The United States of Arugula (10 page)
Read The United States of Arugula Online
Authors: David Kamp
Like Claiborne, Julia found in France, and in French food, the focus that her life to that point had lacked. Her very first meal off the boat, at a restaurant called La Couronne, in Rouen, Normandy, blew her away: sole in a basic meunière sauce, made with lemon and plenty of local butter, bookended by oysters to start and salad and brie to finish. “I couldn’t get over it,” Julia recalled years later, still aghast that she’d spent the first thirty-odd years of her life eating “Middle-western, ladies’-magazine type of food.” A latecomer to Francophilia, she plunged into Paris like a woman with some catching up to do. She and Paul took an apartment on the rue de l’Université (to which she referred, with characteristic Julianess, as the “Roo de Loo”), in the city’s seventh arrondissement, and she set about learning French, walking the streets for hours, familiarizing herself with the stalls of Les Halles, having her coffee at Les Deux Magots (as opposed to at the Café de Flore—you fell into one or the other), and, above all, reveling in restaurant meals, in “the gentle garlic belches after eating escargots,” as her biographer, Noël Riley Fitch, put it.
A year into her Paris life, Julia decided she wanted to learn how to
cook in French—not only the
cuisine bourgeoise
of sophisticated French housewives but the haute cuisine of professional chefs, who were, by tradition, men. The logical next step was to enroll at the Cordon Bleu. As strongwilled as she was towering, Julia agitated to get out of the program for amateurs, to which she was initially assigned, and into the professional course for American war veterans, GI Bill guys learning to become chefs. She was the only woman in a class of twelve. Her teacher was Max Bugnard, a bespectacled, droopily mustached old fellow straight out of Audrey Hepburn’s Cordon Bleu scenes in
Sabrina
, who’d apprenticed under Escoffier himself.
Though he joked to friends that he had become a “Cordon Bleu widower,” Paul was thrilled by this development, especially since Julia, in her dogged determination to master the art of French cooking, often attempted to re-create her lessons with Bugnard the very evening after she’d learned them. In a letter to Charlie in December 1949, Paul described, for the first time, the sight of his wife, in their home kitchen, cooking French food—most likely a cassoulet, given the details: “The oven door opens and shuts so fast you hardly notice the deft thrust of a spoon as she dips into a casserole and up to her mouth for a taste-check … Now & again a flash of the non-cooking Julie lights up the scene briefly, as it did the day before yesterday when with her bare fingers, she snatched a set of cannellini [beans] out of the pot of boiling water with the cry, ‘Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock.’”
*
The French kitchen hierarchy in fine-dining restaurants went as follows: At the top was the exalted
chef de cuisine
, who was in charge of planning the menu, deciding the day’s purchases, and overseeing the kitchen. Next was the
sous chef
, the man operationally in charge of running the kitchen and the de facto hatchet man for his boss. Reporting to the
sous chef were
eight
chefs de par-tie
, department heads: the
saucier
, who handled sauces, stocks, and the task of sautéing meats; the
en-tremetier
, or vegetable cook, who also handled soups and omelets; the
poissonier
, or fish cook; the
rôtissier
, or roast cook, who broiled and roasted meats and also made
pommes frites
and other fried foods; the
garde-manger
, who handled cold dishes like pâtés; the
pâtissier
, or pastry chef; the
boucher
, or butcher, who carved the meat and poultry; and the
chef tournant
, the all-rounder who could fill in at any one of these stations in a pinch. The
chefs de partie
typically had three or four
commis
working for them, themselves ranked by ability and experience. In some especially elaborate and expensive French restaurants, there were as many as six
commis
in a department.
*
Taillevent was the
nom de chef
of Guillaume Tirel (1310–1395), still a revered figure among the French. In Paris, there is a Michelin-rated three-star restaurant named for him, where America’s current preeminent genius chef, Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, trained in the 1980s.
