The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Julia was relieved, and grateful, that her colleague had landed on her feet. Simca’s Cuisine “should be a very nice book, I would imagine, and I am so happy to have nothing whatsoever to do with it,” she wrote Avis DeVoto. “It will be good for Simca, I think also, not to be associated with me, and to be quite on her own.”

  In the book Simca wrote her version of the breakup: “We had vowed, Julia and I, to terminate our collaboration—she to pursue her television program and other work, and I to devote myself to my private life. At the age of sixty-six, and after twenty-two years in the professional practice of the cuisine, I wanted a rest! But during the tour of cooking demonstrations…it seemed that a great many people were urging me to do one more book, a book all my own. I ended by taking the course of least resistance (and undoubtedly giving in most of all to my own real desire) in undertaking to write this little book—which would, finally and in truth be my last.”

  In fact, Simca would go on to publish two more books—New Menus from Simca’s Cuisine, written with Michael James and published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1979; and Food & Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine, written with Suzanne Patterson and published by Viking in 1991.

  “After Julia, Simca never found the right collaborator,” Jones sighed. Though Simca’s Cuisine had sold about twenty-six thousand copies by 1977, Knopf had printed many more, and the editor had decided not to publish a second volume. In a carefully crafted letter, Jones explained to Simca: “I was struck by how little emphasis there was on new and different and somewhat experimental ideas; rather, I felt the recipes [in Simca’s proposal for a second volume] were almost interchangeable with those in the first book…I just have serious doubts about how well we would do with it…So do pursue the Harcourt offer and know that you have my blessings.”

  What is remarkable about this difficult transition is that while Julia and Simca would never write another book together, they preserved their friendship. They continued to post a steady stream of letters across the Atlantic, and remained devoted neighbors in Provence until the end.

  V. OUT OF STYLE, OUT OF STEP

  On May 4, 1971, Julia narrated a version of Tubby the Tuba, accompanied by conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra. It was a glamorous affair before a live audience, and was taped for a PBS special. But after months of taping the final episodes for Season Two of The French Chef, Julia was worn out. The next day, she and Paul flew off to their quiet French retreat. Then Julia checked into a clinique in Cannes, where the skin on her fifty-eight-year-old face was tightened a bit (to preserve a youthful appearance for TV), far from America’s prying eyes.

  Stuck in bed without much to do, Julia took stock of her career, which had hit a perplexing juncture. In early June, she typed her thoughts out in letters to her confidants. While Mastering, Volume II, was doing well—Knopf had sold two hundred thousand copies by then—public reaction to Season Two of The French Chef had been muted, and she couldn’t understand why. The new show had all of the right elements to make it a hit: it was shot in color for the first time, was expansive in scope with more episodes than ever, and it featured the novel “French Chef in France” documentaries. She had worked hard on those shows, and was proud of them. Yet the public seemed indifferent.

  “Actually Paul and I are both a bit disappointed…the new series has really provoked little or no comment,” Julia wrote to Ruth Lockwood. “Apart from the reaction to our very first show, there seems to have been no reaction whatsoever. We did engender some small amount on the bread shows, in the provinces, but nothing on the pressed duck, the puff pastry, or on really anything else—with or without the [French] inserts.”

  Julia puzzled over the dilemma as she typed: “Perhaps we aren’t quite getting across. So why? This we must try and find out, because if we don’t do better, there won’t be another year. Are we trying to be too technical or booky? Are we losing the fun because we are too picky? Are we too complicated and talky? Or are we just getting out of step? (I will NOT do macrobiotics and vegetarianism, however.)”

  She wrote a similar letter to Judith Jones: “I don’t feel this year’s shows have been particularly successful, at least they haven’t raised even a ripple of comment, praise, or blame…The unifying force is the same old cook in the same old kitchen. That is perhaps why we have aroused no more interest, in spite of color and French inserts—essentially the same, so why talk about it.”

  Here Julia seemed to confront a previously unthinkable possibility: that the culture was shifting beneath her feet and America’s infatuation with French cooking—and The French Chef—was becoming passé, in part because of forces she had unleashed. Though Julia remained a brightly shining star, she worried that the response to Season Two was a harbinger of professional mortality.

  “I am quite aware that there comes a time when one is frankly out of style, out of step, and had better fold up and steal away,” she wrote Jones. But then she seemed to catch herself sounding maudlin, and stiffened her spine: “However, I shall certainly hang on with full vigor for the time being.”

  Julia was restless and, perhaps unconsciously, preparing to shift her career in what Jones called “new and different and somewhat experimental” directions.

  —

  JULIA WAS NOT the only one whose restless energy was shifting in experimental directions that June. Just up the road a darker spirit prevailed in Villefranche-sur-Mer, a seaside resort between Nice and Monaco, where the Rolling Stones had “exiled” themselves to record a new album. On the run from British tax authorities, Keith Richards had rented Villa Nellcôte, a stately mansion twenty-five miles east of La Pitchoune, and turned the basement into a studio. A growing tribe of musicians, engineers, producers, drug dealers, writers, and hangers-on—Gram Parsons, Bobby Keys, Mick Taylor, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern—along with the wives, girlfriends, and children of the band, turned Villa Nellcôte into a den of Fellini-esque debauchery. Playing loudly through the night for months on end, the Stones created their seminal double album Exile on Main St., which was released in May 1972. Mick Jagger called it “fucking mad” and “not good,” but others have deemed Exile one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll albums ever. While Julia Child characterized one aspect of the seventies, the Stones embodied another—the manic, dangerous, sexy, hallucinogenic weirdness of the time—a few miles away.

