by Ann Mah
From the roof deck of the Maison du Charolais, Bouchot and I surveyed the lush pastures of the region, divided by hedgerows and dotted with white cows. The animals dominated the landscape in the same way that vines characterized the Côte d’Or.
“Does meat represent Burgundy?” I asked Bouchot as we gazed at the view.
He hesitated. “Wine is more attractive.”
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In her memoir, My Life in France, Julia talks about a trip she and her husband, Paul Child, made to Burgundy in 1949, lingering in “valley towns whose names sounded like a carillon: Montrachet, Pommard, Vougeot, Volnay, Meursault, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Beaune.” She doesn’t mention boeuf bourguignon, but I thought of her as I ate it there, admiring the tender melt of the beef, the tang of its sauce, making a few mental notes to my own recipe as I wiped my plate clean with a piece of bread.
I had known about Julia’s recipe for boeuf bourguignon ever since I was a little girl, when my dad used to cook it for parties. I used to sit on the kitchen counter and watch him wield his Chinese cleaver, shouting “Bang the garlic, Daddy!” when he brought the side of his blade down on an unpeeled clove. Over the years he melded Julia’s recipe with one for Provençal daube from Sunset magazine—adding black olives and orange peel to the wine and beef—but her fleur-de-lis-covered book was still the one he consulted for questions on French technique. It maintained a place of honor on our kitchen bookshelf, an authority on timing and temperature, on the right kind of cooking equipment to buy, on the best way to trim an artichoke or line a charlotte mold with ladyfingers.
I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, but cooking shows were different, educational. My dad and I sometimes watched Julia together, each of us inspired by her confident, clear instructions. One Friday night when I was about thirteen, my parents had some friends over for dinner, and my father and I decided to make a Grand Marnier soufflé for dessert. I prepared the base before everyone arrived, whisking the flour into warmed milk, dropping egg yolks into the liquid and watching it thicken over the heat. I rubbed sugar cubes over a “bright-skinned orange”—as Julia specified—and released a faint mist of citrusy oil that clung to my fingers. Midway through the meal, my dad nudged me and we slipped to the kitchen to whip the egg whites and fold them into the base. The electric beaters whined over the conversation in the dining room, but though I whisked and whisked, the egg whites refused to form stiff peaks. The plastic bowl probably hadn’t been squeaky-clean enough.
“What would Julia do?” my dad asked me.
“Start over?”
“She’s not a perfectionist.”
“She would use them anyway,” I said reluctantly. And so we folded the drooping clouds of white into the warmed bouillie sauce, turned the mixture into our sugared mold, and placed it in the oven. The word souffle means “breath” in French. Did they name the dish soufflé because you hold your breath for the entire twenty minutes that it bakes? When the timer rang, we rushed to the oven. The soufflé’s golden surface had risen just above the rim of the dish, but it was a shaky puff, nervous and unsure. When we removed the dish from the heat, the soufflé started to slump like a sulky teenager. “Serve it!” my dad urged. “Hurry!”
We rushed the dish to the dining table and scooped portions onto every plate. The texture was all wrong—like a spongy flan edged with grainy sugar rather than an airy cloud—but the orange flavor was bright and sweet, almost flowery, darkened by the boozy edge of Grand Marnier. “Mmmm!” exclaimed Mrs. Chang, the ninety-three-year-old mother-in-law of my mom’s friend Janet. Thus far she had picked her way through the Chinese dinner my father had made—when you’re ninety-three, you don’t have much appetite, I suppose—but now she gobbled up her dessert.
“You like it? Ann made it,” my dad told her. She smiled, but I wasn’t sure if she’d understood him. Mrs. Chang was as sharp as a mandoline, but she didn’t speak much English and my dad spoke no Mandarin.
