Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

by Bob Spitz

  That goal wasn’t as easy as it sounded. There were two books on her shelf that she drew on for basic facts—Milo Miloradovich’s The Art of Fish Cookery and Louis Pullig De Gouy’s The Gold Cookbook, which included a twenty-six-page index of French fish and American equivalents. For most people, that would serve as plenty to ponder, but Julia wouldn’t rest until she had all the facts. “My, there is so much to know, and I keep bumping into things,” she wrote to Avis DeVoto. There was no point, she said, in just taking “hearsay” out of a book or relying on advice from Simca and Louisette. Every time she intended to make a point in her writing, Julia stopped and asked herself: “Do I really and absolutely know that fact?” For Julia Child, the facts possessed almost a mystique. They were the key to her power as a cooking teacher, the key to having American home cooks trust in her authority. Too many cookbooks, she found, had recipes from so-called reliable chefs that were adapted, but never tested for accuracy. For a woman for whom facts were sacrament, cutting corners like that was an unpardonable sin. Getting it right meant all your facts were in order, and not only in order, but bulletproof, airtight. Damnit, she was going to squeeze every last bit of information out of sources before committing a recipe to the printed page.

  To that end, Julia leaned on Paul’s government access to agencies, offices, and bureaus that had collected and studied the facts. Fish … hmmm, let’s see, she wondered … who would have data on everything to do with fish? Ahhh, of course: the Department of Fisheries, part of the new Interior Services. There was even a Deputy Fish Coordinator, imagine that. She fired off letters full of questions, great and small, about fish, as well as to the official’s French equivalent. And answers came back with notable efficiency—reams and reams of information, everything you wanted to know about fish but were afraid to ask: which were firm-fleshed, which flimsy, which were saltwater, which fresh? She asked similar questions about meat, corresponding with personnel at the Department of Agriculture. “I loved this kind of research,” she wrote in a memoir. Facts, facts as valuable as ingredients.

  She also loved her guinea pigs—not of the whiskery rodent sort, but friends and relatives who tested her work and sent back detailed critiques. These guinea pigs were her personal pets: “very typical of most average Americans … not aware of the classical tradition of French Cooking.” Every time Julia finished writing a recipe, she opened the case of her Royal portable typewriter and banged out single-spaced letters explaining the technique in exquisite detail. “Woodpeckering,” Paul called the sound she made tapping at those keys. It went on for hours, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck peck, while Julia attacked her “flying wedge”—six or seven pages of onionskin separated by five or six sheets of flimsy carbon paper. The number depended on how many guinea pigs got a copy. On most occasions, one went to Dort in San Francisco, Avis in Cambridge, Freddie Child in Pennsylvania, Rachel Child at college, Katy Gates in Pasadena, as well as Simca and Louisette. Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck … It took some elbow grease to get an impression through all those pages, and also something entirely different—a fierce perversity—making correction after correction. “It was terrible, just awful,” she complained of the job, in retrospect. But it was the only way she felt able to maintain perspective.

  Perspective skewed by a bit of paranoia. Julia anguished over sharing several “real innovations”—recipes she and her colleagues had developed that, as far as anyone knew, hadn’t appeared in any other cookbooks. From all she had heard about the publishing business, these recipes were essentially fair game, so better to keep them from the grabby hands of rivals lest they wind up in some rag and “become old stuff.” It would just kill her to lose the beurre blanc recipe she’d cadged from La Mère Michel in Paris. And her “beloved mayonnaise” was as confidential as the nuclear launch codes, although an almost identical version appeared in Madame Saint-Ange. Nevertheless, she made her guinea pigs swear an oath of silence. And just in case they hadn’t gotten the message, Julia buried these recipes between special colored sheets and scrawled Top Secret across the tops and bottoms of each page. “This may sound overly cautious,” she apologized to her sister, Dort, “but I don’t want to take no chances, after all the work we’ve put in.”

