Laura Shapiro Page 4

  Julia wrote to Paul about all of it, whether the results were delicious or disastrous. Far more than books or politics, food became a red-hot connective wire between them during these months of separation, a living metaphor for the intimacy that had seemed so elusive at the end of the war. “I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” Julia wrote; and Paul suggested that she move to Washington and become his cook—“We can eat each other.” This was the highly charged context in which Julia threw herself into studying recipes, practicing her Hillcliff lessons, and staging dinner parties: every cup of flour and sprinkle of herbs seemed to radiate her desire for Paul. He, too, was getting hungry. In July, he showed up in Pasadena, and the two of them got into Julia’s Buick and drove back across the country together.

  It was the supreme test: long, hot days on the road, nights in cheap motels. Julia had packed eight bottles of whiskey, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of premixed martinis. She was as good a driver as Paul, he noted with approval, and it turned out that they liked stopping to look at all the same things—“wineries, crab-canneries, local architecture and nature.” Julia never complained, ate and slept as comfortably as if she were traveling in luxury, painted her toenails, and washed Paul’s shirts. “Quite a dame,” he told Charlie. By the time they reached Niagara Falls, he was in love and knew it.

  Julia’s determination had carried her to a glorious finish line: the raw, emotionally chaotic “old maid” that Paul once dismissed was now his lodestar. Sitting down to analyze his rush of awakened feelings in a letter to his brother, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Did Julia change, or did he? It was Julia, he decided. And Julia had indeed changed, or rather she had opened up areas of her mind and personality that nobody before Paul had demanded to see. Yet when he went on to list what he loved most about her, he didn’t dwell on the intellectual skills that had newly flowered, but rather on the great, stalwart elements of her character that had always made people warm to her—and would have the same effect years later on millions of people she would never meet. “She never puts on an act,” he wrote, pinpointing at the top of the roster the very quality her audiences would relish most. “She frankly likes to eat and use her senses and has an unusually keen nose…. She has a cheerful, gay humor with considerable gusto…. She loves life and all its phenomena…. She has deep-seated charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest…She tells the truth.” And he noted appreciatively that she had none at all of the “measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex” that might have been expected in an inexperienced woman nearly thirty-four years old. A month later, they were married.

  Chapter 2

  Prof. Julia

  THE STORY OF Julia Child’s first meal in France has been told and retold, most eloquently by Julia herself. In 1948, she and Paul were living in Washington, not quite sure of where his career was heading, when to their great joy the State Department posted him to Paris to become exhibits officer at the United States Information Service (USIS). They arrived at Le Havre on November 3, and as soon as their Buick emerged from the ship, they drove off toward the capital. Around lunchtime they came to Rouen. The name of the restaurant was La Couronne, and Paul—“in his beautiful French,” Julia recalled—ordered the meal. She described it lovingly in the fish chapter of From Julia Child’s Kitchen: first came oysters and Chablis, and then a splendid sole meunière was set before them. “It was handsomely browned and still sputteringly hot under its coating of chopped parsley, and around it swirled a goodly amount of golden Normandy butter,” Julia wrote. “It was heaven to eat, the flesh so very fresh, with its delicate yet definite texture and taste that blended marvelously with the browned butter sauce. I was quite overwhelmed.” This traditional dish, each detail put into place with care and all of it glorious with butter, had everything she would always adore about French cooking. She published the memory in 1975, and in time it joined Swann dipping his madeleine, and M. F. K. Fisher drying tangerines on the radiator, as a classic of culinary nostalgia.

  Twelve years later, Julia wrote again about her first meal in France. In an essay she contributed to a book of Christmas food memories she described the same Buick, the same arrival in Rouen, the same restaurant—but a different menu. “We started with oysters, followed with one of their famous duck dishes,” she wrote. “While husband Paul commandeered a fat ripe Comice pear for dessert and an equally fat wedge of Camembert, I went for the pastries.” No sole meunière? Who knows? Most likely she’d forgotten the earlier version. And even the earlier version may have been conflated with other cherished menus. Paul, who described their first meal in France in a letter written from Paris to his brother that very day, said they had blissfully eaten oysters (“very strong of the sea”) and filet de sole, without specifying the preparation. But sole, especially meunière, came up again and again in his accounts of restaurant meals during those heady first weeks—“Julie had a delicious sole meunière,” “Julie can’t get over how good the sole is,” “Julie wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole.” Julia, too, wrote home about it: “Sole meunière, crisp and bristling from the fire.” Plainly, that simple homage to freshness and butter made an impression on her. As for the “famous duck” of Rouen, it’s not clear how this particular dish made its way into her official past; but Julia loved storytelling, and she loved duck; maybe she had one roasting in the oven while she was typing that day. In 2000, she was asked to describe her “most memorable meal” for Gourmet, and once more she gazed back happily to Le Havre, to the Buick, to the restaurant in Rouen, and to the duck—“fire-roasted and then passed through a duck press.” What emerges from these memories, one folded into another and all of them touched with sepia, is the staying power of the encounter itself, which began when the ship docked and continued for months in a haze of rapture. The rapture was the part she never forgot, and never revised.

