Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  “All this looks a little terrible until you get it done,” she noted in passing.

  “Let’s just taste and see if it’s any good,” she said a little later, dipping a spoon into the just-blended duck mousse. She tasted, paused, cast her eyes upward. “It’s pretty good,” she said, adding a touch more cognac. Another taste, and a nod of the head. “I think,” she said, patting the cognac bottle, “that that’s what makes the difference between an American meat loaf and a French pâté, don’t you?”

  Rosie and Liz moved in and out of the work space, helping where needed. Julia chatted with them and with the audience. From his seat out front, Paul occasionally offered a suggestion, telling Julia, for example, to move to the right or the left so the overhead television cameras could pick up what she was doing and relay it to the screens on either side. “They can’t see what you’re doing, J.C.,” Paul would say. “Hold up the pan.”

  James Beard spoke recently of the “all-embracing quality” that draws people to Julia Child. “She has the kind of bigness that all great artists have,” he said. “Singers especially. She just sweeps everyone up and carries them away. I think she could run for political office and do very well.” The choreographer Merce Cunningham, a great fan of Julia’s program, has observed that she moves like a dancer. “Everything is direct and clear—no superfluous gestures,” Cunningham said. “That must be how she gets through all that complicated business within the time limit, and it’s one reason she’s so fascinating to watch.” She is also very good at building to a dramatic climax.

  The Charlotte Malakoff provided the climax of the first day’s demonstrations. Instead of serving the velvety almond-cream dessert (flavored with chocolate and rum) molded in homemade ladyfingers, as the printed program had said she would, Julia decided to serve it in a cage of spun caramel. Donning a thick red rubber glove from the Sacred Bag to keep from burning her hand, she took a small cake pan, held it upside down, carefully buttered the exterior surface, then set to work covering it with molten caramel dripped from a spoon. The skeins of caramel glittered in the stage lights. It took several minutes for her to cover the pan. She let it cool, then carefully began to work the caramel loose, chatting the while about the need for patience in cooking. After a tense interval, the caramel slid free, and she held up a gossamer cage. Applause from the audience. “Don’t clap yet,” Julia warned. She thought the cage needed fixing in a couple of spots, so she slipped it back over the bottom of the cake pan and added more hot caramel. “Anything you spill you can turn into taffy,” she said. Again the cage was delicately pried loose from the pan. Julia started to hold it up for all to see, and in doing so dropped it. Gasps and groans from the audience; the cage was in smithereens. Julia put her head back and laughed. “We’ll just have to do it all over again,” she said, and did it all over again, successfully, to thunderous applause.

  The same thing happened at the second performance, that evening, except that she broke the cage when she went to put it in the freezer. “Never give up!” she cried. “This is a fine illustration of not getting discouraged.” The audience, which this time included a substantial number of men, was limp with delight. Fifty or more people stayed on after the show to stand in line and have their copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking autographed by Julia and Paul, and nearly all of them wanted to talk with the Childs, to say something about what Julia had meant in their lives and how grateful they were. Julia asked questions about each person’s home or family or kitchen. They were signing autographs until after midnight.

  Later, back at the hotel, the team gathered in the Childs’ suite for a nightcap. They had ridden up in the elevator with Rudolf Nureyev, who was in town with the National Ballet of Canada and was staying at the same hotel; the two “superstars,” as Herb Caen referred to them in his column in the Chronicle, rode up together silently, without a sign of recognition, but afterward Julia commented with interest on Nureyev’s costume, which consisted of knee-length snakeskin boots and a snakeskin shirt. It looked, Liz Bishop said, as though the snake were eating him. The conversation in the suite flowed without effort. Julia and Paul talked about Norway, which they had both adored. They liked the Norwegians and their way of life, they liked the countryside, and they even liked, in moderation, the food. “You have to learn how to order there,” Julia said. “Their poached sea trout is delicious. The fried food is awful. And their idea of vegetables is four kinds of potato and some parsley.” Julia learned more Norwegian than Paul did, because Paul was too busy at the embassy to give full attention to lessons. Julia has been known to sing the Norwegian national anthem at parties, her great, plummy voice swooping up and down the scale with utter confidence, though in no discernible key.

