Julia Child Rules (21 page)

Karen Karbo’s
first novel,
Trespassers Welcome Here,
was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year and a Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year. Her other two adult novels,
The Diamond Lane
and
Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me,
were also named NYT Notable Books. Her 2004 memoir,
The Stuff of Life,
about the last year she spent with her father before his death, was a NYT Notable Book, a
People
Magazine Critics’ Choice, a Books for a Better Life Award finalist, and a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short stories, essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in
Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Outside,
the
New York Times,
Salon.com, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and a winner of the General Electric Younger Writer Award.

Karbo is most well known for her best-selling Kick Ass Women series, which includes
How Georgia Became O’Keeffe,
the bestseller
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel,
and
How to Hepburn.
Karen grew up in Los Angeles, California, and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she continues to kick ass.

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Julia improved her GPA and purchased a 1929 Ford, which she named Eulalie. She used it almost exclusively to venture to speakeasies in nearby Holyoke. The car was a convertible. Most convenient, as it allowed Julia and her friends to get sick over the side without ruining the upholstery.

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Paul Child was possibly the last man in America to utter the words “I like my women to be intellectual.”

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Midway through the second season of
The French Chef.

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Just because we adore her doesn’t mean we’ve lost touch with reality.

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Not hyperbole. An early draft of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
was 1,200 pages long.

†
In the November 25, 1966, issue the precise wording was “the Lady with the Ladle,” a much less poetic coinage that appears in “A Letter from the Publisher.” Somewhere along the way the phrase morphed into Our Lady of the Ladle, and it is misquoted as such by
Time
in “The 25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century” in 2010.

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Not much is known about Boulanger, including whether he ever existed.

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Hereafter to be referred to as simply
Mastering.
I toyed with using MTAFC throughout, but it looks to my eyes like one of those unfriendly military acronyms.

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If there’s anything that dates
The French Chef,
it’s the obvious and touching lack of an on-set stylist. Julia’s coiffure was so flat in the back; given the mania for teased hair in those days, it’s hard to believe that one of her assistants didn’t think to rush out with a comb and can of Aqua Net and give the back a little volume. But as I write this, it occurs to me that aside from her sister, Dort, who was six foot five, the only people who ever came face-to-face with the back of her head were men. Eventually, Paul struck on the idea of employing a wig—so much easier!

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Terms I learned only decades later. When I was a surly child watching her cook, I had no idea what was going on.

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In which was stored a loaf of rye bread, a loaf of white, and a package of Van de Kamp’s oatmeal cookies.

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Friday nights, unless Mom found a new recipe she was desperate to try.

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From here on out, please just assume that unless otherwise specified the person in question is one of Julia’s friends. For her entire life, wherever Julia went, she had many friends. Friends who would come over and cook with her, friends who would throw her parties, friends who would travel with her, friends with whom (and on whom) she could play practical jokes. So many friends, that a normal person would be exhausted by all this human contact, but not Julia.

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The woman was known to make friends in the produce department at the A&P and was a devotee of the Halloween party long before adults went in for such things. Like Julia, she loved a party more than anything and would have thrown many more than she did, except that my father loathed a party more than anything.

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She wasn’t necessarily wrong; I know many adults who can in less than a minute access the deep anguish they felt at not being asked to the prom.

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It was so authentic I could confuse a herding dog.

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What do land managers do? No idea. Whatever it is, it pays better than, say, managing an apartment building or an Office Depot.

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Best not to mention the summer homes in Santa Barbara and St. Malo, an exclusive development near Oceanside, where, to this day, the homes, modeled after a French fishing village, are passed on from one generation of Sepulvedas, Doheneys, and Chandlers to the next.

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On second thought, maybe Jukes’s mom did try to force her to learn how to cook, and that’s how she found herself doing all this cool stuff.

†
One thousand dollars in 1925 is worth $13,218.11 in 2012 dollars.

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Two young cute guys named Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus who’ve made careers for themselves being two cute guys with a basic website and no stuff.

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This isn’t a back-to-the-earth retro-hippie screed; I love my Chanel mascara.

