Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  A controversy about the hygiene at Cordon Bleu arose in 1951 when an American woman wrote a satiric exposé of the school (“First, Peel an Eel”), describing the dirty drawers, endless dipping of fingers into pots, the reuse of unwashed pots and pans, and food dropped on the floor, “delicately known as a coup de ballet parisien and forthwith returned to the mixing bowl [instead of being kicked under the table, as the expression suggests].” The school “stands firmly aloof from almost all equipment invented since the beginning of the school…. In my six weeks at the Cordon Bleu I never spied a thermometer, mechanical mixer or pressure cooker.” The author described the peeling of live fish and the drowning of little rabbits in white wine. She added that with the absence of green vegetables, salads, and fruit, and the excessive saucing and cream, it was little wonder that “every Frenchman complains perpetually about his liver and why the larger eaters go to Vichy for periodic cures.”

  Julia blamed the dirty facilities and lack of modern appliances on the stinginess of Madame Brassart, who had bought the school in 1945, when it was clear that the charity (for orphans) which had inherited it at the death in 1934 of the founder, Marthe Distel, could not manage it. The Cordon Bleu began as a sixteenth-century chivalric order of a hundred gastronome aristocrats who wore a Maltese cross on a blue ribbon (cordon bleu) and gathered for “first-class feasting,” according to Catharine Reynolds. The weekly magazine Cordon Bleu was started in 1895 by Marthe Distel, who gathered the subscribers and household chefs for demonstrations by great chefs. Brassart, who studied with Henri-Paul Pellaprat (one of France’s greatest professor-cooks), bought both the magazine and the school. She introduced the first hands-on classes and saw to it that only cuisine classique was taught.

  There was no love lost between Madame Brassart and Julia Child. Brassart, after reading harsh criticisms from Child, said as late as 1994 that “Mrs. Child was not marked by any special talent for cooking but for her hard work.” She repeated the judgment that Mrs. Child did “not have any great natural talent for cooking,” but added that she was a bonne exécutrice who understood French cuisine and what was important about it for Americans. Certainly Mrs. Child lacked “taste memory,” an expression coined by James Beard, whose mother had brought him up amid the gathering, preparing, and serving of food in Portland, Oregon. To make up for lost time, Julia studied and researched recipes and food and practiced long, hard hours. During the winter while other Parisians leisurely watched from the Deux Magots the renovation of the church of St.-Germain, Julia stayed in the kitchen or haunted the markets, cooking shops, and specialty shops, such as Androuet, the famous cheese emporium behind the Gare St.-Lazare.

  Brassart also said, however, that “Julia was a woman of character, a good communicator. She was courageous. She worked very hard.” After her American student achieved fame, Brassart would say that she was the only student allowed to conclude her studies after just four months [she studied six]. Bugnard praised her work, according to Louisette Bertholle: “Max Bugnard and Claude Thillmont said that you were the most gifted of us all. They were not only talented chefs, they were also good predictors.” Julia’s eagerness to learn offset the French suspicion of foreigners. She was a spy in the house of food, in the temple of gastronomy, and would reveal its secrets. One day she would make them clear and apparently simple to her compatriots.

  Despite what she thought of Madame Brassart, she valued her lessons at Bugnard’s stove and enjoyed the teaching of chef Pierre Mangelotte, a “young, sad-eyed” magician with dramatic skills, who was chef at the Restaurant des Artistes in Montmartre. He always held his audience’s attention. Holding his knife high in the air, he announced in a loud voice, “Voici! A potato!” His enthusiasm over his creations was loving. Raymond Desmeillers was also one of her demonstration cooks (it was he who peeled the live eel for the woman who wrote the exposé on a dirty Cordon Bleu). She also studied with Claude Thillmont, the pastry chef at the Café de Paris, who was once associated with Madame Saint-Ange. Paul called him “a fine, honest, salty technician with a ripe and rapid accent, and a wonderful way with a pie-crust.” He gave her individual classes in cake making the next year (she remembered beating eggs for a cake for twenty minutes).

  Maurice-Edmond Saillant, known by his pen name Curnonsky, also came to teach at the Cordon Bleu. A key figure in gourmet circles, he wrote a thirty-two-volume encyclopedia of France’s regional foods and in 1928 founded the Académie des Gastronomes. The author of Cuisine et Vins de France had just turned seventy-seven.