  Before going to bed, they talked a little about the various groups, mainly in California, that were now dedicating themselves to mysticism, psychic experimentation, and the transformation of consciousness. Julia didn’t seem to know much about the new consciousness, but she thought it sounded interesting. “I just hope,” she said at one point, “that good food is a part of it.”

  1974

  “It’s the waiter at the restaurant where we ate tonight. He wants to know if everything is still all right.”

  LOOK BACK IN HUNGER

  ANTHONY LANE

  Ready? Ready. Okay, here we go. “Fold the wings akimbo, tucking the wing ends under the shoulders as shown here.” Lovely. “Then, on the same side of the chicken where you came out from the second knee…” Umm. “Poke the needle through the upper arm of the wing.” Wings with arms, like a bat’s. Cool. “Catch the neck skin, if there…” Hang on. If there? If not there, where? Whose neck is this, anyway? “…and pin it to the backbone, and come out through the second wing.” And go for a walk in the snow, and don’t come back till next year.

  This wing-stitching drill, as any cook will tell you, is from the celebrated “To Truss a Chicken” section of Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. It’s a pretty easy routine, really, as long as you take it slow, run through a batch of test poultry first, have a professional chef on hand to help you through the bad times, and feel no shame when you get arrested and charged with satanic drumstick abuse. Julia Child is a good woman, with no desire to faze or scald us; she genuinely wants us to bard that bird, to cook it, and to carve it. (“Fork-grab under the knee…. Soonyou’ll see the ball joint where the leg-thigh meets the small of the back.”) Hell, she wouldn’t mind if we went ahead and ate the damn thing.

  I don’t know what it is about cookbooks, but they really drain my giblets. I buy them, and use them, and study them with the micro-attentive care of a papyrologist, and still they make me feel that I am missing out. I follow instructions, and cook dinner for friends, and the friends are usually friends again by the next morning, but what they consume at my table bears no more than a fleeting, tragically half-assed resemblance to the dish that I read about in the recipe. Although I am not a good cook, I am not a dreadful one, either; I once had a go at mouclade d’Aunis, once made a brave fist of cul de veau braisé Angevin, and once came very close to buying a carp. Last summer, I did something difficult with monkfish tails; the dish took two days to prepare, a full nine minutes to eat, and three days to wash up after. But an hour in front of my cookbooks is enough to slash my ambitions to the bone—to convince me that in terms of culinary evolution I remain a scowling tree dweller whose idea of haute cuisine is to grub for larvae under dead bark.

  And we all know the name of the highly developed being standing tall at the other end of the scale. Super-skilled, free of fear, the last word in human efficiency, Martha Stewart is the woman who convinced a million Americans that they have the time, the means, the right, and—damn it—the duty to pipe a little squirt of soft cheese into the middle of a snow pea, and to continue piping until there are “fifty to sixty” stuffed peas raring to go. Never mind the taste; one glance at this woman’s quantities is enough to spirit you into a different and a cleaner world. “I discovered a fantastic thin
g when preparing 1,500 potatoes for the Folk Art Show,” Martha writes in her latest book. The Martha Stewart Cookbook is a magisterial compendium of nine previous books, and offers her fans another chance to sample Martha’s wacky punch lines (“Tie securely with a single chive”) and her naughtiest promises (“This hearty soup is simple to assemble”). So coolly thrown off, that last line, and you read right through it without picking up the outrageous implication. Since when did you “assemble” a soup? Even the ingredients are a fright. “Three pounds fish frames from flounder or fluke,” Martha says brightly, sounding like Henry Higgins. To the rest of humanity, soup is something that involves five pans, two dented strainers, scattered bones that would baffle a forensic pathologist, and the unpleasant sensation of hot stock rising from the pot, condensing on your forehead, and running down into the pot again as lightly flavored sweat.

