Julia Child Rules

by Karen Karbo

  The small house, called “La Pitchoune,” which Paul and Julia, those compulsive nicknamers, immediately re-dubbed La Peetch, was more or less a kitchen and a bedroom—Paul and Julia each had their own; Julia was a prodigious snorer—plus a living room. Then as now,* the kitchen is warm but not fancy, with slightly higher counters and the cream-colored pegboard with its black utensil outlines, and a fine collection of copper pots.

  Outside, on the terrace, they built a concrete patio table that resembled a mushroom. “You could get the measure of someone’s character, sitting at that table,” Julia used to say.

  James Beard was someone whose character Julia approved of, and he visited her often in Provence. She never forgot the generosity he showed her upon the publication of Mastering, and even though they championed different cuisines, Julia and Jim shared the belief that nothing was more fun than working hard in the kitchen, and that making good food was not only endlessly interesting but also life’s highest calling. Beard was also fun and forgiving. Once, in Cambridge, when they were first becoming friendly and Julia was enjoying Famous Cookbook Author status, she cooked him a terrible meal of flavorless veal scallops, underdone broccoli, and dusty-tasting chocolate cake, which he shrugged off with a laugh and an invitation to cook at his school. He descended on La Peetch the summer of 1969, where together they watched the moon landing.

  The great advantage (and disadvantage) of living a stone’s throw away from Simca was living a stone’s throw away from Simca. Paul and Julia lived most of the year in Cambridge but spent the winter months in Provence.

  Because Julia had been right on that awkward day in Boston when she tried to convince the people of Houghton Mifflin that cooking French food could fill several volumes, Julia and Simca had plenty of recipes to fill Volume Two. They restored some of the sauces and chicken recipes edited from Volume One, included more soups, bisques, and fish stews, and more vegetable recipes, including the “American vegetable” broccoli, of which Julia was quite fond, and more desserts, which were Simca’s specialty.

  Fifteen years, give or take, had passed since Julia and Simca had met in Paris. They were not just older but significantly wiser, especially when it came to the highly specialized task of writing a cookbook of French recipes for American cooks. They’d made it up as they went along the first time around; now, with one book behind them, Julia was very clear about what worked and what didn’t and what needed to change. Her inner scientist was more finicky than ever. She demanded more operational proof than ever, particularly when it came to using American ingredients, which had turned out to be more than a little different from those found in France. American flour had more gluten than French flour; American chocolate had more butter fat; American sole filets were thicker; American chickens tasted “less chickeny.” This made a huge difference, and she and Simca would have to make sure to allow for these differences. On and on it went. Julia was a mad researching fool, more obsessed than ever about why and how recipes worked.

  Simca was intuitive and improvisational. Most of their original recipes came from her family, and she could make them in her sleep. Julia had the considerably more complex task of interpreting Simca’s instructions for herself, then re-cooking the dish with American ingredients, then writing the recipe in a way that an American cook could follow, then presenting the dish to Simca for her “approval,” which rarely happened, because even though the original recipe had, say, required leeks, Simca had decided that maybe leeks were not such a good idea after all, and so Julia would return to her kitchen to remake the dish with no leeks. They were the Lennon-McCartney of cookery: For several halcyon years their differences combined to create an unprecedented work of genius, but those same differences guaranteed that it could never last.

  Julia loved Simca with all her heart, and even though most days she wanted to clock her, she would never let anyone say a word against her. Once Paul wrote a letter to Charlie complaining about how bossy and irritating Simca could be, and Julia made him add a footnote that this was merely his personal opinion. Still, Volume Two was the end of their collaboration. Late in her life someone asked Julia her true feelings about Simone Beck, and Julia is said to have replied, “Well, we never worked together again, did we?”