  By March 24, 1950, Julia decided she had completed the course and learned what she could from the Cordon Bleu. The recipes were getting repetitive, and she preferred to study independently with Bugnard, attend afternoon demonstrations, and practice for her exam. She spent six months, except for the Christmas holiday when she cooked with Mari Bicknell in Cambridge, England, preparing food in the early morning for two hours, cooking lunch for Paul, attending three-hour demonstrations in the afternoon, and then preparing the same dishes that night for Paul, Dorothy, and friends. (She did essentially nothing else, except, she told one interviewer, “I would go to school in the morning, then for lunch time, I would go home and make love to my husband, and then …”) Probably no one at the school worked that thoroughly. The halfhearted GIs would continue three more months, but Julia wanted no more of the six-thirty wake-ups. Later when she asked Madame Brassart when she could take the final examination, Julia heard nothing from her.

  It would take more than a year, the written testimony of Max Bugnard, and finally a blunt but professional letter to Madame Brassart before she received a signed diploma. Julia’s letter a year later (March 28, 1951) detailed her work and the failure of Brassart to set an exam date, and insisted she must take the test before leaving on a trip in mid-April: Il est surprenant de vous voir prendre si peu d’intérêt à vos élèves (It is surprising to me to see you take so little interest in your students). Everyone at the American Embassy, including the ambassador, she added threateningly, knows that she has been studying at the Cordon Bleu. In a postscript she offered her own well-equipped kitchen if there was no room at the school for her exam.

  Results were immediate, her exam completed, and the diploma sent with a date that preceded her letter by thirteen days. Julia thought that the written portion of the exam was far too simple for her training, and she was self-critical about her cooking techniques and failure to memorize several basics for the final meal prepared for Bugnard (though Helen Kirkpatrick, who was a guest, remembered that “Bugnard ate everything at the dinner with gusto”). Both Bugnard and Julia were pleased that the paperwork was complete. In his Christmas letter to her, he expressed admiration for her and asked for her help in answering the exposé article in Life International. Not surprisingly, when Julia publicly responded to the article, she charged the school only with “poor administration.” And two years later, she would write to a friend, “I hate only a very few people, one being Mme. Brassart, head of the Cordon Bleu, who is a nasty, mean woman, [Senator] McCarthy, whom I don’t know, and Old Guard Republicans, whom I see as little as possible.”

  While Julia was giving herself up to Cordon Bleu recipes, “that bastard from Wisconsin!”—as Paul called Red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy—was making life miserable for several of their friends, as well as for Secretary of State Dean Acheson. They took a keen interest in the “trial-by-McCarthy,” France’s war in Indochina, and the crippling strikes during the spring of 1950. Julia, whose appliances were gas-generated, had to cook her food on the stoves of the Cordon Bleu and put a block of ice in her refrigerator for a large dinner party she gave during the gas strike. She thrived in adversity, and Paul reported the party’s success: he poured Chablis ’37 with the oysters, a Corton ’32 with the beef, and a Volnay ’45 with the Brie.

  They always maintained, beyond their cooking and photography, a rich French intellectual life, attending plays (they saw Louis Jouvet in Molière’s Tartuffe that spring), documentary film
s and discussions at their ciné club, the Wednesday medieval art history nights at the Baltrusaitises (they found Jurgis egotistical and difficult, but adored Hélène), and their Sunday mornings’ in-depth exploration of another quarter of Paris (marking each section off on a map of Paris they kept on the wall). One day in May, as she listened to Weber’s “Overture to Oberon” on the radio and could smell the soup gently simmering on the stove, she wrote that the “gentle soft night was lovely, Brie cheese is at its peak right now, strawberries are just coming in, and cream is thick and butter yellow.” She reveled in these sensuous pleasures.

  An American in Paris with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron was the movie of 1951 and an impetus for travel (the Childs would reluctantly see the movie the following year and enjoy it). The beginning of the spring influx of visitors, including Julia’s cousins, both their families, and an assortment of friends made it impossible for Julia to continue her early morning Cordon Bleu classes. The arrival of family and even the most distant of friends made great demands on their time and entertaining capacity.

