by Bob Spitz
Food, of all things, was becoming her passion. It was everywhere around her, impossible to ignore. Bountiful markets were in the fabric of French life, and they fascinated her, with their myriad stalls of the freshest of everything. Vegetables! Julia was used to simply opening up cans, but in Paris she found fat, unblemished spears of green and white asparagus, turnips the size of softballs, dimpled heads of purple garlic, mushrooms in enough variety to stagger a cultivator, beans still in their shells (imagine that!), potatoes so creamy they could pass for flan, and produce she’d never laid eyes on before: shallots, chard, leeks, truffles, celery root, zucchini flowers (the French ate the flowers!). Over time, Julia became a fixture at her neighborhood market on rue de Bourgogne and, eventually, the protégée of a rumpled old character known as Marie des Quatre Saisons, who sold produce from a three-wheeled cart and dished out gossip and advice as freely as she dished out Brussels sprouts. She took an instant liking to this new, fresh-faced arrival from America. The two women often spent hours together talking—in French, no less—about getting around this peculiar broken city, its ins and outs, its ups and downs. Julia loved the sound of the woman’s voice, the way her words ran together in a breathless fluency. A cook herself, with the ample figure to prove it, Marie was a natural teacher who picked up on Julia’s unexplored enthusiasm. “She took great pleasure in instructing me which vegetables were best to eat, and when,” Julia recalled, “and how to prepare them correctly.”
She also pointed Julia toward a supporting cast of shops: the butcher opposite the market, where a menagerie of freshly slaughtered farm animals hung on hooks in the window; the crémerie and fromagerie a few doors down, whose fifty-megaton odor could take one’s wind away, with a selection of cheeses that rivaled the surface of the moon; next door, the fishmonger, with box stands of fresh oysters and misbegotten sea creatures; the wine merchant, Nicolas, just around the corner, where Paul began building an unparalleled personal cellar; all became whistlestops on Julia’s daily shopping circuit. Friends suggested she let their maid do the shopping, but Julia demurred. Shopping was her education; she picked up the inside scoop on the street. “Besides,” Julia wrote to her father, “it is heart-rending not to go to the markets, those lovely, intimate, delicious, mouth-watering, friendly fascinating places. How can one know the guts of the city if one doesn’t do one’s marketing?”
The market on the rue de Bourgogne was her neighborhood haunt, but for a change of scenery Julia often walked up the boulevard Saint-Germain to the market in rue de Buci, or on Wednesdays and Saturdays crossed the Champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower to the sprawling outdoor market off the Pont de l’Alma.
Food—“gorgeous food!” It was slowly taking over her life—where to get it, what to do with it, how to enjoy it. What a strange, tantalizing development this was turning into for Julia. She waxed rhapsodic about the extraordinary flavors she tasted: “tender escargots bobbing in garlicky butter,” the air-cured sausages doused in strong red wine, ripe, runny Brie, chicken from Bresse, the capital of chickendom, “great big juicy pears,” and grapes so sweet it was as though she’d never tasted grapes before. Julia devoted her long days alone to learning about new and nutritious produce, collecting bags full of goodies in her tour of the shops, then hitting the kitchen with her haul and beginning to experiment. With Paul tied up at the USIS office, she had plenty of time to test some of the recipes in Ali-Bab.
She attempted quenelles (“The smallest may be the size of a rooster kidney,” Ali-Bab advised) and, of course, sole, sole, sole, struggled with calf’s brains, made duck à l’orange, a saddle of rabbit with mustard, braised leg of lamb, pommes Anna, sautéed cauliflower, not to mention desserts galore—crème anglaise, crêpes, chocolate cake, and soufflés.
Cooking! A once-calamitous process started to grow on Julia. She loved making breakfast for Paul, fried eggs and fluffy omelets, but lunch gave her another excuse to spar with the redoubtable Ali-Bab. Some yeasty talent was brewing in the kitchen at Roo de Loo. Julia wasn’t self-assured or spontaneous by any stretch of the imagination, but enough of her experiments turned out favorably to inspire those feelings. It inspired other feelings, too—her food served as an aphrodisiac. Before long, Paul started coming home for lunch—“followed by a brief nap,” Julia always added with a saucy wink.
