The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Julia’s enthusiasm steeled the nerves of thousands of readers. To make French bread in the home oven, she noted, required the dough to rise over a minimum of seven hours: “That sounds horrendous to the non-cook—7 hours! Ye gods!” she wrote. “But you’re not standing around holding it by the hand all this time. No. You are out shopping, but remembering to come back on time; or you are teaching a course in croquet, or you are playing the flute—and the dough takes care of itself…In other words, you are the boss of that dough.”

  One of Julia’s most endearing traits was to admit her own mistakes. She bemoaned her aptitude for collapsing apple desserts, acknowledging that “every one of them has been my own fault because I chose the wrong kind of apple.” This led to a recitation of her “sad” errors. A beautiful apple charlotte sagged because she had “stupidly” used juicy apples that did not hold the dessert upright. On another occasion Julia made a tarte tatin, a gorgeous upside-down, caramelized-apple confection, on TV. Feeling chuffed that she had developed a new method for preparing the dish in a cast-iron pan and dramatically unmolding it on a platter, she ignored Ruth Lockwood’s suggestion to practice the dessert before taping the show. “No tricks,” she declared. “I want people to see the whole tart just as it would be at home. There won’t be any problems!” But when she flipped the pan too soon, she produced a puddle of beige mush. To save the day, she scooped the apple mess into a pile, sifted powdered sugar over it, and browned it under the broiler. “Voilà!” she trumpeted—though, in truth, she was annoyed with herself for appearing unprofessional.

  “Cooking up a storm”: Julia and Simca make a sole mousse with crawfish butter sauce for Vogue, December 1968.

  Sometimes Julia “failed” on purpose, to make a teaching point. When she demonstrated mayonnaise, for instance, she would allow the sauce to thicken but then add a large dollop of olive oil. This thins out the mixture; if allowed to sit, the soft yellow mass turns into broken curds separated by rivulets of oil—“a dreadful sight that looks particularly fine in a close-up view on color television,” Julia chuckled. To save the mayo, she explained, you need only to beat teaspoons of the turned sauce with Dijon mustard in a warm mixing bowl. “The contrast of those miserable curds side by side with the thick yellow reconstituted sauce coming into being beside it, is sheer drama.”

  When Julia’s grocer said that long, thin, female eggplants taste the best, and that one can tell the female by its smooth bottom, she “confidently gave this bit of lore over the air, and was roundly scolded by letter afterward,” Julia acknowledged. “There is no such thing as sex in fruit.” Yet when she informed her grocer of the mistake, he shrugged and said, “Maybe so. But the long, thin eggplants with the smooth bottoms are still the best. We call them female.” To which Julia added, “So there!”

  There were times when Julia found herself nonplussed by fans, like the “nutty woman” she met, appropriately, in the fruitcake section of the supermarket. “I love the way you cook your green beans,” the woman said, “but I only do it your way on weekends [because] I want to be sure of getting all my vitamins.”

  Then there was the couple who could not wrap their heads around Julia’s instruction to “fluff the rice lightly with a fork.” “What does that mean, ‘fluff with a fork’?” he asked. “It’s in Webster’s Collegiate,” Julia responded. “ ‘Fluff,’ a verb.” “I don’t think you should use words like that,” he said. “Well,” Julia replied, “if neither you nor your wife can find out how to fluff with a fork, you’ll never be able to cook rice.”

  And she poked fun at scolds. When she dared stray from classical French cooking into curries or paella, she was attacked by “angry nationalistic chauvinists.” Her most vociferous critics were the “Italian anti-defamation league,” who, with “blood in their eye and fury in their ears,” called her an ignoramus and demanded a public apology for suggesting that lasagna could be made in a French way. In such cases, Julia resorted to form letters: “We should be thankful to the Italians for having invented lasagna-shaped pasta, and to the French for their fine cooking methods that make such a splendid dish possible.” Then she slipped her lasagna recipe into the envelope. Pleased by her “masterful rebuttal,” Julia never received a reply.

