Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  If a name or recipe was not French, they made note of the fact, as in filet de boeuf en croûte: “Whether the English, the Irish, or the French baked the first filet of beef in a crust we shall probably never know, but [it] is certain that the French would not have named it after Wellington,” she wrote. Also, in a passing reference to sour dough, Julia wrote, “Sour dough is an American invention, not French, and you adapt your sour dough recipe to the method described here for plain French bread.” Later, food writer Karen Hess, who believed that the beef Wellington should not have even been included, disagreed with Julia about the origins of sour dough.

  Julia checked every recipe with the French classics. “We cannot use tomato in bisque,” she said, “because neither Carême or Escoffier or others give tomatoes in their bisques, therefore to protect ourselves from criticism by knowing types” she said no. They also remade some classic dishes too briefly described in the older texts and occasionally found inspiration when they ate out. After eating a delicious loup de mer en croûte at L’Oasis, Julia and Simca tried to copy it, revising and refining it several times over two months. Because she had all the French classic texts and subscribed to current French (Cuisine et Vins de France and La France à Table) and English-language food periodicals, she checked their recipes carefully for originality. “It cannot be copied—if close it must be improved,” she told Simca. And if it was improved, they must acknowledge its origins. While making pain d’épices, Julia discovered it was an adaptation of one in Ali-Bab that had too much liquid. “We cannot copy an Ali-Bab classic,” she said, and did not use it. When Simca suggested adding orange marmalade to pain d’épices, Julia said she did not want to add ingredients that echoed “ladies’ magazines and English additions.”

  Again, their recipes fell between the haute cuisine of the three-star chef and the bourgeois cooking one would see at a wedding feast. Julia, who wrote all the script, applied the techniques of the chefs to dishes from middle-class and farm regions. “Is it French in technique?” she would ask, or declare, “Don’t add milk, it is not in the French tradition.” When she labeled the cuts of meat or questioned American produce, Julia wrote to national and government sources, always asking questions. “She was good because she was curious,” notes Russ Morash.

  Finally, of course, they had their same publisher, illustrator, and editor. Judith Jones was an editor made for these volumes and for working with Julia. Julia respected her knowledge of cooking, Paul her “New Englandy” restraint. She kept a “loose rein” on Julia, but paid a couple of encouraging visits to Cambridge when Julia needed them (William Koshland was leading the company since Knopf’s retirement). After one weekend of work with Judith until one in the morning, Paul informed Charlie that Judith Jones “could be a Fairy Queen who has chosen to take on human form. She is also perceptive, kind, shy, skillful at her job and (curiously) tough. It’s a great pleasure to work with her.”

  One of the major differences in Volume II was that Julia was now closer to home and American produce, as she frequently pointed out to Simca. (“Things are different here … our sole fillets are thicker … [and] you have to be here to know what is available, and what things taste like.”) Also, they included several recipes and food groups not appearing in Volume I: choucroute, bisques (with illustrations of cutting up lobster and crab), broccoli, courgettes, and, of course, the French bread she and Paul tested and tested.

  Julia discovered that the gluten content differed between French (9 percent) and U.S. (11.5 percent) flours. They also came up with a new puff pastry recipe that was superior to all they tasted, using 1⅓ cups of A&P flour and ⅓ cup of cake flour (or ¾ to ¼). Much better results than using regular flour, she discovered. Julia picked up the idea from the pastry chef at the White House. The puff pastry section soon swelled to a comprehensive thirty-two pages.

  The tension mounted as the months passed and more people at Knopf tasted their recipes. They feared their French bread and puff pastry recipes would be stolen. They trusted only their secret testers, including Freddie Child, Avis DeVoto, and neighbor Pat Pratt. But when Time-Life asked to publish their bread recipe, Julia was surprised that they even knew it was in the works. She refused, and they soon came out with a supplement claiming to give “an American version of French bread.” Julia wrote to Simca: “I am happy to report that theirs has no relation whatsoever to the way French bread is made in France—thank heaven. I was so afraid they would get hold of Carvel, too! Michael Field, I am quite sure, knows nothing at all about yeast.” Calvel gave them (after months of their own experimenting) private lessons in Paris using American flour they took to him. When a man in Japan wrote about the Calvel techniques of bread making, Julia worried needlessly. No one else paid any attention.

