by Karen Karbo
Together we made the pastry dough, peeled and sliced the apples. She then arranged them in a pattern at the bottom of the skillet in the butter and sugar and dropped the circle of pastry dough on top.
“Wait!” I cried. “What about the caramelizing?”
“It happens when it bakes,” she said.
“You need to cook it on the stove first, before you put on the dough.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You cook it on the stove first, and baste it with the butter.”
“This is the way Julia does it,” she said.
“No, Julia cooks it on the stove first, then puts it in the oven.”
“No, she doesn’t!”
“Yes, she does!” I cried. A week before we came here I made two Tarte Tatins, and after you arrange the apples in the pan, you baste the apples with the butter to get it to caramelize before it goes in the oven. I’m positive.”
Kathy is half-Serbian and half-Albanian and is much more stubborn than I am, but I knew I was right, and she saw my certainty, and then said, “Well, I’m doing it my way,” and slid the skillet into the oven.
“But you can’t do it your way!” I shouted. “The whole reason we’re here is to cook Julia and this isn’t Julia cooking, it’s your cooking!”
“I’ve done it this way for years.”
“You can’t!”
“I’m doing it this way.”
“Well I’m the one writing the book, and I’m going to use your real name.”*
The Tarte turned out perfectly delicious, if a little pale, because it was under-caramelized, which made complete sense, since if you just throw it in the oven without monitoring the tricky caramelization process, you’re just baking on a wing and a prayer, something of which Julia would never approve. Later, because I couldn’t let it go, I did some research and discovered that in fact both methods were “Julia”; Kathy was making the Tarte Tatin from Mastering, and I was used to the recipe from The Way To Cook,* which is, according to Julia, the fourth iteration of the recipe, and, in her opinion, the final and correct one.
That night we took the Tarte Tatin back to the apartment. I held the plate on my lap in the Metro and was disappointed that no one commented on it. I was disappointed in general, because it turned out that cooking Julia was no guarantee that you would be infused with the magic of being Julia. We were just two old friends in Paris squabbling over how to bake a Tarte.
But when we turned onto rue de l’Exposition, we almost ran into our neighbor, out walking her dog. She was tall but thin and wore a short, chic brown wig. We’d caught her placing something just inside the gate at the Romanian embassy. We pretended to window-shop, looking with feigned interest at the shampoo on display in the Confidence beauty salon, waiting for her to go inside. Once she did, we ran across the street, careful not to drop our Tarte Tatin, to see what she’d left. It was a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce.
So absurd was this, we forgot our argument, went upstairs, and devoured the tart straight out of the baking dish.
FANFARE FOR THE MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN
By 1966, Julia was it. That year she won an Emmy and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The illustration showed Julia with redder hair than she’d probably had in thirty years, surrounded by her glimmering copper pots; beneath her chin is a plate of some kind of cartoon-looking fish with orange spots, displayed on a bed of something green. “The Lady with the Ladle,” they called her, and saluted her for single-handedly rescuing Americans from their wretched Miracle Whip salads and gloppy frozen chicken pot pies.
The celebration of Julia as The One was simplistic and inaccurate. Julia’s friend M.F.K. Fisher had been writing about fine dining and gastronomy since the 1930s, Gourmet magazine had been around since 1941, and James Beard, while not a French cook, was a believer in all the things Julia championed: taking your time, cooking with love, having a care for the outcome. Craig Claiborne, who’d trained in French haute cuisine in Lausanne, Switzerland, and who brought major food coverage to the nation’s paper of record, had been reviewing cookbooks and restaurants, and writing columns about fine dining for years.
Still, none of them were Julia.
There is possibly no better middle-aged woman in twentieth-century history than Julia Child. That’s what Time magazine should have celebrated her for. Compared with the mundane yet agonizing minute-to-minute struggles of the regular fifty-four-year-old woman—her age when she was crowned Our Lady of the Ladle—anyone can write a three-pound cookbook and film thirty-four television episodes in a single take over a six-month period, not to mention cook for her husband every night of the Lord. (You didn’t think Paul grilled up his own lamb chops, did you?)
