Julia Child Rules

by Karen Karbo

  In March 1944, Julia crossed the Pacific aboard the USS Mariposa, with three thousand men and eight other “crows,” as the women were called. Their mere presence caused pandemonium, which Julia partially suppressed by spreading the rumor that they were all missionaries. It took thirty-one days to travel from California to Calcutta, during which Julia played enough bridge to last a lifetime and volunteered as a reporter for the shipboard newspaper. She also had her eyes opened.

  Julia knew she was undereducated more or less by choice, but was still throttled by the sheer brain power and sophistication of the “eggheads” she met, first on the ship and then at her eventual postings in Kandy and Kunming, China. Social scientists, psychologists, biologists, historians, and journalists; anthropologist Gregory Bateson, then married to Margaret Mead, became her shipboard drinking buddy. Julia didn’t know it yet, but she’d found her tribe.

  The moment the Mariposa docked in Calcutta, Julia received word that she was going to be transferred to Ceylon, where a new outpost was being established in Kandy, under the leadership of British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. Julia would be in charge of setting up the Registry there. She lived in dark, dank quarters that flooded a foot and half every time it rained hard (every afternoon), with a small refrigerator in the living room, on top of which sat a two-burner hot plate.

  The longer she did her job, the less she liked it, but she was a trouper. She was her father’s daughter; she believed in leaning into the task at hand. She believed in toughing it out.

  She claimed that her long hours left her no time to “scintillate.” This wasn’t quite the case. There was actually plenty of “scintillating” going on; in the small community there were forty males for every female. It was paradise for every single woman but Julia, who was popular in the way she had always been: a good sport who knew how to have fun, but never a romantic prospect.

  Despite her cushy upbringing, Julia possessed a hardy constitution. Before joining the OSS she spent her stamina on the usual upper-middle’s pursuit of entertainment and pleasure. Once she was assigned to head the Registry in Kandy, she discovered that she also possessed a remarkable ability to tolerate monotony and discomfort, often working ten hours a day, six days a week.

  Her job was at once critical and murderously dull, tasked as she was with handling, cataloging, indexing, and filing every piece of intelligence that passed through the outpost. The OSS didn’t just gather information, it also carried out myriad clandestine operations that included spreading misinformation, infiltrating local political organizations, acts of counter-espionage, and pretty much everything we’ve come to expect from spies vis-à-vis Hollywood movies; to do all this, the operatives needed sometimes speedy access to material, which is where Julia and her secure-yet-easily-navigated filing system came into play. Throughout her life, Julia downplayed her role in the war, claiming to be a mere file clerk, but her high security clearance tells another story.

  YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MIGHT FIND AT THE END OF AN IMPULSE

  One of the great satisfactions of casting our gaze back on the whole of someone’s life is being able to see where the twists and turns led, and how events given scant attention during their unfolding paved the way for bigger things, sometimes even the biggest things in their lives.

  The largest fork in Julia McWilliams’ road was her meeting Paul Child, which never would have happened had she not followed that first whim to answer FDR’s call to arms, and the second whim that led to her putting in her application to be sent to India. All along the way, and without a thought, she followed her heart. But meeting Paul, who not only changed her life but also gave her a brand-new one, was only part of the yield.

  By casting her lot in with the OSS, Julia gained confidence, grew up, met the kind of people with whom she would spend the rest of her life, and also, somewhat bizarrely, learned to cope with vast amounts of important bits of information, an underappreciated and homely activity that over time exercised the muscle that, years later, would allow her to build complex recipes. It turned her into a woman who could write a massive, comprehensive, many-thousand-page cookbook that would revolutionize an entire nation’s attitudes about food, cooking, and eating.

