Julia returned to Bonn, German lessons, and further chicken recipes. By summer she completed the section on sautéing and gave a few private cooking classes. Louisette sent her comments on the poaching and stewing sections (thirty-two pages), and Simca and Jean visited in time for the brief asparagus season. Julia and Paul celebrated Julia’s forty-third birthday with a brief weekend in Paris. They had breakfast once again at the Deux Magots, visited Dehillerin’s (for some knives for Avis), saw an exhibit of Picasso’s work, and dined for her birthday lunch at Lapérouse, just down the street from Picasso’s former studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. Julia was disappointed in the meal of tourte gelée (crab) and ris de veau braisés (sweetbreads). Her improved recipe for the latter dish would appear in the book in progress.
With each return to Germany, she threw herself into another poultry dish each day: fricassée, sauté, and canard à l’orange with a disappointing sauce. “Our tenure in Cologne was all poultry,” said James McDonald, who frequently dined with his wife at the Childs’ home. Each of these recipes would be perfected for the book. And each one was tried by Avis DeVoto in Cambridge, as well as by Julia’s other “guinea pigs.” With hundreds of traditional and precisely named French recipes for chicken, duck, and goose, they would choose the recipes Julia thought most Americans could and would prepare. They already had hundreds of pages of recipes to date, far more than would eventually be included.
When she got discouraged and “beset by doubts, wishing we had been working with Escoffier for twenty years before ever undertaking such an enterprise!” she reminded herself and Simca that “then, of course, we would not have a housewife’s point of view at all.” “We” must do exacting experiments “to be absolutely sure of our conclusions,” she told Simca in May 1954 as she tested their pâte feuilletée with the flour she bought in Bonn. Julia continued to experiment with her duck in orange sauce, which would be one of only three duck recipes included, each with variations. For example, canard à l’orange had two variations (cherries and peaches: caneton aux cerises, also called caneton Montmorency, and caneton aux pêches). Accompanying these recipe groups were clear and simple descriptions of how to choose, wash, disjoint, truss, or stuff poultry, how to tell when it is done, and suggestions for vegetable, sauce, and wine with each.
Julia took her manuscript and files with her during the Steichen exhibit in Berlin in September (where 30,000 people saw “The Family of Man”) and in Frankfurt and Munich in November, as well as on their two-week gastronomic vacation in France in October. They drove through Colmar, Bourg-en-Bresse, and Les Baux to Marseilles, where they stayed with the Whartons, then through the wine country, where the air was filled with the work of wine presses, to a foggy Paris, for a full day of work with Simca.
While nursing Paul through nearly two months of infectious hepatitis, with his high fever and jaundice, Julia finished and sent to Simca (and Houghton Mifflin) the section on cut-up chickens, asked Louisette for vegetable suggestions, and worked up the section of recipes for suprêmes de volaille (skinless, boneless chicken breasts). Not surprisingly, these recipes with little fat (pot-au-feu, poule-au-pot) came at a time when Paul was restricted to a no-fat regime. “I find to my surprise that I can grill meats and chicken with no fat … I usually put in a bit of salt and lemon juice.” She also learned to vary her recipes by using shallots, lemon juice, and vegetable stock. By the time Paul was able to return to work for half days in January 1956, she had completed this work. Unfortunately, they missed their second Christmas in Cambridge with the Bicknells. The day after Paul’s doctor told him to go south for two weeks, he bought train tickets to Rome and Julia began her first research on cooking a goose. In Rome she had the best baby peas of her life and for the first time had the fennel bulb thinly sliced in a salad.
“Have you seen Dione Lucas’s new book?” Julia asked Louisette in January. “I find it very poor in many respects … and it is certainly not French cooking.” She told Simca (“ma plus que chère et adorable amie”) three months before that Lucas’s Meat and Poultry was a little “sloppy” and not as detailed as theirs, but “with our snail’s pace we have a chance to study our competitors.” None of the Trois Gourmandes personally knew Dione Lucas, the most prominent cooking figure in New York City in the 1950s, but since 1948 she had both a cooking school and a local television cooking program. Lucas was a severe and dry English woman, but her cooking programs (her name was synonymous with omelets) hold up even today. Several people in the New York food world, including cookbook writer James Beard, questioned the validity of Lucas’s claim to Cordon Bleu training, a question echoed in Julia’s judgment. But her book first gave Julia and Simca the idea that they might publish their work in several volumes.
