Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  For nearly five years now, Julia had been tasting the artistic life of postwar Paris, a period which saw a new generation of Americans, many of them black, come to Paris. Though New York City was to take Paris’s place as the center of art, the residual fame of the great School of Paris was still luring young artists to the Seine. Julia and Paul always seemed to be going to one embassy or French vernissage or another: Raymond Duncan came to the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit in his dirty toga and sandals. At a New York City ballet performance in Paris, they chatted with Janet Flanner and Glenway Westcott. After Steichen judged the American photo exhibit and acquired five of Paul’s photographs for MOMA, Julia and Paul drove him to Luxembourg, where he had been born seventy-two years before. Among their friends who painted seriously were Rosie Manell and Jane Foster (newly discovered), with whom Paul exchanged paintings.

  “We have finally tracked down Jane Foster (Mrs. George Zlatovsky),” Julia wrote on their next Valentine’s card to Ellie and Basil Summers and other OSS colleagues. They found her through an advertisement for an exhibition of her paintings. “She is still just as much fun as ever, and doing wonderfully good paintings. They’ve been here three years, but everyone thought she was lost.” Jane had worked for the USIS in Austria, was now married to a Russian, and (according to Betty McIntosh) was reporting the names of all CIA people, as well as Paul’s name, to the communists. Eventually Jane Foster would disrupt their lives.

  Julia was forty years old on August 15, the calmest Parisian day of the year, when everyone who had not already left the city was doing so. They tried a dozen restaurants, which were all closed, and settled on the Ritz Hotel with the Manells. Afterward they sat on the balcony of the Manells’ Ile St.-Louis apartment, and, while Paul sketched yet another scene of Paris rooftops, Julia went to the movies with Abe. The next day Julia and Paul alone ate at Lapérouse: sole in a cream sauce with truffles and a half bottle of Chablis, followed by roast duck and Chambertin ’26. As the famous American diner Julian Street (Where Paris Dines was Paul’s first guide to Parisian restaurants) said about the place: “I had there one of the finest dinners I have ever eaten.” Lapérouse, not Le Grand Véfour (where Paul had recently gotten ptomaine poisoning), was now their luxury restaurant of choice. For the best bistros this year, they chose the Restaurant des Artistes, La Grille, Au Grand Comptoir, Chez Anna (the old lady had seven cats), Chez Marius, and La Truite.

  Julia was reading the Herald Tribune carefully one day because their autumn was filled with worries about the elections (they preferred Adlai Stevenson to Dwight Eisenhower), McCarthyism, and Nixon’s Red-baiting. Suddenly she burst out laughing when she read the front-page story of the Nixon Fund, which listed the businessmen who had contributed to his secret slush fund. There it was: “John McWilliams, Pasadena Rancher.”

  Soon her stepmother and brother wrote to ask that Julia not write anything more in defense of Charlie Chaplin and against Nixon. Her father canceled his subscription to The New Yorker when they ran a profile of Mrs. Roosevelt. Julia was just as uneasy with her father’s politics as she was with the anti-Semitism of some of their upper-class friends. The Childs’ enlightened liberalism extended to lesbians (such as Cora DuBois), but Paul shared his generation’s scorn of male homosexuals (“fairies,” he called them). Paul seemed to be comfortable with what Joseph Alsop called the “Wasp Ascendancy” in U.S. foreign policy following the war, for some of his dynamic friends (Dick Bissell and Charles Bohlen) were helping to run the world. Ambassador Bruce, who came to France to head the Marshall Plan and then serve as ambassador, left Paris (for Washington, then Bonn and London), and was replaced by, in Paul words, “careful and colorless Jimmie Dunn.”

  When the end of Paul’s USIS assignment came, he was appointed to the regular foreign service in order to keep him on the job. There was much talk about him being assigned as Public Affairs Officer in Marseilles or Bordeaux (“both Julia and I are good at public relations”) or Exhibit Director in Vienna. They preferred to stay in France.