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Her more studious roommate, Mary Case, was forced to move out.

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One of the great misconceptions of basketball is that being tall is enough. Julia was an enthusiastic athlete, but not a particularly coordinated one.

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Multiple times, usually.

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But not too provocative.

‡
Complete with incisive line-by-line critique.

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Yes, there’s an obnoxious acronym for the so-called top schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.

†
Not unhappily, I might add. Still.

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Invented in 1923 by Clarence Birdseye, with a $7 electric fan, a bucket of brine, and a cake of ice.

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That’s a lot; about $1.6 million in 2012 dollars.

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Even then Julia loved to talk about politics, but Pop forbade disagreement; if she ventured to open up a discussion, he left the table.

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Hereafter referred to as Whole Paycheck; self-explanatory.

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Her parents sent her a weekly $100 allowance, which she put in her savings account.

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I do blame my mother’s death, perhaps unfairly, for all of my cooking neuroses. I harbor an irrational belief that had she lived, I would have been able to rebel like a normal teenager, then I’d have come round to the fact that she was a fantastic cook and she would teach me her secrets, and we would stand together beside the stove with identical wooden spoons, stirring identical simmering Julia-inspired sauces, laughing and planning what we would sauté and simmer next. Maybe after getting a mani-pedi.

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Possibly until they invent an affordable meal-in-a-pill, which I would take over a jet pack any day.

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The only kind there is in the kitchens of super-celebrity chefs.

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Tapas come from the Spanish word
tapar,
meaning to cover. They were originally slices of cheese or ham used to cover wine cups to keep out the flies.

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Julia advised: “Always start out with a bigger bowl than you think you’ll need.”

†
If you or your children have ever made a papier-mâché piñata or giant monster head for the school play, you’ll know the stuff I mean.

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Yes, human poo.

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So delicious it gets its own mention in
My Life in France,
and rightly so.

†
Once, not long after my mother died and my father had moved to Newport Beach, California, we went to a nice restaurant overlooking the ocean. I can’t remember the occasion, but I do remember that we slurped down our oysters, and then wound up in the ER a few hours later, where we each had our stomach pumped. That was the end of oysters for me.

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Also Candlestick Park. When the Giants are playing at home you can watch the fireworks over the stadium both in real time and two seconds later on TV.

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One wonders how our relationship to cooking would be different if Julia Child had not had the good sense to get out of millinery.

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I own the original 1975 edition, which sports a picture of Julia on the cover wearing a snazzy blue and white floral Qiana disco shirt, and a terrific, literary description beneath the title: “With hundreds of delicious recipes—her own personal variations of the French classics as well as a multitude of new dishes using everyday foods (soups, stews, vegetables, beans, pasta, an American Fish Chowder, the Perfect Roast Turkey)—here is Julia Child, with her incomparable gift for explaining the whys and wherefores of cooking, delighting you with her own experiences, and sharing her findings about everything in the kitchen from microwaves and magic mixers to meat cuts and weeping meringues.”
Weeping meringues.

†
In France it is believed that if you can bake bread, you cannot possibly make pastries, and vice versa. It’s one or the other.

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A vivacious Parisian married to a famous Lithuanian art historian and cultural advisor to the American Embassy, where Paul worked.

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I’m even unclear about this. A few friends who’ve lived in Paris insist it’s actually Bonjour, m’sieurs dames, a sort of contraction of the older, more formal Bonjour Messieurs, Mesdames.

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The cubes or strips of pork belly that show up in a lot of Julia’s recipes; they give butter a run for its money.

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We figured out pretty quickly that Julia stuck a lot of stuff in the oven that could easily simmer on the stove.

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Not that anything in Paris would fit her. Nothing in Paris fits an average-size American, much less a woman of Julia’s stature.

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A cocotte is a small cast-iron casserole, in which French comfort food is served. The chicken fricassee is supposed to be swoonworthy.

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Images of Alice Waters stroking a stalk of celery and fondling a lemon come to mind.

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In other words, putting out has got to be a priority.

