by Bob Spitz
For a moment, in the stunned silence, you could hear a croissant drop. Then wild applause broke out from the gallery of instantly radicalized wives. On the spot, they decided to “throw one of the greatest banquets imaginable, invite the men”—the lowly husbands—“and show them what could be done.”
In all respects a Hollywood ending ensued. One of the Gourmettes, as they now called themselves, offered the use of her country château, and the gals launched a showstopper that put Le Club to shame. Not only was the food an unqualified sensation, but the show itself a lollapalooza of a hit. Somehow, they’d gotten the Republican Guard to officiate at the door, resplendent in helmets, crimson jackets, white trousers, and black boots, with a corps de chasse—a horn quartet—to sound a fanfare, announcing each course as it was brought to the tables. The men gobbled up the food, including a forkful of crow, when forced to admit “the women knew their way around a menu” with great élan.
Naturally, Julia loved the whole suffragette aspect. Any time that women stood up for themselves and stuck it to the men was a red-letter day in her book. She wanted into the club from the moment she heard about it. As it turned out, all these years later, Mme. Ettlinger was still la présidente, and she governed the organization with ironclad rules: “Each gourmette must be able to cook—under her own steam; each gourmette must be able to order a perfect dinner and the perfect wine to accompany each course; service and table settings must match in elegance the meal itself; and discussion of politics or religion is taboo at luncheons.” Well, Julia would have no trouble with three out of the four, but hopefully she could learn to keep her opinions to herself.
In any case, she began attending the luncheons. But Madame Fischbacher (feesh-bah-shay), her sponsor, had an ulterior motive. She’d turned up solely to meet Julia Child, but not with the intention of luring her into Les Gourmettes. No, Mme. Fischbacher was trolling the party for an American who cooked to help her resurrect a failed pet project.
With her friend Louisette Bertholle she’d cobbled together a small spiral-bound booklet of about fifty recipes called What’s Cooking in France that was published by Ives Washburn in 1949. At the time, however, Americans didn’t care what was cooking in France, damning the few thousand copies printed to the rubbish bins. Even Mme. Fischbacher recognized its literary shortcomings. “[I] am ashamed to say it’s a pretty paltry cooking book,” she said in retrospect, “full of mistakes, owing to a faulty translation.”
Undeterred, she plunged back into writing, gathering old family recipes from every source she could think of and sending them to a family friend in New York who happened to be on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Same result: “This is just a dry bunch of recipes,” the woman wrote back. But the assessment, while severely critical, offered advice to salvage the project. The recipes could benefit from a personal touch, little anecdotes that explained the French way to American cooks. “Get an American who is crazy about French cooking to collaborate with you; somebody who both knows French food and can still see and explain things with an American viewpoint in mind.”
Mme. Fischbacher sensed immediately that Julia was the right person for the job. She seemed “mad about French food” and fairly radiated enthusiasm. It would be fair to say the interest was mutual. The project was exactly the kind of lifesaver that Julia was looking for, and the added option of “giving lessons in Paris” with this woman excited her even more.
“Why don’t we meet at our apartment tomorrow,” she said, extending a hand to Mme. Fischbacher.
The woman gave it a quick, crisp shake. “Please,” she said. “Call me Simca.”
SIMONE SUZANNE RENÉE Madeleine Beck Fischbacher deserved the nickname Simca. The daughter of a rich conservative Norman industrialist, she was as high-powered as the famous Renault coupe, but also as economical, bourgeoise, with a large, well-designed chassis that admirers found handsome. On top of it all, she was built for speed. “She was always on the go,” says a nephew, “a no-nonsense woman, kind of haughty but not condescending, very liberal, which was odd for a devout Catholic, and regimented, as regimented as a gendarme.”
