Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  During this period of post-television calm, Julia wrote several articles, including a piece about her Cambridge home for Architectural Digest and a review of the new Joy of Cooking, which she placed first on her list of indispensable cookbooks in English. She informed Architectural Digest, a Los Angeles-based “slick, clubby ne plus ultra monthly” (in Newsweek’s words), that her Cambridge place “was not grand, just a comfortable working place.” Architectural Digest added the Irving Street home to the celebrity series that included the homes of Truman Capote, Robert Redford, and Richard Nixon. Doug Dutton of Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, a noted bookseller and music professor, observed that the Childs’ bookcases were only one of two homes shown with a “not bought by the foot” library.

  FROM JULIA CHILD’S KITCHEN

  To launch both the publication of From Julia Child’s Kitchen and the founding of Anne Willan’s La Varenne cooking school in Paris, she and Paul spent ten days at the Dorset Hotel in New York City. At her own expense, Julia had Rosie Manell and Liz Bishop with her at five demonstrations at regional Bloomingdale’s stores and one at Altman. After appearing on A.M. America and the Tomorrow show, they attended a dinner party at Beard’s house for Julia and Paul, Jacques Pépin and his mentor Helen McCully, and Mark and Anne Cherniavsky. Finally, she and Jim hosted (and La Varenne paid for) the American launch party for La Varenne at the Four Seasons “to introduce Anne to the Foodie types, and the travel people as well” (she told Simca). La Varenne would open a month later (November 10) in Paris, and Claiborne would be there to cover it for the New York Times: he had made the winning bid on American Express’s French meal in any restaurant, money-no-object contest (he and Pierre Franey dined at Chez Denis for $4,000 at American Express’s expense).

  Published on October 6, 1975, From Julia Child’s Kitchen was a beautifully designed book, full of Paul’s black-and-white photographs. Filling the title page is his photograph of Julia in the window of their first Marseilles apartment, the harbor and boats behind her. The title page of each chapter contained a photograph of Marseilles, Provence, or Paris, and most sections began with a memory. The book was dedicated to Ruth Lockwood, her producer, “always steady, even-tempered, able, astute—she has been my ever-loving friend.” Ruth was moved to tears. “I went over to Julia’s house and stood eye to eye on the stairs and told her what it meant to me.”

  Instead of the seventy-two French Chef recipes being presented in chronological order, as was done in The French Chef Cookbook, they were organized by category, from soup to cakes (the latter included her Grande Bouffe cake with almonds). She put in her French bread recipe, two recipes for madeleines, and the essential sauces and primary dishes from her other three books. Of course, most of the recipes were French—“because that is my training”—but there were also American favorites such as coleslaw, pizza, chicken Kiev, pumpkin soup, and hamburgers. Because 55 percent of the 714-page volume was made up of WGBH material, she gave WGBH 20 percent of the advance (“They put me on the map,” she reminded one reporter).

  Reviewer Bill Rice said she “departed from the professorial tone of earlier works.” Her voice is indeed less pedantic, but the text is still thorough, offering full teaching charts on measurements and terminology. She included the use of the Cuisinart for the first time. Part of the informality of the book came from the inclusion of reproduced cartoons by the New Yorker’s George Price (“Any word as to the nature of the soupe du jour?” asks one man to another in a charity soup line). She also broke her rule about naming dishes and included pommes Rosemary, les tartelettes Bugnard, and her own Mrs. Child’s famous sticky fruitcake. This was her most personal book. She told Mary Frances seven years later that she found it “difficult to be personal” in her writing, but this was “my own favorite book, which is entirely my own, written the way I wanted to do it.”

  Judith Jones encouraged her to establish her personal voice and include stories such as her encounter with Colette in France. In this volume the voice of Julia clearly speaks to “my fellow cook.” This is your own “private cooking school” she told her readers in the introduction, and even the most knowledgeable learned something. “She finally explained the background and theories,” says cooking teacher Betty Rosbottom, who adds, “I learned for the first time, for example, the formula for stewing fruits.” Julia told Mary Frances, “This is the summation of my 25 years in the kitchen. I have little more to say about anything. I’m writ out, dry,” she added. “NO MORE BOOKS!”

