Julia Child Rules

by Karen Karbo

  Even though she came, eventually, to stand for celebrating the glory of our imperfect, overseared pork chops, and potato pancakes we accidentally dropped on the floor, she knew that occasionally a dish could be perfect, and a life could be perfect, for just that moment. Like every superhero, Julia had that origin story, and in making Mastering she was given an opportunity to relive it. She was both enjoying and documenting in the recipes her own self-discovery, that which, finally, in middle age gave her life its meaning.

  During those years in which she labored over Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she lived in a state of more or less permanent jubilation, spending her days in “flow,” that hippie-sounding term that describes a feeling of complete absorption in the task at hand.*

  Happiness studies are all the rage now, even though all the ancient philosophers, including Unknown and Anonymous, insist that happiness is a by-product of something else, like being busy (Mark Twain), limiting our desires (John Stuart Mill), or letting go (The Buddha). My idea of happiness is doing something with your life that echoes a time when you were 100 percent sure you were happy.*

  A friend of mine had a son who loved playing “office” when he was small, and he has grown up to be the happiest† contracts attorney I know. Likewise, the world is full of people who opted for business school or marketing careers either because they weren’t lucky enough to find something that put them in a swoon, or they needed a career, and one seemed as good as any other. Almost always they find out, too late, that one is not as good as any other.

  Julia worked hard and worked happy for a good half century. How did she do it?

  Throw yourself into it, even when no one cares but you.

  Mayonnaise is relatively easy to make. Julia mastered it early. Often, when the cooking wasn’t going well and she was pulling out her hair, ruining pound after pound of escalope de veau,* she would whip up a pint or two to boost her confidence. Combine an egg yolk with half a cup of oil and add a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. Voilà, mayonnaise.

  Then one day the yolk would not accept the oil or the oil would not mingle with the egg, or something was going on. Julia did exactly what she always did, but she wound up with something closer to mucus than mayonnaise. She was flummoxed. Why did her recipe, which had never failed her, suddenly fail her? Learning to cook had awakened Julia’s inner voluptuary, but this was something else. Apparently, it was not enough to be able to make something, document how you got there, and call it a recipe; you also had to know why the food did what it did, so that if something changed (What changed? Hadn’t she made mayonnaise the way she always made mayonnaise?) you could modify your technique.

  Thus Julia’s inner scientist was born. Cooking was worthy of being her life’s passion because it was the only thing, aside from her love of Paul, that kept revealing new parts of herself.

  How could Julia have known she had an inner, exacting chemist? This now nearly middle-aged woman who had no apparent aptitude for science was now consumed with how cooking worked. She was obsessed with her failed mayonnaise. Was it the temperature of the egg yolk? The temperature of the bowl? The temperature in the kitchen? Would mixing it with a fork guarantee perfection?* Did it make a difference whether you added the oil all at once? Fast or slow? Slow at first, then faster? Drop by drop?

  She was now no simple Foreign Service wife dutifully throwing together a meal for her hardworking husband. This was something else, a woman on a mission to find the answer to something meaningful only to her. She spent days making nothing but mayonnaise. She made so much mayonnaise, even Paul, who ate and relished everything she cooked, said No more, and she was forced to dump gallons of it down the commode. Finally, triumphant, she recorded her discovery,† and she mailed it to all her friends and family. Let’s pause to remember the effort this took in 1950: the typing, the procuring of the proper postage stamps, the mailing, the waiting for a response. The result: complete silence.

  Julia became obsessed over the molecular structure of potatoes and wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if they might offer any insight.‡ She educated herself on the best part of the cow’s stomach to use for tripe, and if anyone cared, which part of an egg yolk is the core. Once, she threw a dinner party and served sea bass with a beurre blanc sauce that wouldn’t “blanc.” Why? She was astounded, believing she had her beurre blanc down cold. The next morning she made six more batches to make sure she got it right. She did all this because it interested her to know, not because it was necessary for writing the cookbook, although it wound up being absolutely necessary because it lent Mastering the authority it enjoys to this day.

