Backstage with Julia (19 page)

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

—Anaïs Nin,
The Diary of Anaïs Nin

"Let's get a hot dog," Julia said. We were driving south from Cambridge on Route 128. It was about ten in the morning, and I was surprised, not by the hot dog but because Julia almost never ate be- tween meals. She believed that snacking was a regrettable American habit brought about by a lack of enjoying good, satisfying food at mealtimes. I love hot dogs, but they were not on my mind at that particular time and place.

"Where should we go?" I asked.

"There's a highway stop just up ahead." Okay, it was going to be a fast-food hot dog.

The dog wasn't half bad, but the real feast was seeing other travelers poke each other and point our way, most likely asking if that really was Julia Child pushing a plastic cafeteria tray along the counter and ordering "one with everything."

Before I knew her, I would have been as amazed or amused as they were at the sight of not just any celebrity but a gourmet celebrity ordering a hot dog at a quick roadside stop. But I wasn't with a celebrity; I was with a friend.

In his
Life of Johnson,
James Boswell wrote, "We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over." In a profession dominated by the pleasures of the table, the lines between collegial and social are often blurred, since so much of our work involves sharing good food and fine wine at a table surrounded by people who are jovial and friendly just because they are eating. Julia had good friends and it was obvious who they were, but she also had a most splendid way of making many people around her
feel
like friends. I don't know at what point I began to think of her as a friend or she me, but I remember the first time she said it.

We were working alone in her kitchen. It was late morning, three or maybe more years after we met. "Let's go out for lunch," she said.

"Great idea. Let's do it."

Two other people were working in the upstairs office, and I asked if I should invite them to join us.

"No," she said, and then, perhaps to clarify her quick response, she added, "They work for me. We're friends." I remember feeling glad that she'd said it.
I
felt that we were friends, and it was good to know she did as well.

From the get-go Julia made it easy to be her friend, and it could have been otherwise. After all, to culinary zealots, she was the food goddess, the high priestess of cuisine. Many devotees admit that dining with her for the first time involved a lot of self-pinching and silent repetition of
I am sitting at the table with Julia Child!
In less time than it takes to scramble an egg, she cleared idolatry from the table by being so regular, so utterly unpretentious. Those who couldn't make a quick transition from hero worship to "Let's go get a hot dog" missed out on the fun; Julia did not warm to constant fawners at all.

I think the foundation of our friendship formed as soon as I went on the road with her for those early demonstrations in Memphis and New Haven. We traveled well together—a deal breaker for friendship if ever there was one. Can you be flexible? Can you meet, smiling and chatty, for breakfast at 6:00 a.m., even though you were operating on less than five hours of sleep? Will you forgo the aisle seat—without grumbling that an inside one makes you claustrophobic—because there was only one left on the plane and Julia's long legs made any other seat impossibly uncomfortable for her? Is the focus of your day where your next meal will be? And, above all, will you have a good time, and never mention the T-word even when the days are long and the workload staggering?

That all worked for me. The early mornings and the long days were never an issue, since all my life I never seemed to require more than five hours of sleep; I was thrilled to have someone else awake and ready to talk at five-thirty in the morning. Seating was irrelevant. As Julia liked to note about my short stature, whether referring to an airplane seat or the middle spot in the back of a car, "Nancy can sit there. She has no legs." I was as guilty as the next passionate foodie of swooning over one meal while at the same time planning what and where I would eat the next. And, after 1984, I was happy to send for room service on Sunday nights so Julia wouldn't miss her favorite TV show, Angela Lansbury's
Murder, She Wrote.

The have-a-good-time part was easy. We all loved what we were doing. And we had Liz, who made us all laugh with her quick, irreverent Boston Irish humor. Ten years older than I, Liz had been with Julia for some twenty years, and she gave me my Berlitz class in Julia-ese. She told me about the T-word and warned me, "We never mention the name of that other spread on the table," the one that's not real butter. I learned from her which people we never mentioned by name but only with sobriquets such as "that woman from Schenectady" or a sarcastically toned "
your friend
from Ohio."