And speaking of Julia’s apple tarts, in an early episode of The French Chef,* watch the first few minutes, and you will see a close-up on Julia’s hands as she prepares the pastry crust, measuring out the flour and cutting in the cold butter. Do you see those spots on her hands? Those are age spots, Reader. And yet, there are her capable hands, working away, and her voice tootles and trills offscreen above them. Her hands have age spots, and yet Julia still thinks what she has to say has merit.
I’m willing to believe that this wasn’t so astounding in the mid-1960s. For one thing, Tina Fey hadn’t yet made the observation that in Hollywood older women (thirty-nine and up) are considered crazy because “the definition of crazy in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”
I want to say Fey’s observation wasn’t true in Julia’s day, or if it was no one admitted it. I want to say, “In Julia’s day people had more respect for their elders,” but Julia was so long-lived—she lived to be ninety-one, dying in her sleep two days before her ninety-second birthday*—it would be unclear the “day” to which I’m referring. Also, I remember a moment in 1968, in Laguna Beach, where we had a beach house for a time, when my father, having just come from work in his shirt and tie, was spit on by some hippies sitting on the sidewalk in front of a juice bar, and that’s not very respectful now, is it? But I won’t say those things because it’s the twenty-first century now, and anytime a woman references the past, she renders herself instantly irrelevant. Is this also true for men? I don’t know. Somewhere they have their own apologist tackling this issue.
Julia, the Best Middle-Aged Woman Ever, at least had the advantage of being famous during a time when being middle-aged wasn’t considered an embarrassing display of bad character worthy of shunning. Being an adult was still something to which children and teenagers aspired. Did they sit at the feet of their elders seeking wisdom? Of course not, but they saw that becoming an adult was a prison break. To be an adult meant staying up as late as you wanted, ignoring your chores, spending your money as you pleased, not having to wash your face and brush your teeth, and, best of all, getting stoned without having to roll up a towel and stuff it beneath the door.
Now, because everyone from toddlerhood on up is allowed not only to do whatever they please, but also encouraged to do so in the name of “being who they are,”* middle-aged people rightly see that life is much better when you’re underaged and your skin is rudely smooth, your torso is a taut, flexible stem, and your parents are still footing the bill. When you walk through the world, people admire you for being young and free, consumed with texting and hooking up. No one gazes upon the average fifty-year-old and admires her for supporting those children, for making sure there’s food in the house and on the table, and, possibly, for paying for that house. Wisdom is merely the consolation prize for aging. One could go on, but of course, in going on, one just reaffirms one’s status as a crazy woman in “mid-life,” the new euphemism for middle-age that’s meant to sound more like an expensive blue jean than the depressing reminder of mortality that it is.
No one told Julia that middle-aged women weren’t allowed to hog the spotlight, or that if they did, they could only do it if they passed as someone much younger. Maybe it was all that time spe
nt in Europe, where women aren’t rendered instantly irrelevant at the first hot flash, or maybe it was because Julia was never the prettiest girl in the class, or even one of the pretty ones. “I learned the truth at seventeen/that love was meant for beauty queens,” Janis Ian crooned in 1975. The song won a Grammy and went on to top the billboard charts. Why? Because every record-buying girl between the ages of six and twenty-six knew this to be the Painful Truth of Life.
Except, it isn’t. Because one of the secrets of life, hiding there in plain sight, is that we’re “old,” i.e., not seventeen or eighteen or even twenty-two, for a very long time. So-called “mid-life” is the Sahara Desert of the human life span. It goes on for decades. If, like Julia, you were never a beauty queen—and who among us was, really? Consumer culture conspires to make sure pretty much every woman feels bad about her neck (thighs, hips, waist, hair, nose, lips, philtrum*)—middle-age is the great equalizer. The older you get, the less the great female currency of youth and beauty is worth. Trying to look like a hot twentysomething when you’re fifty is the modern woman’s comb-over: No one is fooled. Indeed, if you did not spend your formative years as a smokin’ hot babe, where the world was your oyster simply because you happened to be born with good looks, middle-age is for you.
