Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  When Julia asked specifically for suggestions, I gave them. Let me amend that. I zealously gave them. I recently had a good laugh when I discovered copies of my letters to Julia among her papers at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge. In offering my suggestions, I was, as Liz Bishop would say, like the man who knew how to spell banana but didn't know when to stop. In response to her program list that began with "I have thought of the following eleven for Gd. Morning (but haven't done anything more than think, as follows: 1) Lentils 2) Sausage cakes 3) Meat Loaf (Do you have any great ideas?? I like beef and sausage, and think it useful for leftover meat)" and ended with "But I don't have any desserts here—any ideas?? . . . would welcome the comments from our Exec. Chef!" I sent back three handwritten pages that contained every thought I had ever entertained about the subjects: "I adore lentils—didn't Esau sell Jacob his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup? My grandmother used to make the most wonderful pasta e fagioli soup with lentils, macaroni, sausage, tomatoes, onions—heavenly. Cold lentil salad is good—and of course just lentils hot with butter, walnuts or pine nuts." I droned on about sausage cakes and meat loaf, even suggested having GMA purchase a meat grinder, and then I went on to desserts. "You have never made a crème anglais on GMA . . . you could serve it over poached fruit or macerated orange slices—or stabilize it for something like those wonderful individual size tarte St. Tropez . . . or a trifle with bananas and nuts. " I wasn't finished. I still had Indian pudding, the great American brownie, applesauce, flummery, and a fruit fool to suggest. Had I been Julia reading my rambling list of suggestions, I would have thought the fool particularly appropriate. In spite of my babbling suggestions, Julia never stopped asking me to "send them along."

  Team is a real feel-good word—team effort, team spirit, team goals. Biographies can better discern at what point in her life Julia developed an appreciation for and keen understanding of what constituted a team. But she did, and in every sense of the word, she thought of herself and her associates as one team. She was always right there in the thick of things, working along with us. We never questioned that she was in charge, but she made it clear that she valued and trusted our opinions (babbling suggestions and all) by involving us in all aspects of the work we did together. She even created a team motto—"EOT" (eye on target)—and she set very high standards for that target and gave us very large responsibilities in seeing that it was met. But she never sent us onto the field alone; she was always in the game with us.

  As soon as she promoted me to head of the kitchen team, she assigned me my first major task. We needed an additional kitchen associate for the fall, and she asked me to choose one. "Whomever you would like to work with would be fine with me—it's you who will be in command, anyway, and must have someone you like and trust there," she wrote me from France that summer. I began to search but was having difficulty finding someone with the necessary experience who had the job flexibility to take two days off every month. Plenty of friends who were gourmet cooks offered their services, but we needed a professional, and in 1980, there was not the large number of trained professionals in Rhode Island that there is today. My contacts in New York and Boston were few. Just as I was beginning to feel that I might not be able to accomplish the task, Julia called me.

  "I've asked someone named Susy Davidson to call you. She studied with Anne Willan at La Varenne and worked with Simca [Simone Beck]. Simca's very fond of her and she may be just who we are looking for. Talk to her and see what you think." Perhaps it's a subtle bit of leadership, but it did not go unnoticed to me. Julia did not relieve me of my responsibility to find a new associate because I hadn't accomplished what needed to be done; she left it in my hands while giving me the assistance I needed.

  I liked Susy immediately when she called, and could tell that she was more than qualified to be a JC associate. I relayed my opinion to Julia, and we agreed to give Susy a trial run. That fall when Susy joined us, I quickly saw that she was truly qualified for the job. Moreover, the minute she walked into the prep kitchen, I was immediately aware of just how eager she was to do her job well—and how resourceful she was. On the mornings that Julia was on live, we were at the studio no later than 5:30 a.m., so there was no time to eat at the hotel beforehand. Not a problem. There was always a huge buffet waiting for us; Paul could have his banana and Julia usually some melon and maybe an English muffin, "well toasted, please." I had relayed this information to Susy during our phone conversation, and at five-thirty that morning, into the kitchen walked this tall, striking twenty-nine-year-old brunette carrying an artfully arranged platter of neatly sliced bananas, melon sections with the rind carefully cut away, and a thoughtful assortment of other fruit. Whether or not there were decorative garnishes, I don't recall; I only know it was a presentation decidedly more attractive than the simple whole banana and half melon I regularly served Paul and Julia. When had she had time? How had she found the buffet and the utensils?

