Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  The reception was held a few blocks from the church in the Mowrers’ apartment, and thanks to Dick Myers, who represented the distributor Sherry-Lehmann, champagne flowed freely. Close friends, including Julia and Paul, then drove to Crécy for a dinner at the Mowrers’ country home. Paul took the wedding photographs by the garden wall, Jack remembered.

  Dort, who was closer to Jack and Puck, visited the newlyweds in Berlin in early August after the theater season ended and again in 1950 after the birth of their first daughter, Joan (Muffet), in Paris. Paul, who thought the final production of three one-act plays amateurish, was pleased that she was visiting the Hemingways, for he thought Dort’s theater crowd was “rather emotional.”

  August 15, 1949, was Julia’s thirty-seventh birthday, and Paul wrote to Chafred in Maine that it was an auspicious day: it was the fourth anniversary of “Japanese acceptance of Allied surrender terms. It’s the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic of Korea. It’s the second anniversary of the proclamation of independence of India and Pakistan. It was the day when the cease-fire in Indonesia officially came into force, it’s the 70th birthday of Ethel Barrymore and it’s Julie’s birthday. A great and glorious day.”

  More important, it was a passage for Julia. She and Paul may have been nostalgic for the smell of balsam wood in Lopaus Point, Maine, but they were making plans for Julia’s future that would tie them forever to France. She was planning to enroll in the fall at the Cordon Bleu cooking school. Several people have taken credit for suggesting that she enroll: Janou, the librarian at USIS, suggested to Paul that Julia’s enthusiasm for French food should lead her to the famous school; Jean Friendly, the wife of Paul’s associate in the Marshall Plan, says “my husband suggested she study at the Cordon Bleu”; certainly the influence of Mari Bicknell in Cambridge, who graduated there and with whom Julia cooked, must have been significant. Julia visited the school on June 2.

  She eagerly wrote to ask Freddie to come over and “be a Cordon Bleu too,” but by the time of her birthday she gave up on the hope that her sister-in-law would join her. Paul joked about them opening a restaurant together. His birthday gift was Larousse Gastronomique (“1,087 pages of sheer cookery and foodery, 1,850 gravures, 16 color plates, definitions, recipes, information, stories and know-how—a wonder book,” Paul told Freddie).

  In preparation for her new career, she took a long trip to Marseilles with Paul after saying a tearful farewell to Hadley and Paul Mowrer, who were retiring to New Hampshire. Their final meal together was a four-hour lunch. The fish course was the best lobster Julia had eaten in France, accompanied by a fine white Burgundy.

  On a grand gastronomic tour introducing Julia to some of the variety of France’s cheeses, wines, and produce, and to celebrate their third anniversary, Julia and Paul left Paris on September 3, drove south through the heat and burning land in the most serious drought since 1909 and through the hills and cooler gorges of the Auvergne. Hélène Baltrusaitis and the French art historian Philippe Verdier (who agreed not to talk too much) accompanied them for half the journey. A few days out, happy with lunchtime wine and blinded by the sun, Julia drove over a high curbstone and the gas tank fell to the ground. “Paul was upset but not condemning. He never scolded Julia,” remembered Hélène.

  Marseilles is “a wonderful vibrant, colorful bouillabaisse,” declared Paul when he arrived to complete arrangements for his exhibit and hold a press conference. They arrived with a case of Pouilly wine in their trunk and stayed with Abe Manell (who had worked with Paul) and his wife, Rosemary, for whom Julia had an immediate liking. Rosie had been in the WAVES during the war, and Paul described her as “a big, blond, Earth-mother, young, California sculptress wife.” In Rosie, Julia found a friend for life and her future food designer. Rosie remembered having heard so much about Julia before meeting her: “I thought they must be exaggerating because no one can be this interesting, this funny, and I couldn’t believe it—she was better even than I thought.” On the drive to Marseilles and back (alone) through the Dordogne, Julia and Paul visited layers of time: Roman aqueducts, medieval castles, an eleventh-century abbey, and Renaissance fountains. Julia was especially thrilled with the gastronomic discoveries of the present: bass with fennel, grilled lamb flambé with fennel branches, wild duck, truffles, confit, and a visit to the Roquefort caves. She was ready to learn more about this fertile and complex country.