  VI. A SUMMATION

  In December 1972, Julia finished taping Season Two of The French Chef and began to contemplate her first solo project since The French Chef Cookbook. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to shift her focus back home. After all, she was living in Massachusetts, and had family roots stretching back to colonial days; her audience was American; and she was cooking all kinds of foods at home. But how best to give form to this vague idea?

  One of the first ideas the Childs pitched to WGBH was a TV cooking show before a live audience. For years Julia had given demonstrations for crowds that could swell to more than a thousand people. She loved the electric energy of live performance, the back-and-forth banter, using real knives and flame and producing real smoke and smells, to teach flesh-and-blood people who liked to cook and eat real food. Things could, and often did, go wrong onstage. Audiences were thrilled as Julia recovered from mistakes—adding a dash of olive oil to save a separating sauce, or plastering a delaminating cake together with extra frosting—to make everything turn out right, more or less, in the end.

  But director-producer Russ Morash wasn’t sold: “We can do it,” he wrote. “The question really is, should we?” He didn’t think a live cooking show would make consistently compelling television, and he worried there were too many ways it could go wrong.

  When Julia suggested a program in which she would cook with well-known professional chefs, David Ives, president of WGBH, turned her down: “I have doubts that such cooks could come up to your standards as television personalities,” he wrote. (Julia moved on, though her instinct about this would be validat
ed: in 1993, her show Cooking with Master Chefs was nominated for an Emmy Award; the 1996 follow-up series, In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs, won Julia her second Emmy.)

  Feeling stymied, the Childs put their heads together and composed a list of ideas they labeled “10 Possibilities for a New Julie-Special Show.” A close reading reveals the Child team’s preoccupations in midcareer. It included: a look at their life at La Pitchoune, with a peek at Julia’s kitchen “laboratory,” Paul’s photography, and guests such as James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher, and Richard Olney; a visit to Charlie and Freddie (Fredericka) Child’s cabin on the coast of Maine, featuring Julia on a lobster boat, Paul and his twin building an art studio, and a view of local maritime history; life in Cambridge—its history and food, and the Childs’ remarkable group of neighbors; a tour of the SS France, with an emphasis on the liner’s haute cuisine; a behind-the-scenes look at The Four Seasons Restaurant in New York, a gastronomic mecca; “From Ocean to Gullet,” a documentary about the procuring and eating of fish, from the Grand Banks cod fishery to fly-fishing for trout in a Wyoming creek; “The Beef Cycle” (aka “From Range to Range”), in which Julia would follow a single cow from a ranch in Montana to cattle train, slaughter, processing, selling, buying, cooking, and eating (an idea that presaged contemporary endeavors, such as Michael Pollan’s celebrated article “Power Steer” in The New York Times Magazine); and “How a French Chef Program Is Made,” in which Julia would take her audience behind the scenes at WGBH as she shopped, cooked, taped, ate, cleaned up, publicized, and fund-raised for a typical episode.

  Most intriguing to Julia was the notion of a “Cross-Country Culinary Tour,” which, in the spirit of “The French Chef in France,” would follow her on an adventurous tour of regional cooks and specialties in the United States: from John Bennett’s restaurant in Oklahoma City to a streamside lunch on a Rocky Mountain pack trip; from a chitlin-and-hog-jowl dinner in Harlem to a poolside party at a Pasadena mansion. It was to be an ambitious and expensive idea, which is probably why it was never green-lighted.

  Each of these ideas had potential, but none of them gained traction at WGBH. Yet such brainstorming had been the Childs’ modus operandi for years, and they trusted that it would eventually lead them to an answer. “We put down anything we could dream up because any one of these might strike a spark in somebody else’s mind that could lead to the kind of spectacular blaze we want,” Paul wrote.

  —

  BY THE SPRING of 1973, Julia was honing the conception of a new book. It would be a transitional work: starting with a handful of recipes from Season Two of The French Chef not used in Volume II of Mastering—including dishes such as pressed duck and chickpea pancakes that she investigated in the “FCiF” documentaries—she would expand her vision beyond classical French cuisine to encompass dishes from the United States and around the world. To some, this seemed a radical shift, but to Julia it was a natural evolution.

  In a 1966 Life profile, Julia said, “I personally will never do anything but French cooking. There are so many marvelous French recipes, I don’t think I’ll ever live long enough to do them all.” But with the benefit of a dozen years of experience, she said, “I’m tired of French cooking. It’s too limiting.”

  The more she widened her gastronomic scope, the more she delved deeply into “tangents, comments, anecdotes, personal trials and discoveries,” until her new work became a “rather large and rambling book—a summation, really, of my 25 years in the kitchen…a personal meander.”