  "Good morning, America!" she exclaimed, lighting up the tiny kitchen with her smile. Julia had invited her to join us "on trial," and Susy came prepared to do the best job possible so that we would keep her. And she was a keeper. She became a cherished friend to Julia and still is to me today; I always think of her as Julia wrote and spoke of her: "that darling Susy."

  Susy was young, effervescent, and ready to gobble up, in the dearest way, all that New York had to offer. A native of Portland, Oregon, and just back from Paris, she seemed a bit like Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina—a sweet, generous girl who had been broadly painted but not tainted with Parisian sophistication. I suspect that Susy's joie de vivre reminded Julia of herself so many years before when she had discovered the joys of Paris.

  Julia queried Susy about every detail of what was going on in the Parisian food world, and Susy filled her in on who was who and what was what in culinary France. Julia would recall—as she said, with "trembling nostalgia"—her early days in Paris, when she first sampled the evocative flavors of French cuisine that had so overwhelmed her appetites. She spoke with wistful reverie of the lessons she had learned under the tutelage of chef Max Bugnard at the Paris Cordon Bleu. I didn't have much to contribute during those conversations since my one trip to France had occurred prior to my epiphanies with chicken Kiev and deep-fried parsley and I had spent more time drooling over haute couture than haute cuisine. But I was a greedy listener, and when I returned to Paris a few years later, the passion of their conversations inspired my trip. I ate in their suggested restaurants and purchased so much cookware at E. Dehillerin and foodstuffs at Fauchon that my customs inspection back in the United States was interminable.

  Talking about Paris seemed to stimulate Julia's memories of the useful French trucs or tricks that Bugnard had shown her, and she decided she should show more of them on the show. Throughout her television and teaching career, everything Julia cooked followed the principles of classic French techniques according to Escoffier. Legendary among chefs and gourmets, George Auguste Escoffier simplified, modernized, and wrote down the lessons of haute cuisine that Antoine Carême had pioneered before him. Escoffier's 1903 Le Guide Culinaire became and remains every serious culinary student's definitive text on how to cook. Julia's way to cook always adhered to the Escoffier method, but in the years following her original shows and initial books, she expanded her recipe repertoire to show that those techniques could and should be applied to "good, plain old cooking," whether it was American fare, Mexican cuisine, or that of Timbuktu. She made meat loaf, hash, guacamole, and hummus with the same Gallic care with which she made the staples of classic French cuisine.

  When she decided to demonstrate some of the useful lessons from Chef Bugnard, she chose a French truc of how to make end-of-the-season, slightly over-the-hill garden peas taste sweeter by cooking them with a few of their pods and some shredded lettuce, and I ran into my first snafu as executive chef.

  It was a taped segment, and that meant we needed three backups for every stage of the recipe Julia would demonstrate. The
script called for her to begin by shelling a few peas and adding those to a pan of peas sitting on the stove. So we needed four times enough peas in their pods for her to shell, four times enough shelled peas to fill the pan on the stove, and one set of cooked peas to put on a serving plate. The problem was that it really was the end of the season, so we could find only enough peas in the market for one backup for every stage instead of our normal three. But it was a simple spot—what could go wrong? Scary words in television.

  Paul Child offered to shell the peas and sat on a stool quietly removing the pods and then dividing the peas into the two setups. At one point, I heard him say, "Forgive me, but I'm peeing on the floor."