  The work that went into Volume Two was monumental. Julia was no longer a Foreign Service wife with time on her hands, but America’s reigning queen of cuisine, quoted in national magazines and invited to the White House by President Lyndon Johnson, which led to a PBS behind-the-scenes documentary about the White House kitchen. “The only national television female of real authority is Julia Child,” said TV Guide in 1968.*

  Whether in Cambridge or Plascassier, Julia cooked and wrote seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day, for months to make the deadline. Despite coming across as a little dotty when she misplaced an ingredient on The French Chef, Julia had become an astonishingly competent cook, a recipe-producing machine, often with at least three dishes going at once; the chops would be set aside to marinate while a sauce was being reduced on the stove, while the bones and trimming of some animal or another would be boiling in a big pot for stock, and she would notate and amend all three recipes as she moved forward. Was this cooking with proper love, care, and devotion? No, but it was the mixed-bag reality of being someone with something for which the world longed. After the book was completed, Julia said she would never do this kind of long encyclopedic book again, that she was tired of being locked up in the kitchen, or in her room, typing typing typing, and she wanted to cook with other people, and celebrate food with other chefs. Cooking was supposed to be fun and this was murder.

  Still, their work paid off. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two: A Classic Continued: A New Repertory of Dishes and Techniques Carries Us into New Areas was published in October 1970 to great acclaim. Newsweek thought it was even better than Volume One.

  This time, Knopf ponied up for a book tour. A twenty-two-year-old publicist, newly hired, named Jane Becker,* had a thought: Why not send Julia and Simca to cities with PBS affiliates and large department stores? The store could take out a big advertisement in the newspaper announcing a demonstration by the authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, and the night before the event PBS could host a party for the local media. The bigwigs thought it was worth a shot, and they chose Minneapolis as the guinea pig city and set up a demonstration at Dayton’s Department Store.

  Jane cautioned Julia not to expect much. It seemed like a good idea, but there was also a good chance she and Simca would be making mayonnaise for a room full of empty seats. They were staying at a hotel near Dayton’s, and early on the morning of the demonstration, they looked out the window, and there was a line in front of the still-closed department store, snaking down the block and around the corner. Every person had in hand a copy of the new book.

  Remember that being an expert doesn’t mean you know everything.

  In 1972, a neighbor boy, the one whose orthodontist uncle put braces on his teeth so he could get out of going to Vietnam, drove an orange Ford Ranchero with a bumper sticker that said Love Animals Don’t Eat Them. I misread it every day until he moved away: Love animals don’t eat what? I thought. I didn’t know from vegetarianism. My friends’ mothers may have now made vegetarian sandwiches with homemade whole wheat bread, avocados, cheese, tomatoes, and sprouts, but at our house Julia Child still ruled. My mother still cooked from Mastering, still stood at the stove and sautéed, deglazed, reduced, and, above all, stirred. We still ate veal scallops with mushrooms and chicken fricassee. Had Julia known, she would have been pleased, because the rest of the nation seemed to have turned against her.

  The American attitude about food and cooking, which Julia had helped realize, was changing. Overnight, it seemed average citizens had become unduly preoccupied with every bite that passed their lips. Were they eating enough fruits and vegetables, enough sprouted whole grains and legumes? Were they slowly killing themselves with porterhouse steaks and b
aked potatoes drenched in butter? Was it possible they were harming their souls eating creatures with four legs? Was the rumor true that broccoli could think, and did that make it wrong to eat it? What about factory farms? Could you possible enjoy an omelet knowing the eggs came from a chicken housed in a poultry gulag?

  Even though Julia was an early adopter—she loved her gadgets, saw no problem with the microwave, had a desktop computer as early as 1982 and a laptop shortly thereafter—she would never change her mind about eating. Food was one of life’s greatest pleasures, and it should always be viewed that way. The only diet she believed in was one of moderation.

