by Karen Karbo
But for most of us, Julia is primarily The French Chef. TV Julia was organized, efficient, yet breezy, with her kooky warble, effortless confidence, and endearingly never-quite-right hairdo,† chopping onions, grating cheese, whacking frozen pastry crust with a wooden dowel, giving pointers on the wrist action involved in flipping an omelet, and demonstrating with glee the fascinating, mildly revolting innards of a lobster.
She came off as a woman not unlike her viewers, who, before she became famous, was cozily married to a nice man who went off to his government job every morning while she, in pearls and twin set, puttered around the kitchen. She spent her hours grocery shopping, preparing meals for her husband, hosting dinner parties for his business associates, writing newsy letters to friends and family, purchasing copper saucepans, and, when she had the time, catching up on her magazines. She was Everywoman, if every woman could thrive in Paris despite speaking almost no French, eat everything she pleased, put in fourteen-hour days for years on end creating a cookbook for which there was, as far as anyone could tell, no market, and, deep into middle age, train herself to cook, instruct, and entertain in front of the camera, something for which in 1963 there was little precedent and no official handbook.
Which is to say that, however average and normal she may have looked, she was like no one else.
Not long after Julia’s famous conversion luncheon of sole meunière in Rouen on the afternoon Paul and Julia arrived in France, she enthused to Avis, “I’ve finally found a real and satisfying profession which will keep me busy well into the year 2000.” Julia was a self-professed exaggerator and must have thought, as George Orwell did when writing 1984, that 2000 was eons away, that people would be vacationing on Mars by then. Instead, she would have exactly that career. In September 2001, at the age of eighty-nine, she would still be in front of the camera, filming a video to run alongside an exhibit of her famous kitchen at the Smithsonian Institution.
Julia was able to convince an entire nation that cooking could be creative and endlessly absorbing because that was how she experienced cooking. If there was ever an evening when Julia was feeling tired and grouchy and simply could not bring herself to throw a chop in a pan, it has been lost in the mists of time. For Julia Child cooking was fun, and fun was something Julia, from the time she was a girl breaking into the homes of neighbors just for kicks, never said no to.
I cannot, in good conscience, allow that word “fun” to sit there on the page unmodified. One of the great misunderstandings we hold about Julia Child—the first being that she was housewifey in the aforementioned manner, when really she was Che Guevara armed with a pound of butter and a sauté pan—is that most of us share with her the same definition of fun.
Chances are, if you’re one of those people who define fun as any activity that includes a cocktail and putting your feet up, you’re not a cook on a par with Julia Child. This is not to say you might not be a devotee. This is not to say that you don’t have a few terrific recipes. This is not to say that you refuse to answer the clarion call to pickle your garden’s bounty in August or, as we do in my house, spend three weeks baking cookies in December. This is not even to say that you, like me, have been known to be lazy.
But fun for Julia always involved breaking a sweat. It may have involved a few swigs of wine while she worked, but it never involved kicking back. Like people who fancy ultramarathons and Ironman contests hosted in tropical climes, Julia loved endless exertion.
I’m tap-dancing here. Can you sense it? Readers are so sophisticated these days; they can tell when a card is yet to be played, a shoe to drop, when something is being withheld.
Here I am, setting out to write a book about our beloved Julia’s many inspirational and aspirational qualities, but, if I’m to be honest, when I say her name—Julia!—I’m not infused with feelings of warmth and joy, but with a low-grade feeling of dread.
My problem with Julia is that it’s impossible to extricate her from the main problem I had with my mother, which is that she was an early devotee of Julia. Every time I think about French Chef Julia lustily chopping off a fish head with what she called her “fright knife,” or closing her eyes and tasting some beurre blanc, I can smell the buttery, floury, slightly blood-infused smell of browning beef in our yellow and orange kitchen in Whittier, California, not fifteen miles from where Julia grew up in Pasadena. In my memory it is always a day during the triple-digit heat of September, my mother—redheaded, like Julia—red-faced before the stove, stirring and tasting and stirring and tasting and stirring and tasting. Then stopping for a cigarette.
