The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  On Friday, the team walked along Rue Meynadier, a winding street in Cannes lined with shops selling wineglasses, butcher’s knives, and dining-room furniture. There was cheese at the fromageries, terrines and cured meats at charcuteries, voices speaking in dozens of tongues, the clatter of cutlery, and snatches of music emanating from cafés. At Maiffret, where glacéed (candied) fruit had been made since 1885, wicker baskets filled with preserved fruits and boxes of candies were on display. In the back room, peaches and strawberries bubbled in vats of sugar syrup. Women peeled oranges and pitted cherries, and punctured holes into pineapples and lemons, to allow the sugar syrup to penetrate the fruit. Once cooked, the fruits were marinated in shallow terra-cotta bowls for months, to deepen the flavors.

  As Peter’s camera rolled, Julia entered the store and spoke with the owner and the director, over and over again. She was happy to do multiple takes, but Paul was increasingly frustrated. He had developed an executive instinct in his diplomatic career, and it was difficult for him to stand by.

  “A psychological difficulty for me is to remind myself that I am not the leader of this group,” he wrote in his diary. “I find that I am constantly planning, trying to think ahead about such things as whether the budget will allow certain expenditures, whether or not the baker who helped us was thanked, if the team had found a place to park,” and so on. “I am only the photographer, I make no decisions for the team, I salve no hurt feelings…and I keep my mouth shut when the 40-year-younger David decides to shoot a sequence which I feel certain we shall never use.”

  David Atwood had spent most of the morning filming bowls of fruit and salesclerks tying packages, while Julia stood by mutely. Though she was in full makeup, she was filmed only entering the shop and admiring its sweets, not interacting with anyone. “Julia was not sent to France at considerable expense to Polaroid Corporation and WGBH merely to interpret…what might as well be stock footage,” Paul muttered. The sequence “won’t be quite personal enough.” This message was transmitted to David, who vowed to adjust.

  On Monday, May 25, the crew arrived at Le Festival, a two-star restaurant in Cannes, where the chef was preparing a spectacular dish: un loup grillé et flambé au fenouil (sea bass that is grilled and flambéed over fennel). The bass was cleaned, oiled, and grilled; then the loup was placed in a fish-shape wire basket and smoked with flaming fennel stalks; the fish was then filleted and served with melted butter. It was a dramatic but fairly easy dish to make, and, Paul said, “nothing could be more mouthwatering.”

  As Paul dabbed the sweat from Julia’s forehead, she leaned in toward him, and, in hushed voices, they discussed how to re-create the loup at the Child family house in Maine, where fennel was not available. Paul wondered if they could use fir tree fronds instead, but Julia concluded the flavor would not be quite right. They were completely absorbed with each other and the task of adapting a classical French dish to an American context. It was a small but telling moment, when the two kindred spirits were content, alert, and working in sync.

  Stove doors slammed, pans banged on grills, lids clattered, knives chopped. “Silence, s’il vous plaît!” Daniel Berger said, and the noise dropped. Waiters and cooks stood still as the camera whirred and a scene was shot.

  “Cut!” said David, and the cacophony resumed.

  As the dining room filled with visitors, a woman from Michigan interrupted: “My goodness, it’s Julier Chiles! It sure is wonderful to see you in action. My daughter and I watch your program every Thursday night. My friends won’t believe it when I tell them I actually saw you in person!”

  The clock ticked and the crew waited while Julia graciously chatted with the fan. The Michigander left, and they picked up where they had left off.

  On Tuesday morning, the “FCiF” company headed into the crowded Nice marketplace to procure ingredients for a salade niçoise. Down the line of food stalls stood tables groaning with pizzas, soccas, and pissaladières, traditional Mediterranean finger foods. Periodically, a boy on a red bike appeared from the backstreets, hauling a wagon holding freshly baked pizzas under a conical iron cover. In the market, the boy retrieved empty trays and replaced them with the fresh, bubbling-hot pizzas. Julia and her crew followed the boy back up a cobblestoned hill into the winding maze of the Old City. In a small courtyard surrounded by ocher-colored walls, an open doorway led to a large wood-burning oven. A sweaty, sooty, demonic-looking baker poured beige socca (chickpea) batter onto a large, well-oiled, circular black pan and slid it toward the flames. As the fresh socca was loaded onto the boy’s trailer, Hoving lifted the heavy camera and tracked him as he pedaled around a sharp corner, flew down the hill, and disappeared into the hubbub of the market.

