The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Julia may have distrusted organic food even more than health food. In 1981, she declared that the organic movement was built on “balderdash.” And she opined, “Most people don’t really know what they mean by organic. What they really mean is that they don’t want to get poisoned. Most of what they’re feeling is fear…The public is swamped with misinformation. It’s just emotion, not science.” Julia liked to quote from “The ‘Organic Food’ Kick,” an essay by R. A. Seelig published by the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group: “There is no room for the cult that regards ‘natural methods’ as good, and all improvements on nature as bad. Many of the organic food cultists…appear to have a semi-religious conviction that what is natural is a manifestation of God’s purpose, while what is scientific is a denial of God’s plan.”

  Such language, equating organic farmers with religious extremists, seemed calibrated to push the buttons of the Childs. Neither of them trusted blind faith—or, at least, blind faith as they interpreted it—and Julia reacted strongly against any perceived zealotry. When the group CHEFS (Chefs Helping to Enhance Food Safety) asked her to advocate for organic produce, Julia responded, “I just do not want to be allied to any cultist type of operation, which this could well turn out to be. I am for hard scientific facts.”

  The latter sentence was a favorite Julia trope. She prided herself on having a logical mind that valued rigorously tested “science” and “fact” over hope and gut intuition. But where did Julia’s facts come from? In researching her books, TV shows, and articles, she had long relied on trade groups, such as the National Livestock and Meat Board or the Poultry and Egg National Board, or government offices, such as the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, to supply her with technical information. Yet she credulously quoted them without taking into account their potential for obfuscation or self-interest.

  Julia spoke out in favor of MSG (monosodium glutamate) and the “ongoing need to excite our taste buds.” She considered GMOs (genetically modified organisms), which have been controversial, “one of the greatest discoveries” of the twentieth century, which fed millions of poor people around the world. And she dismissed the Food and Drug Administration as “insane” for regulating the sodium nitrate used to preserve hot dogs, bacon, and other cured meats. Most famously, Julia defended her love of butter and cream on the grounds that they tasted better than the alternatives, and she was skeptical of claims that they were unhealthy.

  Julia’s mantra on eating rich foods was drawn straight from her years in France: “Food is joy,” Chef Bugnard taught at the Cordon Bleu. “But everything in moderation.”

  Julia sometimes changed her mind, and there were instances when her opinion on food trends grew nuanced, or convoluted and self-contradictory. Consider the question of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. One of her motivations for making “The French Chef in France” documentaries was to preserve traditional cuisine from mechanized, American-style food production. Yet in 1977, she unfavorably contrasted a French village market to her local American supermarket. Shopping in San Peyre, she found “Asparagus…just laying there for who knows how many days, no refrigeration, sometimes right in the sun, and the stems…all withered. Rotten apples, limp carrots, very limp lettuce.” She missed the clean Star Market on Beacon Street, and she concluded, “All this romance about French products written by people who don’t do the shopping, and read by people who want to read lovely prose. People don’t want to hear what they don’t want to hear, and furthermore, they don’t hear it.”

  Later that year, Julia invited cuisine minceur star Michel Guérard and his wife, Christine, to dinner at 103 Irving Street. Julia served them lobster mayonnaise, saddle of lamb, broccoli, and a tarte tatin. The Guérards raved about the dinner, including the tarte—for which Julia had used Golden Delicious apples, a variety that critics of U.S. agribusiness derided as tasteless. “All this good food came from plain old markets,” Julia crowed to Simca. “I was interested that Guérard had no complaints about shopping, about butter, or cream, or vegetables, meat or fish.”

  There were exceptions, of course: Julia still loved the traditional markets in Cannes and Grasse, and disliked the giant, homogeneous, fluorescently lit American supermarkets that sold days-old fish, flavorless melons, and rock-hard tomatoes wrapped in plastic. Moreover, the French weren’t passive consumers of American efficiency: they tailored the speed and convenience of supermarkets to their own proclivities—selling wines, cheeses, breads, and locally grown vegetables in supermarchés.

