to use in baking, but she never fully tested it, and when I tried it in her recipe it didn’t work at all. So I had to stop work on my own recipe, find out what had gone wrong with hers, and rewrite the directions. (Later, in order to really understand chocolate, I invited a Nestlé chemist to 103 Irving Street, and asked him all about the chemical composition of American chocolate, the best way for a home cook to melt it, and so on. It was a fascinating lesson, but Simca had zero interest in that sort of thing.)

  I knew my slow, careful approach drove my intuitive co-author crazy, but it was the only way I knew how to work. I was basically writing these recipes for myself. And I was the type of person who wanted to know everything about a dish—what worked or didn’t, why, and how to make it better—so that there would be no unsolved questions in our master recipe.

  “Ne te décourages pas, chérie,” I wrote Simca. “I am just being extremely difficile, which we both must be.”

  A related bit of friction developed when Simca continued to send me recipe after recipe after recipe, even when it was clear that we could hardly use a third of them. She was hurrying off so many suggestions, and each one would take so long to get right, that I only attempted a fraction of her outpouring. This frustrated her, as did my corrections to the recipes we did use. “Non, non, non!” she would shout, after I had changed something of hers (to make the recipe work). “Ce n’est pas français!”

  “Of course, if my method turns out to be wrong, or if your method is better, then I will be happy to change things so that the final recipe is correct,” I replied, just as stubborn as she was. “But every recipe in this book must be foolproof!”

  I tried to steer Simca’s voluminous outpouring in other directions—to Gourmet magazine, which was looking for authentic French re
cipes, or to Jim Beard’s cooking school, where she could teach and make her own contacts in the States—but for some reason she didn’t pursue these leads wholeheartedly. Paul grew increasingly irritated with her sometimes imperious behavior, and began to refer to her as “Sigh-Moan” Beck. But I valued her as a creative force de la nature, and wouldn’t allow him to run her down.

  Finally, when she proposed using her dozens of unused recipes in a future Mastering, Volume III, I had to be frank: “I have no desire to get into another big book like Volume II for a long time to come, if ever. Too much work. I can do nothing else, and I am really anxious to get back again into TV teaching, and out of this little room with the typewriter.”

  It was in the midst of this whirlwind of experiments, drafts of recipes, and spirited conversation that Judith Jones suggested in her gentle but compelling way that we really owed it to our readers to include a recipe for French bread. Now, this was not a subject that Simca and I had planned to tackle at all. But, of course, Judith was right. One is not really dining à la française without proper brioches and croissants for breakfast, or a symmetrically baked, close-grained, beautifully textured sandwich bread for hors d’oeuvres, or a fine baguette to mop up the sauce on one’s plate at dinner. “Bread is so quintessentially French—no meal is complete without a baguette,” Judith pointed out. “And you can’t really buy a decent loaf of French bread here in the States. Why don’t you teach people how to make their own?”

  Ouf! How were we to create an authentic-tasting French bread in a typical home kitchen? We faced at least two major hurdles: first, American all-purpose flour was different from French flour, and we’d have to accommodate it to traditional baking techniques; second, boulangers used traditional bread ovens for baking, and we’d somehow have to create a simulated baker’s oven for the typical home kitchen.