The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Here, Julia admitted that she was forced to diet from time to time, and kept notes on her caloric intake, though she insisted on allotting one hundred calories for a glass of wine, “to keep up morale.” In truth, she hated to diet, and didn’t care much for lo-cal food: “ ‘Diet food’…is dismal food: no fun to plan, no fun to fix. Pure labor in vain,” she lamented. “It is fake food…unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking. Dieters are the best audience a cook ever has, for they savor and remember every morsel.”

  In her Cocktail Party menu, Julia strikes a different tone: “We like to give our guests a spread. I hate it when people get hungry after a couple of drinks and charge out somewhere to supper before I even get to see them. So…I serve a great big puffy something I baked specially, and something fishy and fresh, and lots of good hearty treats on the side: chicken wings and oysters and clams and stuffed eggs, and meatballs and rabbit food [carrots and celery]…and peanuts, of course. Without peanuts it isn’t a cocktail party.”

  In the case of her New England Potluck Supper, Julia recycled some of her “Thirteen Feasts” research for a menu of fresh fish chowder, coleslaw, and Indian pudding—chosen, Julia writes, because “I wanted to make a point of the earthy, primal simplicity of these great American dishes.” She associated chowder with August lunches at the Child family house on the coast of Maine, “with salty sunbaked granite around me and the sea crinkling below—and with the knowledge that a pail of wild berries is waiting in a cool purple cranny in the rocks.” As she had discovered about bouillabaisse recipes in Marseille, “there are loads of recipes around for fish chowder…and many cooks insist their particular recipes are the only authentic versions.” After much testing, Julia found a version that used croutons instead of pilot biscuits and sour cream and parsley instead of a final blob of butter. “For me [this is] the best, the most genuine, indeed the only recipe worth cooking,” she wrote.

  Julia added a Postscript about “a friend of ours” who won eternal familial fame by cooking “Bean Hole Beans.” This friend was my paternal grandfather, Hector C. Prud’homme. He was born in Peking to Belgian parents, went to school in America, and had worked as a diplomat, banker, and teacher; he fancied himself a frontiersman. Perhaps inspired by something he read in a Louis L’Amour cowboy novel, he decided to cook beans “the old-fashioned way.” He instructed us grandchildren to dig a deep hole in his backyard, line it with rocks, and allow a fire to smolder on its bottom for several hours. He filled a cast-iron pot with beans, onion, molasses, and thick hunks of pork, and lowered it into the pit; he raked the coals over the pot, piled seaweed on top, and covered it with a canvas tarp. The beans simmered for hours, emitting mouthwatering smells that made our stomachs gurgle in anticipation. That evening, he pulled the bean pot up to the surface and unveiled his creation. Julia described the moment: “We sat out on the grass, in a circle, while he lifted the lid to release the aroma of those slow-cooked beans with the flavor…baked right into them. They were almost crusty although surrounded by thick juices, and we ate them with great helpings of coleslaw and homemade rye bread.” The beans were sweet, smoky, and deeply satisfying. It was a meal I will never forget, and it inspired Julia to include a Crock-Pot version in Company.

  She also, at long last, managed to work the recipe for “fish in a crust” into print—an Americanized version of the Loup de Mer en Croûte that Julia and Simca discovered at L’Oasis in 1969. (Simca included her own version of the dish in Simca’s Cuisine.)

  Studded throughout Company were mini essays on some of Julia’s favorite subjects, like rice, fish, and tomatoes. And sidebars on a few of Paul’s famous homemade cocktail recipes, including the Buddha’s Eye (a gin, lime juice, and crème de menthe concoction inspired by the J. Milton Hayes doggerel poem “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”); Ivan’s Aperitif (a drink made of vermouth, gin, and orange zest, and named after Julia’s brother-in-law, Ivan Cousins); or a drink called À la Recherche de l’Orange Perdue, a dark rum, orange, and marmalade homage to Marcel Proust. For the lo-cal meal, Julia included a nonalcoholic Angosoda Cocktail, made of Angostura bitters, a slice of lime, and sparkling water (“It tastes like a real drink,” she insisted).