  A COOKBOOK FOR AMERICANS

  Though she was studying with two chefs (the Cordon Bleu distributed no recipes), Julia was very aware (as well as skeptical) of cookbooks. On July 4, Louisette introduced Julia to Irma Rombauer, the author of Julia’s first cookbook as a bride: The Joy of Cooking. Rombauer was in France for a ten-day visit on her way to Germany, dining at the Bertholle home, and very interested in Les Trois Gourmandes. Her book—the latest editions revised with her daughter—she told them, was written for the middle class and avoided anything too fancy. “We all have copies of Mrs. Joy,” Julia wrote a friend the next year. “Somehow, old Mrs. Joy’s personality shines through her recipes…. She is terribly nice, but pretty old, now, about 70 or so; and just a good simple midwestern housewife. She said she’d been in some way weaseled out of something like royalties for 50,000 copies of her book, and was furious.” Julia claimed also to have a copy of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, though she did not use it, and a 1909 edition of Mrs. Beeton (as a collector’s item). Such were the offerings in the United States.

  Julia was much more interested in French cookbooks, and owned the encyclopedic Larousse Gastronomique, the Chamberlains’ Bouquet de France (she found a number of “unprofessional” mistakes), and Le Livre de Cuisine, by “Madame Saint-Ange”—“sort of The Joy of Cooking for France,” Julia said about what she called “one of my bibles then.” Marie Ebrard (her husband’s first name was Saint-Ange) had, according to her granddaughter, rewritten the recipes in her (and her husband’s) Le Pot-au-Feu: Journal de Cuisine Pratique et d’Economie Domestique, founded in 1893 as a monthly.

  But Julia’s greatest reverence was for Georges-Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), the world-famous chef who cooked for royalty and high society during the Belle Epoque. Escoffier invented assembly-line cooking, stock reductions for sauces, and food endorsements (“foodiebiz”), as well as further codifying conduct and recipes (Guide Culinaire, 1903, and Ma Cuisine, 1934). Fifty years later she would call him her greatest hero, the man under whom her chef Max Bugnard studied. She now added two great French chefs—Carême and Escoffier—to Balzac and Beethoven as her supreme heroes. Her choices reveal her traditional approach: her moment in French culinary history fell at the end of the classical approach (Thillmont and Bugnard were both in their seventies).

  The current god of the food world in Paris was Curnonsky. For the Great Gastronomic Banquet celebrating Curnonsky’s eightieth birthday, all eighteen French gastronomic societies were invited, including Julia’s Gourmettes and Paul’s Le Club Gastronomique Prosper Montagne. Nearly four hundred people who, in Paul’s words, “whirl around the French food-flame” attended, many bedecked in decorations, and each with nine glasses in front of his plate. During one of the final speeches, about quarter to one in the morning, Paul and Julia drifted out.

  Ten days later, Julia and Simca called on Curnonsky at 14, Place Henri Bergson. He greeted them in his pajamas and bathrobe at four in the afternoon. He was a spirited and charming old man, Julia discovered. As a gesture of admiration and friendliness, Julia gave him a carton of Chesterfields. He had written an introduction to the forty-eight-page, spiral-bound book that Simca and Louisette self-published (Editions Fischbacher) in April. It was written in French and translated into English. What’s Cuisine in France, consisting of fifty recipes for Americans, sold about 2,000 copies. Louisette took it and a larger manuscript to New York, and Sumner Putnam of Ives Washburn bought it for $75.

  The same booklet in its blue, white, and red cover, was published in New York City by Ives Washburn. But this sixty-three-page edition was entitled What’s Cooking in France and had three authors’ names: Louisette Remion Bertholle, Simone Beck, and Helmut Ripperger, identified as the author of many books on cookery. Ripperger, the “food adviser,” chose the recipes and wrote the bridge passages from the recipes by Simca and Louisette, who were identified as “Parisian hostesses and expert amateur cooks.” The book was dedicated to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who
“loves France,” and stated that the three authors were “preparing a larger volume.” Even at $1.25 the booklet did not do well.

  When Ripperger gave up on editing their volume in the summer of 1952, Simca and Louisette had already prepared six hundred typed pages of recipes entitled French Cooking for All. “I am the one who had the idea … after one of my trips to America,” says Louisette Bertholle. Putnam informed them that they would have to get an American collaborator and adapt their French recipes to the American method. Naturally, Julia would become their coauthor. “Julia is exceptional,” Bertholle said in 1992. “You will never find another Julia for maybe half a century.” Putnam agreed with their proposal and wanted to deal directly with Julia, but sent no contract.

