Laura Shapiro

by Julia Child

  Julia was adamant that her programs be aired in prime time, not only for the prestige but because having men in the audience made her work legitimate in her own eyes. Daytime television attracted only housewives—“And that’s not our audience,” she often said. Her audience, of course, was overwhelmingly female and packed with housewives, but when Julia said “housewife,” she meant someone who didn’t take food and cooking seriously. She knew very well there were countless women who weren’t “housewives” in this sense; nonetheless, all “housewives” were women. If improvements were under way in American cooking and eating habits, it had to be men who deserved the credit. “Thank heaven for the men in our TV audience,” she remarked in 1966. “They are responsible for stimulating interest in cooking. The women would just pass it over.” When an interviewer asked her what she would say to young brides starting to cook, Julia’s advice was to think about what men like to eat. “It will keep you away from those horrible gooky casseroles covered with canned mushroom soup and cornflakes,” she went on. “Men don’t like that stuff, and men are the people you want to feed.” And, she added, be sure to buy solid, high-quality knives. “Just because the housewife doesn’t know a great deal about equipment, she is often, unfortunately, taken in by glitter. If she went with her husband, he would not allow her to get a lot of this sort of flimsy junk, knives that are pretty.” Women were too easily intimidated in the kitchen, Julia believed; they panicked if the recipe called for three tablespoons of lemon juice and they had only two. Men were fearless—in fact, men were accustomed to bullying, she once noted, which could be a very useful trait when faced with a recipe.

  But while she was confident that men would have a good influence on the American home kitchen, their growing visibility in the culinary profession was a touchier subject. Yes, an infusion of talented male chefs was exactly what the profession needed in order to gain stature and respectability. But the ambitious young men taking up cooking included a number of homosexuals, and Julia feared they would soon define the profession, keeping straight men away. “It is like the ballet filled with homosexuals, so no one else wants to go into it.” She urged a few close friends in the food world to encourage the “de-fagification” of cooking, but admitted that she had no idea how to go about it—and besides, “fags” bought plenty of cookbooks, including hers. “What to do!”

  What she did, in the end, was generously support the career aspirations of every gifted cook who came her way—male or female, “normal” or not. Her devotion to “real male men” ran deep, but her appreciation for good cooking ran deeper still, and at this level she was entirely free of prejudice. Richard Olney, the moody American living on a Provençal hillside whose brilliant cooking impressed even the French, was a homosexual and not particularly friendly to Julia or most other people; she, in turn, never took to him personally. Yet she gave a press party when he published Simple French Food and used all her contacts to help him promote it, simply because his work was so outstanding. Another very skilled male cook of her acquaintance was “on the soft and wandlike side, feminine, but nicely so”: this was a rare instance when she praised such traits in a man. And though she distanced herself from the women’s movement in general, she spoke out readily against sex discrimination in the culinary profession. “You know, it wasn’t until I began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed to women,” she told a reporter in 1970. “It’s very unfair. It’s absolutely restricted. You can’t get into the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven! The big hotels, the fancy New York restaurants, don’t want women chefs.” Her remark drew indignant letters from the director and the dean of women at the institute, pointing out that there were fully a dozen women among some 650 students. (“Julia and her sister Women’s Lib advocates might also be pleased to hear that, if they don’t get married first, each female has at least five good job offers by graduation.”) By 1976, the institute had moved to Hyde Park, New York, and was doing so much better in regard to women that Julia agreed to speak at graduation. “Finally we have found out that women are people,” she told the crowd. “It’s a useful thing to know.” In her own profession, she was a feminist in spite of herself: she simply would not put up with any injustice that threatened to deprive the world of a good chef. Julia funded scholarships for female culinary students, encouraged them to write to her about their progress, did a great deal of networking on behalf of young women chefs, and dispensed quantities of advice and encouragement. For her Master Chefs programs, she made a point of inviting male and female chefs in equal numbers; and she worked her media connections tirelessly to help cookbook writers she admired.

