Laura Shapiro Page 5

  Yet the more she learned, the more she could see what a long way she had to go. If she were trying to play the violin, she reflected, the challenge would be the same: training and practice, training and practice. The fishmongers and butchers were nerve-rackingly good at identifying customers who didn’t know what they were buying (“Bluff is no good, you’ve got to KNOW,” she wrote home) and she was determined to “KNOW” every single thing about market and kitchen. One day she spent four hours on a lobster recipe—at the typewriter, not the stove. She had already worked on the cooking; she could prepare it just as it should be, and now she wanted to put the whole procedure into words. “Good practice, to make it absolutely exact and water-tight,” she wrote the family. She did a massive round of research on mayonnaise and wrote it up in more detail than any of her sources had, then went to work on béarnaise. These mini dissertations were for herself. She wanted to have in front of her the most explicit, flawless recipes ever written, so that she would never lose touch with what she had mastered. Failure still had a horrible way of seizing control of a meal. One day, after she had been several weeks at the Cordon Bleu, she made lunch for a friend and ended up serving “the most VILE eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” She didn’t measure the flour, which made the sauce thick and horrid; she couldn’t find spinach so she substituted chicory, and the whole mess was disgusting. Would she ever outgrow these bursts of ineptitude? Maybe not, but she wasn’t about to share her guilt and misery with the guests. It was bad enough that they had to eat the stuff; they shouldn’t be forced to claim it was delicious. “I carefully didn’t say a word, while they painfully ate it, because I don’t believe in these women who are always apologizing for their food,” she wrote home. “If it is vile, the cook must just grin and bear it, with no word of excuse.” Her famous advice to the hostess—“Never apologize”—was forged in crucibles like this one.

  The harder she worked, the more impatient she became with her class at the Cordon Bleu. The GIs weren’t making much progress, and the course was slowing down and becoming repetitive. “After 6 months, they don’t know the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way,” she complained. Finally she decided she’d had enough of the school but not nearly enough of Bugnard, so she dropped out of the course and hired the chef to teach her privately for another six months, while she practiced between lessons. Then, with a year of study behind her, she decided she was ready to take the exam and receive a Cordon Bleu diploma. Here she ran into a problem. Madame Brassart, director of the school, had always disliked the big American woman who thought she was too good for the amateur course, pushed her way into the professional program, then dropped out before completing it. Now she had the effrontery to demand a diploma. The director refused to schedule the exam. It took months before an increasingly furious Julia was allowed to take the exam, and Madame Brassart relented only after Julia sent a letter hinting that the embassy would soon start wondering why an American student was being treated so badly by the Cordon Bleu. When Julia finally received her certificate—Madame Brassart wouldn’t issue a real diploma, since Julia hadn’t finished the course—it was dated March 15, 1951, some two weeks before the date on the warning letter. The director was covering her tracks. For many years, Julia included Madame Brassart on the very short list of people she hated, which was headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  The exam itself sorely disappointed her, for it was superficial and made no reference to the complicated procedures she had practiced with zeal. Madame Brassart had decided to give this uppity student a beginner’s exam, the sort given to housewives who took a six-week elementary course. Julia was outraged, all the more so because she flubbed quite a bit of the test. She did well on the written section, in which she had to describe how to make a brown stock, how to cook green vegetables, and how to make a béarnaise sauce. But in the cooking section, she made mistakes everywhere. Asked to prepare an oeuf mollet, she made a poached egg instead of a soft-boiled one; she also put too much milk into the crème renversée, or “caramel custard,” and she forgot what went into an escalope de veau en surprise (veal, duxelles, and sliced ham, cooked and then reheated in a paper bag). Julia sautéed the mushrooms instead of making duxelles and left out the ham entirely. “All my own fault, I just should have memorized their little book,” she admitted in a letter home. “My mind was on Filets de sole Walewska, Poularde Toulousiane, Sauce Venetienne, etc. etc. etc. and I neglected to look at the primary things.” Her mistakes in the paper-bag recipe didn’t bother her, since it was an idiotic dish anyway—“the kind a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner to ‘épater’ the boss’s wife.” The whole experience was frustrating: she could turn out flawless sauces, pâtés, and mousses; bone a goose without tearing the skin; clean, eviscerate, and cut up a chicken in twelve minutes—and she had tripped over her own feet when asked to take a baby step. When she opened her own cooking school, she vowed, she would turn people into cooks “through friendliness and encouragement and professionalism,” not the nasty methods of the mean-spirited Madame Brassart. Who, she added pointedly, was a Belgian, and not French at all.