All you women who suffered for having “great personalities,” please step forward.
Julia did, wielding her eccentric personality and joie de vivre like the fright knife she waved over her head on The French Chef.
Middle-age was the time of Julia’s life.
STILL, IT’S GOOD TO LOOK GOOD
It was never easy for Julia to find clothes that suited her. Her height limited her fashion options; no jeans or fetchingly sloppy boyfriend cardigan for Julia. Until the end of her life, her style read “woman.” She wore skirts, blouses, and her famous pearls. In a little seen black-and-white photo taken just after the publication of Mastering, she’s wearing what appears to be a classic Chanel suit with bouclé jacket and iconic Chanel hat.
The early episodes of The French Chef are so dear because Julia looks like exactly what she was, a slightly frazzled home cook with flat hair in the back of her head and bags under her eyes. Dissatisfied with the way she looked, she realized quickly that if you wanted to succeed in this new medium, you better look good.
She didn’t wear much makeup, believing that her eyes weren’t made for mascara, and solved the problem in a rather badass fashion with plastic surgery.
She had an “eye job” in the late 1960s. In 1971 she had a face-lift, and another in 1977, and yet another in 1989. The last one made her look like someone wearing a Julia Child rubber mask, but she was determined to stay in it as long as possible, and she knew viewers would prefer to learn to cook from someone fresh and vital-looking, than from an old bag with one foot in the grave.
For Julia, to give up on her looks meant to give up on living life to its fullest, and if it took a plastic surgeon’s knife, then so be it.
WHEN THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING
In addition to the basic indignities of aging, the strange forearm flab where no fat exists, the suddenly chubby armpits and propensity for weeping at the National Anthem, life tends to get deadly serious, fast. It happens to us all, and it happened to Julia.
The first hit came in May 1962, while she and Paul were preparing to film The French Chef pilot episodes. John McWilliams Jr., Julia’s cantankerous right-wing father, died. He was eighty-two, suffered from myriad ailments—a pesky virus, emphysema, perhaps leukemia—and the end was prolonged enough so that Julia could fly from Cambridge to Pasadena for the bedside vigil. She had dutifully written Pop a weekly letter while she and Paul lived abroad, and she sent him clippings and updates about her doings once Mastering had been published to acclaim. She’d never failed to send the yearly birthday and Christmas cards. It had never mattered. Her marriage to Paul, whom Pop found to be beneath contempt, as an intellectual and thus a communist, had sundered him from his daughter forever.
Julia’s sadness was tempered, as always, by the pragmatism that drove her character. If her father had lived to be a hundred and two there was never going to be a chance of reconciliation, something she’d managed to make peace with long ago. She was grateful Pop had enjoyed a happy second marriage, and that his death was mercifully quick. Except when it came to finding the proper casings with which to stuff a homemade saucisson, or whether it was okay to substitute cream for butter, Julia never overthought anything, and we are well-advised to do the same. She was saddened but was able to move on.
Then, a scant six years later, in 1968, while she and Simca were pushing to finish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, she discovered a lump in her left breast. The cancer wasn’t life-threatening, and the same diagnosis today would call for a lumpectomy. “Left breast off,” she wrote in her diary on February 28. The surgeon removed her lymph nodes, too. The surgery required a ten-day hospital stay, during which Paul, a lifelong hypochondriac, nearly required hospitalization himself. It is said that when it was over, Julia wept in private.*
Even in these times, when open heart surgery is practically an outpatient procedure, ten days in the hospital is a long time for the average person; may we stop for a moment and meditate on just how long that must have been for Julia, who was, let’s be honest, a manic workaholic?
Her recovery was not as speedy as she might have wished. She had to wear a plastic sleeve on the left arm and spend time getting outfitted with “a false titty,” as she confided to a friend. Cooking was difficult, but she felt lucky it wasn’t her right arm; that might have really tripped her up. She was anxious to get back to work on Volume Two, and at her weekly post-op doctor’s appointment, her only question was, When could she return to France?
