Julia Child Rules

by Karen Karbo

  Second, she knew that mastering anything was a process, and just because you were serious, that didn’t mean you wouldn’t mess up, a lot. Her own show is a real-time lesson on this philosophy: the nonsensical instructions, the occasions when things are overdone or underdone, or something that’s supposed to adhere, doesn’t. This is simply the way of it, or so the unspoken message goes, and there’s no need to apologize, ever.

  This was an attitude she adopted after she’d been at the Cordon Bleu for only a few weeks. She made eggs Florentine for a friend, neglecting to measure the flour and substituting chicory for spinach, proclaiming them afterwards to be the most “vile eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” You didn’t apologize because it put the guest in the uncomfortable position of having to lie to reassure you, but you also didn’t apologize because this was just part of the rigors and challenge of cooking: Sometimes it just didn’t work out and there was nothing for it.

  By the time Julia became The French Chef, she had finally figured out her audience. The “servantless American cook” that she, Simca, and Louisette had arrived on sort of haphazardly as their target audience had morphed first into the mythic loathsome housewife/chauffeur and finally “into a readership that not simply enjoys cooking, but was also excited by the challenge of making something fabulous and difficult, the effort made more seductive still by the fact it was French.” This was the person she was addressing when she looked into the camera.

  For all of the equality feminism has wrought, women are still the Apologizing Gender. Not long ago I did an inventory on how often I apologized for something. For a week I wrote down everything I said I was sorry for. I don’t especially consider myself someone who’s eager to please. Around our house, which is now just Jerrod and me, my daughter having gone off to college, I do pretty much exactly what I want. I do laundry when I feel the need to do something that occupies my hands and not my mind, make the bed most, but not all, mornings, cook when I feel like it, order out when I don’t. If I’m really feeling wild, I go outside and prune the roses and tug a weed. As my own boss, I’m never late for meetings, never fail to get the memo, or send one for that matter, and I have no one but myself to answer to when I screw up. I meet friends for drinks or for a walk when the mood strikes; Jerrod and I grab a movie when the spirit moves us, or go for rides on his motorcycle. Sometimes, we borrow his parents’ RV and head out somewhere where we can ride horses. My major day-to-day obligation is feeding the dogs.

  You would think someone with this much agency would not have so much for which to apologize. These were the things I was sorry for, that week:

  Answering an e-mail late (it had been three days)

  Walking out of the library with a book that I thought I’d checked out but hadn’t (an honest mistake)

  Taking the trash cans to the street for garbage pickup and not lining them up so that it was easy to back out of the driveway (a little lazy, but look who was taking out the trash)

  While playing World of Warcraft, failing to reapply Blessing of Might, thus making it more difficult for Jerrod’s Druid tank to hold aggro (everybody died)

  Being less than five minutes late meeting a friend for a coffee (“I’m sorry!” by which I mean, “Hey, how are you?”)

  Accidentally making some garlic bread with butter and ginger paste instead of garlic paste (Ugh, sorry)

  Texting at dinner (justified)

  Sneezing (I said excuse me, a form of “I’m sorry”)

  Why all this apologizing? Except for the texting, which admittedly was rude, I had nothing to apologize for. It’s a terrible and silly tic, and it’s not remotely polite. Instead, it creates the mental habit of feeling apologetic.

  I don’t doubt that Julia apologized when she was wrong. Part of her upbringing as an Upper Middle Brow–girl in Pasadena would have dictated that she had good manners, but she was not about to apologize when she’d done nothing wrong. One could argue that failing to measure the flour in that long-ago eggs Florentine was “wrong,” but mastering cooking—or anything—is a process to be both accepted and respected, and the people who benefit from your practice—your friends and family—must also accept and respect it.

  There is no need to reinvent yourself.

