Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  He turned to the front of the book and pointed out what he told me was a favorite photograph—Julia silhouetted in shadow in front of the window in their Marseilles apartment. "Julie looks really good in this," he said, becoming the only person I would ever hear call her Julie. Somehow it instantly revealed the closeness that was theirs and gave me a glimpse of the extremely charming man who had governed Julia's heart for some thirty-four years.

  Paul, Julia, and me in my kitchen.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen, Liz Bishop was perched on a stool—knees crossed, top leg swinging sassily—surveying her surroundings. Liz had been working with Julia since the first television series. They were good friends. She was in her forties, brash and entertaining with a quick, bawdy wit and a sharp tongue that Julia found terribly funny. So did I. Then Liz said something that caught me off guard.

  "You studied with Madeleine?" she asked, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head in the direction of my Modern Gourmet diploma in the bookcase. This was a touchy subject because I knew that there was bad blood between Julia and Madeleine. The times that Madeleine even mentioned Julia in class, it was to say, "She is neither French nor a chef."

  "Yes, I did," I responded, and Liz gave me an inscrutable smile. I gave it my own read: I would be condemned by association and deep-sixed before I got to demonstrate my efficiency or serve my great-grandma Feely's red chowder. But no one said anything more on the subject. Not then, anyway.

  We spent close to an hour in my kitchen, getting to know each other and smiling for Sylvia, who, being Sylvia, had her camera and was snapping photos. Julia talked mostly about the recipes for the demonstrations, describing in detail how she planned to mix this or assemble that. The words perfectly, carefully, and impeccably sifted evenly throughout her descriptions, and I knew she was sending me a message: We don't rush through things. As she spoke, her hands slowly pantomimed cooking motions, and I remember how their expressiveness captured my attention. Julia had very long, graceful fingers, adorned only by a lovely wide gold Tiffany wedding band. When she was imitating a culinary move, she cupped her palms slightly, tightened her knuckles a bit, and splayed her fingers gracefully in a most distinctive gesture. They were artist's hands, chef's tools that never ceased to captivate me. And her eyes intrigued me. They were the most delicate shade of pale blue and glistened as though tears were waiting to appear.

  "The caramel gave us a lot of trouble in the past," she said, referring to the spun-caramel dome that would sit over the cake she was to demonstrate. Although I had never made a caramel dome, I knew the process involved swirling hot caramel with a spoon into a webbed pattern on the exterior of a bowl and, when it cooled, lifting it in one piece off the bowl.

  "How so?" I asked, wondering what problems she had encountered.

  "It kept breaking when we lifted it off the bowl. We tried different bowls, more butter, layers of plastic wrap. In the end, we found the difference was chilling the bowl beforehand."

  It was obvious from her animated discussion that not only had she researched the releasing qualities of caramel with scientific precision, but she had thoroughly enjoyed the research process. It had been thirty-one years since Julia took her first cooking class at the Cordon Bleu, and yet there she was enthusing about learning a technique with the same passion of a first-year culinary student. Her enthusiasm was infectious.

  That evening, at the patrons' gala dinner, I met Julia's assistants, Marian Morash and Sara Moulton. My copy of Marian's The Victory Garden Cookbook, the landmark, definitive work on vegetables, was as worn and stained as my copies of Julia's books. I had watched her on her own television show, The Victory Garden, but I didn't know that she is married to Russ Morash, the director responsible for Julia's successful burst into the television world. Sara, who would go on to become the star of her own shows on the Food Network, is a petite dynamo. I like to call Sara "petite." Since I am only five feet two inches, it's elevating working with someone who's even shorter. Sara looked like a teenager, but I knew she had to be older than that, because it took a lot longer than nineteen years to accumulate her degree of culinary expertise. Since both Marian and Sara had worked with Julia for a number of years and knew her routine well, I expected they would hardly need me for anything more than managing the dishwashing station.

  Liz seated and me getting to know Sara and Marian, while patron Nancy Taylor of Providence looks on.

  The next morning, I stood back and waited for directions.

