Laura Shapiro (4 page)

Still, they weren't quite engaged when the war ended. For all the delights of this relationship, they both worried that perhaps it was just a wartime fling. Maybe what Julia called their “friendly passion,” which was rooted in their great enjoyment of each other's company, wasn't powerful enough to see them through to marriage and beyond. Julia was painfully aware of how different she was from Paul's great love, Edith Kennedy, who had been chic, intellectual, and—Paul's favorite term of approval—“worldly.” Years later, when they were married and living in Paris, she could go to a Christian Dior fashion show and admire the “slightly ravaged ‘worldly' look” of the models, admitting it was a look far beyond her power to achieve. (“Great big milk-fed ‘femme de menage,' that's me.”) But now she just had to hope it wasn't an insurmountable problem. As they parted in China with plans to meet each other's family and test the relationship by the light of real life, neither one knew quite what would come next. Julia went back to Pasadena, and Paul returned to Washington and the State Department. They spent the first six months of 1946 on opposite coasts, writing letters and pondering the future. And, as it turned out, missing each other terribly. If this was “friendly passion,” the emphasis was beginning to fall equally on both terms. “I am in a warm love-lust mood, wanting to have my ear-rings eaten,” she sighed, having just received two letters and a packet of photos from “Paulski.” For his part, he said he wanted to “see you, touch you, kiss you, talk with you, eat with you…eat you, maybe. I have a Julie-need.”

Julia knew she didn't want to settle in Pasadena, no matter what happened with Paul, but she couldn't figure out what to do with herself. By now she was sick of filing and secretarial work, yet she hadn't come home from the war with any more specific career plans than she had when she left. What she really wanted to do was marry Paul, but she could hardly explain that to him, so she wrote to him about her plans in carefully circumspect fashion. Maybe she ought to look for a job in Hollywood? “I don't know, as I have no contacts yet,” she mused. “I feel that it is not worth it to me to get any kind of a job like ‘Registry,' nor a job that doesn't pay at least $4,000 a year. I want something in which I will grow, meet many people and many situations. There is also and always Washington and the gov't—both of which I like.”

But it was clear, at least to Julia, that the real project for her stay in Pasadena was to work on becoming Mrs. Paul Child, a project somehow distinct from the question of if and when they would marry. Marriage was inconceivable unless Paul found her to be the right person, and she knew she wasn't, yet. She had no wish to give up her identity; what she was hoping to do was expand it to meet his, and then dissolve the borders. Paul urged her to read Henry Miller, which she did with mixed reactions (magnificent writing, she thought, but too much of a “stiff-prick forest”); she also took up semantics, psychology, and politics, which she followed in the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times.
“There is just
so much
that is fascinating!” she told him, and underlined the phrase eight times. When she turned to cooking, it was in the same frame of mind—here was an exhilarating intellectual adventure that would bring her closer to Paul. Cooking, love, and learning would be conjoined for the rest of her life.

And learning—conscientious, painstaking, step-by-step learning—was at the center of the enterprise from the moment she first propped a cookbook on the counter and went to work. Julia had none of the instincts that make a man or a woman “a born cook.” Much as she enjoyed food, it's unlikely that her cooking would have acquired much depth or refinement on its own. She simply wasn't one of those mysteriously gifted creatures who could wander into the kitchen and wander out again bearing a wonderful meal, never having glanced at a recipe or measured an ingredient. Cookbooks were supposed to help, and she studied them with the faith and zeal of a Torah scholar; but the recipes always seemed to fall horribly short. One day she made a broiled chicken according to the directions in a book, checked on it when the book said to, and found a blackened mess. If she was going to cook, and cook well enough to please Paul, she knew she needed lessons.

Two British women, Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe, ran the Hillcliff School of Cookery in Beverly Hills; and in the spring of 1946, Julia started going three times a week. She was ambitious and diligent, but when she came home with her new knowledge and put it into practice, nothing seemed to happen as it should. A dish of brains turned into mush on the stove, a duck blew up in the oven because she forgot to prick the skin. She mastered béarnaise sauce—“Awfully easy when the tricks are known,” she told Paul airily—but tried it another time using lard instead of butter and watched the whole thing congeal into a vile mass. There were triumphs occasionally: she and a friend gave an elaborate dinner for twelve featuring three kinds of hors d'oeuvres, steak and kidney pie (“The crust was superb”), and peas cooked with lettuce, the French way. But then there was the day she got up at 6:30 in the morning to make the family a big breakfast and ended up in near-hysterics two hours later when she still hadn't managed to put any food on the table. “The kitchen was a mess, and they came in and hovered over me, and the coffee fell on the floor and burned them, and they made rude remarks, and I threw them out and burst into tears,” she recalled years later, still grim at the memory.

