Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  Julia was completely outside the small but growing food world of New York City. She was familiar with many names from the national magazines she read in Europe and knew that Dione Lucas had a school and television program and that James Beard wrote many cookbooks and endorsed a stream of products (living, his biographer said, by “trade-offs, favors, freebies, and consulting”). But Julia had never met them or the real power brokers who edited the magazines, such as Helen McCully at McCall’s, the first food editor of a major magazine who was not a home economist, and certainly the most powerful food editor in the country. She was learning their names, but harbored a certain skepticism. She had yet to meet Craig Claiborne (New York Times), Ann Seranne (Gourmet), Poppy Cannon (House Beautiful), or Cecily Brown-stone (Associated Press). But her time was coming.

  THEIR AUDIENCE

  When Julia and Simca put aside their weighty manuscript, began their streamlined version, and copyrighted the name L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, they did not change their purpose or what they called their “intended audience.” Their purpose always remained to teach “the servantless American cook” authentic French techniques, not “adaptations,” to achieve, as nearly as possible, French results. The audience, as Paul once said, is “Everybody, like bird-shot from both barrels, from Brides to Guides and from Sophisticates to Wistful Mates.” Julia told Avis in 1952 that they wanted a book “understandable to the novice, interesting for the practiced cook.” She and Simca first agreed in 1954 that they were “writing for an audience that knows nothing about French cooking; that will follow every word that we utter … or be put off if we do not explain thoroughly.” For this reason, she occasionally—as in the case of velouté aux champignons—rejected a recipe that was “too complicated for our audience.” The following year it was “a literate audience that LIKES TO COOK AND WANTS TO LEARN.” Now, with her growing awareness of the shortcut cooking in the country, she suggested to Simca they include fewer grande cuisine and more cuisine bourgeoise dishes,

  … which is complicated enough for them. They are not used to taking the time and care we are used to taking in preparing things…. Nobody has a mortar, sieve, or pilon for pounding things … we shall have to emphasize in our introduction that LOVE is one of the big ingredients … and that the taste of food (not its looks, ease of preparation, etc.) is what you are striving for, and why some shortcuts won’t work.

  To keep in touch with their future audience, Julia occasionally taught cooking classes, the first one on April 27, 1957, for a group of women who met every Monday to cook lunch for their husbands. Later that year she responded to a request to teach a class of eight in Philadelphia, four hours away by car, which she did monthly through the spring of 1958. From ten until two, when the food was served, she hurriedly cooked the following menu: oeufs pochés duxelles, sauce béarnaise (which in their book would be called oeufs en croustades à la béarnaise); poulet sauté portugais; epinards au jus (the blanched spinach would also appear in their book); and pommes à la sévillane. Every detail was carefully typed up ahead of time and later narrated to Simca, who was giving cooking classes to a group of U.S. Air Force wives in Paris. During her visit to Washington, Simca was involved in a couple of the classes Julia was giving in 1958 at her own home, under the name L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes. The first menu: quiche aux fruits de mer, coq au vin, and tarte aux pommes.

  Not long after Paul told friends their “nest is feathered,” he learned they were to be transferred to Oslo, Norway. This time he would not repeat his Germany experience of transferring before he learned the language, and so he negotiated a six-month delay—and then two more months—so he could learn the language and Julia could get further toward completing the book. Beginning in September 1958, Paul began what would amount to 116 hours of Norwegian study from the wife of the press attaché at the Norwegian Embassy, who offered to teach him (the U.S. State Department did not teach the language) without pay. By the next spring he and Julia were very chummy with the Norwegian ambassador and his wife.

  Bob Duemling, who would leave for Rome in the spring of 1960, remembers the party that Paul and Julia gave for a dozen friends to honor the woman who had taught him Norwegian. “Paul made a delightful speech to thank her, then gave her a small box. She burst into tears.” Later Duemling examined the gift Paul made: the wood was covered with gesso, painted as a replica of a famous Norwegian fresco of a saint which he had copied, then antiqued to look like a medieval icon. “It was an elegant and thoughtful gift that showed Paul’s imagination and talent.”

