Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  What a misfire. There had to be something more gratifying in store for her. Again, she and Paul put their heads together, hoping to come up with a solution. “You do like to eat, Julia,” he reminded her periodically—certainly an understatement considering the ten-month binge she’d embarked on in Paris. All joking aside, he had raised a new idea: that Julia should devote herself entirely to food.

  But could an inexperienced cook—an American, no less—do something on a professional basis with French food? In Paris, of all places? Less controversial conceits had touched off international crises. “I wasn’t sure that it would lead to a career,” Julia recalled, “but I knew I wanted to learn how to cook. French food—a perfect place to start.” Paul encouraged her to explore the possibilities, and Julia approved. She couldn’t wait to get started. She’d already begun cooking in the French manner, respecting local ingredients and timeless recipes. Thanks to several friends, she had mastered a few mouthwatering dishes, like veal blanquette and navarin printanier, embracing the spirit of la cuisine bourgeoise. At the stove, she was learning to express herself in an entirely new way. “I had no qualifications,” she admitted when asked about it later. “I wasn’t really turned on by anything until I discovered cooking. And then I realized, ‘This is what you’ve been waiting for all these years—you’re obviously not going to be a great woman novelist.’ It was just something that suited me, that I became absolutely interested in.”

  During a visit to England earlier that spring, Julia had cooked a dinner with her friend Mari Bicknell. “If you really want to learn how to cook,” Julia remembers her saying, “you should consider taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu.” Mari had graduated from their diploma course and dazzled Julia with her poise and technique. Paul had been given the same advice by the librarian at the USIS. Le Cordon Bleu, it seemed, was the only school where professional chefs taught traditional French cooking in a serious, hands-on atmosphere.

  Julia hardly needed any further encouragement. She made a beeline for the school and signed up for its intensive six-week course, a soup-to-nuts affair, beginning in early October. Finally, Julia could focus her prodigious energy on cooking. Almost simultaneously, the aftermath of war began shifting patterns in the kitchen, whereby home-cooked meals depended more on modern convenience than on practical know-how. It would prove a fateful coincidence. As odd as it seems, Julia didn’t try to bridge the two extremes. She didn’t have to. They conformed to her.

  Julia’s 7:00 a.m. cooking class, with GIs at Le Cordon Bleu, Paris, 1950 (Photo credit 9.1)

  Ten

  Lady Sings the Bleus

  The school itself was ridiculously hard to find. An oblivious student might walk right past the near-invisible sign identifying the “École de Cuisine,” located in a mouse-gray Renaissance-style building on an unremarkable corner of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. As Julia pushed through its weather-stripped doors for the first time, the atmosphere inside was no more reassuring. The four cramped street-level classrooms suffered from hard wear; the two kitchens, located belowground in the basement, lacked the modern appliances found in most cooking schools. There were no mixers or meat thermometers or mandolines or chinois, none of the new electric blenders that were all the rage, only a miscellany of “ancient, almost non-existent equipment.” In the words of one student who attended, “the rooms swarmed with confusion.”

  This was the vaunted Cordon Bleu, if not the most respected cooking school in the world, certainly the most famous.

  Julia began classes there on October 6, 1949. Turning up bleary-eyed and fighting a nasty head cold for a 9:00 a.m. tutorial, she assembled around a badly scarred wooden table in one of the tortured classrooms along with her fellow students—two young women, one English, the other French—neither of whom had the wherewithal to brew a pot of tea. As the class progressed, it dawned on Julia that the demonstrations were geared toward the clueless. This is the way to peel a clove of garlic. Or: We will now hard-boil eggs. Of all things, she realized, I’ve landed in a housewife course! Her heart sank; it wasn’t at all what she had in mind. After two days entertaining such drivel, she’d had enough. She decided to put in for a transfer to a more “rigorous” program, which required the consent of the school’s autocratic director, Madame Élisabeth Brassart. Waiting outside the office in order to make her case, Julia got a preview of the muddle that lay ahead. She watched the willful chaos, the frantic back-and-forth, the to-and-fro, the “nonstop door opening and slamming” in the narrow one-lane hallway, reminding her of “a madcap bedroom farce.”

