Julia Child Rules (20 page)

Nancy Verde Barr was one of Julia’s young friends. A good twenty years younger and a full foot shorter than Julia, Verde Barr was a graduate of Madeleine Kamman’s Modern Gourmet cooking school and owned a school of her own. Kamman, born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, was a
Super-Française
and would snort with derision at the mere mention of Julia’s name, who she dismissed as a mere TV cook, and not a real chef. But Julia didn’t hold this against Nancy, with whom she traveled and hung out for the last twenty or so years of her life.

By the early 1990s, Julia lived alone, visiting Paul every day when she was in town, but taking Nancy as her escort to the many dinners, receptions, lectures, benefits, and parties (including most of those birthday parties) to which she was invited. One day she told Nancy that they should really make a point of finding some nice men, because wasn’t life just that much more fun with men around? Nancy, perhaps to humor her, agreed, but said nice men weren’t that easy to find.

Less than a week later, Julia called Nancy and said not to worry about her, that she’d found a man. John McJennett was an old friend of Paul’s. When Paul had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d crashed the twenty-first birthday party of McJennett’s late wife. They’d stayed friends throughout the years, and now he and Julia were smitten. McJennett was a he-man, a Harvard man, Marine, and semiprofessional baseball player who was an inch taller than Julia (!) and knew nothing about cuisine.

He squired her around for years and sometimes dropped hints about getting married, forgetting that Julia was married. She confided in Nancy about his proposals, mock-groaning that she already had taken care of one old man, and she didn’t need another one! Did she love him? Who knows. She loved the old mold that he came from, that straight-up manly man, simple as the steak and baked potato he preferred. Perhaps he reminded her of Pop, only nicer, but he enlivened her days.

On May 12, 1994, Julia and John were having a late dinner at Jasper’s, after a long day of filming
Master Chefs,
when word came that Paul had died. Julia bolted up from the table and raced to the nursing home to see for herself. Three days later a wisteria Paul had planted in the yard decades earlier bloomed for the first time. Even though he had been sick for so long, Julia cried for days.

James Thurber, humorist and dog person, said, “Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved
compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.” Those of us who admire Julia are troubled by the wish to be as happy and carefree as she, who had no fear, didn’t worry, didn’t fret, and sobbed herself sick when she was grief-stricken, then when her tears were dry, moved on to the next thing.

As Julia explains for us in
Julia Child & Company
(1978), French cuisine is not only haute cuisine, fine dining at one of those four-star restaurants with exotic ingredients
*
and no prices on the menu. The French have an itch to classify everything they encounter, and their famous cooking is no exception. In its time, people supposed
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was instructing Americans on how to make haute cuisine, but it was actually proffering recipes from
la cuisine bourgeoise,
one step down from haute cuisine.
^†
One step down from that is
la cuisine de famille,
which Julia typifies as a Sunday lunch with a starter of sliced tomatoes vinaigrette, followed by a roast leg of lamb with green beans, then the cheese course, followed by a nice apple tart. One step below that is what is referred to as peasant cooking or
la cuisine bonne femme
: a hardy soup, big pieces of crusty bread, followed by a piece of fruit for dessert. Late last century nouvelle cuisine came along (three spears of asparagus arranged artfully on a plate), then
cuisine minceur,
literally “slimming cooking” (two spears
of asparagus arranged artfully on a plate). It goes without saying that there is no name for a cuisine that includes standing in the middle of the kitchen eating a hot dog you’ve cooked over the burner.

Missing from this list is
la cuisine Julia,
the foundation of everything we cook today.
La cuisine Julia
is not French, but Frenchy. Its founding philosophy is liberal rather than classical, believing that there is always room for variation, experimentation, and completely screwing up. Fresh ingredients are preferred, but no one is sent to food hell for opening a can of cream of mushroom soup.
La cuisine Julia
is, above all, serious; it renounces shortcuts, sloppiness, or a lack of attention to details. It must be performed with time and love, and a little imperfection.