  She took Paul with her on the tour, for he was uneasy away from her, his mind still scrambled. She had moved from heartbreak to a sense of loss, from an acceptance of the inevitable to a determination to get on with life, no matter what people thought. Those who met Paul for the first time in Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh knew only that he was withdrawn and grumpy. The food coordinator at Lipman’s department store in Portland, Oregon, remembers Paul sitting in the front row during her demonstrations. Sometimes he sat in on the interviews, though his answers did not always match the question (Julia did not think it mattered).

  Her reception in New York City was positive, from appearances on Barbara Walters’s Not For Women Only to Beverly Sills’s Lifestyles and the New York Wine and Food Society’s “A Gentle Roasting” of Child and Beard at the Hotel Pierre. In New York magazine, Mimi Sheraton (who would soon become the chief restaurant reviewer for the New York Times) selected fourteen out of the one hundred cookbooks published that year and named From Julia Child’s Kitchen the best of the fourteen, a list that included Jacques Pepin’s splendid The French Chef Cooks at Home. She praised Julia’s “personal [and] no less precise and enticing” book, preferring her new listing of ingredients first. Another reviewer said that Julia was “as elegant as médaillons de porc sautés à la crème, and as unpretentious as good ragoût.” People magazine gave her the cover for the first week of December, featuring the thirty-year partnership between Paul and his “wonderfully sensuous” Julia. The Washington Star gave her a front-page Q&A (she touted La Varenne), and, closer to home, her butcher sold 400 copies of her book along with his meat.

  NOUVELLE CUISINE

  The tone for the tour of From Julia Child’s Kitchen was set before the plane tickets were purchased when John Kifner of the New York Times asked her about the undercooked vegetables of “nouvelle cuisine” now sweeping upscale U.S. restaurant kitchens. Julia pooh-poohed nouvelle cuisine as “just that Paris PR game.” The controversy made for good conversation and copy. She could rise to the quotable occasion: “A plate should look like food, not a Japanese dinner.” And “This food looks fingered. It doesn’t look foody to me.” When journalists asked about heavy French cooking with sauces, she said they must be talking about French tourist food cooked in starred restaurants. She knew, as did most food people, that nouvelle cuisine was, in one food historian’s words, “the apparent culinary equivalent of the sixties miniskirt revolution … [and] the old food journalism trick of proclaiming their own current project the latest news.” The expression “nouvelle cuisine” had been used two hundred years before. In 1975 it meant innovative cooking, lighter sauces, fish and vegetables, decoratively presented smaller portions.

  If there was a conflict, it was conducted largely in the press. After all, Julia knew most of the chefs, and when Bill Rice, the respected food editor of the Washington Post, gathered a group of them together for a dialogue in a French restaurant in Washington, DC, on November 8, Julia was glad to participate. She was on the penultimate stop in her tour, and she met four three-star French chefs (Paul Bocuse, François Bise, Alain Chapel, and Louis Outhier) as well as the French and U.S. press. They discussed in French the trends in American and French cooking. Paul recorded that the French chefs “treated Julia with deference.” She later wrote to Helen McCully that “we all agreed on everything.”

  The French chefs denied reports they were “down on Escoffier” (famous himself for lighter if saucy cooking) and concluded that nouvelle cuisine mea
nt freedom to create and to improvise on the fundamentals. No longer would every restaurant in France have on its menu the same dishes with the same names. Reading menus has been a challenge for diners ever since, and Jacques Pépin asserts that “nouvelle cuisine has destroyed the repertoire and nomenclature of French cooking.”

  In Julia’s opinion, the most innovative chef among those in the nouvelle group was the modest Michel Guérard, creator of cuisine minceur, France’s first calorie-counting haute cuisine. Narcisse Chamberlain, who edited Guérard’s book for Morrow the next year, brought him and his wife, Christine, to the Childs’ for dinner. According to Chamberlain, “Michel and Christine were thunderstruck by Julia,” her voice and height and informality. The master of cuisine minceur (at Eugénie-les-Bains) soon rolled up his sleeves and began cooking with Julia. “It was a howl and they had a fabulous time. The Guérards continued their exhausting book tour as far as California, but nothing matched the Cambridge meal.”