  Excuse me? Had I heard right? I turned and immediately saw the twinkle in his eyes. He was referring to the occasional wayward pea that slipped from its pod onto the floor. He was pea-ing, not peeing, and I thought it was a terribly funny thing to say, but Julia, who usually gave such comments her great hoot of a laugh, merely smiled, and I realized it was probably a quip they had shared many times while shelling peas. I also realized that we needed those peas that were scattering hither and yon, and I crawled around on my hands and knees to capture them as they rolled under stools and nested next to cable wires. Such is the lot of an executive chef.

  With the cameras rolling, Julia shelled a few peas, put them in a pan with the ones we had placed there, added pea pods and a healthy handful of finely shredded lettuce, and then something—I don't recall what—went wrong. The director yelled, "Cut," and asked that she start again. Starting again meant using the last of the pea crop. If something went wrong with the next take, we had no backup, and directors and producers don't want to hear that the segment has to be scrapped because someone (me) has run out of peas. Furthermore, when the director tells the talent to start again, he or she means immediately. Time is money in network television.

  Stagehands rushed our one and only backup to the set and then raced the "used" peas to the prep kitchen, where I tossed them out onto a cookie sheet. As Julia began her second take, we began frantically and painstakingly to pick pea pods and tiny shreds of lettuce out of the peas that she had started to cook in the first take. Again, after making it through the addition of lettuce and pods to the second pan of peas, something went wrong, and we whisked those peas back to the kitchen for lettuce removal. That oh-so-simple spot took five takes, and today I have a Pavlovian reaction to cooking old peas: I add the lettuce and pods to the peas and then immediately pick them out.

  "Hooray! We did it," Julia said, enthusiastically cheering her team for hitting the target in spite of the chaos. It was, of course, what she expected her team to do, and no more than she herself always did. What felt so good about her response to overcoming what could have been a failure was the way she acknowledged that it was a team effort. Other than having us jump on the field in a large pig pile, she couldn't have done more than exclaim, "We did it!"

  No segment we did for Good Morning America gave us more trouble or more satisfaction than the one on the complex making of a Tarte Tatin. The famous upside-down apple dessert, known classically as tarte des demoiselles Tatin in honor of its creators, the spinster Tatin sisters, is a lovely dessert with a good story. Supposedly, the two Loire River restaurateurs forgot to put the pastry in the bottom of the pan before layering the apples in it, so they put it on top instead and reversed the dessert after it was baked. Another version of the story says the sisters dropped the tart after it was baked and it landed upside down—a more amusing story but doubtful.

  Making the dessert calls for a number of steps—swaps in our case—and, because it was a taped segment, three backups for each swap. The first step is to melt sugar and butter in a cast-iron skillet until it turns to a bubbly brown caramel. The next step is to arrange several layers of sliced apples in a decorative pattern of concentric circles over the caramel, then cook and baste them with the caramel until the apples are soft and the juices are thick and syrupy. After a brief cooling period, on goes a circle of pie dough and the tart is baked until the crust is golden and the caramel rich and thick. Then the drama: turn the pan upside down on a large plate and lift it away to reveal buttery, caramelized apples sitting atop the crisp pastry crust.

  Tarte Tatin is not a difficult recipe to prepare in one's own kitchen, but showing all the steps in three and a half minutes was a challenge. Our calculations told us we needed ten cast-iron pans and a seeming orchard of apples.

  Early Monday morning, we all got to work on the setup for the Tuesday taping. We peeled and cut apples until our fingers ached, then sprinkled them with sugar and lemon juice so they wouldn't turn brown overnight. Then we set up the pans: a pan for Julia to show the ready caramel and how to start layering the apples (only one backup since we would have time to wash out the pan and pour in caramel if things went wrong); a pan with all the apple layers in place and cooking on the stove to show the texture of the cooked apples and perfect thickness of the caramel (three backups); a ready-cooked tart for Julia to unmold (definitely three backups in case she dropped it).