“Your old prince is but an unhappy octogenarian,” Curnonsky replied to a Christmas card from the Julia. The great man had taken a terrible fall and broken several ribs. The doctors put him on a un régime terrible that excluded wine, salt, sauces, and cream. He had “been around too long” and was awaiting death, he said, but “with no regrets,” for he had tasted the wonderful joys of life. He asked her to visit again on her next trip to Paris, for her presence would bring great joy.
Julia and Paul’s most daring Valentine card was sent in 1956. Instead of an original artwork prepared months in advance and colored with a spot of red by Julia and Paul, they sent a photograph of themselves in a bubble bath with a red stamp above their heads that read: “WISH YOU WERE HERE.” Their bare shoulders and upper chests showed above the bubbles. Stamped on the bubbles: “Happy Valentine’s day from the heart of old downtown Plittersdorf on the Rhine.” In retrospect the photograph seems an implicit retort to the special agents’ earlier charges against Paul. Julia inscribed one card to an OSS friend: “Your old CBI companions in one of their more formal diplomatic moments.”
Good health was very much on their minds this spring, both because of Paul’s lengthy recovery from hepatitis and because Julia, at the age of forty-three, was having to deal with weight gain for the first time. Since the long and successful treatment of their amoebic dysentery in Paris, Julia had added some weight (she weighed 155 pounds, Paul 165). “My stomach keeps getting fatter and fatter … which is probably only the onslaught of un certain âge,” she confided to Simca. The previous May she had five polyps removed and this April they returned, so she had a curettage (“les malheurs d’un certain âge”), but not without taking her duck manuscript to the hospital. “Back on the old regime,” she would say about dieting at the end of a trip. After a series of articles about cancer and smoking in the International Herald Tribune, Julia and Paul gave up smoking. “I have always smoked too much anyway,” she wrote Louisette, “but I did enjoy it so much.” What began as rebellious play in a Pasadena treetop, was now to be regarded, she said with her typical strong will, “as a poison, pure and simple, not a pleasure.” Their resolve would be short-lived.
During her last five months in Germany, from February to May, Julia focused on duck. While she had frequently served caneton à l’orange to guests, now she experimented with various techniques: boned stuffed duck, braised duck in a crust (which they eventually put with a terrine section in a cold buffet chapter), salmis (partially cooked duck, cut up and cooked again in sauce), and civet (stewed in a sauce thickened by duck blood), which did not make the cut. Her experimentation even extended to dehydrated potatoes. After turning away when she first spotted them on the commissary shelf, she bought two packages of instant potatoes and after adding butter and cream served them to Paul, who noticed nothing. Though there was no question of ever including them in their cookbook, she sent a package to Simca to get her reaction.
Articles and advertisements reinforced what Julia had noticed on her last visit to the United States: the country was in the middle of what social historian Harvey Levenstein would label “the golden age of food processing,” referring specifically to frozen food, even frozen meals in restaurants. She wondered in a letter to Simca as early
as March 2, 1954, if in fifty years cooking would be only a handicraft hobby such as bookbinding and hand weaving. “Too bad for our cook-book [if we] face such ‘progress.’”
She was almost done with the duck portion of the poultry chapter (and was looking ahead to goose and vegetables) when they joined Avis DeVoto, whose husband, Bernard, had died the previous November, for a trip that Paul had planned to cheer her. From London, they took her to meet Peter and Mari Bicknell in Cambridge, and together they made the traditional soufflé Grand Marnier, drunk with Château d’Yquem ’29. They then took her to Paris for a series of classes at L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes taught by chefs Bugnard and Thillmont and a luncheon with the Gourmettes with Julia’s two partners. Simca carefully planned the Paris visit to impress Avis, the “godmother” of their book. Julia made a special visit to see the ailing Curnonsky, who would die this July. When Julia and Paul took Avis to Bonn for three days, she read the manuscript (one hundred pages on poultry alone) and was slightly overwhelmed. They talked about publishing sequential volumes.
