Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  A reunion took place several months later in Washington. “We had decided that we should look each other over in civilian clothes, and that we should meet each other’s families,” Julia recalls. That done, they were married in the fall of 1946. Julia was thirty-four, Paul forty-four. For the first year and a half, they lived in Washington. The Office of Strategic Services had been discontinued, but OSS people who had been in Visual Presentation were automatically absorbed into the State Department, and Paul was now doing graphic work for the government. Early in 1948, by a happy official stroke, he was assigned to the United States Information Service office in Paris.

  France was not at all the way Julia had imagined it. “I’d never met any French people before,” she said not long ago, “and I thought they’d be—you know, snippy, the way they always seemed in Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue. I was just amazed to get off the boat at Le Havre and see all those great big beefy people. We drove to Rouen and had lunch there at the Couronne, and I was euphoric. I was practically in hysterics from the time we landed. Of course, I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be for me to learn the language. It was two years, really, before I could get along in it, and four years before I was fluent. But from the beginning I just fell in love with everything I saw. It took me a long time to get over my infatuation—now they can’t fool me so easily.”

  The Childs found a comfortable third-floor apartment on the Rue de l’Université, behind the Chambre des Députés. Paul could walk across the Pont de la Concorde to his office, on the Faubourg du St. Honoré. At first, Julia spent most of her time at Berlitz, struggling with the language. Both the Childs readily concede that at this point her cooking left a good deal to be desired. Paul knew and appreciated good food, but Julia, like many American women of her background, had never really learned to cook at home, and until she married Paul she had never been interested in learning. In the fall of 1949, though, she was sufficiently interested to enroll in a special early-morning course at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, where she found herself the only woman student—the twelve others were ex-GIs, learning cooking on the GI Bill of Rights. “I would leave home at seven in the morning, cook all morning with the GIs, and then rush home to make lunch for Paul,” Julia remembers. “I’d give him the béarnaise or the hollandaise sauce I’d just learned, or something equally rich. In about a week we both got terribly bilious.”

  The Cordon Bleu, founded in the nineteenth century, once served as a cooking school for orphans, to help them make their way in life. By the 1930s, it had become a place where well-to-do housewives (many of them Americans) sent their servants to learn the techniques of the classic cuisine. In modern times, it has not been a professional school—to become a professional chef in France one has to serve as an apprentice for years in a restaurant or hotel kitchen, and that training is often supplemented by attendance at a government-sponsored technical institution. But the Cordon Bleu hired professional chefs as teachers, and when Julia enrolled, in 1949, the teaching was excellent. Two of the three chefs whom Julia had as teachers were in their seventies: Max Bugnard, who had owned his own restaurant in Brussels before the war, and Claude Thillmont, for many years the pastry chef at the Café de Paris. The third was a younger man—Pierre Mangelatte, who was the chef at an excellent small restaurant in Montmartre, the Restaurant des Artistes.

  “Bugnard was a marvelous meat cook, a marvelous sauce maker, wonderful with stocks and vegetables, although not so much with desserts,” Julia recalls. “As a young man, he had known Escoffier. Chef Thillmont had worked in the twenties with Mme. Saint-Ange on her great cookbook, Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme. Saint-Ange, now unfortunately out of print. Those two men knew just about everything there was to know. And in the afternoons we would have demonstration classes by Mangelatte, who was a brilliant technician.” Julia had just enough French by this time to keep up with the instruction. Her interest in the subject, she found, was limitless. “Until I got into cooking,” she once said, “I was never really interested in anything.”

  Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833), celebrated gastronome, personal chef (successively) to Talleyrand, Czar Alexander I, George IV, and Baron Rothschild, author of five classic books on food, is generally considered the founder of la grande cuisine. On the Sunday evening before the cooking demonstrations began at the Kabuki Theatre, the Chefs Association of the Pacific Coast presented its Carême Medal to Julia Child, at a dinner given in her honor in a private dining room at the Jack Tar Hotel. The dinner began, surprisingly, with matzo-ball soup, continued with a seafood coquille, paused for sherbet, forged onward with beef Wellington, a potato basket, and cucumber salad, and concluded with a chocolate bombe and petits fours. In draping the Carême Medal around Julia’s neck, the president of the association spoke of her as “the person who brought classic cooking into American homes” and “the one chef in the country who has the recognition that we are all striving for.” A few of the chefs at the long table seemed to harbor reservations about the award’s going, for the first time, to a woman—Joe Rivas, the principal chef for the Pam Pam chain of restaurants in San Francisco, said firmly that women would never make it as chefs in major restaurants, because they were not strong enough physically—but virtually every one of them, including Rivas, wanted to meet Julia and shake her hand.

  There was a good deal of talk at the dinner about the shortage of qualified chefs in this country and the absence of professional cooking schools. The Pacific Coast chefs, most of whom seemed to be European-born and in their late fifties or sixties, bemoaned the fact that so few younger men were coming up to take their places. Julia said that unfortunately the same thing was now true in France. Fewer and fewer people wanted to put in the long hours that a first-class restaurant, or even a humble village bakery, demanded. Convenience foods were taking over in restaurants as well as in private households. There were some great young chefs at work, to be sure—Julia mentioned in particular Roger Vergé, whose Hostellerie Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes, had just received its third star in the Guide Michelin. But, as Paul Child pointed out, men like Vergé and Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers did not write down what they had learned or invented, and their discoveries would probably die with them. “Nowadays, everybody likes to run down Escoffier,” Julia said, “but nobody’s doing what he did to preserve the great traditions.”

  “She’s doing it,” Paul said, pointing at his wife.

  “Oh, but I’m doing it for the home. Somebody should be doing it for the profession, the way Escoffier did.”

  “Nobody has that kind of dedication,” Paul said.

  What Paul had in mind was the dedication that went into Mastering the Art of French Cooking, on which Julia and two collaborators worked without interruption for ten years. The book’s phenomenal success—the first volume alone has sold more than a million and a quarter copies in America to date—suggests that perhaps the traditional haute cuisine of France may be moving not only from the restaurant to the private home (where it began) but from the Old World to the New. Only a few long-established, all-purpose cookbooks, such as Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking, have sold more copies in hardcover. There are many young couples in America who start out conjugal life with what they refer to simply as Julia Child and continue to use it more or less exclusively ever after. A woman who lives on the Alaskan tundra has written to say that she is cooking her way through Julia Child. The wife of a forest ranger in New Mexico, who lives sixty miles from the nearest town, is doing the same. Much of the book’s success, of course, is directly related to the even more phenomenal success of Julia Child as a television personality, but it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who puts down $12.50 for the book is not just going to leave it out on the cocktail table. A lot of dedicated French cooking does seem to be going on.

  Julia had no intention at first of getting involved in the book, which she heard about soon after a friend in Paris had introduced her to Simone (Simca) Beck. Mme. Beck had started to work, with anot
her friend of hers, named Louisette Bertholle, on a book about French cooking for Americans. “Simca was very much like me,” Julia has said. “A middle-class person who was extremely interested in cooking. She had gone to the Cordon Bleu in the old, prewar days, when Henri Pellaprat was teaching there. I knew nobody then who was really deeply interested in cooking. I had nobody to talk to about it, and so when I met Simca we just fell into each other’s arms. She and Louisette introduced me into the Cercle des Gourmettes, which is a French ladies’ gastronomical society—founded, I think, in 1927. The Cercle met every two weeks, and there was a chef to give instruction. By the time I joined it, most of the members were in their seventies, and they would never arrive until about noon, in time for the aperitif and lunch. Simca and Louisette and I would arrive at nine-thirty, so we got what amounted to private lessons from the chef. It was my introduction to really sophisticated French food and living—foie gras in season, and lobster dishes, and very elaborate ways of doing things. Anyway, I knew that Simca and Louisette were working on a big book, and that they needed an American collaborator—they’d had one, a man, who didn’t work out for some reason—but I had no interest in it then. The book was their affair.

