Backstage with Julia

by Nancy Verde Barr

  I called Julia to tell her that Badia a Coltibuono had everything Sonya was looking for—the respected Chianti label, the magnificent estate, even the chef to cook with Julia (Lorenza wrote cooking and gardening articles for Italy's premier culinary magazine, La Cucina Italiana).

  "Call Sonya immediately!" Julia urged. "It sounds just like the sort of place we want."

  Sonya agreed, we put Badia a Coltibuono on the itinerary, and for a number of years after that I brought groups of students to Lorenza's classes. Not one of the happy, satisfied students ever referred to their experience at Badia a Coltibuono as "monastic."

  We left for Italy in September 1985, and for the first time since I began working with Julia, Paul was not with us. His health had been failing, and Julia thought the hectic pace of the trip would be too much for her eighty-three-year-old husband. So he remained at home with a relative. It was the right decision, but I missed my Italian tutor and Julia missed her partner. She telephoned him daily, sometimes twice.

  My job in Italy was to work with the chefs in the kitchens setting up the food for the camera. In some cases, Julia cooked with a chef on camera and I had to prepare swaps and backups just as I did in the GMA studios. For other segments, the cameras only shot footage of Julia tasting the food, so all I needed was a finished dish that looked appetizing. Sonya worked out the schedule: we met the film crew each morning to shoot Julia in a scene that established our location, and then Sonya, Julia, and the crew left to tape segments on the culinary specialties of the area while I left for the restaurant to oversee the food preparation.

  We began shooting "Julia Child in Italy" with a cultural segment in Parma. Framed by the historic nineteenth-century opera house Teatro Regio, treasured especially for performances by Verdi and Toscanini, Julia walked across the old stone-paved street toward the camera while the melodic strains of a Verdi opera played in the background. As in the ABC studios at home, neither she nor anyone else ever definitely scripted what she was to say. Sonya could always count on her to come up with whatever fit the moment. I don't recall what pertinent comment she made about the city or opera, but I do distinctly remember that she warned any would-be divas to beware: Italian audiences in Verdi's times critiqued unsatisfying concerts by hurling rotten tomatoes.

  Julia, Sonya, and the crew then left the scene with a representative from the Parma del Consorzio—the association that oversees the production and controls the quality of the Parmesan foods. Their schedule included footage of Julia learning the two-thousand-year-old art of making Parmigiano-Reggiano—"the crown king of all cheeses," as the local Parmigiani call it—and then the patting of the great fat pigs that ate the whey from the same cow's milk whose curds went into the cheese. The shooting continued in the air-drying rooms, where the breezes from the nearby Po River converted plain old ham into exquisite prosciutto di Parma and another type of ham called culatello. I visited both on previous trips to Italy and learned that the exceptional flavor of the products was a result of the unique air from the nearby Po River and that the flavor was not only irreproducible but also unrivaled anywhere else in the world. Who's going to argue with an Italian? Anyway, the flavor of the pork products was far superior to any other we had tasted.

  Meanwhile, fortified with my rudimentary new second language, I ventured into my first restaurant kitchen in Parma. It wasn't really a restaurant, not even the small one that the Italians call a trattoria. In fact, when a local Parma newspaper published an article about Julia and American television being in their city, they referred to Al Vecchio Molinetto as our stop for "fast food." Sonya didn't plan to show any cooking in the restaurant, just Julia enjoying a local specialty, torta fritta. So I needed a finished dish as well as the recipe in case viewers wrote in for it. My small book of Italian foods told me torta fritta translates to "fried cake," and in other regions of Italy, with slight variations of ingredients, they were called crescentine, gnocchi fritto, or chizze. But my book did not explain exactly what they were. It wasn't until I walked into the kitchen and met the four women, all clad completely in white, that I realized what they were making was good old-fashioned fried dough. Every Italian American street festival in the United States has at least one stand selling deep-fried dough, usually dusted with sugar.

