by Luke Barr
Child planned to roast two geese for Christmas dinner. She would stuff them with prunes, sausage, and chestnuts. Prunes and goose were an exceptionally fine combination, she believed.
They had a full house: Paul’s brother, Charlie, and his wife, visiting from Maine, at La Pitchoune in the room Beard had lately vacated; a couple of English friends next door at Beck’s; and Judith and Evan Jones and still other friends at nearby inns. The Joneses were at an auberge called La Maillane, which Child decided was a charming place. It had very attractive rooms, and the proprietors were obliging in every way. It cost fifty francs a night for two people, including breakfast—about ten dollars.
Judith and Evan came in the early afternoon to help cook. The weather was cloudy and cold, but inside was warm and festive, with a fire in the fireplace, a kitchen full of food. Julia had bought a large terrine of jambon persillé from Boussageon, in Plascassier.
Child and Jones had a long-standing and warm professional relationship. They had worked together many hours, going over recipes and page proofs, particularly on the second volume of Mastering, when Jones had spent days at a time in Cambridge with Julia and Paul. She had stayed in their guest room, waking in the early morning to the “thump-thump-thump” of her hosts doing their daily exercises. But this was different: a purely social occasion—a vacation!—and included her husband, Evan, himself a well-regarded author. He wrote about archeology, American history, and, increasingly, about food; he was an excellent cook.
“What a dear pair they are,” Child wrote to Beard the following week. “She is so gay, and such fun, and we like him very much, although he is rather quiet and less easy to know.”
Judith and Evan had rented a car, and spent their time exploring the area and tasting the local food:
The pâté de bécasse in oval crocks with the woodcock’s head and long beak emerging at one end and the two clawed feet at the other; whole alouettes, little larks embedded in jelly; terrines of hare, duck, pheasant; and whole stuffed piglets with “joyeux Noël” written in strips of fat along their glistening sides; and, of course, our sentimental favorites, boudins blancs.
They had eaten the delicate boudin blanc sausages at their very first lunch together, in Paris in 1948. In the years since, they had become experts at making their own charcuterie, including sausages; Judith was pleased that Child and Beck had included an extensive selection of such recipes in Mastering II.
It was frustrating for Jones to see so much beautiful food and produce in all the markets, but not have a kitchen to cook it in! So it was a great pleasure to join Child in the kitchen at La Pitchoune—not to work, or to test or refine a recipe, but simply to cook together.
They prepared the geese for roasting. Child gave a quick lesson on how to judge the age of a goose by pressing the breast bones. A goose had to be under six months old to be any good, she said. And it was important that the feet still be attached: this was how you removed the tendons in the legs. Jones watched as Child cracked an ankle bone, cut the skin, and located a tendon. Then Child set the goose on the floor and straddled it, winding the tendon around a broomstick, which she used to yank it out. The tendon came out whole.
“Just like pulling the cork out of a bottle,” Child said.
The process was repeated with the other tendons, and then Child cut out the wishbones, chopped off the wingtips, and removed loose fat from the necks. Jones, meanwhile, was peeling gizzards. They would be chopped and sautéed with the goose liver, sausage, and onions for the stuffing. This all went into a large bowl, where it was mixed with cubes of dried bread, eggs, and a dash of cognac.
Child set out smaller bowls, in which she poured preserved whole chestnuts in syrup and prunes steeped in brandy.
The birds were ready for stuffing. Child and Jones spooned in layers, alternating the sausage stuffing, the chestnuts, and the prunes. When they were done, Child sewed the vents closed, and pricked the birds all over, so the fat could escape while they were cooking. She trussed the birds securely with string and placed them in roasting pans.
Would both geese fit in the oven? They made it work. The oven was the massive La Cornue the Childs had put in when they built the house. All other French ovens had seemed like rickety junk, Julia thought, so they’d bought the classic, handmade machine. It was tricky to clean and a bit temperamental. Ah well. The new dishwasher had arrived, and was sitting out in the cabanon, awaiting the various workmen who would install it after the holidays.
