Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  While the leaders of the American food world worshipped at the Child-Beck culinary shrine in Provence in the summer months, Julia and Paul chose to live there in the winter. For the next three winters, she and Simca tested and compiled their second volume. Julia wanted to be the best teacher and writer she could be, yet her respect for technique and productivity was always in the service of congeniality.

  The tricolor French flag flew from the front door in Cambridge when thirty guests arrived for a Bastille Day dinner on July 14, 1966. The hot weather cooled down enough for the guests to linger over drinks in the garden, then to admire the food arranged in the dining room. Julia cooked several salmon in a large wash boiler so they appeared “lively,” curved in the Chinese manner as if swimming upstream. Paul decorated the cold salmon with green mayonnaise. Julia kept it simple with a large salad of crudités, a cucumber salad with fresh dill and watercress, and, for dessert, fresh fruits around pineapple ice, and almond madeleines. Jane Howard and photographer Lee Lockwood (Ruth’s son) of Life magazine were there to record the festivities for an article they were writing. Julia wrote Simca with a detailed analysis of the food and cost ($6.50 per person, including the serving women, bartender, and cleaning woman). “No wonder restaurants are so expensive!”

  Christmas dinner in Provence began at ten in the evening with velouté of onions, mushrooms, and red pepper, followed by goose stuffed with chestnuts and pork sausage, chestnut purée, cheese and fruit, and Moulin à Vent. Paul opened champagne for the bûche de Noël. The Childs, the Fischbachers, and Avis DeVoto touched glasses for le carillon de l’amitié, the bell of friendship, holding them by the stem both for clarity of sound and to keep the wine from heating.

  The cast for New Year’s Eve (le réveillon) at La Pitchoune included not only Avis DeVoto, Simca and Jean, but also Smithie Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank and her husband. Helen peeled chestnuts with Avis; Paul and Robbins Milbank opened Belons and Bouzigue oysters; Julia prepared two foie gras marinated with fresh truffles in port and cognac (one in périgourdine style, the other packed in a pig’s caul, à l’alsacienne). Pouilly-Fumé washed down the oysters. While sipping the 1872 Madeira and a Meursault with their foie gras, they discussed their preferences in the cooking methods for foie gras. Dessert: charlotte aux poires with marrons glacés, a hot strawberry sauce laced with kirsch, accompanied by Pommery Brut champagne.

  During the previous days of foie gras preparation, Avis took careful notes, concluding that watching Julia and Simca work together was inspiring: “This is certainly one of the great collaborations in history. They are absolutely necessary to each other and it is a happy miracle that they met…. It is the combination which makes their work so revolutionary, and for my money they are benefactors of the human race.” Words that could have applied as well to the “team” of Paul and Julia Child.

  Chapter 19

  THE MEDIA ARE THE MESSAGE

  (1967 – 1968)

  “The dining-room is a theater …

  the table is the stage.”

  CHATALLON-PLESSIS

  PAUL ROLLED UP ten copies of the Boston Globe and wound sticky masking tape around the bundle while Julia grabbed a bowl and dumped in the contents of an entire can of Crisco. The photographers were waiting as Paul sawed off on the slant both ends of his newspaper roll. Julia had already added some powdered sugar and cocoa to her mix when she took the Globe roll from her husband’s hands. With a spatula she slathered the brown lard all over the paper roll and decorated her “Yule log” or bûche de Noël, running her knife in irregular lines along the lardy mass to simulate the bark of a tree. The only thing edible on the “cake” was the fake mushrooms, which were made from meringue.

  PHOTO FAKERY AND

  THE COMMERCIAL FOOD WORLD

  Inside the oven, the temperature was a cool 57 degrees; outside the August sun was baking their seventy-eight-year-old Cambridge house. The photographer and designer from House & Garden were intent on creating “Christmas with the Childs” for their eager holiday readers several months hence. “But we don’t even spend Christmas in Massachusetts anymore,” she told José Wilson, food editor of House & Garden, when asked for this interview. “We spend every winter in our little house in Provence.” No matter.