  Marthe Distel had never envisioned it that way when, in 1896, she and pastry chef Henri-Paul Pellaprat expanded the magazine they founded, La Cuisinière Cordon Bleu, into a cooking school for (mostly) high-society housewives. Rejecting the age-old tradition of cuisine de grand-mère, which held that women learned to cook from family elders, they set out to establish a structured, instructional environment based on the French académie system that stressed classic skills taught by professional chefs. Relying on a built-in clientele of nearly twenty thousand subscribers, the school prospered mightily and by the early twentieth century carved a preeminent niche in the world of culinary arts. Young boys who were serious about cooking careers still apprenticed themselves at age twelve to master chefs, who imparted their wisdom in exchange for extreme donkeywork; they wouldn’t be caught dead inside Le Cordon Bleu. But women, who were barred from professional French kitchens, took refuge in the school’s studio classrooms, where they mastered the skills denied to them by dint of sex. Utilizing the refined recipes inspired by Escoffier, they “bridged the divide between the haute cuisine of male chefs, generally restaurant-based, and the cuisine ménagère of the devoted female cooks who managed middle- and upper-class households.” Unbeknownst to anyone but its graduates, Le Cordon Bleu had staged a quiet revolution in the halls of French cuisine.

  But by 1942, forty-seven years after its founding, the school lay buried in financial shambles. The combination of Marthe Distel’s death, in 1934, and her will, bequeathing everything to a charity for orphans, precipitated its downward slide to near-extinction. It took a mercenary like Élisabeth Brassart to nurse Le Cordon Bleu back to its feet. A finely wrought Belgian, impeccably turned out, with a rigid, thin-lipped smile and the disposition of a rattlesnake, she staged a scorched-earth assault on the school’s runaway budget, hired three world-class teaching chefs, and instituted an in-depth course leading to the Grand Diplôme that guaranteed, she said, “a place of honor in the very best kitchens.”

  That’s exactly what Julia was after—training that would bring her some acclaim at the stove, not a cream-puff class for dilettantes. Madame Brassart wasn’t so sure. For one thing, she explained, Julia had little or no experience with elegant French food preparation, and for another, Madame disliked Americans, Julia included. So the haute cuisine course was out of the question. Besides, it was a six-week immersion for proficient cooks and Julia had signed up for a yearlong commitment. Madame gave her a look of sincere displeasure. Americans—zut alors! There was another option, she relented, one that Julia could likely pursue—a course for professional restaurateurs that had begun just that week. It was the best she could offer; it was either that or the housewife course. Madame Brassart was used to strong-arming her students, but it was hard to intimidate this six-foot-three American with the determination of a bulldog. Julia hesitated, considering her options. As a sweetener, Madame mentioned that the class instructor was none other than the school’s star teaching chef, Max Bugnard. That sealed the deal. Julia jumped at the opportunity.

  Madame failed to mention that the course began just after sun‑up and was a repository for American GIs. The next morning, when Julia bounded into class, she was met by the stares of eleven hulking veterans in aprons and white caps. Who was this intruder—this woman!—in their midst? And how did she expect them to make room for her? It was obvious from the heavy vibe that she’d infiltrated a boys’ club of sorts. They were a ra
gtag outfit, “very GI indeed,” she thought, “quite like genre movie types.” You had your army mess cooks, your butchers, your hot-dog vendors, your bakers. “Nice guys, and tough, and simple.” There wasn’t a gastronome in the bunch, that much was clear. They’d cooked the kind of food best called grub and only sought to build on that turf. Say all you want about bœuf bourguignon; to them beef stew was still going to be beef stew. Julia was not deterred. She’d spent a year and a half in Southeast Asia with just such a crew. She knew how to handle herself in mixed company—company mixed with a little grit. This wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind either, but she could live with it.

