My Life in France

by Julia Child

  AT THE END of February, we realized that we’d been in Marseille for a whole year, and were just getting our footing. It had gone by so fast. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we had another year to go, at least. Paul requested our home leave for August, so that we could visit Charlie and Freddie in Maine. It came as a shock when Paul was reminded that we’d been transferred to Foreign Service staff on “a limited appointment,” which would expire in September. Given the budget battles, Paul could lose his job if we happened to be on home leave then. It felt like a dirty trick. “Merde alors!” Paul said, canceling our plans.

  This feeling of impermanence and the lack of say in how our lives were to be lived were getting tiresome, even for us adventurers.

  It was only a few weeks later when Charlie Moffley, now the deputy assistant director of USIA for Europe, gave us the news we had been dreading: we would have to leave Marseille soon, maybe even by the end of June, to make way for a new PAO.

  It wasn’t possible! We had been in France for nearly five and a half years, but it seemed as if we’d just settled in Marseille. How could they tell us to leave now? It made no sense! Paul had finally met all the local bigwigs, was working with a consul general he liked, and was just getting the hang of running the office smoothly. It wasn’t fair! We’d finally gotten our adorable little apartment in shape, at quite some expense. I was used to the kitchen and was making progress on The Book. But now it was away with us! I suppose we should have seen this coming. Our colleagues had said, “You watch out, it always happens that as soon as you fix a place up you get moved.”

  Where would we be sent? The leading prospect was Germany, which didn’t strike us as much fun. We suggested Spain or Italy would make more logical postings, “because they use Romance languages.” (In reality, we just liked Spain and Italy better than Germany.) But we had no say in the matter, and even Abe Manell couldn’t help this time.

  One should ideally have the attitude that “I am my country’s creature” and be willing to go anywhere, anytime, to serve. But after the travails of the last few years, I had lost that noble esprit de corps. I felt that at any moment we might be accused of being Communists and traitors, and that no one at the head office would lift a finger to support us.

  My new attitude was: We must look out for number one, as no one else was going to do it for us. I was shocked at the depth of my feelings, and dared to reveal my true thoughts only to Paul and Dort.

  On April Fool’s Day, the word came in from Washington: “Steps Taken Here to Effectuate Transfer of Child to Bonn as Exhibits Officer.”

  We were being sent to Germany.

  The transfer was a real feather in Paul’s cap: Bonn was ten times more important than Marseille, and the exhibits department there was far more important than the one in Paris. Yet we’d much rather have stayed in our lovely little backwater!

  We fretted about learning German, about living in one of those all-American military compounds, about the lingering stench of the concentration camps. We discussed, again, the idea of quitting the Foreign Service and just staying in la belle France. I had The Book to work on, but what would Paul do? He had flirted with the idea of becoming a freelance photographer, had sold his prints to the big New York agencies, and knew people who could help him gain entrée. But he also knew about the ulcers and deadlines that those glamorous photojournalists faced in places like Greenland and Dien Bien Phu, and had decided it was a hell of a life. So the decision was made: we’d stick with government work and see where it took us.

  THE REALIZATION that we were really and truly leaving France was painful. Paul had lived here for a total of eleven years. I had been here over five years. I was fluent in the language. I could shop like a Frenchman, and cook like one, too. I could even drive like one, if I had to. We felt nostalgic just sitting there in Marseille.

  Perhaps someday, we dreamed, we’d buy an apartment in Paris or a house in Provence, and would spend part of every year here.

  In the meantime, we’d be going back to the U.S. for a couple of months of home leave. Charlie and Freddie would meet us on the dock in New York. I couldn’t wait to see them and get my feet on U.S. soil. But what I really looked forward to was eating an honest-to-goodness American steak!

