by Bob Spitz
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1 A hydrometer that measures the density of sugar, used in making sorbet and preserves.
The McWilliams sisters in Paris, 1950 (Photo credit 10.1)
Eleven
What She’d Gotten Herself Into
With the vast reserves of training and knowledge that Julia had been slowly accumulating in the year since she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, her progress was so ferocious that the test kitchen could no longer contain her. Julia wanted validation.
Paul had exhorted her to “go for broke,” maintaining that the meals she was making “were equal to anything served in the best Parisian joints.” Right after New Year’s in 1951, a mammoth galantine de volaille that took her three days to complete stood on the kitchen counter, its flourish of forcemeat and truffles marinated in cognac and topped with a clarified bouillon jelly a testament to the breadth of her virtuosity. Meanwhile, Max Bugnard continued to extol her talents, declaring she was “qualified to be chef in a maison de la Haute Bourgeoisie.” Buoyed by the accolades—from both friends and professionals—Julia rattled her credentials at Madame Brassart, demanding that a date be set for her diploma exams.
Normally, this would be a given. A course of study at Le Cordon Bleu always culminated with practical and oral finals. In fact, there was rarely an instance when a student didn’t graduate with solemn heraldry, clutching a certificate signed by the despotic headmistress. But Julia Child was no ordinary student. To Madame Brassart, she had been trouble from the get-go—an upstart American, of course, but something far worse: a woman who knew what she wanted and stood up for her rights and, even worse, stood up to Madame Brassart. Madame didn’t appreciate gals with gall. Who was this … this American with the temerity to demand a diploma from her? Madame wasn’t going to stand for such effrontery. On the other hand, Julia loathed anyone who played petty politics, and she threw up a façade that radiated disdain. Each woman was repelled by the other’s magnetic force. Their mutual distrust was palpable; they “got on each other’s nerves.” So when Julia petitioned Madame for a date for her exams, the request was ignored with resounding silence, as was every follow‑up request.
Every few weeks throughout the beginning of 1951, she whipped off another letter to Madame Brassart, the tone growing “stern”—and sterner—with each new appeal. In the meantime, Julia studied like mad, convinced that when the time came, when Madame Brassart eventually caved in and administered the exam, it would be a ballbuster, designed to show her who was boss. She reviewed recipes, honed techniques, memorized proportions; she even timed herself cleaning, flaming, and cutting up a chicken, nailing the procedure in twelve minutes flat. Julia was ready—oh, she was so ready for anything that witch Brassart might throw at her.
She just didn’t know how to penetrate the veil of silence. What was driving this woman to torment Julia like this? Julia suspected it came down to money. Had she taken the school’s “regular”—amateur—course, the one in mid-morning, upstairs, with the clueless housewives, it would have cost two or three times what Julia paid for the “professional” basement program, which was supplemented by the GI Bill. “They didn’t make as much money out of me as they could have,” she decided—that must still be bugging the vengeful headmistress. And, perhaps, to some extent, she was right. That may have had some influence on the situation, but more than likely it was a good old-fashioned power play.
Well, two could play this game, Julia decided. In late March, with Paul’s help, she wrote her stoniest letter yet, this time containing the whiff of a threat. She indicated that all her “American friends and even the U.S. ambassador himself” knew that she had worked diligently “morning, noon and night” at the Cordon Bleu, surpassing almost everyone else who labored at the school, and that “it is surprising to me to see you take so little interest in your students.” Moreover, she was slated to leave for a vacation to the States in April and demanded to take her exams now, before they sailed. “If there isn’t enough space at the school,” she insinuated, “I would be happy to take the exam in my own well-appointed kitchen.”
The ambassador … my own well-appointed kitchen. That must have made Madame Brassart’s Belgian blood boil. To her credit, however, she refused to take the bait. Julia awaited a swift answer, while none, in fact, came. Zut! A week later, the gloves came off. Julia took her case to Max Bugnard, who agreed to run interference for her. Somehow, the old chef’s plea did the trick.
