Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  Julia was acutely aware of the differences between the French and American attitudes toward what they ate and who prepared it, and she devoted her professional life to obliterating those differences. As New York columnist Regina Schrambling wrote in her column headlined, "Julia Child, the French Chef for a Jell-O Nation," Julia "brought cassoulet to a casserole culture." Julia not only wanted to raise America's awareness of and demand for good food, she wanted to bring the French concept of cooking as a respected career to America. The one notion of the French kitchen she had no desire to replicate was the sex of the chef. She saw no reason why women as well as men should not pursue that career.

  Julia did not begin her career with the intention of changing an entire profession. She had learned something wonderful about eating well and wanted to share it. But her very presence on television inspired young men—and women—to choose culinary careers. At book signings across the country chefs, teachers, writers, and several food industry executives thanked Julia for being responsible for their careers. Numerous authors whom she had never met credited her in the acknowledgments of their cookbooks as the person who made it happen.

  When Julia realized how much she could bring to gastronomy, she used her renown to mentor not only the industry as a whole but the individuals in it. She gave chefs and cooks the respect she felt they deserved. Seldom do I recall a restaurant meal that did not end with her going into the kitchen to speak with and encourage the chef and the entire staff, most of whom removed sweat-covered hats or food-stained aprons and asked her to sign them. She listed her telephone number in the local directory and answered the phone herself; anyone could call and ask her questions, whether it was about how to stabilize whipped cream or what to do with their professional lives. She personally responded to the multitude of letters she received from those who wrote to ask her advice on topics from what to serve for Thanksgiving or where to go to culinary school.

  Where did all this mentoring lead? Today, chefs are megastars. No longer are restaurants staffed with a diffident group of cooks who remain nameless in the kitchen. We speak of Mario, Jasper, Wolfgang, and Emeril and sometimes have to ask ourselves, "What are the names of their restaurants?" We have a cable television station totally devoted to food, twenty-four hours a day. In 2006 alone, cookbook sales were projected to reach $519 million. Dunkin' Donuts sells croissants—of a sort. Culinary education, food writing, and product development are big business. Unlike in the days when it was a blue-collar job, a great many of those who enter the profession are augmenting already-earned college degrees in history, literature, art, engineering, biochemistry. Like Julia herself, the "new culinary professional" is intelligent, well educated, and above all, passionate.

  If Julia had a conscious strategy in establishing a new culinary order, it was to organize the troops. While she was introducing TV audiences to the joys of fine cooking, she was also rallying a new generation of food professionals to prepare and educate themselves to meet the needs of an eating public with higher expectations. "Ours is a really serious profession and a discipline and an art form," she said in an interview for the video magazine Savor. And Julia did all she could to validate her comment. Together with Rebecca Alssid and Boston University, she succeeded in establishing the first American degree program in gastronomy. She joined and supported the growing numbers of national, international, and state culinary organizations that cropped up to support those flocking to culinary careers. In some cases, Julia was an active worker bee in these associations. At the very least, she made it a point to attend as many meetings as she could. To neatly tie together professionals with nonprofessional but dedicated culinary advocates, she joined forces with Robert Mondavi of Mondavi Vineyards in 1981 to form the American Institute of Wine and Food, open to anyone serious about gastronomy.

  The extent of her influence is impressive, but it was futile to suggest to Julia that she was so remarkable as to be responsible for altering the culinary path of America. While she never denied her influence, she claimed that luck had just put her in the right place at the right time. Luck and timing undoubtedly played a major role in making her famous, but her exceptional attributes were what changed the face of the culinary world.