Find your passion.
One of the standard-issue life lessons, which I’m sure I’ve posited along with everyone else who thinks about these things, is that one’s life is enriched immeasurably if you’re able to find an abiding passion. You don’t have to be good at it, it just has to be something that would consume every waking hour if you let it. A good friend, a New York book editor, discovered surfing in her forties and now spends her vacations at a house she built in Costa Rica, and on the weekends, at her apartment in Manhattan, she gets lost in surfing movies, videos, and books. The walls of her office are adorned with big pictures of cresting waves.
There is another, less often mentioned, advantage to possessing a lifelong passion: When you’re getting on in years and your parents are dying, and your body is reminding you in the least dignified manner possible that it, too, will fail you sometime, perhaps in the not too distant future, having something you care about deeply gives you hope, focus, and a reason not to dwell on the bad stuff. We don’t discuss this much, I think, because what could be more of a downer? Find your passion! It’ll keep you from jumping off a bridge when you’re middle-aged! But a deep passion for something outside yourself is money in the bank.
In drawing up the contract for Volume Two, Julia’s editor, Judith Jones, suggested Julia and Simca include a recipe for French bread, which Americans simply could not find even in so-called French bakeries. The ingredients are flour, yeast, water, and salt. What could be easier? Everything, as it turns out.
After spending two years producing pale, gummy loaves at home, Julia went to Paris and apprenticed herself to French bread-making expert Raymond Calvel. “It was like the sun in all his glory, breaking through the shades of gloom,” she would later write in her Foreword to Volume Two. Calvel set her on the right path. Paul took pictures of his hands at work. Back home in Cambridge, they were able to copy Calvel’s moves, but alas, not the necessary dampness in his baker’s oven.
Julia dubbed Paul “M. Paul Beck, Boulanger” after he got into the act, baking his own loaves, experimenting with how much and what kind of yeast to use, how best to get the dough to rise and for how long, how large the loaf should be, and how to moisten it while it was baking. M. Paul Beck squ
irted the top of the baking bread with the sprayer appropriated from his nasal decongestant, and Julia used a wet whisk broom. They made baguettes (translated as “the stick”), batards (half the size of a baguette), flutes (twice the size of a baguette), and ficelles (a glorified bread stick that must be eaten as soon as it comes out of the oven, or else risk breaking a tooth). They would nail the recipe, leap around with glee, then discover they couldn’t duplicate it. Two hundred and eighty-four pounds of white flour later, Julia felt confident she’d mastered Pain Français.* It was this kind of dedication and enthusiasm that kept her grounded and optimistic about the future.
I often wonder whether Julia ever experienced any dark nights of the soul. Paul was pretty much all dark nights, all the time, pessimistic and fretful and prone to depression. Did she ever sit in her kitchen with a cigarette—yes, she was a heavy smoker until after her mastectomy—and a glass of Beaujolais and remember her beloved mother, Caro, who died at sixty, not young, but certainly not old, and how she, Julia, with a bout of breast cancer behind her was only a few years younger? Did she think, I better make the most of this because who knows what the future holds, and wallowing about anything is pointless and a waste of time?
If at all possible, build an adorable vacation home in the south of France.
With Julia’s first two royalty checks* she and Paul built a small house in Provence, on the corner of a plot of land owned for generations by the family of Jean Fischbacher, Simca’s husband, and where Simca and Jean lived in a three-story house made of stone. Plascassier is a small village on the winding road between Valbonne and Grasse. For Julia, it was heaven: She was in France, yet the diffused golden light, the rolling green-gray hills, the smell of jasmine, orange blossom, and lavender in the air, reminded her of her California. It was possibly the most perfect place imaginable: a place that evokes all the glorious aspects of childhood, without the attendant traumatic reminders lurking in the actual place you grew up. For Paul it was perfect because he got to build a house to his specifications, using his flawless French.
