by Karen Karbo
THE WHIM LIKE NO OTHER
Given the stupendous success of the marriage they created, it’s hard to imagine the degree to which Julia and Paul were ill-suited for each other. Look up the word sophisticate and there you might find a picture of Paul Child. He was also an accomplished photographer—some of his pictures are in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art—and his various positions during the war always involved “visual presentation,” mapmaking, or designing and creating war rooms. In the 1920s he’d hung out with artists in Paris, painted movie sets in Hollywood, taught sailing, and in pretty much all ways lived the kind of peripatetic life immortalized by Hemingway, minus the bullfighting and big-game hunting. He was a black belt in judo and read books in their original French. He wore a cravat.
By the time he was assigned to Kandy, he was forty-four years old and still reeling from the death of the great love of his life, Edith Kennedy, a small, chic intellectual twenty years his senior, with whom he’d spent the last seventeen years. Even though they’d been desperately in love, they were bohemians and had no use for traditional marriage.
Still, Paul thought about love more than the average sixteen-year-old girl. Every night while he was stationed, first in Kandy, and later in Chungking and Kunming, he wrote to his brother Charlie, parsing the various charms of the women on the base. He was persnickety about the traits he required in a mate, but once he thought he’d found someone who met his standards, he had a habit of pouncing. He fell in love with Rosie Frame, the child of Chinese missionaries, who was fluent in Mandarin and recruited by the OSS to infiltrate Chinese social circles; and with San Francisco socialite and wild-child Jane Foster, who would in 1957 be indicted for being a Soviet spy; and outdoorsy Marjorie Severyns, who hailed from Yakima, Washington, and loved hiking and double entendres. They were all very young and had their pick of the various young, dashing scholars, reporters, and intelligence officers. When Marjorie threw Paul over for a married man, and not just any married man, but the same one who stole the heart of an earlier crush, Paul became depressed.
Paul liked Julia, even though she wasn’t his type. He found her to be warm, droll, and fun to pal around with, but neither well-read nor worldly enough. Once they had a conversation about Gandhi, and Julia said she thought he was a horrible little man and didn’t know what all the fuss was about. If this bone-headedness wasn’t enough to put him off, she also possessed a somewhat frantic virginal quality that communicated to him that regardless of her good qualities, she was simply too much of a fixer-upper.
Julia, provincial as she may have been, wasn’t stupid. In a letter she would write years later to Avis DeVoto, she characterized their main difference thus:
“He is an intellectual, as I interpret the word … meaning he is interested in ideas, and is ready to dig for information and is always trying to train his mind (like with General Semantics), and has a thirst for knowledge. Me, I am not an intellectual, though I had 4 years of college. But the people I admire most are the intellectuals; I am trying to train my mind, which is sometimes a fuzzy sieve.”
Near the end of the war, in early 1945, they were transferred first to Chungking, then to the medieval city of Kunming, at the rough, mountainous end of the Burma Road. Kandy was a five-star resort compared to Kunming, where the electricity was less dependable, the city outside the station more dangerous, the mud beneath their feet during the rainy season more fetid. In their quarters, they had no furniture aside from army cots. The war felt closer here; on the other side of one of the mountain ranges that surrounded the city on three sides, warlords led peasant armies in skirmishes against the Japanese. Outside the walls of the field station, the citizenry took advantage of the general chaos; there was smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and a thriving black market.
Except for suffering from unrequited love for Paul, Julia thrived; difficult circumstances brought out the best in her. Without breaking a sweat, she organized and managed the new Registry and was in charge of doling out the opium with which to bribe Chinese officials. The caramel-colored block arrived in a diplomatic pouch and was stored inside the Registry safe.
Paul’s love interests came and went, but Julia was always around and available to drink vodka or venture out for a hike around the rice paddies or a visit to a local temple. Together they ventured forth and discovered authentic Chinese food. It was beyond adventurous. Chinese farmers fertilized exclusively with night soil,* and every meal was inevitably accompanied by a chaser of dysentery. Paul had been averse to playing Pygmalion, and yet he found himself visiting Julia’s quarters most evenings, sharing books, poetry, music, and art with her.