  Company was designed to be user-friendly and included a profusion of suggestions: notes on Preparations, including what kinds of knives and pans the cook will need; a Marketing and Storage shopping list; a graphic of a clock to indicate how much of a recipe could be done ahead; suggestions on Timing, to help the home cook produce every element of a meal in sync; Menu Variations, which suggested, say, replacing clams with crab, broccoli with zucchini, or potato salad with bread; recommendations for how to use the Leftovers; and the occasional Postscript—and Post-Postscript—in which Julia mused about cooking with children, suggested books about beef, or exhorted her audience to cook with gusto. “In private or public cooking, broad, firm gestures are the most efficient. Wallop your steaks! Whoosh up your egg whites! And, behind your chafing dish and before your guests, act with assurance and decisiveness,” she wrote. “Let every move accomplish something, and don’t twiddle.”

  And, as she had done before, Julia could not resist adding a plea for the metric system. Company included heating directions in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade, and both imperial and metric measurements—noting that meatballs, say, should be rolled in “gobs of 1 inch or 2½ cms.” A die-hard enthusiast, Julia editorialized: “Some day we shall convert from our illogical system of pounds, ounces, feet, and inches to metrics, where all will be easy divisions of 10 rather than a mishmash of 2’s, 4’s, 12’s, 16’s.”

  III. HARMONY INC.

  The Julia Child & Company television series stood out with a distinctive new aesthetic. The French Chef had used a temporary structure in a WGBH studio; it took two hours to set up, and another two hours to break down, a rigmarole that had been a sore spot. “We wouldn’t do the new series unless we had a kitchen that was ours—that we could just walk into and work in and leave,” Julia explained. For Company, WGBH built a new set in a factory loft, featuring an open kitchen with white walls and blue countertops, a central island with butcher block around a six-burner stove, two wall ovens, a fridge, pans and copper lids on the wall, and a collection of cookbooks, oils, spoons, and spatulas, and bottles of wine arranged on a countertop. Julia, the self-professed “gadget freak” was likely to whip out one of her contraptions—a mechanical pea sheller, industrial blender, pasta maker, a scale and calculator—at the slightest provocation.

  To the right of the kitchen stood a small “dining room” with gray wallpaper, a mantelpiece with a candelabra, and a table where Julia could slurp fresh oysters from the half shell. Behind the scenes was a ready room, equipped with an extra stove and sink, where the Company team could prep items for the day’s menu.

  Julia thrived on pressure, and with only a half hour to get through each Company program, many dishes were prepared in advance. When she placed a meringue in the oven, another prebaked meringue was ready for her to take out, and a third was on standby, in case of complications.

  To bring her new creation to life, Julia relied on a familiar, tested crew. Russ Morash was the show’s producer. Willie Morton, who worked on Julia’s 1962 pilot and on 1970’s “The French Chef in France” documentaries, was in charge of sound. Ruthie Lockwood and Avis DeVoto researched recipes, wrote scripts, and choreographed the staging of meals. Julia’s kitchen team included Liz Bishop and Rosemary “Rosie” Manell. Rosie, a painter, cook, food stylist, and Northern California earth mother, moved into the 103 Irving Street guest room, and was, Julia judged, a “marvel of cookery, workery, [and] good humor.” The only drawback was that Rosie was a “compulsive eater…as am I,” Julia said. “If there is anything in sight anywhere I’ll eat it unless I most sternly and with supreme willpower and reasoning turn from it.”

  The musical theme for Company was developed by Robert J. Lurtsema, the molasses-voiced host of WGBH-Radio’s Morning Pro Musica: it was a
sprightly tune played by bassoons, with a sound that Julia described as “an elephant walk.”

  Julia loved nothing better than to be shoulder to shoulder with fellow cooks, elbow-deep in barbecue sauce or a scrambled eggs and mushroom gratiné. Though she came up with most of the menus for Company, she did not pose as a grand master speaking down to her disciples, but pushed everyone to speak up and pitch in. “The show is fun to do because it’s real team work,” enthused Julia, who had dubbed the collaboration Harmony Inc. Complete Food Production.

