by Karen Karbo
But the same could not be said of Paul. He recovered somewhat from his stroke, and he was able to get back to his painting and photography, but his personality had become less complex; he’d become dull-witted and confused. Still, Julia kept him as her constant companion. When she was on the set doing a show, he was given the role of Official Photographer, but there was always another photographer on hand to make sure everything was done right. At the beginning of what would be diagnosed as dementia, he would blurt out whatever he was thinking at inopportune moments. “Yes, Paul,” Julia would say, as though it were the most normal thing, which it was. Paul behaving oddly had become the new normal. C’est l’âge.
The sudden death of his twin, Charlie, in 1983, was a setback from which he never recovered, and in 1988 he walked out of their house in Cambridge, hopped in a cab idling at the curb, and drove away to he knew not where. For Julia, that was the sign she could no longer care for him, and the next year she settled him in a nursing home where, until the day he died in 1994, she visited or called him every day.
When Simca died in 1991 at the age of eighty-seven, Julia turned over the keys to La Pitchoune to Simca’s family, according to the agreement she and Paul had made with her nearly thirty years before. As much as Julia loved the places of her life, she loved the people more. Now that Simca and her husband, Jean, were gone, now that Jim Beard, who “slid off the raft” in 1985, wouldn’t be coming to visit, and Paul was too weak to travel, Provence was no longer the same. The fields of wild lavender were being bulldozed to make way for new houses, and people no longer shopped at their local butchers, bakers, and cheese makers, but at the supermarket. She was appalled to realize it reminded her of the worst of Southern California.
Julia spent one last summer in Provence with her sister, Dort, who brought her children, Julia’s nieces and nephews. Julia set her alarm at 2:00 a.m. to call Paul every day back in Cambridge. Even though they were separated by an ocean, they were still Pulia. She played golf, tidied up, and cooked. Julia Child was not the sentimental sort. When she was done with something, she was done. She ate a final meal of Boeuf en Daube à la Provençal—French pot roast—then closed up La Peetch and moved back to California, where she lived for another busy decade. She didn’t just have a blowtorch, she was a blowtorch.
Old age. I don’t know when it really starts, and I’m not interested in finding out. Julia pretty much ignored the whole thing, and that may be the only real lesson there is for the end of our days. Just pretend like it isn’t happening, until you have no choice but to accept reality. If you’re lucky, like Julia, you’ll die peacefully in your sleep after having enjoyed a dinner of onion soup.
Love the young.
Julia, by nature, was always interested in what was around the next bend. Her disinclination to dwell on the past was probably some kind of psychological disorder. Professionally, she was always curious about what the next crop of chefs were up to, even if she didn’t agree with them. All those young master chefs mentioned earlier? They all became friends; some were featured on In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs, where she flew around the world, visiting each chef in his or her own kitchen.
Thus, with every new television series, or whenever she took on a project that required help, a squad of eager young’uns—production assistants, prep cooks, associate producers—entered her life and most often became friends. They were Tina, Stephanie, Suzy; they were Liz, Sara, and Jocelyn. They were full of energy, hardworking, and when the show, magazine editorship, class, or demonstration was finished and Julia took a group photo with them, she instructed them to say not cheese, but souf-flé, to get the proper slightly opened mouth smile, and they would. In the picture they would look like a bunch of friends in white aprons, and in most cases that’s what they were. Julia didn’t look like anyone’s grandmother, or even anyone’s mother.
In Jewish tradition, if a funeral procession meets a wedding procession at a crossroads, the wedding procession is given right-of-way. Once you reach a certain age you basically have two choices: You can be the neighbor who yells “Get off my lawn!” and grouses about kids today, or you can let the wedding procession pass. Or, you can do as Julia did, and leave the funeral procession and join the wedding procession.
On August 15, 1992, Julia turned eighty, and the nation was in the mood to celebrate her. Fame is mysterious. What was so special about her eightieth birthday? Is not seventy-five a bigger milestone? Is not living to ninety a more staggering achievement?
Had it been up to Julia, she would have ignored the day completely, but then she agreed to attend a few birthday benefits for the American Institute of Food and Wine, which she helped found, and soon, anyone who could wangle a few chefs and rent a hotel banquet room wanted to hold a party for Julia, La Dame du Siècle, who had taught America how to cook.
It mattered not that French cooking was passé, that now fine dining was all Asian fusion, “architectural” presentation, prosciutto-wrapped figs, mango/jicama slaw, sundried tomatoes, barley risotto, blackened fish and pork and tomatillo chili, and that home cooks had discovered “lite” dairy products, boneless skinless chicken breasts, and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
The parties, which began months before Julia’s birthday, continued into 1993. In New Orleans and San Francisco, in Las Vegas, Miami, and Napa, glasses were raised, toasts were made, sumptuous feasts were prepared and consumed.
