Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  “Julia thinks I should be President,” Paul once told his brother. His efficiency reports (one acknowledged he was “underrated”) gave him the highest rankings for character and ability, dependability and thoroughness, organization, and his wife: “Mr. Child has an intelligent and charming wife who is an asset to him professionally as well as representationally.” Other evaluation phrases explain why he remained at rank four so many years: “interests primarily cultural” and “impatient with certain administrative details … and tendency to be self-effacing.” That he ranked low in “knowledge of administrative practices” and was thought “to doubt his ability as an executive” reflect his disdain for office politics and the bureaucracy. Thus he lacked ambition for promotion (though his letters to Charlie through the years reveal that he expected promotion). In 1959 he was promoted, nevertheless, to Acting Chief of the Exhibit Division.

  Because Washington was a hub through which many passed, Paul and Julia entertained a number of people they knew earlier in Washington and in India, China, Paris, Marseilles, and Bonn. There were also, of course, Julia’s friends from California and Smith (Mary Belin lived in nearby Evermay mansion) and Paul’s Connecticut connections. As always, Julia was interested in political and social issues. With Nancy Davis, who had worked for Adlai Stevenson, Julia went to hear Dean Acheson address Congress, attended Inherit the Wind starring Melvyn Douglas, and sat in the front row to watch Eisenhower’s inaugural parade. (“I find I am a mad parade watcher,” she wrote Simca the following October when Queen Elizabeth came to town, “and besides I have never seen a queen.”) She awakened early to try (unsuccessfully) to see Sputnik circle the globe and watched the squabbles on Capitol Hill with keen interest.

  They missed the Washington of Dean Acheson, believing the government was now run by lesser men. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Acheson’s “despised” and “untrustworthy” successor, seemed to have a callous absence of loyalty to the professionals of the State Department, firing many, and supporting the rule of Chiang Kai-shek. The closest Julia came personally to the government was on February 14, 1957, when the FBI interviewed her about Jane Foster, though all she remembers telling them was that she did not “think someone that funny and that scattered could be a spy.” In her datebook she pronounced the visit “very pleasant,” which reflected both relief and the influence of her proximity to the seat of government.

  All Washington loved to dine out, though few took to cooking as a serious profession. For several months after Julia’s kitchen was finished, they entertained “like mad”: dinner or cocktails for Cartier-Bresson (the French photojournalist); Walter and Helen Lippmann; Nancy Davis, who was marrying Wing Pepper of Philadelphia; Helen Kirkpatrick, former Information Officer for the Marshall Plan in Paris and recently Assistant to the President at Smith College, who was marrying Robbins Milbank; Sherman and Nancy Kent, whom they had last seen in Marseilles; Avis DeVoto from Cambridge. Several OSS buddies, including Guy Martin, were living nearby.

  During their wanderings, they had seen all of Julia’s family, but now they looked forward to their frequent weekends at Coppernose in Pennsylvania, where Julia and Freddie cooked seriously, most often a large turkey (poultry not readily available in France, thus requiring careful changes in timing and cooking temperature). At the wedding the following spring of Erica, the eldest of the Child children, Julia arranged the flowers, Charlie decorated the cake, the Kublers provided the music, and Paul took the photographs. Her wedding to Hector Prud’homme (Rachel Child married Anthony Prud’homme several years later) was indeed a family matter, for now the Childs were connected by marriage to the Bissells (Marie and Richard Bissell’s daughter Anne Caroline was married to Hector Prud’homme, Sr.) and to the Kublers (the elder Bissells’ son Dick Bissell was married to Betty Kubler’s sister). This tight band of people (Julia called it an “ingrown,” happy family) remained their emotional support as well as the best company for holidays, including the traditional August in Maine.

  Julia and Paul’s new red Ford pounced out onto a rocky point of land which stuck out into the sea on Mount Desert Island. They were surrounded on three sides by ocean, rocks, and lobster pots. With the excitement of being “home,” they drank in the sea smells and familiar surroundings of Lopaus Point, examining every improvement, the new addition, and Freddie’s herb garden. This was the first real herb garden Julia had seen; “I found it just heavenly,” she wrote Simca. They picked blueberries and raspberries and reminisced. They waded out into the surf and sea spray to take the lobsters out of their anchored cages.