Every morning my mother sat at our Formica breakfast bar, smoked a Viceroy in her orange quilted bathrobe, and planned the evening’s menu. Cooking was not easy for my mother, a redhead with fragile skin who suffered from raging allergies to citrus and even carrots, which she was forced to peel wearing rubber gloves.
The longer something took to cook, the more it required simmering, reducing, deglazing,* the more my mother liked it. I think she found the standing and stirring, while puffing on a ciggie, what we would now call meditative. Looking back, I suspect she stood and stirred when it wasn’t entirely called for.
I came home from after-school sports practice around five o’clock. At my big public Southern California junior high and high school, it was pretty much an all-comers meet. If you were moderately coordinated and were willing to stay after school every day for practice, there was always a spot for you on the Junior Varsity whatever. I played field hockey, basketball, and volleyball. I was a long jumper on the track team and swam the breaststroke on the swim team. But most of all, when I came home at five, I was starving.
My mother would be standing at the stove, wearing a pair of capri pants and a short-sleeved cotton shirt (not unlike those worn by Julia on The French Chef), smoking her Viceroy and stirring. The kitchen smelled of onions and butter, or garlic and butter, or what I know now to have been wine and butter. I’d ask when we were going to eat, and she would say soon. But it didn’t mean soon. It meant whenever she was finished stirring. My father would come home around six-thirty, kiss my mother on the cheek, and make himself an Old Fashioned. Under cover of his cocktail preparations—the opening of the cabinet to fetch a glass, the opening of the refrigerator to retrieve the lemon peel—I would try to steal a cookie from the treat drawer.* The treat drawer was separated from the stove top by the sink. If I waited until the exact moment my dad opened the fridge, there was a chance my mom would be distracted and I could dip into the drawer and snag a cookie. But usually she saw me coming out of the corner of her eye, reached over, and pushed the drawer shut on my arm. For years I sported matching indentations where the edge of the drawer got me.
We usually ate around eight-thirty. I had finished my homework hours earlier, and some important TV show was inevitably on at that very moment. I had long since stopped being hungry and had entered the state where your body starts digesting its own organs to stay alive. My mom liked to focus on one impossibly difficult Julia dish at a time, so her Porc Braisé aux Choux Rouges would be accompanied by Birds Eye frozen squash, the bright orange variety that looked exactly like the baby food I would one day serve my daughter. Her Tranches de Jambon Morvandelle was served with frozen succotash.
Even so, it was all the same to me. Unless it was Taco Night,† what we had for dinner was immaterial to me. As it was to my dad, who was the ultimate food-is-fuel guy. But I was not so hungry, nor worried about missing Sanford and Son, nor wrapped up in schoolyard drama, that I did not see what my mom was up against: Night after night she went to all this trouble for two people who didn’t appreciate her food.
I’ve come to understand that my mother threw herself into cooking like Julia for complex personal reasons. She’d always wanted to go to Europe, and this was a way of participating, however modestly, in what she thought of as High Culture. I imagine she was also “cooking Julia” because it was creative and challenging, because she knew she was responsible for dinner an
yway, and she might as well amuse herself in the process of making it. Hindsight, however, does nothing to change the truth that at the time I was deeply annoyed. I was the one who did the dishes. And what the number of dishes conveyed to me was that what my mother spent the afternoons of her life doing was a hell of a lot of work, for little reward.
As a result, the Julia I prefer to hold in my heart is a strapping California party girl who crowbarred herself out of the comfy life in Pasadena, who forced herself on France and won over the French, the woman who lived with abandon.
LIVING WITH ABANDON, A LA JULIA
Julia’s genius for throwing all caution to the wind served her the entire length of her long life. Given that she worked harder than most of us, and believed in rigor and discipline, how did she also live with abandon?