But more than a language lesson, Liz showed me through her own candid relationship with Julia that Julia did not expect docile veneration from her friends. One day in Cambridge, we were testing Julia's recipe for a free-form meat loaf, which had to look particularly appetizing since it was destined for the cover of
Parade
. Brown food, such as meat loaf, is always a challenge for stylists and photographers, but that particular meatloaf really pushed the envelope. It was a long way from looking good, and worse, its texture was unpleasant and its flavor just so-so. Julia asked for our opinions, and we made polite comments: "Perhaps more eggs," "It seems a little tight," "Maybe a red sauce of some type on the top," and of course, "Cover it with parsley."

Then Liz piped up, "It looks like dog food."

"You're right," Julia said, and scrapped the recipe.

Liz did not restrict her candor with Julia to the privacy of Julia's home. She needled her in public, and Julia loved it. In addition to working for Julia, Liz consulted for a Boston wine shop. She had an appreciation for and knew much about wines from many countries, and eventually taught wine classes at my cooking school. Frequently in restaurants, waiters would hand Julia the wine list with an announcement from the chef or owner, "The wine is on us. Please choose whatever you would like." No question what he meant. The sky was the limit, and for a moment Liz would get a wistful look glancing at the possibilities. But she knew what Julia was going to order, and she mimicked Julia by mouthing the exact words at the same time Julia told the waiter, "A nice little Beaujolais would be lovely. Thank you." That's when Julia's eyes would twinkle, and she would poke Liz in the arm.

On nights like that, when our team dined alone, our conversations covered a wide range of topics. We weren't strictly colleagues discussing the latest culinary trends. We were friends talking about current affairs, gossiping, ribbing one another—and occasionally squabbling. My first experience with a family spat was in Memphis, and it was between Paul and Julia. It was also the first time I saw Julia dig in her heels in a way that just told you there was no sense in trying to talk her out of whatever bone she was gnawing.

And Paul was just as obstinate. On that evening, they locked horns in an unselfconscious, open argument at the table, and it felt just like family. Liz, Marian, Paul, Julia, and I had finished dinner, and although Julia usually enjoyed a nibble of something sweet after a meal, that night the chef had sent so many complimentary appetizers that none of us had room except Paul, who could always be counted on to eat a small dish of ice cream. When the waiter brought his ice cream, he also set a three-tiered tray of small sweets on the table.

"Who ordered those?" Paul asked.

"No one," Julia responded. "The chef sent them."

"I don't think he should send something that no one ordered."

"It's something chefs like to do."

"I don't think they should. If no one ordered them, then no one will eat them and they will go to waste."

"That's not the point, Paul. It's a nice thing to do and someone may want eat one." I had been eyeing the pieces of candied orange peel, but at that point, it was no longer dessert; it was a gauntlet that had been thrown down, and I wasn't about to take sides.

"If someone wanted to eat one, they would have ordered one," Paul insisted, and so it went, long after we signed the check, all during our departure from the restaurant, and in the elevator ride upstairs. It was not a heated, acrimonious argument, just a test of who would get in the last word. I don't know who did or how long into the night they argued, but they were their usual agreeable selves at breakfast.

With Julia making it obvious that she was just like everyone else and wanted to be treated that way, and Liz driving the point home by doing so, my rapport with Julia was equally open and unguarded. We liked each other, and the first of Boswell's imaginary drops of friendship began to fill the vessel.

Our closeness grew as I began to spend more time with her at home. "Come for dinner and spend the night," she said for the first time when we were working on
Parade
. "I have plenty of room, and you can have your own bathroom," she added, expressing a shared preference we established when we were on the road together—our own bedrooms and our own bathrooms. The bathroom was a draw, but not as much as the fact that sleeping over meant I would not have to deal with daily round trips in the horrid commuter traffic back and forth between Cambridge and Providence.

To Julia, "come for dinner" meant "we'll cook dinner together first, then we'll eat." Cooking with her for no reason other than eating was different from cooking for work. We didn't have to hurry for the cameras, take notes, or retest. Our meals were simple; we didn't look in cookbooks for fancy new dishes. Still, Julia applied the same careful preparation to everything we cooked, no matter how basic, as she did to her "audience" food. And because teaching and learning were such a part of who she was, cooking dinner was always an opportunity to learn something new.