  Meanwhile, Julia, who thought the recipes were “not very professional,” began testing, organizing and typing the sauce recipes for French Cooking. To a confidant she said it was “just a big collection of recipes” and “not one of the recipes will stand as they were written.” It was her job to rewrite the original technical instructions and get everything into readable English. Because none of the recipes stood up, she confided to her friend Avis DeVoto, they were going to write an entirely different book: a book for American home cooks that would present cuisine bourgeoise using the techniques of haute cuisine—that is, the techniques their chef teachers had taught them. “Julie is girding up her loins and spitting on her Underwood,” Paul reported.

  La Julification des gens, Paul called her “special system of hypnotizing people so they open up like flowers in the sun.” She went to Chez la Mère Michel, which specialized in beurre blanc nantais, in order to learn how the woman herself made the beurre blanc. Indeed, Julia talked her way into the kitchen and watched them make the foaming white butter sauce. Disappointed that Larousse Gastronomique, Flammarion, Curnonsky, and others were vague on the subject, she went to the source and then perfected the method in order to write it up for their book.

  Julia typed for weeks and experimented with sauces, during the winter cold and fog. They now called the book French Home Cooking (a title chosen by Putnam). When the publisher wrote on November 20 to say they were returning the Simca-Louisette manuscript by embassy pouch, Julia wrote a joint letter informing them the book was entirely changed and the sauce chapter was being sent.

  Before their annual Christmas in Cambridge with the Bicknells, Julia finished the chapter on sauces “as a sample of style and method,” then sent it to Paul Sheeline, Paul’s French-born nephew, and their lawyer, who gave it to Putnam. She also sent copies of her sauce chapter to Avis DeVoto (her Boston “pen pal”), Freddie, Katy Gates and Susy Hastings (the latter two old Pasadena pals), and others “for critical and helpful comments.” She kept out three “top secret” recipes and warned these friends to keep the recipes and format secret, for “the cooking business is as bad as Georgetown real-estate or La Haute Couture … it’s cutthroat.”

  Immediately Julia began on soups, which she thought would make a better first chapter (sauces being too Frenchy). Her approach was to prepare one soup each day, beginning with soupe aux choux (cabbage), and spread out for comparison Montagné’s Larousse, Ali-Bab’s Gastronomie Pratique, Curnonsky, and several regional cookbooks (probably the monthly La France à Table). She made two traditional recipes and one experimental, preparing the latter in a pressure cooker. (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cooker, I hate them! I can spot and taste a pressure cooker dish anywhere,” she said.)

  Though Louisette was discouraged by Putnam’s failure to respond to the sauces chapter, Julia and Simca were not. They were hoping that Julia’s “pen pal” would interest Houghton Mifflin, with whom she had connections, to take the book. At the end of December 1952, Mrs. DeVoto responded enthusiastically to their professional recipes and asked their permission to show the manuscript to her husband’s publisher.

  Avis DeVoto was an invaluable link in the career of Julia Child as well as a precious friend. They had corresponded since Julia sent a French knife to Bernard DeVoto. Julia read DeVoto’s “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s in which he asserted (at his wife’s behest) that stainless-steel knives were no good because, though they did not rust, they could not be sharpened. Julia heartily agreed, sent a fan letter with a French carbon-steel paring knife, and the correspondence about food began. Avis, a very good cook, received and tested Julia’s recipes for months.

  Julia’s long letters to Avis reveal their growing friendship as “heart-to-heart” correspondents. In addition to sending photographs of themselves and their husbands, Julia included on February 23 a written description of herself:

  Julia, 6 ft. plus, weight 150 to 160. Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed the Botcelli [sic] bosoms are not big either. Legs OK, according to husband. Freckles.

  By the end of January, encouraged by Avis’s confidence and connections, they broke with Putnam, who rejected the book as too unconventional. Julia received a contract and $200 advance from Houghton Mifflin in February. She was to draw up a separate contract between herself and the other two women. Avis assured her, “I am in a state of stupefaction…. it is going to be a classic.”