In New York City three hundred guests showed up at The Rainbow Room and paid $200 each to enjoy a multicourse meal prepared by fourteen chefs. Julia was presented with a four-foot whisk enrobed in pearls. She tossed it over her shoulder, baseball bat–style, and marched around the room. WGBH in Boston threw her a party at the Copley Plaza Hotel, and the Boston Pops played “Fanfare with Pots and Pans” on whisks, pots, and pans. Diana Rigg stood and read a poem written by Paul decades earlier about Julia’s cooking prowess, and Julia sat there and cried. In Southern California, at the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Rey, nine of France’s top Michelin star chefs were flown in to collaborate on a $350 a plate feast, assisted by forty-four of the best American French chefs and twenty sous chefs. Before the dinner, sixty different kinds of hors d’oeuvres were passed* At the Washington, D.C., bash† the finale consisted of three cakes it had taken the pastry chefs three months to construct.
There were smaller parties, too. Jasper White held a private party at his restaurant in Cambridge, and Pam Fiore, editor of Travel + Leisure, hosted a dinner at her New York apartment, where the guests regaled Julia with songs Fiore had penned especially for the occasion, including one called “What Child Is This?”
Julia, who even at eighty had the stamina of a sled dog at peak training, attended all three hundred of them.
Enjoy the power of man power.
Nancy Verde Barr was one of Julia’s young friends. A good twenty years younger and a full foot shorter than Julia, Verde Barr was a graduate of Madeleine Kamman’s Modern Gourmet cooking school and owned a school of her own. Kamman, born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, was a Super-Française and would snort with derision at the mere mention of Julia’s name, who she dismissed as a mere TV cook, and not a real chef. But Julia didn’t hold this against Nancy, with whom she traveled and hung out for the last twenty or so years of her life.
By the early 1990s, Julia lived alone, visiting Paul every day when she was in town, but taking Nancy as her escort to the many dinners, receptions, lectures, benefits, and parties (including most of those birthday parties) to which she was invited. One day she told Nancy that they should really make a point of finding some nice men, because wasn’t life just that much more fun with men around? Nancy, perhaps to humor her, agreed, but said nice men weren’t that easy to find.
Less than a week later, Julia called Nancy and said not to worry about her, that she’d found a man. John McJennett was an old friend of Paul’s. When Paul had lived in Paris in the 1920s, he’d crashed the twenty-first birthday party of McJennett’s late wife. They’d staye
d friends throughout the years, and now he and Julia were smitten. McJennett was a he-man, a Harvard man, Marine, and semiprofessional baseball player who was an inch taller than Julia (!) and knew nothing about cuisine.
He squired her around for years and sometimes dropped hints about getting married, forgetting that Julia was married. She confided in Nancy about his proposals, mock-groaning that she already had taken care of one old man, and she didn’t need another one! Did she love him? Who knows. She loved the old mold that he came from, that straight-up manly man, simple as the steak and baked potato he preferred. Perhaps he reminded her of Pop, only nicer, but he enlivened her days.
On May 12, 1994, Julia and John were having a late dinner at Jasper’s, after a long day of filming Master Chefs, when word came that Paul had died. Julia bolted up from the table and raced to the nursing home to see for herself. Three days later a wisteria Paul had planted in the yard decades earlier bloomed for the first time. Even though he had been sick for so long, Julia cried for days.
JULIA WISH
James Thurber, humorist and dog person, said, “Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.” Those of us who admire Julia are troubled by the wish to be as happy and carefree as she, who had no fear, didn’t worry, didn’t fret, and sobbed herself sick when she was grief-stricken, then when her tears were dry, moved on to the next thing.
As Julia explains for us in Julia Child & Company (1978), French cuisine is not only haute cuisine, fine dining at one of those four-star restaurants with exotic ingredients* and no prices on the menu. The French have an itch to classify everything they encounter, and their famous cooking is no exception. In its time, people supposed Mastering the Art of French Cooking was instructing Americans on how to make haute cuisine, but it was actually proffering recipes from la cuisine bourgeoise, one step down from haute cuisine.† One step down from that is la cuisine de famille, which Julia typifies as a Sunday lunch with a starter of sliced tomatoes vinaigrette, followed by a roast leg of lamb with green beans, then the cheese course, followed by a nice apple tart. One step below that is what is referred to as peasant cooking or la cuisine bonne femme: a hardy soup, big pieces of crusty bread, followed by a piece of fruit for dessert. Late last century nouvelle cuisine came along (three spears of asparagus arranged artfully on a plate), then cuisine minceur, literally “slimming cooking” (two spears of asparagus arranged artfully on a plate). It goes without saying that there is no name for a cuisine that includes standing in the middle of the kitchen eating a hot dog you’ve cooked over the burner.
Missing from this list is la cuisine Julia, the foundation of everything we cook today. La cuisine Julia is not French, but Frenchy. Its founding philosophy is liberal rather than classical, believing that there is always room for variation, experimentation, and completely screwing up. Fresh ingredients are preferred, but no one is sent to food hell for opening a can of cream of mushroom soup. La cuisine Julia is, above all, serious; it renounces shortcuts, sloppiness, or a lack of attention to details. It must be performed with time and love, and a little imperfection.
Not long ago a woman who grew up on my street in Whittier contacted me and said she was going through some old books at her parents’ house and came across a cookbook published in 1966 by Las Damas, a women’s club my mother belonged to. She saw my mother had contributed to it and wondered if I’d be interested in having it. Oh, man! I thought, in the exact voice of the girl I was when my mother was making all those recipes.