  WHEN TO HEED A WHIM

  The current flavor of positive thinking, which holds that if we just assume something we desperately want is on its way as long as we “put it out there,” has never captured my imagination. Maybe it’s because I spent too many Decembers as a child fervently hoping, as a common Christmas Eve myth holds, that my dog would talk to me at midnight. Every year I’d wait for Smitty, our surly black dachshund, to open his mouth and hold forth, and every year he sat curled in his bed giving me the side eye. One year, I even curled up beside him on his little plaid bed and started conversing, hoping that maybe he just needed some reassurance; what I got was a snarl instead.

  But embracing the power of the whim is a way to shake things up that nudges life into tossing something unexpected in your path. It’s employing your psychic divining rod, allowing it to lead you in a direction where something good, or at least different, is bound to enrich your life.

  When I started thinking about whims in general, my first thought, unimaginatively, was the impulse buy. The random candy bar tossed in the grocery basket at the checkout counter; the cute little bracelet thrown atop the sweater at the department store register.

  One friend said yes one night when she received a phone call from the Obama campaign asking whether she’d be willing to spend the five weeks leading up to the election working in rural Pennsylvania. On a whim, she said, she left her husband and kids and went.

  The best time to heed a whim is when we find ourselves stuck in life, when putting one foot in front of the other is only taking us further away from where we want to go, even though we don’t know where that is. The most accomplished whim-follower I know is the twenty-year-old son of a friend. Last year, unhappy at college, where he was taking classes that meant nothing to him, he told his parents he was not returning for his sophomore year but was instead moving to Barcelona to live with some family friends. Barcelona was great for a month, until he met some people who sang the praises of Prague, where he went and worked in a coffee shop for a year. There, he also met a girl, whom, after a time, he followed to Seattle, where he is now working in yet another coffee shop and preparing to return to college. This young guy is of the whim-following age, although from what I can tell, most young adults, with the awful pressure on them to decide on a career path by sixth grade, are too frantic with worry to succumb.

  The thing about whims is that most of the romantic ones involve a serious outlay of cash. Even hopping in the car for a weeklong road trip across a state or two will set you back a few hundred dollars; here on the West Coast one of the whims that makes you feel like your life is not in a rut—“let’s go to Mexico!”—will set you back thousands. You used to be able to dream about the sun on your face on a Monday, and by Friday your toes were wriggling in the sand at Puerto Vallarta. Now, you’d have to be a part of the 1 percent to afford those tickets.

  THE ONE RELIABLE WHIM

  The most obvious whim, given the subject of this book, is what to eat. Every day we’re faced with satisfying a food or cooking whim. Because when it comes to cooking I’m tortured with ambivalence,* my culinary whims are perpetually at war with each other. On a daily basis, I experience opposite urges. I long to both flee the kitchen† and devote myself to cooking in Julia-holic fashion. But my behavior is purely whim-driven.

  Nothing was left to chance in my mother’s kitchen. She wrote out her weekly menus on Sunday and shopped for the week the next day. Monday night was pork chops; Tuesday night was hamburger pie, a stewed tomato–heavy take on Shepherd’s Pie, with hamburger substituted for lamb, and including frozen French cut string beans; Wednesday night was reserved for “something new”; Thursday was beef stroganoff or beef bourguignon or something that involved simmering; Friday night was Taco Night; Saturday night was Chef�
��s Salad; Sunday night was pot roast. I live in a permanent state of rebellion against this regimen. The thought of writing out a weekly menu makes me want to tear off my clothes and run down the middle of the street, so slavish and restrictive does it seem. My cooking life is all whim, all the time. Even before my kids went off to college, I would often find myself standing in the middle of the kitchen at 5:30 p.m. wondering what to make for dinner, waiting for my taste buds to speak up. Sometimes I would race to the corner Whole Paycheck for a rotisserie chicken and broccoli. Sometimes I would throw open the cupboard and make Something with Noodles. Sometimes I would make “breakfast dinner.” Sometimes, in a burst of inspiration, I would make something fabulous, coq au vin or grilled halibut. Sometimes, we would just go out. I prefer to think this refusal to plan means I’ve embraced the French attitude about eating. I’m allowing the spirit to move me. Unfortunately, the spirit is not as epicurean as I would like it to be.