When we had finished eating, I rose to clear the dessert plates, reaching past Mrs. Chang’s unnaturally jet-black head to move the soufflé dish. I felt her hand grasp my arm, stilling me with a surprisingly firm grip. A voice said something in Chinese. “She wants you to leave it,” said my mom. “Leave the dish.”
I placed the dish in front her, and all of us at the table watched as Mrs. Chang took her spoon and scraped out every last morsel of imperfect soufflé. In my head I heard Julia’s high-pitched, slightly madcap, swooping voice: Never apologize.
That was the first time Julia had inspired me—as the careful, methodical teacher who broke down recipes step by step, illustrating that even the most complicated were possible as long as you were thorough. And if something went wrong, as things inevitably did, she simply patched up her mistake and ate the dish anyway without apology or embarrassment.
The second time came a few years later, during a cold, damp winter, my first on the East Coast. I had just graduated from college in California and moved to Boston to work as an assistant at a book-publishing company. I lived in a lightly heated apartment, with roommates I’d met through an ad in the Boston Globe, made $18,500 a year, and subsisted on rice and beans. For entertainment I relied heavily on the public library, which is where I found Noël Riley Fitch’s biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life.
On the book’s original dust jacket, Julia’s face appeared younger and moodier than her television persona. I kept glancing back at the photograph as I read, absorbed by a tale that has by now become the stuff of legend: the awkward girlhood in California, the string of unsuccessful careers, the classified job in the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), the post in China during World War II, her romance with Paul Child, their assignment in Paris, her gastronomic blossoming, her astonishing late-in-life success.
I loved Julia’s story of reinvention and determination. But I was twenty-three and still in the middle of my own invention. It would be years before I felt the resonance of Julia’s tale, before I experienced just how profoundly a change in circumstances could alter a course, or provoke a transformation.
For Julia that change was her husband. Her life blossomed after their marriage, shifting from one of secretarial work and badly cooked meals to passion and glorious food. He was the great love of her life, the reason she came to France, the inspiration behind her cooking. “I would have never have had my career without Paul Child,” she wrote in My Life in France.
Before our move to China, my friend Erin, the wife of one of Calvin’s foreign-service colleagues, warned me about life at post. “Prepare yourself for the 1950s,” she’d said. I nodded even though I had no idea what she was talking about. But once in Beijing, I quickly found out. I found out at the embassy orientation, where my name tag was preprinted with my husband’s last name. I found out at the coffee mornings that gathered accompanying spouses—almost all women, almost all unemployed—for a few hours of light gossip followed by lunch and shopping. I found out every time my hostess introduced me—not as Ann but as Calvin-from-the-political-section’s-wife. I found out when people asked me at parties, “What do you do?” and I could only mumble about a job I used to have.
Even though I loved being married to Calvin, even as I relished our cozy, exclusive domesticity, the weekday hours stretched before me long and purposeless. Oh, I had plenty to do—cooking, cleaning, sightseeing, lunching—but even as I went through the motions, I felt drowned by this new life, one that defined me by my husband’s job, not my own. It was, I knew, hopelessly American to link my identity and self-worth to a career. But I was American, the product of an immigrant mother who went back to her job as a doctor a few weeks after I was born. The idea of spending the rest of my life without a career made me feel as if I’d amputated a limb.
And yet my husband was a diplomat—the very word was synonymous with frequent overseas transfers. And anyone who has ever accompanied a partner on an overse
as transfer knows that nothing slows your own career more quickly. For a while I wallowed in Kafkaesque existentialism. At least I wasn’t alone in my predicament. Diplomacy has been called the world’s second-oldest profession, and ever since the sixteenth century—and maybe even before—other wives of diplomats have endured similar existential crises, fading into obscurity while their husbands’ achievements were recorded in history. Perhaps, then, that is why I turned to Julia for inspiration for a third time, not just because she loved food, and had also lived in China, and was also a trailing spouse, just like me—but because I was looking for proof that professional success and marriage to a diplomat were not mutually exclusive.