  Soon after Julia and Paul settled in Paris, an old woman told Julia that France was “just one big family.” As far as Julia was concerned, that family was hers. At their favorite restaurant, Michaud, she couldn’t stop glancing over at a dozen people celebrating around a table spread with “innumerable courses of everything”—champagne, chickens, salads, cheeses, nuts—and everyone relaxed and goodhearted as they talked and ate and drank. “We keep being reminded of the Orient,” she wrote home. “Possibly because both are cultivated old civilizations, who enjoy and have integrated the physical and the cultural things in living.” Julia was at home here. The French struck her as wonderfully natural and earthy, and at the same time immensely civilized. They seemed to believe that the great pleasures of life—food, drink, sex, civility and conversation, pets, children, the splendor of Paris—were simply part of the fabric of being human, and that to enjoy them was as fundamental as breathing. Yet it was also taken for granted that stewardship of these gifts meant relishing them openly, discussing them, arguing about them, and keeping them meaningful through the very power of appreciation. Here was a whole country dedicated to being “worldly.” Right away she started French lessons at Berlitz: nothing was more important to her at this stage than becoming comfortable in the language. She was ecstatically absorbing the city, all her senses wide open and craving more; and she wanted the sounds as well, that constant chatter in the shops and streets; she wanted to “talk and talk and talk” and make a place for herself in the life flowing around her. “Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”

  They found an apartment at 81, rue de l’Université, on the Left Bank of the Seine across from the place de la Concorde, in an old private house. Their rooms on the third floor were as French as the view of rooftops outside the windows. Sagging leather wallpaper, gilt chairs, moldings, and mirrors everywhere—Julia called it “late 19th century Versailles.” Up a narrow flight of stairs there was a roomy kitchen with appliances so small in relation to her height th
at she might have been standing over a toy stove. She decided she could live right there in that apartment forever, in perfect happiness. Already she regretted missing Paris in the twenties, an era Paul had seen in person; and she pounced happily on the occasional sighting of such figures as Colette, Chanel, André Gide, and Sylvia Beach. Once, when the Childs gave a Bastille Day party, Paul invited Alice B. Toklas, whom he had met back in the twenties. She arrived, drank a glass of wine, and left. Toklas was so tiny, and wore such a wide-brimmed hat, that the only way Julia could see her face was to be sitting down while Toklas stood directly above her.

  Julia spent her first months studying French, walking through the streets with a map and a dictionary, and tasting, tasting, tasting. Everything she bit into was full of exhilarating flavors: the sausages, the tarts and petits fours, the snails, the Brie, “great big juicy pears,” and grapes so sweet she nearly swooned. Like most of their French and American friends in Paris, she and Paul had a maid who cooked and cleaned; but after living that way for a few months, they let her go. They hated having to show up on time for meals, and her cooking disappointed them. Julia was embarrassed to serve guests such inadequate dinners—her own could be alarming at times, but when they came off well, she took a great deal of pride in them. “Besides,” she wrote home, “it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly, fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn’t do one’s marketing?” So they hired a cleaning woman to come in twice a week, and Julia gladly took charge of the food. At the market, she examined pigs’ heads and scrutinized fruits and vegetables, breathed in the smells of the boulangerie, carefully chose a terrine or pâté from the charcuterie, and chatted away with the shopkeepers. In France, food was a sociable enterprise: everyone had something to say about the turnips or the kidneys, and to be able to join that nationwide conversation—in French!—was Julia’s bliss.

  But as the winter passed, she found she had time on her hands. She was never bored with Paris, or the daily delights of living there, but her own lack of direction bothered her. She and Paul would have liked to raise a family, but she was now thirty-six, and the possibility of children seemed increasingly remote. Surely there was something she could do professionally that would give her life substance and purpose. How about…hat making? She did have a bit of a background in fashion, having worked for Coast magazine before the war (she forgot how much she had hated the job), and Paris was certainly the capital of such things. She embarked on a few lessons and even made a dress and hat for herself that she wore to a wedding. “Awful, awful,” she admitted later. Paul, too, was thinking about her problem, and he mentioned it one day to the librarian at the USIS, a Frenchman who knew Paris well. “What does Julia like?” asked the librarian. Art, perhaps? Music? Sports? Paul reflected for a moment, then said decisively, “She likes to eat.” He went home with the address of the Cordon Bleu.

