by Karen Karbo
Be prepared to dust off the pom-poms.
I’m as guilty as anyone of making perhaps too much about Paul’s enrichment of Julia’s life. Perhaps it’s because she never failed to give him credit. But in her continuous praise and expression of gratitude, as constant as a heartbeat, we see what she gave him: full-time access to her joie de vivre, sense of humor, and optimism.
For Paul, it must be said, could be a sourpuss. When they met, he was going through a full-fledged middle-age crisis, and he despaired that he had done so many interesting things in his life but had nothing to show for it. He was conflicted about his art, his relationship with Charlie, his twin, who he felt was the picture of success, and his various Foreign Service jobs, where he felt underappreciated.
Paul was more like an average person, going about his life in a light drizzle of dissatisfaction, with a few sun breaks of joy. But Julia shored him up, buoyed his spirits, endlessly championed what was great about him, and ignored the other stuff.
Please appreciate the word endlessly.
Part of the secret of their great marriage—or any great marriage—is shoring up the other guy, regardless. You are always not simply on his (or her) team, you’re his head cheerleader. Julia had Paul’s back in a way no one else did, not even his twin brother. Even when they were going through the “or for worse” part of the vows, Julia was devoted to doing everything she could to move them into “the better.”
Before Paul retired in 1961, the same year Mastering was published, and the unlikely switcheroo occurred, where he devoted his life to her career, Julia was the perfect Foreign Service man’s wife, attending countless cocktail parties, dinners, receptions, and cultural exhibits on her husband’s arm; hosting luncheons and dinners—sometimes every evening, depending on which mucky-muck was in town; and making an effort always to be positive, charming, and full of laughs. Once, she returned home from her morning shopping around 11:30 a.m., intending to cook all day, and had a message from her husband that he was bringing home members of the visiting U.S. Fencing Team for lunch. Every dish in the place was dirty, the beds were unmade, books and papers were strewn around the living room, and clouds of cat hair scudded around the baseboards. She tidied up and put up a pot of Soupe de Pistou without a syllable of complaint.
Can you imagine doing all this for someone you’d settled for? He better damn well be the love of your life.
Practice husbandcentricity.
In fairness to all of us with children, Julia was able to tend to Paul the way she did because they didn’t have children, only a cat, Minou. Thus, her attention was divided only between her work and her man, not, like so many of us, between our work, our man, and the impossible demands of contemporary hothouse parenting.
This may seem obvious, but if you want to have a successful, world-class marriage, you need to pay attention, and I mean a lot of attention, to your spouse. I know not one, not two, but three grown men who confessed to having shed a tear during the movie Avatar. All of them cited having been wrecked by the Navi greeting “Oel ngati kame” (“I see you.”)* It could be because the greeting was delivered mostly by Neytiri, the hot Navi chick played by Zoe Saldana, or because these guys, all husbands and fathers of young children, felt less like men and lovers and more like the unpaid nanny. Nothing bums out the man of the house more than being the object of your lust and adoration, only to be transformed overnight into a pair of extra hands once the baby is born.
When people say marriage takes work, this is the work they mean, taking the time every single day to actually see the person you loved enough to marry. The best places to do this? The kitchen and the bedroom.
RULE No. 6:
TO BE HAPPY, WORK HARD
There is so much that has been written, by people so much more professional than I, that I wonder what in the hell I am presuming to do, anyway.
POSTWAR PARIS WASN’T ALL CRÊPES SUZETTES AND LADIES SWANNING around in nip-waisted dresses. Not surprisingly, we have the movies to blame for this impression. Pretty much every American movie set during the early 1950s in Paris achieves its historic magic by putting the actors in fedoras and parking a few beautiful old Peugeots on the street and calling it authentic, which it was, minus the shell shock and pieces of cardboard people were still lashing to their feet in place of shoes. During the first years Paul and Julia lived there, there were endless shortages; days would pass without enough coal for the stove, so that preparing a simple lamb chop and a pan of peas was an ordeal. There was a fierce drought in the summer of 1949; vegetable crops and vineyards were withered and wasted by September, causing a steep rise in produce prices. Then, just when Paris seemed to be regaining her mojo as a world-class city, the General Strikes of 1951* meant weeks without public transportation. Paul and Julia rose to the occasion, employing the Blue Flash to shuttle their friends and Paul’s colleagues at the embassy wherever they needed to go.
But Julia was always at her best when she had to buck up and make do. Whether she was aware of it or not, a life of ease failed to bring out her best qualities. Difficult circumstances never seemed a reason not to do what you wanted to do, and after a few months at Le Cordon Bleu, with its own shortages of basic equipment and ingredients, cooking became the only thing Julia thought about, aside from Paul. Her days began at 6:30 a.m. and ended at midnight. She cooked in class all morning, returned to her Roo de Loo attic kitchen and cooked between classes, went back to Le Cordon Bleu in the afternoon, where she paid extra for special demonstrations, then came home in the evening to serve dinner and entertain. As we all know from Julie & Julia, most days she and Paul had a nooner.