  During these months of intensive cooking, a friend who thought Julia might like to meet another food-struck woman introduced her to Simone Beck Fischbacher—a meeting as momentous for Julia as the day she encountered Paul. Here was her first culinary soul mate and a woman who could balance Julia’s classroom cuisine with real-life French home cooking. Simca, as everyone called her, had grown up in Normandy in a wealthy household with servants, but as a child she found the kitchen irresistible and soon began trying her hand. She became a brilliant, intuitive home cook, self-taught apart from a brief period of study at the Cordon Bleu, with a vast repertoire of recipes and techniques that she was continually expanding. Everything she tasted seemed to inspire her; Julia used to say she threw off ideas like a fountain. Like Julia, she was married and had no children, and cooking was at the center of her life. As soon as they were introduced, the two women started talking about French food and didn’t let up until Simca’s death forty years later. Their friendship, renewed year after year on the hillside in Provence where they both made second homes, launched both of their careers and spawned a huge correspondence that dissected every aspect of French cookery. They were “ma sœur” and “ma grande chérie” to each other, sisters whose volcanic arguments never quite shattered their bond. To Julia, in those early years, Simca was France itself—beloved, inspiring, wildly irritating, and fundamental to everything.

  Simca belonged to a women’s gastronomical club, the only one of its kind in a country where haute cuisine was a well-guarded male preserve. No women cooked or even waited on tables in the great three-star restaurants; no women were invited to join the elite dining clubs that met over grand lunches and elaborate banquets; and the most revered authorities on classic cuisine were male. Out in the provinces, of course, women did some of the most distinguished and characteristic cooking of France; and it was a reflex among chefs to honor their mothers’ cooking above all other influences. But if women’s cooking was the sentimental favorite, men’s had the prestige, the exclusivity, and the cash value.

  The lone exception to this gender divide was Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a group of food-loving women who began meeting in 1927, prompted by an incident at a sumptuous banquet held by one of the men’s gastronomical societies. Women were sometimes allowed to attend these feasts as guests, and on this occasion both men and women were at the table when a man was heard declaiming the ancient truism that women, of course, understood nothing about fine food and wine. A certain Madame Ethel Ettlinger—an American who had been living for decades in France but clearly hadn’t adapted—jumped up in fury to remind the men that in all their homes it was women who ran the kitchens, ordered the meals, and trained the cooks. The women then got the idea to stage a magnificent banquet of their own and invite the men. They held the dinner in a borrowed château, arrange
d to have each course introduced with a trumpet fanfare, and easily demonstrated that women could spend money on glorious food and wine just as knowledgeably as men could. (The women themselves didn’t cook, any more than the members of the male club would have.) After that, the women chose a name for themselves and met regularly for decades, most often at an elaborate lunch prepared by a chef. Any Gourmettes who wanted to come at 10:00 a.m. to watch the chef and act as his assistants were invited to do so. Simca showed up regularly for these cooking sessions; and Julia, who joined the group soon after meeting Simca, never missed one if she could help it.