  A PERMANENT HOME IN CAMBRIDGE

  There was a storm in Cambridge in January 1959 when Avis DeVoto called to say a house was coming on the market at 103 Irving Street and they must come immediately to see it. They took a train in the freezing rain and literally bought the house out from under a family who were walking through the house at the same time. According to Avis, Paul tapped on the walls of the four floors (counting the full basement) and Julia looked longingly at the two pantries and large, well-organized kitchen with a restaurant stove.

  A half year before, during the 1958 Fourth of July weekend with Avis, Julia and Paul had expressed an interest in eventually settling in Cambridge. But a walk about the town with an agent turned up nothing available. Now, with only three months left before leaving for Oslo, they bought the three-story house for $48,500 and asked the third and present owner, Mrs. Margot Smith, to remain on while she looked for another home. Julia explained their decision:

  Paul said he did not want to be in government any longer than sixty years of age. He wanted to devote himself to the creative arts. So we decided where we wanted to live. We looked in California, but that was too far away. Paul had grown up in Boston and loved the area, and we stayed with Avis DeVoto, who had a friend in the real estate business. Avis was wonderful to us. We looked at the house for twenty minutes and immediately took it, while the other people were talking it over among themselves.

  Josiah Royce (1855–1916) and his wife were the first owners of the house from its construction in 1889 until 1944. Royce was the famed idealist philosopher during the “Golden Age of Philosophy” at Harvard, when he taught with George Santayana and William James (whose mother-in-law lived at No. 107). One of Royce’s students was Gertrude Stein, who lived with her brother Leo at No. 123 when she attended the “Harvard Annex” (later Radcliffe) from 1893 to 1897. Poet e.e. cummings was born across the street at No. 104. This area, once part of the Norton Estate, was called the Shady Hill area (Paul had taught at the Shady Hill School in 1930–31) or the Divinity School area, between Beacon Street and Harvard Divinity School, north of Kirkland Street.

  Julia and Paul had already met some of their neighbors three years before: the John Kenneth Galbraiths (Julia went to Smith with Mrs. Galbraith) and the younger Arthur Schlesingers were a part of the DeVoto group that Bernard celebrated in his famous little book The Hour. Buying here among all the university professors and writers was like buying a piece of Bloomsbury for a Londoner. More important than the heady environment was the fact that this was Paul’s hometown, where he taught school one year, and later where his love Edith Kennedy lived and died; indeed, two of her sons, Robert (architect for the restoration of the DeVotos’ house) and Fitzroy, still lived in Cambridge with their families. It seemed natural for a girl reared by a New England mother and sent to Smith College to choose New England. In 1957 Julia told Simca that New England “is the cradle of our country and has a very special character.”

  Julia had twenty-seven daffodils blooming in their Georgetown yard by the second week of April. Paul was feeling older than fifty-seven years, as he was slowly recovering from a tonsillectomy, when the shippers picked up their goods for Oslo. The painters prepared the Georgetown house for renting, while Julia sent her copy of the rejected manuscript to Avis. “I thought you might just hang on to it in case HM might need another copy,” she wrote. “I have not been able to proofread it at all, but have confidence in … the proofreader an
d typist. She is a jewel, and it looks beautiful, I think.” Avis would recall that “Julia left the book in my lap.”

  “Elegance of Cuisine Is on Wane in U.S.,” Craig Claiborne announced four days later in his front-page article in the New York Times. The fault of the decline lay in the decline in its Frenchness, he asserted, and among those he interviewed was James Beard, who said, “This nation is more interested in preserving the whooping crane and the buffalo than in perpetuating classic cooking and table service. We live in an age that may some day … be referred to as the time of the decline and pall of the American palate.” One food historian called this article “a news report of national crisis of some import, at least for the well-heeled readers of the Times.” Houghton Mifflin was not listening. Julia was preparing to walk out the door.