  I am sobered when I think of how much of Julia’s cooking life was spent satisfying her own curiosity. For me, cooking remains confusing, all wrapped up in housewifery, in being the body attached to the arm attached to the hand that holds the plate of steaming food, in being the woman, in her place, in the kitchen. Home cooks cook because someone is hungry or there is going to be a celebration that demands food. A recent episode of Downton Abbey, the British upstairs/downstairs soap opera, touched on the dilemma when Mrs. Patmore, the head cook of the Abbey, feared and obeyed by all the young kitchen maids beneath her, is courted by a local produce purveyor. This would have been the last chance at romance for Mrs. Patmore, but she turns him down, realizing he only wanted her for her cooking, and that she would rather oversee the tremendous daily work of making the meals for the Crawleys of Downton Abbey than be at the endless beck and call of a husband who demanded his pudding made just so.

  But cooking aside, how often do you—do any of us—work that hard at something simply to find the answers to questions no one else is asking but us? Whatever modern strides have been made in feminism, women, it seems to me, are as tied to results, by which I mean pleasing others, as we ever were. The woman I consider to be my most successful friend—lucratively self-employed with a sweet and handsome husband, lovely kids—swears by her To Do List. She loves her To Do List. She has blogged hilariously and with great affection about her To Do List. I asked to see it and was surprised, given her success, that not one thing on it was something she did purely out of her own curiosity. When I asked her about this she laughed and said, “Who has time for curiosity for curiosity’s sake?” But what made her happy? Her family, of course. Her lucrative career, of course. But what else? “Getting to the end of the day,” she said, “and knowing I’ve finished my To Do List.”

  Do not cater to the flimsies.

  Julia was a stickler for proper cooking technique but was free and easy when it came to language. When she couldn’t find what she considered to be the proper word or phrase, she made up her own. Some of her favorites, in no particular order:

  Person Traitoria: A traitor, specifically herself, in relation to her right-of-Joe-McCarthy father.

  Dogmatic Meatball: a blowhard, usually French, who believed his way was the only way, and who patronized her because she had two strikes against her, being both female and American.

  Upper Middle Brow: Her people (“distressing examples of conspicuous waste of good human material”). Next to being sloppy and taking shortcuts, the biggest insult in Julia’s arsenal.

  Upper Bohemians: Her new tribe. Paul and Avis belonged to this class. They read books.

  A&P Garboozova: All the god-awful grocery store items passing for food in America: frozen TV dinners, margarine, Cheez Whiz.

  Bilious: Any kind of digestive ailment (bloating, nausea, the feeling that the blood in your veins is being replaced by cream) that results from overeating too many test recipes.

  Phoo: Short for phooey.

  Fluffies: People into “gourmet” cooking. She thought the word gourmet was pretentious, as were the fluffies.

  Flimsies: People who didn’t take cooking seriously, who must never be catered to.

  “Flimsies” is such a ridiculous word, but Julia was serious. She, who’d never been taken seriously before, was serious on every front on which she coul
d be: serious about not allowing anyone to condescend to her because she was a mere housewife; serious about behaving like a professional, even as she was still learning; serious about refusing to dumb down her recipes to make them seem less daunting to her readership;* and perhaps most important, serious about her procedures, which were the actions that spoke louder than her words.

  She tested and retested every recipe in Simca and Louisette’s book and rewrote every one. She had to find out everything for herself, had to see it with her own eyes. If Simca, Louisette, or Avis, or one of the trusted friends back in the States who were trying out her recipes as she was completing them came up with a different result, she would try the recipe again, to see if she could duplicate it.

  When the time came to tackle cassoulet, the iconic comfort food casserole from the south of France—pork sausage, goose, and white haricot beans cooked for days in a heavy earthenware pot—Julia rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all from chefs who claimed, in Dogmatic Meatball–style, that their recipe was the correct recipe.

  Reader, she made them all.