  Martha does not perspire. There is not a squeak of panic in the woman’s soul. She knows exactly where the two layers of cheesecloth can be found when the time comes to strain the stock. She assembles her fish chowder as if it were a model airplane. Moreover, she does so without appearing to spend any time in the kitchen. “One of the most important moments on which to expend extra effort is the beginning of a party, often an awkward time, when guests feel tentative and insecure,” she says. The guests are insecure? How about the frigging cook? Believe me, Martha, I’m not handing round the phyllo triangles with lobster filling during that awkward time; I’m out back, holding on to the sink, finishing off the Côtes du Rhône that was supposed to go into the stew. But Martha Stewart is an idealist who has cunningly disguised herself as a helping hand; readers look up to her as a conservative angel who keeps the dream house tidy, radiant, ready for pals, and filled with family. “If I had to choose one essential element for the success of an Easter brunch, it would be children,” she writes, as if preparing to grill the kids over a high flame.

  Yet the conservative image won’t quite fit. The Stewart paean to the joys of Thanksgiving (“To not cook and entertain on this day would seem tantamount to treason”) is itself rather joyless in its zealotry; you keep hitting something sharp and steely in her writings—a demiglace intolerance of ordinary mortals. Her kitchen is bewitched, and she’s Samantha. You won’t see it on her TV shows, but I bet Martha Stewart can wiggle her nose and turn any chauvinist Darrin into crabmeat. If you’re planning to fork-grab her under the knee, forget it. Was it the spirit of the season or a quiet celebration of dominant female power that led to the baked-ham recipe at the start of Martha Stewart’s Menus for Entertaining? It looks succulent in the accompanying photograph, and I have long yearned to make it, but three factors have restrained me. First, it serves sixteen, and I don’t know that many people who would be happy to munch ham at one another. Second, you need “one bunch chervil with flowers.” (That’s plain silly, if not quite as ridiculous as a recipe that I came across at the peak of nouvelle cuisine, in the 1980s—a recipe that demanded thirty-four chervil leaves.) Third, the ham must be baked for five and a half hours in a pan lined with fresh-cut grass. As in meadow. “Locate an area in advance with tender, young, organically grown grass that has not yet been cut,” our guide advises. “It is best to cut it very early in the morning while the dew is still evident.” I’m sorry, Martha, but it just won’t do. I have inspected the grass in my backyard, and I am not prepared to serve Baked Ham with Cat Whiff and Chopped Worms.

  There must be millions of other people who refuse to get up at dawn and mow the lawn for dinner. This fellow feeling should be a comfort to me, yet somehow it makes no difference. Cooking, for all the apple-cheeked, home-baked community spirit in which food writers try to enfold it, is essentially a solitary art—or, at least, a guarantee of lonely distress. When your hollandaise is starting to curdle and you’ve tried the miraculous ice-cube trick and you’ve tried beating a fresh egg yolk and folding in the curdled stuff and the result still looks like the climactic scene of a David Cronenberg picture, it doesn’t really help to know that someone is having the very same problem in Pittsburgh. Your only friend, in fact, is that shelf of cookbooks just out of reach. Leaving the sauce to its own devices, you grab each volume in turn, frantic for advice, and make your fatal mistake: you start to read. Two yards away, the sauce is separating fast—the lemon is pursing its lips, the eggs are halfway back to the fridge—but you don’t care. By now, determined to find out where you went wrong, and already dreaming of a perfect future sauce, you are deep into Georges-Auguste Escoffier’s recipe for hollandaise: “Remove the pan to the side of the stove or place it in a bain-marie.” Well, which?