  “What happened next was that some friends of ours from California came to Paris and, knowing about my interest in cooking, said, ‘Why don’t you teach us?’ Simca, who is always enthusiastic, said, ‘Why not?’ And so the very next day we started our school, which we called the École des Trois Gourmandes. Our apartment was the perfect place for it, because we had a big, airy kitchen on the upper floor (it was a two-floor apartment) with a dumbwaiter that brought things down to the dining room. We engaged two of my Cordon Bleu chefs, Bugnard and Thillmont, to come in once or twice a week. There were never more than six in the class—mostly Americans, but one or two French. We would cook all morning, then sit down and eat it, with Paul at the head of the table to pour the wine. If you brought a guest, you had to pay five hundred francs. We three found that we were absolutely fascinated with teaching.”

  Sometime in 1951, Julia was persuaded to become the American collaborator on the cookbook. She had her own ideas about the project, however, one of them being that it should be a “real teaching book” rather than a mere collection of recipes. With the shining exception of Mme. Saint-Ange’s classic, most of the available books for serious students of French cooking were little more than a chef ’s shorthand notes for the various dishes; unless the reader knew beforehand how to make a white sauce or poach a trout, or how to add egg yolks to a hot sauce without making it curdle, the book was not much help. Julia thought that every step and every technique should be thoroughly explained, and that the reasoning behind the various techniques should also be made clear. The essence of French cooking, she has often said, is knowing the properties of each ingredient and cooking it in such a way that its best points are fully brought out. If the purpose of their book was to overcome the American fear of “elaborate” French cuisine, one of the methods would be to leave nothing out—to describe, for example, what a dish should look like and feel like at each stage in its preparation, and also to discuss some of the things that could go wrong during the process, along with corrective measures. This meant long recipes—pages and pages long in many cases. (The longest is the twenty-two-page recipe for French bread in Volume II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, an adaptation of the professional baker’s art to the home kitchen that Julia and Paul, who collaborated on the research, regard as probably their most important contribution so far.) It also meant a prodigious amount of research (two years on French bread alone), testing, and often impassioned argument among the three authors.

  From 1952 on, much of the argument was by mail. After four years in Paris, Paul Child was transferred to Marseille, and then, two years later, to the embassy in Bonn, where he was exhibits officer, and where the Childs acquired a reputation for oddness because they did not spend much time in the embassy’s housing compound or swim in the swimming pool there (they preferred a pool on the other side of the Rhine), and because Paul did not spend weekends polishing his car. Paul concedes that he never really became reconciled to the bureaucratic aspects of government service. He and Julia had been unable to have children, and their primary interests were aesthetic and culinary. Julia was always well liked by the other embassy wives—she was too delightful not to be—and her social talents were a notable asset to Paul in his career. “I can’t tell you how important it is for a Foreign Service officer to have a partner like Julia,” Paul said one day in San Francisco. At the same time, she was putting a great deal of time and energy into research on the book—experimenting and testing, amassing a private library and clipping file on the subject, exchanging information and ideas with her collaborators. One epic argument with Simone Beck, over the proper ingredients of the vrai cassoulet, consumed sixty single-spaced typewritten pages before it was finally resolved.

  In the spring of 1951, Julia wrote a sample chapter and an outline of the book, had several copies made, and sent them to various friends in the United States. One of the recipients was Avis DeVoto, Bernard DeVoto’s wife. Some time before, in his monthly column in Harper’s, DeVoto had written a diatribe against the stainless-steel paring knife, which, he complained, would not take an edge or perform any useful kitchen function. Julia saw the column in Paris, wrote him a letter expressing vigorous agreement, and enclosed a French paring knife with a good, sharpenable carbon-steel blade. Avis DeVoto had written a friendly reply, and a correspondence had sprung up. “We both liked to write letters,” Mrs. DeVoto said recently, “and there was a lot to write about. The McCarthy thing was heating up in Washington. Julia and Paul were bewildered and rather frightened by it. Sometimes we’d write each other three or four times a week.” According to Mrs. DeVoto, Julia was a pretty bad writer at that point. The sample chapter of the cookbook struck her as “muddy, verbose, and awkward,” and the spelling was atrocious. “But I knew the minute I saw it that this book on French cooking was really going to work,” she said. “I’m not a bad cook, and I could see this was a whole new approach.” She took it around to Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of several of her husband’s books. Although the response there was somewhat mixed, Houghton Mifflin gave the authors a $250 advance and told them to have the book finished in a year’s time.

