Dorothy left with Ivan Cousins for the boat train and New York City on January 12, 1951. In the months before, when Dorothy rented her own apartment and moved into Ivan’s life, Paul accepted the inevitable. Before Dorothy left Paris, Julia threw what she proudly called “a large, wildly successful party,” with Hélène and Rosie helping her create platters of food centering on an “art-galantine made out of boned chicken and farce-fine, decorated with flower design and covered with a layer of madeira-flavored jelly,” the whole platter in turn decorated with geometrical designs using hard-boiled egg whites, red pimentos, leaves, and truffles. When they heard three months later that Dort and Ivan were engaged, they arranged for their leave to coincide with the wedding so they could give her the moral support she needed, for, as Paul told Charlie, her “Papa [is] not wildly enthusiastic about this husband either.” Another incident coincided with their plans to return to the United States: the Blue Flash broke down on the Concorde Bridge, and they decided to sell the Buick her father had given them in Washington, DC.
Julia and Paul took their home leave six months late, sailing on May 4 and returning to Paris on August 5. First they made a large circle by train from Lumberville (where they twice saw Budd Schulberg, Charlie’s friend and a former colleague of Paul in the OSS in Washington, and attended Rachel’s high school graduation) to Pasadena (where they spent a long weekend with her old friends the Hastings, Wrights, and Nivens), to San Francisco (Gay Bradley, Janie McBain, the Davises), and back to New York City and Lumberville. They attended her father’s fiftieth reunion at Princeton, then visited for six days with friends in Washington, DC, checking their house, before moving on to New York City to attend Dort’s wedding on June 23. All the McWilliams family gathered at St. John the Divine (Episcopal) Church for the simple ceremony and a hotel reception nearby. Julia and Paul drove (in a new Chevrolet) to see the Mowrers in New Hampshire before moving on to Lopaus Point, Maine, for the Childs’ annual lobster-filled holiday for two weeks. Soon Paul found himself recoiling when Charlie turned braggart and loquacious. While driving south through Avon and New Haven, Connecticut, they analyzed the Charlie-Paul relationship—an anguish that Paul always suffered through after visiting his sometimes beloved twin.
They sailed on the Nieuw Amsterdam (the sea calm and Julia was bored), docked in Le Havre, off-loaded their car, and drove for a second time to have lunch at La Couronne, ordering the same meal that excited Julia two and a half years earlier. This time, she renewed her commitment to making cooking her career.
MEETING SIMCA
Since January 30, 1951, Julia had been attending the Cercle des Gourmettes, a club of French women dedicated to French gastronomy. She was privately cooking with Freddie Child, Mari Bicknell, and Rosie Manell, but now she wanted the French connection. A woman named Simone Beck Fischbacher, whom she met at a party at the home of George Artamonoff (a Russian-born American, first president of Sears International and now with the Marshall Plan), told her about this French cooking club. Julia resumed her informal French lessons with Hélène and returned to the Cordon Bleu in January to attend pastry demonstrations by Claude Thillmont. After dining at the Restaurant des Artistes one night (she loved the chefs chicken cooked in tarragon), and learning that Mangelotte was teaching another class, she attended his course at the Cordon Bleu for several weeks. When she invited Max Bugnard to lunch on February 20, they discussed her frustration with the failure of Madame Brassart to give her an exam. She also put a notice in the Embassy News announcing that Bugnard, now retired from the Cordon Bleu, was available as chef for private dinners and lessons.
The Gourmettes dined together bimonthly, either at one of their homes or at a restaurant such as Maxim’s. Occasionally their husbands would dine together elsewhere. When they dined at the Chambre des Députés, their husbands accompanied them. Despite the strikes that nearly crippled the city that spring, Julia did not miss a meeting. By April 2, when she was formally accepted into the club, her closest friend in the group was Simone Beck, whom she took a liking to at their first meeting—“one of the great encounters in culinary history,” says one of Beck’s students.
