Julia Child Rules (12 page)

Their letters are astonishing, a primer both on what it means to be a good friend and why people loved Julia the way they did. When DeVoto, as Avis referred to him, won the National
Book Award, Julia leaned hard into her congratulations, raving for a solid sincere paragraph about his achievement. She always inquired about Avis’s work, health, and sons,
*
and they jointly railed against Republicans, McCarthyism, books they’d read and loved and hated, even the findings in the Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior.
^†
Their letters were tender and conscientious. Once Julia apologized for failing to send more biographical details about Simca and Louisette and promised them next time, along with “a nice photo of a cold decorated fish.”

Mostly, they rhapsodized about cooking, and about Julia’s big book project. Reading through these long, euphoric letters to Avis, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether Julia was on something other than a beautiful Bordeaux 1929. She enthused over the pure beauty of white beans, the eye-watering bite of some garlic sausages, the heavenly ham hocks, tiny French strawberries, which she called dreamberries. I’m perfectly willing to accept that I don’t possess the foodie gene that inspires me to speak in tongues when in the presence of the year’s first crop of string beans, but neither did Julia. In her rather heavily documented life, there are few foodgasms before she met Paul: She rhapsodized dutifully about her mother’s codfish balls and Welsh rarebit and waxes nostalgic about tootling down to Tijuana with her family to try something called a Caesar salad, but otherwise she seemed to be a born food-as-fuel gal.

What changed?

My theory, extrapolated from years of watching Dr. Huang of
Law & Order SVU: Special Victims Unit
explain why people (usually deranged criminals) behave in ways the rest of us find inexplicable, is that every time Julia perfected a dish, she was revisiting the rapture of her life’s grandest transitional moment, the Day of the Sole Meunière in Rouen. It was her own private Eucharist, celebrating love, the senses, the joy of sex and intimacy, and the transformation of a lost girl, now found.

Even though she came, eventually, to stand for celebrating the glory of our imperfect, overseared pork chops, and potato pancakes we accidentally dropped on the floor, she knew that occasionally a dish could be perfect, and a life could be perfect, for just that moment. Like every superhero, Julia had that origin story, and in making
Mastering
she was given an opportunity to relive it. She was both enjoying and documenting in the recipes her own self-discovery, that which, finally, in middle age gave her life its meaning.

During those years in which she labored over
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
she lived in a state of more or less permanent jubilation, spending her days in “flow,” that hippie-sounding term that describes a feeling of complete absorption in the task at hand.
*

Happiness studies are all the rage now, even though all the ancient philosophers, including Unknown and Anonymous,
insist that happiness is a by-product of something else, like being busy (Mark Twain), limiting our desires (John Stuart Mill), or letting go (The Buddha). My idea of happiness is doing something with your life that echoes a time when you were 100 percent sure you were happy.
*

A friend of mine had a son who loved playing “office” when he was small, and he has grown up to be the happiest
^†
contracts attorney I know. Likewise, the world is full of people who opted for business school or marketing careers either because they weren’t lucky enough to find something that put them in a swoon, or they needed a career, and one seemed as good as any other. Almost always they find out, too late, that one is not as good as any other.

Julia worked hard and worked happy for a good half century. How did she do it?

Throw yourself into it, even when no one cares but you.

Mayonnaise is relatively easy to make. Julia mastered it early. Often, when the cooking wasn’t going well and she was pulling
out her hair, ruining pound after pound of
escalope de veau,
*
she would whip up a pint or two to boost her confidence. Combine an egg yolk with half a cup of oil and add a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. Voilà, mayonnaise.

Then one day the yolk would not accept the oil or the oil would not mingle with the egg, or something was going on. Julia did exactly what she always did, but she wound up with something closer to mucus than mayonnaise. She was flummoxed. Why did her recipe, which had never failed her, suddenly fail her? Learning to cook had awakened Julia’s inner voluptuary, but this was something else. Apparently, it was not enough to be able to make something, document how you got there, and call it a recipe; you also had to know why the food did what it did, so that if something changed (What changed? Hadn’t she made mayonnaise the way she always made mayonnaise?) you could modify your technique.

Thus Julia’s inner scientist was born. Cooking was worthy of being her life’s passion because it was the only thing, aside from her love of Paul, that kept revealing new parts of herself.

How could Julia have known she had an inner, exacting chemist? This now nearly middle-aged woman who had no apparent aptitude for science was now consumed with how cooking
worked.
She was obsessed with her failed mayonnaise.
Was it the temperature of the egg yolk? The temperature of the bowl? The temperature in the kitchen? Would mixing it with a fork guarantee perfection?
*
Did it make a difference whether you added the oil all at once? Fast or slow? Slow at first, then faster? Drop by drop?

She was now no simple Foreign Service wife dutifully throwing together a meal for her hardworking husband. This was something else, a woman on a mission to find the answer to something meaningful only to her. She spent days making nothing but mayonnaise. She made so much mayonnaise, even Paul, who ate and relished everything she cooked, said
No more,
and she was forced to dump gallons of it down the commode. Finally, triumphant, she recorded her discovery,
^†
and she mailed it to all her friends and family. Let’s pause to remember the effort this took in 1950: the typing, the procuring of the proper postage stamps, the mailing, the waiting for a response. The result: complete silence.