  Given her insatiable curiosity and open-mindedness, her love of research and experimentation, you would think she would have been intrigued and perhaps more accepting of the new thinking about food, but the woman stood up for butter and cream as though they were her own children. She knew good and well what doctors were saying about cholesterol, and they were dead to her. She despised the idea that a cook should feel any anxiety over what her ingredients might be doing to her health. The idea of food as poison—or medicine for that matter—appalled her. She railed against the Food Police, she excoriated the Nervous Nellies, she howled at the self-imposed strictures of vegetarians. A little pâté never hurt anybody, she cried.

  She was fundamentally right, of course. Decades later, people are more tortured and confused about food than ever. Where I live in Portland, any slob can be a vegetarian.* To really get right with the food god you must be a vegan … who occasionally slips up and binges on maple donuts topped with bacon.

  Everything that goes into our mouths has become suspect: nonfat milk, conventionally grown red delicious apples, and grapes. A single portion of Dover sole can deliver enough mercury to make you forget your own name. A store-bought cookie will kill you as sure as an automatic weapon.

  On the strength of Super Size Me, I gave up all fast food but recently read that even a “good” burger is comprised of at least eight DNA strands, meaning eight cows went into the making of that patty, along with whatever old Band-Aids and nail trimmings found their way into the mix. As of this writing, the only food that remains pure and blameless is kale; I expect some bad news to reach us about this holiest of leafy greens any day now.

  In deep middle-age, Julia spoke her mind, even when it was out-of-step with the times, even when she was wrong. How different from the young woman newly enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, all those years ago, who said, “Being the only woman I am being careful to sit back a bit, but am being very cold-blooded indeed in a quiet way.”

  Over the years she would be forced to modify her position in her cookbooks and TV shows—times were changing and she knew if she was to remain relevant she had to keep up with them—but she would never fully capitulate; at the age of eighty-eight, in a radio interview, she disparaged “nutrition-type people,” and told the story of one nutrition-type person who insisted that vegetables should be cooked in the least amount of water possible. “Her beans were not only gray and lifeless,” said Julia, “she also died rather early.”

  I often wonder if some part of her demanded that she refuse to alter her position because of the fate that befell Paul, who was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis. In 1974 he underwent coronary bypass surgery; several arteries were blocked, and the procedure was then in its infancy. When he came out of surgery he seemed to be fine, but over the weeks and months it became clear that something else had gone wrong. His thoughts were a mishmash. The letter he used to whip off to his brother Charlie every evening took him days to compose. His doctors thought that perhaps he had suffered a small stroke or two while he was under anesthesia. In any case, Julia noticed that the light had gone out of him. In a cruel twist his perfect French, which had helped define him in Julia’s eyes as a sophisticated man of elegance and worldliness, had completely deserted him. Now, he spoke not a word.

  Of Julia’s many stellar qualities—her optimism, stamina, determination, and loyalty—living with tortured ambivalence was not one of them. To allow that food she fed her beloved—the gallons of mayonnaise; beurre blanc and béarnaise sauce; the pounds of richly marbled beef and lardons; the pâtés, terrines, and foie gras; the Tarte Tatins and crème brûlée—had anything to do with his disease would be unthinkable. She loved him more than cooking, more than her life. How could butter be bad, when it had brought them so much joy?

  RULE No. 10:

  EVERY WOMAN SHOULD HAVE A BLOWTORCH*

  “Make every meal an occasion” sounds to me like “Live each day as though it were your last”—just plain overwrought. People do preach it, but does anyone practice? Not me! But to love your art as well as your audience does seem to make for pretty good living, day by pleasant day.

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF MASTERING, VOLUME TWO, JULIA AND Simca went their separate ways. Julia would always consider her to be her French sister, but she found she could no longer abide the basic Dogmatic Meatballery of French cuisine. Even though she was against food fads of every stripe, the French were simply too hidebound, too fond of their rules, which Julia was against perhaps even more than she was against vegetarians. She would go on to write a dozen more good, often great, cookbooks, including The Way to Cook, my favorite, and the one in which she finally perfects her recipe for Tarte Tatin.