  Julia’s tangled sensibility about sex, gender, and food relaxed a good deal in the warmth of her friendship with James Beard, whom she loved and admired above anyone else in the American culinary world. Beard, a homosexual who neither hid nor flaunted his orientation, was widely recognized as the nation’s leading authority on good cooking when Julia set out on her career. When she, Paul, and Simca went to New York for the launch of Mastering, Beard invited them to his house in Greenwich Village; and Julia very quickly recognized a soul mate. It was not an obvious match: Beard was self-taught, not professionally trained; his expertise was in American cookery, not French; and besides being homosexual, he was so extremely fat that he had none of the physical charms Julia normally liked in a man. But the two of them forged a bond that lasted until his death in 1985. They were both magnetic people, and when they turned that magnetism upon each other, they were captured simultaneously. Both were sharp, funny, and unpretentious; and both of them felt the same way about cooking—that it was endlessly and profoundly fascinating, that it deserved all the time and intelligence they could command, and that it was the greatest fun imaginable. A few months after they met, he was urging her to consider teaching at his school and touring with him so they could give joint lecture-demonstrations; she in turn wanted him to come to Boston and meet the people at WGBH—perhaps he could become involved in her new television series. “I would very much welcome the idea of doing something together,” she told him. “I sense une grande sympathie spirituelle!” Beard was Julia’s model for how to be a professional and how to be famous. She never forgot how generous he was when she arrived on the scene in 1961, a potential rival whom he greeted enthusiastically and introduced to everybody. “I think he has done much to set the tone of friendliness among cooking types, which is so different from that sniping and back-biting that goes on in France,” Julia told M. F. K. Fisher. “Jim is such a hard worker, has such a vast store of knowlege in that enormous frame. There is outwardly some bluff in him, but I think that is because he is very tender inside.” She used to say he was “cozy”—one of her favorite qualities in a man.

  Julia rarely commented on Beard’s homosexuality; she was far more concerned about the various health problems associated with his weight. Yet her homophobia came and went during their long friendship, apparently at random. “Good that people are out of the closet at last!” she noted in her journal in 1974, upon learning that an acquaintance was openly gay. “Makes things easier all around.” A year later, she was agitating to keep “them” out of the culinary business. But by the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis began to unfold, the horror of what was happening to people she knew, and people she loved, dealt a significant blow to her longtime prejudice. “Last year my husband and I stood by helplessly while a dear and beloved friend went through months of slow and frightening agony,” she told a crowd at Boston Garden in 1988 during an AIDS benefit sponsored by the American Institute of Wine and Food. “But what of those lonely ones? Those impoverished ones with no friends or family to ease the slow pain of dying? Those are the people we’re concerned about this evening. And food is of very special importance here. Good food is also love.” Her politics, her passions, and her fundamental decency were coming together at last. Some time after that, when a woman friend told her she was in love and about to marry another woman, Julia blanched for a second and t
hen congratulated her warmly. What was important was the team.

  Chapter 6

  I Am Getting Very Tired of Kiwi Fruit

  JULIA WAS SO enthusiastic about the idea of the National Beef Cook-Off, an annual cooking contest sponsored by the beef industry, that, in 1979, she agreed to be a judge and flew to Omaha. There were forty-nine beef dishes in competition, each a prizewinner at the state level, and the judges sat in a closed-off dining room tasting and discussing two dishes every half hour for two days. At 10:45 a.m. the first day, Julia finally tasted something she liked (Greek Beef Stew with Herb Biscuits), but the rest of the day proved disappointing. “Good idea—bad cook,” she jotted on her scoring sheet after trying Pot ’n Cot Roast, and although she herself enjoyed Cantonese Beef Dinner, none of the other judges did. The next day started hopefully—Saucy Beef Taco Pizza was a success—but she let Mariachi Beefballs and Farmer Brown’s Steak Supreme pass without comment. Best in show, she decided, was Fiesta Crepes en Casserole: cornmeal crepes stuffed with a mixture of beef, canned tomato sauce, canned creamed corn, and readymade taco seasoning mix. A year later, Julia was back, enthusiasm undimmed, but after several rounds of tasting, she began to lose patience. “How to ruin a good piece of meat,” she wrote next to Grilled Hawaiian Chuck Steak. Looking over the recipe for Spicy and Saucy Stuffed Round Steak, she scribbled, “What is ‘beef sausage,’ what is ‘red cooking wine’?” One entry after another fell flat: “Tastes of the can.” “Dead ‘packaged’ taste.” “No real taste.” First prize that year went to Baked Beef Brisket, made with only salt, pepper, garlic, onions, cornstarch, and water. “Tastes like food!” Julia noted gratefully.