  Three of the women were standing at a long wooden counter that held several towel-covered mounds of what I surmised was the resting dough. They were rolling ready dough into large thin sheets and swiftly cutting them into rough triangular shapes. Signora Ermina, apparently the executive woman in white, was standing at the stove and slipping two or three triangles at a time into a large pan of simmering fat. She nudged the frying pieces tenderly here and there and turned them over carefully until in no time at all they turned a golden brown and floated to the top, revealing that they were now delicate pockets. She transferred the pockets to paper towels to drain, split one open in the middle, filled it with the prized products of Parma—wispy slices of Parma ham and slivers of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese—and handed it to me. I had eaten more than my share of street-festival fried dough, but never had I tasted the ethereal likes of the fried heaven those women were making.

  I wanted the recipe, not just for viewers but for myself. Since all the dough we needed for the shoot was already made and resting under those towels, I had to ask them to start from the beginning. It was no easy task. None of the women spoke any English, and when I addressed them in my elementary Italian, they didn't seem to understand that either. Turns out they spoke not standard Italian but a local dialect, unfamiliar to me. I was clueless as to what they were telling me.

  Undaunted and on a mission, I resorted to my most fluent form of Italian—gesturing, shrugging, and raising my eyebrows. I made them understand that I wanted to see them make the dough from the start. Signora Ermina understood when I removed a towel from a mound of dough, pointed at it, then lifted my shoulders and said, "Come fa?"—close enough to "How is it made?" She put flour on the counter and added salt and lard. Several times I said, "Aspeta" (wait) with my hand held up and "Quanto?" (how much) with raised shoulders. She understood. She pointed to the flour and then to the 500-gram mark on a nearby scale. She held up the other ingredients for me to see and said something in dialect that could have been a measurement but most likely was my nonna's standard reply: "This much." Ermina was on to me by then, and before she dissolved the yeast in water, she motioned for me to put my finger in the water to feel that it was warm. By the time she added the yeasty water to the flour, we were conversing like old friends. She pointed to the liquid, raised her shoulders, and tilted her head back and forth, which I understood perfectly: sometimes you need more, sometimes less. We gestured our way through kneading, and when she set the dough aside under a kitchen towel, I pointed at my watch and asked, "Per quanto tempo?" She raised one finger, lifted her shoulders, and wrinkled her forehead into a questioning expression. Easy translation: about an hour, maybe more, maybe less. I looked at the dough we made and those ready to roll and wrote down, "Let rest one hour or until doubled in size." I had my recipe.

  The crew arrived, and before the cameras were finished setting up, Julia had devoured at least three torta fritta along with a glass of local Lambrusco wine. "These are absolutely delicious," she said. "How do they make them, Nancy?"

  I told her exactly how, and she said, "I'm so glad you've learned to speak Italian." Indeed!

  I made out better linguistically at our next restaurant stop, Ai Tigli in nearby Pilastro, where Carla Cantoni spoke the Italian I knew as she walked me through the secrets of tortelli alla parmigiani, elongated ravioli filled with ricotta and herbs. At first, she hesitated to allow me to help her with the several pieces of tortelli we needed for the setup. But I knew I could do it her way. She did not use ravioli trays but formed them by hand, just as my nonna did. And she rolled the dough with a hand-cranked pasta machine, not the four-foot-long pasta pin Marcella had taught us to use in Bologna. Hand-rolling pasta is an art not easily mastered. Ita
lian women who are able to transform a pound of flour and eggs into a perfect, thin pasta circle as large as a hula hoop are called sfogliarine, from the Italian word for "sheet of pastry," sfoglia. The legend is that you can recognize sfoglarine by their wide hips since the process of rolling requires a constant back-and-forth rocking motion. I bought a pasta pin when I was in Marcella's class, but the hip thing discouraged me from using it very much.