  Occasionally, the Harmony train went off the rails. When she demonstrated the making of choulibiac—sole with mushrooms and fish mousse wrapped in a pastry crust—Julia suffered a half dozen mishaps. On the first take, she sneezed and the scene had to be reshot; on the second, the plate slipped and a thick slice of choulibiac fell to the counter; and so it went for the star-crossed dish. The clock was ticking, but every time something went wrong the Harmony Inc. team descended on the choulibiac like a pit crew servicing a race car. They scraped off the top layer of pasty, replaced it with a new one, rebaked it, and reshot the sequence, lickety-split. In the photograph she used in the book, Julia notes that the choulibiac’s top layer “is a bit thick…and not quite cooked!”

  To accomplish her many tasks Julia kept a rigorous schedule. On Mondays, she and Ruthie Lockwood scheduled upcoming episodes, and reviewed them with Paul. Tuesdays they did a “cook-through,” in which they blocked out shots, cooked dishes to judge how much time they took, and discussed how to explain the food. Wednesdays were devoted to fine-tuning the week’s menu and rehearsing the show with producer-director Russ Morash. Once those details were ironed out, they held a dress rehearsal. On Thursday, Harmony Inc. taped the show for TV.

  In the days of The French Chef, the crew would have devoured the food Julia had cooked “like a pack of wolves” after the episode was shot. But for Company, the food had to be preserved for Jim Scherer to photograph for the book. “There it was, beautifully displayed at the end of the program, hot, tempting, and ready to eat—and there it sat, and sat, and was moved around, and lit this way and that, and moved again, and reheated and fussed with, and finally most carefully photographed,” Julia recounted. Her team would spend an hour changing lights and camera angles to clearly show how to, say, devein a shrimp. But once they were done, they used laughter as a pressure release. It was “hard to believe five grown people could spend more than an hour most earnestly bent over something like a shrimp’s intestine,” Julia marveled.

  The Julia Child & Company book ends in a thicket of “Menu Alternatives”: entirely different dishes for the Lo-Cal Banquet (with recipes from The French Chef) or A Dinner for the Boss (with dishes from Mastering, Volume II), and added new suggestions, such as A Pizza Party (last seen in From Julia Child’s Kitchen). In those final pages, Julia displayed her vaulting culinary imagination and hinted at what could have been a whole other book. It was as if she couldn’t let go, and just wanted to jam a few more ideas into that slim volume. So it was not surprising that she began a follow-up to Company shortly after the TV Company wrapped.

  IV. MORE COMPANY

  Called Julia Child & More Company, the second book and TV series appeared just a year later, in 1979. The crew remained largely the same, a team of about fifteen people, with a few new players. While Julia liked to keep the mood loose and eschewed titles, she was learning how to manage on the job. Deadline pressure and human nature led to friction in the kitchen, and team members took Julia aside to ask her to clearly define the roles they were expected to play. So Julia bestowed official-sounding titles, naming Marian Morash—the wife of Russ Morash, and chef at Nantucket’s Straight Wharf Restaurant—executive chef; Sara Moulton, a rising young cook in Boston, executive associate chef; Liz Bishop as the executive associate; Rosie Manell as food stylist; and Ruthie Lockwood as the talent coordinator. Julia’s friend Pat Pratt was in charge of fresh flowers and folding napkins into fleur-de-lis shapes. Her husband, Herbert, a wine maven, was a beverage adviser. Paul was deemed “husband and officially unofficial photographer.” Once the hierarchy was clarified, Harmony Inc. operated a lot more harmoniously.

  Julia with Sara Moulton (third on the right), Marian Morash (second on the right), and others from the Julia Child & More Company crew

  “Whether we were devising a quick ice-cream glorifier or judiciously comparing versions of a new lobster soufflé, the whole team pondered, cooked, and tasted together,” Julia wrote. “Serious artist or weekend amateur, it’s more fun cooking for company in company.”

  As with its predecessor, the recipes in Julia Child & More Company were written, photographed, and taped for television in one fell swoop. Unlike Company, however, the new book focused on components of meals—what to do with rabbit (“It’s nice to see city people raising their own for home consumption”), how to prepare monkfish (en pipérade, Julia recommended, demonstrating with a twenty-five-pound “Sydney Greenstreet of the ocean…a tadpole almost the size and shape of a baby grand piano”), a then newly trendy vegetarian meal (“In America we eat needless, indeed preposterous, quantities of animal protein”)—rather than on special events.