  In that simple “or” reside both the delight and the frustration of the classic cookbook. It should ideally tell you almost everything but not all that you need to know, leaving a tiny crack of uncertainty that can become your own personal abyss. If any text counts as a classic, it is Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, which was published in 1903. Escoffier was a colleague of César Ritz, and a man of such pantry-stocking initiative that when Paris was besieged in the Franco-Prussian War he fed the starving troops on zoo animals and stray pets. I eagerly scanned the Guide for pan-seared hartebeest or poodle mousse à la Fifi sauvage, but all I could find was this unflinching recipe for clear turtle soup:

  To kill the turtle, lay it on its back at the edge of the table with the head hanging over the side. Take a double meat hook and place one hook into the upper jaw and suspend a sufficiently heavy weight in the hook at the other end so as to make the animal extend its neck….

  It goes without saying that the flippers should be blanched, and that “the green fat which is used for making the soup must be collected carefully.” But where, exactly, does this green fat come from? The author doesn’t tell us. Somewhere between the carapace and the plastron, presumably, but I’m not sure that I really want to know.

  Whether cooks still use Escoffier—or Larousse, or Carême, or any of the other touchstones of French cuisine—is open to question. It is not just the encyclopedic spread of these Frenchmen’s interests, their desire to chew on something that we would prefer to watch in a wildlife documentary, that feels out of date; it is also their unshakable conviction that we already know our worldly way around a kitchen, that they are merely grinding a little fresh information into our basic stock of knowledge. When Escoffier tells us to “stud the fattened pullet with pieces of truffle and poach it in the usual manner,” he presumes that we habitually spend our weekends looking for pullets to fatten and that we can poach them in our sleep. Many readers are scared off by this assumption; I feel flattered and consoled by it, all the more so because I know it to be dead wrong. I am not a truffle stud, nor was meant to be. Yet I willingly dream myself into a time when you could “quickly fry 10 blackbirds in hot butter”—just because I relish the imaginative jump required to get there, not because I particularly want a blackbird-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich for my lunch.

  In other words, the great cookbooks are more like novels than like home-improvement manuals. What these culinary bibles tell you to do is far less beguiling than the thought of a world in which such things might be done. A single line, for instance, from Benjamin Renaudet’s Secrets de la Bonne Table, published at the beginning of this century, effortlessly summons up the century that had just ended: “When the first partridges are shot in the early morning, send them down to the house.” If that grabs you, take a look at Culinary Jottings for Madras, a collection of recipes by Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert. First published in 1878, the book tells you more about the nature of imperial rule in India than any number of political histories. If you can feed a party of eight on snipe soup, fish fillets à la Peg Woffington, mutton cutlets à la Moscovite, oyster Kramouskys, braised capon, and a brace of wild ducks with bigarade sauce, if you can finish off with prune jelly, iced molded pudding with strawberries, and cheese, and if you can serve and eat all that when it’s ninety-five degrees in the shade, then you can conquer any country you li
ke. Nothing can stand up to Peg Woffington.

  There is a pinch of snob nostalgia in reading this stuff, of course, but I don’t think it ruins the flavor. What is attractive about cookbooks, after all—what prickles the glands like vinegar—is not luxury but otherness. I have a particular weakness for the chunky, old-style blockbusters that sit in every kitchen, offering reams of advice that is seldom taken, or even required. Endlessly updated with new editions, these masterworks are doomed never to be up to date. Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book, which has slowly acquired the gravitas of Holy Writ, was first published in 1961. I found an early edition, and smiled at the hors d’oeuvres suggestions that are arrayed for our delectation in the first section of the book: how to serve oysters on the half shell, how to serve caviar, how to serve foie gras. It was a time capsule of America in the late fifties and early sixties; it made me want to watch Pillow Talk all over again. With a sigh of regret, I turned to the latest edition. How would it start in the nineties? Char-grilled calamari with arugula and flat-leaf parsley? Stuffed snow peas à la Martha? Shiitake tarts? But no, there it was again: how to serve oysters on the half shell, et cetera. What was once an accurate index of national taste has now become a museum piece. It’s the same story with Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, which began life in 1931 and reads as if it had never got past 1945. Social historians should head straight for the “Pies and Pastries” section and check out the crusty jokes: “No wonder pictures of leggy starlets are called cheesecake!” Ba-boom.