  She never returned to the Cook-Off, but she never gave up, either. Julia had a long, complicated relationship, much like a marriage, with American food. She was committed to it, and genuinely attracted, but the shortcomings, the character flaws, the willful misbehavior, and the sorry failures were constantly greeting her at the door. Thanks to a nature wonderfully capable of absorbing bad news with goodwill, her faith remained strong; but it was tested often. And if Mariachi Beefballs constituted one sort of betrayal, a bare slab of grilled fish surrounded by undercooked baby vegetables constituted another, perhaps worse. Sometimes it seemed to her that the food was becoming less and less appealing, even as Americans grew more sophisticated. “I am getting very tired of kiwi fruit and little juliennes of leeks,” she said wearily in 1980. But she didn’t tire of tuna fish sandwiches on rye. Or canned corned beef hash. Or hot dogs or chocolate ice cream sodas. And though she blanched at the sight of one of the Cook-Off entries—flapjacks folded over ground beef, garnished with strawberries, and doused with maple syrup—she dutifully tasted it. Then she brightened up, pronounced it delicious, and devoured the whole serving.

  Julia had always been restless within the confines of traditional French cooking, especially during the years when she was becoming famous for it. To be sure, whenever she was working on a recipe with a recognized French name and heritage, she remained as faithful as possible to “le vrai” or “the real thing.” Trying to re-create in Cambridge the Burgundian specialty of parslied ham in aspic, for instance, she found she had forgotten precisely how it should taste, and put the recipe aside until she could get back to France and restore her taste memory. But if she was simply pondering chicken, or dessert, or something good to eat, she relaxed. To her, French cooking wasn’t a list of rules and ingredients, it was a set of techniques and a certain frame of mind. “I will never do anything but French cooking,” she told Time in 1966, when she was being interviewed for the cover story. “It is much the most interesting and the most challenging and the best eating.” She made this declaration, the magazine reported, “with Francophilic fervor.” But a year or so earlier, for The French Chef she had invented a dessert she called fantasie bourbonnaise—peanuts, brown sugar, canned apricots, sliced bananas, and bourbon. “I just make up all the titles, as you can see,” she told Simca cheerfully. By this time she was also employing instant mashed potatoes on occasion, stuffing crepes with whatever sounded appealing and setting them on fire (“People always seem to like this”), and rooting around for a decent paella recipe, testing French, Spanish, and American versions before settling on what she termed paella à la Julia. It all tasted good, and to her way of thinking, it was all French even if it wasn’t “kweezeene.” She had been trained in France, her training shaped everything she did in the kitchen, and as long as she didn’t pass off her inventions as time-honored recipes, she felt confident she was being true to what was important about French food. One day on The French Chef, she tossed spaghetti with chopped walnuts, olives, pimiento, and basil and called it spaghetti Marco Polo, urging viewers to eat it with chopsticks. Authentic? Sure, she argued: it was an authentically French way to think about dinner. “Taking ordinary everyday ingredients, and with a little bit of love and imagination, turning them into something appealing”—that was how the French cooked, she said, and that was how she cooked.

  Nevertheless, every time the “Lasagne” and “Paella” programs were shown, or the “Curry Dinner” program, viewers were aghast. “You should be requested with all possible speed to confine yourself to the type of cooking you know well and leave the cuisines of other countries to those who know and respect it,” wrote a typical distraught fan. Julia kept trying to explain—“It is the idea of lasagne, freed from ethnic restrictions and limitations,” she wrote back—but this satisfied nobody. After 1972, when the last series of French Chef programs was taped, the word French disappeared from the titles of her books and television shows.