  One of the benefits of working with Julia was that the crew always stopped for lunch. Not for them soggy sandwiches on wilted paper plates. Rather, a long table was dressed with a tablecloth, and set with real china and decent flatware. The meal began with a vermouth aperitif and was accompanied by wine. The team ate what they had cooked, either the outtakes of the recipe they were working on or composed salads made from leftovers in the fridge. Julia thoroughly enjoyed the camaraderie, and would exclaim, “Isn’t this fun!” (Work in the afternoon tended to go more slowly, and Julia reluctantly gave up wine with lunch.)

  At times Julia’s high spirits caught her Company mates off guard. One day, she announced that a store-bought baguette was not up to snuff, and blithely flung it over her shoulder. As the offending loaf spiraled over tureens of French onion soup and platters of carefully prepared food, Sara Moulton and Marian Morash held their breaths in dumbstruck terror. The doughy projectile could have destroyed an entire day’s work in an instant. Instead, it whistled over the trays of food and wrapped itself harmlessly around a wine bottle in the corner.

  “No question, it was great TV,” Moulton recalled. “And we never did tell her about the near disaster.”

  V. LAYING AN EGG

  When Company was published in 1978, Knopf printed 190,000 copies, and the book was named as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate. Yet, both the Company and More Company books received mixed reviews.

  In The New York Times, Mimi Sheraton praised Julia’s recipe for puff pastry as “worth the price of the book,” but criticized Company for promoting frozen fish and “some unnecessarily gimmicky recipes.” Even some of Julia’s friends were underwhelmed. Of Company, Jacques Pépin observed: “Julia did not write that one with her guts, you know?” As for More Company, he said, “That one was too slick.”

  Yet Julia’s appeal remained intact, and a Knopf executive claimed that More Company, published in 1979, was “selling as if it were free.” While that was a stretch, sales were healthy, and some 240,000 copies had flown out of bookstores by the fall of 1980. The TV shows, however, did less well, especially Julia Child & More Company, which did not become the breakout hit the team had labored so hard to create.

  Julia had high standards and a competitive streak, and she felt stung by the public’s collective shrug. To make things especially galling, she did not believe her herculean efforts were destined to fail. She suspected that she had been overlooked, let down, or even sabotaged.

  —

  IN 1978, most PBS stations across the country decided to air Julia Child & Company at 6:00 p.m., a time when much of the show’s potential audience was in transit or otherwise busy. The ratings were decent but not great, and Julia’s frustration was palpable. In a 1978 interview with The New York Times, she worried that the Company programs were “awfully expensive�
��all that personnel and studio time. There’s very little payment on our side, but everything else is so expensive that we can’t spend all the time on taping that we’d like.” In commercial terms, the shows were primarily vehicles to advertise her cookbooks, she said: “We really make very little from the series. We get a one-time payment from public television, and no residuals, even if it runs for twenty years. I make money out of selling books. I don’t do anything commercial except selling books of mine. I endorse nothing, and I won’t appear on anything that implies endorsement.”

  When it came to Julia Child & More Company in 1979, WNET—the big New York public TV station, to which many other public stations looked for guidance—decided not to air Julia Child & Company at all, for reasons of its own. Julia was disheartened by the lack of support over Company and More Company. In a 1981 interview with Dial, an in-house PBS magazine, she unchar­acteris­tically pointed a finger of blame: “We just KILLED ourselves. We had the best team we’ve ever had. But PBS—I don’t know whether they forgot we taped it or what, but it never got on in New York, and if you’re not on in New York, you ain’t nowhere.”

  Julia had suffered setbacks before, but rarely vented her anger in public. Company, she fumed, was “paid for by Knopf, our publishers. They gave the advance for the book, and it never got off the ground, and I just thought to hell with that.”

  Years later, Judith Jones remained mystified by the programming snafu. “The Company books sold, but not extremely well, especially in comparison to Julia’s previous books,” she said. “I’m not sure we’d have published them if we’d known” that PBS would not promote the television shows with much enthusiasm. (Unwilling to let her hard work fade into obscurity, Julia combined the texts of Company and More Company, and Wings Press republished them as Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook, which Knopf distributed in 1991.)