  In the second, as in the first, volume Julia focused on time-saving devices, such as what portion of a recipe could be made in advance, while staying away from what she called cuisine express, which was growing in France. She was now concerned with fat content because of the increased attention to cholesterol in the United States. She wrote Simca:

  Do you think we shall have to think a little about cholesterol and not too much butter and cream in Vol. II? I am afraid we may have to, and will ask Judith what she thinks. A most disturbing report has come out of the American National Heart Association, saying there should even be a law, to save people’s lives, etc. I am asking a girl from a big butter company what they are doing to combat this horrible situation.

  She told Simca that her boudin recipe had too much fat in it. On the other hand, she rarely cut down on the number of eggs or amount of cream called for in a traditional recipe, though they were not afraid to improve on a traditional recipe.

  “Food is not static,” French chef Jacques Pépin recently observed. “It shows a lack of intelligence to criticize someone who is changing a recipe. Food progresses like language progresses. When it becomes static, it dies. Food has to move forward. Escoffier would be the first one if he were alive today to make changes and learn. If he were alive today, he would be the first one to use the food processor.” Indeed, Julia insisted that, when possible, they should use the new machines on the market. (“We have to keep up with new household inventions, Simca!”)

  Some of the differences between the two major books of Julia’s career are accounted for by the changes occurring in the decade of the 1960s. Indeed, even the mail between Julia and Simca took half the time to arrive. Xeroxing now saved much time. Wondra flour was invented, as were new machines such as the Cuisinart. Cake mixes were better and thus challenged them to make their cake recipes more outstanding. Even frozen and canned food improved, and Julia encouraged Simca to visit and learn about these changes, though Simca never did.

  Most importantly, recipes were now more sophisticated and detailed, thanks in part to the influence of Julia and Simca. There were more and better-quality cooks. Many of the present recipe writers were Simca’s former students in Paris. The world was growing smaller.

  By 1970, Julia’s letters revealed a subtle change in her estimation of the audience for this volume. She informed Simca that public food is on the whole worse (because of the lack of trained chefs and the cost of hand labor), but “home food, among those who cook and there is a growing number, is far better.” (She contrasted these serious home cooks with “the assemblers,” as she called those who assembled frozen and canned foods.) These improved home cooks and the growing number of professional cooks who read Julia’s books brought about a change in her perception of their audience, explaining the relatively increased difficulty of Volume II. “The chefs and men are interested in our book,” she told Simca, and “it does very much interest the serious and intellectual types, of which there are a lot in this country.”

  An ironic change Julia noted during her frequent movement back and forth between the two countries was that France was becoming more like America every day, and not just in the increased number of its supermarkets. The French were using more canned mi
lk, she pointed out to Simca, but we cannot do it because it is not traditionally French, “because that is very American and would shock those romantic people (which means most of the Americans) who still think French cooking is very special and that they do not use such canned things. Little do they know how the two countries are coming ever closer together.” Perhaps this was a pivotal reason to preserve the classic dishes of France.

  By the summer and fall of 1969, months before she was finished with the book, Knopf was starting to print up three-chapter sections and Avis DeVoto was brought in for copy editing and proofreading; a three-part interview and prepublication of recipes was being prepared for McCall’s magazine; and Ruth Lockwood was organizing a new series for The French Chef to be shot in color and to appear at the time of the publication of the book. The pace was hectic; the stress and testing added pounds. Julia and Paul were on a protein diet (Paul gave her five-pound dumbbells for her fifty-seventh birthday), and she and Ruth were half seriously talking about finding a plastic surgeon for a face lift.