  They hardly had their fill of lobsters when it was time to drive down to Cambridge for book and cook work, taking ten lobsters along with them to Avis.

  IN NOTHING ELSE SO

  HAPPY OR SAD

  Julia’s greatest joy was in the kitchen, testing recipes, discussing tastes and results with Avis or Freddie—if she was in their kitchens—or taking notes for Simca—if she was home. She had less success cooking with Freddie (“It must be something psychological,” she said about working with her sister-in-law). She shared everything with Simca: variations in cooking techniques, ways to bring down Simca’s high blood pressure, America’s feelings about the racial tensions in Little Rock, Simca’s servant problems (with her prickly temperament, she had trouble keeping a maid), and the wisdom of Simca publishing some articles and recipes in French periodicals (Julia frequently encouraged her to assert her professional authority).

  The Houghton Mifflin people and Avis (who was working as a scout for the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf) encouraged Julia to place recipes in The Ladies’ Home Journal (the food editor said the recipes were “too involved”), House & Garden, and Town & Country. Julia sent several recipes to Woman’s Day, a publication of the A&P grocery store chain, but never heard a word back from them. The Washington Post called because they heard of her kitchen, but when the article appeared she was disappointed they had not used any of her recipes or made any mention of Simca. By the fall of 1957 the manuscript was so dog-eared, they had to get it retyped.

  Simca’s correspondence was equally loving and encouraging. She was testing Julia’s poultry recipes, as Julia was testing her vegetable recipes. Simca reported on “Chef Oliver,” Raymond Oliver, who cooked on French television. They used yellow and rose onionskin paper for their carbon copies to keep track of their chapters and responses to their responses, which they kept carefully filed. Theirs was truly a collaborative work, and one they believed would be seminal. Aware of James Beard’s new American recipes and each American cookbook (Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book had sold more than three million copies since 1950), they took seriously the few attempts to present genuine French recipes, such as in Gourmet Cookbook II, which they considered “poor.” “Ach, la concurrence!” Julia sputtered when a new book or recipe appeared. “Ours will have to be better!” They worked as hard as they could and would not compromise quality; the only compromise would be a multivolume publication.

  Several issues were emerging that affected the development of their masterpiece. Most immediately, Julia noticed changes in the produce, equipment, and cooking habits of her native country. In Bonn, she had noticed at the commissary that America was enthusiastic about what culinary historians Karen and John Hess called “precooked frozen gourmet glop.” The Hesses criticized Craig Claiborne, the new food editor of the New York Times, who graduated from a Swiss hotel school, for hailing fifty-five new items from General Foods’ “Gourmet Foods” line and calling others “exciting products” of 1958: Seabrook’s “inspired beef à la bourguignonne,” Pepperidge Farm’s frozen puff pastries, Betty Crocker’s “glamorous” new instant meringue, Carnation’s “excellent and quickly made” Golden Fudge, Fluffo margarine, and Campbell’s frozen fruit pies. Very discouraging for two women who had spent the better part of five or six years preparing a book to teach French recipes.

  Moreover, there were several issues related to the cookbook itself. On her first visit
to Cambridge the month they arrived, Julia tried to convince her Houghton Mifflin editor, who was also testing their recipes, to publish what they had so far (soups, sauces, poultry, vegetables), then work on other volumes. They would need four or five more years to complete the fish and meat chapters, Julia argued, in order to make her appeal more convincing. (Privately to Simca, Julia acknowledged that a multivolume plan complicated their relations with Louisette.) At first the editor agreed, saying they would publish this first volume at Christmas 1958, calling it French Cooking, Vol. 1: Sauces and Poultry. Then Lovell Thompson, the general manager, said they wanted only one book, but Julia would not make a decision until Simca arrived in January 1958.

