Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  TO EAT LIKE A GOD IN FRANCE

  Julia and Paul explored a different quarter of Paris each weekend, including its bistros and restaurants. Though the Guide Michelin was their bible, they did some independent testing, placing the names and addresses of their favorite places inside Julia’s datebook. In the back she listed the wines and their good years. They noticed that most restaurants, like the ones they visited in China, had potbellied stoves with stovepipes going across the ceiling and out the window.

  They enjoyed poulet gratiné at Au Gourmet in the rue des Canettes and tripe at Pharamond near Les Halles, took Dick Bissell to Au Cochon de Lait, returned frequently to La Truite, located off the rue Boissy-d’Anglas near the American Embassy, owned by the same family who owned La Couronne in Rouen. Michaud remained a favorite, as did Escargot d’Or, where the first week they lunched on a dozen escargots with a half bottle of Sancerre, followed by rognons Bercy in wine and mushroom sauce with a half bottle of Clos de Vougeot, followed by escarole salade, and finished with café filtre. They thought they had discovered Le Grand Véfour and its chef, Raymond Oliver, and its sommelier, Monsieur Hennoq, until they caught a glimpse of Colette there. “I remember the estouffade at Le Grand Véfour. It is a dish made by hollowing out a loaf of bread and rubbing it with creamy butter, then baking it to a golden brown and filling it with crevettes [shrimp] in cream and butter.” They had “truly elegant” gratins of shellfish at Lapérouse, beer and sandwiches at La Closerie des Lilas, and oysters and wine at the Brasserie Lipp after a cold day prowling Montmartre. And it was almost always to the Deux Magots for drinks or after-dinner coffee.

  Although Michaud’s has since disappeared, a number of the restaurants that Julia listed in her datebooks of this period are still serving meals under the same name fifty years later: Chez George, Marius (rue de Bourgogne, just steps from the Childs’ flat), Pierre, Prunier, Pharamond, and Lapérouse. Paul frequently expressed gratitude that “Julie loves Paris so much.” She is a “darling, sensitive, outgoing, appreciative, characterful and interesting woman!” he wrote Charlie and Freddie early in 1949. “Well, let’s face it: I’m a lucky bastard.”

  Though restaurants may have originated in China, they flourished in modern times in France after the French Revolution, when chefs who had worked for the aristocracy went into business for themselves. The word “restaurant” originated both from “to restore” and from the French term for fortifying soup. French taste dictated the scale and suitability of the proportions, the sculpture, and the presentation of the food, the ritual of the tablecloth and wineglasses—every detail of the selection, preparation, flavoring, and timing of meals. The amount of bread crumbs on the tablecloth spelled out the crisp quality of the bread. Gastronomy in France is reserved for the fine arts and sciences, and the art of the table is accorded a reverence akin to religion.

  The city surrounded and embraced the river, Paul pointed out to her, unlike Boston, where the great homes turned their backs on the basin. These elements of French taste at table and in architecture were discussed and evaluated with Paul. Julia’s response was ecstatic, both in appetite and in the way she dressed. She now wore a suit and hat and regularly had her brown hair permed. “The artistic integrity of the French,” Edith Wharton pointed out, “led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman’s hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble.”

  “What I remember most is the elegant but genuine cordiality of the restaurants,” said Julia. And the subtlety of tastes. If food is linked to human behavior, so the reasoning of cultural anthropologists goes, then French “subtlety of thought and manner is related to the subtlety of its cuisine,” just as the reserve of the British is attributed to their “unimaginative diet” and the German stolidness to heavy food. As the German expression for pleasure goes, “happy as God in France.”

  With her continuing studies at Berlitz, her market shopping, and her menu reading, Julia was amassing a large vocabulary of French food. Because the French had codified cheeses (325 varieties!), wines, foods, and cooking techniques, many of their words were already a part of her vocabulary: menu, sauce, fruit, salade, mayonnaise, céleri, bifteck, meringue, raisins, paprika, hors d’oeuvre, dessert. She discovered a language saturated with food imagery: crème de la crème (top of society), gâte-sauce (beginner).