When Simone was born, on July 7, 1904, she was baptized with a few drops of Bénédictine, the herbal liqueur whose secret formula was owned by her family and thus endowed with riches beyond most dreams. Simone grew up in Babylonian splendor, raised in a fully staffed late-nineteenth-century château with turrets, moats, and stables, an English nanny to teach her carefully chosen phrases, and trips abroad to stimulate her intellect. There were boarding schools and winters on La Croisette in Cannes, where she ate bouillabaisse out of the hollowed trunk of a cork tree. Meals were mostly lavish affairs in a formal dining room that often seated forty-five. In the kitchen, she gamely pushed the family’s longtime cook aside to prepare her own elaborate dishes, drenched in incomparably thick sauces of sweet Norman butter and luscious-but-deadly crème fraîche.
A life of splendid leisure was duly laid out for her, but deep down a sheltered future did not appear all that promising. She was “bored and restless,” convinced of the fact “there was a lot missing,” and “naïve”—seriously naïve. When an older friend of her father’s asked him for her hand, she balked, never having had so much as a suitor, but she eventually relented after he promised that they would live in Paris. The fact that she neither loved nor even liked the man was beside the point. Escape was all that mattered. In Paris, she no doubt could fend for herself, though that outlook was entirely presumptuous: she was not yet nineteen.
It was a mistake, of course. The marriage was “dreary and fruitless.” In Paris, she led what she called la vie oisive—an inactive life—though filled with discovery. Like Julia, she was a rich, pampered girl desperate to prove herself worthy of a meaningful goal. She learned to drive, hewed to haute couture, and apprenticed herself to a master bookbinder, whose folios she finished with gorgeous hand-stitched calfskin. Like Julia, she described her late adolescence as nothing more than that of “a social butterfly,” and also like Julia, she endeavored to dispatch that image by taking cover at Le Cordon Bleu.
The cooking school in 1933 predated the tyrannical reign of Mme. Brassart. Back then, the founding Distel sisters ran it as a finishing school for domestics, as just a demo stage, without any of the hands-on classes that popularized it later on. In no time, Simone grew bored and discouraged with the pedagogical lectures. She already knew the basics that were being taught. The chef’s recipes were nothing new: daube, quiche Lorraine, omelets, pommes anna, crêpes. Sole normande—really! The dish originated practically in her backyard. Instead of stomping out in a huff, Simone cornered the chef one day after his demo and explained her frustration. She wanted to cook in a more refined way than the simple meals he offered, elegant dishes in her own home. Would he agree to teach her there, privately, she wondered, and regularly, too, after his classes were finished?
That he consented was only overshadowed by the fact that he was Henri-Paul Pellaprat, one of France’s acknowledged maîtres. Like Max Bugnard, Pellaprat was among the sage troupe of missionaries who brought the gospel of the great Escoffier to young Parisian chefs. Drawn to Le Cordon Bleu after years of cooking in celebrated European kitchens, he remained there teaching for nearly four decades, during which he wrote L’Art culinaire moderne, to this day one of the classics of French cuisine.
Simone learned magic at Pellaprat’s elbow—not just little trucs, the tricks, that defined a master’s skill, but the kind of grand illusions, entire elaborate dinners served in four-star restaurants. Working together, they made duck with turnips and green olives, lamb roasted in red wine, fish pâté en croûte, ballottines, terrines, charlottes, soufflés, the works. Cooking by upper-class women was “practically unheard of,” she recalled, but at last Simone Suzanne Renée Madeleine Beck had found her calling.
Her timing couldn’t have been better. As she became more accomplished, more confident, more directed toward scaling new heights, her marriage was going in the o
pposite direction. She and her husband “had arrived at a totally platonic relationship,” but his nature had darker repercussions. “Simone’s husband had a drinking problem,” says a relative, “and the alcoholism, at its peak, was impossible for her to deal with.” When she could no longer withstand his emotional abuse, she did what was foreign to French Catholic women: she filed for divorce after twelve years of marriage.
