The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Julia goaded him: “The whole two continents of America were nourished on nothing but corn!”

  “I know,” Beard mumbled. “Rather amazing.”

  “Corn,” she added, “has everything but niacin in it.”

  “Everything in the world. And of course it won’t leaven.”

  “No. But who wants that? OK!” Julia turned to grin into the TV. “We can say the Indians gave us meal and the English gave us pudding. Everything that is dessert, the English call ‘pudding.’ ”

  “Alas and alack, yes.” Beard sighed.

  Julia and Jim loved to cook together whenever they could, so it was surprising that their on-screen chemistry was…flat.

  It came down to personality, style, and the very particular skills required for TV. While Beard was eminently knowledgeable about colonial food, technique, and cookware, his voice went from a deep baritone to a high pitch; sounding like an exasperated schoolteacher, he broke into rapid-fire, fact-crammed bursts that were hard to follow. Even a seemingly minor detail—his bright yellow shirt with red bow tie—which looked good onstage, appeared jarring on the screen.

  For her part, Julia had a wild energy that day. She had a frizzy new hairdo and grew so excited about cod, venison, maize, and molasses that she sometimes talked over Beard, or pleasantly bossed him around, while cracking jokes and weaving double entendres as she played to the camera.

  “It’s truly a most beautiful wild turkey—doesn’t it look beautiful, Julia?” Jim said in his deep voice, nodding at the bronzed fowl with baked apples that glistened enticingly on a platter. “They taste very turkey.”

  “Not like the artificial breasts” of modern supermarket turkeys, Julia chuckled, “those old fatsoes!”

  As Beard explained how Native Americans ground corn between stones—“just like the Mexicans do, in a metate [a stone mortar, used for milling corn]”—Julia began to play with various corn-grinding contraptions. She instructed Beard to grind corn by hand in a silver device screwed to a stool. “It takes a little muscle, but it does very well,” she encouraged him. In a mischievous tone, she added, “Let’s do it without the little cover and see what happens…” She removed the splatter shield while Beard dutifully ground away. A great spray of cornmeal flew out of the machine and scattered across the floor. Delighted, Julia put her head back and roared with laughter. “Well, you see how it goes all over the kitchen!”

  Beard looked at her with a tolerant, slightly worried expression, unsure of what she’d do next.

  After trying out a modern corn-grinding attachment on a rotary mixer, which smoothly ground fine cornmeal and stored it cleanly in a glass jar, Beard said, “I think I’ll take this against the hand one.”

  “Hmm!” Julia said, turning her attention to a copious New England seafood platter: an Essex lobster, Cotuit oysters, Annisquam mussels, and Ipswich clams.

  In a reverential tone, Beard announced, “Gloucester codfish cakes…with egg sauce…”

  “I was brought up on that because my mother came from the Berkshires.” Julia sighed. “Oh, I love egg sauce.”

  Later, as she dolloped spoonfuls of cream onto the viscous brown “Injun pudding,” Beard said, “What a lovely feast it ’tis. A feast of Native American things prepared according to the English rules.”

  “You can say it’s the birth of American cooking,” Julia noted.

  At the end of the segment, Beard explained that the term “wassail” signified “the pledging of health,” a New Year’s custom among the Saxons. Upon drinking in honor of a friend, they would salute him with the phrase “Wes hal,” which meant “Be hale,” or “Health be to you.” The modern version of the drink is made from warm beer, sugar, nutmeg, ginger, sherry, and slices of lemon. It is served with slices of toasted bread, set afloat in the brew, whence comes the origin of “drinking a toast.”

  Beard dipped a piece of toast into a tankard of ale, and in a fine voice sang, “We’ll wassail, and wassail, all over the town.”

  Julia held up a piece of toast and hoisted her tankard heartily toward the camera: “Let’s say ‘Wassail, to the Spirit of Seventy-Six!’ ”

  III. OUR DECISION IS FINAL

  “Our great week of TV trials with Jim is finally over,” Julia wrote to Simca in March 1975. “He does not seem well, is fat as ever, and has lost some of his verve—which, I suppose, is to be expected. But his schedule is as busy as ever, including classes twice a day…Eh bien…it sounds nutty to me, but that’s what he loves to do.”