  Then there was the subject of fast food. Initially, she worried that quick, cheap burger chains were serving junk to Americans—“We don’t believe good food is to be found at McDonald’s,” Julia stated in 1972—and would destroy the traditional social fabric of France. Yet Julia was not a snob. She enjoyed hot dogs, hamburgers, and French fries as much as the next person—especially if the fries were cooked in beef tallow, as McDonald’s did. (When the company discontinued the practice, Julia publicly complained.) But her feelings about McBurgers evolved. Just a year later, she told Time magazine: “The Big Mac I like least because it’s all bread. But the French fries are surprisingly good. It’s remarkable that you can get that much food for under a dollar. It’s not what you would call a balanced meal; it’s nothing but calories. But it would keep you alive.” And by 1979, she handed the chain a backhanded compliment in an article for New York magazine: “Would you rather have an airline lunch with mystery meat, frozen, tasteless vegetables, and lettuce with sugar, or would you rather have a nice Quarter Pounder and an apple turnover and French fries? What’s the choice there?…I’d certainly rather eat that.” Her only suggestion was that McDonald’s serve a decent glass of red wine in America, as it did in France.

  The first French McDonald’s opened in a Paris suburb in 1972. It was greeted with derision as yet another example of American cultural imperialism, and the chain was lampooned as “McDo” (pronounced “Mac dough”). In 1999, the sheep farmer José Bové scrawled “McDo Dehors, Gardons le Roquefort!” (“McDonald’s Get Out, Let’s Keep the Roquefort!”) on a McDonald’s in the town of Millau. He famously “dismantled” the restaurant by using his tractor to tear off the roof. The stunt landed him in jail and turned him into a hero to the antiglobalization movement. But over time, the fear of “McDomination” abated, and the French grew as fond of the burger maker as billions of other global citizens had. The company ingratiated itself good-naturedly, even referring to itself as “McDo,” and serving cafés au lait, beer, and specialty items, such as the McBaguette (two hamburgers, Emmentaler cheese, lettuce, and mustard on a baguette). By 2014, there were more than twelve hundred McDos across France, including branches in the Louvre and the Sorbonne, and the company employed 69,000 people. Meanwhile, native fast-food restaurants, such as the Franco-Belgian chain Quick, sprang up to serve “Le Double Mix,” “Dark Vador,” and “Jedi Burgers.”

  Julia liked food that was well made and tasted good. While she detested Jell-O, salty canned soups, and limp cookies, she did not reject all convenience foods. In contrast to Simca, she felt that a box of potato flakes—when mixed with plenty of butter, cream, salt, and pepper—could produce delicious mashed potatoes. She didn’t mind canned carrots or frozen beans, as long as they were cooked with care, and she even developed a refined recipe for tuna casserole fortified with butter, Swiss cheese, and hard-boiled eggs.

  She exhorted Americans to get over their squeamishness, and learn to steward limited resources by eating cheaper fish, such as skate, in order to preserve overfished cod stocks. Or by substituting high-protein, low-cholesterol rabbit meat for expensive, fatty steak. “We’ve been terribly spoiled in America. Meat has always been cheap here,” she declared. “Now we’re beginning to live the way the rest of the world always has.”

  Julia wanted Americans to love food, not fear it. “It was supposed to be about pleasure,” Jud
ith Jones observed. “The French use a word, soignée, to describe their approach to cooking. It means you care. You make a little extra effort, even for something as mundane as green beans. Julia always emphasized that. People heard her, and they walked away thinking, ‘You know what? She’s right.’ ”

  When it came to other cultural issues Julia could be equally out spoken or confounding. In 1970, Julia was a budding feminist. “What do you think of women’s lib?” she asked a reporter from TV Guide. “It wasn’t until I began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed to women! It’s absolutely restricted! You can’t get into the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven! The big hotels, the fancy New York restaurants, don’t want women chefs…You know, people with skills are becoming scarce. If they need people who are earnest, intelligent, and dedicated, they’re going to have to allow women in. Fewer men are interested in devoting these qualities to this type of work.” And later she said, “We who are pro women’s rights must do a great deal to get our views across.”

  Yet Julia resisted attempts to label her a feminist and pointedly extolled the virtues of marriage and homemaking. “Women should stop squawking and start cooking!” she proclaimed in 1973. “Julia and I felt the same way about that,” Judith Jones said of feminism. “We were from a different generation.” Child and Jones didn’t like the stridency of the bra burners, even as they were paragons of strong womanhood.

