Secret Ingredients (18 page)

“Let’s focus on what we do best—eating out.”

GOOD COOKING

CALVIN TOMKINS

T
he headwaiter at Kan’s could not decide immediately where to seat the Child party. One table was too small, another too far from the windows. Chinese waiters flew about in response to his urgent commands. Mrs. Kan, the proprietor, hastening to the scene, exchanged ceremonious greetings with Paul and Julia Child and was introduced to Rosemary Manell and Elizabeth Bishop, who would be assisting Julia throughout the next week in a series of cooking demonstrations for the benefit of the Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. Mrs. Kan was deeply honored by the presence in her restaurant of Julia Child, whose television show,
The French Chef,
is well known in San Francisco, but also deeply distressed, for she had not expected the visit. At length, the Child party was seated at a large table near the center of a big, elegant second-floor room that overlooks the city’s Chinese quarter.

“Julia would like it if you ordered for all of us,” Mrs. Manell said to Mrs. Kan. Julia nodded, beaming. She had lost her voice two days before, in Seattle, where she had given a series of four cooking demonstrations for the benefit of St. Mark’s Cathedral. At a cocktail party following one of the demonstrations, she had swallowed an hors d’oeuvre that contained a very hot pepper, and a doctor she consulted seemed to think this might have been the cause of it. She was not supposed to use her voice, and she was communicating with facial expressions, gestures, and notes written with a felt-tip pen on a white pad. Whenever she scribbled a note to Mrs. Kan, Mrs. Kan took the pad and pen and wrote out her reply. Mrs. Bishop explained that this wasn’t really necessary, since Julia could hear perfectly well, but Mrs. Kan seemed to think it impolite to reply orally to a written message.

Mrs. Kan’s selections began with barbecued spareribs, served as an hors d’oeuvre, and progressed to fried squid. “Fresh frying fat makes all the difference,” Julia wrote when she had tasted it. Mrs. Kan wrote back, “An expert such as you knows!” The squid was followed by diced-winter-melon soup, pale green and delicately flavored (“Does it look like cat vomit?” Julia inquired in a note not shown to Mrs. Kan), and then by lemon chicken, Kan’s special noodles flavored with chicken and coriander, asparagus with beef, and bean cake with barbecued pork. Two other diners sent complimentary greetings to the Childs’ table, and their waiter told them that everyone wanted to know what Julia was having (nobody in America calls her anything but Julia). As the meal continued, Julia scribbled faster and faster, and asked the others to read her notes aloud, so there could be the appearance of conversation. “Isn’t this far better than that hot Szechwan stuff?” she wrote. “Paul and I lived 1
¹
/2 years in China and never had it. I wonder if it really exists there.” The Childs lived in China during the Second World War—Kunming, in fact, was the scene of their courtship, while they were both working for the Office of Strategic Services—and they have retained ever since a keen interest in Chinese cooking. Julia Child does not do any Chinese cooking herself, because she feels that one lifetime is hardly sufficient to encompass the cuisines of France, her specialty, but she loves to go to Chinese restaurants. “I would be perfectly happy w. only Chinese food,” she wrote. “Either French or Chinese. Could live w. only Chinese.”

Mrs. Kan wanted the Childs to see the kitchen. She also wanted to take their picture, and she refused to let them pay for the meal. Paul Child made certain that the photo would not be used as an endorsement for Kan’s—“We never do that”—and he said that they always paid for meals in restaurants. “We must be very careful, no payola,” Julia wrote on her pad. “Remember Watergate!” Mrs. Kan smiled firmly. Everyone got up and went into the kitchen, where Julia inspected mysterious vessels and vats, and put her arm around the chef. The chef, who stood a good eighteen inches short of Julia’s six feet one and a half, seemed absolutely delighted.

Going back to the hotel in a taxi, Paul was upset that he had not been permitted to pay for the meal. “She was so determined,” he said. “I didn’t want to do
battle
over it.”