The cookbook is the size of a hardback book and comb-bound with a brown plastic comb. It is dedicated to “The Modern Home. In our Home today, and always, Life is Centered around Our Kitchens.”
The recipes are what you would expect from a suburban 1960s cookbook: lots of casseroles, lots of recipes with “easy” in the title, terse instructions, practically haikus: “Brown meat. Add remaining ingredients. Serve over Fritos.”
My mother contributed recipes for Nuts ’n Bolts (“Hors d’Oeuvres, Party and T.V. Snacks”), Baked Chicken Breasts (which she recommends serving with Rice Pilaf and Caesar Salad), Chafing Dish Gourmet (the less said about this the better), Mixed Vegetables Mornay (using a box of Birds Eye Frozen Mixed Vegetables), and Beef Stroganoff.
The stroganoff instructions are the longest in the book, and at the end, my mother thought to include this: “Note: Dill greatly enhances the flavor of meat, potatoes, and vegetables. Each year I buy a bunch of dill and preserve it by cutting off the sprigs, discarding the stalks, and packing in salt in a large jar, which I keep in the refrigerator. When ready to use, simply wash a sprig in cold water.”
Instantly, I recognized the internalized voice of Julia, informing, guiding, and reassuring.
I wish I could say that I was inspired to make my mother’s beef stroganoff that very night, and that it was so delicious my complicated feelings about food and cooking were transformed forever, as were Julia’s on that long ago day in Rouen, but beef stroganoff?
Still, there is hope for me yet. Remember the fish filets poached in white wine that Kathy and I almost didn’t make that day in Paris? We did not give up that night. Instead, we opened a bottle of our three-euro Chardonnay and stumbled forward, poaching the filets in our makeshift white wine and vegetable broth, covering it with buttered notebook paper to hold in the heat, and continuing to simmer it on top of the stove, because we had no oven. It was in all ways wrong, but we proceeded as if we were following Julia’s recipe to the letter.
While Kathy was monitoring the fish, I assembled the egg yolk sauce, for that is the homely anglicized name of Sauce à la Parisienne, making a roux from the fish poaching stock, flour, and that stupendous French butter, then adding the cream and yolks. It was not as flavorful as Sauce Hollandaise but much sturdier and more difficult to ruin, and it could be made without a whisk.
We sautéed some beautiful, slender haricots verts and shallots, threw together a green salad, grabbed a baguette, and sat down at our table in front of the window looking out on the Romanian Embassy. Next door, we could hear our neighbor yelling. We poured more wine, toasted our ability to persevere, and dug in.
Reader, it was perfectly delicious.
A Reading List
These were the titles I read and reread as I thought and wrote about the woman we came to know simply as Julia. A complete list of Julia Child’s books, television shows, and DVDs can be found at www.juliachildfoundation.org.
JULIA CHILD
Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noël Riley Fitch
As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon
Backstage with Julia: My Years with Julia Child by Nancy Verde Barr
A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS by Jennet Conant
Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz
Julia Child: A Life by Laura Shapiro
Julia Child’s The French Chef by Dana Polan
M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child & Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table by Joan Reardon
My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme
Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS by Elizabeth P. McIntosh
AND OTHERS
The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition by M.F.K. Fisher
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken
Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell
My Kitchen Wars by Betty Fussell
Paris Journal 1944–1955 by Janet Flanner
The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones
GENERAL FOOD HISTORY
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural His
tory of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
Setting the Table for Julia Child: Gourmet Dining in America, 1934–1961 by David Strauss
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro
The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp
Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows by Kathleen Collins
Acknowledgments
I was reminded recently of the old German proverb, “To start is easy, to persist an art.” People who have practiced the art of persisting with me, throughout the writing of this book, and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude:
Editor extraordinaire Lara Asher at Globe Pequot Press, for saying a big yes to Julia. Also, her top-notch crew: Lauren Brancato, Shana Capozza, Jessica DeFranco, Meredith Dias, Janice Goldklang, Kate Hertzog, and Ann Seifert. At Inkwell Management: David Forrer, Nathaniel Jacks, Richard Pine, Hannah Schwartz, and Kim Witherspoon, without whom … well, they know.
Others who offered insight, wisdom, and support, sometimes all three: Elizabeth Benedict, Leslie Bilderback, Kathy Budas, Lynne Bollinger Christensen, Hannah Concannon, Marcelline Dormont, Kim Dower, Debbie Guyol, Deb Nies, Randy Rollison, Danna Schaeffer, Lisa Spiegel, Abby Bliss White.
A special merci beaucoup to Kathie Alex for sharing La Pitchoune with me.
To Jerrod Allen and Fiona Baker: Paul said it best, about Julia: You are the butter to my bread, you are the breath to my life.
Notes
Abbreviations of names cited in the notes:
ADV: Avis DeVoto
CMW: Carolyn “Caro” McWilliams
DdS: Dorothy de Santillana
GK: George Kubler
JC: Julia Child
PC: Paul Child
SB: Simone Beck