To Simone, those years of emptiness and alienation must have seemed a kind of penance for her adolescence as a dilettante. The years of amusement and self-indulgence had been relatively happy; the years of marriage nothing more than a “bedroom farce,” a façade. “My life was almost at a standstill,” she said. But by 1936, she was finally free, and for the next year she immersed herself in the family’s main business, selling a silicate powder used in industrial ceramics. Sometime that September, she paid a call on a company that made perfume and cleaning abrasives, both of which also used silicate. The assistant director was a Spanish-born Alsatian named Jean Fischbacher. As the meeting wore on, their attention turned from business to mutual friends—and mutual attraction. Still, it took him almost two months after that to ask her out for a date, at the end of which he accompanied her to her car.
As she struggled to fold her gangly five-foot-eight frame into a rather compact Renault, Fischbacher flashed an appreciative grin. She was something to look at, all right, “a terribly imposing, beautiful woman with deep, seductive arches in her eyes and so very shapely.” Even though it was the middle of winter, she slapped open the sunroof to accommodate the long, stylish feather attached to her beret. For Fischbacher, this was the punchline to the visual joke. “What a big chassis for such a little car!” he exclaimed, laughing at the scene. He glanced at the bumper of the car and saw the model’s name in script: Simca. That was all that it took. On the spot, it became her official nickname. “From then on,” she said, “I told everybody to call me Simca.”
WHEN SIMCA TOOK the rattletrap elevator up to Julia’s fourth-floor apartment in June 1951, she couldn’t have known the extent of the tall American’s cooking obsession. According to those who visited Roo de Loo, Julia’s kitchen had been outfitted so that it now “rivaled that of a fully-operational restaurant.” At the top of the small staircase on the fifth level, Simca came face-to-face with a veritable wall of cookery—a giant pegboard Paul had erected on which hung dozens of strategically placed gadgets, each outlined in bold felt-tip marker so that everything could be put back in its proper place. Some were from America, others from Dehillerin; a few were scavenged from the stalls of the Marché aux Puces. A library of cookbooks teetered on several shelves. All in all, it was an impressive display, and Simca was duly bowled over. Here was another woman just like herself, a kitchen zealot who lived and breathed cooking, and they “talked almost exclusively about food for hours.”
Both women wanted to harness their passion. They could keep making dinner parties until they were blue in the face, but something necessitated more of a challenge. The two self-confessed former social butterflies could no longer be contained. They needed to express themselves in other ways—to fly. There was more to be made from their cooking, they agreed. Julia loved Simca’s cookbook idea. Explaining French cooking to Americans was such an attractive affair. Why shouldn’t women back home discover the same pleasure and gratification that she had? And they kept coming back to some kind of a homey cooking school. Teaching others, sharing the wealth—yes, yes, this was everything Julia had dreamed about.
A few days later, Simca introduced Julia to her sidekick, Louisette Bertholle, an attractive, earnest, engaging woman with a girlish heart, whose travels abroad had confirmed her instincts that French cooking was primed for an evangelical crusade. The United States especially intrigued Louisette. “She loved America and all things American,” says her grandson, Bern Terry. Politics, sports, the Social Register, you name it, she could recite statistics at the drop of a hat. She’d begun making trips there immediately after the war, staying with an uncle in Savannah, Georgia, while traveling throughout the North and East, making friends. One of them, Gladys Birch, who owned a bookstore in Greenwich, Connecticut, encouraged Louisette to write a French cookbook for the American palate. According to Birch, soldiers had come home after missions on the French front lines spinning tales of the indescribable food they’d eaten. The time was perfect to strike, she advised. Birch had contacts throughout the New York publishing world and introduced Louisette to Sumner Putnam, an editor at the Ives Washburn Company.
In retrospect, it was a mixed blessing. Ives Washburn was one of the smallest New York publishing houses, with meager resources and parochial tastes. It cost them practically nothing to put out What’s Cooking in France, but, as Simca noted, “it was given no promotion.” Louisette and Simca held out hope that their follow‑up effort, tentatively titled French Cooking for All, would produce more favorable results. The publisher had even hired a freelance editor to help whip the bulky, incoherent manuscript into shape, but the authors remained convinced that only a true American cook—someone like Julia—could give the book what it needed most: a soul.