  “And I do not have time to prepare a Christmas meal,” she added, glancing at Paul, who was helping her test a bread recipe for the second volume of her Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But José hurriedly explained that they would provide everything and stay only long enough to arrange and photograph the dishes and the table. The recipes printed in the magazine, of course, would be Julia’s carefully tested television recipes.

  True to her word, the professional decorator arrived and swiftly arranged a little tree covered with cookies. They put together a mixture of buttermilk, canned tomato paste, and egg yolks to represent lobster bisque. “That would probably keep a starving Bengali alive for three days,” Paul muttered as the crew arranged the table. His eyes lit up when he saw them open a 450-gram box of foie gras. They would keep that for themselves.

  Each time the photographer moved his tripod, he swiftly made four separate exposures, saving hours of preparation time. Click, click, click, click, dishes, furniture, food, holly … and lard. “The world of photo fakery,” Paul called it in a letter to his brother, “unlike our TV show where everything is superbly edible.” Fakery, like the “hoked-up dinner” The Ladies’ Home Journal had staged just a month before.

  When Julia was approached by the Journal that winter, her first reaction was negative; she did not equate serious cookery only with “ladies,” nor was she impressed with the reputation of its food editor, Poppy Cannon, author of The Can Opener Cookbook. She seemed to represent everything Julia stood against. But the circulation was six million, she explained to Simca, and “as long as there is no new book, and no new TV shows, it would be useful to keep the name in the public eye.” It still sounded “ghastly.”

  The sophisticated and well-dressed New York “designer” arrived at one o’clock to choose the plates, napkins, glasses, silverware, and serving dishes for the Journal’s feature piece, which they were tentatively calling “Julia Gives a Dinner Party.” When Julia protested that her long hours of recipe testing and typing for the new volume did not allow time for more than half a day, Poppy Cannon said, “No problem.” The Journal would furnish the food, the flowers—and the guests.

  The designer returned with masses of exotic blooms and greenery to match their color scheme. At two-thirty a tough-looking “manager” wearing a bold stare and white fishnet stockings appeared. At three o’clock the two New York home economists arrived carrying the dinner, which they had prepared in the studio kitchen of the Cambridge Electric Company, where Julia’s early television programs were shot in 1962. The dinner was to be cooked according to Julia’s menu and television recipes: soup, veal Prince Orloff, braised endive, molded pineapple sorbet with orange. And five bottles of Médoc wine.

  Soon a tall, unshaven man in dark glasses named Levy entered, followed by a Japanese man named Matsuoka and a black man named Pinder sporting bush jacket and shades, all carrying suitcases. The photographers had arrived. Lights, cables, and cameras were almost set up when the “guests” showed up: four young women wearing miniskirts and false eyelashes, accompanied by their husbands, each couple obviously recruited from Beacon Hill or Harvard Yard.

  All this time Julia was upstairs trying to ignore the ringing doorbell. She was leaning her six-foot-two-inch frame over her desk, furiously typing letters and recipes she mailed sometimes every day to Simca in France. Having completed the soup chapter for the new book, they were struggling with a perfect recipe for Americans to make French bread.

  When Paul came up to report on the events in his colorful narrative style, Julia fumed. She muttered something about being “put upon by a bunch of hard-boiled New Yorkers with a flock of cheap models, spilling cigarette ashes all over the house, and telling us what to do in our own kitchen.” S
he refused to get dressed and come down until her morning’s work was completed.

  Paul reasoned with her and she eventually put on the many-colored dress that Paul had chosen for her that spring in Cannes. She composed her smile as she descended the stairway and was soon charmed by the young guests, all in their twenties. Beatles music played in the background to enliven the atmosphere. The cat was shut up in the large basement.