Simone Beck was nicknamed “Simca” (the name of a French car, and the name she preferred) by her husband, Jean Fischbacher. She was a Norman who liked Americans, and Julia especially. Her father was an Anglophile. Julia described her as “a tall blonde with a remarkably vivid pink-and-white complexion; she was good-looking and dashing in a most attractive and debonair way, full of vigor, humor, and warmth.” Simca, in turn, admired the joy that Julia brought to every location, calling it “la Juliafication de la vie.” In a videotape made by Peter Kump in 1990, Simca says:
Julia told me she got her Cordon Bleu certificate because she could skin an eel. She was always a very funny person. A very, very good actor. She is a very clever person … [with] a fantastic palate. She was the first person to really excite me. She impressed me in many ways.
Simca’s friend Louisette Bertholle (both were about seven years older than Julia) had had an English governess when a child, traveled extensively in the United States, and wrote, with Simca, a little French cookbook for Americans. Each had a household cook in residence, unlike their American friend. They both saw in this tall and food-obsessed American a potential partner in their plan to write a larger book. Perhaps they were convinced by a meal Julia served at her apartment.
Julia asked Bugnard to help her prepare a lunch for her favorite Gourmettes, Simca and Louisette, and their husbands, on Friday, April 13. On the twelfth he helped her pound the crab and on Friday morning he assisted again. In her datebook she mentions only the crab, but says their lunch was “great fun.” On April 27 they dined chez Bertholle, as they would frequently during the coming months.
In her heavy schedule of lunches and dinners this fall and winter, Julia records only one detailed menu in her datebook and letters. This one she prepared before a 1951 Thanksgiving week in Bruges, Belgium, and the leftovers fed the Bicknells when they arrived for a visit:
Terrine de Canard (boned duck, meat farce, truffle, etc., duck and veal strips, all wrapped in duck skin after marinating in cognac) baked, cooked, then sliced and decorated with jelly; Roast leg of venison (marinated for 3 days in red wine, cognac and spices) served with purée de céleri rave, and prunes stewed in white wine and meat stock. It was a superb dinner, if I do say so.
She entertained nephew Paul Sheeline, Alice Lee Myers, Robert Penn Warren, the Fischbachers, chefs Bugnard and Mangelotte, the Teddy Whites, and Narcissa Chamberlain; picnicked with the Manells and Baltrusaitises; and socialized with Judge and Mrs. Learned Hand and, in a lunch for embassy wives, with Evangeline Bruce and Mrs. Dean Acheson.
The collaboration with Simca and Louisette was building. Julia soon learned that Simca’s specialty was desserts and pastries. In early December the three women lunched with Mangelotte at the Artistes one week and the next he joined them for pâte feuilletée at Julia’s apartment. By December 17 they met at the Bertholles’ apartment to discuss the idea of a cooking school and Louisette’s plans to renovate her kitchen, which they would use for classes.
After Julia and Paul’s Cambridge Christmas and a big dinner to celebrate Paul’s fiftieth birthday—a dinner for which Bugnard cooked (freeing Julia to be with the guests)—the three women got down to business over a dinner for them and their husbands at the George Sand restaurant. L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes they would call their cooking school, and each would credit the other for pushing through the idea: Louisette said it was Julia’s idea, Julia said it was Simca who hurried it along, when she herself claimed she was not ready to teach.
On Wednesday, January 23, 1952, they gave their first cooking class for three women in Julia’s kitchen. They had not planned to begin so soon (Louisette’s kitchen was not ready), but Mrs. Martha Gibson, a wealthy widow from Pasadena, insisted upon having a class and recruited two friends, a Mrs. Mary Ward (also a widow) and Miss Gertrude Allison, who owned an inn in Arlington, Vi
rginia, and was studying at the Cordon Bleu with Bugnard (she was not happy with the Cordon Bleu, or with Dione Lucas in New York City, whom she found not very scientific). For the next five days, Julia, Simca, and Louisette met nearly every day to plan the physical arrangements and do food preparations. This time Julia typed up seven detailed pages, including menu, steps in preparation, and detailed ingredients and techniques for poached fish, beef knuckle, salad, and banana tart (the menu for January 29). Their class commenced at 10 A.M. with lunch at 1 P.M. every Tuesday and Wednesday from January 29 through May 7, 1952.