  I envy people for whom cooking is their true, abiding creative outlet, people who arise every morning and as their coffee is brewing plan what they’re going to cook that day. Julia famously said, “People who like to eat are the best people,” and presumably she’s not talking about the people who stand in the middle of the kitchen eating Wheat Thins with a squirt of aerosol cheese.

  When Nora Ephron died, Joan Juliet Buck, who played Madame Elisabeth Brassart, the director of the Cordon Bleu, in Ephron’s Julie & Julia, wrote a droll, fond remembrance of her friend for The Daily Beast, in which after extolling her Renaissance woman genius, she said, “She also had a real life, two early marriages and then one great one, and two sons, one of whom I know and adore. And she cooked.”

  And she cooked.

  There are few three-word sentences that so perfectly evoke a superior sort of down-to-earth femininity. Nora Ephron cooked. This did not mean she threw some Annie’s white cheddar mac ’n cheese into a pot of boiling water and emptied a bag of pre-washed romaine hearts into a bowl and called it dinner, like some people I know. Nora cooked, which meant she was warm, generous, sexy, sensual, passionate, and life-loving.

  There’s a little shop not far from my house that describes itself as “a home decor and flower store in Portland, Oregon, offering a clever mix of modern, vintage, and organically inspired products.” Among the clever inventory are cookbooks where every author is a windswept blonde who looks as if she stepped straight from the pages of Robert Redford’s Sundance catalog, in jeans or a vintage dress, her white chef’s apron tied snugly around her waist. And she always has a waist, this hip and competent cooking beauty, giving testament to her ability to spend her life cooking fantastic food, but never eating too much of it.

  If I could genetically modify myself, I would make myself over as one of those people who feels joy at the thought of food every minute of every day, in the hopes that I might capture some of the joy that everyone who loves to cook—and everyone who enjoys cooking loves to cook—seems to have. Am I the only one who’s noticed this? These days there seems to be an unspoken competition among people who consider themselves to be cooks. No one says “Sure, cooking’s okay,” or “Yeah, I like to cook,” or “Cooking’s a nice way to pass the time,” or “Sometimes I’m in the mood to cook, but just as often I could go for take-out Chinese.” These days, cooking is a sacred calling that must be pursued with religious zeal. So intense is even the home cook’s love of cooking that Jerrod, the man of the house, and I have devised a TV cooking show drinking game wherein every time a contestant proclaims his or her passion for cooking we drink. Fifteen minutes into every episode of last season’s Master Chef, we were slurring our words.

  I read and admired Bill Buford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany about his own obsession with cooking (unlike me, he suffers no tortured ambivalence), and the time he spent working in the kitchen of super-celebrity chef Mario Batali. Once, after a long and brutal shift,* he rhapsodized: “I was a member of a team of cooks, closed away in this back room, people’s knives knocking against cutting boards in the same rhythmic rocking way: mine as well; no windows, no natural light; no connection to the outside world; no idea, even, what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable—a great comfort, surrounded by these intense association of festive meals.”

  I long to be one of these passionate people, but I can’t help but wonder whether they possess the same passion for kitchen cleanup, because that crap ton of work accompanies every great meal ever made unless it’s this one, perfected when I was a junior in college and had my first apartment and had vowed never to learn how to cook:

  Saucisson Hebraïque Nationale en Fourchette Plongé dans la Moutarde Dijonnaise

  Ingredients

  1 all-beef hot dog (best you can afford)

  Grey Poupon mustard

  Skewer hot dog on fork, cook over gas burner, unscrew top of mustard, dip hot dog in mustard, stand in the middle of the kitchen and eat.