Not long ago a woman who grew up on my street in Whittier contacted me and said she was going through some old books at her parents’ house and came across a cookbook published in 1966 by Las Damas, a women’s club my mother belonged to. She saw my mother had contributed to it and wondered if I’d be interested in having it.
Oh, man!
I thought, in the exact voice of the girl I was when my mother was making all those recipes.

The cookbook is the size of a hardback book and comb-bound with a brown plastic comb. It is dedicated to “The Modern Home. In our Home today, and always, Life is Centered around Our Kitchens.”

The recipes are what you would expect from a suburban 1960s cookbook: lots of casseroles, lots of recipes with “easy” in the title, terse instructions, practically haikus: “Brown meat. Add remaining ingredients. Serve over Fritos.”

My mother contributed recipes for Nuts ’n Bolts (“Hors d’Oeuvres, Party and T.V. Snacks”), Baked Chicken Breasts (which she recommends serving with Rice Pilaf and Caesar Salad), Chafing Dish Gourmet (the less said about this the better), Mixed Vegetables Mornay (using a box of Birds Eye Frozen Mixed Vegetables), and Beef Stroganoff.

The stroganoff instructions are the longest in the book, and at the end, my mother thought to include this: “Note: Dill greatly enhances the flavor of meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Each year I buy a bunch of dill and preserve it by cutting off the sprigs, discarding the stalks, and packing in salt in a large jar, which I keep in the refrigerator. When ready to use, simply wash a sprig in cold water.”

Instantly, I recognized the internalized voice of Julia, informing, guiding, and reassuring.

I wish I could say that I was inspired to make my mother’s beef stroganoff that very night, and that it was so delicious my complicated feelings about food and cooking were transformed forever, as were Julia’s on that long ago day in Rouen, but
beef stroganoff?

Still, there is hope for me yet. Remember the fish filets poached in white wine that Kathy and I almost didn’t make that day in Paris? We did not give up that night. Instead, we opened
a bottle of our three-euro Chardonnay and stumbled forward, poaching the filets in our makeshift white wine and vegetable broth, covering it with buttered notebook paper to hold in the heat, and continuing to simmer it on top of the stove, because we had no oven. It was in all ways wrong, but we proceeded as if we were following Julia’s recipe to the letter.

While Kathy was monitoring the fish, I assembled the egg yolk sauce, for that is the homely anglicized name of
Sauce à la Parisienne,
making a roux from the fish poaching stock, flour, and that stupendous French butter, then adding the cream and yolks. It was not as flavorful as
Sauce Hollandaise
but much sturdier and more difficult to ruin, and it could be made without a whisk.

We sautéed some beautiful, slender haricots verts and shallots, threw together a green salad, grabbed a baguette, and sat down at our table in front of the window looking out on the Romanian Embassy. Next door, we could hear our neighbor yelling. We poured more wine, toasted our ability to persevere, and dug in.

Reader, it was perfectly delicious.

These were the titles I read and reread as I thought and wrote about the woman we came to know simply as Julia. A complete list of Julia Child’s books, television shows, and DVDs can be found at
www.juliachildfoundation.org
.

J
ULIA
C
HILD

Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child
by Noël Riley Fitch

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto,
edited by Joan Reardon

Backstage with Julia: My Years with Julia Child
by Nancy Verde Barr

A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS
by Jennet Conant

Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
by Bob Spitz

Julia Child: A Life
by Laura Shapiro

Julia Child’s The French Chef
by Dana Polan

M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child & Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table
by Joan Reardon

My Life in France
by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme

Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS
by Elizabeth P. McIntosh

A
ND
O
THERS

The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition
by M.F.K. Fisher

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford

The I Hate to Cook Book
by Peg Bracken

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
by Julie Powell

My Kitchen Wars
by Betty Fussell

Paris Journal 1944–1955
by Janet Flanner

The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
by Judith Jones

G
ENERAL
F
OOD
H
ISTORY

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan

Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934–1961
by David Strauss

Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
by Laura Shapiro

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
by David Kamp

Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows
by Kathleen Collins

I was reminded recently of the old German proverb, “To start is easy, to persist an art.” People who have practiced the art of persisting with me, throughout the writing of this book, and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude:

Editor extraordinaire Lara Asher at Globe Pequot Press, for saying a big yes to Julia. Also, her top-notch crew: Lauren Brancato, Shana Capozza, Jessica DeFranco, Meredith Dias, Janice Goldklang, Kate Hertzog, and Ann Seifert. At Inkwell Management: David Forrer, Nathaniel Jacks, Richard Pine, Hannah Schwartz, and Kim Witherspoon, without whom … well, they know.

