Julia Child Rules

by Karen Karbo

  The genuine extent of my French is this: Bonjour, Madame!

  Technically, of course, I speak more French than this, but this is the limit of what I can speak with élan, or anything resembling authority. In France, it’s customary to say Bonjour, M’dame or Bonjour, M’sieur whenever you enter a shop.* To enter and say anything else is considered the height of rudeness. I can Bonjour, Madame with the best of them. I can Bonjour, Madame with the conviction of a third-generation concierge. But that’s the end of it. If the M’dame or M’sieur replies with anything other than Bonjour M’dame, I’ve got nothing. What’s worse, I’m aware that the quality of my Bonjour, Madame is so fine—I’ve mastered the perfect high-pitched, slightly querulous tone, the almost but not quite silent first “a” in Madame, the general air of having bonjoured a million madames in my time—I am bound to be confused with a near-native speaker. Or if not a near-native speaker, at least not an American. I feel both shame and guilt about this predicament; shame because given the number of years of French I studied in school (six), and the number of times I’ve been to France (also six), you think I’d be able to do better. Guilt, because every time I Bonjour, Madame someone, I’m flying under the flag of false fluency.

  As Kathy and I approached our first shop, it started to rain. We had neither hoods nor umbrellas. The five-hour energy drink I’d downed in the cab on the way from the airport was many hours ago. I tried to summon the spirit of Julia in her most polecat-charming mood, but it did nothing to alleviate the basic dread I always felt upon entering a shop in Paris, further complicated now, since I was on a pilgrimage, with the despair at never being able to speak enough French to learn Julia’s secret to living well. Surely Julia didn’t mean the secret to living well was being thought an imbecile by every French person you met, did she?

  We entered the green grocer first and I ardently greeted the only person who looked as if he worked there, a kid of perhaps sixteen wearing a white apron and a knit cap. He looked at us as if he wasn’t quite sure we were talking to him. When we brought our basket to the register and I Bonjour, M’sieured him again, he said, “Hey,” or something that sounded like “Hey.” The one thing he did not say was Bonjour, Mesdames. I looked at him again and pegged him as the American pop culture–loving son of, perhaps, an Algerian owner. One thing he wasn’t was a disapproving Parisian matron (not to worry, she was manning the counter over at the fromagerie).

  “Tiens, il pleut!” I blurted out. (Hey look, it’s raining.)

  “Il fait froid, aussi,” he said. (It’s cold, too.)

  “Merci beaucoup! Tu es, I mean, vous êtes, vous êtes si bon!” I pretty much shrieked. (Thank you! You are very kind!)

  Had I been able to continue my thought, “I am grateful that you have resisted treating me like a complete imbecile!” I would have, but I settled for smiling and dipping my head like a horse about to dig into some fresh alfalfa.

  The relief I felt was all out of proportion to this simple exchange, and I had a sudden inkling, trudging home in the drizzle along the rue de Grenelle, that this may have been Julia’s secret. Whether she knew it or not—and given her innate optimism it’s doubtful she gave it a thought—her successful conversations with the shopkeepers, bureaucrats, waiters, tobacconists, and more mechanics (the Blue Flash was now making yet another weird noise) on whom she practiced her French were many times more encouraging and glad-making than the disastrous ones. She possessed the type of personality that set much more store by the good than by the bad. Good experiences were that much more good than bad experiences were bad. It was not simply a matter of refusing to dwell on the bad; the good was just so much better, so much more energy infusing, inspirational, and satisfying, it simply drew more attention to itself. The bad, like the promises we make to see more of people we don’t really like, falls away, forgotten.

  I recently purchased and devoured a book called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, which tells you everything you need to know about my aptitude for unbridled optimism. But this realization, that one good exchange was worth, say, a dozen discouraging ones, was something I could get behind, in part because there are no mental gymnastics involved in trying to find a way to transform the bad into the good, the fallback position of most knee-jerk positive thinkers.