  For a few weeks, after she’d moved into the apartment on the quay, Julia had the place almost all to herself. Paul was working endlessly, brutal fourteen-hour days, including weekends, so she plunged into the proverbial soup to demystify bouillabaisse. One can only imagine the trapdoor that recipe opened. In Marseille, where the dish originated as a fisherman’s stew, everyone and his brother claimed to make the only authentic stuff—la vraie bouillabaisse—but Julia, characteristically, pronounced that “a lot of bushwah.” She knew “a ‘real’ fisherman would make a ‘real’ bouillabaisse with whatever he had on hand,” the bony unsalable leftovers from the day’s catch, along with a brothy Provençal soup base of garlic, onions, tomatoes, olive oil, saffron, thyme, and bay leaf. La vraie bouillabaisse? Julia’s response to that was: “Balls!”

  Bouillabaisse wasn’t a stylish soup in the gastronomic sense: the stock was water-based, the vegetables coarsely chopped, fish flaked inelegantly apart, herbs as sharp and musky as pipe tobacco. It was nothing like the potages Julia had mastered at Le Cordon Bleu, with their fine, rich creams and clarified stocks, or Simca’s vichyssoise so dense with minced chives it resembled a work of pointillism. But bouillabaisse possessed an undeniable intensity: it filled the mouth with an explosion of flavors, a splendid example of culinary anarchy. Provençal people were as passionate about it as American Southerners about their barbecue.

  Julia wasn’t intimidated. She went right at it, canvassing the boats that docked off the port, buying catch-of-the-day from a gang of burly fishwives, discussing her options with various local restaurateurs. If she was going to make bouillabaisse, it would be the real McCoy—or as close to that target as was humanly possible. A traditional specimen, she knew, had at least three kinds of Mediterranean fish, typically rascasse (scorpion fish), grondin (sea robin), and congre (eel). But Julia had seen it made with lotte, red mullet, hake, Saint-Pierre, and mussels, even langoustine, if one were feeling particularly flush. The rules were fast and loose when it came to this soup. Some recipes called for tomato, some for potato, some no saffron, others for rouille, a peppery aïoli floated on top, as a garnish. “Some people also say that if the fish are caught and eaten immediately, they have enough taste so you don’t have to make a stock,” Julia said. “Maybe that’s true, but who lives by a fishnet all the time?”

  “How in the hell are we ever going to make bouillabaisse in [the States]?” Avis prodded her.

  Whatever the eventual recipe, Julia knew it had to remain authentic but accessible to the American cook. That meant experimenting—she called it bouilla-ing—like mad in her new kitchen. First up was bouillabaisse borgno with fennel, saffron pistils, bay leaf, and thyme. She made it for lunch one day and, at the last minute, decided against straining out the vegetables, which was a standard of Marseillais style. The next day, she processed everything through a food mill, to thicken the broth. To potato or not to potato?—that was the question, so she made it both ways, with and without. Later, she cut lobsters and crabs into pieces to gussy up the dish. Who knew there were so many variations?

  The book was taking an enormous amount of research. Each recipe required endless preparation—shopping and cooking, testing and note-taking, scrutiny and analysis—much like the development of any master’s thesis. Readers, Julia knew, would demand such thoroughness. An American cook had to be able to follow each recipe. It had to be logical and establish a sense of confidence that everything the cook made, while not necessarily easy, would at least be foolproof. Everything had to come together just as the authors promised, and it had to taste good, taste French. Even if a modern lifestyle tended toward the fast and the easy—casseroles had become all the rage back home—there was an appreciable interest in entertaining with flair. French flair. It
seemed to prove everything Avis had been saying about American housewives and a new kind of cook. They wanted to educate and enchant their families, to impress their guests. “Don’t compromise—,” she warned Julia, “you know what you are doing, and you don’t want to turn out a hybrid cookbook. This is a discipline, and it mustn’t be watered down.”