Julia hardly noticed the muddy water boiling around tree trunks along the quai. The workload and enthusiasm of the gourmandes rose in February, along with the floodwaters of the Seine. They were gourmandes in the sense of being connoisseurs of good things (not in the recent sense of being heavy eaters). Julia described the purpose and dynamic of the school to Fredericka, her first sister-in-cooking:
L’Ecole … is to be mostly technique, as we feel that once one has one’s tools one can adapt them to [other cuisines]…. I have just been lucky having so much time with two professional chefs [Bugnard and Mangelotte], which has taught me good methods of cutting things up, handling the knife, cleaning and carving and saucery. And my colleagues, with a lifetime in France, and having spent three years over writing a cookbook … it’s a good combo. I can also bring the practical side of being an American, and cooking with no servants anywhere … The atmosphere is … homey and fun and informal, and passionate pleasure from both pupils and professors.
Jeanne la Folle, her housekeeper, got into the spirit by coming in at one o’clock to wash everything up. Dehillerin gave them a 10 percent discount on purchases by their students. And, she added, “my shopping quarter is fascinated with our project. My darling chicken man on the rue Cler is giving us a special price and is most anxious to give a demonstration to us and our pupils on how to pick out a fine chicken; the butcher ditto.”
Initially, each class cost the student 600 francs ($2.00). The school was not affected by the 23.5 percent rise in the cost of living in France during the previous year. Food was up 21 percent and heat and light up 42 percent. But the students were Americans who could afford the expense. Paul, who gave an occasional lecture on wine (the Americans were used to drinking only white wine), worked out the finances so that there was a profit for the school. In April, he designed the logo for Trois Gourmandes, which Julia would use for more than forty years.
A new class began on March 12, after Julia put a notice in the embassy newsletter. The five women—Paul called it a “floating population”—included Anita Littell, whose husband, Bob, headed the European office of Reader’s Digest, and Jennifer (Mrs. Samuel) Goldwyn of Beverly Hills. Short-term student-guests for classes and/or lunch included friends of Julia such as Gay Bradley Wright (who with her husband, Jack, was spending a month in Paris) and Harriet Healy (who ran a Florida cooking school and store, for which she was buying goods in Europe’s flea markets). Occasionally Julia invited guests for the class lunch (Bugnard and Rosie Manell) and gave individual lessons. After one such lesson, Julia wrote to Freddie: “I have just given my first solo lesson today, to a French woman in pâte feuilletée. … I learned a great deal, and would have gladly paid my pupil … it’s such fun. Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook. To think that it has taken me 40 yrs. to find my true creative hobby and passion (cat and husb. excepted).”
Scholars of French cuisine, such as John and Karen Hess, have criticized Julia for becoming an “instant chef.” Indeed, none of the three was a “chef,” meaning an administrator with years of training in all areas of cooking. In terms of training, it may have been presumptuous for them to begin a school. Yet they viewed themselves as “home cooks.” Both Simca and Louisette had taken some women’s morning classes at the Cordon Bleu (Simca with Henri-Paul Pellaprat), and when Simca thought about completing her diploma five years later, Julia called it “useless” for someone with her knowledge, assuring her that she did not intend to make any use of her diploma.
Julia’s class time was indeed brief but intense, and she was still studying with Bugnard and using him as her tutor for the school. “We won’t feel good about it until we’ve given at least 100 lessons,” she told Freddie, “and have thoroughly tested everything out. Getting recipes into scientific workability is very interesting.” Metrics could not be automatically translated into teaspoons and ounces, as she learned in making béchamel sauce. Paul described it as the “practical use of General Semantics” or “subjecting theories to operational proof,” and admired his wife for not trusting any recipe, no matter what the source, without testing it. She had found her home with the French, who see themselves as a people who appreciate method and logic, symbolized in René Descartes, their emblem of rational thought.
The working relationship of Julia, Simca, and Louisette was best expressed by Paul: “Louisette appears to have a Romantic approach to cooking, while Simka [sic] and Julie are more ‘scientific’ [they measure quantities]…. Simka and Julie are both hard workers and good organizers.” In private letters they shared the belief that Louisette did not know enough about cooking. Hélène believed that “Simca was somewhat pedantic and a perfectionist and Julia was not.” But they both practiced “operational proof” in testing—for example, the different results from making pie crust with French and American flour (American flour needed one-third more fat) and with butter, Crisco, and margarine. They also, Paul noted during a trip to the Normandy home of Simca’s mother in March, were “relentless sightseers.” Temperamentally, they were driven women with boundless energy. Neither, unlike Louisette, was inhibited by domestic responsibility, which in part triggered a compulsive urge to create. Each called the other une force de la nature. Julia also called Simca la Super-Française.