  FAMILY MATTERS:

  DIVORCE FROM POP

  Easter brought the McWilliamses, father John and stepmother Phila, otherwise known as Philapop, for a three-week holiday with Julia (and, for a while, Dort) in Italy. Because Julia and Paul forged a secret pledge to make Pop happy (which meant no political discussions) and because he was on their turf, the days in Paris were pleasant, and Paul was pleased. Pop was generous, and they stayed at the Ritz. They all dined at the best restaurants, including Lapérouse, Pré Catalan, Tour d’Argent (for the McWilliamses’ anniversary), and in the Palais Royal, Le Grand Véfour—the latter, according to Paul, was their “favorite ritzy eating place” costing “a million dollars,” but “because Julie is both unusually tall and unusually nice, everyone always remembers her, and we get the royal-carpet treatment.”

  Julia and Paul had never been apart more than two days since their wedding, and it was difficult for both of them when she left to travel with her father and Phila to Naples and back through Lucerne. Difficult for Julia because her father’s back hurt him (they spent only a half an hour in the Uffizi, she noted in her datebook), and she knew after two weeks he wanted to be back in California. He was indeed Old Republican Guard and Scotch Presbyterian, so she did not disagree with him when he contrasted clean Switzerland with dirty France. But she spoke positively: “Pop is an old darling, who has mellowed mightily in every respect but that old Tory hard-core of politics.” She wrote Charlie and Freddie her response to the trip: “What surprised and interested me is how far away I am from their life and interests. We have just about nothing in common any more, no reactions, likes, life, anything.” Paul, who felt that life without her was “like unsalted food” (“You are the smell to my flower, the butter to my bread, the breath to my life”), was pleased to observe that “Julie finally got her divorce” from her father.

  Dorothy returned early from Italy to work at the American Club Theater and keep Puck Hemingway company until the birth of her daughter at the American Hospital (Jack stayed at his job in Berlin). Dort still had her own room in their apartment and preferred the company of outsiders, misfits, and bohemians. Paul was urging her to leave the theater group (she was demoted from her nonpaying job) and the company of Ivan Cousins, whom he did not like. Paul complained twice in letters to Julia about the theater company “fairies,” with their speech patterns and walk, who hung around Dort’s room.

  Ivan was a former Navy man (captain of a PT boat in World War II) from Greenfield, Massachusetts, who worked for the Marshall Plan (Office of Small Business) and occasionally acted in the theater company. Because he had studied in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse with classmates Gregory Peck and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., he played the father in Thornton Wilder’s Happy Journey. He had come to Paris at the urging of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a Navy buddy with whom he roomed in Paris for two years. When Ivan’s mother arrived for two months, including travel with Ivan, Paul urged Dort to make the break (“he’s a dreary, emasculated youth”). Instead she found her own apartment in July and by the end of the year went to Washington to be with Ivan.

  Ivan was Irish, “witty, fun, and social,” says his daughter, “he played the piano by ear and had many talents and had the joie de vivre that Julia does.” Julia thought him “jolly and huggable.” Louise Vincent, who acted with Ivan, remembered he “had much of an overgrown child in him” and “Dorothy was a protective figure for Ivan.” For Dorothy, she added, “Ivan was the traveler, the adventurer, the artist, the troubadour, and far removed from her father.” They completed and accepted each other. Clearly Ivan saw in her the McWilliams (or rather Weston) love of life. “One of the reasons I married her is that she makes me laugh so much,” he later told a journalist.

  The most joyous reunion came in July when Charlie, Freddie, and their three children arrived in St.-Malo, Brittany, where Julia and Paul drove to meet them. By Bastille Day on July 14 the Child clan was cooking a big dinner together in Paris, including the Bicknells, who had come from Cambridge, and some of the Foçillon group. Julia served a huge stuffed breast of veal poached in wine with, as she told me, one of the best stocks she would ever make. In helping to clean up, Charlie mistakenly threw out the pan of stock (Julia would remember it forty-five years later). Nevertheless, she whooped it up, taking them to a demonstration at the Cordon Bleu and to the Dehillerin kitchen shop, to picnics and Paris sites. Paris was where Charlie and Freddie had fallen in love after college and where they lived together before marrying and rearing a family.

  After two weeks the Chafred family went to Cassis in Provence near Marseilles, where Julia and Paul joined them at the end of July for three weeks. They stayed in the Marseilles home of Rosie and Abe Manell and visited with Richard E. (Daddy) Myers before returning, on Julia’s thirty-eighth birthday, through Geneva. After the family left by boat train for Cherbourg and the Queen Mary, Julia and Paul celebrated a late joint birthday for Julia and Hélène with her Foçillon family at Maranville. They had foie gras, poulet de Bresse, and Meursault.