  Back at the apartment, we made omelets and Pommes de Terre Sautées à la Catalane (potatoes sautéed with onions and peppers), basically, a fancy breakfast dinner. While Kathy cut the potatoes and failed to fret in a very Julia manner that we’d forgotten to get lardons,* I further inspected the kitchen and took stock of our batterie de cuisine: We were without a whisk, a cutting board, measuring spoons, measuring cups, or a cheese grater. All of these items we could easily purchase and leave for the next renter. But what to do about the lack of an oven? Over our cheese course—we sprang for a wedge of Brie de Meaux at the fromagerie—Kathy left a message for Marcelline, the one person we knew in Paris well enough to barge in on and commandeer her oven.

  While waiting to hear back from Marcelline, we fell into a routine. In the morning we brewed coffee in our unromantic, rental apartment Krups coffeemaker, and while one of us ran to the corner boulangerie (croissant for me, pain au raisin for Kathy), the other would start planning a dinner that could be adapted to the stove top,* which then took the rest of the day to shop for and prepare.

  The day we settled on a relatively simple dish of Filet de Poisson Pochés au Vin Blanc (fish filets poached in white wine) with Sauce Hollandaise, we spent most of it in search of wax paper, which Julia, who is lax when it comes to certain things, insisted we use to cover the fish while it simmered; aluminum foil apparently discolors the wine. This sort of attention to detail is what helped Julia make her name, but it plunged Kathy and me into a Kafkaesque search for papier paraffiné. From FranPrix to MonoPrix to Biomonde, no wax paper. I’m sure we were pronouncing it wrong. The word paraffiné in the wrong mouth (mine) might sound, I don’t know, like par a fini, which means “finished by.” Bonjour, Madame, do you have any paper finished by? Kathy’s French is moderately better than mine, but it didn’t seem to matter. No one in Paris had any paper finished by. We decided we could make do with a piece of buttered notebook paper, of which we had plenty.

  Not a moment after we checked wax paper off our list, we were faced with what to substitute for the “white wine fish stock made from heads, bones and trimmings.”

  This is as good a place as any to discuss Julia’s money, which we tend to lose sight of in the face of her unflappable can do, DIY spirit. Despite that generous inheritance, Julia was always frugal. When she and Paul were married, they resolved to live on his civil service salary, which they managed to do by economizing on furnishings for their various rental apartments first in Paris; then Marseille; Plattsdorf, Germany; and Oslo. You never hear about Julia splurging on a Persian silk rug or a Dior dress,* nor did Pulia, as they liked to call themselves, ever say, as far as we know, “This cold Parisian fog is simply too much to bear, we need a week in Cancun.”

  What they did spend her money on was groceries, eating out, and outfitting Julia with the most spectacular batterie de cuisine in Paris, smaller only than that of E. Dehillerin, the famous kitchen supply store on the rue Coquillière, near the Louvre, where she would often buy so many copper pots, aluminum pans, casseroles, molds, grinders, graters, choppers, strainers, bowls, funnels, egg rings and separators, boning knives, bread knives, paring knives, cleavers, and whisks, she would have to make two trips in the Blue Flash.

  When Julia wasn’t cooking at home, she and Paul worked their way through the Guide Michelin. They preferred two-star restaurants, where they could get a meal for about five dollars. Michaud became their regular haunt for a while—Julia adored the sole meunière, and the bustling friendly proprietress, who at four feet three was a full two feet shorter—and they also loved Le Grand Véfour, one of Paris’s oldest restaurants, where they ate scallops and duck, and spied the writer Colette in the corner
, tucking into a plate of sausages.

  It pains me to be the fun-killer, but I feel compelled to point out what most first worlders of a certain economic class who are devoted to eating well, however we individually define it, prefer not to think about: Food can be expensive. And I’m not talking about the meals at the world’s lofty food shrines, the $500 prix-fixe menu at Masa in New York or Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée in Paris, or any of the other fine-dining restaurants where dinner for two is a month’s mortgage. I mean if, for example, you’re with a friend in Paris and you’re trying to cook in the manner of Julia Child and want to make a nice white wine fish stock with bones, heads, and trimmings. I have no doubt that there is a shop somewhere in Paris where you can purchase a fish carcass, or that somewhere there was a jovial, tolerant fishmonger who would be enchanted by our mission, not that we could explain it in French, and for a euro or two sell us some bones, heads, and trimmings, but all we could think of at the moment was that we would have to purchase a few whole fish (in addition to the filets) from which to make the stock, and even though we had saved money by substituting buttered notebook paper for wax paper, we suddenly feared for our budget.

