by Bob Spitz
Julia was learning “how to feel her way through a recipe,” which took skill developed over time, lots of time, and was ultimately the mark of a real cook. That goal seemed insurmountable at times, when everything overwhelmed her. There was so much to learn, so much to practice. Six weeks at Le Cordon Bleu, she lamented, was “nothing, nothing at all. I feel I am just beginning to be a cook.” It exasperated her that it might take “two years of training and [another] three years of working” at a first-class restaurant until “you might have something. [Along with] cooking, cooking, cooking all the time at home.” After seven weeks at Le Cordon Bleu, she realized “I may just have my foot in the door.” But only a month later, an arm and a hip squeezed through. “It’s beginning to take effect,” she wrote her family. “I feel it in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”
The mysteries of French cuisine were starting to make sense, bit by bit, but cooking was still a slippery slope for Julia. Occasionally, feeling overconfident, a misfire occurred. One afternoon her friend Winnie Riley came to lunch, and Julia “served her up the most VILE eggs Florentine I have ever imagined.” It was as if she had forgotten everything that she’d learned at Le Cordon Bleu. Measuring? Who needed to measure ingredients, especially the flour when making a sauce Mornay? Julia just improvised, beating in the grated gruyère, until the béchamel congealed into a thick, gluey mess. And ingredients? Weren’t most ingredients interchangeable, after all? That was her rationale when she couldn’t find spinach at the market and substituted chicory, which was too tough and refused to wilt in time to complement the eggs. Julia stared at the plates she was about to serve and thought, “God, they were awful.” The dish looked horrid—beyond a disaster.
Julia was mortified. She had to serve it as it was; there wasn’t time to start anew. She was wretched with defeat, but why should her guest have to suffer for that? She’d be damned if she’d call attention to the disaster and ruin the social aspect of the lunch, as well. “So I carefully didn’t say a word, while she painfully ate it,” Julia recalled.
One can only imagine the women trying to make conversation while struggling to get that nasty glop down their throats. If it was inedible, neither let on. They cleaned their plates, without a word about the food. No excuses were made, no apologies offered, which, for Julia, became a lifelong doctrine. Never apologize! “I don’t believe in these women who are always apologizing for their food,” she explained. “If it is vile, the cook must just grin and bear it.”
No apologies were made for her fixture fetish, as well. Julia loved cooking utensils almost as much as she loved the cooking, and she spared no expense when it came to stocking her cozy kitchen. “Why, the place is practically an alchemist’s eyrie,” Paul marveled. In her ramblings around Paris with Chef Bugnard, Julia had stumbled on two favorite haunts whose aisles were to French kitchens what Home Depot is to fixer-uppers. Le Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, or BHV (bay-ahsh-vay), across from city hall in the Marais, was an enormous department store where Julia literally bought carloads upon carloads of the bare essentials: frying pans, casseroles, pails, dishpans, a broom, and anything else she could stuff into the Blue Flash. BHV seemed to have all an aspiring cook needed—that is, until Bugnard took the class to Dehillerin, in Les Halles. Julia took one look at the wall-to-wall shelves bulging with shiny restaurant-quality merchandise and got the hot flush a gambler feels entering a Las Vegas casino. She’d hit the jackpot—“THE KITCHEN EQUIPMENT STORE of all time,” she gasped, a cavernous place “stuffed with mouthwatering things” that were catnip to a gadget junkie like Julia Child. Chef Bugnard did her no favor by introducing her to the owner. In the weeks and months that followed Julia returned there again and again, relying on M. Dehillerin’s savvy to explain the absolute need for each implement, until the shelves of Roo de Loo resembled a Dehillerin annex.
“Our poor little kitchen is bursting at the seams,” Paul observed, citing the gridlock forming in their upstairs cuisine. Where did all this cooking stuff come from? Horrified, he inventoried the “pots, pans, vessels, sieves, measuring rods, scales, thermometers, mortars, timing-clocks, choppers, grinders, knives, openers, pestles, spoons, ladles, jars, skewers, forks, bottles, boxes, bags, weights, needles, graters, strings, rolling-pins, mullers, frying pans, double boilers, single boilers, marble slabs and fancy extrusion-dies” weighting down the plywood shelves. And it didn’t end there. My God! “She’s got special whips for sauces, long needles for larding roasts, a deep copper bowl for beating eggs, a pèse-sirop,1 a chinois, three little frying pans used only for crêpes, a copper sugar-boiler, stirring paddles made of Maplewood, tart-rings, and a whole gamut of flat long-handled copper pot lids.”