Louisette, it seems clear now from the beginning, did not have the drive for professional success that her partners did. She had children—indeed, two of her daughters (from her first marriage) got married that year—and homes in Passy and Chinon. But it was she who had the initial idea to teach Americans how to cook French food, and it was she who had the best social contacts. The three couples enjoyed each other’s company, though Paul believed the “fat and charming” Paul Bertholle was a “preening egocentric.” Jean Fischbacher, on the other hand, had “sensitivity wedded to physical vigor and generosity.” He was a forty-six-year-old Protestant, a chemical engineer (parfumeur), “vigorous and intelligent,” who had spent five years in German prison camps.
When Brentano’s windows began filling with maps of Paris and displaying banned books such as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, they knew it was spring and tourist season. Though Paul declared they “dove for the bomb-shelters,” in fact they did not; Paul’s USIS window exhibits increased to fourteen in one month and Julia hosted lunches and dinner almost daily. A rising tide of visitors came from Pasadena and Pittsfield, from Smith College, from the OSS days (Rosie and Thibaut de Saint Phalle, Jack and Hedi Moore, Joseph Sloane). Smith classmate Kitty Smith remembers Julia driving them to Chartres and stopping at a poultry shop to choose a chicken to be killed for lunch on their return trip. After their eighth trip to Versailles in six weeks, Paul revolted.
The best arrival of spring was baby Phila, Dorothy’s baby, named after their stepmother, Philadelphia McWilliams. Phila would become, in many ways, the daughter that her Aunt Julia never had: tall, freckled, and Celtic. Ivan, who had his Navy pension, began working with the government, then started a job with Garfinckel’s Department Store in Washington, DC.
Knowing that his four years in Paris would be over this fall, and with it the government funding for his position, Julia and Paul traveled extensively when the Gourmandes’ classes were not meeting. Except for a train trip to Lucerne (where a few of Paul’s photographs were on exhibit) and Venice (Paul’s “beloved city”), they drove the Chevy, which they called the Black Tulip or La Tulipe N
oire. Julia knew, as Balzac did, that one dines best in the provinces. They made friends with chefs, innkeepers, and vintners (helping the son of one go to dental school in Iowa) as they traveled west to the Atlantic, east to Alsace, and south to the Loire. When they visited Julia’s Smith chum Mary Belin in her Château Andelot in the Jura, Paul designed a wine label for her cellar.
Another session of the cooking classes was announced in the Embassy News on June 20, emphasizing the informality and the “cook-hostess” angle [that is, no hired cook]. The fee was now 2,000 francs, including lunch, “which is prepared and served by” the five students and three teachers. According to Louisette, Ann Buchwald was in their class. They taught “basic recipes, cuisine bourgeoise or haute cuisine.” By contrast, women in the United States were learning to cook chicken pot pies, corned beef hash, confetti Jell-O, carrot-raisin slaw, and macaroni and cheese.
Paul had mixed feelings about his own job: “I love living in Paris w/ Julia. My job makes it possible. I believe it is useful work.” Other times Kafka-like frustrations at the embassy reminded him of Menotti’s The Consul, an opera that gripped him. Yet the work gave him an opportunity to meet leaders in the art and political world: Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Jackson Pollock, Nadia Boulanger, and Edward Steichen (head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City). With Darthea Speyer, who was in charge of exhibits, Paul helped plan numerous photography and art exhibits. But he was no workaholic; he was always a balanced person. People like Abe Manell worked weekends, but Paul always went home by seven and had time to paint, photograph, and write carefully crafted letters to Charlie, Daddy Myers, or George Kubler. He finished a couple of paintings this year (one for the Bicknells and one for the Littells) and bought a Foujita painting of a girl in a French kitchen for Julia’s kitchen.
Appetite for Life Page 25