  Carla and I were still making tortelli when Julia and the crew arrived. Now, here is the tell-all part of this book. Julia Child had a checkered past—with pasta. She didn't really love it. She never quite understood its pervasive appeal , especially to American restaurateurs whose only association with Italy was a couple of waiters named Angelo and Giovanni. She made an occasional concession to its popularity in her work, but when she created Lasagne à la Française for one of her early TV programs, she claims she was "almost lynched by the Italian anti-defamation league." Although children showed no such hostility when she made her Spaghetti Marco Polo on the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood TV show, horrified pasta chauvinists wrote angry letters after seeing her eat the spaghetti with chopsticks. She defended her method by saying she'd chosen it in tribute to Marco Polo's journeys in China. "It's more fun with chopsticks, and they truly eat spaghetti that way in China; I've seen them do it," she wrote in From Julia Child's Kitchen. But, with all that talk of lynching, Julia remained a bit gun-shy—or I guess in this case rope-shy—about making pasta for her audiences. When for a Christmas issue of Parade Rosie suggested that we make green and red lasagna, Julia asked me to develop the recipe. I created a nontraditional spinach and roasted red pepper lasagna for the issue, and Julia clearly stated in print that it was my recipe and included my photo so there would be no question of its Italian authorship—or perhaps, if there was to be a lynching, it would be my head in the noose.

  So on that tortelli day in Parma, Julia stood back for a while and watched as Carla and I made pasta. But she never could resist trying her hand at kitchen machinery, so she hijacked the pasta machine and rolled out the dough. The mechanics of the machine intrigued her more than the sheets of pasta she produced. In the end, she did not experience the epiphany my Italian passions hoped she would. She continued to think that too much hoopla surrounded our fascination with pasta, and I don't recall her ever making it again, although she did enthusiastically consume Carla's tortelli, which were swimming in butter and Parmesan cheese.

  In Bologna, we shot footage of Julia and Marcella Hazan enjoying an al fresco lunch of a veal chop pounded until it was the size of a small plate, then breaded and fried until golden. Marcella explained that this was the traditional Milanese manner of preparing a perfect cotoletta. Julia agreed with the "perfect"; not only was it a beautifully simple preparation, but as Julia said, "the meat was real baby veal and not small cow."

  Julia and I with Marcella Hazan, our mentor in all things Italian.

  Julia cooked on camera in Bologna with a local cookbook author who demonstrated the long-cooking, classic method of making a Bolognese sauce using finely chopped beef and not hamburger, as so many recipes specify. Julia thought the sauce was delicious but had a less positive reaction to the talent. In his preproduction letters to Sonya, he claimed he was fluent in English. He neglected to mention that his pronunciation was so bad that he might as well have been speaking Chinese. Julia had so much difficulty understanding him that she took to a lot of atypical nodding instead of her usual pertinent comments or playful bantering.

  My prep area for readying the veal and the sauce was the kitchen of a local restaurant where the language barrier was the least of my problems. The entire staff was male and had never had a woman work in the kitchen with them. They could think of only one reason for a woman to be in their midst, and it had nothing to do with cooking. In most ways, they were simply playful. They made the large amount of Bolognese sauce we needed in a very tall pot, so tall that I could not see into it or reach the bottom with a spoon to stir it. So they provided me with a chair to stand on—was I forever going to have to cook standing on a stool?—and then hovered suggestively in a grinning group around me. At worst, they would not let me cook. I was by no means a militant feminist—I liked men to open doors for me, enjoyed flirting, and chuckled at wolf whistles—but their antics were interfering with my work.

  I took a cup of espresso outside to the patio and told Julia that I thought my honor was in jeopardy in there. She told me that was how it was in French kitchens and obviously Italian ones as well. She spoke from her own experience, since she'd studied in a male-dominated arena when she was the only woman in a class of male ex-GIs at the Cordon Bleu. She held her own in Paris, but of course, six feet two inches of Julia Child was a lot more imposing than five feet two inches of Nancy Barr. Besides, she spoke enough French to declare her seriousness of purpose and to discourage unwelcome advances in two languages.

  "But it's so archaic," I complained to Julia. "Haven't they heard of women's liberation?"