  Like her shows about cooking rabbit, roasting a whole pig, or preparing calf’s brains, veal, or tripe, Julia’s lobster “murder” raised a hue and cry from aggrieved humanitarians. “I saw your show where you were cooking a lobster and I couldn’t believe your cruelty when you cut it up alive and struggling,” read a typical complaint. “Don’t be so cruel to an animal, and don’t tell me that he died within a few seconds so what does it matter? It matters plenty!” Julia found herself sending out dozens of form letters in response: “That was not a live lobster…we killed him 2 hours before the show,” she wrote. “The only alternative to killing animals for food is to be a complete vegetarian; just because one has not personally participated in the assassination of a steer for one’s beefsteak does not mean one is free of guilt. And now it appears that plants have feelings.”

  She consulted the Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery to get to the bottom of proper crustacean dispatching, “with no shillying around the murder aspects.” Plunging a knife into the lobster’s brain or tail causes suffocation, she learned, while setting the cephalopods in cold water and slowly bringing them to a boil led to drowning. “The most humane way to deal with live lobsters,” Julia concluded, “is to plunge them headfirst and upside down into boiling water. Since their circulatory functions are centered at the back of the head, they die within a few seconds.”

  From Julia Child’s Kitchen wasn’t all bubbly comedy or cold-blooded instruction: for the first time, Julia told personal stories, including a reminiscence of one of her earliest taste memories. In 1926, when Julia was fourteen, the McWilliamses took a family trip from Pasadena to Tijuana, Mexico, just south of the border. It was a place where Americans could drink forbidden beer and cocktails during Prohibition, listen to marimba, and “gamble wickedly” at the casino. Word had spread to Los Angeles, and soon Hollywood celebrities were driving down to enjoy the good life in Tijuana. One of the allures was Caesar salad.

  Caesar Cardini was an Italian immigrant who owned a restaurant in Tijuana. On July 4, 1924, a crush of tourists depleted his pantry, and Cardini made do with whatever leftovers he could find: romaine lettuce, olive oil, lemon juice, eggs, Worcestershire sauce, croutons, garlic, Parmesan cheese, and black pepper. He carefully composed a salad, using only the best leaves, and then—with a flourish—tossed the ingredients together tableside, turning them over and over, “like a large wave breaking,” Julia wrote. When the McWilliams family visited, “Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table [and] tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl,” Julia recalled. “I can see him break 2 eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as eggs flowed over them.” He encouraged his guests to pick each romaine leaf up by the stem and eat it with their fingers. “What a great idea!” enthused Julia (who instructed her nieces and nephews to eat asparagus with their fingers). “What fun for television.”

  Julia championed “modern machines” in this book, especially mixers of various ilks. Referring to the old French recipes that instructed pastry chefs to beat butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, then add eggs, one by one, and beat each one to create a sweet froth, Julia—who had once aspired to becoming a famous novelist—slipped into a fictional reverie. She imagined a cook’s exhausted helper, “sitting on a stool in a dark corner, her bowl between her knees, her poor little arm beating, beating, beating, a wisp of hair escaping from her mussy white cap. Every once in a while cook gives her a contemptuous look and orders her to beat even faster and more vigorously.”

  But then she snapped back to the present: “Those cakes took grueling hours to make, while a mixer does the same work in a few minutes.” Julia dismissed those who quavered that “a cake is just not the same when made with an electric mixer,” and di
agnosed them with bramble bush syndrome: “It’s no good unless it hurts.” In her all-American mode, Julia teased, “Let these romantics make their cakes by hand, then, while we go to heights unheard of, by machine.”

  Yet, wary of romanticizing the “new,” Julia admitted to her mechanical misadventures: “I used my microwave a lot for cooking when I first got it…Now I rarely cook in it. I defrost frozen bones, stocks, egg whites, and bread; I warm a chilled glass of milk…I use it for melting chocolate and softening butter, for drying out wet newspapers…I have learned…to never leave the oven in operation when I am not right in the kitchen, since…an overcooked fully dried-out newspaper will catch fire. That latter lesson cost me thirty-five dollars in oven repairs.”

  Julia reflecting on her most personal cookbook

  In keeping with the personal tone, Jones wanted to call the book From Julia’s Kitchen, but the author demurred: “People won’t know who ‘Julia’ is,” she said. “Of course they will!” the editor retorted, trying not to laugh. In the end, they opted for the more formal From Julia Child’s Kitchen.