  Though Julia believed the manuscript could easily take five more years, she had only five months. She and Judith cut the eleven chapters down to seven, leaving out enough recipes to fill another volume. Frustrated by the many months locked away with her typewriter, Julia was actually looking forward to her television teaching schedule. She took the minimum amount of time for two family weddings and a ceremony at Smith College, where she received one of five medals (three of the five alumnae were honored for their volunteer work).

  Two crises saddened her private life and interrupted her work. The first was the sudden death in August 1969 of Brooks Beck, her friend and lawyer. He died of a pulmonary embolism after difficult hip surgery at the age of only fifty-one, leaving three children with his widow, Wendy. The second crisis occurred while she was racing for a deadline in February 1970 and her gynecologist informed her that there was a small mass on her right breast. This time she had only a biopsy, which showed the lump was benign. The news left them feeling released from “bondage” and Paul, with what he called his “capacity for self-torture,” in “a state of nerve-wracked joy.” Their friends Herb and Pat Pratt celebrated this, as well as the seventh birthday of The French Chef with a bottle of Griotte-Chambertin ’62.

  NO MORE COLLABORATION

  What became increasingly clear to Julia during the last two years of work was that she no longer wanted to write books and that she could no longer collaborate with Simca. Writing Volume II demanded she do nothing else but work on the book. It was “too confining.” As early as August 1968 she told Simca that it was “too damned much work and no let-up at all. Fistre [fichtre, meaning ‘screw it’].” By the following February she said, “I have no desire to get into another big book like Volume II for a long time to come, if ever. Too much work. I am anxious to get back into TV teaching, and out of this little room with the typewriter!” Nineteen months later, her resolve was even firmer.

  The second reason was the growing intractability of Simca and an equally stubborn drive in Julia to make her own independent decisions. The contrast between Simca’s temperament and that of Julia had always been there, but the more intense working conditions made their differences more acute. Julia was more than annoyed when Simca left to return to Paris to vote for Pompidou just when an important journalist flew in for a joint interview. But the sharpest criticism of Simca would be found in the letters of Paul, who implied that Simca was neurotic and undependable (as usual, Julia added a disclaimer in the margin of his letter). Julia’s “exhaustive research goes for nothing,” Paul wrote Charlie on June 21, 1969. “Simca will NOT listen to anything Julia says…. NO MORE COLLABORATION has become the watchword.”

  Though she would not allow open criticism of Simca to go unchallenged, she did confide in M. F. K. Fisher, sharing with her a French article she also sent to Simca. In the copy to Mary Frances, mailed on September 1, 1969, Julia highlighted the line “Every Frenchman is convinced he is a connoisseur who has nothing to learn from the experts.” It had taken her fifteen years, she added, to learn this truth, which was “exactly what has been bugging me in my collaboration, and why I can’t take any more of it. I don’t know why I have been so dumb, but it is something one can hear, but not feel viscerally because how can anyone (but the French) have such arrogant nonsense as to live by that conception.”

  No evidence suggests that Julia tried to drop Simca from the team. Indeed, all the letters suggest that she kept her partner fully informed and asked her repeatedly for more research. “I think that the trouble with our collaboration is that the recipes do not come out as Simca, but as Julia—which is natural because I have to be le responsable. There is no reason at all why you should be wedded to me in English!” Julia insisted, sending her the names of editors at Gourmet and at England’s Wine & Food. She talked to Beard and others about publishing articles by Simca. “The more Julia tried to include her, the more Simca resented Julia’s skyrocketing success,” says Phila Cousins. Simca pulled away from her partner and concentrated on her cooking class with small groups of devoted American students. In the end, it was to be the fame of the French Chef that drew their careers apart.

  On the personal level, they remained sisters devoted to each other and presided, often together, at what many called the Bramafam/La Pitchoune culinary salon, even after Julia found out that Simca had never even tried Julia’s French bread recipe.

