by Luke Barr
Olney was cagey when it came to the Childs. When he first met them, along with Simone Beck, the previous summer, he’d taken an immediate dislike to the couple. It was M.F., indirectly, who introduced them, as she’d suggested to Lord and Bedford that when Olney came to Les Bastides for a visit, as he occasionally did, they should bring all these people together. Olney and his brother James went to dinner at Beck’s, and to the Childs’ at La Pitchoune for a drink beforehand. Julia gave him a tour of the house that day: the kitchen with its Peg-Board and inked outlines of utensils; the bedroom with its pair of framed Time magazine covers, one of Julia (real), the other of Paul (a joking mock-up). They had drinks. “We enjoyed a few minutes of desultory conversation,” Olney would later write; “she asked if she and Paul could come to Solliès for lunch, I said we’d be in touch, and we escaped to dinner …”
His feelings toward Beck were much warmer. Beck was French, and proud of it, and Olney admired her for that.
It happened that Olney had come to Plascassier on the same weekend that Child and Beck were being profiled for an article in McCall’s, and the women seemed to have been fighting. He could sense the tension between the two coauthors, though he did not know the source. But it was clear to Olney that Child was the preeminent one in the partnership, and since he felt that Child was simply coasting on Beck’s talent, Olney’s sense of pride kicked in vicariously. This is how it was sometimes with Olney: his default mode was passive aggressive. A few months later, he took note of the way Beck disappeared from the many news stories about the newly released Mastering II: “All the articles I have seen are quite funny as they begin with a grudging mention of the coauthors,” he wrote to his brother, “and from then on, only Julia is mentioned—Simca, who, as we know, owns Julia, must be furious.” Olney possessed a refined sense of resentment; he was a man who cultivated grudges, particularly when it came to the rest of the food establishment, even when the grudges weren’t his own.
But, for the moment, M.F. and Olney were getting along famously. She was wry and amusing, he was happy to be cooking for friends, and there was the possibility (unmentioned, of course) that she’d be writing about him and his cookbook for The New Yorker. Bedford was in an effusive mood. They finished the wine, and Olney served raspberry sorbet.
It was well past midnight when M.F., Bedford, and Lord walked down the hill with a flashlight. The steep path was more intimidating now in the dark, particularly for the less-than-sure-footed M.F. She did not like heights. The many, many glasses of excellent wine didn’t help, either.
Olney had found an old villa nearby for them to stay in, a dark and rather dirty place, but one that would do for the night. As they wandered the streets of Solliès-Toucas toward their waiting beds, Bedford insisted on stopping at each fountain in the village to taste and compare the waters. Each fountain had a unique taste, she claimed. M.F. and Lord took turns at the various spouts and had to agree—Bedford was right!
There was of course something more than a little ridiculous about this scene: three ladies, in the dead of night, discussing the flavor of water. And yet it was for M.F. emblematic of the evening, which had been filled from beginning to end with talk about food and wine, with judgments and discernments and pronouncements. They had talked as well as eaten with great seriousness—too much, perhaps, she thought. It was all too precious for her taste. There was a time when she might have reveled in such conversation. But no longer. Something was shifting.
The next day, with Bedford again at the wheel, they drove back to La Roquette. They had skipped breakfast; Bedford was testy and on edge, and drove with less than her usual finesse. But they all agreed it had been a tremendous dinner, and they looked forward to Olney’s upcoming visit to Les Bastides a few weeks later, just before Christmas.
During the drive, they decided to do a potluck—what they were calling, a bit more grandly, a collaboration dinner—for him. Each of them would prepare and bring a dish. They would be hospitable in their own communal, casual way—creating a meal far less elaborate than the one Olney had prepared for them, but in the same gourmet and bohemian spirit.
When she returned to her rented apartment that afternoon, M.F. sat in pleasant solitude, drinking a vermouth rouge-et-blanc, writing a letter to Gingrich, and contemplating a simple dinner: a lamb’s lettuce salad, bread, and cheese.
“Richard’s house is fantastic. So is he, of course,” M.F. wrote. “We ate the most amazing meal, with four wines.”
“The M. F. K Fisher visit was fine—she is very nice.” Olney wrote in a letter to his brother.