Child was always interested in the latest devices and machines—mixers, blenders, electric super-blenders, microwave ovens—anything that could save time and effort without compromising quality. Quality, of course, was paramount. Indeed, she and Beard and all the other pioneers of cooking in postwar America had fended off 1950s “home ec” attitudes about convenience and speed—the idea that cooking should be fast, simple, processed, frozen, and prepackaged. But while maintaining her commitment to excellence, she had taken a key lesson from the “home ec” approach; she understood the importance of accessibility. She felt strongly that her readers and viewers needed to be able to replicate her cooking, not just admire it. Hence her interest not just in laborsaving devices but in clarity and precision, too. She explained recipes step by step. She measured everything.
It was a point of pride for Beck, by contrast, that she did not measure anything; she relied on instinct. Olney was the same way: “Precise measures bore me,” he would say. “I prefer pinches, suspicions, splashes and handfuls.” His recipes were brilliantly written and evocative, but they were not quite reliable or precise. Elizabeth David, too, was scornful of what she saw as the American need for hand-holding and pedantic explanations and measurements. Her recipes were notoriously vague. When Jones made suggestions to David to clarify some of the recipes for Knopf’s edition of her Italian Food in the late 1950s (it had already been published in England), David sent a curt and condescending reply. “The implication was,” Jones later wrote, “that you’d never be a real cook if you were so fussy about details like that.”
Well, Child was fussy about details like that. In fact her next book, based on the new episodes of the TV show, would include a detailed appendix on weights, measures, and the metric system, correlating grams to ounces to cups and tablespoons for numerous ingredients. “Although a pint of water is a pound and can be contained in a 2-cup measure, a pound of flour is 3½ cups and a pound of sugar is not quite 2½ cups,” Child wrote. It was indeed confounding, but she explained all.
Olney and David were dismissive. “Poor old Julia,” David sighed with amused contempt when the two of them discussed her. “Now she is Minister of Measures.”
But if Child preserved a teacher’s sense of basic instruction, she jettisoned schoolmarmish pursed lips and disapproval. She embraced pleasure and fun. And unlike Beck, or Olney, or the tradition-minded French, she was open to change and experimentation. She was unorthodox, unafraid. And she wanted her readers to feel the same way.
As she sat at her desk in La Pitchoune planning upcoming episodes of her TV show, she did not limit herself to the standards, to classical dishes and preparations, or to French food. She wanted to go beyond that. Sure, there would be a pot-au-feu and a quiche Lorraine (the dough made in an electric mixer), but there would also be a pizza episode—why not? And a curry dinner, or lamb shashliks and chicken shish kebabs.
“After all,” she wrote, “although my formal culinary training was entirely French, and while I am constantly building it during our months in France every year, I remain very American indeed. I always look at French cuisine from an American point of view.”
On TV, the force of Child’s personality carried the show. And as she started work on the new cookbook, she found herself growing into a new role. The writing drew more upon her life than her previous cookbooks; it was full of stories and reminiscences. Recipes were introduced with variations, tangential observations, anecdotes, and personal discoveries. In the poultry chapter, for example, she might
tell the story of a dinner in the English countryside in the early 1950s, at a charming Tudor inn with a garden filled with roses. Paul had ordered the roast beef, and she the chicken.
My fowl, on a very large, very white plate, was a leg and thigh combination, rather bony, and partially covered by a stark pale blanket of what turned out to be the famous English white sauce, through which poked a good half dozen long brown chicken hairs. We were both delighted with my fowl; it somehow represented what we had always heard about English cooking but had never quite believed before. It looked so perfectly what it was, a thoroughly boiled, quite elderly hen, and a sauce that was literally only flour and water with barely a pinch of salt to flavor it.
Child told the story as she worked in the kitchen, side by side with Jones, both of them laughing about that awful boiled chicken, so vivid in the description that Jones could almost see it. She thought it the perfect, comic story to lead into a series of stewed chicken recipes.
