She dimly recalled seeing these recipes in the little pamphlet she was handed on her first day but never bothered to look at again. She decided to improvise, but the results didn’t amuse Madame Brassart, who swiftly delivered the fatal blow—a failing grade. Her pronouncement that Mrs. Child did “not have any great natural talent for cooking” would be remembered as the most colossal misjudgment in culinary history. Julia later dismissed this verdict with a withering riposte: “Mrs. Brassart is Belgian, not French.”
Furious with herself for failing the simple test, Julia stormed down to the basement kitchen alone and cooked the menu again, flawlessly. She never doubted her abilities, and neither did those who mattered most—her mentor Chef Bugnard, Paul, and anyone who had the good fortune to eat at Roo de Loo. Shortly after the debacle, Bugnard persuaded Madame Brassart to let him be the judge of a retest in Julia’s own kitchen.
The timing was perfect. She and Paul had recently given the place a face-lift and added three square-top stools so they could now seat seven people, or six people and one cat, “if we don’t have to be formal about it.” The finishing touch was the coveted blue ribbon in its handsome frame, proof that Mrs. Child had mastered the art of French cooking.
Reserved seat
THE SCHOOL OF THE THREE HEARTY EATERS
ON THE FIRST day of class at her fledgling school, Julia’s kitchen suddenly seemed cramped. How would it hold two more profs, three American-sized students, and Minette, who refused to give up her personal stool? They originally planned to hold class in Louisette’s spacious kitchen, but her remodel wasn’t ready. Neither were the three would-be teachers when Julia got a call from an old California friend who saw their ad for cooking lessons in the embassy newsletter. This friend had rounded up two companions and wouldn’t take no for an answer, so ready or not, the School of the Three Hearty Eaters was open for business.
The faculty arrived, market baskets brimming with leeks, potatoes, apples, and sweet Normandy butter. They quickly organized their tools, sharpened knives, and donned aprons. Pinned to each crisp white smock was the logo Paul designed, l’École des trois gourmandes in script encircling a large curlicued 3 that looked a little like a corkscrew.
Promptly at 10 AM, the novices crowded into the kitchen, all hats, gloves, and stylish suits as if they were going to a Junior League luncheon in Pasadena. Julia handed them aprons and collected six hundred francs each—about two dollars a lesson, including lunch.
Supersized Julia stood next to the merely tall five-foot-ten Simca, who was beside the petite and très chic Louisette. Simca was a whiz at technique and delivered firm opinions about everything in heavily accented English. The charming Louisette was fluent in English but a bit cavalier when it came to organization. To Julia, her colleagues’ most valuable asset was a lifetime in France.
The two Frenchwomen were trying to publish a cookbook for Americans, but without much luck. Julia wasn’t surprised. Their book was a random collection of recipes that home cooks would find impossibly daunting. Where on earth would Americans find fresh ox blood? Certainly not the A&P. Julia knew where housewives in the States were coming from—supermarkets full of frozen fish sticks, Betty Crocker cake mixes, and orange bricks of Velveeta. Their kitchens boasted Amana freezers and Waring blenders—machines designed to save time and get them out of the kitchen.
Julia called the class to order and made introductions, including Minette Mimosa McWilliams Child, placidly perched on her stool. As the slicing, dicing, and whisking accelerated, Minette scanned the floor beneath the table for bits of dough, puddles of cream, and the occasional broken egg yolk. If anything edible hit the floor, Minette discreetly slipped down, tidied up, and returned to her roost.
The kitty added to the ambience, which was exactly what Julia had hoped it would be: “homey and fun and informal, and passionate pleasure from both pupils and professeurs.” Everyone felt at ease, free to admit mistakes and learn from them. But errors were few and Julia felt a little guilty that Minette wasn’t getting her fair share of the feast.
The first menu: potage Parmentier, leek and potato soup, a mainstay of every French home cook, and tarte normande aux pommes, classic custard-apple tart, a specialty of Simca’s Normandy. The morning flew by in an aromatic cloud of simmering stock mingled with sweet pastry tart, cinnamony apples, and friendly chatter. When it was time to finish the soup, Julia poured in a generous dollop of heavy cream just as the glistening dessert tarts emerged from the oven to rapturous sighs.