The first cooking lesson Julia asked me to give her was how to make risotto. I was slightly surprised that she wanted me to give her an Italian cooking lesson. Overall, she wasn't a great fan of Italian food, nor did she think it involved the discipline and technique of French cuisine. But she loved risotto and was aware that a good one required know-how. The classic Italian rice dish was popping up around the country in restaurants of all ethnicities, in culinary magazines, and at catered events. A well-prepared risotto is ethereal; badly cooked, it's a blob of glue on the plate. Julia wanted me to show her how to make it exactly the way Marcella Hazan had taught me in Bologna.

"Can you bring the rice, dearie?" she asked when she called me at home. Rice variety is key to a good risotto. The grain must be able to dissolve enough to create the creamy texture yet remain firm enough at the center to deliver the characteristic bite of the dish.

I had a cupboard full of Italian rice—Arborio, Vialone Nano, Carnaroli. I chose the Carnaroli because, of the three, it produces the creamiest texture. I also brought my own meat broth from my freezer, since one of the most important lessons I learned from Marcella is that Italian
brodo
and French stock are not interchangeable. French stock is richer and its flavor is distractingly strong in a delicate risotto.

Julia stood next to me, observed, questioned, and commented on every step as I made the dish—how long did I sauté the rice before adding the wine, at what pace did I add the hot broth, how much broth and when should we stir in the final butter and cheese. Thank you, Marcella—our risotto was perfect, and Julia and I made it together often. When a grower sent Julia a bag of special California-grown rice, touted to be as good as the Italian Arborio for risotto, we couldn't wait to try it. I didn't think it was quite as good, but that might have been my heritage talking. Julia thought it was—undoubtedly her California roots speaking.

Usually what we cooked did not involve standing over each other and observing step-by-step preparations, and mostly I remember the easy way Julia applied her culinary training to just cooking. The first time I saw her make her "small chicken stock," I wondered why I had never even considered it. We were roasting a chicken, and Julia said we should make a "nice little velouté" to go with it. Velouté is one of the French "mother sauces" and a first lesson in culinary school. It's made by adding white stock to a flour-and-butter roux and then whatever flavorings or enrichments one chooses. I knew how to do that.

"Do you have chicken stock?" I asked, walking to the freezer.

"Yes. But we can make a small chicken stock. We don't need much."

I didn't know "small chicken stock." I only knew four-hour, twelve-quart-pot stock. Julia cut the wing tips from the bird and browned them in a one-quart saucepan with the neck and gizzards. She then added large pieces of onion (with the skin for color), unsalted canned chicken broth (sometimes just water), a tomato half for a bit of acid, and an herb bouquet, and by the time the chicken was cooked, we had a fine, rich stock for our sauce. Julia's "small stock" was a departure from traditional culinary school techniques and perhaps one of my first understandings of what she meant when she said, "You have to be a fearless cook." If you know what something is supposed to taste like and can get there a new way, "go whole hog and do it."

Our fearless-cook triumph together was polenta, the age-old, classic Italian cornmeal staple that had become as popular as risotto in American restaurants.

"Do you know how to make it?" Julia asked me. What kind of a question is that to ask an Italian? Before I learned how from Marcella, I learned how from my grandmother. Their methods were the same: drizzle cornmeal slowly through your fingers—
come neve
(like snow), Nonna said—into boiling water and stir well to prevent lumps from forming. Nothing to learn there, or so I thought. Julia wondered if we couldn't apply a trick she had learned, I think it was in making grits, that called for mixing the grain first with cold water until it is smooth and then adding boiling water to it and finishing the cooking. Blasphemy! But it worked. There was no loss of texture or flavor and absolutely no chance for lumps to form. Traditionally, as soon as polenta is fully cooked, it is immediately poured out on a plate or board and eaten, or shaped into a cylinder and cooled for later use. Excited with our cold-water success, Julia then wondered how long we could keep the cooked polenta in the pan before pouring it out. So we left the pot on the stove, and as water evaporated we added more boiling water to the pot. It kept perfectly for hours. Julia was so pleased with our results that she decided to use our recipe for an issue of
Parade,
and then some years later, when she asked me to teach a class with her at Mondavi Vineyards, she suggested I demonstrate our modern polenta. We always thought of the recipe as "our polenta."