  Julia did not see herself as exceptional. If you said she was, she'd reply, "I'm just good old pioneer stock," alluding to the fact that her grandfather, as a teenager, had headed West in a covered wagon. It often surprises even some of her most ardent fans that Julia was a California girl, born and raised in Pasadena and not in Boston, as so many thought. She did have a New England air about her, most likely inherited from her mother, Julia Carolyn (Caro) Weston McWilliams, who was descended from a long line of blue-blooded New Englanders of impressive pedigree. But Julia was not one to assume airs about lineage. She preferred telling stories about her grandfather, John McWilliams, instead of dry and dusty accounts of her Massachusetts colonial ancestors. When he was only sixteen, McWilliams attached four oxen to his wagon laden with bacon and flour and set out to pan for gold in the Sacramento Valley. "My grandfather was a good, tough old boy who fought in the Civil War and died at ninety-three."

  Paul was less reticent about his wife's outstanding qualities, and he said it well in Julia's debut Parade issue in February 1982. The magazine published an interview that included Paul's answers to what attracted him to her. Along with "the sound of her voice" and "I thought she was beautiful," Paul said, "Brains . . . guts . . . ability . . . I liked that she was tough and worked like mad and never gave up on things." Those were the strengths that converted culinary hobbyists and blue-collar cooks into professional culinarians.

  For those of us working with her, the conversion was personal. We had a private Merlin, a one-on-one mentor, our own Yoda. She never stopped encouraging and promoting us along a path that would grow our professional lives, never stopped introducing us to the infinite opportunities that the cooking business provided. Being a Julia Child associate was the culinary equivalent of being a graduate student, and I was right to have thought that I should pay her for the education.

  "Aren't we lucky to be in this profession?" Julia said repeatedly over the years. Well, yes! She made it stimulating and exciting far beyond the challenges of mastering the art of cooking. She offered us the opportunity to be part of the new world of American gastronomy.

  For all I knew about cooking techniques when Julia hired me—and believe me, Madeleine taught us well—I was a neophyte in the new world of Julia's vision. I was completely unaware of all those culinary organizations that existed. Julia not only let me know about them but encouraged me to get involved. And she made me want to. Once alerted to the expansive nature of the profession that I'd begun as a hobby, I was a most eager soldier under her command. Her goals became mine, not just because they were hers but because she so ably convinced me of their wisdom and necessity.

  I joined and began to attend meetings with her of the Boston Women's Culinary Guild, which Sara Moulton had helped found; a few years later, because we worked in New York, we qualified for and became charter members of the New York Women's Culinary Alliance, of which Sara was also a founder. Julia introduced me to the International Association of Culinary Professionals (at that time called the International Association of Cooking Schools) and I became a member, traveling with her to meetings across the country where I met large numbers of people who had also turned cooking hobbies into culinary professions. When the IACP instituted a professional certification program, Julia and I both took the exam and passed, thereby giving us the right to place the professional affirmation CCP (Certified Culinary Professional) after our names. When the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food was formed, I was there with my checkbook, and I eventually worked on establishing a chapter in Rhode Island. Within two years of meeting her, I had become an actively involved culinary professional.

  Seeing that I was such an avid convert to the cause, Julia involved me in her objectives, which she always clearly defined. Better foo
d in America was her overall goal, but she concentrated her efforts on education—teaching, writing, and learning. She demonstrated her commitment to that area of gastronomy in her own work and in her financial support of organizations that shared that goal. She donated an annual scholarship to the IACP's foundation, stipulating that it was available only to those seeking to further their culinary educations. In the summer of 1982, she wrote asking me if I "would be so kind in helping to interview a prospect for our scholarship—we've changed it from 'fellowship' and are directing it to those interested in teaching, writing, or research of a scholarly nature—no restaurant types . . . Seems simpler to make limits, and those are my interests, anyway—and yours too."

  So characteristic of who she was, she didn't just urge others to educate themselves but continued to school herself, and encouraged me to do the same. When conference programs and registrations arrived in the mail, she would call me and we would go over which lectures and seminars sounded most interesting. Together we attended several sessions of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, where she participated fully in the required writing exercises. We attended numerous cooking classes at which she listened attentively and took notes. In England, we joined the culinary intelligentsia at the Oxford Symposium on Food, where we attended lectures on such topics as the significance of the shish kebab skewers in the corner of the ancient 214-foot-long Bayonne Tapestry and the prevalence of cannabis (marijuana) as an ingredient in biblical-era cooking.