By Friday, April 2, 1951, Paris was beginning to thaw from a particularly long and brutal winter. It was a beautiful day, a sweater day, cafés spilled onto the sidewalks. Sun streamed in the windows that fronted the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as Julia took a seat at the counter in one of Le Cordon Bleu’s upstairs test kitchens. She was prepared for anything, knew her coursework inside and out. The moment had finally arrived and there were no second thoughts, no butterflies. Bring it on!
The first part of the test, the written section, was a no-brainer. Julia was asked to explain how to make fond brun, a simple brown stock rendered from butcher trimmings and vegetables; the proper method for cooking green vegetables so they retained their color and flavor; and the exact preparation for a sauce béarnaise. Any cook worth her toque knew these basics by heart, and Julia scrawled the answers with precision and speed.
The practical cooking section was another story. One of Madame Brassart’s factotums handed Julia an index card with a set of instructions typed on one side. It said: “Write down what ingredients you want for the following, for 3 people,” and beneath that: oeufs mollets, sauce béarnaise; côtelettes de veau en surprise; crème renversée au caramel.” Julia stared at the words with mounting alarm. Oeufs … what! What the hell was mollet supposed to mean? And what kind of surprise surprised a veal cutlet? None of these were dishes that Julia had heard of before. As for the exact proportions for a caramel custard, they weren’t anything she could recall off the top of her head. This wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. “My mind was on Filets de sole Walewska, Poularde Toulousaine, Sauce Vénitienne, etc. etc. etc.,” she recalled, the classic dishes they’d practiced again and again. These came at her from out of nowhere. Except it wasn’t from nowhere, but rather a throwaway Cordon Bleu booklet that was handed to the housewives when they signed up for their six-week course. Julia’s practical, as it turned out, wasn’t groomed for a serious cook but for “a beginning pupil who had never cooked before her six-week course.”
She’d been had!
The realization slowly hit Julia that she was doomed to fail. Not only wasn’t she familiar with the recipes for the aforementioned dishes, she had no idea how to cook them, which was the next part on the exam. “I just should have memorized their little book,” she concluded ruefully. Now, there was only one thing to do—“make everything up”—and bluff her way through.
Wordlessly, she tromped down to the basement kitchen “in a cold and clean fury … and whipped up the stuff,” with no prayer of being accurate. The eggs weren’t even close: she poached them instead of coddling and then peeling them. And the veal missed the mark altogether. The recipe called for a sautéed veal chop, surrounded by duxelles, which were hashed, cooked mushrooms and ham slices. “Julia sautéed the mushrooms instead of making duxelles, and left out the ham entirely.” As for the surprise: the whole conglomeration was to be reheated in a paper bag! Some surprise, Julia thought. “The paper is just a lot of tomfoolery, the kind a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner to ‘épater’ ”—impress—“the boss’s wife.”
The exam was designed as an insult, she concluded. Madame Brassart knew damn well that Julia was a serious, dedicated cook, she knew how much a diploma would mean to someone who had put in the overtime at Le Cordon Bleu. “Me,” Julia fumed, “who can stuff a sole with a forcemeat of weakfish, and serve it with a sauce au vin blanc such as they could never hope to taste the perfection of. Me, supreme mistress of mayonnaise, hollandaise, cassoulets, choucroutes, blanquettes de veau, pommes de t
erre Anna, soufflés Grand Marnier, fonds d’artichaut, oignons glacés, mousse de faisan en gelée, balantines, galantines, terrines, pâtés, laitues braisées … me, alas!” After all that, the upshot was a veal chop in a paper bag. She had to hand it to Brassart: that woman had stuck it to her good.
Julia could kiss that diploma goodbye. For all she knew, Brassart never intended to give her one anyway. “She feels a diploma is like being initiated into some secret ‘rite,’ ” Julia fumed. Well, to hell with her and her school. “The main thing, of course, is that I know how to cook.”