  Despite the distinction of its name and history, the Cordon Bleu had plunged into mismanagement by the time Julia enrolled in the fall of 1949. Pots and pans went unwashed, equipment was broken, dirt was everywhere, and classes ran short of ingredients. More irritating for Julia, she found herself taking lessons with two women who had never cooked before and needed to start at the kindergarten level. After two frustrating days, she managed to get herself transferred to a professional course. Here she found eleven ex-GIs who were training to become restaurant cooks under the GI bill, and a distinguished teaching staff of master chefs long steeped in the tastes and techniques of classic French cooking. This was more like it. They started at 7:30 in the morning, Julia and the former soldiers peeling and chopping and watching and asking questions in a top-speed flurry while producing sauces, fricassees, custards, and whatever else the teachers ordered up. “It’s a free-for-all,” Julia told her family. “Being the only woman, I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way (got to be cold-blooded and realistic, but retain appearance of sweetness and gentility).” At 9:30, the class was over, and Julia went home to practice on what would become lunch for herself and Paul. Then she returned to school for an afternoon demonstration class, watching intently as chefs prepared the thoroughly professional versions of soufflés, galantines, charlottes, and fondants that she planned to master. Then back to rue de l’Université, exhilarated, to make dinner. “After that one demonstration of Boeuf B, I came right home and made the most delicious one I ever ett,” she wrote home jubilantly.

  “My cooking has been always on the experimental side, these courses will make them SURE.” She found she liked the demonstrations best, because she could learn so much from watching the chef make an entire dish from beginning to end, “giving the proportions and ingredients, and explaining everything he does, and making little remarks.”

  Julia’s particular mentor was Chef Max Bugnard, who was seventy-four when she met him and had started his career sixty years earlier as an apprentice, later moving to London to work under Escoffier himself. Bugnard was the teacher who made Julia a cook. This generous and knowledgeable chef became a kind of culinary archetype who would rule her imagination for the rest of her life. Bugnard had a gravitas about him that came from his learning, his experience, and his respect for the work; and for Julia, such a sensibility would forever mark the difference between the real cooks and the dabblers. “He has that wonderful old-timey ‘art for arts sake’ approach, and nothing short of perfection satisfies him at all,” she wrote to a friend. “It’s an inspiration to work with such a man.”

  Bugnard’s classes at the Cordon Bleu took place at a level far above the inadequate conditions of the school. He knew the repertoire intimately, and his standards were, as Julia often said, impeccable. As he demonstrated and explained the well-honed methods of French cookery, supervised and corrected her work, the doors she had been banging on so ineffectually swung open at last. After years of following recipes only to meet failure, enjoying a triumph only to see the same dish mysteriously go wrong the next time, planning lovely little dinners that didn’t get to the table until 10:00 p.m.—now she could understand what was happening and why. Now she could learn. Julia cooked all day, all evening, and all through the weekends; and when she wasn’t cooking, she was compulsively buying sieves and whisks and copper pots and larding needles. At the far end of an alley in the Paris flea market, she found a marble mortar and a pestle so massive Paul had to hoist them onto his shoulder to get them back to the car, which was parked two miles away. He was delighted to do it. “Julie’s cookery is actually improving!” Paul exclaimed to his brother. “I didn’t believe it would, just between us girls, but it really is.”

  Ducks and rabbits and fish and eggs, every step of every dish, from the raw ingredients to the final garnish, everything performed by hand with only the most elemental equipment—Julia was rocketed to paradise. This was what she had needed without knowing it: a clear, rational guide to making every dish taste the way it should. No longer was she fortune’s fool in the kitchen. Her mind was on fire: every day, more mysteries fell away, and in their place was structure, system, and logic. The secret behind good cooking turned out to be that there were no secrets. There was only good teaching.

  Studying French cuisine wasn’t just a matter of absorbing traditional rules and methods: Julia was learning to cook with all her senses engaged, to cook with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients that was increasingly out of fashion in the American kitchen. Ever since the late-nineteenth century, each generation had been purchasing more and more food that had been cleaned, cut, packaged, and sometimes partially cooked in a factory. The convenience was addictive, and so was the impressive rationale created by the advertising industry: these uniform, sterile products, “untouched by human hands” as one slogan put it, made cooking modern and far more sanitary. Why fumble around with messy, smelly chicken parts and carrot peelings the way poor Grandma had to do?

  Cooking from scratch remain
ed the standard in most households, but what women meant by “scratch” was continually changing. By the time Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, an American dinner made from scratch might include beef that had been ground into hamburger before it arrived in the kitchen, bottled ketchup, fresh potatoes, canned peas, and a Jell-O dessert in the most popular flavor, namely red. In France, by contrast, to cook meant to sustain an intimate relationship with ingredients. Julia had to learn how to feel her way through a recipe even while she was following written directions, how to leave enough space from step to step to let the food itself tell her what to do next. How should the rice smell when it came out of the oven after its long baking in milk? How would the egg whites look when they had been beaten just enough? How much nutmeg would make the dish taste right—with no taste of nutmeg? She took to this approach avidly. She may have lacked the instincts of a born cook, but she was blessed with an excellent palate and skillful hands. And she loved the feel of food, loved letting her senses run riot at the kitchen counter, loved handling raw meats and vegetables and inhaling the aromas as they cooked. Learning to cook was an intoxicant; she could have been sipping her first glass of champagne. “It is beginning to take effect,” she wrote home after three months at the Cordon Bleu. “I feel it in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”