  If you are old enough to have watched The French Chef as a child, it’s nearly impossible to watch it today free of the miasma of nostalgia. The perky vintage 1960s theme music.* The grainy black-and-white film. The often lame introduction. (Who can forget “These are the chicken sisters!”) Front and center, Julia herself, wearing her uniform of cotton-blouse-with-strange-badge,† pearls, and apron tied at the front.

  I set my college-age daughter down to watch some Julia, to see if it resonated. She doesn’t watch any of those chef shows—Master, Iron, or Top—or Cake Boss, or Kelsey’s Essentials, or that show with Paula Deen’s son. The entire food-show phenomenon—spawned, of course, by the success of The French Chef—holds no interest for her, at least not yet.

  She watched the quiche episode and was surprised. “Julia is so natural and normal,” she said. “I felt like I was in the kitchen with her. I wanted to be in the kitchen with her!”

  Julia’s ability to be herself in front of the camera hypnotized us, and still does, apparently. Who was this large, occasionally breathless, excitable woman who had no ability to put on airs? It wasn’t as if she forgot the camera was there—every once in a while, especially in the early episodes, she looks up and into it with a startled smile—but she possessed no ability to alter behavior because it was there. She would sometimes crack herself up and do nothing to disguise her glee. In the episode on how to roast a chicken, when describing the age of an old stewing hen, she said, “This chicken is beyond the age of consent” and practically laughed out loud at her own improvisation. Each show was filmed in one take, and some were rougher than others. The aforementioned “To Roast a Chicken” was particularly rocky. The sentence “This chicken weighs five and a half to nine months” was followed moments later with information on how much you might expect to spend: “It’s twice as much more expensiver than.”

  Viewers not only didn’t mind her mistakes, they loved them and found them comforting. They loved watching her taste something. She lowered her eyelids, her gaze softened, then she slurped or licked or bit. She was somewhere else, focused within, feeling the food in her mouth, evaluating it, reflecting upon what needed to change. We were transfixed.

  Even though TV was in its toddlerhood, viewers could still smell a phony. It’s what sunk James Beard, who misread the medium and believed that showmanship and being “entertaining” was all that was required. WGBH was besieged with fan mail raving about Julia’s “honesty,” “forthrightness,” “naturalness,” “lack of that TV manner.”

  The obvious lesson here is to “be yourself” just like Julia was, but the degree to which that’s easier said than done cannot be underestimated. For one thing Julia, because of her staggering height and unusual voice, had, from a very young age, no choice but to be herself. There was no radar beneath which she could fly, no opportunity for her, ever, to adopt the affectations of a conventional woman and get away with it. Who she was, was who she had to be; when the camera was turned on her at the age of fifty, she had no experience being anyone else.

  This isn’t true for most of us. Most of us fit in better than Julia did, and the pernicious urge, from the time we are small, day in day out, week in week out, in order to keep fitting in, is to succumb to the society-pleasing parts of our personalities. Most of the time you think, Where’s the harm in acting more accommodating than I really am? Or feigning an interest in soccer or locally grown produce that I don’t really possess? Or pretending to be superinvolved in my kids’ enrichment activities? Or overpaying for a pair of low-rise jeans that don’t really fit, aren’t comfortable, and prevent me from sitting on a bar stool without my ass hanging out? Or laughing more than is entirely necessary at that hot guy’s joke? And speaking of being
hot, as long as you’re able to work your hotness every waking moment, you’re exempt from everything listed above.*

  My point is that the average woman’s inclination to obey her culture’s imperatives is a tiny, constant stream that eventually creates a majestic, postcard-worthy canyon of Who the hell am I? And if, perchance, you’ve decided you’re alternative and edgy, with a snarky blog, chipped dark brown nail polish, and a fashion pieced together from the thirteen cents a pound bin at the Goodwill, you’re fighting the same losing battle. Sorry.

  All this said, usually by age fifty—Julia’s age when those first pilots were filmed—if we’re ever going to figure out who we really are, now is the time. We’ve lived a little, have accepted that we’re never going to go to the Olympics in any sport other than dressage or shooting, and that we do, in fact, have a favorite child.