  The chef, to his credit, made it work. Max Bugnard was “a darling,” Julia thought, a sprightly little man in his mid-seventies with a dignified manner and a countenance to match. He had some meat on him, more roly-poly than plump, with bushy eyebrows, a wiry tobacco-stained mustache, and round horn-rimmed glasses that made him look rather scholarly. A gentleman and a gentle man, he was a natural teacher who had been around the butcher block. He had sixty-five years of cooking under his belt, working in small family restaurants, bistros, the galleys of steamships, even in London’s Carlton Hotel, at the elbow of the great Escoffier himself. There wasn’t a French recipe that Max Bugnard hadn’t cooked with panache, and Julia came to think of him as her “guiding spirit.”

  In class, he would sweep through the kitchen in his chef’s whites, pausing long enough to see that everyone had the ingredients before launching into several demonstrations all at once. He just fired away in his “rat-a-tat delivery,” expecting everyone to keep up, “giving the proportions and ingredients, and explaining everything he [did], and making little remarks.” So many of the basics to be learned, so many techniques mastered. Chef Bugnard didn’t believe in gradual immersion. Right off the bat, he taught proper chopping skills before launching headfirst into master recipes. Students were expected to give all vegetables the classic seven-sided cut, making sure each was the same bullet size, perfectly peeled, perfectly shaped. Sauces! He ran through the entire bourgeoise repertoire, beginning with the fundamental elements of sauce bases—the brown sauces and veloutés—and right up the gamut: demi-glace, soubise, madère, Mornay, béchamel, rémoulade, bordelaise, hollandaise, béarnaise, all the -aises. Custards! Crème anglaise, crème caramel, buttercream, pots de crème. Julia’s head swam. The course, it turned out, was rigorous and challenging. There were so many ingredients and ways to combine them! She found it “a bit confusing,” especially that first week, with everyone clamoring for Chef Bugnard’s attention, working, fumbling, firing questions all at once. “It’s a free-for-all,” she realized, fighting to be heard above the men while madly scribbling notes, trying to get it all down.

  Being the only woman, she was careful not to come on too strong. She could tell that the others were not as committed. They worked hard, but clearly their goals were decidedly different from Julia’s. “All have ideas of setting up golf driving ranges with restaurants attached, or road houses,” Julia concluded. Their objective was to spruce up their cooking skills, to turn the grub into comfort food, whereas she aspired to master French haute cuisine. So a delicate balance had to be struck. She couldn’t seem too ambitious, too possessive of Chef Bugnard’s attention. “I am being careful to sit back a bit,” she explained in a letter to her sister-in-law. She resolved to be “cold-blooded and realistic, but retain appearances of sweetness and gentility.”

  Julia loved Max Bugnard’s classes. They held out the promise that one didn’t have to be French to prepare classic French food. From what she could tell, it was all about technique—understanding “the fundamental principles that underlie each and every recipe” and learning how to execute them with proficiency and style. Everything depended on practice, practice, practice, executing recipes the “right way,” over and over again, and Julia was more than willing to put in the effort. The real work was done outside the Cordon Bleu kitchen. The minute class was over, at 9:30 a.m., she made a beeline for the market, scooping up the identical ingredients they’d worked on in class, before heading back to Roo de Loo to duplicate a dish. She recalled how “after that demonstration of Boeuf B. [as she called bœuf bourguignon], I came home and made the most delicious one I ever ett.” Every part of the recipe had to be broken down into its basic ingredients and then reconstructed—from the fat content in the beef to the type of red wine incorporated in the sauce. Tasting as she went along was essential in order to “thoroughly analyze texture and flavor.” She worked all morning practicing what she learned until her handiwork began to resemble the example from class. Almost immediately, she saw progress in the results. “I have noticed the most TREMENDOUS differences already in my cooking,” she noted. And Paul agreed. “Julie’s cookery is actually improving!” he informed his brother. “I didn’t believe it would, just between us girls, but it really is.”