  The meal appeared good enough, though it was evidently undercooked to look better for the cameras. They took 432 pictures; Paul counted. When Julia offered a chilled bottle of Château d’Yquem to go with the dessert, she and Paul were amazed to discover that Julia’s glace à l’ananas aux oranges glacées was made of Crisco and powdered sugar. Fake food, a fake dinner, and fake “Julia’s guests.” Later she would learn other tricks, such as rubbing a turkey with bitters, olive oil, and soy sauce and cooking it briefly just enough for the oil to stay on the skin for a tight, glossy photogenic bird.

  When the October issue of the Journal appeared, subscribers read that the four men “guests” had written to Julia to thank her for teaching their wives how to cook. To express their gratitude—and allow the magazine to illustrate the convenience of freezing ahead—the men made “a raid on the four couples’ freezers” and put together “a complete Julia Child meal [for their] date with their wives’ teacher.” The article was ironically entitled “The Julia Child Way to Plan Your Own Ready-Ahead Dinner.”

  America’s “scholar cook” met Madison Avenue full in the face that summer. These slick magazine spreads—and there would be others this year and next—and the reruns of the French Chef television program would keep the sales of Mastering the Art of French Cooking alive while Julia and her partner spent three years preparing their second volume. The care Julia took with the recipes, cross-testing every variable, baking thousands of brioches, croissants, and loaves of bread, would always set their books apart from other cookbooks. Hadn’t Mary Frances (M. F. K. Fisher) just written her that their first volume was now a “classic”?

  Though she was swept into the commercial food world of New York, her head was not turned by the national attention she received following the Time cover six months before. She was fifty-four when fame hit, a California girl who was natural and forthright, the daughter of a practical New England mother. Food writer Paul Levy remarked pungently, and with admiration, that she could call a fart a fart when talking about cassoulet.

  By and large, she followed her own steady dictates, aware that she was different. When in September she was asked to attend the Harper’s Bazaar luncheon (“100 Women of Accomplishment”), her letter to Simca revealed her sense of remaining outside the glamorous world of New York City: “I hesitated about going, but then thought it would be great fun to look at all the fancy ladies, and I do know a handful from among them. This sort of thing is rather rich for our blood and I shall never have the right costume to wear, however there will be other simple souls like myself who are not dressed and coiffed by the great salons!”

  THE IRVING STREET BAKERY

  AND MASTERING II

  When they prepared their detailed outline in early February 1966, Julia and Simca believed the second volume would be completed in two years. It would take twice that long. Julia had to conclude her final work for the Time-Life people and The French Chef Cookbook, and she had a difficult time saying no to the many demands. But the major complication came when Judith Jones, their Knopf editor, asked them to include a recipe for “French” bread and prevailed with the argument that because Americans cannot buy this bread in their own country, they might want to try making it. Julia agreed, as long as they could come up with a recipe and technique to produce a bread that was both different from what Americans made in their own homes and close to the color, taste, and texture of the French. The book now changed from one that resembled the first volume to a book that would include a large chapter, following the first one on soups, on baking.

  They originally agreed the volume would be a “continuation” of the first volume. In this way, the publishers were assured the second volume did not diminish the value or relevance of the first. Eventually they would integrate recipes for both volumes in the complete index, distinguished by red and black ink. Their audience would be, in Julia’s words “as before, those who like to cook and/or want to learn, as well as those who are experienced cooks, including professionals. So we have to keep dumb debutantes in mind, as well as those who know a lot, and who are thoroughly familiar with the classic French cookbooks.” She wrote these words to Simca two days after giving a large family luncheon for nephew Jonathan Child’s graduation from Harvard.

  In 1967 alone, Julia and Paul used hundreds of pounds of white flour experimenting to find the best techniques for making brioche, croissants, pain de mie (sandwich bread, which did not interest Julia), a variety of pastry doughs, and—the most significant and challenging—French bread in all its various shapes (baguette, bâtard, champignon, boulot, etc.). The ingredients never changed: yeast, water, flour, and salt. (American recipes, including Fannie Farmer’s, always used sugar.) Why the difficulty? Paul soon learned, when he decided to experiment alongside Julia, that there were “ten thousand variables” involved in the yeast, the rising, the shaping, the moisture, the timing, and the oven. Consequently, they had to cook batches of bread, making only one variation each time. Though a few critics would fault her for using American grocery store flour, that was precisely the point: Julia maintained that Americans must be able to use the ingredients they can buy.