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A favorite was the “light”
Boswell in Holland.

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In this created-for-the-movie language, there are two words for “to see.”
Tse’a
means to see with your eyes;
kame,
to see with your heart, to “understand.”

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It’s a French tradition to always be striking about something.

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His duck breast prosciutto with juniper berries and peppercorns, cured in the basement-cum-meat-curing-cellar, is quite tasty.

†
She was nicknamed after a popular make of car. The acronym stands for
Société Industrielle de Mécanique et de Carrosserie Automobile.
The modern-day iteration would be a chic, yet thrifty and eco-aware, friend named Prius.

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The first Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest was held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and won by Theodora Smafield for her No-Knead Water-Rising Twists. Little did Theodora know that a dozen years later she would be struggling with the concept of
en croûte.

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DeVoto had been Avis’s English professor at Northwestern; how could the balance of the marriage been any different?

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Avis had two, one of whom was “troubled,” and likely suffered from what we now call Asperger’s syndrome.

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As we know, Julia was wildly interested in the subject.

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Not to be confused with “going with the flow,” it was first defined in 1975 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who would probably be more famous had he changed his name to something like Michael Hale. If you’re reading this, Mr. Csiksz … whatever, it’s not too late.

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The exception to my theory is becoming a rock star. All kids want to be rock stars, because they assume being on stage will make them as happy as they are belting out a song in their room into the end of their hairbrush; this happiness can never be duplicated.

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Which is to say, the only happy one.

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Veal scallops, which “make a perfect main course for a chic little luncheon.” She struggled mightily with browning them. Many books advised browning “slowly,” but how slow was slow? Too slow and the meat refused to brown, too quickly and the butter threatened to burn.

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No, it absolutely must be a wire whisk.

†
Her mayonnaise recipe had stopped working because summer had turned to fall and yolk, oil, and bowl were all too cold. Slightly warming the bowl before beginning fixed everything.

‡
They sent her two pamphlets. She swooned.

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Supposing there was one: She was counting on the American housewife/chauffeur not to be as flimsy as she appeared.

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Guess what? They don’t have to be made of strained fish. The name also refers to the soft, footballish shape. There can be ice-cream and mashed potato quenelles, too.

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Simca’s letters were written in French. Think of it. Julia had spoken fluent French for about six minutes, and here came the communications from her collaborator, written in that spiky European hand.

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The modern iteration of the Average American Housewife. In the same way every American housewife was once “average,” every stay-at-home mom is now “busy.”

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Lest we forget, the camera puts on ten pounds.

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A giant stack of crêpes—we used twenty-four—between which are slathered alternating layers of a spinach/Mornay sauce filling and a mushroom/cream cheese filling, topped with a healthy grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and dotted with butter. We ovenless home cooks melted the cheese in the microwave.

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Colin R. Davis, a British conductor known mostly for his repertoire of Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky, whose uplifting bons mots show up on the Internet a lot, usually accompanied by a picture of a beautiful sunrise or a determined-looking sparrow.

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Or at least I think she did. Julia mentioned Simca’s visit in a letter to Avis, but in her new introduction written for the fortieth-anniversary edition, she says that Simca didn’t come to the States until their book tour in 1961.
Ça ne fait rien.

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In Dijon, famous for their
pain d’épices,
and where this particular recipe is said to have originated, the chilling time could be from several months to several years.

†
They seemed one and all concerned that the housewife would find a monster, multipaged recipe “frightening.”

‡
Julia was only slightly less squeamish than Sweeney Todd.

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And, who can blame her?

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Only the genius of acquiring editor Judith Jones assured
Mastering
did not see the light of day as The Compulsive Cook: Cooking Is My Hobby; Cooking for Love, Cook for Your Self à la Française; or any number of other horrific titles under consideration.

†
$38,498 in 2012 dollars.

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The urge to reach for the “throw shit against the wall and see what sticks” analogy is nearly overwhelming, but my personal credo doesn’t permit the discussion of cooking and excrement in the same paragraph, plus it would be disrespectful to Julia.