  PART II

  CHAPTER 5

  French Recipes for American Cooks

  I. SITUATION CONFUSED

  IT WAS EARLY October 1954, and the sky was gray and the air chilly as we approached the German border. The thought of living in that land of monsters caused me to suffer le cafard (the blues). But cross we did, with me trembling like a leaf. We drove straight into Bonn and had lunch at a small restaurant. Having taken eight language lessons before leaving Washington, I could say, “Hello, how are you? My name is Child. How much does that cost? I want meat and potatoes. I am learning German.” I used all of these phrases immediately when we ordered beer, meat, and potatoes. The waitress understood me perfectly and smiled nicely as she placed two enormous foaming steins in front of us. My, that beer tasted good.

  In the afternoon we made our way to Plittersdorf, in the suburbs of Bad Godesberg, to our new home at 3 Steubenring. Our hearts sank at the sight of it. I felt that if we were going to be in Germany then we should live amongst the Germans. But this wasn’t German at all. We could have been in Anytown, U.S.A.: there was a movie theater, a department store, a colonial church, and a set of modern beige three-story concrete apartment buildings with red trim, brown tile roofs, and radio antennas. Hmm.

  We were shown nine apartments, every one of which was small, charmless, and dark. We chose Number 5, the one with the lightest-colored furniture. The kitchen was adequate, but came with an electric stove, which I didn’t like because it was difficult to control the heat. Worst of all, when you walked in our front door, you looked right into the bathroom. Still, we were right near the Rhine River, which was full of barges and looked like the Seine if you squinted. Across the way was a pretty green hill with some kind of Wagnerian ruins perched near the top.

  Oh, how I missed our Marseille balconies, with their sweeping views and blazing sunlight!

  I wished we lived in Munich or Berlin, somewhere where there was a bit of civilization, rather than sad old Plittersdorf on the Rhine. I found German to be a difficult and bristly language. But I was determined to learn how to communicate so that I could do some proper marketing—an activity I enjoyed no matter where I was. I began by taking language classes from the U.S. Army; Paul wanted to join me, but was immediately swept into work, and had no time for it.

  HIS TITLE WAS exhibits officer for all of Germany, which meant he was America’s top visual-program man for the entire country. His job was to inform the German people about the U.S.A., and once again he was organizing exhibits, tours, and cross-cultural exchanges. Because of the geopolitical/propaganda importance of Germany, which was right smack up against the Iron Curtain, his department had a budget of ten million dollars a year, more than the combined budgets for all of the USIA’s other information programs around the world. It was a big job, a huge professional step up, and I was proud of him.

  Paul’s office was in a vast structure, seven stories high, and almost half the bulk of the Pentagon. He had a large and very able staff, and since we were living and working in an almost entirely American enclave, they were the only Germans we really got to know. As he was wont to do, Paul treated his staff as individuals rather than as underlings to be bossed around. “They seem more aware of my worth than the Americans do,” he noted.

  Morale was not great. Paul’s boss was a selfish, immature fellow we called Woodenhead, and his assistant was known as Woodenhead the Second. Foreign Service and army types never got along especially well, and the divide was especially noticeable in Plittersdorf. The army families showed almost no interest in Germany or the Germans, which I found depressing. Hardly any of them spoke the language, even after having lived there for several years. The wives were perfectly nice, but conventional, incurious, a
nd conservative; the men spoke in Southern accents, usually about sex and drink.

  They drank beer, but only the lighter, American-style beers. What a shame! They were surrounded by some of the most wonderful beers in the world—and, with a 13.5 percent alcohol content, some of the strongest, too—but they deemed the traditional German ales “too heavy.” We quite liked German beers. Our favorite was a flavorful local beer called Nüremberger Lederbrau.

  On the weekends, Paul and I would drive into Bonn to do our shopping, each with a pocket dictionary in hand. We bought chickens, beans, apples, lightbulbs, an extension cord, olive oil, vinegar, and a rubber stamp that said “Greetings from Old Downtown Plittersdorf on the Rhine.” I have always been a nut for rubber stamps, and I couldn’t wait to use this one on our letters. Stamp, stamp, stamp! At lunch, we took half an hour to decipher the menu, then ordered smoked sausage, sauerkraut, and beer. It was delicious, and, again, we were struck by how nice the Germans were. I struggled to reconcile the images of Hitler and the concentration camps with these friendly citizens. Could they really be the same people who had allowed Hitler to terrorize the world just a few years earlier?