But M.F. and Olney’s happy feelings for each other would not last.
5
FIRST MEALS IN FRANCE
THE VIEW FROM THE AIRPLANE WINDOW WAS thrilling, the horizon tilting this way and that as the pilot aimed for a runway somewhere below, in Nice. The glinting Mediterranean stretched off in the blue distance, and now the palm trees, beaches, and overbuilt coastline of the Côte d’Azur loomed suddenly into view: Cannes … Juan-les-Pins … Antibes … and then Nice. The airport was right on the water, at the western end of the Promenade des Anglais, the two-mile-long boardwalk fronting the sea. The plane sank ever lower, picking up speed along the way—at least that’s how it felt. There was always something a little disconcerting about these last few minutes in the air, the changes in speed and air pressure. The Childs did not much like flying, but the landscape outside the plane windows was undeniably glamorous. Here was the Riviera, in all its seductive glory, spread out before them on a clear December day.
They were nearly there.
Once the small plane had landed and Julia had extracted her six-foot-two-inch frame from the too-small seat and Paul had exhaled a sigh of relief at the safe landing (he suffered from vertigo), the couple made their way through the terminal to the airport restaurant. This was where they always went when they arrived in Nice. “This has become our ritual gear-shift from the USA,” Paul wrote of the Childs’ airport lunch in a letter to M.F., “because the difference between that kind of meal and anything even remotely like it in the USA is immense, and we only then realize we are in our second culture.”
The restaurant was on the second floor of the passenger terminal, and had large windows overlooking the runways and sea, and in the other direction, views of the Alpes-Maritimes rising up in the distance. Some of the waiters recognized the Childs from their frequent previous visits, and greeted them like old friends. It wasn’t a fancy place, but it was decent, upstanding in every way. The seafood was fresh, the bread was crusty, and the wine was a far cry from what they’d have been served at the bar at Logan, where their trip had begun.
There was no better cure for incipient jet lag than a glass of Riesling. They were finally free of the never-ending stress of travel: “While we are in the grip of airplanes, information booths, ticket counters, moving stairways, public address systems, money changing booths, surging, harried people pushing luggage strollers, and nine different languages bouncing off our eardrums, we could be anywhere, from Hamburg to Heathrow,” Paul noted. But no longer.
“France—we are here!” he exclaimed.
They always ordered the same thing—this was part of the ritual. It was a meal that symbolized not only their arrival in France but every arrival, and all the memories of arrivals past.
OYSTERS
FILET DE SOLE
GREEN SALAD
FROMAGE BLANC
It was more or less exactly what the two of them had ordered the first time they arrived in France together more than twenty years earlier, in 1948. They’d come over on the SS America, waited for their sky-blue Buick station wagon to be lifted off the ship by crane, and then driven from Le Havre toward Paris through the Norman countryside. They’d stopped for lunch at La Couronne, in Rouen. They’d eaten oysters, and sole meunière. They’d ordered wine—a Pouilly-Fumé, from the Loire Valley.
That first meal would eventually take on near-mystical qualities—a key entry in the Julia Ch
ild canon, which she described many times over the years, though not always consistently; sometimes the sole was a duck in the telling. But it didn’t matter: it wasn’t the fish or the duck; it was their experience, the fragrance in their memories, fleeting and indelible. Sitting in the dining room at La Couronne, Paul explained how butters from various regions in France had different flavors—the full-bodied Beurre de Charentes, or the fine, light Beurre d’Isigny. The sole was otherworldly, the salad vinegary, the coffee very dark. It had been the most exciting meal of Julia’s life.
It was food that signaled one’s arrival in France, not only for the Childs, but for M.F. and her sister, for James Beard, for Judith Jones, and for Richard Olney. They had all experienced that seminal mid-century American-in-France moment at some point during the preceding decades, the first epiphany of taste and promise of European pleasure. Something new, and better … and with lots of butter (or butters).