The war ended first in Europe, then in the Pacific, and in 1946 Julia McWilliams was awarded the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service for her “cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications,” a nice honor that had absolutely no bearing on her status as the old-maid daughter of curmudgeonly John McWilliams. After she was discharged, she returned to his house in Pasadena, more or less back where she started from.
She may have appeared to be the same Julia—big, boisterous, golf-playing, martini-swilling, content to sit at the dinner table while her father ran through his usual political rants—but Paul Child was in her head and in her heart.
She’d observed his devotion to letter writing and took up her pen with purpose. Paul was also at loose ends and a little desperate. What was to become of him, a single, middle-aged man with no career to speak of, living in a basement apartment in Washington, working somewhat reluctantly for the State Department? Her letters to him were upbeat and flirtatious; she regaled him with news of her intellectual self-improvement. She subscribed to the Washington Post and the New York Times, and devoured books on psychology, philosophy, and semantics. She dutifully read Henry Miller, after Paul’s recommendation, and wrote that she found his work to contain too many stiff pricks.
Julia, knowing that Paul’s mother had been a terrific cook, began taking cooking lessons from two old English ladies in Beverly Hills, who specialized in pancakes. She was a terrible cook and regaled Paul with stories of her disasters, including the time she blew up a duck in the oven. Their talk of food and eating slid into sly confessions of wanting to eat each other, and Julia, on the whim of her life, invited him to come to Pasadena to see if what they both suspected was true: They were meant for each other.
RULE No. 5:
ALL YOU NEED IS A KITCHEN AND A BEDROOM
We analyzed one another, and concluded that marriage and advancing age agreed with us.
THEY DOCKED AT LE HAVRE AT DAYBREAK AND ARRIVED IN Rouen, the medieval capital of Normandy, in time for lunch. It was November 3, 1948. Paul consulted the Michelin Guide and settled upon Restaurant La Couronne, located in a medieval, low-ceilinged house not far from the square where Joan of Arc was put to death. Someone else might have found the proximity of an execution site unnerving, but to Julia it was history, something they simply didn’t have in California.
Inside, the place was cozy and close, built during the fourteenth century, when even the tiny French were much tinier. Julia had never felt more like a California hayseed, twice the size of everyone else, awkward in her American clothes, unable to speak French despite her many years of schooling.
The simple meal that changed Julia’s life, and eventually the face of cooking in America:
six oysters served on the half shell, with pain de seigle, French rye bread
beurre d’Isigny, creamy unsalted French table butter*
the legendary sole meunière
green salad with vinaigrette
a baguette
fromage blanc, i.e., a really nice cheese plate
a cup of filtered coffee
With the exception of the oysters,† I’ve eaten a version of this meal about eight hundred times. I’ve ordered sole meunière in restaurants the world over (New York) and make it perhaps every other month at home with some not-cheap Dover sole from Whole Paycheck.
Paul had come to adore the woman he once admired for having resigned herself to her old-maid status. He loved her for her stamina, competence, brains, guts, and good humor. What I love most about her, which is to say envy, was her ability to be enraptured by a piece of nicely cooked fish. In descriptions of that lunch in Rouen much is made of the buttery, succulent splendor of that sole, but her world was unmade by so much more. It was the medieval restaurant with the white walls and the low brown beams, the fire blazing in the fireplace with a chicken turning upon a spit, the attentive waiter with whom her beloved spoke his immaculate French, the care with which the meal was served, the Pouilly-Fumé (wine at lunch!). It was the whole French megillah. Years later, when Julia was famous she would often receive letters from people who asked not simply how they might learn to cook. They already knew the answer: They owned her cookbooks, but they were yearning to know how they might become passionate about it. She always answered the same thing: Go to France and eat.