Food and love had become one rapturous province. Julia’s marriage, to say nothing of her life, had blossomed and bloomed. In less than two years, all the stars in her galaxy had managed to align: first with Paul, then Paris, and now food sparkled with promise. It was an unprecedented turnaround to a once-shapeless, wayward life, and Julia was understandably ecstatic. She adored Paris for its “sweet naturalness and healthy pleasures of the flesh and spirit.” And she adored her husband, whose affection for her abounded. “I love that woman,” he gushed triumphantly in a December 1948 letter to his brother, enumerating Julia’s many virtues, including her tendencies for “only pleasure and growing satisfaction, never once a harsh word, or a bitterness, or a sense of disappointment.”
Their attachment to each other was enormous—and intense. They loved each other’s company, cherished those occasions when they explored a new neighborhood, discovered a new café, tasted a new dish or made new friends. Neither had ever experienced a friendship so complete, or so fulfilling. Everything they undertook or encountered became a shared experience, even Paul’s work, which was fraught with difficulties.
The USIS was a bureaucratic quagmire, and Paul a man up to his eyeballs in the morass. His office was understaffed, “a shambles … riven with petty jealousies,” the assignments too demanding, his budget woefully insufficient. He was overworked, he complained, and seriously underpaid. And he bemoaned the tangle of official red tape that ensnarled every request, forcing him to go through “the channels, the channels.” The deplorable conditions irked Paul no end, and he decried them without letup for being “ridiculous, naïve, stupid, and incredible!” He regularly vented his frustration to Julia, but also to those whose jobs intersected with his office, a habit that didn’t endear him to the team players. “Paul did not fare well with the career service boys,” says an American colleague who knew him well in Ceylon and France. For one thing, “he was didactic,” thorough, often perceived as condescending, and somewhat of a loner, steering clear of office interplay. “He was an unusual guy, a perfectionist, too much of an individual to fit in,” according to the colleague. Things had to be done the right way, his way, or else he’d take things into his own hands, always “covering for others,” dissatisfied that nobody appreciated him. “He was too temperamental, definitely not a bureaucrat, and it used to affect him physically and really upset him.”
Julia had her hands full keeping Paul’s bitterness at a simmer. Despite his loving disposition, he was not an easy man. “He was so contrary, so anti-authoritarian,” says his niece, Phila. And “methodical to a fault!” according to his nephew, Jon. Precision and rightness topped Paul’s personal list of standards. His was a constant fight against undisciplined co-workers, the dullards and incompetents, and, as such, he had to be soothed, stroked, consoled, constantly reassured. But from the beginning, he responded to Julia’s encouragement and love. She had the perfect touch for a man with Paul’s prickly temperament, acknowledging his frustrations while exhorting him to persevere. “She was such a positivist, an energetic force of nature,” according to Rachel Child. She had a wonderful sense of the mechanics of marriage that dovetailed perfectly with Paul’s shortcomings. He’d written to friends that Julia “would bring out the best even in a polecat,” an observation that suggests he was speaking from experience.
It couldn’t have been easy for Julia, having to remain so positive morning, noon, and night while her husband battled the forces of gloom, real or imagined. Evenings and weekends were set aside so that Paul could decompress. He often spent long hours painting stylized cityscapes, mostly of Parisian rooflines, from an easel at the windows of Roo de Loo, while Julia read o
r fiddled at the stove. For the most part, they steered clear of embassy functions, choosing instead to dine alone or with their own group of friends. Their social circle was widening exponentially thanks to the efforts of ex-pats and introductions. Earlier in the year, they’d been co-opted into a salon known as le groupe Focillon, named in memory of Henri Focillon, a beloved professor and medieval art historian who happened to be the stepfather of Julia’s friend Hélène Baltrusaitis. Le groupe was an oddball mix of Focillon’s students, who drank themselves into a lather and argued over scholarly arcana—“a sociable, intellectually vigorous, and very French circle” that contributed to Julia’s expanding enlightenment.