M.F. had eaten her first meal in France on the five-hour “boat train” from Cherbourg to Paris with her first husband, Al Fisher. The transatlantic crossing had taken them to the port town some two hundred miles east of the capital, and the train took them the rest of the way. On the train, they had eaten the best bread she’d ever tasted, green salad, Petit Suisse cheese, gnarled apples, crude wine, and bitter coffee. “It sounds almost disrespectful to say it,” she wrote years later, “but even the astonishing events of the past several weeks or so seemed but a logical preparation for this moment!” Falling in love for the first time, then getting married, crossing the Atlantic for the first time—“they all led irrevocably to 1:43 P.M., September 25, 1929, when I picked up a last delicious crust-crumb from the table, smiled dazedly at my love, peered incredulously at a great cathedral on the horizon, and recognized myself as a new-born sentient human being, ready at last to live.”
Norah rode the same train a couple of years later, in 1931, when she was a teenager and had come to France to stay with M.F. and Al. She had eaten an unforgettable meal of roast chicken. Forty years later, in November 1970, when she and M.F. took the train again, they ordered the familiar poulet rôti and Petits Suisses with fresh fruit. Nothing, though, could equal that very first meal in France, they agreed. The first taste of French butter, the demi-liters of white wine.
As an aspiring opera singer in the 1920s, James Beard had moved to London for a year, and from there made his first trip to France in 1923. He stayed at a pension on the rue Jacob in Paris, not far from the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway were living at the time. The food at the pension was simple and good: pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau—boiled beef, veal stews, and so on. He soon discovered excellent hors d’oeuvres at a nearby boarding-house, and a few months later, he took an elegant acquaintance visiting from his hometown of Portland, Oregon, to the exceedingly chic Au Caneton restaurant. They drank champagne and ate caviar and blinis, among many other things. (Caneton was run by Russian émigrés.) “It was a dinner I have never forgotten,” he later wrote. “Nor have I forgotten the bill. It was a hundred francs—the largest restaurant bill that ever was, I thought at that time.”
It wasn’t until much later, during World War II, that Beard became familiar with the food of Provence: In 1943 he was stationed in Marseille for the United Seamen’s Service. The USS was a nonprofit organization providing recreation, food, communications facilities, and other services to sailors, and the then-forty-year-old Beard volunteered to do his part for the war effort. Marseille was in bad shape at the time, having been bombed by the Germans, and provisions were in relatively short supply. But the city’s food markets and vendors were still worth exploring, as was the food at Beard’s hotel. He was staying at the Hôtel Continental, by the port, where the chef made stuffed eggplant with garlic and fresh rosemary and whatever small amount of meat he could find. Beard also ate bouillabaisse and brandade, garlicky poulet aux senteurs de Provence. These were the flavors that had stayed with him ever since.
Like Beard, Richard Olney’s first meal in France was in Paris. He’d been twenty-four years old. It was the summer of 1951, he had recently arrived from Iowa via New York, and he was eating in “a glum little dining room for boarders, in the Hôtel de l’Académie.” He ordered the plat du jour: gibelotte, pommes mousseline—rabbit and white wine fricassee with mashed potatoes.
The gibelotte was all right, the mashed potatoes the best I had ever eaten, pushed through a sieve, buttered and moistened with enough of their hot cooking water to bring them to a supple, not quite pourable consistency—no milk, no cream, no beating. I had never dreamt of mashing potatoes without milk, and in Iowa, everyone believed that the more you beat them, the better they were.
The first few weeks, my days were spent mostly in museums and, for lunch, I ate as cheaply as possible. Good food was everywhere.
A few years earlier, during the summer of 1948, Judith Jones had embarked on her own life-changing Parisian adventure—finding a job, renting an apartment, eating at inexpensive places. She’d grown up in New York City and had recently graduated from Bennington College, in Vermont. In Paris, no one drank much, except red wine, she recalled, and her appetite was fantastic: “I am no longer content with a fish or meat course; it has to be both.” She soon met a Frenchman named Pierre Ceria, a journalist and former member of the Resistance who taught her to make pan-fried sole meunière, and with whom she opened a salle à manger in the living room of her apartment. This impromptu restaurant was an immediate hit, but wouldn’t last: the large apartment belonged to Princess Marguerite Caetani, an American married to an Italian aristocrat and living in Rome, where she published Botteghe Oscure, a literary journal. When she found out about the “restaurant” on the second floor, she very politely asked Jones and Ceria to leave. (The other tenant at the time was the painter Balthus, who didn’t seem to mind all the cooking and entertaining.)