  As my German improved, I began to explore my new surroundings.

  The local stores were good for meats. Aside from the usual sausages and chops and steaks, you’d see quite a bit of venison and game for sale. You could buy a hare all cut up and sitting in a tub of hare’s blood, which was perfect for making civet de lièvre. Krämers was the swish market in Bad Godesberg, and it was there that I picked out a fresh young turkey to roast. By gum if the whole back of the store wasn’t turned over to row upon row of fat geese, ducks, turkeys, roasting chickens, and pheasants. They were arranged in neat tiers, each fowl marked with the customer’s name. It was a really beautiful sight.

  But, to my palate, German cooking didn’t hold a match to the French. The Germans didn’t hang their meats long enough to develop that light gamy taste I adored, and they didn’t marinate. But I discovered that if you bought the meat, hung it, and marinated it yourself, you could make as pretty a dish as you could hope to find.

  Soon I was back to woodpeckering on The Book, which we were now calling French Cooking for the American Kitchen. Simca and I had finished the chapters on soups and sauces, and we thought the chapters on eggs and fish were nearly done. While I began to focus on poultry, Simca began to work on meats.

  She was a terrifically inventive cook. Wildly energetic, Simca was always tinkering with something in the kitchen at 6:30 a.m. or tapping on her typewriter until midnight. Her intensity bothered Paul (“Living with her would send me screaming into the woods,” he declared), but was a wonderful asset to me. We agreed that she would be the expert on all things French—spellings, ingredients, attitudes, etc.—while I would be the expert on the U.S.A. Together, we worked like a couple of vaches enragées!

  Although I resented the distance between us at first, I came to believe that it was a blessing in disguise. It allowed us to work on things independently without getting in each other’s hair. We conferred constantly by mail, and visited each other on a regular basis.

  Both willful and stubborn, we had by now grown used to each other’s idiosyncrasies: I liked finely ground salt, whereas she preferred the coarser style; I liked white pepper, she preferred black; she loathed turnips, but I loved them; she favored tomato sauce on meats, and I did not. But none of these personal preferences made any difference at all, because we were both so enthusiastic about food.

  In January 1955, I began to experiment with chicken cookery. It was a subject that encompassed almost all the fundamentals of French cuisine, some of its best sauces, and a few of its true glories. Larousse Gastronomique listed over two hundred different chicken recipes, and I tried most of them, along with many others we had collected along the way. But my favorite remained the basic roast chicken. What a deceptively simple dish. I had come to believe that one can judge the quality of a cook by his or her roast chicken. Above all, it should taste like chicken: it should be so good that even a perfectly simple, buttery roast should be a delight.

  The German birds didn’t taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

  Simca and I spent a great deal of time analyzing the different types of American chickens versus French chickens, and what the most suitable method of preparing each would be—roasted, poached, sautéed, fricasseed, grilled, in casseroles, coq au vin, à la diabolique, and poulet farci au gros sel, and so on and on. We had to choose with great care which of these recipes to use in our book. Not only should a dish be of the traditional cuisine française, but it should also be composed of ingredients available to the average American cook. And, as always, it was important to develop a theme and several variations. For sautéed chicken, then, we wanted to include a crisp, a fricasseed, and a simmered version, yet we didn’t want to do an entire book’s worth of chicken dishes.

  Even though Simca and I were both putting in forty hours a week on The Book, it went very slowly. Each recipe took so long, so long, so long to research, test, and write that I could see no end in sight. Nor could I see any other method of working. Ach!