Julia became obsessed over the molecular structure of potatoes and wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if they might offer any insight.
^‡
She educated herself on the best part of the cow’s stomach to use for tripe, and if anyone cared, which part of an egg yolk is the core. Once, she threw a dinner
party and served sea bass with a beurre blanc sauce that wouldn’t “blanc.”
Why?
She was astounded, believing she had her beurre blanc down cold. The next morning she made six more batches to make sure she got it right. She did all this because it interested her to know, not because it was necessary for writing the cookbook, although it wound up being absolutely necessary because it lent
Mastering
the authority it enjoys to this day.

I am sobered when I think of how much of Julia’s cooking life was spent satisfying her own curiosity. For me, cooking remains confusing, all wrapped up in housewifery, in being the body attached to the arm attached to the hand that holds the plate of steaming food, in being the woman, in her place, in the kitchen. Home cooks cook because someone is hungry or there is going to be a celebration that demands food. A recent episode of
Downton Abbey,
the British upstairs/downstairs soap opera, touched on the dilemma when Mrs. Patmore, the head cook of the Abbey, feared and obeyed by all the young kitchen maids beneath her, is courted by a local produce purveyor. This would have been the last chance at romance for Mrs. Patmore, but she turns him down, realizing he only wanted her for her cooking, and that she would rather oversee the tremendous daily work of making the meals for the Crawleys of Downton Abbey than be at the endless beck and call of a husband who demanded his pudding made just so.

But cooking aside, how often do you—do any of us—work that hard at something simply to find the answers to questions no one else is asking but us? Whatever modern strides have
been made in feminism, women, it seems to me, are as tied to results, by which I mean pleasing others, as we ever were. The woman I consider to be my most successful friend—lucratively self-employed with a sweet and handsome husband, lovely kids—swears by her To Do List. She loves her To Do List. She has blogged hilariously and with great affection about her To Do List. I asked to see it and was surprised, given her success, that not one thing on it was something she did purely out of her own curiosity. When I asked her about this she laughed and said, “Who has time for curiosity for curiosity’s sake?” But what made her happy? Her family, of course. Her lucrative career, of course. But what else? “Getting to the end of the day,” she said, “and knowing I’ve finished my To Do List.”

Do not cater to the flimsies.

Julia was a stickler for proper cooking technique but was free and easy when it came to language. When she couldn’t find what she considered to be the proper word or phrase, she made up her own. Some of her favorites, in no particular order:

“Flimsies” is such a ridiculous word, but Julia was serious. She, who’d never been taken seriously before, was serious on every front on which she could be: serious about not allowing anyone to condescend to her because she was a mere housewife; serious about behaving like a professional, even as she was still learning; serious about refusing to dumb down her recipes to
make them seem less daunting to her readership;
*
and perhaps most important, serious about her procedures, which were the actions that spoke louder than her words.

She tested and retested every recipe in Simca and Louisette’s book and rewrote every one. She had to find out everything for herself, had to see it with her own eyes. If Simca, Louisette, or Avis, or one of the trusted friends back in the States who were trying out her recipes as she was completing them came up with a different result, she would try the recipe again, to see if she could duplicate it.

When the time came to tackle cassoulet, the iconic comfort food casserole from the south of France—pork sausage, goose, and white haricot beans cooked for days in a heavy earthenware pot—Julia rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all from chefs who claimed, in Dogmatic Meatball–style, that their recipe was the
correct
recipe.

Reader, she made them all.

She was determined to Americanize dishes that most people could go to their grave without knowing how to make. Fish quenelles is one. The first clue is that there is no English translation. A quenelle is a quenelle is a quenelle. The second is the phrase “force the fish through the strainer.” All that comes to mind is a scene from
Alien Resurrection,
where the massive, gleaming half-human/half-alien is sucked out of a golf ball–size
air hole and into deep space, viscera first. Still, Julia thought we should all know about them.
*

Most of
Mastering
was written via mail.
^†
In 1953, not long after Julia began working in earnest, Paul was posted to Marseille, which they loved (still France) and then to Plattsdorf, Germany (not so much). They spent some time back in Washington, D.C, then went on to Oslo, Norway. There was no question that Julia would accompany him. Where Paul went, Julia went. They were Pulia. Julia packed up her
batterie de cuisine
(totaling seventy-two pots, pans, graters, extractors, squeezers, and whisks) and unpacked it again in some too-small kitchen with too-low counters in another city, so that she could continue working on the book.

Still, it didn’t matter where she was; her work ethic was something not seen often among people in this century. In their little government-issue apartment in Plattsdorf, which Julia more or less despised, she nevertheless set herself the task of learning German. After cooking most of the day, she would finish up writing recipes around 7:00 p.m. and cook dinner to be served at 8:00 p.m. Then she and Paul would “fritter” away an hour (during which she would relax by writing detailed, hilarious ten-page letters to Avis), after which she would study German for a few hours.

Though she often wanted to bash Simca over the head for some
La Super-Française
outburst, she was rarely unhappy.

It’s not a new observation: Throwing ourselves into hard work can be deeply gratifying, and mastering a skill is a satisfaction in and of itself, but the reality of this has largely fallen out of favor. In our modern times, people generally feel that the key to happiness involves doing the least amount of work for the most glory, believing that happiness is to be found in outward appreciation and approval, not inner dedication. That this never really makes anyone happy—witness the miserable reality stars, the depressed lottery winners—fails to deter us; we somehow remain convinced that the smart money is on figuring out a way to grab the gold ring with the least amount of effort.