  It was the American press and Gault-Millau’s Nouveau Guide de la France who polarized the issue of nouvelle cuisine. (Gault-Millau, according to Julia, “browbeat” nonconforming restaurants by awarding red toques to nouvelle chefs and black toques to the old-fashioned traditional holdouts.) The American press’s obsession with the “news” of nouvelle cuisine initiated a trend that would persist in culinary journalism: “trend handicapping,” Robert Clark called it. As in the fashion world, journalists looked for the latest direction in food preparation and featured its leaders in personality profiles. (The real news story, noted Clark, was the public concern with health, which would emerge in the coming decade.)

  Troisgros, Guérard, and Frédy Girardet (near Lausanne) were the true innovators, Julia believed. Others have said the late Fernand Point (La Pyramide in Vienne) was the presumed spiritual father (because many of the young chefs had worked for him). Though she credited Bocuse (near Lyons) for elevating the professional profile of the French chef, she said when his book was translated that it was “hardly anything but classical cuisine” (indeed, two years later she learned Bocuse had put his own introduction on a dead man’s book). Troisgros’s book was just “a list of recipes,” and only Guérard’s book was a good, serious “personal book.” The extremes of nouvelle cuisine (Bocuse called them “a big piece of merde” at their Washington, DC, meeting, Julia reported to Helen McCully) have been called “kiwi-zine;” Julia said they all steamed things in seaweed. If the converts of nouvelle cuisine ever looked back, wrote Laura Shapiro, “they might see Fannie Farmer, whose passion for novelty led her to marshmallows and candied fruit rather than warm liver salad and lemon-flavored fettucini, but whose impact on a generation was no less powerful for that.”

  Julia made her definitive statement on nouvelle cuisine in New York magazine the following year (July 4, 1977), and by explaining its history and the French rating guides, she demonstrated her extensive dining experience in the great restaurants of France. She had scoffed at journalists’ descriptions of Bocuse’s truffle and foie gras “Dinner of the Century” several years before as being new (“Obviously somebody was pulling somebody’s leg”). She had high praise for Guérard and even admitted she loved the experimental new cooking—as she believed Escoffier would. She did not like blood-rare game and undercooked vegetables, which failed to bring out their flavor. And she warned against throwing out “the comfortable old glories” of traditional French dishes.

  FEMINISM

  If nouvelle cuisine was the major food topic of the 1970s, a larger controversy long haunting Julia now clearly emerged: feminism. “Women’s liberation” had frequently come up in a decade of her interviews with the press, though she never brought up the issue herself. With From Julia Child’s Kitchen it surfaced again because she made it clear in her book and interviews that “I never have anything to do with housewives.” She repeated this caveat again for the New York Times reporter. Some readers saw this as “anti-woman,” deprecating the word “housewives.” It was the word Julia disliked, but then so did most feminists. “I have nothing to do with housewives,” she said on several occasions. “We never talk about women cooking. It is PEOPLE who like to cook, and we don’t care who they are—race, color, sex, animals, ANYBODY,” she told a reporter for Dial.

  In interviews she denied feeling discriminated against in what then was primarily a man’s field, though she admitted that had she “gone into restaurant work,” she would have “encountered French male chauvinism.” “You know,” she told one reporter, “it wasn’t until I began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed to women! It’s very unfair. It’s absolutely restricted! You can’t [teach in] the Culinary Institute of America in New York! The big hotels, the fancy New York restaurants, don’t want women chefs.”

  Camille Paglia would later call Julia Child a prewar feminist like Eleanor Roosevelt. She refused the mantle of “feminist,” assuming, as did many women of her generation, that it meant anti-men. And Julia adored men! She always noticed a handsome man and loved to flirt. She was sometimes critical of women, disdaining whining women who were afraid to take risks. One reviewer, misunderstanding feminism, said Julia was “no feminist” because she “unabashedly [gave] her husband credit for her achievement.” When she pointed out that there were few women in professional kitchens, she was again characterized as antifeminist. She believed she was merely stating a lamentable fact. She rejoiced in the success of Lydia Shire, a Boston chef, and told Simca: “So it shows that women chefs can go places, which is nice to know.”