  In 1980 Julia signed on to do a regular spot on ABC’s morning show, Good Morning, America. She’d always viewed herself first and foremost as a teacher, and her cookbooks as textbooks rather than a mere extension of her brand.* After the success of The French Chef, the networks came courting with splashy deals and big promises, but she turned them all down, believing she belonged “with the educators” on educational TV. But PBS, the nonprofit that had become the umbrella for the country’s individual educational stations, mishandled the distribution of her recent cooking series, Julia Child & More Company, and she was furious. Somehow, the New York affiliate, as well as a few other big stations, had failed to schedule it, and Knopf had paid a fortune for the companion guide. Julia knew that the show was essential to publicize the book, but if no one saw the show, how would they know about the book, and the whole thing was a big mess. It’s possible the people at the affiliates had had enough of Julia Child, who though famous, was also sixty-eight years old. Even if ageism was not in play (doubtful), there was also the matter of her association with traditional French cuisine, which, with its heavy foundation sauces and fussy insistence of wrapping in pastry dough every animal that flew, swam, or ran, had gone out of style. They didn’t see that she had evolved, was evolving, and had developed her own excellent recipes for paella and pasta primavera.*

  But it was a new day. Now, there were young chefs in her home state like Michael McCarty who opened Michael’s in 1979 in Santa Monica, and the Austrian émigré Wolfgang Puck, chef-owner of Spago, who were cooking something called California cuisine. Alice Waters was out West too, at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, making good food that barely needed anything done to it, and her protégé, Jeremiah Tower, who asked Waters for a job in 1972 after having eaten one of her berry tarts, and would go on to open Stars in San Francisco, serving up both New American cuisine and that new type of celebrity: the chef.

  Kathy and I were in film school at USC in the early 1980s. In the morning, in our apartment in the Wilshire district, before leaving for class, we would sit around drinking coffee out of chipped mugs and reading the paper and watching Julia on Good Morning America. We were young and mean, and we snickered at how earnest she was, and yes, how old.

  Old, but entertaining. We’d be late to class before we’d miss a segment.

  C’EST L’GE

  It really does make a difference to say it in French. Are your knees starting to go, as Julia’s did? C’est l’âge! Is your husband falling asleep in the middle of a lively and festive dinner, as Paul did during numerous occasions throughout the 1980s, requiring the person sitting next to him to give him a hard kick under the table? C’est l’âge!

  Into her s
eventies Julia kept the same insane hours she always did, up by six and to bed no earlier than midnight. The rigors of taping a TV show—twelve-hour days of organized chaos—energized her. Often, when the day wrapped at 10:00 p.m., she would ask the crew where they were going to go eat dinner. Even the twenty-five-year-olds would groan with fatigue. When she wasn’t taping a show, she was writing the companion book, doing her job as food editor of Parade magazine, traveling around the country speaking on behalf of the various causes she supported* or the American Institute of Food and Wine—a nonprofit she cofounded in 1981 with vintners Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to promote and celebrate gastronomy in America—guest lecturing at a cooking school, or attending a ceremony to collect one of the many honorary doctorates† she was snapping up like paperbacks at a yard sale.

  In addition, most nights she hosted an informal dinner party at the big gray clapboard house on Irving Street in Cambridge. Julia never prepared dinner ahead. If she invited you, you were expected to pitch in. On any given night John Kenneth Galbraith—esteemed economist, author, Harvard professor, and President Kennedy’s ambassador to India—could be seen at the sink peeling carrots, or international chef Jacques Pépin, setting out the pâté, or celebrated English cookbook author Jane Grig-son, peeling potatoes. Every chef who came to Boston wound up at Julia’s table. You always ate in the kitchen, and her hors d’oeuvres were always the same: Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.

  She attributed her vim and stamina to being made of “good pioneer stock,” and aside from her knees, which were chronically inflamed and sometimes caused her to sob with pain at the end of the day, she really was a miracle of fine health.