  Although Julia would later say they had little money and ate out only once a week, according to her datebooks their first months in Paris were filled with restaurants. They set aside the $100 from her family income and used it to dine out. They could eat in a good French bistro for a dollar. Fifty years later she would exclaim, “I was so fortunate! This was before the nutrition police had reared their ugly heads; it was still the old French cooking with butter and cream.” And: “There were no nutritionists in Paris then, thank God!”

  Markets in Paris were a sensuous delight. Julia stared at pig’s heads, sniffed sausages, poked fish, salivated over baskets of mushrooms, and practiced her French with the fat market people in wooden shoes, black aprons, and red faces who yelled at each other over the cacophony of market sounds. The carts and tables were piled high with mussels, squash, leeks, and chrysanthemums when she first arrived in Paris. The cabbages were as green as those in China. The spring brought endives and mandarins, and the summer provided strawberries, green beans, and tomatoes. Because each growing season was limited, the arrival of the first tomato or the first strawberry was celebrated. Little could be preserved anyway, for most people had only an icebox. No wonder she remembered that she was “in hysterics for months.” France’s national passion became hers.

  She bought staples such as cigarettes, chocolate, and soap at the American PX and Normandy cream, butter, and cheese from the crémerie and fromagère in the rue de Bourgogne. The cheese shop, Julia remembered, “was run by a buxom blonde who could tell me whether the cheese should be eaten tonight or for lunch tomorrow.” There were small individual shops for meat and bread, and wine, but in these days before supermarkets, there were only open-air markets for a variety of fresh produce. She walked up the Boulevard St.-Germain to the market in the rue de Buci or, “if I had enough energy to walk, I would cross the Champs de Mars to the largest market on the Left Bank.” She quickly learned she had to establish a relationship with the vendors to get the best produce: “I learned human relations in France,” she would say.

  Paul joined a men’s gastronomic club. Through Pierre Andrieu, its adviser, they went to choose some good wines at the Foire de Paris, where they sipped Armagnac, brandy, champagne, and Sancerre, Bordeaux, and Alsatian wines. “It was an expensive excursion … and we were feeling very jovial indeed,” Julia wrote a friend. “About two weeks later cases upon cases of wine arrived at our apartment, so much that we had to buy two wine racks for the cellar; we had quite forgotten what we had ordered.”

  Across the river was Les Halles, the belly of Paris, a living organism of fruits, vegetables, animals, and fowl, where every restaurant in Paris bought its produce. And Les Halles aux Vins, the vast hall of wines at the east end of the Left Bank’s Boulevard St.-Germain, was a collection of vendors whose wine stained the streets and filled the air of this quarter of the 5th Arrondissement. The sheer magnitude overwhelmed her, but she studied the names of the foods and wines.

  Though she still had not mastered The Joy of Cookings recipes, Julia continued to cook and entertain. She prepared toast and two fried eggs each morning, a simple lunch (she would greet Paul’s return “with a whoop,” he said), and a more elaborate dinner if they were entertaining. They had a maid for a month but hated her cooking, disliked the time regime, and decided to economize. Thereafter, twice a week they had a femme de ménage named Jeanne “la Folle” (the crazy woman), who urged them to buy a cat to get rid of the mice. Julia adored Minette, who ate the mice and one day brought a bird in from the roof and ate it on the Persian rug. Thereafter they would be devoted cat lovers.

  Spring brought green fuzz to t
he chestnuts on Paris’s trees and peach blossoms to the Mowrers’ country home in Crécy. Paul and Julia enjoyed picnics, visiting friends, and trips with Hélène Baltrusaitis. “We would walk along the banks of the river on the quais,” recalled Julia. “We were great picnickers, even picnicking on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower (before there was a restaurant there). It was lovely.” Her datebook reveals she had lunch or tea or drinks or dinner with friends nearly every day. Among her guests their first year in Paris, including the Mowrers and Baltrusaitises, were May Sarton (poet and longtime friend of Paul visiting from New England), the Bicknells (visiting from London), Dick Bissell, Life reporter and photographer Helen Morgan, painter Buffie Johnson, French art critics Roger Caillois and Philippe Verdier, as well as nephew Paul Sheeline and his wife, and her good friends the Chamberlains. Sam Chamberlain was a great cook, writer, and photographer, and was accompanied by his wife, Narcissa, with whom he would soon publish Bouquet de France: An Epicurean Tour of the French Provinces.