Julia turned to give the soup a final stir and found herself staring at a coagulated mess. Woe! While admiring the novice cooks’ triumphs, she forgot to take the pot off the heat. Now the once creamy blend of pureed potatoes, leeks, and broth had separated into a lumpy, watery brew the color of fresh cement. Simca clucked and began to apologize, but Julia cut her off. Oui! She had made a mistake, but there was a good lesson to be learned. Adding cream to boiling broth will make it curdle. She knew that, of course. The soup wasn’t pretty but even so it would taste quite marrrrrvelous. The students dipped their spoons into the unpromising mix, and voilà! As predicted, the soup tasted just fine. In fact, délicieuse!
Teachers’ pet
Appointing himself visiting professor of oenology, Paul joined the ladies for lunch. He poured the wine generously, making the already high-spirited gathering feel like a party. As they ate, Julia used the curdled soup to give another bit of sage advice: “Never apologize.” That only draws attention to the meal’s shortcomings and guests start to feel bad for the cook. “Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew … eh bien, tant pis!” At that, the ladies glanced around nervously for Minette. Her stool was empty, but the hungry cat had merely moved to her usual lunch spot on Paul’s lap. Looking relieved, they polished off their soup and lingered over another glass of wine.
COOKERY BOOKERY
WORD GOT AROUND fast. L’École des trois gourmandes was the in place if you wanted to learn French cooking. The trio of teachers made the classes fun, and where else would you have a cat for a classmate? Encouragement flowed freely, but beneath the casual charm was discipline, expertise, and passion that appealed to women like Julia herself, curious and serious about the world of food.
Their school’s success breathed fresh life into the idea of a French cookbook for Americans. Simca and Louisette’s slim spiral-bound book, What’s Cooking in France, had sold poorly. Undeterred, they submitted six hundred more pages to their New York publisher, but Putnam found the bigger manuscript vague and frustrating and refused to greenlight the project unless they got an American collaborator.
Professeur Julia agreed to get involved if her partners were willing to start over. She had a plan for a teaching manual, not just a recipe book, along with a new title: French Home Cooking. Julia saw the book as an extension of her classroom: thorough, practical, and fun. Above all, it would be easy to follow—as if Julia were at the cook’s elbow offering help and encouragement.
Before she wrote a word, she tested and tasted relentlessly. In one day, she made soupe aux choux (cabbage soup) using three different methods. Paul patiently evaluated them all, but Minette turned up her nose, especially at the batch made with a pressure cooker, the latest laborsaving device from back home. Julia agreed with the cat and banished the clunky, hissing pot to the “forgettery.”
Paul and Minette kept Julia company as she bustled around the kitchen. He read aloud from their favorite books, like Boswell’s London Journal, which Julia found almost as fascinating as her own Paulski’s diaries. When she blithely predicted she’d finish the cookbook in six months, Paul saw the timeline stretching into the future, to the end of Boswell and possibly through the complete works of Balzac. He knew adapting French culinary technique for American kitchens would be a monumental job, and the burden would fall to his capable but overly optimistic wife.
Julia finished the first chapter, on sauces, in December 1952, sent it off to New York, and held her breath. She went back to working on the
soup chapter, but at the end of January, Putnam rejected the whole approach as much too ambitious. Julia and her partners vowed to push on and find a more sympathetic publisher. Meanwhile, Julia’s Boston pen pal, Avis DeVoto, had fallen in love with the manuscript and sent it to her publishing connections. Soon the trois gourmandes were toasting a new offer with flutes of bubbly.
But their high spirits dissipated faster than the champagne fizz. Change had been hanging in the air at Roo de Loo for several months. Paul had overstayed his Paris posting, and relocation rumors were growing louder by the day. Where would they end up? Bonn? Norway? London? Back in the States?
Julia, a graduate of the most prestigious cooking school in Paris and an accomplished teacher deep into “cookery bookery,” faced her uncertain future in typical fashion—she worked even harder. Hunched over her Underwood, she churned out single-spaced onionskin pages with five carbon copies and stacked the growing pile neatly next to the stove.