  The routine was familiar: lunch with Jane McBain, cocktails with the Lippmanns, dinner with the Bissells, and the farewells went on for days and days, despite Paul’s fatigue. From the deck of the SS United States on a beautiful sunny day in New York Harbor, they waved to Charlie and Freddie, Alice Lee Myers, and John and Phila McWilliams (who had recently visited them in Washington). Julia wept with sorrow to be leaving, though, always upbeat, she told Avis, “We are indeed awfully lucky to have this post … which I hope will be our last!” They knew that when they returned from this last station, they would have a new and bigger house. Now they began talking about the new world they were to conquer and the French and then Norwegian soil that lay ahead. After a day and a half of champagne, caviar, and truffled pork loin, Julia spent two days in bilious discomfort, recovering in time to meet Simca in Rouen to re-create that first sole meunière lunch that had changed her life.

  The reunions with Max Bugnard, Hélène Baltrusaitis, and others were sweet. The USIA’s special exhibit, “The Twenties: American Writers in Paris and Their Friends,” which Hélène coordinated for the embassy, had concluded just five days before and she introduced Julia to the woman whose collection had been the basis of the exhibit: Sylvia Beach, the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. After dining at Lipp, La Grille, Closerie des Lilas, La Méditerranée, and other sentimental places of memory, Julia was down again with a fatigued liver. But she and Simca got in two days of hard work (their ham en croûte was “not a success”) and a meeting with the Gourmettes before Paul and Julia drove away on a beautiful May day to Bonn. They lunched beside the Rhine and visited friends for three days. After dining with Erica and Hector Prud’homme in Amsterdam, they drove past the whitewashed stone houses of the flatlands of Denmark toward their ship to Norway.

  Chapter 15

  “I AM AT HEART A VIKING”

  (1959 – 1961)

  “… far from the extravagances of Place Pigalle.”

  PAUL CHILD

  THE SHIP wove its long, winding way through the deep, island-strewn fjord toward Oslo. Julia and Paul awakened at five to take in the drama of this “land of the generous sea,” and were not disappointed to discover that the steep forested cliffs, granite boulders, and smell of pine woods reminded them of Maine and the Washington State coast. Little wooden clapboard houses dotted the water’s edge. The day began as slate-colored, the air cold and damp, and the experience strange, as any new land is to a visitor. But the smiling faces of Fisher and Debby Howe on the wharf warmed their 7 A.M. welcome. Debby had attended Bennington College with Julia’s sister Dorothy. Howe, whom they first met in the OSS in India and last saw in Washington, had been in Oslo three years as Deputy Chief of Mission.

  Marching bands and more than five thousand children holding red balloons and red Norwegian flags filled Karl Johan Street, making their way to the palace to greet the royal family for Norway’s Constitution Day. May 17, 1959, was a new beginning for Julia and Paul, as well as the beginning of the planting season in Norway. “The color and noise of thousands of kiddies lifted my spirits—dashed by a terrible lunch,” Julia noted, going through her usual “wish we were home” reaction, which always followed a bad meal in a new country.

  The sun broke through to blinding brightness. They were picked up at their hotel by Eline and Bjorn Egge, whom they had met briefly at one of their farewell parties at the home of Mary Belin in Georgetown (Lieutenant Colonel Egge served at NATO headquarters in Paris with Captain Peter Belin). Their first Norwegian friends drove them up to Holmenkollen, where the Winter Olympics had been held seven years before. At 1,150 feet above sea level, they looked out like eagles over the city of Oslo. “I feel better about things,” Julia wrote in her datebook.

  “Julia and Paul [were] excellent representatives of their country in Norway,” said Bjorn Egge, who would be elected president of the World Veterans Federation in 1995. “They liked people and the Norwegians were very fond of them. They were in fact the incarnation of American culture in Norway at a time we badly needed to have that aspect of the United States emphasized. From the very first moment they put a great deal into learning to know the very special brand of Norwegian outdoor culture.”