The counters, which extended out from either side of the stove, looked like the lab of a mad scientist. “On one side there are seven Ali Baba oil-jars full of basic reductions, standing in a row like seven fat soldiers,” Paul noted. “On the other, hanging from hooks, are pewter liter-measures, demi-liters, quart-de-liters, deciliters and demi-deciliters, [as well as] innumerable scrapers, choppers, cutter-uppers, rockers, crushers, and enough knives for a pirate boarding-gang.” He couldn’t even fathom the types of vessels on exhibit—copper vessels, iron vessels, stainless-steel vessels, aluminum vessels, glass vessels, terra-cotta vessels, tin vessels, enamel vessels, crockery vessels, and porcelain vessels “forced, jammed, and pushed” into niches that he never even knew existed.
A sterner husband might have enrolled her in Gadgeteers Anonymous, but Paul, if anything, was an enabler, not a regulator. He was tickled by Julia’s cannonball into the deep end of cookery and eager to help her stay happily afloat. Watching her jackknife about at the stove was a meal in itself. Paul was mesmerized and aroused by the way his wife took the controls, turning out feast after feast with the touch of a virtuoso. It amazed him how she moved with assurance and grace, how “the oven door opens and shuts so fast you hardly notice the deft thrust of a spoon as she dips into a casserole and up to her mouth for a taste-check.” His descriptions of Julia in a series of letters to his family are filled with admiration and wonder. And yet, as she dived deeper into the process, she never lost the wonderful wicked spirit that first enchanted him in Ceylon. It cropped up and charmed him at the damnedest moments. For instance, one night, while Julia prepared pasta for a dinner party of friends, she snatched a bit of cannelloni out of a pot of boiling water, and cried: “Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock!” Paul hooted at the outburst. He loved her sense of ribaldry, loved the way she held nothing back, called it the way she saw it. The Old Girl was something else!
It appeared that the Old Girl was finally happy, really happy doing something she loved. If the definition of happiness is being fully engaged in something that one is good at, up until this point she’d been only sporadically engaged. Sure, Julia did things that she enjoyed, kept her busy, but she wasn’t testing her abilities in any way. Cooking gave her structure, it was substantive, meaningful, it brought her accomplishment and independence, everything she’d long desired. The last thing she’d wanted was a conventional life. Julia dreaded turning into the obedient little woman. She had seen that happen to so many of her friends. Smart and sophisticated, they disappeared after college into the shadows of traditional home life, expected to cook, clean, and raise families, ceding the more challenging work to their well-paid husbands. For women, at that time, there weren’t that many opportunities to fully engage. But cooking, for Julia, was engagement enough. Far from resenting the kitchen to which she was virtually chained, she learned to love the feel of food and to love working with it: “the variety of dishes and sauces and arrangements,” she said, “are immensely stimulating for the imagination.”
For those first few months, Julia was content. She went every day to Le Cordon Bleu’s morning and afternoon sessions, returning to Roo de Loo to practice what she’d learned. “Am still spending most of my life in the kitchen,” she admitted, in a letter to Freddie Child toward the end of 1949, “just can’t
stay away from it.” It seemed the more she learned of practical technique, the more theory she wanted to know. Cooking, she determined, was more than simple mechanics; there was technology and science—chemistry—involved. It wasn’t enough to just walk through a recipe without understanding how ingredients integrated and combined. That meant first understanding the characteristics of each ingredient—where they came from, what they were made of, how they responded to heat. In her spare time Julia studied the classic recipes from class, turning them inside out, in an attempt to understand how all the elements combined.