“We’ll send her a book,” Julia wrote. And a little later, in a note to Mrs. Bishop, “We must all help to cheer up Paul. He gets depressed when anything wrong w. wife.”

The Childs and their associates were at about the midpoint of a demonstration tour that had begun in Seattle and would conclude in Honolulu. There were to be eight cooking demonstrations in San Francisco, at the Kabuki Theatre, in the new Japan Center on Geary Street. They had flown in from Seattle on a Thursday, four days in advance of the first demonstration, and they needed all of the time they had to get ready. In their comfortable suite at the Clift Hotel, the Childs, Mrs. Manell, and Mrs. Bishop spent hours going over lists, schedules, and recipes in thick loose-leaf notebooks. Other lists had preceded them—lists of cooking equipment and food staples and hardware and supplies of all kinds, which the Women’s Board of Presbyterian Hospital of Pacific Medical Center, co-sponsor of the event along with Liberty House, the San Francisco branch of the Honolulu department store, had agreed to provide. The Women’s Board had done its job with great zeal—had provided, in fact, more than fifteen hundred separate items, from a stove and a refrigerator down to rolls of paper towels and packages of scouring pads. (Many of the utensils were going to be raffled off to ticket buyers after the demonstrations.) There were always a number of things, like fresh vegetables, that could only be bought at the last minute, however, and Mrs. Manell and Mrs. Bishop were responsible for getting those. The dishes to be cooked onstage at the Kabuki were all fairly spectacular. Having more or less invented what could be called the theatre of cooking during her twelve years on television, Julia was not going to let her audience down, and the stage, she knew, required larger effects than the home screen. She would give San Francisco her Caneton en Aspic à la Parisienne and Charlotte Malakoff, Beef Wellington and Quiche aux Asperges, Le Loup en Croûte and Crêpes à la Pagode en Flammes.

By Saturday, two days before the first demonstration, Julia’s voice had returned. Her younger sister, Dorothy (Mrs. Ivan Cousins), who lives in Sausalito, had sent her to a throat specialist well known for treating opera singers and other performers, and he had painted and sprayed Julia’s aggrieved larynx so skillfully that she was able to go through with a scheduled press conference at the Kabuki Theatre that morning. Julia and Paul sat for an hour at a small table in the theatre lobby, which Liberty House had turned into a festive-looking culinary boutique for the demonstrations, and replied in their quite different conversational styles—cheery, gracious, down-to-earth in Julia’s case, precise and urbane in Paul’s—to the not invariably stimulating questions of a dozen or so food and feature editors. Julia recommended that newcomers to cooking approach it “with courage and daring.” Paul said they should not be afraid of hard work. Julia said cooking wasn’t really hard once you mastered the essential techniques. Paul said that mastering the techniques required much hard work. Julia came out against the term “gourmet,” which she said had lost all meaning through overuse (“We just say ‘good cooking’”), and she also had harsh words for the frozen string bean. A bearded reporter who said that he was from the Gay Liberation Press announced that he and his friends were coming to all the demonstrations. (“I think it’s very good they’re coming out of the closet,” Julia said later.) Since nobody asked her about cholesterol, Julia brought up the subject herself. It was a very bad idea, she said, to think that you could cut out all foods that were high in cholesterol, as those were often the healthiest foods. Everyone needed a balanced diet. “We’ve done research on this,” she said, “and we’ve found that some doctors believe a completely cholesterol-free diet can lead to premature aging and sexual frailty.”

Although the press conference was a great success, the publicity for the cooking demonstrations had been, up to this point, somewhat disappointing. Only one major story had appeared in a San Francisco paper (the
Chronicle
), and that one had printed the wrong telephone number to call for tickets and reservations. Tickets for each demonstration were priced at fifteen dollars, and advance sales had been slow—partly, it was thought, because San Franciscans were nervous about the so-called Zebra murders, and were afraid to go out in the evening. With Julia’s arrival, though, the trickle of publicity became a flood, and ticket sales picked up.