AND COOK SHE did. Julia continued to build on what she learned at Le Cordon Bleu, perfecting the lessons until they’d become second nature, after which she began working her way through Larousse gastronomique, the encyclopedia-size “wonder book” of French cooking that had become her bible. She had begun to experiment seriously with other recipes, other styles, other sources, as if they might lead her to the next phase of her romance with food. “I was no longer satisfied with being ‘just’ an accomplished home cook,” Julia decided. It was too limiting, too unimaginative for her awakening ambition. “I wanted to make a career of it,” she said. But how, if not as a domestic? There were no glamorous positions for people who made food, no celebrity chefs. She was already pushing herself to explore other realms, taking a few pastry lessons, corresponding with purveyors. Teaching continued to fascinate—nothing large-scale on the order of Le Cordon Bleu, but something more informal, and more reasonable, perhaps small, private classes for Americans in Paris.
Though how long she would remain in Paris was anyone’s guess. With the rise of communism rampant since the end of the war, Paul was growing worried about a destabilized Europe. It alarmed him how Russia was forcing itself onto countries that had been weakened by the aftershocks of World War II. France was already grappling with its own brand of subversion, coping with the arm-twisting tactics of Soviet-influenced unions. A series of carefully coordinated, insidious strikes crippled the country in early 1951; gas, electricity, telephone, transportation, and dock workers all staged walkouts at the same time. Most of Paris ground to a halt, causing skeptics to predict violent change of some sort. “This seems to me one of the ‘good’ moments for the Russians to start something,” Paul chimed in. He’d been keeping an eye on similar hot-button situations in England and the United States, both of which were preparing for momentous elections, along with the hostilities raging in Korea, where the Communist threat was all too real. “The Big War, as of now, seems about fifty-percent possible,” he speculated. However, if the variables conspired to upend the fragile balance, “it will decimate much of Europe.”
Where would that leave him and Julia? As far as Paul was concerned, their options were “turning more and more toward the USA.” Any permanent return Stateside was further down the road, but he was already considering “certain places [there] for the storage of valuables … places that wouldn’t be such obvious bombing targets as Washington or New York.” They had a “home leave” scheduled for the beginning of June, four weeks of vacation split between Pasadena and Lopaus Point, after which he felt it was “going to be difficult psychologically—if it wasn’t impossible physically—to come back to France for another two-year stretch in July.”
Julia’s view was more sanguine. She “didn’t believe in the possibility of war right now,” nor did she anticipate a rash move back to Washington. She saw it more as an “unsettled period,” the result of “shuddering birth pangs” across Europe. Paul, as she well knew, got overexcited when it came to circumstantial matters, such as preparing for a “Russian invasion,” whereas she held out hope that common sense would prevail. “I prefer her attitude,” Paul confessed, admitting to his negativist bent; nevertheless, he remained convinced that war would eventually uproot them from Europe. “There is no possibility whatsoever that in five years’ time Julie and I will be right here doing just what we are doing now.”
In any event, they were homeward bound for a while. It would be good to touch base with old friends and relatives, “to see how the ol’ country was holding up,” look in on Pop, spend time with Charlie and Freddie at their seaside cabin, take a break from the bureaucratic grind. Julia was looking forward to some time away from the stove. The trip abroad would put some distance between her and the debacle at Le Cordon Bleu, give her a little perspective on the long-range plans ahead. Maine would be insanely beautiful in the heart of summer, when everything was in bloom and beach plums filled the margins of the lichen-covered fields. She could hardly wait to see the ocean again.
Amid the preparations and excitement, another distraction arose. Suddenly, Dort announced her engagement to an actor in her troupe, along with plans to marry him in New York at the end of June. While stirring and impulsive, the event itself was not unexpected. Dort had been seeing Ivan Cousins on and off “for a good year,” ever since he turned up in Paris “to cool off” at the urging of his navy buddy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Dort had been attracted to the cherubic, pug-legged, bright-eyed Cousins, whom friends described as “boyish” and “roly-poly.” Clearly, the two were an odd couple in person. Although Ivan stood almost a head shorter than Dort, he had a big personality that played gamely off this “large, robust, loud American girl.” It helped bridge the obvious differences that they had the theater in common. Ivan had studied at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and had some success modeling, doing commercials for clothes. Appearances in a few off-Broadway productions gave him cachet in the American Club Theater, where he played Elmer Kirby in Thornton Wilder’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and other leading roles.