  "It will be a long time coming to the European kitchen, so just tough it out in there." Despite the fact that her career had so much to do with opening restaurant kitchens to female chefs, Julia did not consider herself a feminist at all. She believed in equal kitchen rights for all but did not zero in on women. In fact, she disliked being labeled a women's rights activist. It was just not her cause, so she was not about to race into the kitchen wielding a cleaver in order to threaten the men into behaving and treating me as a culinary equal. Assuming my most authoritative (but still diminutive) stance, I returned to the kitchen and got the job done.

  Our cultural feature in Bologna was the seventeenth-century wooden surgery amphitheater, Teatro Anatomico (Anatomical Theater), located in the Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio in the old University of Bologna. The original structure had collapsed in 1944, a casualty of World War II air raids, and was then painstakingly salvaged and restored to its original beauty, with its pine paneling, professor's chair, statues, and models. The focal point is the white-linen-clothed operating table that sits in the center of the room so that students and doctors could watch the dissections. Of course, there would be no dissection the day of our visit, but Julia loved the idea—no doubt she envisioned the table laden with a large steer ready to become chops and roasts.

  Just as our transportation arrived at the hotel, Sonya realized that she'd left papers she needed in her room. We were on a tight schedule and there was no time for her to retrieve them. "Will you get them, Nancy, and take a taxi over?" Since there was no food at the shoot and nothing for me to do but imagine some poor body stretched out on the table as exhibit A, I didn't have to be there when they were.

  "No problem. I'll see you there."

  "Here, I'll take your tote bag with me. And hurry, because the shoot is a quick one and we won't be there long."

  I got the papers and hopped right into an available taxi.

  "Dove?" the driver asked. I told him where I wanted to go, in English. He didn't speak English. Sonya had my tote bag with my itinerary and I couldn't remember the Italian name of where I was supposed to be. But I knew the concept of the place, so how hard could it be to explain? I figured vecchio università da Bologna (old university of Bologna) was a good place to begin. The University of Bologna, old and new, covers a lot of city territory, and so my comment helped him not at all.

  "Non capisco," he replied. I comprehended that completely; he didn't understand. So I began tossing out all the Italian words I knew that had anything remotely to do with my image of where I was supposed to be. Museum, that was easy, museo, but there are hundreds of museums in Bologna. He pulled over to the side and turned to look at me, fortunately with amusement and not annoyance. Good—I could pantomime. I stiffened my fingers to look like what I thought was a cutting implement, and feigning a look of painful agony, I said hospital in English and historico, what I thought must be the Italian word for "historical." Hospital was pretty close to the Italian word, ospedale, but obviously historico s
ounded more like the Italian for "hysterical" than the proper word, storico.

  "Allora," he said, his eyes shooting open in recognition. "Si, signorina. Subito." And he took off at a considerable speed, which he maintained until he came to a screeching halt in front of the emergency room entrance of the local hospital.

  I might well still be there had Sonya not sent out an all-points bulletin for me. As the taxi driver and I sat in the hospital parking lot once again trying to communicate where it was I wanted to be, I heard his two-way radio sputter out some Italian followed by the words "Signora Barr."

  "That's me! È mio! È mio!" I cried, pointing to the radio and then to myself.

  I arrived at the Teatro Anatomico just as the crew was getting ready to leave. "What happened to you?" Julia and Sonya asked.

  "I had to stop off for a little surgery," I said.

  "I hope they didn't remove anything you needed," Julia responded without asking for more of an explanation.

  With all my body parts intact, we left Bologna behind and headed south to Tuscany. The crew left in a van, and Sonya, Julia, and I took the long, peaceful drive together, sharing the backseat of a comfortable Mercedes-Benz behind a driver who spoke a smattering of English and could comprehend my Italian. At least he had no trouble understanding me when I conveyed Julia's several requests that we stop along the autostrada for something to eat—usually panini, little sandwiches, which in Italian sound so . . . well, little and uncaloric. Julia liked the ham and cheese best. Since snacking was not a Julia thing, her frequent suggestions that we stop had more to with her curiosity about what those roadside eateries offered than her hunger.