  Julia sitting in on a late night study session at the writers' symposium at The Greenbrier.

  "That was fascinating" and "I always learn something," she would say after classes, and always learning something was essential to her. Samuel Johnson wrote, "Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of the vigorous mind." Vigorous indeed, and keen. She was curious about so many things, not just about food. She was interested in and savored every substantial morsel of life, whether it was about people, politics, or technology, and hers was not idle curiosity. At a time when even those in the industry were saying home computers would never catch on, she was already using one. She was intrigued with the remote to my Jeep and would ask me to test its range in parking lots, from the windows upstairs and downstairs in her house, from her car to mine. The exacting, minute details of a person's life, the state of the country, and the love life of Pamela Harriman were all equally interesting to her. If the story involved sex, all the better. She by no means dwelt on prurient things, but she was unashamedly void of prudery and things of a sexual nature did not embarrass her. She loved a good raunchy joke and a bit of lascivious gossip.

  When it came to food, her curiosity was especially inexhaustible. She planned lunch and dinner parties around local or visiting chefs and cooked the meal alongside them, not only because she found it such fun but because she learned from them. "That's fascinating. Show me how you did that," she'd encourage whenever she saw a technique that was new to her. Playful bickering and differences of culinary opinion aside, she adored working with Jacques Pépin, her dear friend and the ultimate master chef, because the good-natured competition kept her mind agile.

  She did not reserve her interest in techniques for chefs. Philip Barr has a most unusual way of eating a fresh pear. He begins by inserting a sharp paring knife straight downward, parallel and close to the stem, until he feels the tip of the knife touch the core. He then removes the knife and makes additional cuts around the stem until he can lift a neat circle of pear out of the top. Then he turns the pear over and slips the knife into the blossom end, angling it out slightly to reach beyond the wider bottom core. He continues making incisions around the core at the blossom end until it is free of the flesh and he can push it out. Then he turns the pear right side up and makes neat horizontal cuts, leaving him with perfect, 1/2-inch-thick, donut-shaped slices. When Julia saw him do this sitting at her kitchen table, she was fascinated. She picked another pear out of the fruit bowl and handed it to Philip. "Here. Do it again. More slowly."

  I marveled at her curiosity, and I teased her about it. Once when we were making a simple salad in her kitchen and I said, "We are now going to consider the forty-two or so possible ways to trim and wash a head of lettuce," she came right back at me with, "There are fifty-four ways and I think we should try them all." Mostly I envied it, and I once asked her if she had always had such a keen interest in so many things.

  "Not at all," she responded. "It was Paul who taught me to really look at everything around me. When I met him, he thought I was a scatterbrain. And I was." I might think that she was exaggerating, but Paul's assessment of Julia's lack of attention to detail is forever stored in the archives of the Schlesinger Library. Shortly after meeting her, he described her to his brother Charlie in a letter: "Her mind is potentially good but she's an extremely sloppy thinker." Paul made it his mission to correct that, and he obviously did a bang-up job. When he introduced her to the joys of the table, particularly the French table, she found her passion, and with it a sense of direction. With intense curiosity and dogged determination, she spent the rest of her life perfecting her culinary knowledge.

  "[Cooking] takes all of your intelligence and all your dexterity," Julia said in a 1984 interview, and she always gave it her all. She wanted to know exactly how things worked, why they didn't, and how many ways they could be made to work. She delved into the origins and uses of ingredients the way Einstein studied relativity. She attacked questions of technique scientifically through research, multiple rounds of testing, and querying authorities.