  The transfer to Marseilles came suddenly that month. Julia and Paul left Paris with reluctance, he recorded. “Our hearts have been infected and will always skip a beat at the mention of our city.” Julia said, “How lucky we have been to live here this long, and I shall never get over it.”

  Chapter 12

  MARSEILLES:

  FISHING FOR REDS

  (1953 – 1954)

  “What a meaty, down-to-earth, vicious, highly sensual old city this is.”

  PAUL CHILD, May 30, 1970

  THOUGH MARSEILLES, France’s first seaport, has always suffered from a lack of respect in the rest of France, Julia found it exciting, wonderful, and noisy (three words she would repeat in her many letters). The level of noise, pungent fish smells, and seedy streets excited her. She told Katy Gates she liked the “meridional” temperament and the warmth of the people, “always talking, gesticulating, eating, laughing.” The climate, roof tiles, and eucalyptus trees reminded them of California, the sound of the seagulls evoked Lopaus Point, Maine.

  OLD PORT HOME

  Paul was appointed Cultural Affairs Officer for the southern coast of France, located in the American Consulate at 5, Place de Rome. Moving to Marseilles meant being pulled from the orbit of her Paris partners and her new career. But Julia and Paul understood the system and were good troupers, even eager for new frontiers. They had previously visited this southern port city on the Mediterranean for a week of reconnoitering in mid-February 1953—it was their first glimpse of sunshine in many months and they loved it. As usual, they made a study of their new base and read history books about the twenty-five centuries of Marseilles.

  When Julia did not have to accompany Paul on his diplomatic survey of the region (they visited mayors, newspapermen, and academicians from Perpignan to Nice), she roamed Marseilles looking for the markets and for a neighborhood home. They would choose the rectangular Old Port (Vieux Port), where the fishermen first unloaded their catch. Here in the fertile south were abundant markets, especially the one behind Noailles in the Place du Marché des Capucins, where the first ripe fruit and vegetables appeared each season. Women of various shades of olive skin joked loudly among themselves and called out the price of their eel—hence the term criée aux poissons.

  Before settling in, they returned to Paris for Paul to take photographs of Julia, Simca, and Louisette preparing food in their kitchen before it was dismantled. Paul and Julia went “weeping through the old streets” of Paris, she confided to Avis DeVoto, distressed at leaving and dismayed by “oriental tummy trouble” just when they planned to glut themselves with Parisian food and then “descend slowly to the south from one great restaurant to another, arriving bilious but filled with glory. What a thing, to have this trouble for someone in my profession!”

  Julia had felt bilious since a farewell dinn
er party for twelve that Louisette and Simca gave her in Paris. Unbeknownst to Julia or Paul, who was urged to bring his camera, Curnonsky surprised her when she arrived. With cries of pleasure, they fell into each other’s arms like old pals. Indeed Julia had been visiting him, Paul noted, “like a public affairs officer keeping in touch with a préfet.” Paul added a description of this “Prince Elu des Gastronomes”: “short, fat, eagle-beaked, triple-chinned, pale-blue-eyed, witty, egocentric, spoiled and knowledgeable.” Curnonsky posed for pictures with the three Gourmandes, and the night before Julia left town, she paid a visit to give him the photographs. Privately she confided to Avis that at their party he acted like “a dogmatic meatball who considers himself a gourmet but is just a big bag of wind.”

  In Marseilles, Julia threw herself into the constructing and testing of recipes, official entertaining, and shopping the markets, where she struggled to adjust her ear to the local dialects and accent (which added a g to many words: ving blong for white wine). Paul, meanwhile, was trying to adjust to an unhappy consulate, led by Consul General Hayward G. Hill, known as “Hill the Pill.” The staff was demoralized by what they saw as a fastidious “mother’s boy,” a stickler for protocol, afraid of germs, and always dressed, as if he were in Paris, in a gray suit and homburg hat. Paul described him as careful, mediocre, and twitchy, “nervous as a virgin in a whorehouse.” Furthermore, Julia added in a letter to a friend, he seems “uninterested in eating.”