  Chapter 11

  CORDON BLEU

  (1949 – 1952)

  “I’ve got the Cordon Blues.”

  Country-western song, 1970

  JULIA WALKED past the American Embassy to the corner building at 129, rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, where for fifty-four years the Cordon Bleu cooking school had been housed. She carried her white apron, cap, kitchen towel, knives, and notebook as she paused to look in the window at the display of brandy. It was 7:30 A.M. on Thursday, October 6, 1949. After two frustrating mornings in a class of amateurs, she was finally transferred to a class she wanted.

  LE CORDON BLEU

  In Chef Max Bugnard’s class for ex-GIs who intended to become professionals, Julia was the only woman. (The morning classes, on the other hand, were six-week courses attended mostly by women.) Julia and eleven veterans, whose tuition of 4,100 francs a week was paid by the U.S. government, were taking a ten-month course of twenty-five hours a week, with their days taken up by hands-on cooking from 7:30 to 9:30 in the morning, then three-hour afternoon demonstration classes. The GIs had a friendly irreverence, one observer noted, and renamed the traditional white sauce originally named after Marquis de Béchamel as “Bechassmell.”

  Devoid of the shiny appliances and painted walls of modern cooking schools, the Cordon Bleu was crowded into seven rooms on the ground floor and basement. (Decades later Julia would remember sixteen students and “very roomy quarters.”) Only the office of Madame Elisabeth Brassart, the owner-director, was not crowded (one disillusioned student noted). Julia began dressing pigeons that morning in one of the two kitchens in the basement next to a storeroom. When they finished, they cleaned the wood tables with salt and vinegar, and Julia rushed home to prepare lunch for Paul.

  That afternoon she took her place upstairs in a rising row of chairs that faced a demonstration kitchen where she watched Monsieur Max Bugnard. She was awed by the seriousness and passion with which the chefs worked, but was a little overwhelmed by the number of new French words she was having to learn at once. “My French was very sketchy at first, but the Cordon Bleu was a lesson in language as well as cookery.”

  On Thursday, Julia wrote in her datebook pigeons rôtis délicieux and then prepared the same dish for Paul and Dorothy: “If you could see Julie stuffing pepper and lard up the asshole of a dead pigeon you’d realize how profoundly affected she’s been already by the Cordon Bleu,” Paul wrote to Charlie and Freddie. Dorothy remembers Julia walking down the steps from the kitchen with “meadowlarks” on sticks, “their little feet through the eyeballs,” and the cat Minette on Julia’s shoulder crying for a bite.

  On Friday the class cooked “veal and beans,” and she prepared the same dish at home that night. By the next Monday, Dorothy had une crise de foie, the familiar French stomach fatigue, and on Tuesday Paul was stricken as well. Fortunately, on Wednesday the group, who were presumably going into the restaurant business, visited Les Halles with Bugnard. It was a glorious week for Julia.

  With her usual enthusiasm and concentration, Julia poured her time and effort into learning to cook. Paul referred to himself as “practically a Cordon Bleu Widower. I can’t pry Julia loose from the kitchen day or night—not even with an oyster-knife.” By October 15, he confided to his family, “Julie’s cookery is actually improving! I didn’t quite believe it would, just between us girls, but it really is. In a sense it’s simpler, more classical (in the French tradition of bringing out the natural flavor rather than adding spices and herbs). I envy her this chance. It would be such fun to be doing it at the same time with her.”
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br />   Soon they were planning eight-person dinner parties for Julia to practice her new skills. Her datebook is filled with names, from the leading French and American art historians (Jean Ache from the Foçillon group was Paul’s favorite), to visiting Bicknells and Hemingways, to Paul’s colleagues, including Ed Taylor (former OSS pal, now correspondent for several large publications), and Bill and Betsy Tyler (he also a former OSS buddy, now Public Affairs Officer for France). One of their most frequent and respected guests was Helen Kirkpatrick, a senior at Smith when Julia was a freshman (“Who could forget that tall figure?” said the six-feet-two-inch Kirkpatrick) and now information officer for the Marshall Plan (official title Public Liaison Director of French ECA). Occasionally Kirkpatrick, who was also a great friend of the Mowrers, brought Cornelia Otis Skinner.