  The first trip in France with Hélène was a five-day February excursion (what Paul called Julia’s “first crack at France-as-a-whole”) to Nice, where they visited the vacationing Mowrers. In the spring they took day trips (“picnics”) and during school vacations Hélène had to take her young teenage son, which made her uneasy because she believed that Paul hated children. But she learned when to keep silent with him and sensed that he appreciated her wit (“our friendship was special”). She was honored when one day he told her the full story of his “very difficult” early life. She remembers often stopping for long periods while Paul waited for just the right light for a photograph:

  At first we took day picnics, but eventually we traveled all over France together [said Mrs. Baltrusaitis]. We visited every region but Brittany (because it was too far). Julia could never resist asking questions. She is really intelligent and very curious and loved to meet people. Because she was so tall, people were curious about her and made remarks. It was courage and love for Paul to marry Julia, whom everyone noticed. He never wanted to be noticed. It was not just that he was shy, but he loved Julia and wanted the light on her.

  For a three-day trip to Normandy in May, the three of them took art critic Philippe Verdier, a member of their Wednesday group, whom Paul found too talkative. That summer they returned to Normandy, visited Chartres, and the Champagne region, where Hélène’s family had a house in Maranville, a tiny village bordering Champagne and Burgundy. When they stepped on a rusted German helmet in the forest beyond Lunéville on the way to Strasbourg, the war seemed not so distant.

  Paul took hundreds of photographs and spent weeks and months working on a single painting. While he painted a stained-glass medallion of and for the Focillon group, Julia worked out a classification system for his private and professional photograph files. He designed the first of many annual Valentine’s cards to send in lieu of Christmas cards to their family and friends. This spring he completed a painting of a street of Paris and in the summer an aqueduct.

  The only time Julia ever thought she might be pregnant was about this time in Paris. “I was delighted,” Julia reported fifty years later, remembering that the “feeling” lasted for “about a month.” Not until Paul mentioned it in a letter to his brother did Julia realize it was only stomach fatigue, “I was bilious … too much cream and butter.” Though decades later she would claim she was not heartbroken about her failure to conceive a child, her family and friends are sure she was disappointed. Several family members believed Paul did not want children. He was a loving father figure to two nieces and a nephew and to Edith Kennedy’s three boys. But years of teaching boys in France, Italy, and then Connecticut gave him his fill of squirming boys. “I don’t think Paul was mad to have children,” said Julia, “but it would have been very different if it had been his own.” In 1988 in McCall’s, Julia remarked, “I would have been the complete mother,” and the reporter added: this was her “one regret.” A decade later, as if in justification, she exclaimed, “If I had had a child, I would not have had a career…. because I was freelance.”

  Julia’s sister Dorothy arrived April 8, just about a week before her thirty-second birthday and at the peak of spring green, for an extended visit. Julia had written to tell her to leave the family home, buy a diaphragm, and come to Paris to complete her education. She was “wildly enthusiastic,” according to Paul, when they settled her into their guest room and then took her on the “JuPaulski standard tourist walk” around the St.-Germain quarter, ending with drinks at Deux Magots. After a Sunday with the Baltrusaitises and Mowrers at the latter’s country home, they took her on Monday to the Foire aux Jambons, where Julia and Dorothy (at six feet four inches) collected a crowd. In the months to come she traveled about Europe with friends and became involved with an English-speaking theater group in Paris.

  Paul’s photographs and letters capture their April trip to Lyons for an exhibit that showed the results of the Marshall Plan, an exhibit (it would go to Lille in July) that Paul had worked on since his arrival in Paris. From there they took a ten-day trip in the Blue Flash (Buick) to England to see Nigel and Sally Bicknell, their former housemates in Georgetown. It was the first visit to London for both Julia and Paul, and they delighted in the bowler hats and umbrellas, were struck by the absence of handshaking, and found the English pace vigorous and bustling, but the people ponderous.

  They traveled on to Cambridge to meet the other Bicknells, Nigel’s brother Peter and his wife, Mari, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Peter and Mari, with whom they were perfectly compatible, would remain lifelong friends. Despite the affection for their friends, Julia preferred what she called “little old France,” with its “sweet naturalness and healthy pleasures of the flesh and spirit.” Later she declared that England “seemed more foreign than France” to them.