Julia wrote to Paul about all of it, whether the results were delicious or disastrous. Far more than books or politics, food became a red-hot connective wire between them during these months of separation, a living metaphor for the intimacy that had seemed so elusive at the end of the war. “I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” Julia wrote; and Paul suggested that she move to Washington and become his cook—“We can eat each other.” This was the highly charged context in which Julia threw herself into studying recipes, practicing her Hillcliff lessons, and staging dinner parties: every cup of flour and sprinkle of herbs seemed to radiate her desire for Paul. He, too, was getting hungry. In July, he showed up in Pasadena, and the two of them got into Julia's Buick and drove back across the country together.

It was the supreme test: long, hot days on the road, nights in cheap motels. Julia had packed eight bottles of whiskey, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of premixed martinis. She was as good a driver as Paul, he noted with approval, and it turned out that they liked stopping to look at all the same things—“wineries, crab-canneries, local architecture and nature.” Julia never complained, ate and slept as comfortably as if she were traveling in luxury, painted her toenails, and washed Paul's shirts. “Quite a dame,” he told Charlie. By the time they reached Niagara Falls, he was in love and knew it.

Julia's determination had carried her to a glorious finish line: the raw, emotionally chaotic “old maid” that Paul once dismissed was now his lodestar. Sitting down to analyze his rush of awakened feelings in a letter to his brother, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Did Julia change, or did he? It was Julia, he decided. And Julia had indeed changed, or rather she had opened up areas of her mind and personality that nobody before Paul had demanded to see. Yet when he went on to list what he loved most about her, he didn't dwell on the intellectual skills that had newly flowered, but rather on the great, stalwart elements of her character that had always made people warm to her—and would have the same effect years later on millions of people she would never meet. “She
never
puts on an act,” he wrote, pinpointing at the top of the roster the very quality her audiences would relish most. “She frankly likes to eat and use her senses and has an unusually keen nose…. She has a cheerful, gay humor with considerable gusto…. She loves life and all its phenomena…. She has deep-seated charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest…She tells the truth.” And he noted appreciatively that she had none at all of the “measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex” that might have been expected in an inexperienced woman nearly thirty-four years old. A month later, they were married.

T
HE STORY OF
Julia Child's first meal in France has been told and retold, most eloquently by Julia herself. In 1948, she and Paul were living in Washington, not quite sure of where his career was heading, when to their great joy the State Department posted him to Paris to become exhibits officer at the United States Information Service (USIS). They arrived at Le Havre on November 3, and as soon as their Buick emerged from the ship, they drove off toward the capital. Around lunchtime they came to Rouen. The name of the restaurant was La Couronne, and Paul—“in his beautiful French,” Julia recalled—ordered the meal. She described it lovingly in the fish chapter of
From Julia Child's Kitchen:
first came oysters and Chablis, and then a splendid sole
meunière
was set before them. “It was handsomely browned and still sputteringly hot under its coating of chopped parsley, and around it swirled a goodly amount of golden Normandy butter,” Julia wrote. “It was heaven to eat, the flesh so very fresh, with its delicate yet definite texture and taste that blended marvelously with the browned butter sauce. I was quite overwhelmed.” This traditional dish, each detail put into place with care and all of it glorious with butter, had everything she would always adore about French cooking. She published the memory in 1975, and in time it joined Swann dipping his madeleine, and M. F. K. Fisher drying tangerines on the radiator, as a classic of culinary nostalgia.

Twelve years later, Julia wrote again about her first meal in France. In an essay she contributed to a book of Christmas food memories she described the same Buick, the same arrival in Rouen, the same restaurant—but a different menu. “We started with oysters, followed with one of their famous duck dishes,” she wrote. “While husband Paul commandeered a fat ripe Comice pear for dessert and an equally fat wedge of Camembert, I went for the pastries.” No sole
meunière
? Who knows? Most likely she'd forgotten the earlier version. And even the earlier version may have been conflated with other cherished menus. Paul, who described their first meal in France in a letter written from Paris to his brother that very day, said they had blissfully eaten oysters (“
very
strong of the sea”) and
filet de sole,
without specifying the preparation. But sole, especially
meunière,
came up again and again in his accounts of restaurant meals during those heady first weeks—“Julie had a delicious sole
meunière,
” “Julie can't get over how good the sole is,” “Julie wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole.” Julia, too, wrote home about it: “Sole
meunière,
crisp and bristling from the fire.” Plainly, that simple homage to freshness and butter made an impression on her. As for the “famous duck” of Rouen, it's not clear how this particular dish made its way into her official past; but Julia loved storytelling, and she loved duck; maybe she had one roasting in the oven while she was typing that day. In 2000, she was asked to describe her “most memorable meal” for
Gourmet,
and once more she gazed back happily to Le Havre, to the Buick, to the restaurant in Rouen, and to the duck—“fire-roasted and then passed through a duck press.” What emerges from these memories, one folded into another and all of them touched with sepia, is the staying power of the encounter itself, which began when the ship docked and continued for months in a haze of rapture. The rapture was the part she never forgot, and never revised.