  And what does society, by which I mean women’s magazines and the Huffington Post, think we should do just as our real personality is throwing aside its chains? Reinvent ourselves.

  Do not reinvent yourself, that’s the lesson behind this section. Reinvention is code word for using all your God-given brute female mojo—your intuition, perception, stamina, resilience, wisdom, and perhaps cash from your IRA—to do something so new, your personality has to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt. Give up your job as head of human resources at that Fortune 500 company and open that dude ranch in Wyoming. Give up teaching cha-cha to seniors and go to law school. Close your law practice and move to Cambodia, where you do something or other with children. What you are doing here is disrespecting all of your hard-won experience and knowledge and turning yourself back into a beginner, a neophyte, someone with “girlish” enthusiasm, but no expertise.

  If you’re over, say, forty, you know some things. Citing the accomplishments of Bill Gates and the Beatles, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, posits that it takes practicing for 10,000 hours to become an expert. Why throw away what you’ve become at least good enough at to be a newbie at something else? Even though it sounds all life-affirming and proactive, it feels like just one more case of discouraging women from owning who they are. And if there’s any doubt, consider that reinvention is not something pressed on men.

  I’m not saying you shouldn’t make a change; be Julia, and slide into something challenging and novel, but not completely out of your wheelhouse.

  Julia, on TV, was the sum of all of the Julias she had been: the popular girl in high school; the crazy college roommate; the emperor on stage, hamming it up; the dizzy newlywed hurling herself into Parisian culture and French cuisine; the cookbook writer; the scientist and educator. When she first saw herself on camera, she was appalled, calling herself Mrs. Steam Engine. She was always trying to improve her ability to move around the set, explain the steps while handling the ingredients, and make eye contact with the camera. Notes from producers said things like “Stop gasping” and “Wipe brow,” but no one ever suggested she do anything that wasn’t in keeping with who she was.

  Find yourself a Paul Child.

  The French Chef, which aired nationally through 1973, first in black and white and then in color (the ubiquitous mid-gray-toned cotton blouse was revealed to be a nice French blue), only wished it had had a shoestring on which to be produced. The budget pretty much consisted of the money to pay the light bill. Each show took roughly nineteen hours of pre-production, which consisted of Julia and Paul at home in their kitchen, breaking down each recipe into individual movements and points of instruction, which he would then time with his stopwatch. If Julia felt she needed diagrams to better explain herself, Paul would stay up until the wee hours, rendering something that could have hung in a museum. His drawing of the four stomachs of the cow for the Tripes à la Mode episode is particularly nice.

  On the day of taping, the Childs arose at 6:00 a.m. It was winter in Boston, so you know how much fun getting out of that warm bed must have been. The Cambridge Electric Company display kitchen, where the episodes were shot, was on the second floor of the building, and Paul shoveled the snow off the fire escape before lugging in the pots and pans they’d brought from their own kitchen. (Easier, apparently, than taking the building’s freight elevator.) There were no production assistants, no gofers, no interns. There was Paul, and whatever grip or gaffer was standing around the Cambridge Electric Company’s display kitchen with nothing to do. After the taping, the crew would eat, while Paul did the dishes.

  Reader, I wish I could offer concrete advice on how to find and land your own Paul Child, a guy who will effortlessly switch roles with you if and when your career suddenly takes off, becoming in a matter of a few short months the wife to you that you once were to him, but I fear it’s mostly a matter of luck.

  RULE No. 9:

  MAKE THE WORLD YOUR OYSTER (STEW)

  Toujours Bon Appétit.