  Back at La Pitchoune, Julia encouraged Simca to participate in the “FCiF” documentaries. Though she was an inventive cook and a popular teacher, Simca was not a natural performer, nor did she understand the power of television. She agreed to participate in a couple of quick scenes, then abruptly departed for Paris. This irked Julia and Paul. They knew that The French Chef had been crucial to the popularity of Mastering—the book would not have had the sales or cultural impact it did without Julia’s exposure on television—and hoped for a similar success with Volume II.

  On Thursday, May 28, Julia and Simca shot “The Spinach Twins” episode at La Pitchoune. They demonstrated pâté pantin aux épinards—a turnover made with a pâte brisée (pastry dough) that enfolds a mix of puréed spinach, mushrooms, and ham; is decorated on top with pastry strips; and glazed with egg yolk. It was a simple, earthy recipe that Simca had devised.

  The lights were hot enough to melt an igloo, Paul observed, yet La Super Française looked cold and severe. She stared down at the table as she pounded and rolled out a pastry crust, leaving minutes of dead air. Attuned to the camera, Julia kept talking, then appeared to goad Simca, saying of the pastry, “You could even use a piecrust mix, couldn’t you?”

  Simca stopped and glared. “I’m French. I hate ready mix.”

  Julia laughed, and said, “Oh, Simca, you’re going to get them in France, you’ll see.”

  “Even if they come in France, I won’t use them—”

  “How about dehydrated potatoes?”

  “Ugh, awful! For me it’s awful. To be good, plenty of eggs and plenty of cream, then you can eat it. No, I think it’s interesting, but that’s my own opinion. I’m old-fashioned. I’m an old-fashioned—you know that!”

  The two friends smiled, as Simca’s strong fingers folded the pastry and sealed it tight.

  V. RIGOR MORTIS

  On Saturday, May 30, the crew piled into their rented white Peugeot wagons and drove west to Marseille, France’s second-largest city after Paris. For the Childs it was a homecoming. In 1953, Paul was transferred from the U.S. Embassy in Paris to the U.S. Consulate in Marseille, where he would spend a year and a half as the public affairs officer (PAO). At the time Julia, Simca, and Louisette were deep into the sauce chapter for what would eventually become Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julia was devastated to be uprooted from Paris, but within a month of arriving in Marseille she had adjusted to the Mediterranean climate and its flavor base of olive oil, garlic, onions, tomatoes, herbes de Provence, and fish. She sipped pastis, made gallons of soupe de poisson, and researched the many versions of bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise. By the time they were transferred to Germany, in October 1954, the Childs had been seduced by Marseille’s rough charms. Paul seriously considered quitting the Foreign Service in order to stay in France. He would work as a freelance photographer, while Julia taught cooking classes and finished her cookbook. But the more they discussed it, the more they realized that this was a romantic dream. With a decent government job in hand, Paul decided to stick with what he knew.

  As the Childs drove into Marseille in 1970, they were sad to see that what had once been open countryside was now crowded with multistory housing blocks. But once they’d pushed their way into the loud, smelly, crowded heart of Old Marseill
e, their mood lightened. “It comes over us again what a meaty, down-to-earth, vicious, highly seasoned old city this is,” Paul noted. “It has its own atmosphere, part African, part oceanic, reverberating with the rhythms of the whole Mediterranean littoral, from Turkey to Spain, and from Morocco to Egypt.”

  The streets were jammed with people of every hue, and the stalls sold a dizzying variety of foods. One shop displayed sixteen different kinds of olives. At a fish stand, Julia met a beldam who had been selling fish in that spot for sixty-one years. When Julia asked who would take over when she retired, the woman snorted, “Nobody wants to work anymore! The young people are afraid they might get dirty hands. Not everybody can be driven around town in a golden bathtub, name of God!”

  This was the kind of vital Gallic earthiness that the Childs had hoped to capture on film. Years later, Daniel Berger recalled in a blog post:

  Julia and Paul were guided by their memories. With an applied and joyful gluttony, they revived in Eastmancolor [film]…a France of music, markets and auctions, roads, and squares of chocolate, brave men in berets. [Julia did not give] real briefings before [shooting began, but] rather imagined how each story would restore the atmosphere of a neighborhood, the light of a shop or kitchen, the colors of a dish…[She never gave] orders or instructions, not even suggestions. She told a story and nobody in the team posed questions, everyone knew what he had to do.