Dort loved Ivan’s joie de vivre, the way he captivated any crowd with his easy mix of banter and bluff. She loved the “overgrown child in him,” the imitations and the mimicry he segued into seamlessly. She loved his vulnerability, too, even though it often masked something darker.
The darker side cast a doubly long shadow. “Ivan was a notorious drinker and he led something of a double life,” says Alex Prud’homme, a distant nephew who came to know Ivan well. The drinking may have not raised too many eyebrows, but it helped distract from the fact that Ivan was gay. In any case, Dort was undeterred. “She knew all of it was there from the beginning,” says Prud’homme, “and chose to ignore it.” Like Julia before her, Dort, in her thirties, was rootless and adrift. Her job, such as it was, had no upside or future, her crowd changed from one week to the next. Ivan had come into her life when she needed him most, and immediately she achieved a sense of stability. With her usual abandon, Dort threw herself into the relationship, and in 1951, when Ivan landed a day job at the Economic Cooperation Administration, they moved into a flat together on the boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg.
Paul, especially, was happy that Dort vacated Roo de Loo. He’d grown tired of the stagy theater crowd and the “fairies” that gravitated around her room. Their easy, empty utterances and affected gestures made “his blood boil.” And though he wasn’t privy to Ivan’s sexual tendencies, he had his doubts. Oh, he had his doubts! In any case, Paul made no secret of his disapproval of Ivan. “He’s a dreary, emasculated youth,” he concluded, and urged his sister-in-law to break her engagement at once.
His sense of displeasure went almost unacknowledged at first. Dort was accustomed to Paul’s finchy moods and probably assumed, like others, he’d eventually come around. The same with Julia, whom she fought with regularly, but loved unquestioningly nonetheless. Dort sensed the “slight undercurrent” of tension when Ivan was around Paul and Julia, but refused to let it intrude on the couples’ otherwise pleasant coexistence. As far as breaking her engagement, Dort wouldn’t hear of it. Marriage arrangements were already in the pipeline. In fact, she had made up her mind to remain in the States with Ivan, whose job was relocating him to Washington, D.C.
Some time before everyone left for America, the two couples—Julia and Paul, Dort and Ivan—attended a cocktail party at the Saint-Germain-en-Laye home of Ivan’s boss, George Artamo
noff, an American executive who helped administer the Marshall Plan in the Far East. It was a boisterous affair: more than a hundred people crammed elbow to elbow in a salon the size of Versailles. During the evening, another guest named Simone Beck Fischbacher regaled Julia with stories about an exciting, though “somewhat disorganized,” French cooking club called Le Cercle des Gourmettes. That same night, Julia decided that she would join the group, too.
THE GOURMETTES WAS a renegade group of culinary anarchists who predated the French Resistance. It originated in 1927, when an American woman, Ethel Ettlinger, lobbed an oratorical grenade into the all-male Club des Cent, a handpicked society of windbag gastronomes. There were no casualties, aside from a few bruised egos, but the imbalance of power was never the same.
The insurrection occurred at the end of Le Club’s yearly feast—the only one at which members were permitted to bring their lowly wives. The august president, Louis Fourest, offered a few closing remarks, including this doozy: “I salute the men at this table, without whose skill and knowledge, and whose capacity for appreciation, this truly noble feast could never have been created.” His smug smile insinuated that women weren’t able to pull off such a feast. Such impertinence! Such temerity! After a burst of macho applause, Mrs. Ettlinger, the wife of a prominent member, pushed back her chair and tapped her champagne flute for silence. Bristling with indignation, she announced in broken French: “And I wish to propose a toast to the women at this table. After all, it is we who run your households, we who order your food, we who see that it is properly prepared, we who keep you men happy and content. And furthermore, I have no doubt whatsoever that we could arrange a meal in every way as splendid and as satisfying as the one we have just enjoyed.”