Once I stumbled upon this in my research—that not only did other people understand that what was singular about Julia was not her recipes, per se, but her passion for perfecting them, and that the solution for self-infecting oneself with such passion lay in going to France and eating—I called my friend Kathy, the only person on earth who would understand the need to go to Paris and rent an apartment in Julia’s old neighborhood and walk the streets that Julia walked and frequent the markets Julia frequented, in an effort to re-create the je ne sais quoi that transformed Julia Child into Julia.
Kathy lives in San Francisco, and one weekend I flew from Portland to celebrate my birthday and powwow about our upcoming pilgrimage. Kathy spent eight hours and about $200 making what she called Julia’s Bouillia, Julia’s monster bouillabaisse. Julia had more than a few showstoppers, and her bouillabaisse was one of them. “… remember it originated as a simple, Mediterranean fisherman’s soup, made from the day’s catch or its unsalable leftovers,” Julia reminds us in Mastering. The dish itself is ancient, having been brought to Marseille in 600 BC or thereabouts by Greek sailors.
Kathy is one of the few people I know who cooks from Mastering on a regular basis and doesn’t view it as a beloved relic from an earlier time. She’s undaunted by the multipaged mega-recipes that require you to flip back and forth between the earlier page that lists the eighteen steps required to properly sauté an onion and the page that lists the showstopper recipe at hand. Kathy is also not afflicted with tortured ambivalence, nor does she share my personal culinary algebra that the longer something takes to cook, the better it should taste—that for example, if a dish takes six hours to prepare, it should taste thirty-six times better than does my high-quality all-beef frank cooked over a gas burner and dipped in a jar of Grey Poupon. I don’t believe this is possible, whereas Kathy doesn’t care whether it’s possible. Like this:
In fairness, I should say that Kathy’s version of Julia’s Bouillia, in which she uses the less-expensive Trader Joe’s flash-frozen cod and mahi-mahi for the fish soup base, and fresh red snapper, cod, and clams for the bouillabaisse proper is worth all the work, and when we ate it that night in her San Francisco apartment—with its dazzling view of the East Bay and a wedge of downtown*—served with a green salad, a good baguette, and some Napa Valley pinot grigio, I knew without a doubt that the meal would have had the Julia bon appétit seal of approval.
ALL YOU NEED IS A KITCHEN, AND NOT A VERY GOOD ONE
Earlier in the afternoon, while Kathy stood at the stove in her galley kitchen and stirred, I went online and found a perfect Paris apartment for us to rent in the 7th arrondissement, a few blocks west of Julia and Paul’s apartment on rue de l’Université. Our primary concern was renting a place that had a kitchen big enough for both of us to stand in at the same time, and maybe a window, although if it was impossibly cramped and dingy, that would be okay too, since Julia’s kitchen was appalling, and it did nothing to dampen her spirit. It was to kitchens what a Porta-Potty at a construction site is to the en-suite master bath at the Four Seasons.
It was the only room on the third floor, occupied almost exclusively by a mammoth coal-heated stove that went cold every time there was a coal shortage, which happened not infrequently in postwar Paris; it had a separate tiny, two-burner contraption that came up to Julia’s thigh, a weensy box oven in which you could bake a cupcake, and a sink that ran only cold water, and whose pipes froze a half dozen times every winter.
The point is that Julia’s first important kitchen was one step above a campfire in front of a cave, but that did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for learning to cook. Nor did the half-assed situation at Le Cordon Bleu, where she enrolled in 1949, after a short, failed attempt to become a hat maker.* Due to the war and bad management, the once-great cooking school was down at the heels, lacking both basic equipment and ingredients. Often, if they ran out of something during class, someone would be sent out to the market to purchase some more with his or her own money. Also, Julia was in a class with eleven former servicemen who, taking advantage of the G.I. bill, hoped to learn how to cook well enough to return to the States and open a diner, or a snack bar at their local bowling alley.
None of it mattered; Julia was ecstatic. “How magnificent to find my life’s calling at last,” she said. She was thirty-eight years old.
To me, this is one of Julia’s finest qualities: her ability not just to make do but to excel, even in god-awful circumstances. She never needed anything to be perfect or easy; in fact, I suspect she preferred the difficulty that comes with having to muddle through.
