by Bob Spitz
Julia had a Harry Houdini–like power over her audiences—and was eager to use it. “She became a dynamo once the lights hit her and the applause kicked in,” Jane Friedman recalls. “I’d never experienced anything like it before—or since. More than anyone I’ve ever met, Julia was a true star.”
She loved being in front of a live audience, loved it. But the book signings, most of all, were her payoff on the road. She planted herself at a desk next to Paul, while long lines formed with fans clutching both volumes of Mastering, and made sure she had a word or two with everyone who greeted her. “It became personal,” Jane recalls. Julia would hold on to a book that someone handed her to sign, while she asked them something about themselves that humanized the encounter. “And what are you making for dinner tonight, dearie?” was one of her favorite icebreakers. Or: “Tell me, dearie, what dish do you enjoy cooking most?”
No feigned interest, no brush-off. She looked them right in the eye.
Occasionally, someone she’d met before would greet her and say, “You once told me to tie a veal roast in caul fat” or “You said it was okay to use bittersweet chocolate instead of semi-sweet in the Queen of Sheba recipe.” Instead of trying to recall the conversation, Julia would say, “And how did that turn out?”
She was fast on her feet.
“I wasn’t surprised that she could handle the crowds,” says Jane Friedman. “She was a natural. Here she was too tall, gawky, squeaky voiced, not what you would call a pretty woman, and who had just had a mastectomy. But put the camera on her, and, man, she was a superstar.”
After a few weeks on the road, Julia staggered back to Cambridge in time for the holidays—more than a star: “a kind of Public Property,” a household name.
Julia and Paul lunching alfresco in Plascassier, Provence, May 6, 1970 (Photo credit 20.2)
Twenty-one
We Are Not All Eternal
The distinguished couple that stared into their plates at Lucas Carton on rue de la Madeleine one evening in September 1974 was flabbergasted by what they saw. On one lay six tiny slices of blood-rare pigeon pinwheeled like drops on a Miró canvas atop a bed of tender turnip rounds, a tang of anise rising off the surface. The other featured a cluster of roe-dusted lobster meat artfully arranged on a mound of spinach and watercress and drizzled with—could it be?—vanilla sauce. Around them other diners were tsk-tsking over similar concoctions. Rouget with black olives, capers, and lemon slices sauced with nothing but warm olive oil infused with herbes de Provence. Loup de mer—sea bass—wrapped in green lettuce leaves, barely cooked salmon in a satiny sorrel sauce. Julia and Paul looked at each other through scimitar eyes. What in the name of Escoffier was going on here?
Quite obviously, the chef had gone mad. But then all of Paris seemed to have gone mad for a folly they were calling la nouvelle cuisine.
No one seemed to enjoy it less than Julia and Paul. But only a week before, since arriving from the States, they had made the rounds of their beloved standbys. Le Restaurant des Artistes, where old Mangelatte came out of the kitchen to personally serve them sole meunière, was “no more, alas.” La Méditerranée, on place de l’odéon, was “slowly going downhill.” Chez la Mère Michel, where Julia first learned the secret for beurre blanc, was disappointing and they “sadly crossed her off the list.” Michaud was dated, Brasserie Lipp a tourist trap, the riotous Les Halles now, egad, a cavernous construction site. Even at Le Grand Véfour, where they “always got the royal treatment,” they now got food poisoning and swore off going back. It seemed only fair to try one of the temples of nouvelle cuisine. But even though they’d heard plenty about the revolution going on, the skirmish on the plates took them by surprise.
Nouvelle’s flourishes announced to an unprepared dining public that chefs had arrived. For years—decades—the masters of restaurant kitchens cooked classic French dishes exactly the way they’d been codified by Escoffier at the turn of the century. That was the unwritten law: “according to Escoffier.” It was unthinkable to vary the formulas, and no one dared question them. So, in effect, a chef produced poularde Albuféra at a brasserie in the Latin Quarter or at an autogrille on the A-1 motorway using the same ingredients and technique as the chef at La Tour d’Argent, and, as such, each toiled in virtual obscurity.