  Louisette, alas, wasn’t contributing very much. She had a difficult husband, two children, and a household to run; the most she could offer was three hours a week teaching at L’École des Trois Gourmandes (which Simca continued to run) and six hours a week for book research. I was sympathetic, but our intense effort on a serious, lengthy magnum opus did not really fit Louisette’s style. She would have been better suited to a quick book on chic little dishes for parties. The hard truth, which I dared not voice to anyone other than Paul and Simca, was that Louisette was simply not a good enough cook to present herself as an equal author. This fact stuck in my craw.

  We had at least another year’s worth of work ahead of us, and I felt it important that we formally acknowledge who was actually doing what. It was too late to change the wording on the Houghton Mifflin contract, our lawyer said, but we all agreed that henceforth Simca and I would legally be known as “Co-Authors” and Louisette would be called a “Consultant.” We agreed to work out the financial details when, or if, the book was published. This was a difficult subject to discuss, but I was relieved to see our responsibilities clearly laid out on paper.

  In matters of business, I felt we had to be as clearheaded and professional as possible, even at the risk of offending our friend. When Simca wavered a bit, I wrote: “We must be cold-blooded.”

  ONE THURSDAY IN April 1955, Paul received orders to return to Washington, D.C., by the following Monday. No reason was given, but we suspected that someone at headquarters had finally woken up and realized it was time to give my husband a promotion. Would he be made head of the department? Would he finally get a raise? Would we be recalled to the States for important work in Washington? Off he flew, to find out.

  I was about to leave for a trip to Paris, but as I was packing I received a telegram from Paul in Washington: “Situation confused.”

  No one could, or would, tell him why he was there. He had been made to sit and wait in anonymous offices for various VIPs who were MIA. He suggested that I delay my Paris visit, which I did.

  “Situation here like Kafka story,” he telegrammed.

  By Wednesday, the bizarre truth had dawned on me: Paul wasn’t being promoted, he was being investigated. For what? By whom? Would he be arrested?

  I couldn’t reach him, and began frantically calling our extensive network of friends in the Foreign Service to find out what was happening. I stayed up until four o’clock in the morning talking on the phone. What I eventually pieced together was that Paul had spent all day and into the evening being interrogated by agents from the USIA’s Office of Security, an outfi
t run by one R. W. McLeod, who was said to be a J. Edgar Hoover protégé.

  When they finally appeared, the investigators had a fat dossier on Paul Cushing Child. They attacked him with questions about his patriotism, his liberal friends, the books he read, and his association with Communists. When they asked if he was a homosexual, Paul laughed. When they asked him to “drop his pants,” he refused on principle. He had nothing to hide, and said so. The investigators eventually gave up on him.

  But, clearly, someone had implicated Paul as a treasonous homosexual. Who would do such a thing, and why? The whole episode was shockingly weird, amateurish, and unfair. Paul felt he had acquitted himself well under the circumstances, and had proved himself “a monument of innocence.” Later, at his insistence, the USIA gave him a written exoneration. Still, this shameful episode left the taste of ashes in our mouths, and we would never forget it.

  What was happening to America? Several of our friends and colleagues were tormented by McCarthy’s terrible witch-hunt. It ruined careers, and in some cases lives. Even President Eisenhower seemed unwilling to stand up to him, which made me angry. When Eisenhower announced that he’d run for a second term, after having a heart attack, I had no doubt that Adlai Stevenson would make the better (and more resilient) president. Ike was just not inspiring: I got nothing but a hollow feeling from his utterances, as if Pluto the dog were suddenly making human noises. Just about anyone from the GOP had, for me, a fake soap-selling ring to him, with the exception of Herbert Hoover, who had impressed everyone on a recent swing through Europe. Stevenson, on the other hand, had a nobility of ideals that appealed to me. I just liked eggheads, damnit!

  While Paul was in the States, he decided to zip up to New York, where he met with Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, to arrange to bring the photographer’s wonderful “Family of Man” exhibit to Berlin. He had befriended Steichen while we were stationed in Paris, and Steichen had bought six of Paul’s photos for the MoMA collection. That was a real coup, but one that modest Paul played down.