  “Americans are flooding into the city like the tide at Mont St.-Michel,” Paul wrote to Charlie. The terraces of the Deux Magots and the Café Flore were crowded with people watchers, “the national pastime in France.” More old friends were in town, including the Brennans, who were there for a month (Hank, working for Henry Luce and writing an article for Fortune magazine on the recovery of France, had been to the Lyons exhibit). “Julie cooked a goose” for eight people, Paul added, “and very well too.” The meal ended with strawberries and crème d’Isigny. His letters to Charlie were sprinkled with newly invented mixed drinks for the cocktail hour.

  HEMINGWAY WEDDING

  Hadley asked Julia if she would serve as maid of honor for the wedding of her son Jack, “Bumby,” and Julia made her dress and hat (she had been taking hat lessons with a friend) for the occasion. John (Jack) Hemingway and his bride, Byra (Puck) Whitlock, whose first husband had died in the war, wished to be married with a church wedding in the old-fashioned manner. Because Puck was still in Idaho and Jack was stationed in Berlin with Army Intelligence, it fell to Hadley and Paul Mowrer to make all the arrangements and take care of the complicated legal papers. Once Julia agreed to serve as maid of honor (Puck was a tall girl also), Paul agreed to stand by as best man if Jack could not get a friend released to come with him, and the Childs offered to put up Jack when he arrived in Paris on June 20, 1949 (Hadley planned to keep the couple separated until the church wedding).

  Jack, Julia informed a biographer of his father, was “an attractive, blond, good-looking American boy, who wed an attractive, unsophisticated and extremely nice young woman.” Paul thought that Puck was “a lovely tall dark girl with a face full of character” and described the groom as “a vigorous, extroverted, attractive, thick young man. He’s a U.S. army captain with lots of medal-ribbons and paratrooper’s wings. He was in OSS and was dropped behind the German lines to form agent-teams. He’s bi-lingual, was captured and escaped no less than four times. Like his Poppa he is nuts about fishing, and thinks of Ernest’s estancia outside of Havana as home.” Papa, however, did not attend the wedding.

  On Thursday, the night bef
ore the civil wedding, Julia and Paul hosted a cocktail party for the Hemingway wedding party and Mowrer friends, a “big good party,” Julia described it (Paul normally preferred a maximum of eight guests at a time). Many old-time American expatriates were there; Julia was particularly thrilled to meet Alice B. Toklas, whom Paul had met through Daddy Myers in the 1920s. Toklas and Stein had witnessed for Jack’s christening.

  Jack’s friend Lieutenant Bob Shankman, who was six feet six inches tall, squired Dort around Paris that weekend, attracting attention wherever they went. “When the two of them got out of her little MG TC and stood up,” remembered Hemingway, “crowds would gather and stare in awe at the wonderful mismatch.” The wedding party, Dort’s friends at the American theater where she was working on staging, and various colleagues in UNESCO and USIS wandered in and out of the Child apartment. Julia seemed to thrive on the chaos and numbers of people. Staying in their apartment were not only Jack Hemingway and Dorothy, but Peter Bicknell, who was on his way back to London. Paul complained that “a steady tunnel of liquor flows from our bar down all these throats.”

  According to French law, Jack and Puck were married in a civil ceremony first at 4:45 P.M. on Friday, June 24, at the mairie (town hall) of the 7th Arrondissement, with a rehearsal for the church wedding following. Alice Lee Myers gave a cocktail reception before the Mowrers’ bridal dinner.

  On Saturday, the wedding—Julia calls it the “Mowrer wedding” in her datebook—took place at 11:30 A.M., with Julia and Lieutenant Jack Kelly as witnesses in the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. U.S. ambassador to France, David Bruce (formerly head of OSS in Europe), Richard (Daddy) and Alice Lee Myers, and Fanny and Hank Brennan were in the congregation. Hélène Baltrusaitis believed this was “the only time I ever saw Paul Child,” whom she describes as “an aggressive atheist,” inside a church. He should have been at home in this particular church, however, because in the 1920s he had spent hours putting in the stained-glass windows. Tarzan of the Apse, Charlie named him.