While Julia typed like a mad woodpecker, Paul kept a grip on normal by sketching scenes of the Paris he loved, views out their windows and their playful poussiequette. But Minette wouldn’t sit still for her portrait—she too felt the vibes of their shifting fortunes. “Oh, for a crystal ball! Where will we be in six months? What doing? It seems unlikely that we’ll be drawing Paris rooftops and writing Cookbooks.”
THE CHARCUTERIE CAT
IN JANUARY 1953, the Childs’ crystal ball revealed boats bobbing in the sun and bowls of fish stew. Paul had been named Cultural Affairs Officer for the southern part of France, based at the American consulate in Marseille. After four and a half glorious years, they had to say good-bye to their beloved Paris, but at least they’d be staying in la belle France.
JuPaul left the cold, rainy streets of Paris behind to scout out their new city. Paul loved the tempo of the raucous old port: “There seems to be 10 times as much horn-blowing, gear-clashing, shouting, whistling, door-banging, dropping of lumber, breaking of glass, blaring of radios, boat-whistling, gong-clanging, brake-screeching, angry shouting as anywhere else.” Julia took to the boldly seasoned, fish-centric Mediterranean diet, washed down with muscular young regional wines. And the bouillabaisse! The timing of this move couldn’t have been better, since she was about to start the fish chapter of her cookery book.
Leaving their beloved Roo de Loo was sure to be traumatic. Julia wondered how they ever saw the charm in these rooms four years ago, when they were chock-full of “floozy superfloo,” Madame Perrier’s faded belle époque decor. But now this home was where their hearts would always be, and they couldn’t imagine feeling the same about any other place. Julia even wrote to Charlie and Freddie, suggesting they consider renting it to keep the apartment in the family, a Parisian pied-à-terre, a steal at $140 a month including electricity, though that still worked fitfully.
For Julia, it was doubly hard to bid adieu to her colleagues, who reluctantly decided to carry on with the cooking school in Louisette’s big blue kitchen. She planned to return as often as possible to work on the cookbook. In the meantime, she would keep her Underwood hopping and la poste in business sending packages of neatly typed pages zipping to Paris, Marseille, and their agent in Boston.
Between packing and farewell parties, Julia and Paul made tearful rounds of their favorite haunts. They grieved for the loss of Paris as if it were a loved one, passing through the stages of denial, resignation, and finally acceptance: “Paris won’t be the same with us gone.… No other city will ever seem so wonderful for us ex-Parisians.… Our hearts have been infected, and will always skip a beat at the mention of our city.”
They left the most painful parting for last. Julia wrote: “We are regretfully having to leave our darling Minette Mimosa McWilliams Child in Paris … as our life in Marseille, until we find an adequate living establishment, cannot take a pussy. It’s like wrenching off one’s left breast.”
On her farewell tour of favorite shops, she poured out her sadness at having to leave Minette. Maria, her vegetable seller and one of her favorite Parisian women, had an idea. She knew that the old woman who owned the charcuterie had recently lost her own kitty to old age and was inconsolable. Maybe she could keep Minette company until Julia’s life in Marseille settled down. Julia talked it over with Paul, then tucked Minette into a hamper and went to pay a call. She had to make sure the match was right, but she needn’t have worried. The woman’s eyes lit up when she met the frisky, affectionate poussiequette Julia had talked so much about. It was a reprise of that moment four years earlier when Minette leaped out of a market basket and into Julia’s heart. The union was sealed when madame offered her new companion a scoop of her special reserve pâté de maison.
And there was more where that came from. Much more. Madame lived above her shop, a cornucopia of charcuterie, with a window draped in skinny breakfast saucisses and fat smoked saucissons and display cases jammed with pâté en croûte and pâté de campagne, pork terrines, hams, and confit d’oie (preserved goose). Madame had a toasty kitchen and a friendly old dog for company. Julia knew Minette would be happy there as la chatte de la charcutière. The second of her nine lives, like the first, would be filled with love and tasty delights.