  In the summer of 1975 the bicentennial loomed just a year ahead, and WGBH was fully supportive of the colonial food project. The station had changed the show’s working title from the puckish “Thirteen Feasts for Thirteen Colonies” to the statelier “Revolutionary Recipes,” and then the more generic “Julia and Jim: Classic American Cooking.” The latter reflected the fact that “we’re presenting great American cuisine, not just history,” a station executive noted.

  Television production is expensive, and funding public TV shows, even Julia Child’s, was a perennial struggle. Henry Becton Jr., WGBH’s program manager for cultural affairs, was pitching “Julia and Jim” to public television affiliates across the country (if enough of them agreed to purchase the series from WGBH, it would help defray production costs) and potential corporate underwriters, such as Safeway Stores: “I’m confident this series will be one of the most talked-about new television projects of the 1976–77 seasons,” Becton wrote. “We’re already getting many inquiries from the press. Although it’s got a bicentennial emphasis, its value is timeless.”

  But the commitment and cash did not materialize. “Nothing at all has come of that pilot TV program Jim Beard and I did, and I have given [WGBH] a deadline of July 1st…and after that we shall be free to do what we wish,” Julia wrote to Simca. “I pray I shall NOT hear because I really am not at all anxious to get back into that rat race. Tant pis about less exposure for our books—life is too short!”

  She was newly pragmatic, out of necessity. While Paul had regained some muscular strength, he still had trouble processing information. “There is still some brain injury there that has not healed. Perhaps it never will, and he will just have to live with it,” Julia said philosophically. “If he were 54 or even 64 rather than 73, he’d have bounced back faster. It is a shame, is it not, that we shall not all go on forever!”

  Jim Beard’s health was worsening too. While teaching cooking classes at the Gritti Palace, in Venice, he contracted a kidney infection. The combination of Paul’s ill health with Jim Beard’s struggles and WGBH’s challenge in landing an underwriter for the colonial food show gave Julia pause. As the weeks of inaction turned into months, she confided to friends that she was thinking of pulling the plug on her treasured colonial cooking special.

  When he caught wind of Julia’s change of heart, Michael S. Rice, WGBH’s general manager, pleaded: “Please give us a little more time before closing the door on the 1976 series…I know the delay and difficulties are frustrating. I know how disruptive they can be to your heavily committed schedules. But please reconsider and bear with us…Everyone here on staff has felt the excitement and rightness of a series with you on American cooking for the Bicentennial year. It would be WGBH’s most fitting contribution, given your part and our own in Public Television’s short but remarkable history.”

  In a note scrawled across the letter, David Ives, the station’s president, wrote, “Oy!!!!! Is there something that doesn’t meet the eye here? Julia mad at Beard or feeling that he isn’t right as a partner for her?”

  Michael Rice responded in another note: “Am very puzzled. Sometimes I think she’s annoyed that we don’t just go ahead, w/ or w/out funding. Sometimes I think she’s just tired. Hope this letter will smoke out any problems hitherto unspoken of.”

  Julia replied in a terse note: “I’m sorry but our decision must stand. This is really concerned with Paul and his health—a long television siege is really too much for him…I understand Jim
Beard is still right there and willing to go. And there are numerous other people who could do the series with him, if, indeed, anyone is really needed besides that large and charming personage.”

  While Julia’s rationale was legitimate, Ives may have intuited something that Julia could not bring herself to voice. There was something else, a difficult truth behind her decision: Jim Beard was simply not very good on television.

  Admittedly, this seems odd. One would think that after such a long TV career Beard would have gained a workable set of skills, and that Julia would have been aware of his shortcomings. But Beard was a dear friend, a masterly cook and culinary historian, and he seemed like the perfect partner. Perhaps Julia’s devotion blinded her to Jim’s lack of telegenic charm, or perhaps she chose to ignore the facts until she no longer could. Indeed, in 1972 Julia had warned Simca: “We all (including Jim B.) tend to look rather grim when we are concentrating, and…it is really a matter of getting into the habit of showing a sunny smile at almost all times.”