  It took brawn to get to the brine, and Julia’s stamina was more than a match for most of her male fellow students. Unlike Sabrina, the delicate Cordon Bleu apprentice played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1954 movie of the same name, Julia was strong and determined. Madame Brassart, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle (she would not meet her co-authors until the next year) all have commented on the value of her physical strength in hefting iron pots and pans in the kitchen. “When I first saw her stature and enthusiasm,” declared Bertholle, “I knew she would be a great success.” The great chef Escoffier, by way of contrast, had to wear elevated shoes to reach the stove.

  But as important as physical strength was the strength of her commitment. “I just became passionate. I had been looking for a career all my life,” she informed an OSS interviewer. “Julia’s strongest personal trait is dogged determination,” said Helen Kirkpatrick. Hélène Baltrusaitis credited both her intelligence and her seriousness: “Julia was sharp, quick, and perceptive. Her mind was always working, but sometimes she could look naive. She had these two wonderful faces: she cooked with all her heart and seriousness, but could dissolve into laughter and silliness the next minute.” Paul declared she had a “quality of raucous humor” even in her most chic creations, and he later described for Chafred one of her cold fish dishes, decorated with five-point stars cut from leek leaves for the eyes, and strips of anchovies to suggest the skeletal structure.

  Instead of struggling to express herself with words, as she had first envisioned her career before joining the OSS, Julia was finding expression in cutting, molding, and cooking the elements of nature that on the table bring friends together for conversation and good wine. This was not American “home economics,” with its undercurrent of nineteenth-century melioristic scientism, but a century-old tradition at the center of French life. Julia observed the French need for formulating and tabulating nature and art, and she was well aware that she needed to learn to codify food and cooking. There were, after all, a hundred ways to cook a potato, and every variation in a sauce gave it a different name (she learned the first week that adding grated cheese to a béchamel made it a Mornay).

  One month later—in fact, it was a year ago to the day that she landed on French soil—Julia went alone to Les Halles with chef Max Bugnard, a distinguished man with fine mustaches. Trained as a boy with Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in London and a former restaurateur in prewar Brussels, he was a classicist of French cuisine, specializing in sauces, meats, and fish (which would be Julia’s specialties). He was, she told Simone Beck four years later, “mon maître chef Max Bugnard … with impeccable standards.” With him she studied the produce in the market that Saturday. With him she prepared, during the first six weeks, the following dishes: terrine de lapin de garenne, quiche lorraine, galantine de volaille, gnocchi à la florentine, vol-au-vent financière, choucroute garnie à l’alsacienne, crème Chantilly, pets-de-nonne, charlotte de pommes, soufflé Grand Marnier, risotto aux fruits de mer, coquille St.-Jacques, merlan à lorgnettes, rouget au safran, poulet sauté Marengo, canard à l’orange and turbot farci braisé au champagne.

  The list of dishes was compiled by Paul. His respect for French cuisine and for her future career would be an essential element in her success. French women of Julia’s class hired cooks, and their American friends thought she was “a nut” to shop, cook, and serve her own food. Americans disdained (and some argue they still do) home cooking, which was being pushed aside by economic growth and time-saving shortcuts (Pillsbury and General Mills had just introduced the first cake mixes). Food historians agree that the post-World War II period was the nadir of American cooking. But Julia did not know this; she could only revel in crowded street markets, drama in the kitchen, and a nation obsessed with eating well.

  Paul shopped with her when he could, joined a gym, immersed himself in photography during her hours in the kitchen (“If I don’t sit in the kitchen and watch I never see Julia”), and eagerly awaited each meal. He also helped her critique her dishes. It was clear to their friends that she adored and respected him. The only real tension in their marriage was Julia’s love of big dinners and cocktail parties. He preferred small groups and occasional solitude: “It’s inconceivable to Julie that I don’t really enjoy what she called ‘getting out in the world and seeing a few people now and then’!” he complained to Charlie in January 1950.