  For five long weeks, while Paul was at work in the embassy, Julia worked on the new cookbook—the one-volume edition—and explored the city. They lived consecutively in two different hotels, surrounded by unopened boxes. When Julia was not working she was roaming around the city with her usual energetic curiosity, often with Debby Howe, who showed her the commissary, the War Resistance Museum (the Norwegians had been under Nazi occupation for five years), and the statue of Ibsen (their greatest dramatist) outside the National Theater. The sightseeing was interspersed with house hunting.

  The summer sun in this land of Vikings, herring, and the sea seemed never to set. Though everyone was off the streets by 9:30 at night, twilight did not arrive until 11:30 P.M. and dawn came at 4 A.M. The days seemed nightless in this northern land, a third of which was within the Arctic Circle. Sharing the Scandinavian peninsula with Sweden, Norway swept up the western half of the peninsula to take in the entire fractured coastline northward into the Arctic and over the tops of Sweden and Finland to the Russian border. A country of coastline, in places only four miles wide.

  Fjords sliced deep into the mountain interiors for the most dramatic vistas, unions of the power and beauty of nature, where the sea pounded the rock walls. The land was stunning, the people close to nature, open and innocent (“lean and glowing with health,” Julia wrote in the first postcard to her sister Dort). Later she said, “They look like New Englanders, with the healthy color of Californians [for] they live outdoors every minute they can.” As June approached, Julia noticed the hungry way the Norwegians drank in the brilliant sun and realized how long and cold the winters must be. Paul was amazed that “there are virtually no fat people at all!” He underlined that sentence in his letter, contrasting the people in the United States, “where baby-blubber bounces,” and in Germany, “where pig-fat is almost a virtue.” He was also impressed with how much time the fathers spent with their children, crediting the workday routine of quitting at about 3:30 for dinner and a nap, then family time. The Norwegians were the best-looking (especially the women), “clearest-eyed, healthiest, most vigorous and characterful we have ever seen.” “We like the Weegians very much,” Julia repeated in several letters.

  PALAZZO LIVING OUTSIDE OSLO

  Seagulls squawked above. The air, Paul informed Charlie, smelled of spruce, pine, moss, and apple blossoms. Spring burst out in tulips. By July there was a heat wave and drought—the clearest, hottest summer since 1903—that by mid-October had broken all records. Paul Child sweltered in his corner office in the new and controversial building designed by Eero Saarinen, a building in which no windows opened. By August he felt he was baking “like a pâté en croûte.”

  Oslo, in southeastern Norway, was the capital and largest city, as well as the main port. The country’s chief commercial center, Oslo got its produce from the mountains and the sea: forest products and processed food (chiefly fish). Night after night while they lived in hotels, Julia and Paul tried different restaurants, looking for a satisf
ying cuisine, but concluded that the food was the “worst” they had ever eaten anywhere. Julia’s immediate and private reaction was that the cooking was “hideous,” especially the fried foods. Publicly and privately, she would rave about the fish, especially the gravlax, “the best smoked salmon I ever ate.”

  Gawd, the salmon are splendid! [she wrote her family]. There is a great fish store here with a stupendous window display of crossed salmon 3 feet long, surrounded by salmon trout, and interspersed with lobsters, mackerel, flounder, and halibut. Above them is a garland of little pink shrimp … They also have a “gravloch” [sic], which is salmon … served with Stueder poteter (diced in cream with mace), and a dill/cream sauce.

  “[We seem] far from the extravagances of Place Pigalle,” Paul observed concerning the upright Norwegians. The state church was Evangelical Lutheran, the citizens devoted to rectitude, fresh air, and early nights. As one wag said, the liveliest thing about a Norwegian is his sweater. Their puritanism showed in their food and drink. The beer was good, but all alcohol was heavily taxed. The breads were varied and honest, but the vegetables, salads, and meats were, in Paul’s words, “lousy.” These were friendly and hardy people who had been fishing the sea for many centuries. Pleasures were simple.

  Thanks to the Howes, they found what Julia called a “peachy” and “nifty” house on a hill next door to the Howes and almost across the street from the University of Oslo. Erica Child came from Amsterdam for ten days to help her aunt and uncle move into their house. She went to the stores with Julia to help furnish an empty house.