  She was determined to Americanize dishes that most people could go to their grave without knowing how to make. Fish quenelles is one. The first clue is that there is no English translation. A quenelle is a quenelle is a quenelle. The second is the phrase “force the fish through the strainer.” All that comes to mind is a scene from Alien Resurrection, where the massive, gleaming half-human/half-alien is sucked out of a golf ball–size air hole and into deep space, viscera first. Still, Julia thought we should all know about them.*

  Most of Mastering was written via mail.† In 1953, not long after Julia began working in earnest, Paul was posted to Marseille, which they loved (still France) and then to Plattsdorf, Germany (not so much). They spent some time back in Washington, D.C, then went on to Oslo, Norway. There was no question that Julia would accompany him. Where Paul went, Julia went. They were Pulia. Julia packed up her batterie de cuisine (totaling seventy-two pots, pans, graters, extractors, squeezers, and whisks) and unpacked it again in some too-small kitchen with too-low counters in another city, so that she could continue working on the book.

  Still, it didn’t matter where she was; her work ethic was something not seen often among people in this century. In their little government-issue apartment in Plattsdorf, which Julia more or less despised, she nevertheless set herself the task of learning German. After cooking most of the day, she would finish up writing recipes around 7:00 p.m. and cook dinner to be served at 8:00 p.m. Then she and Paul would “fritter” away an hour (during which she would relax by writing detailed, hilarious ten-page letters to Avis), after which she would study German for a few hours.

  Though she often wanted to bash Simca over the head for some La Super-Française outburst, she was rarely unhappy.

  It’s not a new observation: Throwing ourselves into hard work can be deeply gratifying, and mastering a skill is a satisfaction in and of itself, but the reality of this has largely fallen out of favor. In our modern times, people generally feel that the key to happiness involves doing the least amount of work for the most glory, believing that happiness is to be found in outward appreciation and approval, not inner dedication. That this never really makes anyone happy—witness the miserable reality stars, the depressed lottery winners—fails to deter us; we somehow remain convinced that the smart money is on figuring out a way to grab the gold ring with the least amount of effort.

  Is there something you’re dying to attempt, but you manage to talk yourself out of it because it seems like too much work, or will take too much time and discipline? This is your inner flimsy talking. Pat her on the head, but don’t cater to her. You’ll be happier for it.

  Do everything humanly possible to avoid housework.

  Part of the immense gastro-cultural divide between a hallowed Michelin star–studded French chef and the Servantless American Cook was that the chef devoted every waking hour to his art, and of course had someone at home to cook for him and care for him, while the SAC, as well as her family, which she was there to serve, considered cooking to be part of her many chores. You know, the ones that are never done, per the old saying.

  Over the years, so much snark has been directed at those Franco-American Spaghetti, frozen French cut string bean–serving housewives, who really can’t be blamed for wanting to make their lives a little easier. We are now enlightened, and know about using the best fresh produce, using the caramelized nubs of meat left in the pan to make a sauce, the miracle of cooking something down to intensify the flavor, and all the basics instilled in our grandmothers and mothers by Julia, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and all the other kitchen heroes who rescued America from Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Fish Sticks and Tang. But the end of a long day is still the end of a long day—ask any Busy Stay-at-Home Mom.* And often the impulse to order a pizza is overwhelming, especially since it’s all your kids will eat anyway.

  That said, if you want to devote any time to cooking seriously, or doing anything seriously for that matter, something has got to go, and that something is housework. If hiring someone to come in every other week means giving up your daily latte or buying shoes at PayLess, do it. You are giving someone else gainful employment, escaping the admonition of V. I. Lenin, who railed that “petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades” women, and being like Julia, who did as little as possible.

  RULE No. 7:

  SOLVE THE PROBLEM IN FRONT OF YOU

  If you get nervous, just sit back and think about it, and then plunge in and do it again.