  These lunches glowed in her memory long afterward. She once said they marked “the real beginning of French gastronomical life for me.” The tradition she had been pursuing so ardently now sprang up before her like an edible diorama, complete with authentic chefs and guests. “I soon realized I had never really lived before,” she recalled. “There was always an elegant first course, such as fresh artichoke bottoms stuffed with sweetbreads and served with a truffled Béarnaise, or a most elaborately poached fish garnished with mushroom duxelles and lobster tails, and sauced with a creamy puree of crab. The main course might be boned duck, or game in season. Then came dessert, a sorbet aux poires, garnished with pears poached in wine and served in a meringue-nut shell, or a fancy mousse, a molded Bavarian structure, or a Vacherin with exotic filling.” And wines, of course, in abundance. What she liked most about the gatherings, along with the busy, gossipy cooking sessions and the dazzling food, was sitting down among women who talked food as intently as she did and ate with a gusto like her own. She was especially fond of the original members, a cluster of old-world dowagers in their seventies who dived into their lunches like ravenous teenagers. Normally Julia disliked all-female social events—she always came home grumbling afterward about how there hadn’t been any men in the room—but Le Cercle was different. She had never known so many women to whom she felt kin, and she identified herself as a Gourmette with pride.

  One of Simca’s friends at Le Cercle des Gourmettes was a Parisian named Louisette Bertholle. Although she was a less-impassioned cook than Simca, and had none of Julia’s intellectual zeal—Paul Child called her “a charming little nincompoop”—Louisette was bright and chic and full of enthusiasm. Together the three women hatched the idea of opening a school, perhaps in Louisette’s kitchen, where they could teach cooking to Americans. But before they could do much more than think about the possibility, a couple of Julia’s friends from California turned up in Paris and asked Julia if she could give them cooking lessons. In January 1952, Julia, Simca, and Louisette hastily opened their school, using Julia’s kitchen because Louisette’s was being renovated. “A small informal cooking class, with emphasis on the ‘cook hostess’ angle, is ‘L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes,’ which is open for five pupils,” ran a notice in the embassy’s in-house newsletter. “The meetings are Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m. through lunch, in the home of Mrs. Paul Child. The fee is 2,000 francs including lunch, which is prepared and served by the group. There are three experienced instructors, who teach basic recipes, bourgeoise or haute cuisine.” The three instructors were not quite ready for showtime, Julia admitted to her family, but they were learning as fast as they could. She knew that her life’s work had begun.

  These classes became the template for all the teaching that followed, both on television and in books. The atmosphere was “homey and fun and informal,” and every time a student made a mistake, Julia launched a discussion of what had gone wrong and how to avoid it. After the school had been in operation for a few months, Julia typed out for herself a “petit discours”—a little speech she could give at the opening of each two-day course. Though it’s unlikely that she used these exact words when she addressed the pupils, it’s clear that her principles had settled into place. “Our aim is to teach you how to cook,” she started out. “We are prepared to show the basic methods of French cooking, which, when you have mastered them, should enable you to follow a recipe, or invent any ‘little dish’ that you want. We feel that when one has learned to use one’s tools quickly and efficiently one can then provide one’s own short-cuts…. The recipes we give you are basic recipes, with practically no frills. We want them to be as clear and complete as possible. And we want you to feel, after we have done something in class, that you really have understood all about doing it.” Everything was here—the emphasis on fundamentals, the commitment to precision and clarity, and the ultimate goal of instilling self-confidence in the cook. Later on, Paul designed an insignia for the school: a “3” in a circle, with “Ecole des Gourmandes” in flowing script around it. Julia wore it as a badge for decades, and it was always pinned to her blouse when she appeared as the “French Chef.”