  THE EPISODES OF THE FRENCH CHEF THAT I WATCHED WITH MY mother were only slightly more interesting than the 1968 presidential returns and, a few years later, the Watergate hearings, except for one episode, which I recall in detail: Julia Child’s Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) Cake. I’m sure it’s because it had the word cake in the title. I remember Julia cautioning us to make sure we had everything we needed before we began baking, and placing all the ingredients on a special tray, leveling the cup of flour with the back edge of the knife, and checking to see if the cake was done using a toothpick.* But my clearest memory occurs after the show is over, when my mother sighed loudly and flipped her steno book closed with an expression of dissatisfaction I couldn’t name. “Maybe we could make that!” I said. “We don’t bake,” she replied, then lit a cigarette and blew two streams of smoke through her nose. We don’t? All that grocery shopping she did, all that recipe clipping, all that menu planning, all those dinners that took hours to prepare and we didn’t bake? Then I thought a little more and realized that she was right. The Van de Kamp’s oatmeal cookies I was always trying to sneak were store bought, and so was my birthday cake.

  Now I was interested.

  In the movie version, at this moment there would be a smash cut to me, decades later, a grown woman, standing in my kitchen with a 7UP bottle inside a flour-covered tube sock, expertly rolling out the pastry dough for my much-celebrated lattice-top blackberry pie. I make one or two blackberry pies a week starting in early July, the week marionberries are available at the local farmers’ market.

  A cross between the Chehalem and the Olallie berry, the Marion was cultivated at Oregon State University in 1956 and is considered the “cabernet of blackberries” for its complex taste, both sweet and earthy. It’s perfectly delicious, as Julia would say, and I prefer it to all other blackberries for my pies. I love making pies, because unlike whatever that thing is you’ve got stirring in the saucepan, a pie is a beautiful self-contained object that no one really needs, but that everyone, when presented with one, is delighted to have. When it comes to pies I’m not a Flimsie, and over the years I’ve developed the sort of seriousness about pie making of which Julia would approve. Baking one makes me tremble with joy.

  The second thing I like to make, and which I am expert at making, is Julia’s Tarte Tatin, invented many years ago by the Tatin sisters in Lamotte-Beuvron, their restaurant in the Loire Valley. It’s a tricky and thrilling dish to pull off, because you construct it upside down, caramelizing the sliced apples on the stove top in a cast-iron skillet, then covering it with pastry dough. After baking it right in the skillet, you haul that baby out of the oven, flip it over onto a big plate, and if you’ve done it right, everything holds together, and the apples, once on the bottom, are now on top, a glistening rich brown. I make Tarte Tatins all fall, stopping only when I can no longer zip up my jeans.

  I know a thing or two about making Julia’s Tarte Tatin, as does Kathy, who also considers herself an expert on the matter, and when Marcelline, our own Super-Française, finally granted us permission to use her oven, we decided that we must make one.

  That day, once again, it
was dreary and raining, and before we left our apartment the neighbor was already shrieking her head off. Who was she yelling at? The poor dog? The young lover she had chained to the hot water pipe? The deformed mother in the wheelchair? No one? The morning of the Tarte Tatin was especially dramatic. When we stood with our ears to the wall the only words we understood were “fucking fucking shit.” Also, the Brie de Meaux we’d gaily purchased the day of our arrival was beginning to stink to high heaven, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to be typically American and throw it out. We were both in a mood.

  Marcelline has a small apartment in a high-rise in the 19th, one of the outlying arrondissements where everyday Parisians live, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the big, hilly park where Napoleon planted all the exotic trees he could get his hands on—Siberian elms, lindens, ginkos, giant sequoias, and a few cedars of Lebanon.

  Marcelline is tiny and brilliant, an English teacher and writer, and inasmuch as any French person falls into the food-as-fuel camp, she does. Her small, neat kitchen is equipped with only the basics; no million-dollar E. Dehillerin copper pots for her.

  During most of our time in Paris, I was Kathy’s sous chef, mostly because a lot of what we cooked fell firmly in the sautéing/simmering/deglazing realm of my mother, and thus it was less interesting to me. But the Tarte Tatin was my territory.