No more. Chefs became the auteurs. Like many waves of innovation, nouvelle cuisine sprang from the restlessness and disillusionment that sparked the cultural uprisings of the 1960s. In Paris, especially, orthodoxy was deemed corrupt, conformity a malignance. The enfants terribles of French cinema—Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Chabrol—had already made that clear. They broke all the rules with la nouvelle vague, rejecting classical forms by putting their personal signatures on the films they made, to great approbation.
In essence, they were the role models for a gang of disgruntled chefs who were raring to cut loose. Paul Bocuse, Pierre and Jean Troisgros, Louis Outhier, Alain Senderens, Roger Vergé, and Raymond Oliver, among others, abandoned the strictures of classic haute cuisine in favor of a less rigid cooking style that showed off their extraordinary artistry. Heavy cream sauces and overworked recipes were replaced with imagination and ingenuity. Fresh flavors were emphasized, new combinations encouraged. The revolutionary concept, this nouvelle cuisine, called for far lighter and more delicate fare—a white wine reduction, say, instead of flour and butter and cream, an infused oil, maybe, instead of, well, flour and butter and cream. Sauces underneath instead of obscuring the main attraction. Perhaps Asian accents, more spices and herbs; vegetables cooked only long enough to release their flavor, crisp to the bite. Dishes still acknowledged the Escoffier canon—the basic sauces, the fumets, the mousses, the glaces de viande—but also the personality of the chef, the anonymous toiler, who finally stepped out from behind the stove to acclaim himself.
It was a liberating moment in the annals of French culinary history. Chefs swept centuries of tradition aside and elaborate new preparations burst from their kitchens. Suddenly there were no rules, just foundations on which to build, using one’s own intuitive gifts. After a brief period of unchecked anarchy, lorded over by the dour but supremely gifted Bocuse, the new movement coalesced around the proposition that French food, when inventively cooked, was not at the mercy of unique rules and ingredients; it was the means by which to explore unique rules and ingredients.
A pair of food writers—Henri Gault and Christian Millau—were the engines of the new movement. They published a manifesto committed to challenging the system fortified by Michelin, “the bastion of culinary conservatism” and the “pompous stars” it awarded to temples of haute cuisine. Gault-Millau had little interest in the perceived excellence of Michelin’s three-star corps d’élite. They didn’t want to celebrate dishes of the old masters; they wanted chefs to reinvent them: not absurdly, not by painting a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa, as the Surrealists had done, but with craft and subtlety, by pairing sole, say, with a wild mushroom reduction or even fruit, ingredients that complemented each other in new and exciting ways. They seized on the idea that there was a vast, untapped reservoir of talent in French kitchens that needed to be unleashed and encouraged to experiment and improvise. A chef who could liberate a recipe from heaviness, rigidity, and excessive complication would produce dishes that reflected a modern lifestyle. To make their point, Gault-Millau began publishing Le Nouveau Guide in 1973, identifying forty-eight practitioners of nouvelle cuisine who they believed could lead France into a new age of gastronomy and spur countless others to follow their toques.
“Up with the new French cuisine,” they wrote in their introductory issue. “It is bursting with health, good sense, and good taste! … No more of those terrible brown sauces and white sauces, those espagnoles, those Périgueux with truffles, those béchamels and Mornays that have assassinated as many livers as they have covered indifferent foods. Down with veal stock, and down with red wine, Madeira, pig’s blood, roux, gelatin, and flour in all sauces, and with cheese and starches.
They are forbidden!”
By the following year, nouvelle cuisine had left its defiant imprint on the French restaurant scene. Most important head chefs, however hesitant or reluctant, had made some foray into the new expressive approach. Even if it meant nothing more than adding a leaf or two of fresh basil to an Escoffier-enshrined recipe, the act itself felt as rebellious and exciting as an adulterous kiss. In the rush to experiment, chefs sometimes got carried away, combining ingredients that were downright nutty. Kiwi fruit turned up in too many dishes. “I have heard of truffles served with lime ice,” Craig Claiborne reported, “of grapes and other fruit served with sauerkraut in a red-wine sauce; ravioli stuffed with snails and peaches.” There was plenty of room for error and forgiveness, but exquisite creations happened more often than not. After being tied to Escoffier’s apron strings for years and years, chefs flexed their muscles in such a way that, for the most part, showcased their great ambitions and sensuous power.