  Six years later, having decided that their research demanded a multivolume cookbook, the authors delivered an eight-hundred-page typescript that dealt, solely and exhaustively, with recipes for poultry and sauces. “That was my fault,” Julia said last spring. “I’ve always done the writing, and the whole thing was much too detailed and academic. It was my conception that everyone would be interested in knowing, for example, that if you didn’t happen to have a suffocated duck on hand you could get the same effect by using pig’s blood.” Not surprisingly, Houghton Mifflin turned it down. The Childs were in Washington at the time; Paul had been recalled from Bonn in 1956. Simone Beck had come over to visit them, and the Childs met her at the bus station with the bad news. “The despair in the waiting room could have been cut with a knife,” according to Julia. “But then Simca, with her unfailing optimism, said we would just have to do it over again.” The Childs left soon afterward for Paul’s new post, in Oslo, and Julia spent the next year rewriting the book.

  Although the second version covered more culinary ground and seemed to Avis DeVoto greatly improved in content and prose style (“I never thought anyone could really learn to write,” she said, “but Julia did—she taught herself, with help from Paul and one or two other people”), Houghton Mifflin again found it unpublishable. Mrs. DeVoto submitted it next to William Koshland, at Alfred Knopf. She knew that Koshland liked to cook, and she urged him and Judith Jones, another Knopf editor interested in good food, to take it home and try out some of the recipes. Judith Jones was immediately convinced. “I was sure it was revolutionary,” she said recently. “It was like having a teacher right there beside you in the kitchen, and ev
erything really worked.” Koshland liked it, too, and kept trying recipes out of it at home, but other editors at Knopf were uncertain. Time passed. From Oslo came increasingly anguished letters from Julia, inquiring whether ten years’ work was down the drain. Eventually, the fins becs at Knopf prevailed over the doubters. The first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in the fall of 1961, to virtually unanimous praise. Craig Claiborne called it “probably the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on the subject,” written “without compromise or condescension.” The late Michael Field said that it “surpasses every other American book on French cooking in print today.” The New York food establishment, which is not known for its generosity of spirit, took the book and the authors to its collective bosom, and Dione Lucas even gave a dinner for the Childs at the Egg Basket, her restaurant on East Fifty-seventh Street. Houghton Mifflin has been regretting its decision ever since.

  At ten o’clock on Monday morning, Julia stood at the counter of the onstage kitchen at the Kabuki Theatre, pounding out chilled pastry dough with giant blows of a rolling pin and occasionally popping a small piece of it into her mouth. (“I love uncooked dough, don’t you?”) Rosie Manell was cutting green beans and red pimientos into tiny strips, with which Julia would decorate the duck aspic according to a pattern drawn in colored inks by Paul. Liz Bishop was glazing a duck, and Paul was rewriting the scripts for a group of fund-raising appeals that Julia had agreed to tape later in the week for KQED, the local public television station. In contrast with the anxious manner of some of the ladies on the benefit committee, who appeared from time to time to discuss the length of intermissions or the proper way to handle questions from the audience, the cooking team seemed calm and relaxed. On a television talk show two hours earlier, an interviewer had asked Julia whether it was necessary for her to be “quite so sloppy” in the kitchen. It was a familiar question, often asked by television viewers who do not cook or who belong to what James Beard calls “the sanitation school of cookery.” As Paul Child occasionally explains, when you are trying to cook a rather complicated dish in twenty-eight minutes on camera, you do not take time to wash the pots and scour the work spaces. Onstage at the Kabuki, at any rate, a great deal of work was getting done with a minimum of fuss.