Soon after Julia and Paul settled in Paris, an old woman told Julia that France was “just one big family.” As far as Julia was concerned, that family was hers. At their favorite restaurant, Michaud, she couldn't stop glancing over at a dozen people celebrating around a table spread with “innumerable courses of everything”—champagne, chickens, salads, cheeses, nuts—and everyone relaxed and goodhearted as they talked and ate and drank. “We keep being reminded of the Orient,” she wrote home. “Possibly because both are cultivated old civilizations, who enjoy and have integrated the physical and the cultural things in living.” Julia was at home here. The French struck her as wonderfully natural and earthy, and at the same time immensely civilized. They seemed to believe that the great pleasures of life—food, drink, sex, civility and conversation, pets, children, the splendor of Paris—were simply part of the fabric of being human, and that to enjoy them was as fundamental as breathing. Yet it was also taken for granted that stewardship of these gifts meant relishing them openly, discussing them, arguing about them, and keeping them meaningful through the very power of appreciation. Here was a whole country dedicated to being “worldly.” Right away she started French lessons at Berlitz: nothing was more important to her at this stage than becoming comfortable in the language. She was ecstatically absorbing the city, all her senses wide open and craving more; and she wanted the sounds as well, that constant chatter in the shops and streets; she wanted to “talk and talk and talk” and make a place for herself in the life flowing around her. “Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”

They found an apartment at 81, rue de l'Université, on the Left Bank of the Seine across from the place de la Concorde, in an old private house. Their rooms on the third floor were as French as the view of rooftops outside the windows. Sagging leather wallpaper, gilt chairs, moldings, and mirrors everywhere—Julia called it “late 19th century Versailles.” Up a narrow flight of stairs there was a roomy kitchen with appliances so small in relation to her height that she might have been standing over a toy stove. She decided she could live right there in that apartment forever, in perfect happiness. Already she regretted missing Paris in the twenties, an era Paul had seen in person; and she pounced happily on the occasional sighting of such figures as Colette, Chanel, André Gide, and Sylvia Beach. Once, when the Childs gave a Bastille Day party, Paul invited Alice B. Toklas, whom he had met back in the twenties. She arrived, drank a glass of wine, and left. Toklas was so tiny, and wore such a wide-brimmed hat, that the only way Julia could see her face was to be sitting down while Toklas stood directly above her.

Julia spent her first months studying French, walking through the streets with a map and a dictionary, and tasting, tasting, tasting. Everything she bit into was full of exhilarating flavors: the sausages, the tarts and petits fours, the snails, the Brie, “great big juicy pears,” and grapes so sweet she nearly swooned. Like most of their French and American friends in Paris, she and Paul had a maid who cooked and cleaned; but after living that way for a few months, they let her go. They hated having to show up on time for meals, and her cooking disappointed them. Julia was embarrassed to serve guests such inadequate dinners—her own could be alarming at times, but when they came off well, she took a great deal of pride in them. “Besides,” she wrote home, “it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly, fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn't do one's marketing?” So they hired a cleaning woman to come in twice a week, and Julia gladly took charge of the food. At the market, she examined pigs' heads and scrutinized fruits and vegetables, breathed in the smells of the
boulangerie,
carefully chose a terrine or pâté from the charcuterie, and chatted away with the shopkeepers. In France, food was a sociable enterprise: everyone had something to say about the turnips or the kidneys, and to be able to join that nationwide conversation—in French!—was Julia's bliss.

But as the winter passed, she found she had time on her hands. She was never bored with Paris, or the daily delights of living there, but her own lack of direction bothered her. She and Paul would have liked to raise a family, but she was now thirty-six, and the possibility of children seemed increasingly remote. Surely there was something she could do professionally that would give her life substance and purpose. How about…hat making? She did have a bit of a background in fashion, having worked for
Coast
magazine before the war (she forgot how much she had hated the job), and Paris was certainly the capital of such things. She embarked on a few lessons and even made a dress and hat for herself that she wore to a wedding. “Awful, awful,” she admitted later. Paul, too, was thinking about her problem, and he mentioned it one day to the librarian at the USIS, a Frenchman who knew Paris well. “What does Julia like?” asked the librarian. Art, perhaps? Music? Sports? Paul reflected for a moment, then said decisively, “She likes to
eat.
” He went home with the address of the Cordon Bleu.