  Their first stop was a small fish market in an oblong place amid a knot of slim, twisting streets. A flood of people swirled around bins filled with fish of every size, color, and shape, and shouted at one another—not because they were angry, but because that is how they like to communicate in Marseille.

  Daniel, dressed in a bright red shirt, led the way into the melee, yelling in French as he attempted to clear a path for the “FCiF” team. Hoving followed him closely with the bulky camera on his shoulder. Atwood, dressed in yellow, tucked behind him, then Morton, with his tape recorder and microphone. Behind them were Nancy, dressed in green; Julia in pink and pale blue; and Ruth in navy and white stripes. Paul popped up in a window to shoot a panorama over the fish market, vanished, and reappeared close by to capture Julia’s hands buried wrist-deep in a vat of Niçoise olives.

  The taciturn fishermen and the extravagant fishwives were not immune to the charms of Julia and her camera, and a few seemed to compete for the most outrageous, compelling, or quintessentially French interview. The winner was a weathered, long-faced salt with a smoldering Gauloises jutting from his mouth, unloading just-caught fish.

  “Bonjour, m’sieur,” Julia said, eyeing the rigid fish approvingly. “Is that rigor mortis?”

  “Non, madame,” he answered with a straight face. “It’s a mackerel.”

  “That’s marvelous!,” she chuckled.

  At 4:00 on the morning of Tuesday, June 2, Willie Morton swigged a bottle of Pepsi-Cola for breakfast, while the rest of the team tucked into cafés au lait and croissants. Then they trooped into the dawn and made their way to the city’s large central fish market, La Criée aux poissons. In a building the size of a train station, the Criée was already roaring with wild energy. Tuna carcasses lay on the concrete floor. Big men dressed in heavy sweaters and yellow sou’westers speckled with silver fish scales used metal hooks to haul plastic boxes of fish across the floor. They weighed, hosed, shoveled ice, cursed, argued, laughed, and smoked. Women the shape of stevedores, with hair flying and dressed in thick black rubber aprons, hawked their fish shrilly, laughed like hyenas, and screamed like fiends.

  By 6:30 a.m. it was all over. Julia was exhilarated and declared it one of the best days of shooting yet.

  —

  THE SCHEDULE ALLOWED for two days off before the next shoot. Paul and Julia wandered Marseille, socialized with old diplomatic friends, and ate rich bourride (thick fish stew) at a tiny restaurant. Ruthie and her husband, Arthur Lockwood, hired a guide and toured the Château d’If, the island fortress made famous by Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. (In a nod to the local drug trade, a key scene from the thriller The French Connection was shot there in 1971.)

  The trouble began innocently enough. The crew’s next stop was Paris: the Childs and Lockwoods took the overnight Train Bleu north, but the “kids” decided to fly, instead. This would give them extra time in Marseille, and the freedom to spread their wings.

  The film crew spent the afternoon shooting background footage, and that night treated themselves to a wonderful seafood dinner with plenty of wine. The moon was nearly full, and it seemed like a good idea to drive up the hill overlooking the harbor, to take in a panoramic view of the Mediterranean. Atop the hill, the moon glittered on the sea far below. It was warm and dark. Along the sweeping coast, the city buzzed with golden light, like an electrified beehive. It was mesmerizing, and as they tumbled out of the car nobody thought to lock the doors. Half an hour later they returned to discover that Nancy’s purse, which held all of their plane tickets, money, papers, and passports, had disappeared.

  Panic set in.

  Tires squealing, they rushed back into the city, where they filed a police report. The detective in charge was a square-jawed tough guy who modeled himself after Dick Tracy in a fedora, trench coat, white shirt, black tie, and big wristwatch. Astonishingly, he had already apprehended the thief: a wretched little man, who quaked in a cell. One of the flics had noticed the thief “acting queer” in a side street, and it turned out he was stuffing $400 worth of francs into his socks.