Not everyone was appreciative or amused. Defenders of haute cuisine—and they were legion—deplored what they saw as nouvelle’s lack of discipline and unchecked improvisation. Purists like Simca dismissed its recipes as ce n’est pas français. To James Beard, it was “an indulgent hodgepodge.” Jacques Pépin blamed it for “destroying the repertoire and nomenclature of French cooking.” Others denounced it as “the worst thing to have happened to the entire culture of good cooking since the invention of the can opener.”
Julia, for the most part, kept her opinions to herself. Her formal culinary training was entirely haute, but she looked at it always from an American point of view. “When it came to food, her sole criterion was good cooking,” says Jasper White, the Boston chef who later befriended Julia. Still, it was clear the nouvelle concept bewildered her. “Is it a hoax, a public-relations snow job?” she wondered. “Does a new cuisine really exist in France?” She wasn’t prepared to say. As far as she could tell, it wasn’t “a cuisine without the fundamentals, without training in the basics.” There were aspects, however, that were worthy of her opinion. “I don’t like crunchily underdone vegetables,” she objected. The same with meat that was “blood-red and then blue-raw at the bone.” Besides, she was tired of going to a ridiculously expensive restaurant only to be served “the ubiquitous seafood poached with a julienne of carrots, celery, leeks, and a sliver or two of truffle.” That was pipsqueak food, nothing that would satisfy Julia Child. You want to invite her out to dinner, make sure it’s a place where she can dig into œufs en gelée flanked by a chunk of pâté, followed by a well-sauced haunch of meat and a stinky cheese course before dessert. And, brother, don’t forget “a big dollop of thick French cream” on top of that tart.
“All this beating of poor old Escoffier over the head,” she clucked sadly. It was shameful to see him discredited by young culinary mavericks, especially when they owed everything they knew to the master. Still, Julia had enormous respect for some of nouvelle cuisine’s brightest practitioners. The dour Bocuse was, by her measure, “a marvelous marvelous cook,” and no praise was too effusive for Roger Vergé’s “great skill in the kitchen.” Both men were insatiably curious. The worst fate that could befall a chef, in Julia’s estimation, was to “grow stale and jaded”—to become a chef who sacrificed “his own pleasure” in exchange for the safety of a steady clientele.
To some extent, Julia was emulating the young Turks. She had recently brought two mainstays of her career to a decisive end: her writing partnership with Simca (“No More!” she declared. “End of collaboration!”) and The French Chef TV series, which had run its course. After eight years, the demanding shooting schedule had finally grown tiresome—and stale. “It’s just too confining,” she explained to Judith Jones, “and we are really prisoners, unable to do anything else.” It was time for Julia to explore new possibilities—to take what she had done with French cooking and apply it to new realms.
But what? She wasn’t sure. There was another book on the horizon, one of her own, without Simca. Perhaps a few TV specials in tandem with Jim Beard. Promisingly, ABC had offered her a prime time slot for a weekday morning show at a beyond-prime salary, but Julia turned it down, convinced that “all is for housewives in the daytime and that’s not our audience.”
Almost immediately the vultures started circling. Julia’s old nemesis Madeleine Kamman got in touch right away. “Rumor has it that you are retiring,” she wrote, hiding behind the all-too-transparent premise that the life goal of one of her assistants was to replace Julia at WGBH. In fact, Paul had already learned from contacts at the station that Kamman was “spreading stories that ‘poor Julia Child has had a bad operation and can’t possibly continue her French Chef program.’ ” Apparently, she’d made other calls to WGBH, spread other rumors bad-mouthing Julia, in the hope that one day she’d fill Julia’s sizable TV shoes. When a particularly vexing story got back to Julia, she wrote a cautionary letter to her new lawyer: “[Kamman’s] former story about me was that I was mortally ill, and dying. When I didn’t die, she evidently decided to change it to the story that I was an alcoholic.” This needed to be documented, Julia thought, in case it got out of hand. She also warned Simca, who had her own troubles with Kamman. “She is a trouble maker, an immense ego-centric, and I think one should keep as far away from her as possible, always remaining polite, but remote.”