Others who offered insight, wisdom, and support, sometimes all three: Elizabeth Benedict, Leslie Bilderback, Kathy Budas, Lynne Bollinger Christensen, Hannah Concannon, Marcelline Dormont, Kim Dower, Debbie Guyol, Deb Nies, Randy Rollison, Danna Schaeffer, Lisa Spiegel, Abby Bliss White.

A special
merci beaucoup
to Kathie Alex for sharing La Pitchoune with me.

To Jerrod Allen and Fiona Baker: Paul said it best, about Julia: You are the butter to my bread, you are the breath to my life.

Abbreviations of names cited in the notes:

ADV: Avis DeVoto

CMW: Carolyn “Caro” McWilliams

DdS: Dorothy de Santillana

GK: George Kubler

JC: Julia Child

PC: Paul Child

SB: Simone Beck

13.
“
I’ve finally found …
” JC to ADV, 1952, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Center for Advance Study at Harvard University.

25.
“
I’m all for …
” Mike Sager, “Julia Child: What I’ve Learned,”
Esquire,
June 2001.

42.
“
At last, I …
” Julia Child, Alex Prud’homme,
My Life in France
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 112.

42.
“
felt like a frump …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

47.
“
One’s best evenings …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

50.
“
…with the design …
” Will of Sophia Smith, 1870,
www.smith.edu
.

52.
“
I only wish …
” JC to CMW, Noël Riley Fitch,
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), 63.

52.
“
Passing tests doesn’t …
” Noam Chomsky,
The Purpose of Education,
Learning Without Frontiers Conference, January 25, 2012.

56.
“
All I want …
” Bob Spitz,
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
(New York: Knopf, 2012), 85–86.

58.
“
I am quite …
”
Appetite for Life
, 77.

76.
“
She also had …
” Joan Juliet Buck, “Joan Juliet Buck on Being in Awe of Nora Ephron,”
The Daily Beast,
June 27, 2012.

78.
“
I was a member …
” Bill Buford,
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 20.

80.
“
I do love …
” Jennet Conant,
A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 224.

84.
“
He is an intellectual …
” JC to ADV, March 1953, Schlesinger Library.

86.
“
cataloging and channeling …
” Greg Miller, “Files from WWll Office of Strategic Services Are Secret No More,”
Los Angeles Times,
August 15, 2008.

89.
“
We analyzed one …
” Julia Child, Alex Prud’homme,
My Life in France
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 25.

95.
“
How magnificent to …
” Ibid., 68.

96.
“
Theoretically a good …
” Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, Simone Beck,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
(New York: Knopf, 1983) (Updated edition), 3.

99.
“
bring out the best …
” PC to GK, 1949, Schlesinger Library.

108.
“
The Puritans turned …
” Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,”
New York Times,
June 30, 2012.

109
“
If we could …
” Ruth Reichl, “Julia Child’s Recipe for a Thoroughly Modern Marriage,”
Smithsonian
, June 2012.

112.
“
except for La Cuisine …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

117.
“
There is so much …
” JC to ADV, April 1953, Schlesinger Library.

121.
“
a perfectly …
” ADV to JC, 1953, Joan Reardon, ed.,
As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 29.

121.
“
This is a …
” Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, Simone Beck,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1
(New York: Knopf, 1983) (Updated edition), xxx.

124.
“
We also ran …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

126.
“
…a nice photo …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

133.
“
…distressing examples of …
” JC to ADV, 1953, Schlesinger Library.

139.
“
If you get …
” Polly Frost, “Julia Child,”
Interview,
August 1989.