  For each two-hour class, Julia typed up and distributed all the recipes they would be working on; and she also prepared a detailed teaching plan so that each instructor—“Prof. Julia,” “Prof. Simca,” and “Prof. Louisette”—would know exactly what she was supposed to do, and when. On March 12, 1952, for instance, the lesson for the day included blanquette de veau, or veal stew; risotto and plain rice; salade mimosa; and two tarts, banana and fruit. First came the introductory remarks by “Prof. Julia.” Then work on the blanquette began, with Prof. Julia teaching the meat, the shallots, and the parsley, and Prof. Simca working with the onions and mushrooms. (Prof. Louisette, who was caught in a terrible marriage and was trying to get out, did less teaching than the others in the early years of the school.) “During this time, Prof. Julia cleans up, puts rice water to boil,” the schedule read. Prof. Simca took charge of the crème pâtissière, or pastry cream; Prof. Julia, the salad and the velouté sauce for the veal; and Prof. Simca the final liaison of cream and egg yolks. (Apparently the lesson went very well—Julia scribbled “good menu” on the sheet.) On the day the plan featured quiche lorraine, puff pastry, steak à la bordelaise, and the meringue layer cake known as a dacquoise, Julia admitted the menu had been “too rich”; and on another occasion she decided the recipes were just too complicated for beginners. No matter what problems may have plagued the cooking, however, every class ended with a triumphant lunch for the teachers, the students, and their guests, typically a husband or two. When school was not in session, Julia and Simca got together in the kitchen to put their teaching recipes into what Julia called “scientific workability.” They had to be “painfully exact,” she told her family—“viz: exactly how much gelatine in exactly how much liquid per exactly how much mayonnaise so you can make pretty curlicues on a fish.” At her request, the family sent over a set of measuring cups and spoons, which were unknown in France.

  Julia also gave solo lessons, the first to a French woman who wanted to learn puff pastry. Though Julia had made it dozens of times and thought she understood it, she gave herself a practice session before the class and analyzed every step of the teaching to make sure it would be clear and accurate. Even so, there were two mistakes in the course of the lesson. Afterward, she decided she still lacked the “divine self-confidence” that identified a fine cook. “I want every technique to be perfect,” she told the family with determination, “and if there are errors, they must be made on purpose.” More and more, she could envision teaching at her own school, which she pictured in the kitchen of their Washington house.

  Many of the recipes used at L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes originated with Simca and Louisette, who had been working for years on a French cookbook for Americans. Their idea was to produce a wide-ranging collection of recipes with sections on wines, cheeses, and regional specialties, all authentically French, but written in English and published in the United States. Louisette, who was half American and had a number of friends and contacts in the United States, had taken the manuscript with her on one of her trips to New York and offered it to Sumner Putnam, head of a publishing company called Ives Washburn. Putnam was interested, but he had no experience with cookbooks and was unsure of the market. The manuscript, moreover, was
in poor shape. Simca and Louisette had written it in French, and although they had come up with a rough English translation, it needed a great deal of work. Putnam hired a translator and cookbook author, Helmut Ripperger, for the job and asked him to produce a kind of teaser for the book—a little recipe collection drawn from the manuscript and titled “What’s Cooking in France.” Simca and Louisette had signed a contract for the teaser but never saw “What’s Cooking” before it was published. It turned out to be an embarrassment, full of errors, and the women were distraught. In August 1952, they turned to Julia for help. The original manuscript had to be put into decent English before anything else could happen with the book—Would she take a look? Julia sat down with the sauce chapter and started to read with a pen in her hand. She had been teaching from some of these recipes, reworking them whenever necessary; and she also had done a good deal of research and recipe writing for herself. Now she tried to take the point of view of an American homemaker opening a new cookbook. She went into the kitchen and tested a few, exactly as they were written, and found them unusable. Some recipes were too abbreviated, others ran on forever with needless complications, and the instructions were infuriatingly vague. She couldn’t see anything worth saving and said exactly that to Simca and Louisette. By the end of November, the three women had worked up an entirely new plan for the book, and Julia wrote to Putnam to explain what they wanted to do.

  They would produce a teaching manual, she told Putnam, not just a recipe collection, and they would build it around fundamental themes and their variations. It would be written in what Julia called “the informal human approach”—a natural speaking voice, as opposed to the cloying tones of so many food writers whenever the subject was France. There were other French cookbooks for Americans, she conceded, but none was logical; none emphasized what Julia called “the ‘whys,’ the pitfalls, the remedies, the keeping, the serving”; none was specifically dedicated to rescuing the hapless and setting them on the right path. The new book would do all this while spanning the entire territory of basic and elaborate French cooking. She told Putnam to expect the revised chapter on sauces very shortly, and said the rest of the manuscript might take another six months.