Julia, always curious about German cuisine and history, decided she would learn more about its literature by taking a course on Goethe, the national poet. She took a three-week course at the University of Bonn, wrote a paper (though “it is a bit over my head”), and passed the examination. She also had the entire university class over for a party. Paul, off planning seven international exhibits (on police work, therapy, peaceful uses of atomic energy, American painting, architecture, social work, and the Berlin industrial fair), returned to find, he wrote Charlie, “Cat’s away—mice get out of hand (they begin to go intellectual).” Home in time to take her to her birthday dinner, he told her of the rumors that Washington would be asking him to return for a new assignment.
Julia and Paul entertained often, but the only lasting friendships they made in Bonn were with Lyne and Ellen Few, who were stationed in Düsseldorf (“very nice people,” Julia called them at the time, “our type of people”). They were also fond of Elizabeth and James McDonald, she a sculptor and he director of the U.S. Information Center in Nuremberg and then Cologne, nearer Bonn. Julia had come to McDonald’s rescue by mobilizing a half dozen women to help prepare the food for the Cologne Amerika Haus inauguration.
Not long after Julia and Paul celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Berlin (ten hours’ drive away), where Paul was supervising three exhibits (Conant, now ambassador to West Germany, singled him out for praise), they received the order to return to the United States for home leave and transfer by November. “Won’t it be fun to have friends again! What effect will this removal have on THE BOOK?” he wrote Charlie. Julia informed Simca that the return to the United States “would be useful indeed for the final going over of our finished chapters.” In a sort of grand finale for them both, Paul had a one-man exhibition of his photographs in Cologne in October 20 (the packers had already come and gone), and Julia concluded the poultry chapter with several recipes (from Simca) for goose. Only two goose recipes would be included in the book, one with prune and foie gras stuffing (oie rôtie aux pruneaux) and one with chestnut and sausage stuffing (oie braisée aux marrons).
“We really enjoy working together very much and make an excellent team,” Paul reported during their move. Though they had expected to spend another two years in Germany, they were glad to be leaving and to be stopping in Paris before going home. “My, how we long for Paris and our friends … in this desert!” she wrote to Louisette. As they drove toward Paris, Paul reported, “our European impressions are heightened, magnified and made potent.” They tried, “almost desperately,” to absorb and fix every sight and taste and sound of France. Their last ten days in Europe were spent in the Hôtel du Pont Royal, where they had lived almost eight years earlier when they began this great European adventure.
Chapter 14
BACK HOME (AND COOKING)
ON THE RANGE
(1956 – 1958)
“We lived in an age … of the decline and pall of the American palate.”
JAMES BEARD, New York Times, 1959
BEFORE JULIA and Paul settled into Eisenhower’s Washington, more specifically into the Georgetown of Stewart and Joe Alsop, they reacquainted themselves with their country. Itinerants in their own land for the last two months of 1956, Julia and Paul moved from rural Pennsylvania to Boston, from Chicago to Southern California, from Northern California to Boston, and back through Pennsylvania to the District of Columbia, reuniting with family and friends. But they began and ended their travels with Charlie and Freddie at their house in rural Pennsylvania, where they had wed ten years earlier. Finally, their Georgetown house, rented out while they were in Bonn, was available, and their goods and furniture arrived from Germany.
One of Julia’s initial observations was that the country had become partial to flaming food, either in pretentious restaurants or on the backyard barbecue (three million dollars were spent the following year on barbecue equipment alone). On top of that, James Beard, now the dean of American cooking, had published The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery two years before. Had Julia stayed longer at her father’s Pasadena home, she would have learned of Joseph Broulard, a native of the Jura in France, then the reigning chef in Los Angeles, a city whose top restaurants were French. Broulard, she later discovered, spawned several Los Angeles restaurants and chefs from his Au Petit Jean.