  Cooking problems also delayed completion, from the oversized turkeys that had to be cooked differently from the French poultry to the difficulty of finding crème fraîche (Julia informed Simca that adding buttermilk or yogurt to cream and keeping it at room temperature for a day produced the same results). American veal was not as pale and tender as the French; U.S. butchers offered different meat cuts; except for parsley, few fresh herbs were available; Americans ate a lot of broccoli, which was rare in France—and so the discoveries went. Occasionally a recipe, when retried, did not produce the same results it had in Paris, Marseilles, or Bonn. “HELL AND DAMNATION, is all I can say,” Julia wrote Simca on July 14, 1958, in a rare expression of frustration: “WHY DID WE EVER DECIDE TO DO THIS ANYWAY? But I can’t think of doing anything else, can you?”

  Two other, more personal factors, prolonged the completion of the book, though eventually ensuring its validity and longevity. First was the lack of experience on Julia’s part. Never having cooked seriously before going to Paris, she approached her work as a novice studying an established tradition instead of acting on a creative or instinctive level to discover recipes or taste combinations. She approached foods and recipes deliberately, asking basic questions of why and how, thus enabling her to write the clearest and simplest explanations for readers. Second was the influence of Paul Child’s rhetorical analysis (they were now taking memory classes together), which subjected everything to logic and thorough testing, sometimes six different ways. “Paul pushed her to a certain standard,” say his nieces and nephew. This influence from Paul cannot be underestimated in evaluating the quality of the manuscript Julia and Simca were preparing.

  Julia was overjoyed when Simca and Jean Fischbacher (his stay was briefer) at last arrived from Paris in January, for she had done little else the final months of 1957 but revise the chapters and have them retyped. Simca stayed three months and would visit friends or former students in New York City, Chicago and California. But the great event was the trip to Boston, buried then in a blizzard. Because the trains were not running, Julia and Simca took the long bus ride from New York City and arrived on Avis’s doorstep at one o’clock in the morning. Avis recorded her memory thirty years later:

  I waited up for them, and it was snowing fiercely. They went in to see Houghton Mifflin with this huge box of manuscript. [They] presented over seven hundred pages on poultry and sauces alone, which is when HM said they weren’t about to publish an encyclopedia. Although Dorothy [de Santillana] was extremely anxious to publish the book, because she had cooked with a lot of the recipes and knew they worked, all the men said, “Oh, Americans don’t want to cook like that, they want something quick, made with a mix.” They were pushing a cookbook, a Texas cookbook, by Helen Corbett—there seemed to be marshmallows in everything, and that’s where their advertising money was going. Houghton Mifflin has regretted it ever since.

  When Julia heard them say, “We are not going to publish an encyclopedia…. Americans wouldn’t cook that way,” she said to Avis and Simca with her usual dogged determination, “We’ll just have to do it over.”

  That is just what they did, said Avis, spending “the next two years completing a single book” to put in all chapters, including desserts. Avis was absolutely convinced of the uniqueness of the book, though she confided to a mutual friend that she had serious reservations about Julia’s writing ability. The talent she had nurtured after Smith had withered under the demands of government forms and recipe details.

  LA CUISINE CHILD VS.

  CUISINE “GUNK”

  Julia and Paul developed a style of entertaining that endeared them to Washington circles, a style in keeping with a truly modern kitchen and dining space (which opened onto the garden) and the demanding work her cookbook needed. She and Simca returned to Washington from Boston to devise a new strategy for the book and their work. Any entertaining Julia did during 1958 and 1959 would be connected to their book. She never chose a menu because it was her best work; she was constantly experimenting and testing. If a dish went wrong, she said nothing. This was one of her maxims: no excuses, no explanations. She informed Simca, “I am not doing any elaborate entertaining at all until I get this MS out of the way. What we do is to have 4 people in on Sundays.”

  Guests long remembered the informal warmth of her kitchen here and later in Cambridge, where they continued their ritual. Lee and Gisele Fairley, both of whom worked with Paul in Bonn and were now stationed in Washington, remember many visits to the Childs’ “dollhouse”: “Julia was ensconced in her gleaming professionally equipped kitchen [and] we would sit around the kitchen table (a huge butcher’s block of wood) sipping Paul’s dry martinis … and watch Julia prepare the dish(es) of the day. After eating, there was a postmortem discussion, though mostly between Paul and Julia.”