And now Child realized more clearly than ever just how constricted she had felt over the previous few years, working with Beck on Mastering II. There had been no room for the personal in that book, no room for humor.
She was filled with a sense of liberation. Not merely, as she had expected, freedom from the endless arguments with Beck, from the stress of trying to finish the book. It was more than that. She was liberated from France, and from the sort of self-serious snobbery she had seen in her encounters with Olney and Bedford during the past weeks. She had made the firm decision to spread her own wings, and now she felt the full force of what that meant.
She laughed again, long and hard, about that miserable boiled English chicken.
The birds cooked for two and a half hours. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, Child opened the oven and poured boiling water over the geese, to help draw out the fat. She was a firm believer in regular basting. She also turned the birds first on one side and then the other during the cooking, to brown them all over.
Paul had invented a cocktail for the occasion. It was a mixture of French vermouth, Dubonnet, orange essence, and dark rum. He opened bottles of Burgundy for dinner, chatting with his brother, Charlie, who had arrived with his wife a few days before.
When the geese were done, Julia and Judith made a sauce in the roasting pan, spooning out the fat and adding the brandy that had steeped the prunes, cooking it down and scraping up the caramelized drippings. Off the heat, they added a few tablespoons of butter.
Christmas dinner was ready.
APÉRITIF: VERMOUTH, DUBONNET, ORANGE ESSENCE, AND DARK RUM
JAMBON IN PARSLEYED ASPIC
GOOSE STUFFED WITH SAUSAGE, CHESTNUTS, AND PRUNES
BÛCHE DE NOËL
Paul carved the birds, and Julia poured the wines. The guests served the jambon persillé from a large dish on the table.
The mood was celebratory—this was a Christmas feast, after all, but it was also a time to rejoice in being together with friends and family. Judith and Julia toasted each other. It had been a long year, they agreed, and how perfect that they were now here together, in Provence. Judith and Evan had decided to come only at the last minute, at Julia’s invitation. So here they were, admiring the roast geese and delectable stuffing, drinking Paul’s sweet and strong cocktails by the fireplace, looking out over the terrace to the Provençal valley below, congratulating themselves on their extraordinary good fortune.
The geese were fantastic, rich and dark.
“They seem much less fat than the ones we get at home,” Child remarked. “Why are our ducks and geese so fat?”
It was a good question. Maybe Beard would know the answer, they decided. Child would ask him in her next letter.
New Year’s Eve was to be celebrated at Beck’s. She would be preparing an elaborate réveillon dinner.
Jones was on vacation, but she was working, too. She had arranged to meet with M.F. in Marseille, to go over the manuscript for Among Friends. They would meet just after the New Year, their paths crossing before they both returned home. Jones also planned to talk with Beck, once again, about a cookbook of her own.
In mid-November, a few weeks after the official release of Mastering II, the New York Times had published an article called “Simone Beck: The Cookbook Author without a Show on TV,” describing Beck giving a cooking demonstration in Westport, Connecticut, to promote the new book. The article was flattering, though it made note of Beck’s imperious and humorless demeanor (“There was no time for idle chatter, or even a smile. Cooking is a serious business with Mme. Beck”) and the fact that she did not measure anything (“much to the consternation of some of the women who prefer the teaspoon-by-teaspoon approach”). She prepared three dishes: onion-cheese tarts; fish and chicken in a Provençal sauce; and Le Talleyrand, a flaming fruit and meringue dessert. None of the recipes was from the book.
“Julia’s more scientific,” Beck told the Times, “but I go further with the ideas.” She seemed intent on establishing her superiority.
The following day, Jones had written Beck a letter, saying she’d read the article, which had reminded her that they should talk about Beck writing a cookbook of her own. It could include all her recipes that had not fit in Mastering II, and the many dishes she had developed for her cooking classes. “It seems to me that you would have almost enough to make a small collection that could have a strong personal touch (it might even be called something like Simca’s Cuisine),” Jones wrote.