Make the most of the makeshift.
Today, Le Cordon Bleu is an international institute of “gastronomy, hospitality, and management,” with branches all over the world. The name itself attracts such words as “elegance,” “prestige,” “distinction,” and every fancy-pants modifier that comes to mind. But in 1949, the year Julia enrolled, it had fallen on hard times. Like everything else in Paris, the war had done a number on the venerable institution.
The place was dirty. There was no one around to wash the mountains of dishes dirtied by the students. They were often short of necessary ingredients, including salt. After some haggling with the management, Julia was placed in a class with eleven ex-GIs, most of whom were there in order to learn enough to enable them to cook on the line at a diner back home.
It was as lame and poorly run as it could be, yet it was here that Julia met her mentor, Chef Max Bugnard, here where she discovered her great passion for cooking.
The degree to which Julia learned to cook in makeshift conditions cannot be overstated. There’s a famous black-and-white picture of Julia standing in front of her stove in the kitchen at rue de l’Université, stirring something in a saucepan. The stove top hits her at midthigh. So low is the burner, her arm is practically straight. The counters were for “pygmies,” as she good-naturedly complained in a letter to Avis DeVoto. Still, here is where she learned to cook.
These days, we’ve gotten incredibly fussy. With our personal playlists, our complicated made-to-order half-caf, half-decaf lattes, our special mattresses that can adjust for each sleeper, our individually designed college curriculums, we’ve gotten out of the habit of making do with what’s at hand. Part of living with abandon is giving oneself over to one’s circumstances without any expectation that things are going to be to our liking anytime soon. We can hope that things will improve, but it shouldn’t prevent us from doing what we’ve set out to do. Julia had an astonishing capacity to be content with what was in front of her, whether it be a cooking school run on spit and a string or a less than perfect hunk of meat. She made do and moved on and rarely regretted it.
Make it up as you go along.
Do you have a file containing a list of lifetime goals for education, career, and family broken into ten-year plans, complete with large-scale goals to achieve within that time frame, and further divided into smaller goals you must reach to contribute to attainment of the larger ones?
If so, you should seriously consider either moving the file into the tiny trash can on your desktop or folding it into an origami flapping bird before recycling it.
Julia, for most of her life, never knew what the hell she was doing. The moment that best exemplifies her inborn laissez-faire attitude occurred at Smith College, where she professed to anyone who was interested (her academic counselor) that her life’s goal was to be a “lady novelist” but then neglected to take the only creative writing class offered at Smith.
This isn’t to say Julia wasn’t highly organized and meticulous with her cooking—perhaps she loved cooking in part because by its very nature it required her immediate attention and focus—but she was always ready to walk through whatever door opened next.
Who could have planned for, or anticipated, The French Chef ? Even the “bon appétit” was ad-libbed.
Once, during the late 1980s, Julia guest-starred on Late Night with David Letterman. Her task was to cook a hamburger. Letterman asked whether she’d ever cooked anything inedible.
“Of course, many times,” she replied.
“What do you do then?” he asked. “What happens?”
“I give it to my husband,” she said.
Meanwhile, the portable demonstration stove was on the fritz, and the big, bulging patty of ground beef sat cold in the pan. With less than a minute left in the segment, Julia decided to serve it as is, smothered with grated cheese she melted with the aid of a blowtorch she produced from behind the counter. To Julia’s delight, Letterman managed to choke down a mouthful of the “beef tartare.”
Bon appétit!
Make this your mantra: I’m never too anything for anything.
Maybe it was because Julia’s mother, Caro, thought her daughter could do no wrong. Maybe it was because Julia was always the tallest person in the room (beginning with her Montessori preschool class), or because she was old (thirty-seven) when she discovered her passion for cooking, or because she was very old (fifty-one) and very tall and had that cartoon voice when she hit it big as The French Chef. But if she wanted to do something, she did it.
When she landed on the shores of France in 1946, she spoke only high school French, and bad high school French at that. Her teacher had pronounced her accent “insurmountable.”