The making of Julia Child is such an oft-told tale that it bears reminding ourselves that Julia’s enthusiasm and commitment to cooking was a little bizarre. We tend to forget, I think, that she did not have a Julia Child to inspire her to scale the Everest that is Pâté de Canard en Croûte. Few women of her class in Paris did their own cooking. Most bourgeois Parisian households had live-in maids and at least a part-time cook. What Julia was doing in the attic kitchen on the Roo do Loo was to her time and place as a friend’s architect husband who makes charcuterie* is to ours: cool, but a little over the top. That the apartment Kathy and I rented in one of the best zip codes in Paris didn’t have an oven proved that while the French revere haute cuisine, everyday people aren’t really expected to master cooking it.
When Julia wasn’t cooking she attended luncheons and lectures at Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a ladies culinary club that existed primarily because no women were allowed in Le Cercle des Gourmets. In France, not only were men the only humans who truly knew how to cook, but also they were, apparently, the only ones who knew how to eat. Normally, Julia wasn’t a fan of all-female groups—perhaps she’d had enough after her all-girls high school and college—but so eager was she to avail herself of every culinary opportunity in Paris, she thought Why not? Members were invited to show up at 10:00 a.m. on the days of their luncheons, and Julia rarely missed the opportunity.
Around the same time, Julia met Simone Beck. Simca,† whose “family” recipes she’d learned at the knee of the family’s cook in Normandy, had already published one slim book about prunes and prune liquors, and when she and Julia became acquainted, she was working on another book with Louisette Bertholle, translating French recipes for an American audience. The first draft had been rejected by the original American publisher, who felt it was too dry, and lacking in any background or instruction in French attitudes about food and cooking. They needed an American who understood the degree to which American cooks were clueless when it came to La Cuisine, and Julia agreed to see what she could do in order to make the book more accessible, i.e., create the “blah-blah” (Louisette’s term for the friendly background explanations Americans seemed to require).
Meanwhile, the three also hatched a plan to give cooking lessons to Americans. They named themselves L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, Paul designed their stylish badges (the same one Julia faithfully wore
on The French Chef), and they corralled three students for their first class. They were in business!
I must pause here for a side note: How on earth did three wealthy women who grew up in households with at least one live-in cook come to focus on the humble needs of middle-class women like my mother, who was required by the middle-class mores of her day to produce breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year? Simca had the classic French aristocratic upbringing, including the requisite servants and English nannies, while Julia experienced the more rustic Southern California version of same. Even Avis DeVoto, Julia’s pen pal and confidant, herself an avid cook, could pursue her culinary passion because a maid came in three days a week. Mary would come at 10:00 a.m., clean the house, and serve dinner at six-thirty, “a perfectly horrible hour,” Avis once groused. Furthermore, Louisette, the weak link in the collaboration, was unable to share Julia and Simca’s fierce time-consuming obsession, because her impending divorce and financial instability impelled her to think about something other than writing a cookbook. She had the usual messy life, in other words.
Even the now infamous rallying cry from the introduction to Mastering—“This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent–chauffeur–den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat”—presumes that the “occasion” during which a regular housewife and mother can be “unconcerned” with all of those tasks at once is more frequent than the reality, which was close to never.
And yet, they had to address their book to someone, and the American “housewife-chauffeur,” who read women’s magazines and whose highest culinary aspirations consisted of entering the Pillsbury Bake-Off,* must have seemed as good a person as any. What could they possibly have known of the servantless American cook? Other than, like the savages in deepest Africa who were the object of Christian missionary zeal, she was in desperate need of enlightenment.
Julia’s true motives might be that of the natural-born educator that she proved to be, or maybe something more complicated—there but for the grace of Paul Child go I—but in any case she gets a pass, in part because we adore her beyond all reason, and also because she never asked anyone to do anything that she hadn’t done at least a hundred times herself.
For the next eight years, give or take, Julia hurled herself into what she called “cookery-bookery.” There is no other appropriate noun. She and Simca (and sometimes Louisette) cooked and tasted and re-cooked and re-tasted and re-re-cooked and re-re-tasted enough recipes to comprise a first-draft manuscript of more than five hundred pages—and this covered only soups and poultry. They worked with the zeal of law school students determined to graduate at the top of their class, cooking and writing upwards of eighty hours a week.
Simca and Julia grew to love each other like sisters. Theirs was a relationship of deep devotion interrupted by the occasional homicidal fantasy. Simca’s bursts of irrationality combined with her general lack of tact and attention to details tried the endless patience of the organized, methodical Julia.
Their need for each other was like something out of an O. Henry story: Without Simca, Julia would not have access to the hundreds of authentic French recipes that only Simca—or someone like her—could provide; and without Julia, Simca had no access to an American sensibility that could make sense of her classic, complex, never-before-deconstructed dishes.
Julia dubbed Simca La Super-Française, and she was, indeed, one of those energetic, exacting, relentless European women who, after a while, can drive even someone as sunny and diplomatic as Julia Child around the bend. One of the things that irritated Julia beyond measure, aside from Simca’s habit of sputtering “But it’s not French!” when there was some aspect of a recipe of which she disapproved for no reason that she could articulate, was that, like almost all French women of a certain age, she deferred to men.