  She and Paul experimented with fresh and dried yeast, various flour mixtures (Wondra, Gold Medal A&P, unbleached), rising times, and how to get moisture into the oven to simulate a French baker’s oven and to give the bread the color and crispness of French bread. Soon Paul—“M. Paul Beck, Boulanger,” she called her new partner—was baking his own batches with Julia in their Cambridge kitchen in the summer and fall of 1967. He hung the molded baguette dough, after its second rising, in a large dish towel hooked in a closed drawer; Julia would lay hers in the folds of a flowered canvas. Paul got steam on the top of the baking bread by squirting water from a rubber nasal decongestant sprayer every ten minutes; Julia used a washed and wet whisk broom. Finally, they settled on getting steam into the oven by dropping a red-hot stone or brick into a pan of water in the hot oven.

  It was the dueling bread makers who, each time they thought they had a perfect process, found out that it was not as good the second time they followed the same procedure. Mary Frances wrote back one day that she had a dream that Paul, the size of a cat, was slid on a long flat paddle into a hot oven, holding his nasal sprayer. They all had a good laugh. By July their bread was better than anything they could buy in Cambridge, but it was not yet “French” bread. They came to two conclusions: the bread must rise slowly and it must cook with frequent steam infusion.

  Their neighbors on both sides, the deSola Pools and the Browns, remember that summer when many loaves of warm bread were passed over the fence to them. Even old friends (“They fit us like a pair of old shoes,” Paul would say) whom the Childs would visit—the Pratts in their summer home and the Mowrers in New Hampshire—remember the bread baking at their houses. One host discovered a rising loaf hanging from one of the guest room’s drawers. The Child nieces recall the summer bread baking at Lopaus Point (where Julia also visited a factory to learn about professional cracking of crabs). These family and friends, incidentally, were not intimidated by inviting Julia to a meal; she reassured them, “Nonsense, it is only I who am expected to prepare a perfect meal.”

  In 1968, when they spent months in France making croissants every day—feeding every visitor, guest, and family member croissants until they settled every nuance of preparation and procedure—young Jean-François Thibault, Simca’s nephew, thought, “They must be terrible bakers because they have to keep making these croissants.”

  WORKING WITH SIMCA

  Writing Volume II was similar in many
ways to writing the first. Julia was in charge of writing all the copy (both the blah-blah and the recipe directions), which she would send to Simca, who read and tested the recipes. Julia was the authority on how American produce and ingredients worked with French techniques and recipes. “I hope you will accept my findings,” she wrote Simca, “I am the one here in the USA who gets blamed if our recipes don’t work.” In turn, after Simca tested each recipe, she reported her findings and had the final say on all the French names and terminology.

  Simca was the major supplier of recipes. In fact she could not stop sending recipes, even after they constructed their final outline. “Simca is a great improvisationalist,” wrote her student and assistant Michael James. Peter Kump claimed her recipes, like her stories, “changed slightly every time.” Julia told Mary Frances in both admiration and complaint, “She is a fountain of ideas.” She wrote Avis, who insisted upon being a part of the second volume: “I cannot trust Simca’s recipes at all, except as great idea fountains, so every single one will have to go through the chocolate-cake type of testing. I’m just not going to have anything in this book that doesn’t work well—we have 3 in Vol. I which are far too tricky, and which gall me every time I think of them. Vol. II has to be better than Vol. I, and I ain’t going to be rushed over it.” Finally Julia placated Simca with a line about saving a particular recipe for Volume III (though she never seriously considered a third). Back and forth, Julia in English, Simca in French, they would comment in detail on each experiment and on the other’s comments on every experiment. Today the thousands of onionskin pages are brown with food stains and age. As before, Julia reminded Simca they had to keep their recipes and discoveries secret from both colleagues and students.