  Julia’s afternoons sent her flying back to the Cordon Bleu in time for the demonstration classes that lasted until almost dark. In a small, airless amphitheater on the first floor, the class had the air of “a teaching hospital,” with an audience of thirty “interns” seated in rising rows of chairs, taking furious notes while a rotating cast of local chefs worked tirelessly under lights on the kitchen stage. Ten hours a week were devoted to watching the demos, which were informal in the sense that students were able to interrupt with questions, although they were anything but relaxed. Cooking dishes in real time—that is to say, without anything being prepared in advance or precooked, as all television chefs do today—the teachers fixed entire meals, emphasizing timing and rhythm as well as ingredients and basic technique. Like a neat-fingered juggler, the chef would have five or six dishes going all at once. One of the first demos Julia monitored was a culinary three-ring circus, featuring a woodcock roasted with winter vegetables; rouget en lorgnette (which entailed cutting out the backbones of tiny red mullet, rolling them up, and deep-frying); glazed carrots; hand-churned chocolate ice cream; a thick, spongy ganache to spread between layers of cake; and buttercream icing as rich and dense as porridge. Julia’s eyes darted everywhere at once, trying to take it all in—and get it all down. She worked furiously, with almost desperate energy, so as not to miss a word. Her earliest notebooks are filled with barely legible scrawling, entire recipes and explanations jotted cryptically in a personalized shorthand.

  As inscrutable as these demos must have seemed to Julia, she delighted in them. They were like great theater: dramatic, comprising several suspenseful acts, and a climax, always a surprise ending. She sat on the edge of her seat one afternoon early in October, as Pierre Mangelatte, a young almond-eyed chef from Restaurant des Artistes, raced through a menu that featured a lighter-than-air cheese soufflé, galantine of chicken breast, spinach à la crème, and charlotte aux pommes. Whew! It was so much to absorb in one sitting. Still, it was inspiring, watching it all come together with such finesse. “These are the best parts of the course, to my mind,” Julia determined.

  The master’s touch was pure magic, but Julia just had to try these recipes herself, while everything was still fresh in her mind. As soon as the last course was presented, she bolted from class to test her powers of recall, fighting crosstown traffic before her favorite market closed. Demos became dinners at “La Maison Schildt,” as Paul called their kitchen, using the French corruption of their name. Julia worked for hours from her notes, trying to re-create the dishes from that day’s class in order that she could serve them, note perfect, later the same evening. Paul would waltz in from work just after eight to find his wife hunched over a grease-splattered cutting board, up to her elbows in exotic food scraps. It was a sight to behold, considering his wife’s maiden plunge into haute cuisine. “All sorts of délices are spouting out of her finger-ends like sparks out of a pinwheel,” Paul declared, unable to contain his delight. After just her first week at school, he shared his enthusiasm with the folks back home. “If you could see Julie stuffing pepper and lard up the ass
hole of a dead pigeon, you’d realize how profoundly affected she’s been already by the Cordon Bleu,” he quipped. Only a few weeks later, his admiration snowballed: “It’s a wonderful sight to see her pulling all the guts out of a chicken through a tiny hole in its neck and then, from the same little orifice, loosening the skin from the flesh in order to put in an array of leopard-spots made of truffles. Or to watch her remove all the bones from a goose without tearing the skin. And, you ought to see that Old Girl skin a wild hare—you’d swear she’s just been Comin’ Round the Mountain With Her Bowie-Knife in Hand.”

  It wasn’t just the prep work that impressed Paul. It was Julia’s demeanor in the kitchen, her newly acquired body language, how she approached her cooking “with an air of authority and confidence.” She was “pushing her cooking hard,” he noted, as he scored her output from the first six weeks of school. In that time alone, he figured, she had turned out a fantastic array of dishes, including rabbit terrine, quiche Lorraine, spinach gnocchi, scallops in white wine sauce, vol-au-vent, Alsatian-style choucroute, seafood risotto, rouget in a saffron sauce, chicken Marengo, duck à l’orange, stuffed turbot braised in champagne, and a brochette of feathery-light pike quenelles laced with cream, a “delicate triumph of French cooking” that took Julia days, if not weeks, to perfect, but “which ends up on a plate as a sort of white, suspiciously suggestive thing disguised by a yellowish sauce for which, if you saw it on the rug, you’d promptly spank the cat.” Not much to look at, even downright ugly, perhaps—but so delicious that Paul gobbled it up, followed by murmurs of ecstasy.