  Several summers ago we hosted an exchange student from Spain. Her gift to us upon her arrival was a small cookbook featuring authentic tapas recipes. Little did Lucia know that one of our favorite local haunts was a tapas place; that her host family was, in fact, a little mad for tapas.* We decided we were going to have a Spanish-American tapas-themed Fourth of July. There was going to be Patatas con Chorizo (potatoes with chorizo) and Tortilla con Alcachofa y Jamon (artichoke and ham tortilla), Pinchos Morunos (pork brochettes), and Tartaletas con Pisto Manchego (ratatouille tartlets). We also made four batches of Lucia’s favorite, Croquetas de Queso (cheese croquettes), as well as a few other things I’ve forgotten. Creating this feast required every cooking implement we have in the house, in part because Jerrod, who fashions himself a great cook when he’s in the mood, is also impaired when it comes to eyeballing how big a bowl or pan one might need for any given mixture; if a dish like, say, the croquetas, requires something to be mixed, then browned, there will always be at least two extra too-small bowls and pans per cooking step.*

  The tapas feast was memorable because it was delicious, and also because it took me four hours to clean the kitchen, including using a butter knife to scrape the flour/water paste† off the counters, stove top, table top, refrigerator handle, and yes, ceiling. The kitchen was over a hundred degrees and I was sweating like … a person cleaning the kitchen in the middle of summer, when turning on the oven makes as much sense as turning on the furnace.

  And yet, we hear nothing about this from all these passionate cooks, home and professional alike. Do they all have a personal dishwasher? Who scrapes and scrubs and loads and unloads the machine and swabs down the counters and the floors and scrapes the flour/water paste off every blessed surface with a butter knife? Because that takes me at least as long as it does to cook something.

  Never mind the three minutes it takes to eat it.

  Even Julia once said, “I do love to cook. I suppose it would lose some of its glamour if I were married to a ditch digger and had seven children, however so.” Meaning, of course, if you had to cook for that many people day in day out, there would be so many dishes to do you would lose the will to live, much less cook.

  Julia tossed off seven as the number of children it would take to dampen the glamour of cooking, but in my experience it takes only three, plus one father-in-law. Yes, I have done my time as a galley slave. For a half decade I was married to a guy with kids, and our blended family was comprised of my four-year-old, his five- and eleven-year-old, and his father, who lived with us for a year while doing some contract work for the phone company in Portland. In their defense, my husband and my father-in-law ate whatever I put in front of them. Indeed, they ate a lot of whatever I put in front of them. A dozen enchiladas would be hoovered up before I’d returned to the table with the napkins. Seconds, and thirds, were the rule of the day with spaghetti, mac ’n cheese, anything that could be self-served with an overflowing ladle. Another woman might h
ave felt gratified; instead, since I was also the alpha breadwinner at the time, I marveled at how fast thirty bucks worth of organic free-range chicken breasts could disappear.

  Every night I tried to make something that everyone could tolerate, since we’d laid down the law that what was for dinner was what was for dinner. The kids could choose not to eat it, but that was all there was to eat. I would spend hours creating menus that took into account one kid’s hatred of red meat and fruit, another’s hatred of fish and pasta (except plain, with salt and butter), and another’s hatred of chicken and all vegetables. I felt like I was training for the World Rubik’s Cube Championships, and no one was ever satisfied.

  The kids learned to circumvent our strict law against saying “Yuck” when faced with what was for dinner by developing their inner food critics. Not a minute after they’d each taken a bite or two, one would say, “I don’t really care for this steamed broccoli, it’s a little rubbery.” Or, “Pork chops aren’t really my cup of tea, but if they were, I’d say these were a little tough.” Or, “If I was a veggie burger person, which I’m not, I’d say this one could use a little seasoning.”

  I’ve come a little far afield here. My point is this: If your relationship to food and cooking is largely positive and uncomplicated; if, unlike me, you harbor no tortured ambivalence in relation to cooking, then every day provides at least several wonderful opportunities to follow a whim. It’s a little thing, opting to make beef pho when you thought you were headed in the direction of a nice lasagna, but it keeps your impulse-following muscle in good shape for the day when something more momentous comes your way.