  "Where should we begin?" Marian asked me. "You're in charge." How generous is that? Marian and Sara intended for me to be the onstage assistant to Julia during the shows, and their instant acceptance of me immediately endeared both women to me.

  Julia's demonstration that afternoon was to be devoted to fast puff pastry, a quicker but no less buttery version of the classically made, multilayered flaky pastry known in French as pâte feuilletée. The classic version calls for spreading masses of butter over a large sheet of pastry dough, pâte brisée, and then folding the two into a package. The butter and pastry package is then rolled and folded, rerolled, and folded again for a total of six times called "turns," with chilling necessary after each turn. Its success depends in great part on the cook's ability to handle the butter so that it maintains the ideal temperature to spread properly through the layers of dough: too cold and shards of it can pierce the dough, too warm and it can ooze out the sides, sticking the dough together and preventing it from separating into flaky layers.

  Julia's recipe for the inevitable bits of uncooked vol-au-vent dough.

  In 1980, we couldn't buy puff pastry in the market, so if we wanted it, we had to make our own. Julia did not invent the faster method, which she called "pâte feuilletée express," but she heralded its use to her audiences so that they would not miss the joys of the layered pastry because they found the classic method daunting. With quick puff pastry, instead of a large sheet of butter spread on top of the pastry, diced pieces are added and blended directly into the flour and water in the bowl of a stand mixer. The dough is then ready for the traditional six turns and folds.

  Julia would then demonstrate a number of delicious and inventive dishes you could cook up once you had rapidly made the dough. She would demonstrate two types of pithiviers, that wickedly rich, two-crusted tart that oozes sumptuousness: one with a sweet almond paste filling and the other with savory ham and cheese. There would be individual patty shells, called bouchées, and a large vol-au-vent shell.

  Typically frugal, she also planned to show how to rework any leftover pieces of pastry into cheese appetizers. Then, a truc I'd never seen before, she would remove the inevitable bits of uncooked dough from the inside of the baked vol-au-vent, puree them with milk, eggs, and cheese, and bake the lot into a nicely puffed and browned sort of vertically challenged soufflé. She called this last dish Ramequin du Juste Milieu.

  All that pastry with its turns and folds, rests, and shaping meant that we were up to our ears in flour and butter with a lot of work to be done before the show, and we all seemed to be in constant motion. Jody Adams, now the award-winning chef of Rialto in the Boston area, was then a young assistant at my cooking school and one member of my team. When I asked her recently what she remembered about those days on the set, she said, "Running. I remember all that running around." This was in no small part because the only water source was the ladies' room, a good distance away from the stage. Julia worked right alongside us, pausing only briefly to take in the aproned army around her and say, "Isn't cooking together fun?"

  When Julia took the stage at two o'clock that afternoon, an excited, chattering audience warmed all six hundred seats of the auditorium. The house lights went up; Julia marched onto the stage and was greeted by a great thunderous applause. She clasped her hands together over her heart and bowed her head in appreciation. The clapping went on and on, and she raised her hands above her head and applauded the audience. Gosh, she was some showman. The audience loved it and rewa
rded her with louder clapping and several whoops.

  Finally, Julia took her place at the demonstration counter and we assistants stood at the back of the stage waiting for her call to arms. Liz was perched on a stool off to the side. I realized that Liz was a non-cooking member of the team, a kind of majordomo in charge of Julia's arrangements and appointments. Unless need pressed her into action, she would remain perched. Ruth sat in the front row of the audience with Paul next to her. He held a small stack of handmade signs lettered with numbers on his lap. He was to keep track of the time and hold up a sign to let Julia know how much time she had left.

  Assisting in a demonstration is all about anticipating. Good assistants know the recipes by heart, pay attention to the order of presentation, and keep their eyes on what utensils need replacing on the set. We were well on top of things as Julia was whizzing her way through making pastry.

  "Ninety minutes!" Paul Child boomed in a loud voice that startled us all. Then the audience went dead quiet. Heads stretched and turned to see who dared cause such a disturbance. It well might have been an awkward, uncomfortable interruption, but Julia seemed neither uncomfortable nor interrupted. She never missed a roll of the pastry.