  Julia recognized the difference between the so-called reliable cookbooks in American bookstores and the one she’d always intended to write. For the most part, the reliables were “not well-written”; they were slapdash and full of holes. “I want ours to be way ahead of everything in accuracy and depth and perception,” she declared. “Otherwise you get just an ordinary recipe and that’s not the point of our book.” And if Julia happened to overlook the refinement of a recipe, the rigor of a technique, the quality of ingredients, or a venerable age-old rule, Simca and Louisette were on hand to point them out and offer explanations, even if they were often contradictory.

  Letters flew back and forth between Marseille and Paris, where Julia’s co-writers were at work on their own set of classic French recipes. Simca, it turned out, was “a real workhorse,” an extraordinary cook, who, according to Julia, put in “five solid hours of bookery a day no matter what happened.” But Simca’s personal recipes, the ones in her repertoire that she cooked from memory, since childhood, were not precise. They needed testing, retesting, tweaking, and revision before they were deemed suitable for the book. It just wasn’t in her nature to work from a recipe, much less to measure ingredients. Like most Norman women who had cooked all their lives, she “knew in her bones why and how certain things are done.” It befuddled her how Americans needed everything spelled out. “She is inclined to think that written rules, accurate measurements, and detailed explanations are a lot of hooey,” Avis DeVoto wrote of the collaboration.

  Julia constantly had to stay on Simca’s case, and not only about writing clear, orderly—perfect!—directions. Their scientific approach to recipes—that is, their method of testing and retesting until each dish was flawless—often contradicted old masters like Escoffier, Carême, and Brillat-Savarin, whose recipes were anything but scientific. Those “boys,” as Julia referred to them, got away with murder in print, using vague, often elusive instructions. Just because they were renowned didn’t mean they were right. Who said they knew more than Julia and Simca? “I consider ourselves just as much authorities as anyone else,” Julia insisted. It seemed like a perfectly good point, but Simca worried that they’d come off as fools. After all, who were she and Julia to be so cocksure, so insolent? They were only home cooks—and women, to boot.

  “I keep forgetting that in the European tradition women are not used to taking on authority themselves,” Julia reasoned. But Julia was American and didn’t lack for confidence. She was ready to take on all comers, the bigger the better. It irked the hell out of her how so many liberties were taken by established cookbook writers. One book, in particular, Bouquet de France by Samuel Chamberlain, drove her nuts. It was a follow‑up to his beloved best seller, Clementine in the Kitchen, and Julia saw it as “big competition.” “It is a wonderful and beautiful book,” she acknowledged. “I just regret that the recipes are not more professionally done.” Poulet à la niçoise, for example, made absolutely no sense. “Cut a 5lb. fowl for fricassee,” Julia narrated, “cook for an hour.” Hmmm. “How old the chick … 5lb. pretty big, might be an old hen, an hour wouldn’t be enough, probably … and it would be pretty tough eating anyway.” Other recipes—for langouste à l’américaine and escalope de veau, both of which she and Simca were testing for their own book—were equally careless, full of “little slips” and “pitfalls.”

  That would never be the case for French Home Cooking. Never, even if it meant policing her colleagues. “We must be Descartesian [sic],” she insisted, “and never accept anything unless it comes from an extremely professional source, and even then, to see how we personally like how it is done.” To that end, she sent Simca three rules to live by:

  Stand up for your opinions as an equal partner in this enterprise.

  Keep the book French.

  Follow the scientific method respecting your own careful findings, after having studied the findings and recommendations of other authorities. Work with exact measurements, temperatures, etc.

  And, once having established a method, stick to it religiously unless you find it not satisfactory.

  Simca stubbornly clung to the old traditions, but steadily, surely, Julia brought her around. Louisette, however, was an altogether different story.