  AMONG THE FOODIES

  Although it was growing, the cookbook world at that time was still small. Small enough so that they all knew each other, as evidenced by Julia’s comings and goings in the 1960s and early 1970s. Julia went back and forth to their cooking schools and celebratory dinners in New York. She attended a big foodie dinner hosted by José Wilson at her summer home in Rockport (only Pierre Franey, former chef at Le Pavillon, and Craig Claiborne could not make it). When James Beard and then Franey and Claiborne came up to the Beverly Music Circus to give cooking demonstrations, she was in the audience, keenly aware that none of them were trained performers. Each year there were more books and more cooking shows on television.

  The rising stakes in the food world were first signaled by Claiborne’s properly devastating review of Michael Field’s book for Time-Life (readers should “mourn in the name of Georges Auguste Escoffier, Carême, Vatel, and Ali-Bab”). M. F. K. Fisher called the review, repeating a rumor, “a personal vendetta.” (Claiborne, ironically, ended up doing the haute cuisine volume for the Time-Life series.) Field retorted in McCall’s with an attack against Claiborne’s favorite New York City restaurants.

  The food world seemed to be ushering in the “ME decade” of the 1970s, with its mood rings and mood swings. The narcissism of the Manhattan food world echoed what food writer Robert Clark called the “gay camp culture: set pieces of bitchery, betrayal, and revenge dramatized by drag clichés [such as] Callas-like opera divas.”

  The flak the foodies were catching was from outside the tent. Lit by the Vietnam War and rioting, the food world looked mighty self-indulgent and trivial. The swelling egos and endorsements brought out several blasts from writers. When a Nora Ephron article satirizing the “food establishment” appeared in New York magazine the previous September, Julia felt “fortunate to be living quietly in Cambridge rather than getting all involved with that to-do.” Mary Frances told her the article was “delicious” and Ephron a “bright girl,” then asked if she didn’t think the caricature of Claiborne looked like Vice President Humphrey.

  Julia was in Cambridge and Mary Frances in the Napa Valley, but they were indeed still a part of the food world. Julia was in deep with the Time-Life project, thoroughly enjoying wining and dining with editor-in-chief Dick Williams and his wife, Mary. She enjoyed their company, but did not need a job with Time-Life. More important, Julia’s natural instincts still served her well: her immediate reaction was always to be frank and honest. She never developed a hard edge, like those whose “backgrounds geared them to competitiveness and Bi
g Time urban living,” as she put it. “In a world of megalomaniacs,” says Russ Morash, “it is refreshing that Julia Child is always so self-critical.” The self-criticism came, her neighbor Jean deSola Pool claimed, because “Julia has self-esteem and extraordinary intelligence.” She is “a focused and centered lady,” adds cooking colleague Lynne Rossetto Kasper, “one who knows who she is, her desired place in the world, and is fulfilled by it.”

  In 1968–69, a spate of articles exposed the close business connections among publishers, food writers, and the manufacturers of food and cooking equipment. Pointing out that there were twice as many cookbooks published in 1969 as in the year before, writers charged the food authors with a cynical approach to the intelligence of their audience. Too many recipes were untested, stolen from others, or taken verbatim from recipes developed by food manufacturers. There were no standards or certification procedures in this “profession.”

  “It’s a world of self-generating hysteria,” Nika Hazelton told Nora Ephron, whose article began with Time-Life’s book-launching party being disrupted by Claiborne’s review that morning. Ephron chronicled the sellouts: “French’s mustard people turned to Beard. The can-opener people turned to Poppy Cannon. Pan American Airways turned to Myra Waldo. The Potato Council turned to Helen McCully….” Then she described the “mortal combat” between the home economists and writers concerned with the “needs of the average housewife” and the “purists or traditionalists” who tout primarily French haute cuisine, lumping Julia among the “Big Four” of this latter group. “Julia Child has managed thus far to remain above the internecine struggles of the food world” less because of her “charming personality” than because she lives in Cambridge. Ephron’s last volley was against the food fakery and “the influence of color photography on food.” It all made for delicious gossip.