  While Julia was cheerful and dynamic on camera, Jim was glum, static, and mumble-mouthed.

  “It’s true.” Judith Jones sighed. “He was terrible on TV.” It was sad, because “Jim was such a wonderful resource, and a very good friend of Julia’s. She couldn’t go on with the program. She wanted to protect Jim. She was very sensitive to this sort of thing.”

  Despite this significant setback, the American bicentennial was not a historical moment that Julia Child intended to miss. As she scrambled to regroup and find a replacement for “Classic American Cooking,” her mind slipped back to past successes, foremost the White House Red Carpet special of 1967. Would it be possible, she wondered, to return to the White House kitchen almost a decade later? And if so, what would she find there?

  IV. THE INSTANT PRESIDENT

  In 1976, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was occupied by Gerald and Betty Ford, and their guests of honor for the bicentennial would be Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip of England. They would celebrate with a white-tie dinner for more than two hundred VIPs at the White House.

  The more she thought about it, the more Julia recognized this as an opportunity well suited to her professional talents and personal enthusiasms. It would allow her to celebrate America’s emancipation from “the Old Sod,” as she called Britain, while further examining her family’s English roots and celebrating the queen, the rare celebrity who genuinely fascinated her. And Julia had an ace in the hole: her friend Henry Haller remained the White House’s executive chef. The only problem, as far as she could see, was the president himself.

  Gerald Ford had not been elected to office. In October 1973, the Michigan Republican was minority leader of the House when he was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. His party was in chaos: Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for allegedly accepting more than $100,000 in bribes as governor of Maryland. Ford replaced him for a year, until President Nixon resigned in August 1974. At that point, Ford was named president, and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was elevated to vice president.

  Gerald Ford is the only man in history to serve as both vice president and president without having been elected by the electoral college. But that didn’t change his eating habits. Nixon liked to eat cottage cheese slathered in ketchup, and so did Ford. “Day in and day out, Mr. Ford eats exactly the same lunch—a ball of cottage cheese, over which he pours a small pitcherful of A.1. Sauce, a sliced onion or a quartered tomato, and a small helping of butter-pecan ice cream,” John Hersey reported in The New York Times. “ ‘Eating and sleeping,’ he says to me, ‘are a waste of time.’ ”

  In a speech to the Grocery Manufacturers of America, Ford said that he preferred instant coffee and instant oatmeal to the real thing, adding, “I happen to be the nation’s first instant Vice President. I only hope that I prove to be as pure, digestible, and as appetizing to consumers who did not have a chance to shop around for other brands of Vice President when I was put on the market.”

  Julia had little faith in Ford, and referred to him as a tête de lard (“fathead”). Yet he was presiding over the White House at a signal moment in American history, and he had invited Julia to join him in celebrating the bicentennial with the queen.

  8

  The President, the Queen, and the Captain

  I. JUST TWO LUCKY GIRLS AT DINNER FOR THE QUEEN AT THE WHITE HOUSE

  On July 5, 1976, Julia ate dinner with the public television producer Martin Clancy in Washington, D.C. He had run coverage of the Watergate hearings and other major stories, and explained his meticulously planned telecast of the queen’s White House visit. (It was produced by WETA, Washington, D.C.’s public television station.) Most of the show would be live, except for a few pretaped segments. Julia would provide commentary with a multicultural cast: Robin MacNeil, a Canadian working for American public TV, was the anchorman; Jean Marsh, a British actress best known in the States for the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs, would discuss royal etiquette and fashion; and Frank Gillard, a BBC correspondent who had covered the Second World War and helped launch Masterpiece Theatre, would add historical gravitas.

  Washington was in a tizzy. The presidential primaries had just concluded, and now the bicentennial celebration was under way, bringing throngs of tourists to the capital. There were so many official events scheduled that the White House could barely keep up. Betty Ford worried they’d have to close the People’s House to the public for months, but then she hit on a solution.