  (This is probably a good place for an aside on Julia dropping things. The truth is, she never did drop all the things people claimed they saw her drop on her shows. I've heard viewers describe in great detail how ducks, chickens, and éclairs slipped from her grasp and landed on the floor at her feet when it really was only the potato pancake that flipped from her pan to the stove. Anything else that landed on the floor she threw there on purpose.)

  We were all proud of ourselves when we arrived at the studio the next morning and examined our flotilla of pans and apples all perfectly at the ready for their audience presentation. They looked great. It would be a fabulous spot—just not that day. As we began to assign the pans to trays, Sonya came into the kitchen with the news that assassins had killed Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, in broad daylight and in front of crowds of people. The entire GMA studio and all its staff were to be turned over to the news division of ABC immediately, and we couldn't tape.

  We were all stunned at the news. And then we were in awe as a sort of controlled, practiced chaos erupted around us and several producers jumped into action to change their focus from a morning variety show to world-altering news. They hung on every phone desperately trying to contact authorities on Mideast affairs who could get to the studio as quickly as possible. ABC news anchors rushed into the studio to replace the GMA hosts.

  Julia found the news as shocking and the studio changeover as fascinating as we all did, but being the exceedingly practical person she was, she felt that such events did not mean that everything else should stop—and at that moment, everything else to her was the makings of a Tarte Tatin sitting in the ten pans around us. "Well, see if we can do it tomorrow," Julia told Sonya. "Otherwise it's an awful lot of work gone to waste."

  After several discouraging minutes of staring at all those expectant apples, we were relieved when Sonya returned with the news that we could return the next day and tape the spot. We remained at the studio long enough to tuck the pans and apples back into safe places.

  The chaos we faced the next day was far from controlled and in no way practiced. The long wait in new cast-iron pans had turned all the apples a hideously unappetizing shade of gray. They were unusable. Racing against time, we sent out for apples—any apples—and repeated the entire setup, trying not to believe that the segment was doomed—and it wasn't. We filled all the pans for swaps and backups in time for the show, and Julia whizzed through the spot in one take. When the Tarte Tatin recipe appeared in her book The Way to Cook, Julia described the taping: "Whether many of our viewers were able to follow the final intricate proceedings, I don't know—but we did it all in one take, in 3 1/2 minutes, and we felt triumphant." Our team effort did manage the chaos and we shared in the triumph, but ultimately it was her game plan that made it work. She was the one who broke a multistep recipe into stages that fit into three and a half minutes. We just kept our eyes on the target she set, and when we
thought the game was lost, she stepped in to carry the ball.

  After the episodes with the peas and Tarte Tatin, Susy and I felt pretty savvy and confident about television food preparation. After all, we had mastered swaps and backups and even conquered the occasional snafu. But no one told us about the beauty shot.

  A beauty shot is a close-up of a finished dish—usually without the talent—and it's used to entice audiences to stay tuned. A set designer arranges the food on the set along with decorative accompaniments such as napkins, appropriate utensils, perhaps flowers—anything that makes it look appealing. During the first and or second hours of the show, the dish appears on the television screen while the host tells viewers to "stay tuned because Julia Child will be here to show you how to make this delicious dish." If the dish is part of a live segment, it has to be cooked and shot early in the morning, before the show; otherwise, the cameras wait until after the show has been taped. They don't take beauty shots for every recipe, and Susy and I had not heard of it. What we did hear every time we finished taping was the delicate stampede of stagehands and camera operators into the kitchen to get a sample of Julia Child's cooking, and we gladly laid the remains of the day out on large platters so that everyone could have a taste.

  We were introduced to the beauty shot on the day Julia taped a segment on how to roast a turkey. When the spot was over, the usual suspects filtered into our prep kitchen to pull bits and pieces from the juicy bird. They had made it through one entire side when the word came into the kitchen that the director wanted a beauty shot.