Over the eight years it took to complete the book, they prepared, adjusted, tasted, and re-tasted hundreds if not thousands of recipes, and yet, if they found themselves at odds over say, a tomato sauce in which Julia experimented by adding green peppers or carrots, Simca would insist upon deferring to some doddering one-star male chef to settle the matter, rather than relying on their own findings. This drove Julia exceptionally mad, since behind every Guide Michelin chef there was a woman, usually a precious, four foot five, cataract-ridden old granny from whom he’d filched his best recipes.
Julia was fortunate in carrying the genes for both Yankee self-reliance and the American West pioneering spirit, and she believed completely in their own “operational proof,” a term she’d picked up from Paul, who learned it from his physicist father. She tried to impose her American character on Simca, encouraging her to stick up for herself and to trust her own experience.
MASTERING THE ART OF FINDING YOURSELF THROUGH AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG AND SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROJECT OF UNKNOWN VALUE
The general wisdom about following your bliss suggests that most likely you’ll be happy pursuing a field for which you have a natural aptitude, but Julia Child wasn’t a natural cook, nor for a long time was she even a good cook. It’s an imaginative exercise to see past the formidable expert she became, to imagine her in her cold Paris apartment, bent over her typewriter, struggling to write the recipes that would one day comprise Mastering, which for years she called her “scratches.”
One of the reasons she felt the need to devote an entire morning to writing a recipe for cooking lobster, as a way of documenting exactly what needed to be done, step by step, was so that she could follow that particular trail back into the woods the next time she wanted to make it. She needed to have a perfect, highly detailed recipe because she feared she lacked perfect culinary pitch. Had she been a more instinctive, “natural” cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death. The recipes are so infamously long because Julia herself required such details.
Evidence of her obsession, and the ecstasy it produced, would fill an entire book, and did. Page after page of As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto is filled with lengthy passages attesting to Julia’s near-manic joy about food: eating it, cooking it, and everything associated with it: “We also ran into a beautiful Bordeaux 1929, that is just perfectly matured, and is everything one reads about that a wonderful Bordeaux should be but rarely tastes. It is really something to swoon over, the wonderful rich exciting bouquet, that excitement as it fills the mouth … I’m swooning over the typewriter just at the thought of them.”
In 1952, while Julia was still hoping, somehow, to make a career around cooking, she wrote a fan letter to a journalist and historian named Bernard DeVoto in response to a piece he’d written in Harper’s Magazine bemoaning the mediocre stainless-steel knives found in most American kitchens. So grateful was Julia that someone had brought this egregious problem to light, she sent along a “nice little French model” from her batterie de cuisine.
Avis DeVoto, Bernard’s wife, handled all of his correspondence. The thought of the gifted, sage, and canny Avis handling her husband’s fan mail a la Vera Nabokov who, I read once, also escorted her husband around when it rained, to save him having to clutter his mind with learning to open an umbrella, is another rant for another time.* In any case, Avis answered Julia’s letter, and the two became devoted pen pals, then best friends, confidantes, and colleagues. Julia would refer to her, alternately, as her “wet nurse” and her “mentor.”
Their letters are astonishing, a primer both on what it means to be a good friend and why people loved Julia the way they did. When DeVoto, as Avis referred to him, won the National Book Award, Julia leaned hard into her congratulations, raving for a solid sincere paragraph about his achievement. She always inquired about Avis’s work, health, and sons,* and they jointly railed agains
t Republicans, McCarthyism, books they’d read and loved and hated, even the findings in the Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior.† Their letters were tender and conscientious. Once Julia apologized for failing to send more biographical details about Simca and Louisette and promised them next time, along with “a nice photo of a cold decorated fish.”
Mostly, they rhapsodized about cooking, and about Julia’s big book project. Reading through these long, euphoric letters to Avis, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether Julia was on something other than a beautiful Bordeaux 1929. She enthused over the pure beauty of white beans, the eye-watering bite of some garlic sausages, the heavenly ham hocks, tiny French strawberries, which she called dreamberries. I’m perfectly willing to accept that I don’t possess the foodie gene that inspires me to speak in tongues when in the presence of the year’s first crop of string beans, but neither did Julia. In her rather heavily documented life, there are few foodgasms before she met Paul: She rhapsodized dutifully about her mother’s codfish balls and Welsh rarebit and waxes nostalgic about tootling down to Tijuana with her family to try something called a Caesar salad, but otherwise she seemed to be a born food-as-fuel gal.
What changed?
My theory, extrapolated from years of watching Dr. Huang of Law & Order SVU: Special Victims Unit explain why people (usually deranged criminals) behave in ways the rest of us find inexplicable, is that every time Julia perfected a dish, she was revisiting the rapture of her life’s grandest transitional moment, the Day of the Sole Meunière in Rouen. It was her own private Eucharist, celebrating love, the senses, the joy of sex and intimacy, and the transformation of a lost girl, now found.