Au revoir, mon amie
AU REVOIR, PARIS
JULIA TOO HAD new lives ahead of her—best-selling author, teacher, TV star, and culinary icon. From Paris, Julia and Paul’s travels took them to Marseille, Germany, Washington, D.C., Norway, and, after Paul retired from the Foreign Service, a permanent home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through all the moves and years, the loves of her life remained constant.
Paul, of course. During one of their rare separations, she wrote, “Life is a dull thud, an onionless sauce, a nothing-at-all without you.” And he thought he was the luckiest man alive: “Julie … looks younger, more beautiful & ageless than ever.… I am continuously happy & satisfied to be married to her & I hope it lasts forever.”
Pussycats. Before Paris, Julia admitted that she had never really known cats, but “since Minette and other French cats, I just love pussies.” In the decade after Paris, Paul’s job meant they were always being uprooted, so she couldn’t have a cat to call her own, but every time she saw one, she fell under the old spell. Alley cats and strays or the feline friends of friends—she couldn’t resist scooping them up and giving a squeeze. Each one reminded her of Minette and those magical days at Roo de Loo.
La belle France. It would always be their North Star, and hardly a day went by that Julia and Paul didn’t feel it beckoning, “when we hear chimes at midnight, or taste a Pouilly-Fumé, or hear somewhere a snatch of that low-brow tonk-a-tonk music that’s so typically French.” Or hear the plaintive miaouing of a poussiequette choir.
The Book would bring them back to France. After ten long years, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was finally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1961, and Julia became an “overnight sensation.”
La Pitchoune
“THE LITTLE THING”
THE SEA DANCED in the rearview mirror and palm trees waved a welcome as the rented Peugeot headed inland. It lurched through hairpin turns, swooped down a final hill, then up a dusty drive toward a construction site. Julia let out a whoop when she saw the half-finished stucco house perched on the hill. La Pitchoune, “the little thing,” was the dream that got them through some dark days and cold nights in Plittersdorf, near Bonn, and Oslo. Since leaving France in 1954, they had fantasized about a place of their own in la belle France, maybe a Paris pied-à-terre on the île Saint-Louis or in Montmartre. But in the end they were lured by the azure skies and perfumed air of Provence, and an offer too good to pass up.
Several months earlier, on Simca’s patio in southern France, warmed by the sun and not a little wine, Julia and Paul decided this was their paradise, so they meandered through nearby country towns looking for something for sale. Valbonne. Opio. Mougins. Every charming old stone house they looked at turned out to be more picturesque than livable. But Simca’s husband, Jean,
had a proposal. Why not build a house here at Bramafam, his family’s property? They could design it to suit themselves. The land would be leased, and return to his family when they tired of it.
Little chance of that. Julia had fallen for the South of France on her first trip there, in the winter of 1949. Bright blue skies, views of distant mountains, and year-round fields of lavender and roses took her back to childhood summers on the California coast. Paul, with his painter’s eye, was equally enthralled. They sealed the deal with a handshake on the spot.
The house would be almost paid for by sales of Mastering, already in its sixth printing. And it wasn’t hard to rationalize the expense of a second home, since they were already planning a second cookbook. It would be much easier to walk the few yards to the side door of Simca’s kitchen than to send reams of recipes back and forth across the Atlantic, as they had for so many years.
They were only too happy to leave the oversight of the crusty local builders to Jean, and on this first inspection trip, everything was just as they had imagined: a room for Paul to paint and putter, a private nook in Julia’s bedroom for her books and typewriter, and a compact kitchen, all on one floor. They’d even have room for a guest or two, and more if Paul bunked in a little cabanon, a onetime shepherd’s hut a few yards from the house.
For months after they returned to Cambridge, Julia kept a letter from Simca tacked to her office wall. It was filled with local gossip, the adventures of her dog, Phano, and relief that the carpenters and plumbers had packed up their tools and were finally gone, along with the dust and noise. Only one more thing would make the dream house complete. Simca closed with the best news of all: “Madame Pussy cat had two kittens with her little mate, so you’ll have a pussy-cat for your arrival in December and to chase the mice at La Pitchoune.” At last, purrfection.
Julia’s Cats Page 5