Julia Child Rules
Page 18
* The first Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest was held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria and won by Theodora Smafield for her No-Knead Water-Rising Twists. Little did Theodora know that a dozen years later she would be struggling with the concept of en croûte.
* DeVoto had been Avis’s English professor at Northwestern; how could the balance of the marriage been any different?
* Avis had two, one of whom was “troubled,” and likely suffered from what we now call Asperger’s syndrome.
† As we know, Julia was wildly interested in the subject.
* Not to be confused with “going with the flow,” it was first defined in 1975 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who would probably be more famous had he changed his name to something like Michael Hale. If you’re reading this, Mr. Csiksz … whatever, it’s not too late.
* The exception to my theory is becoming a rock star. All kids want to be rock stars, because they assume being on stage will make them as happy as they are belting out a song in their room into the end of their hairbrush; this happiness can never be duplicated.
† Which is to say, the only happy one.
* Veal scallops, which “make a perfect main course for a chic little luncheon.” She struggled mightily with browning them. Many books advised browning “slowly,” but how slow was slow? Too slow and the meat refused to brown, too quickly and the butter threatened to burn.
* No, it absolutely must be a wire whisk.
† Her mayonnaise recipe had stopped working because summer had turned to fall and yolk, oil, and bowl were all too cold. Slightly warming the bowl before beginning fixed everything.
‡ They sent her two pamphlets. She swooned.
* Supposing there was one: She was counting on the American housewife/chauffeur not to be as flimsy as she appeared.
* Guess what? They don’t have to be made of strained fish. The name also refers to the soft, footballish shape. There can be ice-cream and mashed potato quenelles, too.
† Simca’s letters were written in French. Think of it. Julia had spoken fluent French for about six minutes, and here came the communications from her collaborator, written in that spiky European hand.
* The modern iteration of the Average American Housewife. In the same way every American housewife was once “average,” every stay-at-home mom is now “busy.”
* Lest we forget, the camera puts on ten pounds.
*A giant stack of crêpes—we used twenty-four—between which are slathered alternating layers of a spinach/Mornay sauce filling and a mushroom/cream cheese filling, topped with a healthy grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and dotted with butter. We ovenless home cooks melted the cheese in the microwave.
* Colin R. Davis, a British conductor known mostly for his repertoire of Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky, whose uplifting bons mots show up on the Internet a lot, usually accompanied by a picture of a beautiful sunrise or a determined-looking sparrow.
† Or at least I think she did. Julia mentioned Simca’s visit in a letter to Avis, but in her new introduction written for the fortieth-anniversary edition, she says that Simca didn’t come to the States until their book tour in 1961. Ça ne fait rien.
* In Dijon, famous for their pain d’épices, and where this particular recipe is said to have originated, the chilling time could be from several months to several years.
† They seemed one and all concerned that the housewife would find a monster, multipaged recipe “frightening.”
‡ Julia was only slightly less squeamish than Sweeney Todd.
*And, who can blame her?
* Only the genius of acquiring editor Judith Jones assured Mastering did not see the light of day as The Compulsive Cook: Cooking Is My Hobby; Cooking for Love, Cook for Your Self à la Française; or any number of other horrific titles under consideration.
† $38,498 in 2012 dollars.
* The urge to reach for the “throw shit against the wall and see what sticks” analogy is nearly overwhelming, but my personal credo doesn’t permit the discussion of cooking and excrement in the same paragraph, plus it would be disrespectful to Julia.
† From the introduction: “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.” Ha!
‡ The menu is from Julia’s introduction to Mastering. She fails to mention how they were able to bake a cake without an oven.
* Simca’s Cuisine (with Patricia Simon) (1972); New Menus from Simca’s Cuisine (with Michael James) (1979); Food and Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine (with Suzy Patterson) (1991)
† According to the New York Times in 1954.
* Written by Betty Friedan, and thought to be the clarion call for the second wave of feminism.
* The argument could be made that she raised the bar, and I’ve made it, but that came later.
* Given all this impairment, why anyone would marry them is a mystery.
* Composed by John Morris, who worked mostly with Mel Brooks, and who also composed the music for Dirty Dancing, which was also set, ironically, in 1963, the same year The French Chef premiered.
† She faithfully wore the École des Gourmandes badge from the little cooking school she had with Simca and Louisette in her attic kitchen on the Roo de Loo. I don’t think anyone knew what it was for years.
* Except, obviously, the low-rise jeans. The alternative to low-rise jeans are the heinous, hateful mom jeans. A woman in mom jeans, even if she is a mom, is the most pathetic creature to walk the earth. Whoever is the current Sexiest Woman Alive, were she to don a pair of mom jeans, would instantly become a frightful hag.
* How weird was that? My dad used a toothpick after dinner, while he sat and drank his coffee and read the paper.
* It’s Kathy Budas.
* page 435, see Preliminary Stove-Top Cooking
* Called, nonsensically, French Tarts, Apple Style. Shouldn’t it be Apple Tarts, French Style?
* One of the most depressing parts about writing about someone’s life is that sometime during the last chapters you have to say she died. And while death might be one of life’s realities, we builders of narratives can choose to downplay it. A week before her death in Montecito, California, in the summer of 2002, Julia was still working on her memoir My Life in France with her great-nephew, Alex Prud’homme, a task she adored because, she said, Alex reminded her so much of Paul. When she died in her sleep on August 13, 2004, two days before her birthday, the party went on as planned, and people arrived from around the world to drink and eat and celebrate. There. Now let’s not speak about it again.
* Just yesterday a friend, a mother of four children under the age of eleven, said that she and her husband believed the best parenting was “getting out of the way” and just allowing her kids to “be.”
* The groove that runs between your nose and lip.
* Which does beg the question, if it was in private how could anyone be sure?
* The recipe is seventeen pages long. You owe it to yourself to bake it, just to appreciate the sheer lunacy it must have taken to perfect it.
* Totaling about $45,000; about $388,500 in 2012 dollars.
* Kathie Alex, a onetime student of Simca’s, lives there now and runs a summer cooking program called Cooking in France with Friends.
* In a story by Marya Mannes, who also observed that as food is the domain of women, it’s not that big of a surprise.
* Jane Friedman, as she would soon become, went on to have a staggeringly successful publishing career, and was for many years president and CEO of HarperCollins.
* On my Facebook newsfeed some “friend” started a long thread about some food fetish—vegetarian locavorism or something—and I quipped, “I’m an Eat-What’s-Put-in-Front-of-Me-ian,” and she shot back in a second, “You’re what’s wrong with the world.”
* Often attributed to Julia; actually, one of her guests said it, and she thought it was a fine idea.
* A word not yet in use, but that’s how she thought of it.
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br /> * Julia never liked pasta and didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
* Like Planned Parenthood, which was as controversial then as now. Once she caused a stir by noting that if women had easy access to more birth control there’d be less abortions.
† She received honorary degrees from Brown, Harvard, Boston University, Smith (Ha!), Rutgers, Johnson and Wales University, The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, Newberry College, and the California State University.
* Not one of them was Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.
† Picketed by vegetarians who carried signs that said Animals beware! Julia is hungry! Even though she had publicly apologized in 1987 for anything she might have said to insult them, they remained incensed at her treatment of animals.
* Truffles, they always have truffles.
† However gifted, no mere mortal can make haute cuisine, you must be a classically trained chef.