Mayonnaise eluded her for the longest time. Oh, she could make the stuff, great tubs of it, “in a flash, no trouble, perfect brew every time.” The process was simple: all you had to do was beat salad oil into egg yolks until they creamed and thickened, forming an emulsion. A little salt, a dash of vinegar: voilà!—instant mayonnaise. One day she even timed herself, whipping up half a creamy pint in seven minutes flat. But when the weather changed, her mojo changed with it, turning her mayo into a thin rheumy mess. What gives? she wondered, throwing out batch after batch. In her notebooks, Julia jotted down the details of her failed experiments, struggling furiously to forestall the accidents that ensued. But even as she seemed to solve part of a problem, others materialized, in which the ingredients produced a different consistency, another variable, or transformed mayonnaise into something else entirely. This confounded her; she refused to give in to the vagaries of chance—or, worse, to fall back on a bottle of Hellman’s. So she began experimenting, “making vast inquiries and researches” in an attempt to understand the impact that the elements—things like temperature, moisture, solubility, texture, energy, and time—have on cooking.
“Must be the cold that had the bad effect,” she presumed, “or the egg yolks. Perhaps the hard beating of the yolks ‘cooks’ them just a bit.” Or maybe not—she wasn’t at all sure.
Thus began Julia’s involvement with the alchemy of cuisine, understanding everything that went into making a dish, the chemistry, the physics, the theory that allowed her to turn matter into food. She wanted to do more than simply follow a recipe as written, prep-by-prep, step-by-step—but to understand it inside out, to deconstruct the building blocks of cuisine, so that she could not only cook food, but master it. Mayonnaise didn’t emerge from beating oil into egg yolks. There were physical properties involved: “Everything must be room temp,” she concluded after much trial and error, “including the bowl,” as well as the oil, the eggs, and the workspace. And tools: never any kind of beater—heaven forbid!—but a wire whip, a whisk, which enabled you to “moderate the pace and control the action.” And proportions: the quantity of oil in relation to egg yolk. A formula of four parts oil to one part egg seemed ideal for the egg to act as a binding element. And catalysis (yes, catalysis!): the process by which a pinch of salt and a half teaspoon of vinegar are added to break down the yolk so it can absorb the oil and eventually emulsify.
Over and over, she continued to test, tweaking her master recipe to reflect each new discovery she made. “I made so much mayonnaise,” she recalled, “that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet.”
Understanding mayonnaise, Julia discovered, took more than simple know-how, but once she grasped the process she felt she had “licked it” once and for all. Would all French cooking require a degree in molecular structure from MIT? she wondered. From her trials and errors, Julia worried that might well be the case. She “became a bit of a Mad Scientist,” sitting for hours analyzing ingredients and their properties, playing with them as if somehow she could get inside them or spin them into gold. Recipes were complex, mysterious. They presented too many possibilities and raised the chance of accident that hovered over every meal she made.
And yet, sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a veal roast was just a veal roast. Julia had made this revelation during a class with Chef Bugnard. Her approach to the dish had been fraught with complications, detail piled on detail, a veritable excess of veal. “I used to marinate it in 200 herbs,” she acknowledged, stung by her naïveté. “Now, I put on salt and pepper, wrap it in a salt pork blanket, put sliced carrots and onions in the pan, a tablespoon of butter on top and let her go, basting.” Such things were “awfully easy when the tricks are known.”
When it came to French cooking, she needed to strike the right balance: to incorporate precise technique with instinct in order to simplify the process. Practice was essential, she knew that without question, but poise and assurance—confidence—was key. In just a few months, Julia had converted a semester’s worth of lessons into a cascade of recipes. But as far as confidence went, she still had a long way to go.
Even outside of the kitchen, Julia’s confidence remained frayed. She still felt cowed by the long intellectual shadow Paul cast, unsure of herself, socially inept. No matter how outgoing and personable she seemed, Julia was never entirely comfortable in the company of guests they entertained at home. And the Childs entertained like it was going out of style. A celebrated cast of visitors paraded through Roo de Loo in the months leading up to 1950. Paul’s position at USIS brought him into contact with all sorts of visiting dignitaries, most of whom got an invitation to dinner chez Child. Julia prepared meals for America’s greatest minds—politicians, sociologists, authors, journalists, philosophers, ambassadors, art historians, professors, cabinet members, friends, friends of friends, perfect strangers, tout le monde. Hardly a night passed that failed to require an elaborate dinner party. And the conversation, to Julia’s ears, was always lively, always brilliant, though just out of her orbit. It never failed: strong opinions flew around her table, heated exchanges on the Marshall Plan, the global economy, the welfare state, and British socialism—subjects on which she felt inadequately informed.