  Louisette enjoyed the business of the book, its conceptualization, the camaraderie of working on it. She got a kick out of the back-and-forth with the publisher; the idea of being in print thrilled her. But unlike Simca and Julia, who were engaged in a process of discovery, Louisette was oh-so-casual about everything, especially when it came to the cooking. Her recipes were good ones and she turned them out with flair, but they were incomplete, too incidental, haphazard. How she arrived at results was often inexplicable; she seemed incapable of describing the procedure. Where Julia and now Simca were driven to experiment and understand, Louisette was unconcerned. Whether she wasn’t willing to put in the time or merely didn’t have the curiosity is difficult to discern, but the imbalance was surely felt. Julia, especially, was growing disenchanted. “I have a strong feeling that this book we are doing is not at all the kind of book that is her meat,” she wrote to Simca, which was another way of saying Louisette was a lightweight. “I think she is temperamentally suited to a gay little book, like What’s Cooking, with chic little recipes and tours de main [tricks], and a bit of poesy and romanticism. The kind of recipes in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the smart little magazines.” Otherwise, Julia acknowledged that Louisette’s “role in our bookwork was minimal.”

  Louisette had her usefulness, however. Julia saw her as the public face of their book, “everyone’s dream of the perfect Frenchwoman.” If it ever came to pass that they were invited to be on television, an American audience would love Louisette. And she was “a good natural promoter,” plugged into the right kinds of people, with “all those women’s club connections” that would help to sell the book. Later, Julia’s party line would be that Louisette was too wrapped up in her family to contribute equally in the work, but truth be told, she lacked Julia’s and Simca’s commitment. Not to mention their talent. When push came to shove, Julia couldn’t avoid the hard truth. “Louisette, sweet as she is, is just unable and incapable of doing any serious work, and never has,” she wrote to Avis DeVoto. “She is the complete amateur.”

  Even though Julia insisted that the book was “most definitely a joint effort,” it dawned on her that she was carrying the brunt of it. She steered the direction of the content, arranged its hefty format, gave it shape and style. The voice throughout was mostly hers, but the spirit, she knew, “must be French,” even “Frenchy French.” Although she shared the cooking with Simca, “the writing has to be done by Julia because the book will be in her language,” Paul explained. She typed all their respective research, then the recipes, and finally the finished chapters. When Simca and Louisette drifted, she pulled them back on course with rallying encouragement. “We are a team!” she reminded them again and again. She collated the input she received from her litter of guinea pigs. She was the go-between with Avis DeVoto and Dorothy de Santillana at Houghton Mifflin in Boston. The work involved was all-consuming.

  By the end of 1953, the cat was out of the bag: the girls were constructing a monster of a manuscript—“maybe 700 pages,” Paul surmised. Maybe more. His crack that “it ain’t going to be no brochure” was an understatement of colossal proportions. The sauce chapter alone ran more than a couple hundred pages. Julia had “put herself on a relentless five-hours-a-day regime for the book,” but that was only for starters. Five grew to eight, then to nine and occasionally twelve. As the days passed, as the work snowballed, the book—the book—gradually took over her life. Still, Ju
lia refused to scale back. “She’s determined to be author, foreign-service wife, cook, bottle washer, market buyer, and sophisticated hostess,” Paul marveled.

  Never before had Julia worked more diligently than in that tidy apartment overlooking the Old Port. There, and in another, more spacious apartment they moved to in early March 1954, she juggled the challenges, keeping them all in the air. In this hothouse of Paul’s devotion and her own engrossment, Julia thrived. As the challenges shifted and overlapped, Julia kept everything spinning. There, in the midst of apocalyptic disarray, she displayed the full range of her multitasking powers. The crush of responsibilities somehow didn’t overwhelm her. The move to Marseille, in fact, marked the high point of a period of unparalleled emotional tranquillity and productive output.

  Everything seemed to be going right for Julia and Paul. After a long delay, the Houghton Mifflin contract finally arrived, along with a check for $250, the first of three installments toward the $750 advance. Paul’s boss, the consul general, a man he despised and privately called Queeg, was replaced with a man he considered “a wonderful guy.” For a change, he began to enjoy his job, “his contacts around the region just blossoming into real usefulness.” Julia finished a chapter on eggs that took Avis DeVoto by storm. “Swept off my feet,” she wrote in response to a sneak preview. “Knew before how good the book would be but never felt it quite this way before. Masterly. Calm, collected, completely basic, and as exciting as a novel to read.”