Simone Beck was from Normandy, so the food of France was no source of astonishment to her. But she had always taken a more than casual interest in it. As a teenager in the late 1910s, she began to experiment in the kitchen, “mostly with cakes,” she recalled, “for as a girl I had a very special fondness for sweets.” She kept track of these experiments in a series of notebooks, the first of many over the years.
These first meals and flavors were never forgotten—they became figments of Proustian memory that drew each of the Americans back to France again and again. They were idealized memories, certainly, but also a true record of a time when most great cooking was French cooking, simple as that, and when you could not easily find decent bread, fresh butter, let alone a transcendent sole meunière in the States. French food was a revelation, and they were going to bring it home. Which is exactly what they did, each in his or her own way.
6
LA PITCHOUNE, COUNTRY RETREAT
AFTER THEIR LUNCH AT THE NICE AIRPORT, Paul Child lit up a Havana cigar. The lunch had been “perfect,” he and Julia agreed, and so had the wine. They were in a celebratory mood—on vacation at last.
But if that first meal heralded the Childs’ arrival in France, the drive from the coast up to the foothills of Plascassier revealed the less idyllic side of the country—being back in France meant driving on French roads, navigating French traffic.
It was murder.
The first problem was that the car was startlingly underpowered, in the way of all French cars of the era. It was a rented Renault, and required continuous and rapid gear-shifting just to keep it at speed. Even in Paul’s state of tense vigilance, he found himself smiling at the competitive and really quite skillful style of the local drivers.
Paul relaxed as the roads became quieter, after they made their way past Antibes and Mougin, along the narrow streets of Mouans-Sartoux, and then began climbing the hill up to Plascassier. The two-lane road passed through a lush and rather wild landscape of overgrown fields and clumps of forest, olive trees, hedges, and old stone walls. There were new villas going up here and there—most of them ugly, the Childs
agreed—but it was beautiful nevertheless, and now Plascassier appeared, on a hill overlooking the valley. They were close. They decided to stop at the local Casino supermarket for some basic supplies—eggs and milk, that sort of thing.
La Pitchoune was on the slope of a small hill, a few miles from the center of Plascassier. The long driveway from the road was rocky and unpaved.
It was midafternoon when Julia and Paul arrived, and the house was cold; it felt like a dungeon. They turned on the furnace, and padded around the house in their sweaters, putting groceries into the refrigerator and unpacking their bags. They felt at home—and free. Back in Cambridge, they were “as tied down by television as though swarms of Lilliputians had cobwebbed us in our sleep,” in Paul’s words. Now, in France, whatever the shortcomings of their beloved La Pitchoune—the slow heat, the muddy driveway—none of that mattered. Indeed, it was all part of the charm of the place.
The floors were terra-cotta tile, the ceilings tall, with elegant plasterwork in the corners. There were multiple fireplaces, and most of all there was the large and excellent kitchen. It was a square room with light-blue Peg-Board walls and dark green trim, covered with a huge collection of pans, knives, sieves, and every utensil and kitchen device imaginable, each outlined in black ink, marking its particular spot. Paul and his twin brother, Charlie, had made the drawings in 1965. As in the Childs’ Cambridge kitchen, the counters were higher than the norm, designed by Paul to suit Julia’s height.
Julia had the same thought she always did when she came here: Why ever leave? It was so beautiful, the air so fresh. Paul checked on the olive tree on the front terrace, which he’d planted a few years before. Its roots weren’t as deep as the big old trees on the hill and ran the risk of freezing in the winter or drying out in the summer. The tree was one of his many projects.
The Childs had spent the year at a full gallop—finishing Mastering II, first of all. “I keep thinking THANK GAWD that dreadful book is done,” Julia wrote in a letter to Beard, “and I don’t have that driven feeling, that guilt of non-accomplishment always gnawing me.” And then there’d been the new season of The French Chef to contend with—thirty-nine episodes to be planned, written, and shot. It had debuted in the fall, just as the book was coming out.