  Julia’s great hope was that readers would use this book as a “private cooking school.” She structured each recipe as a class, and included personal anecdotes and bits of advice, as if she were standing next to you, kibitzing. “No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing,” she assured readers. “This is my invariable advice to people: Learn to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!” Julia wrote those cheerful words in 1974 to encourage her readers, and herself. For it had been a significant and trying year.

  II. GOOD FOOD IS ALSO LOVE

  In April 1974, Julia wrote Simca a gloomy letter about the state of the world: Simca’s gardener, Jeanne, was in poor health; the popular president of France, Georges Pompidou, had died in office; wars raged in Vietnam and the Middle East; President Nixon’s scandals had led to a loss of public trust in the U.S. government; a photograph of Patty Hearst holding a machine gun had scandalized Julia’s California friends (many of whom knew the Hearst family); overpopulation was a problem; and she worried about the “general aura of nameless terror.”

  In June 1974, after nearly eleven years of performing as “the French Chef,” Julia had decided to retire that persona and move on to a new stage in her career. The decision had been a long time coming. WGBH was shocked, and tried to talk her back into the studio: “Your decision…came as a surprise. I had understood you were open to considering diverse possibilities,” wrote the station’s vice president and TV manager, Michael Rice. But Julia held firm: “We wish to terminate The French Chef series as far as new programs are concerned,” she wrote. (Season One of the show aired from 1963 through 1966, when it went into reruns; Season Two aired from 1970 through 1973. Season Three ran from 1971 through 1972. And Season Four ran from 1972 through 1973. In total, The French Chef encompassed some three hundred episodes over a decade.) In the meantime, Julia devoted herself to polishing From Julia Child’s Kitchen.

  In August, the Childs took a working vacation at La Pitchoune, and invited Jim Beard to join them. It was the first time they had visited their little house at the height of the Provençal summer, and they suffered in the hundred-degree heat. Beard, who was overweight and had a weak heart, looked pale, felt terrible, and medicated himself with iced Champagne.

  Early one morning, Paul was awakened by a suddenly gushing nosebleed that spattered the white sheets with ruby splotches. This was odd and inconvenient, but he didn’t pay much attention to it; everyone gets a nosebleed, after all. Just to be safe Paul spoke to a local doctor, who advised him to apply ice to his nose and keep his head tilted back. He did, and the bleeding stopped.

  Perhaps his nasal gusher had been unleashed by the revelations in Washington, D.C., of President Nixon’s “dirty tricks” campaign against Democrats. On August 9, after the Watergate hearings and facing imminent impeachment, President Richard M. Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign from office. This kind of news got Paul exercised.

  A week later, Julia celebrated her sixty-second birthday with a dinner party on the terrace at La Peetch. The nine guests that night included Beard, Richard Olney—the irritable American writer who lived on a nearby hillside and was an expert on Provençal cuisine—and Simca, whom Olney regarded as a truer French chef than Julia. Julia made a birthday feast of roasted leg of lamb, and a dessert she had been trying to get right for weeks, a tarte au citron (lemon tart), which she deemed “marvelous.”

  It was a festive party and everyone was genuinely at ease, a fact worth mentioning only because of the Childs’ private homophobia. Beard and Olney were gay; so was the New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne; and the Childs’ Provençal neighbors, the writers Sybille Bedford and Eda Lord, were a couple; M. F. K. Fisher was bisexual. So it is surprising that Julia and Paul had privately denigrated homosexuals as “fairies” and pedals (or pedalos, crude French slang for homosexuals) for years. Such language strikes a bafflingly discordant note from a couple who had few prejudices. Julia wrote to Simca that a mutual friend was “distressed that good cooking seems to be the province of the pedals to too large an extent, and that will discourage other people—including real male men. I agree with her. It is like the ballet, filled with homosexuals, so no one else wants to go into it.”