143.
“
the one activity …
” Betty Fussell,
My Kitchen Wars: A Memoir
(New York, North Point Press, 1999), 152.

143.
“
This was no …
” Ibid., 155.

147.
“
old black honey …
” M.F.K. Fisher,
The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition
(Hoboken: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2004), 81.

147.
“
for a painfully …
” Ibid., 81.

147.
“
go ahead as so many …
” Laura Shapiro,
Julia Child: A Life
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 83.

148.
“
We intend to …
” JC to ADV, 1958, Schlesinger Library.

149.
“
…short and snappy …
” JC to DdS, 1958, Joan Reardon, ed.,
As Always, Julia
:
The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 259.

149.
“
unusual vegetable dishes …
” JC to DdS, 1958,
As Always, Julia
, 259.

155.
“
I have a …
” ADV to JC, 1955, ibid., 221.

155.
“
Use finesse as …
” ADV to JC, 1953, ibid., 79.

155.
“
triumph of Norwegian …
” JC to ADV, 1959, Schlesinger Library.

156.
“
Dearest Simca and …
” JC to SB and ADV, 1959, Schlesinger Library.

160.
“
Probably the most …
” Craig Claiborne, “Glorious Recipes; Art of French Cooking Does Not Concede to U.S. Tastes. Text Is Simply Written for Persons Who Enjoy Cuisine,”
New York Times
, October 18, 1961.

164.
“
the talk of …
” Laura Shapiro,
Julia Child: A Life
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 110.

166.
“
We’re doing making …
” Julia Child, “Your Own French Onion Soup,”
The French Chef.
WGBH, Boston. Season 1, 1963.

166.
“
cut your hand …
” Ibid.

166.
“The knife is …
” Ibid.

166.
“
Knives are your …
” Ibid.

167.
“
If you’re serious …
” Ibid.

167.
“
you’ll enjoy it …
” Ibid.

167.
“
You’ll notice I …
” Ibid.

167.
“
Look at this!
” Ibid.

167.
“
They’re perfectly delicious …
” Ibid.

167.
“
It looks awful …
” Ibid.

168.
“
It’s so hot …
” Ibid.

168.
“
It’s possibly browned …
” Ibid.

168.
“
California Mountain Red
” Ibid.

168.
“
When you’ve added …
” Ibid.

170.
“
vile eggs Florentine …
” Julia Child, Alex Prud’homme,
My Life in France
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 90.

173.
“
These are the …
” “To Roast a Chicken,”
The French Chef.
WGBH, Boston. Season 1, 1963.

174.
“
This chicken is …
” Ibid.

174.
“
This chicken weighs…
” Ibid.

174.
“
It’s twice as …
” Ibid.

178.
“
Stop gasping
”
…
“
Wipe brow
” Marilyn Mellowes, “About Julia Child,”
American Masters,
June 2005.

187.
“
The lady with …
” Christina Crapanzano, “The 25 Most Powerful Women of the Last Century,”
Time,
Nov. 18, 2010.

188.
“
the definition of …
” Tina Fey,
Bossypants
(New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011), 271.

191.
“
I learned the …
” Janis Ian, “At Seventeen,”
Between the Lines,
Columbia Records, August 1975.

194.
“
Left breast off”
Noël Riley Fitch,
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child
(New York: Doubleday, 1997), 336.

196.
“
It was like …
” Julia Child, Simone Beck.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 2: A Classic Continued: A New Repertory of Dishes and Techniques Carries Us into New Areas
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), x.

201.
“
The only national …
” Marya Mannes,
TV Guide,
1968 [clipping].

205.
“
Being the only …”
Laura Shapiro,
Julia Child: A Life
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2007), 33.

206.
“
Her beans were …
” JC, interview with Evan Kleiman,
Good Food,
KCRW, Santa Monica, 2000.

209.
“
Make every meal …
” Julia Child,
Julia Child & Company
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 50.

219.
“
Man is troubled …
” James Thurber,
The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles
(New York: Harper, 2001), 114.

222.
“
Note: Dill greatly …
”
Las Damas Cook Book
(Kansas City: North American Press, 1966), 47.