Still, she plowed ahead.
Julia was so at home in her own skin, it never occurred to her that whatever was going on with her or whatever people thought of her would be a reason to refrain. If she had the energy and the interest—and when did she not?—she was up for it. ATV riding at seventy-two. Impromptu trips abroad at eighty. She was an early adopter of technology, especially the laptop, which allowed her to work while on airplanes as she was rounding the bend to ninety. In 2000, four years before she died, she was trading wisecracks with her friend, chef and cookbook author Jacques Pépin on their cooking show, Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home. “Are you going to toast our buns, Jacques?” she famously wondered on the hamburger episode.
Julia arrived at “just do it” as a personal credo long before Nike snapped it up. Nothing anyone thought about her could stop her. Imagine a life in which you’re never too anything for anything. Never too old to go back and get that degree. Never too uncoordinated to cut loose on the dance floor. Never too wrong-of-body to wear that swimsuit and throw yourself into the waves.
RULE No. 2:
PLAY THE EMPEROR
I’m all for hunger among the well-to-do. For comfortable people, hunger is a very nice quality.
IN 1992 JULIA WENT TO LONDON TO ATTEND THE OXFORD Symposium on Food. She traveled with Nancy Verde Barr, who served as the executive chef for Julia’s Good Morning America segments and helped her produce her feature articles for Parade magazine. Anyone who worked with Julia for any length of time inevitably became a good friend, and Barr had been with her for a dozen years by then.
Julia almost never said no to an invitation. Even in her dotage, the only thing that prevented her from saying yes to every invitation that came down the pike was the scant twenty-four hours in every day. Just as the two friends were preparing to leave for England, the London branch of Cordon Bleu invited them to another event, and Julia, a traveling pro with everything she needed packed into a small black suitcase, insisted they add it to their itinerary. But where would they stay? As luck would have it, Julia’s friends—the Sullivans—were traveling in the States at the time, and their very nice flat remained empty.
What could be more perfect? Especially since this would allow Julia and Nancy to throw a cocktail party for their London friends in the cooking world, of which Julia had many.* One night, at the end of their stay, Julia thought it would be nice to thank their generous hosts by photographing themselves enjoying the flat, and enclose the picture
s in the thank-you note. Then she spied a rare porcelain vase sitting on the mantel—but one of the Sullivans’ large, priceless collection—and hatched a better, much more entertaining plan.
Inside their proper thank-you note the Sullivans also received a handful of photos of Julia and Nancy … in their bathrobes pretending to hurl their museum-quality porcelain to the floor. Ha!
Julia was eighty when she carried out this caper, and it was far from her last.
There are many stories like this about Julia, by those who knew her well and those who knew her in passing. What they all attest to is one of the great mysteries surrounding the person of Julia Child: She grew up without losing those tremendous kid-type qualities that make everyday life fun.
NOTHING PREVENTED JULIA FROM BEING HERSELF
Until the day she died, Julia was never out of touch with what my friend Gabby calls her “girl spirit.” For most women that curious, rambunctious, prank-playing, singing-at-the-top-of-our-lungs-while-riding-our-bikes-down-the-middle-of-the-street joie de vivre begins to dwindle around the time we start reading Seventeen, and is usually extinct by the time we’re in the throes of calorie-counting, expensive eye cream–wearing, eligible man–pursuing adulthood. We can hardly be blamed. I can’t think of an era in which Julia’s exuberant tomboy style of behavior was ever in vogue for grown women. Being yourself in the way Julia was herself has been frowned upon as being unladylike, un-Joni Mitchell-like, or un-smokin’ hot babe-like, depending upon the era. This wouldn’t matter in and of itself, except the implication of being a woman who inhabits and expresses the full range of her personality, as inevitably put forth by the pundits-du-jour, is that refusing to get in line with accepted notions of femininity means you’re bound to wind up unloved and alone.