It was Paul’s work as a diplomat that took the couple to Paris in 1948, an assignment that would surround Julia with some of the best food in the world and launch her on the path to a legendary career. She didn’t know that then, though. As she toiled away in a basement classroom at the Cordon Bleu, perfecting the fundamental mother sauces and pâte brisée, she had no idea that one day she would demonstrate those same techniques on American television to audiences of millions. No, she practiced them because they lay at the root of traditional French cuisine and because she was committed—deeply, seriously committed—to learning to cook it.
Julia fell in love with Paris—“I shall never find anyplace more to my tastes,” she wrote—reveling in its markets and cafés, the way a famous monument like Notre Dame could loom suddenly out of the misty distance. She started teaching cooking classes and collaborating with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, on the book that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a massive project that consumed her for almost a decade. But foreign-service posts last only a few years. In 1953 the Childs moved to Marseille, and then Bonn; Washington, D.C.; Oslo; and Cambridge, Massachusetts—six moves in just thirteen years. And with each move came a new house, new friends, a new community, a new life.
Julia had a project and a path, but reading her letters I thought I could sense her anxiety—“From the point of view of cooking career, [it’s] a real blow”—she wrote to her friend and literary mentor, Avis DeVoto, about the move to Marseille. Or, “We are both just sick about this move,” as she and Paul packed for Bonn. Or, “You can prepare yourself to enter a new culture, but the reality always takes some getting used to,” as they arrived in Oslo.
I recognized her apprehension from my own, the same atomic cloud of unease that mushroomed over me every time Calvin and I discussed our next move, studying the list of open assignments and trying to find the perfect place that offered interesting work for both of us, despite our wildly disparate fields. I felt lucky to have found a path of my own to nurture and climb, one strewn with small triumphs and messy disappointments. I knew I was lucky to have a portable job that I loved, one enlivened by our itinerant lifestyle, one made possible by Calvin’s emotional and breadwinning support. And yet each move was a stark reminder of the things that couldn’t be packed into boxes and sent on a transport ship: contacts, friends, inspiration, the daily routine that was my life.
Sometimes it felt like an opportunity; sometimes it felt like an injunction. Sometimes I felt like chattel, a numbered item on my husband’s official orders; sometimes I felt we were a team, more powerful together than alone. Always I tried to remind myself of Julia, remembering her staccato, self-mocking tone when she became a little maudlin. “Too bad.” “C’est la vie.” “WOE.”
Julia and Paul left France in 1954, a departure that she described in her memoir as “painful” (though, in classic Julia fashion, she enthused over “an honest-to-goodness American steak” in the very next breath). I understood her sorrow, because I felt it myself. I had been dreading leaving my beloved, beautiful France ever since the day I found out we were moving there. When Calvin returned from Baghdad, we would have two years in Paris before we moved somewhere else. And then we’d do it again, and again, and again, every two, or three, or four years until he retired.
“This is Paul’s career, and if he wants to stay in it, we’ve just got to resign ourselves to abrupt changes,” wrote Julia to her friend Avis. “Trouble is, neither of us likes to move around at all. We dig in with our paints and pots, as though it were for a century.” I wondered if Julia ever dreamed of a house, a place that didn’t get packed and unpacked every thirty-six months, a place where she knew every creak of the floorboards, where she could reach for the kettle and make a cup of tea without turning on the kitchen lights, where the children she never had left small, muddy footprints in the hallway, a place drifting with the happy ghosts of countless meals cooked by her own hands. A permanent place. A home.
There was a poem, “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer, that I thought about sometimes when the gnaw for permanence became ferocious. In it the narrator contemplates the life that might have been.
It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives.
I missed them, too. A house I’d never seen, its entry hall papered in mad toile prints. A kitchen hung with copper saucepans. The hairdresser who knew my daughter’s favorite ice-cream flavor. Friends who dropped by and stayed for dinner. Business cards that I could print in batches of ten thousand. Colleagues who surprised me with carrot cupcakes on my birthday. And, probably, a career in an office, and not as a writer. Long weekends in Florida, not Luang Prabang. Perhaps no books published, no second, or third, languages spoken. Quite possibly no Calvin.