But her real education came at mealtimes. Of all the sights and sensations that abounded in Paris, the bistros and restaurants went straight to her core. They provided a sensory, social, and cultural experience that threw Julia a powerful curve. She had already gleaned some of its finer aspects from Paul, but nothing could have prepared her for the situation she encountered in Paris. The French way of life espoused what was, for Julia, a radical ideology: that a gastronomic experience was essential to eating, or as her future sidekick Simone Beck aptly put it, “a major occupation and pleasure.” Months after Julia arrived in Paris, this phenomenon continued to captivate her. “The important thing here,” she wrote, “is that food is a national sport, indulged in by all classes. One’s best evenings are composed of a good dinner, and nothing else is necessary, and it takes the whole evening.” The act of dining out in Paris was like good theater to her: the setting, the dialogue, the presentation, the performance—pure entertainment. Divine.
The sheer number of restaurants boggled her mind. It seemed as if there was a dining establishment on every corner, small family places serving beautifully prepared, classic French dishes: bæuf bourguignon, veal blanquette, poule-au-pot, cassoulet, terrines, gratins, fricassées, rôtis, ragoûts …”Good food was everywhere,” Richard Olney noted—and it was cheap, no more than a couple dollars for a meal, and that included wine. Julia was beside herself! She was determined to “devour Paris whole.” She met friends for lunch or dinner nearly every day, and dined out with Paul every chance they got.
Such extravagance called for some fancy bookkeeping. Their lifestyle was tricky on Paul’s meager government paycheck. Most of his $95-a-week salary was already spoken for, owing to rent, clothing, auto maintenance, and staples. The rest got eaten up by their attachment to the good life. Both Julia and Paul spent money lavishly. Julia loved clothes, well-made French clothes, and had her hair done weekly at a Right Bank salon; Paul’s wine cellar rivaled that of any two-star restaurant. They continued to take side trips to Provence, Normandy, and Marseille, staying in posh hotels and sampling all the best restaurants. Such tastes would have driven most couples on a fixed budget to financial ruin.
Fortunately, there was a safety valve: Julia’s inheritance, which they dipped into whenever the situation arose, and it usually arose nightly, at dinnertime, during their deliberation over where to eat. Having lost the struggle over their budget, they opted to splurge when it came to food. “The restaurants in Paris were irresistible,” Julia recalled. “Each one was better than the next.” A few bucks for such pleasure wasn’t going to bankrupt them.
Their go-to place was Michaud, an old-fashioned neighborhood restaurant a few blocks from Roo de Loo, which despite its unprepossessing appearance served imaginative French specialties sauced with puddles of scarce butter and even scarcer cream. “It wasn’t fancy,” Julia recalled, “but every dish was cooked well and delicious, absolutely delicious.” Escargot d’or became another favorite once Julia developed a taste for its signature snails. Another was La Truite, where Julia gorged on the “voluptuous” sole à la normande; it was the “cozy place” behind the American embassy owned by the same family that ran La Couronne in Rouen. Her datebooks reveal the names of at least a dozen places they esteemed, along with meals that made Julia’s eyes bulge and heart swoon: “truly elegant” shellfish au gratin at Lapérouse, oysters and desserts at Brasserie Lipp, poulet gratiné at Au Gourmet, sandwiches and beer at La Closerie des Lilas, dinners at Marius, Prunier, Pharamond, Pierre, Chez Georges, a riot of restaurants. Every place they ate tapped deeper into their savings and fanned their curiosity for the unique, the refined, the exceptional.
It was this sense of curiosity as much as their consuming passion for food that brought Julia and Paul to the doorstep of one of Paris’s most vaunted temples of gastronomy: Le Grand Véfour, in the fluted arcades of the Palais Royal.
Le Grand Véfour launched their dining experience into a stratospheric level. The restaurant, a bulwark of culinary elegance, enjoyed a long legacy tied to its origins, in 1784, as the Café de Chartres, a boisterous watering hole. Its denizens then were a crowd of Jacobins, political radicals who advocated democracy. Later, following a gilt-edged makeover, Napoleon frequented it as a trysting place with Joséphine (supposedly, the kitchen created la bombe in the shape of her breast), and even later, after Jean Véfour took it over and rechristened it, writers began turning up—not your run-of-the-mill writers either, but nineteenth-century studs like Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, and Ivan Turgenev, followed by their twentieth-century heirs, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Louis Aragon. Paul and Julia encountered a grizzled Colette in a red-velvet banquette at the end of the dining room and, over the years, craned their necks as luminaries came and went.