*
La Varenne’s preparations, so recognizably “French” in hindsight, give lie to the notion, often posited by Italian chefs exasperated by the Francocentrism of culinary history, that classical French cuisine derives wholly from the Florentine cooks who accompanied Catherine de Medici from Italy to France in 1533—when, at age fourteen, she married the Duke of Orléans, later to become King Henry II. While the Florentines were indeed a huge modernizing influence on France, popularizing green vegetables and the separation of sweet courses from savory, La Varenne’s
Le cuisinier françois
reveals a chef working in his own distinct idiom, a creative force in his own right.
*
Though Europe has several restaurants that claim to date as far back as the Middle Ages, the restaurant in the modern sense—an establishment that offers waiter service and a varied bill of fare to paying customers—dates back only to the late eighteenth century. The word “restaurant” is attributed to a Paris soup merchant named Boulanger who believed his soups had curative, or restorative, properties. Boulanger’s establishment, which opened in 1765, was said to have been adorned with a sign that read
Boulanger débite des restaurants divins
, which translates, more or less, as “Boulanger provides divine sustenance.” The first fine-dining restaurant of consequence, complete with a good wine cellar, is generally thought to be La Grande Taverne de Londres, which opened in Paris in 1782 under the auspices of Antoine Beauvilliers, who challenged Carême in the cookbook-publishing stakes with his own
L’art du cuisinier
(1814).
†
D’Oyly Carte made his fortune as the producer of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. He built the Savoy Theatre first, in 1881, and conceived of the hotel as a posh après-show spot for well-to-do theatergoers. The hotel ended up being a bigger earner than his theatrical endeavors.
*
In 1910, the New York Ritz, to which César Ritz had licensed his name, opened on Madison Avenue, with Louis Diat as the executive chef. In 1950, as this hotel was about to close, Diat told
The New Yorker
, “I am not of the school of Escoffier, but of the schools of M. Jules Tissier, of the Bristol, in Paris; of M. Georges Gimon, of the Paris Ritz; and of M. Emile Malley, of the London Ritz”—a curious remark, given that Messieurs Gimon and Malley were presumably following the directives of Escoffier.
*
Delmonico’s had begun in 1827 as a café operated by Lorenzo’s uncles, John and Peter—born in Switzerland as Giovanni and Pietro Del-Monico—and by 1831 had upgraded itself to a self-described “Restaurant Français.” The entrepreneurial Lorenzo, the Jean-Georges Vongerichten of his time, extended the brand aggressively, opening a new Delmonico’s location every time New York’s social center of gravity crept northward.
*
Wechsberg, too, attempted to capture Le Pavillon’s aroma in words, as “a delicate blend of
beurre noisette
[brown butter] and
sauce homard
[lobster sauce], Périgueux truffles and broiled Chateaubriand, Fine Champagne 1843 and a fine Havana—and the lovely scents of lovely women.”
†
Doing his bit for the war effort, that irrepressible boulevardier Lucius Beebe devoted several column inches to the quandary of how men in uniform should be seated at fancy restaurants: Do nobodies of high military rank deserve better seating than somebodies of low rank? Evidently not, thought Beebe: “When Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, long an ornament of the plushier puddles, turned up in a boatswain’s mate’s uniform, he wasn’t to be discarded, even momentarily, in favor of some provincial colonel who, until the week before, had never encountered a French menu.”
*
Chamberlain collected his Clémentine pieces into a book in 1943. Fifty-eight years later,
Clémentine in the Kitchen
was reissued as the first title in Random House’s Modern Library food series, with a new introduction by
Gourmet’s
Ruth Reichl.
†
This epithet was first used to satirical effect in a 1995 episode
of The Simpsons
in which the character Groundskeeper Willie, an ever-irate Scotsman, utters the phrase to express his disdain for the French. It was repurposed by conservative commentators as an angry taunt during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which the French government opposed.
*
Claiborne also never forgave his mother for withholding from him for six months the information that his boyhood friend and biggest crush, Gordon Lyon Jr., an air force pilot, had been shot down over the Solomon Islands in 1943. Like Gore Vidal’s great teen love, the baseball prodigy Jimmy Trimble, who was also killed in combat in the Pacific theater, Lyon was a handsome, sensitive jock with a unique tolerance for “dear boys,” though he didn’t have an affair with Claiborne, as Trimble did with Vidal.
THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENT, PART I
James Beard (left) converses merrily with the ladies of the old-line food world at a Greenwich Village garden party, 1950s.
It began with curry. Curry with fifteen little condiments and Major Grey’s mango chutney. The year of the curry is hard to pinpoint, but this much is clear: it was before the year of quiche Lorraine, the year of paella, the year of vitello tonnato, the year of boeuf Bourguignon, the year of blanquette de veau, and the year of beef Wellington … It was the beginning, and in the beginning there was James Beard and there was curry and that was about all.
—Nora Ephron,
New York
magazine, 1968
JIM BEARD RETURNED FROM FRANCE AFTER THE WAR FEELING “ROOTLESS AND WITH
out purpose.” He’d written three cookbooks, catered his share of parties, and dished out Provençal stuffed eggplant to the boys in Marseilles, but in mid-1940s America, there was simply no lucrative niche for a jolly male culinary authority to fall into. Fortunately, the National Broadcasting Company, which had started out in the twenties as a radio network, was in desperate need of ideas and programming for its upstart television operation, and it contacted Beard in 1946 to see if he was interested in doing cooking demonstrations on a new TV show.
Elsie Presents
, as the show was called at first, was a hodgepodge of household hints and stilted interviews with radio and theater celebrities, with segments introduced by a puppet version of Elsie the Cow, the spokes-mascot of the Borden dairy company, the program’s sponsor.
*
(Elsie was
operated by Bil Baird, the great puppeteer who later did the “Lonely Goatherd” sequence in
The Sound of Music.)
Beard was given a fifteen-minute segment at the end of the show called “I Love to Eat!”—in its modest way, the first cooking program ever on TV. The face Beard presented to the public was that of the manly man who’d written
Cook It Outdoors
, the big fella who built barbecue pits and roasted enormous birds.
Elsie Presents
ran on Fridays, fight night at Madison Square Garden, and, in its short run, immediately followed NBC’s boxing telecasts. In that era, TV sets were less likely to be found in private homes than in public gathering places, and the throngs that convened in taverns and hotel lobbies to watch the fights stuck around to watch Beard, too. Charlie Berns of the 21 Club, the exclusive restaurant on Fifty-second Street in New York that began its life as a speakeasy (known colloquially as Jack and Charlie’s), called Beard to tell him that one night his diners had refused to leave the bar to go to their tables until they’d finished watching Beard make spare ribs.
Though
Elsie Presents
helped Beard achieve greater name and face recognition, the show lasted only through 1947, by which time Borden had pulled out and Birds Eye Frozen Foods had assumed sponsorship—incidentally beginning Beard’s long, uneasy relationship with corporate sponsors whose products and methods ran counter to his culinary values. And, for all his ability to charm a live audience at an in-store cooking demonstration, Beard was curiously stiff on TV, not his ebullient self. “Jim wasn’t much good on television for some reason,” says Judith Jones of Knopf. “He started out to be an actor, and I think that was probably his downfall, because the minute he got in front of a mike, he’d suddenly be acting. He couldn’t be himself.”
After Beard, the reigning TV cook was Dione Lucas, an Englishwoman who had graduated from the Cordon Bleu and founded her own cooking
school, L’École du Petit Cordon Bleu, in London in the thirties. Lucas moved to New York after the war and started up the Dione Lucas Gourmet Cooking School (so named because the Cordon Bleu in Paris wouldn’t license the name to her), landing her own one-hour program on CBS for the 1948–49 season,
To the Queen’s Taste
(later retitled
Dione Lucas’s Cooking Show).
Lucas was no more charismatic on TV than Beard—she was small, stocky, and dour, with her hair pulled back tightly like a suffragette’s—but she was undeniably a good teacher, and her specialty was French cookery, the field of cuisine that aspirational housewives most wished to learn.