They also discovered the boom in population and building in Los Angeles, along with the quality of the wine at the Charles Krug vineyard in the Napa Valley. Though it took many years before Paul would acknowledge domestic wines in the same sentence with French, he found the bottles they sampled surprisingly good and bought a case.
Julia was astonished to realize how many Americans were letting Swanson do their cooking and eating on tin trays in front of the television. Twice in their wanderings, families turned on their television sets after a meal, much to Julia’s amazement. At the Childs’ in Pennsylvania they enjoyed The $64,000 Question, but found the TV game show “a waste of time.” The country had turned to prepackaged quiz shows and prepackaged food.
VILLAGE LIFE IN GEORGETOWN
Julia bought a new range, an enormous black restaurant range, on which she would cook the remainder of her life, during two months of major renovations on their house at 2706 Olive Street, the last house on Olive before it curved into Twenty-seventh Street at the little green parkway. They were on the outskirts, in an area of smaller houses, of the most elegant place to live in the city. Georgetown had a village atmosphere in the middle of a city of monuments, and everyone knew each other because they went to the same market, post office, and barbershop.
They exchanged the third floor of a modern housing development in Plittersdorf on the Rhine for a 150-year-old three-story wooden house. Julia finally got her gas range, and instead of the cold, wet winters, they enjoyed the comfort of an air-conditioning machine on each floor. Though there would be snow this winter, Washington, DC, summers were unbearably hot and humid. With the rent money Paul had wisely collected and banked for eight years, they had enough to redo bathrooms and ceilings to stop the leaking, take out a partition to make the kitchen larger, replace the wiring to avoid any possible fire, and repaint the house. Even the walkway above the ground-floor kitchen, which connected the street to the sitting- and living-room floor, had to be rebuilt. But the first room Julia finished was her bedroom/office (on the top floor with Paul’s tiny studio and the guest room), where her typewriter and books awaited her.
If the rent money financed the renovations, the estate of Julia’s mother underwrote her career, including the gas range and the cooking equipment from Dehillerin. She bought a new dishwasher (to save on a maid, she told Simca) and a sink with a grinder to dispose of the waste. She informed Simca that her mother’s inheritance “allowed me to carry on extensive cookery work. My, I hope we don’t have to move out of here in 2 years … I couldn’t stand it! … I shall … cut my throat.” Caro Weston McWilliams, who cared little
about high cuisine or cooking, would have been thrilled with her daughter’s enthusiasm and sense of fulfillment.
Julia and Paul would have preferred to be living in Paris. Yet, in retrospect, it was fortuitous for her book that they were home again, where she could cook each recipe with the food available to the people who would buy their book. They were also enjoying being homeowners, especially since they could afford to fix it up with style; both took pride in their little nest. Paul’s aesthetic sense turned each room into variations on a different color, and he became a “madly enthusiastic gardener,” Julia confided to Simca:
It is great fun being back here to live. I never could get the feel of it when we just passed through on vacations. One thing I do adore is to be shopping in these great serve-yourself markets, where … you pick up a wire push cart as you come in and just trundle about looking and fingering everything there is…. It is fine to be able to pick out each separate mushroom yourself…. Seems to me there is everything here that is necessary to allow a good French cook to operate.
The new supermarket around the corner on M Street (which curved into Pennsylvania Avenue) was not the only discovery: there was now scouring powder for copper pots, which she sent to Simca, and an electric skillet with a thermostat and timer, ready-mixed pie crust, and Uncle Ben’s rice (she had no use for ready-made pie crust or soup). Each new invention was tested and reported to Simca, who promised to visit early in 1958. Julia’s curiosity and enthusiasm were infectious.
Paul shared Julia’s professional passion, but no longer had much enthusiasm for his own career. He liked the art work and the perspective it gave him on the international political scene, but he mainly worked for the income and the occasional pride he could still take in his work. In December, while he was in California, he had finally been promoted to foreign service rank three (FSS-3), where he made a modest $9,660 a year.
Appetite for Life Page 31