  Kathy and I have known each other since the Reagan administration. We were roommates when John Lennon was shot. For a time, just after we graduated from film school, we spent a half dozen years collaborating on the same number of genius screenplays that, of course, went nowhere. We’ve been there for each other through love affairs, marriages, births, divorces: Our now-twentysomething children have known one another since they were born. Our long history has paved the way for like-minded thinking a lot of the time, and when we stood in the middle of the MonoPrix on the rue de Rennes, contemplating the fish stock dilemma, we were reminded of the stupendous Julia Bouillia Kathy had so lovingly labored over months earlier; even with the cheapo Trader Joe’s flash-frozen fish, that bouillabaisse set us back $200.

  One of Julia’s most basic, enduring lessons is the layering of flavors, and every one of those layers, when made with the finest ingredients, costs money. But Julia, despite her Pasadena privilege, was also a woman of great common sense and empathy. She never wanted the inability to find or afford the right ingredients to trip up a home cook; she always offered alternatives. Indeed, later in her career she would be mocked and snubbed by foodies of every stripe for daring to suggest a meal might be tasty using a canned anything. Even though her recipes are maddeningly precise and have a perverse number of steps, she always suggests an alternative that, while not perfect, will do just fine. In our case, the substitution for the white wine fish stock was white wine, vermouth, and jus de palourdes (clam juice).

  Trying to find clam juice was the same business as with the wax paper. The stores we tried either didn’t stock it or the notoriously blasé Parisian clerks weren’t interested in trying to understand what we wanted. We wound up settling for boxed vegetable broth.

  We lugged our groceries back to rue de l’Exposition in the sideways rain. Once at the apartment, we realized we’d forgotten to purchase a whisk, and you simply can’t make Sauce Hollandaise without a whisk. So we switched to Sauce à la Parisienne, a cream and egg sauce made with a flour and butter roux from the fish-poaching liquid, which is not as flavorful as a Sauce Hollandaise but much sturdier and more difficult to ruin. We’d left our apartment just after breakfast and now it was late afternoon. I had a roaring headache and needed water. Forget the mystery about why French women don’t get fat: How do they stride around Paris without collapsing on the cobblestones from dehydration? There are no drinking fountains in the city, and you’ll spot a unicorn before you’ll see a French woman stopping on the street to take a swig from a water bottle.

  In the apartment next door, our neighbor was shrieking either to someone on the phone, or to someone in her apartment who was bound and gagged. The neighbor, who we hadn’t yet seen, started shouting every morning at 7:00 a.m. and shouted on and off all day long. She didn’t merely raise her voice; it was the kind of hysterical raging that generally precedes lunging at someone. She wasn’t yelling in French, or any language we recognized. The Romanian Embassy was across the street. Perhaps it was Romanian?

  Reader, did I mention that our apartment was mere steps away from rue Saint-Dominique, and thus some terrific restaurants? There was La Fontaine de Mars, where Michelle Obama ate, and a little farther down the street, the little fiefdom of Christian Constant, with his trio of well-reviewed restaurants: the casual Le Café Constant, the formal (and out of our price range) Le Violon d’Ingres, and the hip Les Cocottes.* Why am I mentioning this?

  Because we could have gone out to eat. Because I’m the kind of person who memorized something Tim Kreider wrote in an op-ed called “The Busy Trap” for the New York Times: “The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” Because we were in Paris, and trying to cook this stupid fish was Too. Much. Work. Did Julia really think this was fun? She was insane.

  By the time we finally set about poaching the fish, in a skillet and not the suggested baking dish, because, as you know, we were ovenless American cooks, I was losing the will. Kathy was not losing the will. Kathy had uncorked the wine and was merrily chopping the shallots and floating various theories about the mental state of the screaming neighbor.