  Julia identified herself as a liberal Democrat, and a proud supporter of Planned Parenthood. Some on the right criticized her, such as the disenchanted fan who wrote, “I wish Mrs. Child would stick to her cooking and keep her personal views to herself.” Julia was unapologetic, and defended her position on the grounds that a woman should be able to decide what is best for herself and her potential child. “What are your plans for these children once they are born?” she wanted to ask the right-to-lifers who picketed her in Memphis. “You run into so many situations where the child is not wanted and miserable,” she told Boston magazine. “What’s so sacred about a life when you think of all the people who are getting killed and murdered and slaughtered all over the world?”

  Over the course of the 1970s, Julia refashioned her public persona from the chic, multicultural French Chef into something akin to “Julia Child, Down-Home American.” This transition seemed perfectly natural to many, but confusing and even vexing to others. Was Julia Child more French than American, or the other way around, or was she some kind of ersatz invention? Was she a real cook, or a fraud? As Julia expressed her opinions more forcefully, some lost interest in her, while others became openly hostile; a few attacked her to gain attention for themselves.

  Madeleine Kamman, a noted American cooking teacher born in France, snubbed Julia as “neither French, nor a chef.” And the food writers John and Karen Hess sneered that Julia was “not a cook, but she plays one on TV.”

  Kamman—who ran a cooking school, Modern Gourmet, and a restaurant, Chez La Mere Madeleine, in Newton, Massachusetts, not far from Cambridge—was an early adopter of nouvelle cuisine who grew infuriated by the success of The French Chef. “Why Julia? Why not me?” wondered the famously opinionated Kamman. “I am French! Why would they want an American ‘French Chef’?” Kamman banned her students from reading Julia’s books or from watching her TV show.

  Julia was taken aback by the ad hominem attacks, but knew better than to respond publicly. She would say only that Kamman was “very controversial,” though “some people think the ground she walks on is holy.” Kamman, Julia deduced, “doesn’t like anyone in her bailiwick…I follow the footsteps of James Beard and welcome everyone in the business. It is her problem, not mine.” In private, however, Julia grew weary of the “loathsome” Kamman, and referred to her as “she who will not be named,” once writing to a friend: “I shall grab her by the short hairs (wearing gloves of course) and I will grind her alive, piece by piece, in my food processor.”

  By the 1990s, Kamman suffered from heart disease and high cholesterol, and had turned to Buddhism. “I was a good fighter, sister,” she told the food writer Molly O’Neill. “My own intensity has been a lifelong battle…Now, I cultivate peace and forgiveness.” And, she added, “I may disagree with Mrs. Child’s technique and what she does, but that doesn’t mean the person is obnoxious. I recognize what she has done has been very useful for the country, and I have been the beneficiary.”

  Others were less forgiving. In their 1977 philippic The Taste of America, the American food writers John and Karen Hess wrote, “How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have been ravaged, that our food is awful, and that our most respected authorities on cookery are poseurs?” Aggravated that Time had put Julia on its cover in 1966, the Hesses declared that twentieth-century American food was industrially produced “crud” and “glop,” and that Julia Child was largely responsible. Julia, they charged, promoted inferior supermarket produce, used shortcuts, did not really know culinary history, had a sweet tooth, and employed a phony Frenchness to pass off mediocre dishes. Once again Julia declined to respond in public. But when it came to their acid comments about the quality of American food, she wrote, “What are these people talking about? You can get disgusting things anywhere.”

  The Hesses didn’t spare the lash on any of the contemporary food stars, save James Beard. They deemed Pierre Franey “a hack,” Craig Claiborne “disgusting,” Mimi Sheraton “stupid,” and Alice Waters “so stupid.”

  The food establishment was horrified by the assault from within their own ranks. “Those of us who were new recruits to America’s food revolution of the 1960s and ’70s were shocked when our leaders got hit by friendly fire,” Betty Fussell said of the Hesses. “We felt betrayed…it sabotaged what should have been our shared message that good food was a good thing.” In Fussell’s estimation, the Hesses were misguided: American cuisine is based on foreign precedents, after all, and Julia simply translated exotic-sounding French dishes into everyday American.