  “J. feeling middle-aged,” she wrote several times in her datebook that fall. The autumn rains, the ebb tide of tourists, falling horse chestnuts, the war in Korea, and Paul’s hospitalization all brought on a fall melancholy. Doctors finally diagnosed Paul’s amoebic dysentery (which had plagued him since India and China) and prescribed months of treatment, including a rigid diet that curtailed Julia’s cooking and entertainment. Even the Foçillon group, which launched them into French intellectual life, suspended meetings. (They resumed in December.) While he was housebound, Paul painted one of his best works, the rooftops of Ile St.-Louis, and Julia read Stefan Zweig’s biography of Balzac and the latter’s Le Lys dans la Vallée (and she resumed the French-English sessions with Hélène at Closerie des Lilas). Soon she was diagnosed with a milder case of amoebic dysentery (left over from China), and they took medicines together. Nevertheless, they went to Marseilles for Thanksgiving with the Manells, who were to be transferred to Paris in December, because they wanted to “say farewell” to that lovely house and city.

  December at last brought better health, the arrival of the Manells, Paul’s USIS Grandma Moses exhibit (with more than a thousand visitors the first week), and a visit from their OSS and Washington, DC, friends, Fisher and Debby Howe and the Walter Lippmanns. A celebration lunch with the Howes included soufflé Grand Marnier with Château d’Yquem. The exhibits and parties seemed trivial to Paul, who was distracted by the French fifth column and the communist threat in Europe. While Paul predicted war for many months, Julia did not. (“Julie’s different, thank god. She prolly [sic] truly represents the Hope That Springs Eternal in the Human Breast … I prefer her attitude.”)

  Paul was a discreet and sensitive man with an aesthetic sense of appreciation for both wines and his wife. He wrote poetry about the smell of her cooking and the curve of her ankle. As he was storing a new order of wine in his well-stocked cellar, he obser
ved, “It’s like a Harem full of beautiful and eager women—waiting to be ravished.” He later described for Charlie his coming home with Julia after dinner one night: “Going up w/Julie in our little elevator, smelling those fresh lilies-of-the-valley, buzzing gently from Chambertin ’28, and stroking the lovely bottom of a lovely woman—all at the same moment—I thinks to myself, ‘Thaaat’s Paris, Son—That’s Paris.’”

  Several grand meals at the end of 1950 reveal Paul’s growing expertise in wines as well as Julia’s culinary skills. As she cooked dinner, he read to her, first Faulkner’s short stories and later Boswell’s London Journal. For a dinner party of art historians, they served oysters with Pouilly-Fumé ’49, and noix de veau à la Prince Orloff with Château la Mission Haut-Brion ’45. For a three-hour dinner at the Restaurant des Artistes in the rue Lepic, where Mangelotte (one of Julia’s teachers at the Cordon Bleu) was chef, Paul chose to drink with the loup de mer (Mediterranean sea bass stuffed with fennel leaves, broiled over charcoal, and served with lemon-butter sauce) a 1947 white wine from the Jura called Château-Chalon, made from dried grapes so the wine had a deep topaz color. With Paul’s venison cutlets with purée de marrons and Julia’s roasted alouettes (larks) and puffed-up potatoes they had a St.-Emilion ’37. After coffee, Mangelotte talked to them of his academy of professional chefs and projected cookbook (both to rescue the art of French cuisine) as well as his belief that the Cordon Bleu was badly organized and doing a disservice to the métier.

  The finale was a series of meals they all cooked—“in our happy British family bosom”—at the home of English architect Peter Bicknell and his wife, Mari, a ballet teacher, and, in Julia’s words, “one of the best cooks I know.” As they did the year before and would do for the next several Christmases, Julia and Paul took the boat train from the Gare du Nord to Victoria Station and, except for a final few days in London with the Nigel Bicknells (their former Washington housemates), they spent the holiday cooking, ice skating, and attending a children’s ballet performance in Cambridge. Minutes after arriving this year, Mari and Julia were preparing potted shrimps on toast, to be accompanied by Alsatian wine, and two Scottish pheasants, by a young Burgundy. Their dessert was soufflé Grand Marnier with a Château d’Yquem ’29 they had brought from Paris. Another meal was sole bonne femme (Mari made the best, Julia still claimed forty years later) with Hermitage ’29. All four of them would cook in the kitchen of Finella, one of the university’s grand old homes.