  "Thank you, Paul," she said, smiling at him, before telling the audience that her husband was keeping time. Just as on the day before, when Paul had scolded me, Julia was not in the least bit embarrassed by his unconventional behavior. She was as unselfconscious and unpretentious in front of an audience as she had been in my kitchen. I had no idea of the years of partnership and romance that went into that simple exchange with Paul, but I saw clearly that Julia had a strong, secure sense of who she was, who they were, and she didn't need to explain or camouflage any odd behavior on or off the stage.

  The demonstration continued smoothly, with all of us now nodding our thanks in Paul's direction for his periodic time reminders. When Julia got to the sweet almond Pithiviers, she put the filling ingredients—sugar, butter, egg, almonds, dark rum, and vanilla and almond extracts—into the food processor and pulsed them into a paste.

  "This has to be well chilled before we put it into the shell to bake," she told the audience as she handed me the bowl. I, in turn, passed it to Brett Frechette, one of the teachers at my cooking school. She was one of the best, a perfectionist. When I handed her the processor bowl, she looked in and whispered to me, "It's separated." I looked down, and sure enough, liquid was seeping out of the paste. It had been mixed too quickly for the flavorings to be absorbed.

  "She can't use it like this," Brett said. I looked back to Julia to see if I could return the paste to her for fixing, but she was already on to the next recipe. And I didn't think I should I disturb her by removing the processor from the set.

  "The blender," Brett and I whispered at the same time, looking at the brand-new donated Waring blender sitting on one of the workstations. The workstations were long, folding tables that we had swathed in green checked banquet cloths that draped to the floor. Brett grabbed the blender and scooted under the table near an electrical source. I gathered the ingredients and slipped them down to Brett, who turned them into a perfect, firm almond paste to replace the unusable, oozing one. The only person who seemed aware of the quiet whirring emanating from beneath the table was Liz, who smiled at me knowingly from her perch.

  Liz on her stool, me at the ready, and Julia with her cake.

  The theme for the next night's demonstration was filling and wrapping. The first recipe was an elaborate creation of artichoke bottoms stuffed with mushroom duxelles, topped with poached eggs, napped with béarnaise sauce, and served on a platter with large, homemade croutons. Whew! Then there would be a whole three-pound fish, cleaned and scaled but with head on, cloaked in brioche dough and baked—Fish en Cloak. The grand finale—and it was grand—was to be the construction of Mlle. Charlotte Malakoff en Cage, a most elaborate rum-soaked génoise, layered and frosted with a whipped-cream chocolate-hazelnut filling, and haloed with the thoroughly tested, perfectly spun caramel dome. That recipe alone covered five pages, and at the end was Julia's simple, understated instruction to "shatter the dome and cut the cake as usual."

  As lunchtime approached, I found myself wondering if my mother's chowder was really as delicious as I thought. Too late to do anything about it. Volunteers had set up a long table with china, silver, linens, and an empty space for the large pot of soup that my mother was, at that very moment, carrying down the aisle. Rhode Island has three native chowders: a clear broth with clams and potatoes, a creamy white chowder usually called New England clam chowder, and a red one, which, since there are no carrots, celery, or herbs, is not at all like Manhattan clam chowder. Our Rhode Island version is made with salt pork, both quahogs and clams, tomatoes, and potatoes and served with a pitcher of hot milk and pilot crackers.

  Great-Grandma Feely's Rhode Island Red Clam Chowder

  11⁄4 quarts hard-shelled clams, combination of quahogs and cherrystones, scrubbed

  1⁄8 pound salt pork, diced

  1 large onion, finely chopped

  6 large russet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1⁄4-inch cubes

  6 to 8 large ripe garden tomatoes, finely chopped, or one 28-ounce can Italian peeled plum tomatoes, drained and finely chopped

  Salt and ground black pepper, as needed

  For serving:

  Pitcher of warm milk

  Pilot crackers

  1. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a deep pot. Add the quahogs, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in cherrystone clams and continue to cook for 5 to 10 minutes or until the shells open. Remove all the clams with a slotted spoon and set aside. Strain the broth twice through a fine-mesh sieve or paper coffee filters. There should be about 1 quart of broth; if not add warm water.