Taking a page from her own playbook, Julia responded to Kamman’s query with acid charm. “Thanks for your letter, and your concern about my ‘imminent retirement,’ ” she wrote. “Neither Paul nor I believe in retirement, so you shall be seeing us around in one guise or another at least until the year 2001.”
Julia could handle this difficult woman; still, the dispute upset her. There was plenty to be said in Madeleine Kamman’s defense. She had grown up cooking, working hard in the trenches, living the life of a serious cook. Both Julia and Paul thought Kamman was “an excellent cook” who deserved wide acclaim. And word had it that she was a damn good teacher. When she opened her cooking school close by, in Newton, Julia gladly sent her a proprietary list of cooks in the Boston area who might throw some business Madeleine’s way and promised to visit as soon as her schedule allowed. (This, despite credible reports that Kamman advised her students “to throw [Mastering] away or not to buy it because it was not authentic.”) But Julia would no longer pretend a personal friendship where one had once rooted. From now on, not even Kamman’s name would be spoken; she was reduced to a figure of speech: “that woman from Newton.”
In any event, after wrapping up the last seventy-two shows, the ones shot in color, Julia turned her attention to a new pet project. There was demand for a sequel to The French Chef Cookbook, both from viewers who appreciated the easier, more informal lessons and from Knopf, which had sold a ton—a ton—of books. Drawing recipes predominantly from the final color shows, the book allowed Julia to spread her wings, veering outside the confines of strictly regional French cooking, while adhering to the French approach. So there was breathing room in its pages for crowd-pleasers like New England chowders, Belgian cookie doughs, curries, and pasta; for ingredients such as soy sauce and provolone cheese; as well as allowances for the microwave, the food processor, and the pressure cooker—all of which would have touched off a firestorm of ce n’est pas français a year earlier.
At least that monkey was off her back. In fact, Simca had her own book deal at Knopf, for a collection of old family recipes—la véritable cuisine française, as she put it, or “the true French cuisine”—and it was no small coincidence that Judith Jones agreed to edit it. With Simca busy working on her own opus, Julia could concentrate on flying solo for a change.
She began by deconstructing the shows, taking a master recipe that she’d perfected and seeing how multiple variations would alter it; making a modest poached salmon in a white-wine stock, for instance, and afterward flaking the fish into a pastry shell, adding three eggs, enough cream, some dill and parsley, and a sprinkling of Swiss cheese to produce a luscious quic
he. Retreating from the rigid scholarship of the Mastering format, she turned to the chatty informality of a cooking school. Yes, a private cooking school. Just Julia and the reader noodling around in the kitchen—Julia Child’s kitchen, to be exact—making something wonderful to eat. No need to call it The French Chef Cookbook, Volume II. That sounded too indistinguishable, too stuffy. Better it should be From Julia Child’s Kitchen.
Julia took the opportunity to stretch out a bit, throwing an anecdote or a personal travel story in with a lesson. There, among the recipes for cheese soufflé and roast leg of lamb was a descriptive reenactment of that first lunch in Rouen at Restaurant La Couronne, of the characters at the Criée aux Poissons in Marseille, where she learned to make bouillabaisse, and a sampling of the hate mail she received for her method of killing lobsters, which, as a result, she now did in a more humane way. It was a refreshing experience for Julia, who, since college, had always wanted to write compelling narrative. For years, she’d always claimed that writing a recipe was demanding, an all-day affair, similar to writing “a little short story that you have to convey to the reader,” but the book gave her the opportunity to take it one step further, blending in personal experiences with what one reviewer called “feisty prose.”
Occasionally, Julia just let it rip. In one anecdote, she recalled meeting “a quite nutty woman” in the fruitcake section of her supermarket who explained how she cooked green beans according to Julia’s technique only on weekends, while the rest of the week she used another chef’s recipe (Julia deleted the culprit’s name), boiling them for fifteen minutes so she could “be sure of getting all my vitamins.” Rather than dismissing the woman as a crackpot, Julia, ever the empiricist, went home and put the process through the paces, ending up with “gray, color-bleached, taste-leached, miserable beans.” She was disgusted, and characteristically blunt. “Anyone … who cons the public into acceptance of such culinary balderdash deserves to be disposed of, bit by bit, in an electric super-blender-food-processor.”