  Lyne Few and his wife, whom they met in Düsseldorf, were also frequent guests after being posted to Washington. Few remembers:

  Julia’s impressive kitchen with beautiful pots and pans hanging everywhere, and a large rough-hewn table in the center. The guests would sit on comfortable benches and consume delicious cocktails which were Paul’s specialty. Julia would chat with us as she bustled around concocting fabulous dishes. Paul explained that she was working on a cookbook and hoped we would excuse her for using us as guinea pigs. Never were there more willing victims.

  Paul usually made what they called “Ivan’s aperitif” or what Julia later called the “Upside-Down Martini”: in a red-wine glass, filled with ice, they poured both dry and sweet vermouth (they preferred Noilly Prat vermouth), then floated a little gin on the top, decorating with a twist of orange or lemon rind. “Hold it by the stem so it will ring,” suggested Julia as they touched glasses.

  Rosalind and Stuart Rockwell—he was director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs for the Department of State—lived next door and were frequent guests, along with another neighbor, Bob Duemling, who walked to work with Paul. Because Duemling was single (he had dated Rachel Child for several years), he was frequently a guest. The Rockwells remember the chicken dishes (with one portion removed by Julia for tasting) that Julia would bring over for dinner—Paul had had his fill of them. Rosalind would never forget Julia’s generosity to the mother of an active young son. “When Stuart took me to the hospital for the birth of our second child, Julia offered to take care of our son Steve. When I asked that she keep him out of the kitchen, she immediately moved all of the long knives.”

  The following January, to celebrate five birthdays around January 15—Paul and Charlie, Freddie Child, Paul Nitze, and Stuart Rockwell—Julia cooked a grand meal and Paul wrote a poem for the occasion they called “The Pentapolloi Party.” Such care was typical of the Child hospitality, and Paul read his lengthy verse to:

  Splendid Nitze, Rockwell Bold

  and Glamor-laden Freddie,

  Plus Charles and Paul, those brilliant men,

  intelligent and steady.

  Behold the dawn of greater days,

  of love rejuvenate….

  In its informality, La Cuisine Child matched what House Beautiful called “the Station Wagon Way of Life” in the 1950s. But in the quality of the food and the time spent in its preparation, there was no comparison. Americans were then eating canned vegetables with marshmallows melted on top, f
rozen chickens cooked in canned mushroom soup, frozen fish sticks, and dishes that could be served during commercials or cooked on the barbecue outdoors. They were shopping the center aisles of the supermarket, to use food editor (Gourmet) Zanne Early Stewart’s analogy, not the outside aisles where the fresh produce was waiting.

  Processed food products and junk food led to unwanted poundage, which in turn stirred up a wave of dieting and diet books (sprinkled with saccharin and white sodium cyclamate powder), swelling by the end of the century into a tidal wave. Avis decried to Julia the “gunk” in American kitchens and the increasing number of manuscripts for diet books she was receiving, which would henceforth outnumber cookbooks. She described as “gruesome” one she had just received:

  [There is] not a single honest recipe in the whole book—everything is bastardized and quite nasty. Tiny amounts of meat … are extended with gravies and sauces made with corn starch…. Desserts … [are] sweetened with saccharin and topped with imitation whipped cream. Fantastic! And I do believe a lot of people in this country eat just like that, stuffing themselves with faked materials in the fond belief that by substituting a chemical for God’s good food they can keep themselves slim while still eating hot breads and desserts and GUNK.

  In 1959 chemists pushed the tidal wave with Metrecal, a powder to be added to milk to make a meal—an “adult version of baby formula,” as Harvey Levenstein called the “glutinous drink.” Within two years sales would total $350 million. These dieters and instant home cooks were also consuming women’s magazines, whose food editors and lifestyle or entertainment editors were setting the tone for the country. They, not the home economists or master chefs, were telling American cooks what to prepare and how to serve it.