  By now the WGBH crew was worn out, and wanted only to return to the hotel. But French bureaucracy required they fill out a pink slip, a brown slip, and a white slip. A description of every item in Nancy’s purse had to be noted, as did the time and place of the crime, and their reason for being on Marseille’s highest peak at midnight. Plus there was age, nationality, home address, Marseille address, passport number, et cetera, et cetera. After several hours of this, the Americans befriended the thief and felt sorry for him. “If he hadn’t been poor and desperate, he wouldn’t have stolen the money,” they reasoned. But the police wouldn’t allow the man to leave his cell or to contact his family. Nancy thought his wife must be worried sick. When Daniel finally persuaded Dick Tracy to allow the WGBHers to leave, they drove into the bowels of old Marseille with no map. Finally, at 3:00 in the morning, they found the thief’s wife in an Armenian neighborhood. She was frantic about her missing husband. Daniel explained what had happened. She cried and thanked them profusely. As they left, the Americans handed her a fistful of the formerly stolen francs.

  After two hours of sleep, the team rushed off to catch their flight. But a slowdown strike at Orly airport caused them to depart late and to circle over Paris. In the terminal, the bedraggled filmmakers lost the key to their rented car, and a replacement had to be brought from the head office in Paris. At 7:00 p.m., they slumped into the Hôtel Samur, on the Left Bank, “half dead.”

  VI. PARIS: “AN APPETITE FOR WINE”

  Paris was Julia’s favorite city in the world. She had a long list of scenes, foods, characters, and storylines she hoped to document for the “FCiF,” but deciding which to shoot, and where, required some hunting and pecking.

  Couscous, a North African wheat dish that had become a staple of Parisian kitchens, was high on her list. But the grain was not widely available in American supermarkets, and rather than send her viewers on “a wild couscous chase,” Julia decided to save it for another time.

  Then there was the matter of wine. Living in Paris in the late 1920s, Paul had become a passionate oenophile and had passed his enthusiasm on to Julia. By 1970, wine was becoming popular in the States, thanks to vintners such as Robert Mondavi, who had introduced his Sauvignon Blanc—dubbed Fumé Blanc—to California in 1968. Daniel Berger wrote appreciatively: “Paul always knew what to drink with each dish. He had a taste for white as an aperitif, [which was] pretty cool [at the time, and has become] institutionalized since—it was not yet fashionable…and a predilection for red Rhôn
e with red meat, and Burgundy with simmered dishes and cheeses.”

  Julia wanted to demonstrate the pairing of wine with food. The obvious place to demonstrate this was at a classic restaurant like Le Grand Véfour, a gilded three-star tucked behind the Palais Royal park. Built in 1784, the dining room featured a painted ceiling, crystal, ornate rugs, and a grand sommelier named Monsieur Hénocq. The Childs had relied on him for twenty years, but Hénocq was now eighty-seven, and slipped into tedious philosophizing. Julia embraced him warmly, but it was clear that Hénocq would not translate well to American television. “Sentiment and professional standards, alas, cannot be teammates in this instance,” Paul acknowledged regretfully.

  Their next attempt at filming wine led the Childs up an ancient, steep street called Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, where they entered the caves de Monsieur Besse (the wine caves of Mr. Besse). Besse was a jolly fellow with a gap where his front teeth once stood, who owned a legendary wine collection. Although numerous print journalists had chronicled Besse’s caves, no one had yet managed to record their murky depths on film. For Julia, this was an irresistible challenge.

  Besse’s cellars dated to the twelfth century and contained some thirty-five thousand bottles. The caves receded deep underground, connected by rotting ladders and tunnels that grew darker, dustier, moldier, more cobwebbed and claustrophobic as they went. Wine bottles had been dropped in great heaps, flung in random corners, or stacked precariously along staircases. Glass shards jutted out of the shadows menacingly. The caves de M. Besse were emblematic of the kind of hidden treasure that the Childs intended to show their audience: a moody, thrilling, scary, fabulous repository of ancient vinology that was thoroughly un-American. It required a deep knowledge of Paris to find, and there was no logical, business-oriented, market-tested reason for it to exist (Besse ran a collection, not a store); yet it did exist, thanks to the passion of the half-crazed wine miser. Julia worried that in the rush to modernize, not only would France cast aside the rubbish of the past, but also gems, like Besse’s caves or the Les Halles marketplace, and other tools, skills, and places that defined France’s culinary heritage.