But it wasn’t celebrity-watching that drew them to Le Grand Véfour. This is where Julia and Paul learned about serious cooking. Until now, they’d dined in places whose menus featured what could best be called honest French food—classic dishes that belonged to every restaurant’s repertoire, prepared in a refined, albeit straightforward way. Le Grand Véfour was considered a restaurant gastronomique, which was French for fine dining raised to the nth power. “The food is absolutely wonderful and … costs a million dollars,” Paul recalled, “but you are so hypnotized by everything that you feel grateful as you paid the bill.” The presentations arrived tableside like works of art. Pigeon was deboned and stuffed with foie gras and forcemeat, lamb filets came entombed in a savory pastry crust with cranberry beans and dried tomato, turbot was poached in a truffle emulsion, monkfish roasted with zucchini in almond cream. If the sole meunière at La Couronne whet Julia’s appetite for French food, what she ate at Le Grand Véfour pushed her to worship at its ovens.
But even a meal at Le Grand Véfour failed to slake Julia’s greater hunger. As she approached her thirty-seventh birthday, she was feeling increasingly unfulfilled. Homemaking, after all, had never been her calling. She was a big woman with immense enthusiasms who needed an outlet for the energies that tugged and tugged at her. Motherhood might have sufficed. Julia was keen to have children, despite Paul’s indifference. His aversion to kids was evident to almost everyone who encountered him. For one thing, he “didn’t deal well with children.” Gregarious, attentive, and naturally charming in mixed company, he turned “standoffish and gruff” toward kids who invaded his space. They got under his skin. All that neediness! Besides, he couldn’t talk to them about issues that concerned him most, issues “of immense importance … people, ideas, gen’l semantics,” and the like. And at his age, forty-seven, fatherhood seemed even less desirable than his crummy government job. Still, it was clear he and Julia were trying to conceive a child in Paris. Paul revealed as much in a letter to his brother, Charlie. And Julia’s hopes were high. In the early spring, she began feeling “quite queer” and concluded: “ah, pregnant at last!” She “was delighted”; raising a child was something she could devote her life to. For “about a month” she allowed herself to contemplate the start of a family until a routine doctor’s visit short-circuited the dream. The stomach cramps, it turned out, were nothing but indigestion, the result of overindulgent eating. “I was bilious,” Julia recalled. “Too much cream and butter.”
The diagnosis dealt her a crushing blow. It seemed to end
her desire for having children, or, at least, the expectation that they were in the cards. There were no more queer feelings or false alarms during the following months in Paris—or ever again, for that matter—and evidence suggests that she and Paul began taking greater precautions when it came to contraception. Somewhere in the interim the decision had been made that their lives were just fine without putting children in the picture. Deliberate or not, Julia realized that Paul’s so-called willingness to start a family was fraught with misgiving, and she abandoned her maternal yearning rather than jeopardize her relationship. “I would have been the complete mother,” Julia lamented in a magazine article years later, but a vital marriage would have to sustain her for now.
Still, as spring lapsed into summer in 1949, Julia continued to search for her groove. Her conversations with Paul always boiled down to the same nagging issue: “How was she going to keep busy while he was working?” They weren’t in any kind of conflict about it; both wanted something meaningful for Julia, something that gave purpose to her life. As before, she remained firmly opposed to taking an office job. That was for the politic and the tentative—and Julia was neither. The solution had to come from some deep-felt passion, they concluded. But—what? She was at an impasse again.
At the end of July, Julia’s situation took an odd turn when she enrolled in a hat-making course at a boutique on the Right Bank. It was a strange pursuit for a woman with Julia’s hearty interests. By her calculation, she only owned “the same two hats” since 1942 and “rarely” wore either of them. Why, then, devote her time to such a stodgy routine? Perhaps it had sprung from her summer at Lopaus Point, when she and Rachel Child made funny hats from detritus they’d salvaged on the beach. Or perhaps she’d grown desperate—desperate to get out of the house, desperate for something to fill the empty hours. In either case, the class, as a career path, was a complete waste of time. After a few lessons, Julia still felt indifferent toward hats in general and realized she “never was any good at all at making clothes.” Three hats she designed were actually presentable enough to wear, but they “always looked as though I had made them,” she recalled. The overall verdict, in a nutshell: “awful, awful.”