  2. Render the salt pork in a large soup pot and when the fat melts, stir in the onions. Cook over medium-low heat until the onions are translucent and soft; do not let brown. Add the potatoes, tomatoes and broth and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer about 20 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Meanwhile, finely mince the quahogs and coarsely chop the cherrystone clams. When the potatoes are tender, stir all the clams into the chowder just to reheat, about a minute. Season with pepper and taste for salt though none should be needed. Serve the chowder with the pitcher of warm milk and pilot crackers.

  Note: Quahogs or quahaugs give chowder great flavor, but they are tough so be sure to chop them very fine. My grandmother put them through a meat grinder, and my mother pulsed them in a food processor.

  Julia stepped down from the stage to greet my mother, Billie Higgins Verde, who was beaming. My mother was Irish, and her family's food—primarily corned beef and cabbage and codfish balls served with homemade baked beans on Sunday mornings—took a lot of ribbing from my Italian father's family. For her to serve her Irish family's chowder and not lasagna to Julia Child was a real coup—more so when Julia asked for a second bowl.

  That evening, the demonstration began as it had the day before, with much applause and cheering. In spite of the elaborate menu, it was, so to speak, Child's play for Julia. She whipped through cloaking the fish, spinning the caramel, raffling off the finished dishes, and auctioning off the stage equipment.

  But there was more. As I would come to know, a Julia show is not over when the Julia show is over. There were fans to greet, books and aprons to sign, and photos to be taken. Julia left the stage and sat at a table facing long lines of admirers waiting for autographs and a word with her. Some approached her laden with an entire collection of Julia Child cookbooks; others held only the program from the demonstration or an apron they had hastily purchased. They lingered, telling Julia how she'd changed their culinary lives, recounting tales of their own kitchen disasters, sharing family recipes, asking Julia what was her favorite recipe, favorite restaurant, favorite anything. Julia listened attentively, commented graciously, and answered all questions except those about favorites. "That's a media-type question," she'd say with her index finge
r raised. "I don't answer those."

  Jody Adams, Marian Morash, Julia, Paul, Sara Moulton, me, Liz Bishop, and my assistants Jocelyn Hamblett and Sylvia Walker Quinn saying soufflé.

  It was taking a long time after an already long day. When one man babbled on, giving a cup-by-tablespoon description of his great-aunt Ethel's orange cake, I was ready to scream. Julia asked him what kind of baking pan Great-aunt Ethel used. Where did she get the energy?

  At last, with all the books signed and the last fan satisfied, Julia gathered the kitchen teams together for a group photo.

  "Say cheese," the photographer instructed.

  "No. Say souf-flé," Julia corrected, overstressing the second syllable.

  "Soufflé?" I asked, wondering if Julia had randomly chosen a French word. Could we just as readily say quiche or canard?

  Liz, Marian, Ruth, Sara, Paul, and of course Julia were probably hoping someone would ask because, practically in unison, they looked at me, raised their voices, and said "Souf-flé! See? You have to smile to say it right."

  We smiled our "souf-flé" together and then sadly said goodbye.

  Julia's letter to me after the Planned Parenthood event.

  A few months later Liz Bishop telephoned me. I wasn't surprised to hear from her, since we'd made a nice connection when she was in Providence and had promised to stay in touch. She invited me to Boston, to lunch with Julia, and Julia had a question that did surprise me. Marian was working on a second book, was involved with her own television show, and had a growing family that needed more of her time, so she could not commit to all the work Julia needed. Was I available to work with the Julia team? And, just like that, I hopped on Julia's cart. I would be saying "souf-flé" with her for the next twenty-four years.

  Chapter 2

  Look with favor upon a bold beginning.