  When asked directly in 1985 if she was a feminist, she declined the label (her sister Dort proudly wore it): “No. I’m from a different generation.” Yet, as one journalist noted, Julia was the embodiment of feminist achievement and independence. Her friend Charlotte Snyder Turgeon says, “She has always been a nonfeminist, even though she epitomizes them.” Helen Civelli Brown said that Julia “is a symbol of women’s liberation. Through her own intelligence, wit, and hard work, she rose to the forefront in a field traditionally dominated by men.” What Julia seemed to object to was the domination of any group by women, men, or homosexuals: “Others will not want to go into it,” she observed. “I think Julia opened cooking for women,” said Gregory Usher. Corinne Poole, who owns the Giraffe restaurant in British Columbia, says that “Julia inspired me and other young women to open restaurants.”

  Had Julia cared, she would have openly challenged the so-called women’s liberation movement for attacking the women who chose to cook. Women (and men) took up cooking with “a real passion” in the early 1970s, says John Mariani, but then “the Women’s Liberation Movement shamed their sisters out of the kitchen and into the workforce.” It was not just the feminists, of course, for as one anthropologist asserts, “Western philosophers have persistently ignored—or marginalized—one of the most common and pervasive sources of value in human experience—our relations with food.”

  When the San Francisco Examiner put the question directly to a dozen famous women in 1975, Julia admitted, “I guess I am liberated,” pointing out that she was of her own free choice doing what she wanted and loved. “You’d call ours a liberated marriage,” she added, and “my hat is off to the movement.”

  California beckoned for the last two weeks of her book tour in the fall of 1975: visiting the Gateses as well as niece Rachel and her husband, Anthony Prud’homme, in Pasadena, staying with Dort and Ivan in San Francisco, driving to M. F. K.’s house for lunch, and signing books at Williams-Sonoma before flying to Portland for more of the same. Pamela Henstell, on her first job with Knopf publicity for the West Coast, remembers Paul’s “big stopwatch” and him sitting “in the very front row … startling the people around him” by calling out the time. Henstell testifies that Julia “is the least egocentric author I have ever dealt with.”

  Two years after Paul’s surgery and strokes, Julia accepted with resignation that Paul would not recover from his mental confusion and would always need to rest and avoid large groups. One
neurologist told her to “keep on living a normal life,” and she knew she needed to keep promoting her books to keep the income flowing (a fact she always mentioned to Simca). But she had lost her vital and independent partner, her confidant and guide. The resulting loneliness, which would eventually push her toward a frenetic professional pace, initially led to a retreat. Because she wanted a break for herself as well, she took Paul in mid-December 1975 to Paris and Provence for three months. Indeed, she would have him away from Cambridge for most of 1976. She called it her sabbatical (“We have been on deadline for fifteen years!!”). She was not planning a book or a television series, and she gave up (only temporarily, as it turned out) writing features for McCall’s.

  EUROPEAN SABBATICAL

  The five days in Paris in the middle of December 1975 meant dining at Archestrate and Prunier-Duphot, attending a Gourmettes luncheon, and, most important, checking on her personal and financial investment in La Varenne (“so unlike the nastiness of the Cordon Bleu,” she wrote to several friends). She saw the school, which she said was “warm and earthy and professional,” as a place for weekly gatherings of foodies in the Paris world, and she freely gave her advice. During several interviews in the year since the school had opened, she gave it repeated positive mention and endorsement. But in all the years she dropped in, she only met informally with the students; she never gave demonstrations.

  La Varenne used a variety of French chefs, most connected with Sofitel (a French hotel chain), and printed its recipes for the students. Gregory Usher, who had become director of La Varenne, believed Julia’s name as an adviser added integrity to the school, which was 95 percent American. Steven Raichlen, who had just graduated in French literature from Reed College, where he survived on Julia’s French onion soup (the only dish he could afford to make, he says), was one of the many students who were delighted by Julia’s active interest in La Varenne. Raichlen worked there for the next six summers and remembers how they scrubbed every pot and pan before Julia’s visits. Another student, Zanne Early, who had left Gourmet (but would return as food editor), was impressed by Julia’s example: “She does not live in the shadows, she lives in color.”