  Those of us who worked with her, especially when she was developing recipes for her cookbooks, became part of the research team. We shared her enthusiasm, but I don't recall that any of us were prepared to approach all subjects with Julia's thoroughness. Hard-boiled eggs come to mind. HB eggs, in Julia-speak, are not something we think of as particularly difficult. Most cooks can and have made them, yet Julia felt they warranted extensive, exhaustive research. To prick or not to prick, how much water, how long to cook to avoid that "dolefully discolored, badly cooked yolk" with its telltale green-hued ring, how to peel, and how to store were all issues to which Julia wanted definitive answers. She tested several methods, contacted a number of authorities, and liked the method suggested to her by the Georgia Egg Board. It was fail-safe but fussy, and few of us were as excited about it as Julia was. First the eggs must be pricked a quarter inch deep in the thick end, then covered with an exact amount of water depending on the number of eggs, brought just to the boil, immediately removed from the heat, covered with the pan lid, and left to sit for precisely seventeen minutes. When the time is up, the eggs are transferred to a bowl of ice water and chilled for two minutes, then, six at a time, returned to boiling water for ten seconds, and finally put back in the bowl of ice water to chill for fifteen or twenty minutes before peeling. They were perfect HB eggs and a perfect pain to do—for everyone but Julia.

  Whenever our work called for them, we anxiously looked at each other, hoping someone else would do them. If Julia was out of the kitchen, whoever picked the short straw was always tempted to cook them according to his or her own favorite method. The one time she caught me using my technique instead of hers, she didn't tell me to stop, didn't insist I use hers. She cautioned me with one of her favorite warnings: "When all else fails, read the recipe."

  Turkey received the same thorough research as HB eggs. At some point in the eighties, high-heat roasting became the in technique. Magazines and cookbooks devoted a considerable number of pages to the procedure, purporting to tell the reader "everything you ever wanted to know about roasting"—unless you were Julia Child.

  "I think we should test all these methods," she said to me over the phone one day in July. "Would you get five turkeys and roast them five different ways? I'll do the same and we'll compare results." She was particularly interested in the best way to roast poultry since there is always the problem of having the dark meat fully cook
ed without the white meat drying out.

  So for several days, as the temperature stubbornly hovered at record-high levels, I cooked turkeys in my un-air-conditioned summer home—one after the other, because I had only one oven. I roasted one at a moderate 325°F, another at a frightening 500°F. I started turkeys three, four, and five at one temperature and finished them at another. Julia called me midway through her testing.

  "Well, the 500°F turkey smoked up the whole house!" she reported. "And the oven was a horrid mess. The meat was juicy but I think a bit tough. I'm going to try it again and reduce the heat after the initial browning. Maybe add some water to the pan. What did you think?"

  What I thought was that no one should roast anything when the oven and the kitchen are at the same temperature! In the end, she continued to cook her turkeys as she had always done, at a steady 325°F, but she was satisfied in knowing exactly what each method would produce. Meanwhile, I couldn't get anyone in my family to eat roasted turkey for months. At Thanksgiving, they begged for roast beef.

  Cooking, when approached Julia's way, was without question the serious discipline she said it was. It required time, thoroughness, and impeccable attention to detail. We worked hard, and she worked hard right alongside us. She could have given us a list of chores and taken off to lounge in her room—who would have called it bad form? But she loved nothing more than being in the thick of all that chopping, sautéing, whisking, and testing. And that's where the fun came in, because Julia was Julia.

  Multitasker that she was, when we were working at her Cambridge home, she'd put the kitchen phone on speaker and deal with necessary business at the same time she was cooking. When someone called, she'd introduce the phone person to the kitchen people—"Now say hello to Nancy, Marian, and Liz"—and she'd expect us to engage the faceless voice in conversation. When the voice belonged to one of her favorites, we'd be privy to delightful exchanges such as her sign-off to Cuisinart founder Carl Sontheimer, "Give yourself a big, wet sloppy kiss for me," and his to her, "An even wetter, sloppier one back to you."