  There is no simple way to explain Julia and Paul’s homophobia, except as a function of their generation, their ignorance, and their experience. Paul was trim and fit, a natty dresser who favored a turquoise ring, spoke fluent French, wrote poetry with a fountain pen, and was a gourmet. Some observers considered these attributes effeminate. When Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen accused Paul of being homosexual in 1955, he laughed off the question, and Julia wrote Avis DeVoto: “Homosexuality. Haw Haw. Why don’t they ask the wife about that one?” Yet, the accusation left the “taste of ash” in Paul’s mouth, and was part of the reason he took an early retirement from the diplomatic service. Julia, meanwhile, was a tall, loud, self-confident woman who was attractive but not classically beautiful. She wielded a Thor-size mallet and used a serrated “fright knife” the size of Excalibur to pound, cleave, and eviscerate her work. To some she appeared manly, and they suspected she was a lesbian.

  According to family members, Paul and Julia were very much in love and had a healthy physical relationship. I knew the Childs to be tolerant, generous people who embraced unconventional friends wherever they went, and had great empathy. (I witnessed Julia speak to a homeless man on the street one day and an official from the George W. Bush White House the next: she treated them in exactly the same way, peppering each with questions and listening intently to their answers.)

  Julia was a flirt who liked “red-blooded men,” as she put it. She admired not just male physicality, but the “mental male,” by which she meant the self-confidence and clear thinking of men, as opposed to the emotional changeability of women—herself included. “Thank God there are two sexes!” she wrote Avis. Julia rejoiced at macho foreign correspondent/food writers, such as R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., at The New York Times. When William Rice was named The Washington Post’s food editor in 1972, she wrote, “I’m all for having MEN in these positions; it immediately lifts it out of the housewifery Dullsville category and into the important things in life!”

  Sometimes Julia’s weakness for male charm and machismo blinded her to discomfiting realities. When her lawyer, Bob Johnson—who aggressively pushed Knopf and WGBH for more favorable contracts—died of pneumonia at age forty-five, in 1986, Julia was shocked to learn that he had lived a closeted gay life and had, in fact, succumbed to AIDS.

  It was AIDS that led Julia to a change of heart. She was heartbroken when beloved friends suffered “months of slow and frightening agony.” At an AIDS benefit in Boston, she said, “But what of those lonely ones? The ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying?…Food is of very special importance here. Good food is also love.”

  III.
A LION ON MOUSE FEET

  Over the summer of 1974, Paul, now seventy-two, was quietly suffering chest pains on a daily basis. He didn’t bother to mention them to Julia right away. Looking back, he realized they had started in 1967 as slight moments of pinching discomfort that would come and go. He mentioned them in passing to his doctor, who congratulated Paul on having “the heart of an athlete in his thirties,” so he had ignored them. But then he had suffered the nosebleeds of August. When he returned to Cambridge in October, Paul scheduled a checkup at Mount Sinai Hospital.

  When the doctor learned of the nosebleeds and chest pains, he immediately sent Paul to the intensive care unit. Was Paul suffering a heart attack? No one could say for sure: his cholesterol was fine, and so was his blood pressure. But after a series of tests it became clear that two of his major arteries were blocked.

  “It wasn’t a roaring lion of a heart attack, such as you see in the movies,” Paul wrote to his twin. Rather, it was an infarction, a slow but steady blockage of the blood vessels leading to his heart that snuck up “on tiny padded feet, like a field mouse.”

  In 1974 the heart bypass was a relatively new procedure. The doctors removed veins from Paul’s leg and used them to replace the clogged veins around his heart. The operation was deemed a technical success. But it came at a cost.

  “WHAM,” Julia reported to Simca. “Recovery is slow, but if he had not had this operation he would probably be dead, or at least moribund…It will take 6 months at least to get him back on his feet, but when that occurs, he should be just fine. Thus we are making no plans at all.”

  It is unclear exactly what happened during the surgery, but it appears that Paul suffered a lack of oxygen to his brain. He was kept in a hospital bed, trussed in tubes, for weeks. Julia visited him daily, sometimes twice a day. She remained strong and patient in public, but alone in their big house she lamented that Paul had lost much of his dexterity, confused numbers and names, could no longer speak fluent French, and that his beautiful flowing script had deteriorated into jittery scratches and inkblots. This was an agonizing state of affairs for a physical man, an artist who had devoted himself to “the clarity of perception and expression.” My mother, Erica Child Prud’homme, recalled: “I wore a yellow shirt one day, and Paul said, ‘Oh, I love that shirt that is…the color of daffodils.’ He couldn’t remember the word ‘yellow.’ It was alarming.”