  When it came to culinary technique, however, Julia was firm: this had to be French. Nothing else would do, because, as she often explained, French cuisine was the only one that had precise terminology and definite rules, an actual body of knowledge to be taught. Once you learned the rules, you could apply them to any other cuisine in the world. This parochial attitude toward cooking was very different from her wide-open attitude toward eating. Cooking appealed to her when she could imagine herself working within a clear intellectual structure, like a scientist of the sensual, mind and hands and palate fully engaged. A cuisine based on fresh ingredients handled minimally might produce wonderful meals, but it had no kitchen interest for her; and a cuisine that claimed its own complex technique—Chinese, for instance—she figured had to be French at heart. Julia had come to know and love Chinese food during her OSS years, and it remained her second-favorite cuisine, but as far as she was concerned, the best way to become a Chinese cook was to become a French cook first. “You would have already learned the basic ways to chop things up, and you’d just have to change your technique a bit to chop it up Chinese,” she said blithely. As for Italian food, it could be very good to eat, but dropping pasta into boiling water was far too simple a procedure to result in what she called “food-type food.” It was the French who had turned lasagna into something truly delicious. In fact, Julia remarked, when-ever the French appropriated dishes from other countries, they always improved on the original. Like the chefs and Gourmettes who had been her guiding lights when she was learning to cook, Julia knew one true path and stuck to it. When aspiring chefs wrote her to ask where they should study, she always advised France, and she did her best to monitor French culinary schools so that her recommendations would be up-to-date. Here, in the realm of education, was the “Francophilic fervor” that Time had remarked upon. To learn cooking, to learn to dine with pleasure in a civilized manner, to learn the proper role of food in the life of a nation—France was the best classroom.

  But it was very much a classroom and not a shrine. For all the rapture of her own introduction to France, and the pleasure she and Paul took in their beloved home in Provence, she had no patience with American food lovers who saw France through a fog of sentiment. The notion that French food, and French life, existed on some immeasurably blissful plateau unreachable by cloddish Americans was ridiculous to her. The whole point of learning the rules o
f French cooking was that they resulted in French food: there was nothing unreachable about the experience and no reason why home cooks couldn’t re-create it in Pittsburgh.

  The standard for lyrical evocations of culinary France had been set by M. F. K. Fisher, whose passionate following among food lovers and devotees of distinctive prose gave her the aura of a literary saint, especially after her first five books were republished as The Art of Eating in 1954. Julia admired Fisher’s writing, and the two women were affectionate friends; but they had almost nothing in common except their fascination with food. Julia was a teacher: she liked clarity, facts, objectivity. Fisher was a writer from the school of impressionism: she liked artfulness, nuance, emotion. Their differences finally clashed in the mid-sixties, when Julia agreed to act as a “consultant and reader-over” on The Cooking of Provincial France, the first cookbook in a lavish new international series planned by Time-Life. M. F. K. Fisher had agreed to write the text. Her draft of the cookbook’s introductory chapter was swept through with idyllic imagery: French housewives cooking by the seasons, markets full of delectable fresh produce, the family gathering daily for a multicourse midday dinner, old and young embraced by a glowing tradition that was forever France. Julia couldn’t bear the rose-colored glasses. “She is seeing France from pre World War II eyes,” she complained to Simca. Worse, in Julia’s estimation, was the fact that France came off so splendidly in part because Fisher constantly compared it with America at its dreariest, as if nobody in the United States did anything at mealtimes but wolf down TV dinners. In her comments to Time-Life, Julia said Fisher was writing far too romantically. True, France was not yet enslaved to convenience, but changes were under way everywhere. “They are mechanizing in a French way, but those super markets, TV sets, dehydrated mashed potatoes and frozen fish are there to stay,” she told the editors. At Julia’s insistence, Fisher pulled back somewhat, but the final text was vivid with her conviction that French culinary tradition was rooted in French character and would never be fundamentally altered.