  Julia herself didn’t spend much time dwelling on her critics. She simply did the kind of cooking she enjoyed, and trusted that her audience would follow her, whether to France or elsewhere.

  In her book Masters of American Cookery, Fussell pointed to Julia—along with M. F. K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, and James Beard—as one of four “masters” responsible for the culinary revolution of the sixties and seventies. In Fussell’s view, the masters shared a pioneering spirit, an egalitarian outlook, tremendous energy, and a pragmatic streak. In other words, they were quintessential Americans. If the United States were to become “the food capital of the world,” Fussell wrote, then “Julia will be more responsible than anybody because through the newest mass media she has brought home-cooking back into the American home. That she snuck it in with a French accent is tribute to the cunning of this master showman.”

  Julia’s outspokenness had raised her profile in a new way, and turned her into a cultural icon. The attention paid wasn’t always controversial, or food related. She made headlines by reading Tubby the Tuba with the Boston Pops. She was a tireless fund-raiser for WGBH, and used a large cleaver to “edit” film in a promotional short for the station. She even made a humorous educational film about primordial soup—the stuff that makes up the Universe—in her kitchen, with a contraption provided by the Smithsonian. In 1978, Julia was paid what is perhaps the ultimate American compliment, when she was satirized on Saturday Night Live.

  Julia cooks up a primordial soup in her Cambridge kitchen.

  IV. FROM JULIA GROWNUP TO “SAVE THE LIVER!”

  Julia understood that when she appeared on a TV show—virtually any TV show—book sales would spike, no matter how silly or serious it was. If imitation and satire are the sincerest forms of flattery, then she was doing very well by the mid-seventies. Spoofs of her patrician bearing and singsong warble cropped up as soon as she reached celebrity status, most of which played on the misperception that Julia performed drunk.

  As early as 1965, in a variety a
ct called “Cooking While Gassed,” a San Franciscan named Charles Huse donned a toque and zealously stuffed a turkey as he chugged a bottle of wine. In the early seventies, the actress Judy Graubart played the character Julia Grownup on The Electric Company’s skit “Here’s Cooking at You.” Dressed in a pink shirt, with a red bow tie and floppy white toque, her character lectured kids on locution while making zany recipes, such as Grilled Dill Pickles with Chilled Vanilla Filling. Using an enormous drill to bore holes through a dill pickle, she filled the holes with dollops of whipped cream while yodeling, “Use lots of napkins, otherwise your guests might find themselves in a pickle!” The skit was funny, and stealthily encouraged ten-year-olds to use big words and enunciate them clearly; adults enjoyed it, too. “I adored Julia, and she was a natural model for us,” said Graubart, who was a faithful French Chef viewer and sometime cook. “I got a lot feedback from kids—they’d send me pictures of their wacky sandwiches.”

  Julia’s esprit may have also influenced the Muppet character the Swedish Chef—an overenthusiastic, mustachioed puppet who waved forks, saws, and hockey sticks around the kitchen, while explaining “recipes” in a Swedish gibberish: “Yur puuurt thuur chiir-ken airn der bewl—bork, bork, bork!” And in 1989, Julia inspired the musical monologue “Bon Appétit,” in which actress Jean Stapleton trilled about “rich buttery brown batter for le gâteau au chocolat—l’éminence brune.” Julia was flattered, and noted that she had performed a musical about bouillabaisse at a Smith reunion, which included the line: “If you don’t have any fish, you can put in some tennis balls!”

  But without question Julia’s most revered parodist was Dan Aykroyd, the veteran Saturday Night Live (SNL) star, who was raised near Toronto in a food-loving family.

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  “JULIA CHILD was directly responsible for the Bass-O-Matic,” Aykroyd told me. He was referring to one of his most famous SNL sketches, which aired in April 1976 (and reprised, word for word, on the show’s fortieth-anniversary show in 2015). In it, Aykroyd appears as an intense, motormouthed salesman with manicured hair and mustache, dressed in a loud checked jacket and wide maroon tie.