  APRIL IN PARIS, IT TURNS OUT, IS A LOT LIKE APRIL IN PORTLAND. The drear and rain don’t seem like weather, changeable and possibly exciting, but like an occupy movement, here to stay. Kathy and I took the Metro to the Bastille and walked through Place des Vosges to the Marais, having conceived a need to stroll through one of our favorite neighborhoods on the way to the famed E. Dehillerin, about a mile away on the rue Coquillière, where Julia spent a lot of her inheritance outfitting her world-class batterie de cuisine. Despite the slanting rain, we had umbrellas—and I had brought along a brown GORE-TEX jacket (with hood) that was so utilitarian it caused several shopkeepers and waiters to address me in German—and we saw no reason to change our itinerary. Especially since you can’t eat as we had been eating and still expect to have anything resembling a waist.

  The great unspoken dilemma of cooking as Julia would wish us to is that, arteriosclerosis aside, if you sit quietly you can feel your muffin top growing. Until the very end of her life, when she looks not fat, but rectangular, like a refrigerator box, Julia was slim-waisted as an athlete. Even on The French Chef, in her early fifties, with her cotton blouse around her midriff, her apron strings are tied neatly across her flat belly.*

  I have many slender friends who identify as foodies and who spend an inordinate amount of time cooking, but you also never see them eating anything. One acquaintance, who resembles a Modigliani model, never visits anyone without bringing a homemade cheesecake or batch of lemon bars. Another is famed for her stupendous Italian sausage three-cheese lasagna, made with whole-fat ricotta; the last time she served it, she stuck to the dark leafy salad with a whisper of vinaigrette. I’m mystified by this behavior, and suspect it may be cuisinerexia, where the satisfaction is to be found in working your ass off making terrific food and then denying yourself the pleasure of eating it, but at least it makes sense why these women are thin.

  But Julia cooked all day, tasting everything, and also ate breakfast, tucked into a nice lunch, and cooked dinner for her husband, as well as the cavalcade of visiting dignitaries, cultural attachés, and diplomats he was obligated to entertain. People who like to eat are the best people, and Julia was one of the best people of all, and Kathy and I wanted to be part of that tribe, and so we cooked and tasted and ate, and the pounds threatened to pile on like a passel of drunken brothers-in-law at the annual Thanksgiving family football game.

  How did Julia manage it? When posed with tha
t question, Julia advocated moderation in all things, even moderation, and we believed her. How did we manage to overlook the fact that she was six foot three—bigger than most men—and probably had the metabolism to match, bringing to mind my six foot two inches father who, the moment he accrued an inch of spare tire, gave up the bowl of Dried Planter’s Peanuts that accompanied his nightly martini for a week or so and off it came.

  At any rate, Kathy and I are both a mere five foot eight, and to counteract the effects of all the round, yellow, buttery things we were cooking and devouring—various omelets, the Gateau de Crêpes à la Florentine*—we vowed that during the day, if we weren’t cooking, we would be walking.

  The Marais was crowded, with tourists and Parisians and a gang of Orthodox men and boys in blue suits and big hats and with long Pe’ot on their way to temple. Not blocks from the shop, we passed a girl sobbing on the sidewalk, surrounded by two women who stood very close to her. They were all the same height, all with the same dark hair and dark, chic French clothes, all very upright. It’s unusual to see a Parisian sobbing on the street; we walked on and at the intersection saw lying on the ground a tall, thin young man who looked as if he had keeled over and hit his head on the curb. An emergency vehicle was there, and two policemen were there, both sort of leaning over and peeking at the side of his face. No one touched him. Was he hit by a car? An aneurysm, maybe? He looked like a tree felled in the forest, and he was clearly dead.

  It was Saturday, and E. Dehillerin was packed with shoppers and oglers and their dripping umbrellas. The business is 193 years old, the building much older. Chefs bring their copper pots here to be retinned. The raw-beamed ceilings soar, the wooden floorboards groan and creak, and the aisles are narrow enough to make a claustrophobe break out in a sweat. There’s a mildew-smelling house-parts place in Portland that sells doorknobs and light fixtures foraged from condemned houses and Dehillerin smells the same, and shares the same spirit of We Are above Displaying Any of These Treasures to Their Best Advantage.