  Paul gives us this first description of Julia the chef, in December 1949. Though the word “stove” is called “piano” in French, Paul chooses another musical instrument:

  The sight of Julia in front of her stove-full of boiling, frying & simmering foods has the same fascination for me as watching a kettle drummer at the symphony. Imagine this in y[ou]r mind’s eye: Julie, with a blue-denim apron on, a dish towel stuck under her belt, a spoon in each hand, stirring 2 pots at the same time. Warning bells are sounding-off like signals from the podium, and a garlic-flavored steam fills the air with an odoriferous leit-motif. The oven door opens and shuts so fast you hardly notice the deft thrust of a spoon as she dips into a casserole and up to her mouth for a taste-check like a perfectly timed double-beat on the drums. She stands there surrounded by a battery of instruments with an air of authority and confidence. Now & again a flash of the non-cooking Julie lights up the scene briefly, as it did the day before yesterday when with her bare fingers, she snatched a set of cannelloni out of the pot of boiling water with the cry, “Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock.”

  An affectionate portrait of a lusty, loving wife in their private kitchen, reported by her sophisticated husband to his brother. Paul marveled at her ability to remove all the guts of a chicken out through a small hole in the neck and then loosen the skin for the insertion of truffles. She could remove the bones of a duck without tearing the skin: “And you ought to see that Old Girl skin a wild hare—you’d swear she’d just be Comin’ round the Mountain with Her Bowie Knife in Hand.”

  He described their kitchen as an “alchemist’s eyrie,” full of the instruments of her craft. She bought tart rings, zester, a tortoiseshell to scrape a tamis, copper pans, maplewood stirring paddles, a conical sieve, whisks (the French had eight kinds), long needles for larding roasts, scales, and rolling pins at E. Dehillerin, her favorite food-equipment store in the main street of Les Halles. “The store owner was a friend of Max Bugnard and they let us buy on credit,” she remembered. Buying pots, pans, and gadgets “became an obsession I’ve never been able to break.” She hung her pots around the stove, somewhat as in her great-grandfather’s pre-Civil War wood cabin in Griggsville, Illinois, where cookery pots hung around the clay fireplace and where corn bread was the staple meal and migrating pigeons were so thick they bent the tree limbs outside.

  The Cordon Bleu, however, had only the basic equipment in 1950. It had only one sink, did not have electrical equipment other than stoves (and some of them did not work). The English word “Frigidaire” was adopted by the French to refer to their iceboxes: “zinc-lined block-ice dripper-coolers,” to use Paul Child’s description. There were certainly no blenders. On the day they made a ham mousse, Julia and the nine men present had to pound the ham by hand: “We pounded it in this great b
ig mortar, and they had one of those big drum sieves, and they rubbed it through the sieve and scraped it off the bottom. And it was absolutely delicious, but it took about an hour and a half to make. That would be two minutes or less in the food processor,” she said recently. When it came time to make quenelles (which Paul had so lovingly described for her in China), they pounded the pike for thirty minutes (“a horrifying chore”), then forced it through a tamis for the day’s demonstration. The dish was a divine morsel, in sharp contrast to the fried codfish cakes of her childhood.

  When she wanted to make quenelles de brochet at home, Paul accompanied her to the Marché aux Puces (flea market) to buy just the right instrument. Paul said that as if “by some special chien-de-cuisine instinct Julia ran to earth at the end of an obscure alley of packing-box houses on the remoter fringes of the market a marble mortar as big as a baptismal font and a pestle.” With muscles honed by pulling logs in Maine, Paul was able to carry the instruments on his back through the market to their car. He judged the slave labor worth the effort when he tasted the quenelle, though he described it “as a sort of white, suspiciously suggestive thing, disguised by a multiform yellowish sauce for which, if you saw it on the rug, you’d promptly spank the cat.”

  In order to puree any food, Julia recently explained to Food & Wine magazine, “you would have to pass it through a hair sieve—meaning that you first pounded the cooked rice and onions in a mortar, then pushed them through a fine mesh stretched over a drum-shaped form with a wooden pestle, and finally scraped the puree off the other side with a tortoiseshell scoop. That took some doing, and I know since it’s how we pureed in my Paris school days in 1949.”