Thus, it wasn’t necessary for Kathy and me to rent an apartment with a fine kitchen; just an all-right kitchen would do. And we found one, in a one-bedroom apartment on the rue de l’Exposition, above a hair salon called Confidence. Could there be a better omen?
Our apartment was predictably less spacious than the pictures on the Internet rental site suggested, and the layout was curious, with the bathroom just inside the front door, then a long hallway that opened out into the bedroom on the right, and the sitting room and kitchen to the left. Thomas, the upbeat English speaker sent by the rental agency, showed us how everything worked and pressed both Kathy and me to practice locking and unlocking the finicky front door; not a minute after he left, we perused the kitchen. There was a nice L-shaped counter, cupboards filled with IKEA plates and cups, a deep sink, and a stove top. Where the oven should have been, there was a clothes washer.
I opened the washing machine and stuck my head inside, just in case to our jet-lagged American eyes it only looked like a clothes washer but was really a sleek, modern European oven, perhaps manufactured in Scandinavia.
Tant pis! we thought with what we hoped was Julian esprit, remembering her cruddy, cold-water kitchen (but at least she had an oven, however small) and putting a positive spin on her comment in Mastering regarding kitchen equipment: “Theoretically a good cook should be able to perform under any circumstance, but cooking is much easier, pleasanter and more efficient if you have the right tools.” That would be us: performing under any circumstances.
In following Julia’s advice to go to France to eat, we didn’t think it would be necessary to cook strictly from Mastering. Not only has Julie Powell already scaled that particular mountain, but if I’m to be honest, I must admit that when my tortured on-again, off-again love affair with cooking is on, I prefer Julia’s less-Frenchcentric The Way to Cook, which I dragged along in my suitcase, along with my other favorite, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, published in 1975.*
In the spirit of Julia, we decided not to fret about our lack of an oven and skipped over to rue Cler, only a few blocks away, to shop for dinner. Julia preferred patronizing her neighborhood market around the corner from Roo de Loo on the rue de Bourgogne, but occasionally she wandered over to cobblestoned rue Cler, where anything you might want to eat or cook can be found; there’s a green grocer, with fruits and vegetables trucked in before dawn from local farms, a fromagerie you can smell f
rom down the block, a poissonnerie, a charcuterie, a boulangerie, a patisserie,† and a small FranPrix grocery store, where you can buy an excellent three-euro bottle of Chardonnay, which we did that afternoon, and every afternoon thereafter because you can never go wrong having a three-euro bottle of Chardonnay on hand.
Julia, for all her pragmatism, was also a great romantic, and she believed that you could learn both French and the secret to living well by shopping for food in France, which requires one to trade quips with the green grocer, absorb the philosophy of the butcher, and listen sympathetically to the woes of Madame from whom you buy your daily baguette. She believed this even though when she first arrived in Paris her French was wretched; it got worse before it got better. It was murder for such an extrovert as Julia, and after enduring a Thanksgiving party hosted by Mrs. Paul Mowrer (better known as Hadley, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, with whom Paul had been acquainted when he lived in Paris in the 1920s), where her incomprehensible French required her to remain more or less mute, she signed up at Berlitz, engaged the help of her first French friend, Hélène Baltrusaitis,* and threw herself and her “honking consonants” on everyone she met.
She was determined to become fluent in the language of her beloved Paris—practically impossible, by the way, even for the French—and so every day she dutifully went out into the streets and talked and talked and talked, which meant that every day, for a very long time, she subjected herself to humiliating encounter after humiliating encounter with mechanics (the Blue Flash, the station wagon they’d shipped from the States, was making a weird noise), bureaucrats (in order to establish residency she needed to fill out reams of paperwork), postal workers (how do you mail a letter?), and, of course, shop people. The French are among the only people on earth who despise you on principle for not speaking their language perfectly, and Julia put herself in the way of them every day. Julia Child could “bring out the best in a polecat,” as Paul once said of his warm and friendly wife. I don’t even have to know what polecats are to know that they are nicer and less judgmental than your average Parisian.