  Inspired by a party at the French Embassy—where a large tent decorated with crystal chandeliers and red velvet walls hung with paintings had provided extra space—the first lady had a tent erected over the Rose Garden. “Just a great white tent which would also enable us to invite more guests than we could have served indoors,” she recalled. The tent would have a wooden floor and carpet. “I’d been thinking of an outdoor party the Nixons had given for some newly released prisoners of war and their wives. It had been raining for three days, and the chairs just gradually sank into the ground. And all those poor wives, who’d gone out and bought beautiful new shoes, ruined them in the mud.” To forestall such a disaster, Mrs. Ford decreed, “We’ll have a floor and a carpet. It will be just like a room.”

  On July 6, the day before the feast, the White House lawns were clipped, and the vast white tent was assembled, hung with paper lanterns, and equipped with an air-conditioning unit. The doorways to the White House were given a fresh coat of paint.

  Nine years after Julia’s first visit, Executive Chef Henry Haller was fifty-three and at the top of his game. Highly professional and usually discreet, he had suddenly become “unavailable to the press” as of 1970, when he volunteered more about the Nixon family’s food and beverage habits than they cared to share, including that President Nixon liked to mix his own martinis before dinner. Julia and a public television crew were given a two-hour window to film chef Haller preparing the bicentennial dinner.

  Thanks to a renovation, the White House kitchen seemed even smaller than it had nine years earlier. Now it could contain only three cooks and two helpers. The food was still transported from the basement to the dining rooms by rickety dumbwaiters and a zigzag staircase.

  Julia noted there would be 224 hungry guests for dinner, and Haller explained his strategy. After consulting on the menu with the first lady, the State Department gave notice of the royal couple’s single dietary restriction: no raw fish. “That’s not much of a problem for the Queen here, of course,” Haller cracked. “But I guess it is when he [sic] visits the Japanese or the Eskimos. With Prince Philip, it’s not a problem at all—he’s an old Navy man, and eats everything. But I guess these people who go to such dinners all the time learn to eat a lot of things they don’t like.

  “First of all, you use what is seasonal. You do not adjust the seasons to the menu, it should be the other way around. Then it should be possible to do some of the preparation in advance.”

  The meal would begin with a spectacular dish, Ne
w England Lobster en Belle Vue, Sauce Rémoulade. Belle vue is French for “a beautiful sight,” and it was. “It’s a very queenly, beautiful dish,” Haller said. Escorting Julia into the walk-in refrigerator, Haller beamed with pride at a collection of enormous four-pound lobsters, each nestled on a bed of pink aspic. They had been boiled in a bouillon, and their tail meat had been removed and sliced into thick medallions; the medallions were laid out along the tops of the shells, decorated with red pimiento and black truffle, and glazed with jelly. Thus decorated, the crustaceans were arranged on oval platters, twenty-five servings to a platter.

  This spectacular centerpiece was surrounded with a mix of carrots, peas, celery, and apples, topped with the meat of boiled baby lobsters. “Apples: that’s my touch in vegetable salad,” Chef Haller explained. As he garnished a lobster plate with parsley and lemon, he grumbled, “I wish someone would invent lemons without seeds.”

  Julia observes Chef Haller’s lobster preparation in the White House kitchen, 1976.

  To start, each guest would receive several lobster medallions, a serving of the vegetable-apple-lobster salad, dressed with a rémoulade sauce (mayonnaise mixed with lemon, mustard, gherkins, capers, tarragon, and chervil).

  The entrée was saddle of veal, a choice cut that makes for a large and expensive roast that is rarely served in home kitchens. “But if you’re going to have a fancy party like this one, and entertain the queen of England, you’ve got to spend a little money for it,” Julia quipped.

  On a counter, twenty-six saddles of veal (total cost: $1,000) had been boned. Haller cut the veal on the bias, not crosswise, which makes for a slightly larger serving—“a very attractive way of serving it that I hadn’t seen done,” Julia observed. The meat was tender and “just beautiful, a lovely pale pinky whitey color.” Haller used a pastry bag to stuff each piece with a mixture of ground veal, bread crumbs, garlic, herbs, cognac, egg, cream, and Worcestershire sauce; then they were rolled, tied, and roasted in a 350-degree oven for fifty minutes.