  I leaned out the window and watched while a gaggle of gorgeous young Romanians in skinny jeans and roguishly knotted scarves left the embassy. It occurred to me that in our eagerness to experience French food the way Julia did when she was learning to cook, we forgot one major ingredient, for which there was no substitution: Paul. Paul! Julia was practically a newlywed when she moved to Paris. She was cooking for Paul, the love of her life, and Kathy and I were cooking for the heck of it. True food people like to say that to be a great chef, or even merely a good one, you must cook with love. It feels churlish to think too deeply about what this means, but I believe my tortured ambivalence gives me license. Are they talking about love for the people for whom you’re cooking? Love of the art and discipline required? Love of ingredients?* Or, to paraphrase Bill Buford, are the people who cook with love cooking in order to be loved? It hardly matters when we’re talking about Julia Child, because she cooked with every kind of cooking love out there.

  ALL YOU NEED IS TO NEED THE BEDROOM†

  “If we could just have the kitchen and the bedroom, that would be all we need,” Julia said, wistfully, to Ruth Reichl, who was interviewing her for the Smithsonian magazine, as her iconic kitchen was being packed up for its trip to Washington D.C., where it would be on display at the National Museum of American History. The year was 2001; Julia was eighty-nine and a widow. Paul had died seven years earlier, in 1994.

  In her piece Reichl commented that even though Paul had been gone for so long, he remained so present for Julia, and it felt, a little eerily, as if he would walk through the door at any minute.

  Admirers of Julia also tend to admire the forty-eight-yearlong love affair that was her marriage to Paul Child. I’ve been married and divorced and have lived with Jerrod, my beloved, for a dozen years and prefer it that way, so I’m either the perfect person or the worst person to parse what made the Childs’ marriage work so well that Julia, at nearly ninety, was still thinking about her long-gone love in terms of the pleasures of the bedroom. The desire—and ability—to see your partner in a sexual light decade in, decade out, may be the only real requirement for a happy marriage, but in the event it really is more complicated than that, here are a few of Julia’s other secrets.

  Whatever you do, don’t settle.

  Over the past few years there have been a spate of hard-nosed books telling it like it is: If marriage is high on your adult To Do list, you should snag the first reasonably employed guy who doesn’t live with his parents. No one and nothing is perfect, and holding out for someone on the order of Paul Child only puts you further down the road toward having to freeze your eggs or dabbling in animal hoarding.

 
Hooking your cart to someone you “love” because he rescues you from being single is a bad idea for so many reasons, but the one that concerns us here is this: Had Julia said yes to rich, boring Harrison Chandler—who was still interested in courting her after the war, when the OSS was dissolved and Julia had no choice but to return to Pasadena (now at the ripe old age of thirty-three, an old maid in full) to care for her crotchety, right-wing father—she would have been settling, and she would have been miserable. Chandler, a man of her class, who could have given her a comfortable life and perhaps even children, was not the man for her. Had she married him, most likely she would have gone on to become a Pasadena society lady, active at the local tennis club and in community theater, and maybe a little too fond of mid-afternoon martinis. She would have languished, her genius never realized.

  My feminist within would love to be able to make a case for Julia’s having discovered her singular gift for cooking, teaching, “cookery-bookery,” as she called it, and her genius level TVQ, on her own, but it’s impossible. Paul was the final and mostimportant piece of Julia’s self-actualization. It’s not a stretch to say he gave her herself, and Julia was well aware of it. She had no doubt that without Paul she would have failed to find her life’s purpose and passion.

  Paul did much more than introduce Julia to the glories of Paris. She may have had the fancy college degree, but Paul possessed the genuine love of learning. He taught Julia to love Balzac, which she read in the original French, and while she made dinner he’d often read to her.* She was well aware of the way in which Paul had and was schooling her. In a letter to Avis she wrote, vis-à-vis her intellectual rigor, “except for La Cuisine, I find I have to push myself to build up a thirst for how the atomic bomb works, or a study of Buddhism, etc.”