Beck’s response had again been a firm no. She was not interested. She wanted a rest, she said. Child laughed when she heard this: Simca was not exactly the resting type, she said. But Beck was so adamant that Jones had dropped the idea, at least for a while. She figured Beck must be exhausted from the grueling book tour, and the many cooking demonstrations.
Jones would have the opportunity again to talk with Beck about a new book, later in the week. In the meantime, there were country roads to navigate, villages to wander through. Judith and Evan planned an excursion to Italy for a few days, but turned back when they ran into unexpected snow and treacherous roads. The weather had turned very cold.
Julia invited Judith and Evan to another dinner at La Pitchoune, along with Eda Lord and Sybille Bedford—she wanted them all to meet. Child roasted a turkey for dinner.
Bedford had that marvelous, regal bearing, Jones thought. She was very direct, self-assured, and liked to talk about wine. At some point, the conversation turned to their old friend M.F., and how she’d gone off on her own to Arles before Christmas.
Bedford turned to Jones: “You were the one who sent M.F. away,” she said. Bedford was joking, sort of, but also quite serious. Her theory was that M.F. was avoiding her editor—she didn’t want to deal with Jones. M.F. hated being edited.
Child was sure this wasn’t true in the slightest. M.F. was quite fond of Jones, she knew. Child was also irritated at Bedford’s stentorian proclamations, and the impugning of her friend’s motives.
After a bit of back-and-forth, Child said, “Well, let’s just settle this right now!” She knew M.F. was at the Grand Hôtel Beauvau by now (her favorite in Marseille), and she would call her. They had finished dinner and were still sitting at the dining table.
The phone had a long cord, and Child passed it to Jones. She heard M.F.’s whispery voice on the other end of the line: “Of course, dear,” she told Jones, “I will see you in a day or two here in Marseille.” They would meet at her hotel. She’d gone off on her own to write, and think, that’s all.
During this brief conversation, the phone cord was stretched across Bedford’s throat, Jones noticed with some alarm; Bedford was fending it off with her hands. It was a bit of inadvertent symbolism that she would not soon forget.
Child had been right. M.F. was not avoiding her editor. Bedford had been wrong, and Child had proved her wrong.
It was a small, seemingly insignificant moment. But for Child, the battle against self-satisfied, superior European “expertise” had become personal.
At the New Year’s Eve réveillon, lingering tension surrounded Child and Beck: Would they discuss their future relationship? Beck knew that Child was going her own way, embracing her television celebrity and working on books related to the show. Beck would not be involved. Of course it was a bit galling that her American friend had become “the French Chef,” when it was she who was actually French.
For Child, the decision wasn’t simply a matter of escaping Beck’s unfailing certitude about her way being the right way (i.e., the French way); no, it was also a matter of respect. “It is a fact,”
Julia said, “that she has never considered me a cook worth bothering about.”
For dinner at Le Vieux Mas, Beck served a fusillade of dishes, culminating in her annual potée normande. Her husband, Jean, had personally killed their year-old hen for the dish.
CAVIAR
SHRIMP IN FLAKY PASTRY
SMOKED SALMON
PTÉ OF GRIVES (THRUSHES)
FOIE GRAS
POTÉE NORMANDE
Cooking the potée normande was a five-hour affair. It was an elaborate, long-simmering dish of beef, pork, chicken, and sausage in a broth with carrots, onion, turnips, parsnips, and leeks. Beck cooked it in an enormous copper cauldron while she prepared the other dishes. The caviar, smoked salmon, and pâté she’d bought; the shrimp pastries and foie gras she prepared herself. The pastries she called demi-lune (half-moon) after their shape. To make them, she rolled out pâte brisée and cut out four-inch rounds; she sautéed tiny shrimp with onion, diced apples, cream, and a bit of curry powder. This filling was spooned onto the pastry, which was then folded over, glazed with an egg wash, and baked. She arranged them on a large tray.
For the foie gras, Beck cooked the fresh goose liver in a terrine with Armagnac. Jean made the rounds among the guests with each new delicacy. Paul and Julia sat with their French neighbors, toasting the New Year.