One of Julia’s great joys that fall was her afternoon get-togethers with Simca and Louisette. The trio sat for hours in the salon overlooking rue de l’Université glowingly talking food and commerce while occasionally collaborating on a recipe or two. This was what Julia loved most, cooking in which she could mettre la main à la pâte—to get one’s hands on the dough—which was the only way to “learn, while watching and doing.” That would be intrinsic to anything they did, whether working together, just the three of them, or with a class of students, as Julia had hoped. Small and intimate, as opposed to the free-for-alls at Le Cordon Bleu. Julia “liked the energy between Simca and Louisette, the way they interacted,” their mutual respect. In the kitchen, they seemed to have “a short-hand” that allowed them to work in complete harmony, without competing or getting in each other’s way. Where Chef Bugnard had taught a formal, classic style of cooking, these women personalized it, offering a more down-to-earth approach to true French cuisine. Their recipes were inspired by old family standbys, cuisine bourgeoise with a subtle refinement, not quite haute cuisine, but something just as classy. Julia had admired the honesty of their cooking from the moment they showed it to her and understood what it would bring to what she’d already learned.
For the first time in years, Julia felt in the grip of a rewarding career, and the satisfaction made her enduringly lighthearted and ultramotivated. During stretches when Paul’s work plowed him under a dispiriting tangle of red tape, she played Puck to Paul’s stressed-out Oberon, administering charm and entertaining almost every night of the week. Four or five guests routinely turned up for dinner. And these weren’t potluck dinner parties thrown together at the last minute, but fabulous pull-out-all-the-stops extravaganzas with plenty of bang. “I’d never eaten food made with such honest intensity,” says a Smith classmate who visited with her husband in December 1951. While everyone was eating and ooohing, Julia leaned forward, propped her elbows on the table, and maintained a running dialogue throughout the evening. “She kept everything humming, in perfect control.” But it was the food that always stole the spotlight. Once, “just for laughs,” she roasted a leg of venison that had been marinated for three days in red wine, cognac, and spices and served it with a purée of celery rave and prunes stewed in white wine and meat stock. It was impossible to hold this woman back from stage-managing memorable nights. No one appreciated it more than Paul. “Good conversation, good people, good food, good wine—good God,” he exclaimed, “what more can you ask?”
IN THE MEANTIME, the women pushed ahead with the cooking-school venture they were informally calling L’École des Gourmettes. On December 17, 1951, they gathered in Louisette’s “rather grand apartment” at the far end of avenue Victor Hugo, near the Étoile, to discuss the parameters for their classes. They should be small, everyone agreed, “limited to four students,” and be p
ractical, covering everything, from basic technique to recipe preparation to pastry to wine. Since the emphasis would be on teaching Americans to cook French food, Julia insisted the classes should be given in English, in contrast to Le Cordon Bleu where instructors spoke only indecipherable French. Louisette volunteered her kitchen, which, at the moment, was under renovation to make it even more spacious and well-appointed than it already appeared. To attract potential students, Julia offered to place an ad in the Embassy News, which was distributed to the families of all government employees. Hopefully, they could begin sometime in February 1952, when work on Louisette’s kitchen was due to be finished.
But by mid-January, they were forced into early action. Three women had answered Julia’s ad, “money in fist and wanting to start.” Three Americans, bona fide students: it was now or never, even if the instructors were not quite ready. (“But is one ever completely ready?” Julia quipped.) Louisette’s kitchen was still under construction, and Simca worried that her heavy accent was a liability. “We’ve got to plunge right in, Simca!” Julia declared. Temporarily, they could hold class in the Childs’ kitchen, which was small but roomy enough for six. As for ingredients, Paul had access to the army’s PX, through his government job, where they could buy staples for less than they would cost at the market. Every savings helped. The price of a lesson was only 600 francs, which came to about $2.50—and that included lunch.