“I am no good at verbalizing,” she fretted, after one such get-together in late November. Her friends Winnie and Ed Riley had come over for drinks before heading to La Grille, the Childs’ restaurant-of-the-moment, in Les Halles. For months, Julia eagerly sought out the Rileys, whose company she preferred among the community of ex-pats. Ed, especially, was a favorite companion. He had an unflagging, reflective brilliance, “the ideal U.S. biz type,” according to Julia, “plus, so handsome and rugged,” her essential criteria. The evening unspooled leisurely, with updates of gossip traded back and forth, but as soon as the conversation turned informed and serious, Julia foundered. She felt exposed, owing to what she mistook as a “confused mind.” The issues of the day affected her strongly, but every time she waded into the discussion, it seemed she “managed to get [her] foot in [her] backside.” She became flustered, “defensive about [her] positions,” after which everything seemed to come undone—her grasp of facts, her coordination, and especially her emotions. Julia’s fatal flaw was that she became too excitable. Paul had noticed it almost from the day they had met. No one could spot the warning signs more acutely. Her breath grew heavy, she batted her eyes like a Tiny Tears doll, sentences trailed off in a haze of mumbling, or became garbled and overlapped. It was the same sort of behavior that showed up in the first few episodes of The French Chef, fourteen years later.
Entertaining at home was still a performance. No matter how good Julia was becoming at cooking French food, there was another aspect she hadn’t yet mastered.
IN THE MEANTIME, Julia received the confidence she needed from the steady progress she made at Le Cordon Bleu. Her second session began on January 4, 1950, putting her back in the basement studio bright and early each morning, with “my group of dopey GI’s,” as she took to calling them. Julia was impressionable and eager to please, not protesting, as others did, when the same recipes from the first session “began to repeat and repeat” like an interminable mantra. Quiche Lorraine sixteen times, veal blanquette twelve, sole meunière so often the students lost count. Unlike the others, she found the repetition instructive, disciplinary. “I’m gradually learning how to do things the profes
sional way,” she realized, bankrolling the experience for future dividends. It was all very fussy, even painstaking work, but it provided her with the know-how to master the basics of French cuisine: a decent piecrust, a crêpe suzette, a perfect omelet, in addition to sauces. “I am beginning to experience what Paul has always been saying about learning the techniques of the trade,” she recognized—“practice, practice, practice.” The results were too precious, too delectable to squander.
But by the spring of 1950, frustration had set in. Julia became “increasingly disappointed in that damn poorly managed school.” Madame Brassart, a noted skinflint, kept her eye on every sou that went out the front door. “She was all-controlling and skimped on ingredients,” says a former student, who echoed Julia’s chagrin. “We never saw butter, only margarine. And the equipment—ooh-la-la!” The soot-stained pots and saucepans, some said, dated from the Pleistocene Era, and the stoves were a throwback to days when electricity was a key on a kite string. “Of the several electric ovens, only a few worked,” according to another disgruntled student. “The long stove was dotted with electric burners which had an unnerving tendency to short-circuit and shock.”
Julia could deal with the ancient equipment, but the tenor of the class was beginning to wear. The GIs’ high jinks no longer seemed cute. They delighted in trying to confuse Max Bugnard with short-order pidgin, like “Voolez-voo two blindfolds on a buttered shingle, chef?” Or calling the white sauce béchasmell—for the forty-third time. Besides, they were more eager to bang away on the pinball machines in the bistro next door than to perfect a financier or vol-au-vent. “If the ‘Boys’ were more serious, it would be a different matter,” Julia conceded, “but even now, after six months, they don’t know the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way.” It seemed futile for her to keep her spirits up under such conditions. Julia could do it, she could put up a good front. “Being just as cold-blooded and realistic as possible, yet retaining sweetness and humanity” had served her through the intervening months. But the GIs had worn down her defenses, as had the grinding routine—“all this 6:30 a.m. rising and not enough sleep and not having enough resistance” to the germ-infested school.