Nine years earlier I met Calvin and made a choice to live a peripatetic life instead of a more permanent one. I had made my decision, and knee-deep in the glorious, messy minutiae of our daily existence I didn’t regret it. Still, when things got challenging—when the idea of moving to another foreign country and learning another foreign language exhausted instead of excited me, when the loneliness of being new again clawed at me, when Calvin and I fought about our choices instead of compromising—it was easy to dream about that other, steadfast world, where things rarely changed. It seemed so wide open, so rich with the possibility of deep friendships, with attics that I could fill to overflowing, with career opportunities that could grow out of running into someone every morning at the coffee shop.
But when my perspective shifted back to reality, I knew there couldn’t be a world wider than mine, ringed with adventure yet anchored with love’s safe harbor. It was love for Calvin, and his love for me, that made me choose this vagabond life. It was love that made us support each other, and it was love that made us listen to each other, and it was because of love that we agreed to compromises—like going to Baghdad for a year—that didn’t feel good but maybe, possibly, turned out to be the best decisions after all. Calvin and I didn’t have a permanent address to call our own, but instead we had made the world our home. We’d left pieces of ourselves behind in each place we lived, and perhaps we were stronger together—and stronger individuals—because of it.
Of course, it still sailed next to me, that parallel life—it would always sail next to me—as full of joy and challenge as the one I was living. I thought of it sometimes, pale and chilled—lit by a satellite moon, not the sun of reality—a ghostly ship charting a route to what might have been, while I remained on the course of what was.
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The Château du Clos de Vougeot is the kind of haughty building that couldn’t be anything but a château, an immense stone structure looming over a sea of well-tended Côte de Nuits vines. Founded in the eleventh century by the thin hands of Cistercian monks, the vineyard had produced fifty thousand bottles a year in its heyday, a veritable ocean of wine for the period. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson stopped there on his journey to observe the monks’ prodigious winemaking process with an eye toward importing it to the United States. Over the years he would ask his wine adviser, Étienne Parent, to include Burgundy vine clippings with his shipments of wine, in the hope of
cultivating them in Virginia soil.
Today the château houses a museum and a conference center, as well as the headquarters of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a prestigious wine club. But the monks’ industry is still evident in the enormous fifteenth-century grape presses on view in the covered courtyard, the cavernous fermentation vats that stand in the cuverie, and the sweeping ground-floor cellar, built to store two thousand casks.
In 1790, only a few years after Jefferson’s visit, the French Revolution removed the monks from the château and confiscated the property from the Church. Several families owned the estate until 1889, when the 124 acres of vineyards were separated from the buildings, divided, and sold to several producers. The land is currently split among more than eighty owners. The monks have long disappeared. The cuverie and caves where they toiled have been dry for centuries. Two hundred twenty-five years, a vine-ravaging epidemic, and several wars separate us from Jefferson’s visit. And yet the Château du Clos de Vougeot remains a symbol of the Côte d’Or. Today it is a veritable embassy of Burgundy wine, represented by the twelve thousand members of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin.
One afternoon I visited the château and met with its director, Richard Fussner, and head chef, Olivier Walch. As we sat in one of the Renaissance-era meeting rooms, a Confrérie delegation milled around in the gravel courtyard, occasionally breaking into loud refrains of the “Ban de Bourgogne,” the semimusical Burgundian battle cry, which is accompanied by choreographed clapping and hand gestures.
“The Confrérie’s mission is to promote Burgundy’s products, protect its viticulture, and, also, to promote a certain art de vivre,” said Fussner as a tuneless chorus drifted in through the window. “Being a member is like being an ambassador for Burgundy’s wine, culture, and cuisine.”