Despite the distinction of its name and history, the Cordon Bleu had plunged into mismanagement by the time Julia enrolled in the fall of 1949. Pots and pans went unwashed, equipment was broken, dirt was everywhere, and classes ran short of ingredients. More irritating for Julia, she found herself taking lessons with two women who had never cooked before and needed to start at the kindergarten level. After two frustrating days, she managed to get herself transferred to a professional course. Here she found eleven ex-GIs who were training to become restaurant cooks under the GI bill, and a distinguished teaching staff of master chefs long steeped in the tastes and techniques of classic French cooking. This was more like it. They started at 7:30 in the morning, Julia and the former soldiers peeling and chopping and watching and asking questions in a top-speed flurry while producing sauces, fricassees, custards, and whatever else the teachers ordered up. “It's a free-for-all,” Julia told her family. “Being the only woman, I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way (got to be cold-blooded and realistic, but retain appearance of sweetness and gentility).” At 9:30, the class was over, and Julia went home to practice on what would become lunch for herself and Paul. Then she returned to school for an afternoon demonstration class, watching intently as chefs prepared the thoroughly professional versions of soufflés, galantines, charlottes, and fondants that she planned to master. Then back to rue de l'Université, exhilarated, to make dinner. “After that one demonstration of Boeuf B, I came right home and made the most delicious one I ever ett,” she wrote home jubilantly.

“My cooking has been always on the experimental side, these courses will make them SURE.” She found she liked the demonstrations best, because she could learn so much from watching the chef make an entire dish from beginning to end, “giving the proportions and ingredients, and explaining everything he does, and making little remarks.”

Julia's particular mentor was Chef Max Bugnard, who was seventy-four when she met him and had started his career sixty years earlier as an apprentice, later moving to London to work under Escoffier himself. Bugnard was the teacher who made Julia a cook. This generous and knowledgeable chef became a kind of culinary archetype who would rule her imagination for the rest of her life. Bugnard had a gravitas about him that came from his learning, his experience, and his respect for the work; and for Julia, such a sensibility would forever mark the difference between the real cooks and the dabblers. “He has that wonderful old-timey ‘art for arts sake' approach, and nothing short of perfection satisfies him at all,” she wrote to a friend. “It's an inspiration to work with such a man.”

Bugnard's classes at the Cordon Bleu took place at a level far above the inadequate conditions of the school. He knew the repertoire intimately, and his standards were, as Julia often said, impeccable. As he demonstrated and explained the well-honed methods of French cookery, supervised and corrected her work, the doors she had been banging on so ineffectually swung open at last. After years of following recipes only to meet failure, enjoying a triumph only to see the same dish mysteriously go wrong the next time, planning lovely little dinners that didn't get to the table until 10:00 p.m.—now she could understand what was happening and why. Now she could learn. Julia cooked all day, all evening, and all through the weekends; and when she wasn't cooking, she was compulsively buying sieves and whisks and copper pots and larding needles. At the far end of an alley in the Paris flea market, she found a marble mortar and a pestle so massive Paul had to hoist them onto his shoulder to get them back to the car, which was parked two miles away. He was delighted to do it. “Julie's cookery is actually improving!” Paul exclaimed to his brother. “I didn't believe it would, just between us girls, but it really
is.
”

Ducks and rabbits and fish and eggs, every step of every dish, from the raw ingredients to the final garnish, everything performed by hand with only the most elemental equipment—Julia was rocketed to paradise. This was what she had needed without knowing it: a clear, rational guide to making every dish taste the way it should. No longer was she fortune's fool in the kitchen. Her mind was on fire: every day, more mysteries fell away, and in their place was structure, system, and logic. The secret behind good cooking turned out to be that there were no secrets. There was only good teaching.

Studying French cuisine wasn't just a matter of absorbing traditional rules and methods: Julia was learning to cook with all her senses engaged, to cook with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients that was increasingly out of fashion in the American kitchen. Ever since the late-nineteenth century, each generation had been purchasing more and more food that had been cleaned, cut, packaged, and sometimes partially cooked in a factory. The convenience was addictive, and so was the impressive rationale created by the advertising industry: these uniform, sterile products, “untouched by human hands” as one slogan put it, made cooking modern and far more sanitary. Why fumble around with messy, smelly chicken parts and carrot peelings the way poor Grandma had to do?