“This is such an American custom, the way these affairs are run by volunteer women,” Paul Child said that afternoon. “It’s practically unheard of in Europe.” Barbara Grant, the president of the Women’s Board, and Hannah Foster, the vice president, and their colleagues had started eight months before to prepare for the 1974 benefit. It had been Mrs. Foster’s idea to invite Julia Child—in previous years the Women’s Board’s fund-raising had centered on an annual débutante ball. Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Grant, and several others on the benefit committee put in long hours throughout the Childs’ stay in San Francisco, running errands for the cooking team, washing dishes and pots from the stage kitchen, briefing volunteer ushers, selling tickets, and not infrequently pressing their husbands into service as well. Only one or two of the people connected with the Women’s Board seemed to be what Julia refers to as “lady types”—the type that comes into a kitchen, sees several stacks of unwashed utensils, and asks, “Is there anything I can do?”

After inspecting the rather elaborate cooking setup that had been provided for them on the Kabuki stage—a made-to-order kitchen flanked by large hanging screens to pick up television images of what Julia would be doing from three video cameras mounted directly above the work spaces—the Childs were a little worried that the benefit committee might have spent too lavishly. “In Seattle,” Paul said, “we performed in the auditorium of the cathedral, on a set put together mostly from found objects. Somebody had contributed a stove, another person a refrigerator, and there were chests of drawers for work spaces and a couple of child-sized tables under the counters for shelves. It was really very clever and workable, and it didn’t cost much.” The financing of these demonstrations does not directly concern the Childs, who derive no money from them personally. They donate all their fees to WGBHTV, in Boston, the public television station where
The French Chef
originated, in 1962. The tour expenses are paid by the sponsoring group (WGBH picks up any extras), and the Childs look upon the rather considerable effort and time involved mainly as a means of generating favorable publicity for Julia’s books—the monumental
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Volumes I and II, and a book of recipes from their television shows, called
The French Chef Cookbook.
Nevertheless, both the Childs wanted the hospital to make money from the San Francisco demonstrations, and they were somewhat alarmed to hear that the benefit committee had already spent something like thirty thousand dollars on expenses. Liberty House had donated most of the cooking equipment, and Safeway Stores had provided quantities of free staples, but there had been heavy outlays for the construction of the model kitchen on the stage of the Kabuki Theatre. An 850-seat house fitted out with tables for the audience to dine at while watching a performance, the theatre had been designed for the presentation of traditional Kabuki drama, but evidently there had not been enough Kabuki lovers in town to support it, so the management was planning to use the space for stage shows of various kinds. At one point, the management had added to the benefit committee’s difficulties by trying, unsuccessfully, to cancel its one-week lease on the theatre.

The Childs refused almost all invitations to dinner or to cocktails in the days before the first demonstration. “We want to put on a good show,” Julia explained, “and we just can’t spare the time.” Lunches for the Childs and their two assistants were cooked by Rosemary Manell in the demonstration kitchen, and they ate them at a table in the wings. (Later, when they were giving demonstrations each afternoon and evening, they had dinner there as well.) They spent the weekend at the theatre, stocking and setting up for the first show and doing the necessary precooking. A great deal of precooking is done for Julia’s television series; a dish may have to be shown in three or four different stages of preparation, and since the twenty-eight minutes of allotted airtime do not allow for the completion of these stages, versions of the dish at each stage must be ready to show. In a three-hour live demonstration, much of the actual cooking does take place onstage, but puff pastry and yeast doughs must be made ahead so they can rise, backups are needed in case of onstage disasters, and cold ducks (for Caneton en Aspic) must be cooked in advance. Rosemary Manell and Elizabeth Bishop, who had both been on previous demonstration tours, knew the names that Julia and Paul assign to every item of equipment and every work space (to save time in explaining or describing), and they were even allowed access to the Sacred Bag, a phenomenally heavy black canvas satchel containing certain cooking items that Julia cannot do without (her favorite bone flour scoop, her large pastry-cutting wheel, her special knives, and so on), plus emergency items such as extension cords, of which there are never enough on hand. The Sacred Bag has been around since the beginning of the television series.