  With this notion in mind, Julia began to pitch potential titles for the book to Knopf, including: The French Chef, Book II; From the French Chef’s Kitchen; or Straight Talk from the French Chef’s Kitchen. She told Ives—“rather cavalierly,” she’d later admit—that she aimed to publish her latest work in the fall of 1974. This delivery date was off by months. But the resulting book would prove a major turning point in Julia’s career: the most difficult and personal cookbook she would ever write.

  It was called From Julia Child’s Kitchen, and its publication in 1975 marked a watershed. It seemed to release Julia from Phase One of her career and herald Phase Two. In the second half of the seventies, she broke from classical French cuisine to embrace foods of the world, examined the recipes of her colonial forebears, and intentionally re-Americanized herself. Julia Child was sixty-three years old and was at last discovering her true voice.

  Part II

  The French Chef in America

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they nourish themselves.”

  —JEAN BRILLAT-SAVARIN, The Physiology of Taste, 1825

  6

  From Julia Child’s Kitchen

  I. AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

  In her new book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen, Julia broadened her repertoire to include a few French classics, like salade niçoise and madeleines, in a multicultural cornucopia of hamburgers, coleslaw, New England fish chowder, turkey, pizza, curried beef, Bombay duck, Oriental chicken, spiced Belgian cookies, and so on.

  Aside from the recipes, the most obvious departure was the author’s voice. Judith Jones suggested that Julia tell personal stories in her new book. This would have the dual effect of distancing her from the past with Simca and The French Chef, while bringing a new energy and a warmer, more intimate tone to the work.

  But writing about herself in the first person singular—as “I”—did not come naturally to Julia. She was congenitally modest, and preferred to deflect questions than to crow about herself. This trait was endearing, though it could be challenging for her collaborators—as I learned in working on her memoir, when she would deflect my questions about her life to ask about my life. In a typical note, Julia wrote to Judith Jones in 1981: “For our next book it would be nice to have…no photo of cook, except perhaps a small one on the back cover. I’m tired of such photos, and would rather see food for a change.”

  “She didn’t like the me-me-me-ness of celebrity,” Jones explained.

  In general, writing did not come easily to Julia. While she used expressive language—“plop,” “wham,” “OUF!”—she did not have the intuitive and fluid way with words that Paul did. She and her siblings were affected by a set of mild learning issues related to dyslexia, which they referred to as “the family curse.” Julia worked hard to make her writing clear and distinctive, and she relied on Paul and Jones for editorial assistance. Her struggle to find a comfortable first-person voice “was difficult,” Julia admitted to the Chicago Tribune. “But Judith coaxes the writer out of you.”

  The voice Julia settled on was genuine and unpretentious but also, in turns, knowledgeable, humorous, opinionated, self-confident, occasionally revealing, and always encouraging. She wrote:

  Where the other books are almost entirely French in their inspiration, this one has burst out into other directions…Although my formal culinary training was entirely French…I always look at French cuisine from an American point of view: How can we make that pastry here?…How can we make that French bread, or that chick-pea pancake?…I’ve gone into experiments with the pressure cooker…the micro-wave oven, and the electric super-blender-food-processor…I am, in other words, putting my cooking vocabulary to work in all directions. I hope, in turn…to encourage the same attitude in you, my fellow cook.

  Julia spoke to her audience directly in these pages, as if through the fourth wall: “The only way to begin cooking is to start right in, and Mousse au Chocolat is a small treasure of culinary basics,” she wrote. “This recipe, then, I am directing at those of you who are new to cooking…Mastery of this operation opens up endless vistas of soufflés, cakes, mousselines, roulades, and even bûches de Noël. What better way is there to learn five fundamentals of la cuisine universelle, and to eat them too?”

  Julia had done a tremendous amount of research into cooking basics: how to make hamburger taste like something more than random beef scraps molded into a patty (grind your own chuck, and cook
it with shallots and cream); how to Americanize a bûche de Noël (decorate it with American flags and a mini ax for George Washington’s birthday, or sparklers for the Fourth of July); the proper method of consuming spaghetti Marco Polo (“It’s more fun with chopsticks, and they truly eat spaghetti that way in China; I’ve seen them do it.”); or how to deal with a snob who frowns on pairing wine with eggs (give him a carafe of chilled “Château la Pompe,” or plain pump [tap] water, and there will be more Pouilly-Fuissé left for you).

  She could wax lyrical about foods she adored, but made sure to circle back to earth: “A touch of aspic is a touch of magic. It can turn a plain poached egg into a glittering oeuf en gelée, a naked chicken into a poulet en chaud-froid…and a modest poached fish into a glistening poem…The effect is so dazzling you would think only a professional could execute it until you realize that the complex-looking whole is but an assembling of standard parts.”

  Julia was not afraid to state blunt opinions: “If truth in packaging were truly enforced, frozen spinach would be labeled ‘Branch Water & Leaves.’ ” Or, “The greatest block to the self-teaching of meat cuts…has been the fanciful nomenclature used by markets…This [is a] ridiculous, confusing, and frequently deceptive state of affairs.”