The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  Once her stage ended, Bill joined Moulton and they ate their way through Burgundy. (They are now married.) When she returned to Boston, it took Moulton six months to summon the courage to tell Julia about her harrowing experience at the Henri IV.

  Julia didn’t bat an eyelash. “Oh dearie, what did you expect?” she said. “They’re all like that. Get over it.”

  Moulton was stunned: Get over it? It struck her as a shocking and unsisterly thing to say. Then, collecting her wits, she understood the message: If you really want something, don’t let anything—even sexual harassment—get in your way.

  “I don’t think it was feminism,” said Moulton. “Julia would have given the same message to a man. She was willing to go into a man’s world and cook this food that women weren’t cooking. She was a role model.”

  From Julia’s perspective, Cazalis’s boorish groping “was not a real problem,” Moulton said. “He was like a mosquito—ignore it, move on. ‘You’ve had the privilege of cooking in a one-star kitchen in France, and in the long run that’s what matters.’ Now, I think she was right on the money.”

  Looking back, Sara Moulton considered the episode, and Julia’s reaction, a defining experience. It is a lesson that she has passed on to her own followers: “There are always going to be roadblocks. Get over it. Learn what you can, and move on. It was the greatest lesson Julia ever taught me.”

  III. “FCIF” REDUX

  In the summer of 1983, Julia rounded a circle by bringing Good Morning America to Provence, to reprise “The French Chef in France” documentaries. Before leaving Cambridge, Julia wrote a tender note to Simca in Paris: “How time indeed flies, and now it is almost 35 years since we have known each other, and how much I have treasured our deep and intimate friendship. Tu es ma soeur, vraiment [You are my sister, truly]. How lucky to have such a good relationship, and a working relationship, and deep affection. It is too bad we cannot see each other daily, but we are close by thought and by letter.”

  Thirteen years after shooting the original documentaries in France for WGBH, Julia had convinced ABC to revisit the idea. She taped five segments about shopping, cooking, and eating along the Mediterranean for GMA. Now seventy-one, with a slightly puffy face (she had undergone two of her three “sacquepages,” or face-lifts, by then), she took to the project with her usual vigor and vim, in spite of her stiff and painful knees.

  The miniseries was shot in September 1983. In contrast to the wide-ranging “FCiF” documentaries of 1970, Julia did not venture far from La Pitchoune this time, and focused largely on the cookery of Nice. In keeping with her American persona, she eschewed the stylish outfits she wore in the 1970 documentaries in favor of plain green shirts and blue skirts. (Simca did not appear in the GMA segments.)

  In the first installment, the camera panned from on high across Old Nice, looking much as it did in the seventeenth century, with yellow-walled buildings, red roofs, a gray stone beach, and the blue Mediterranean Sea. Plunging into those streets, Julia took her audience to the outdoor food stalls and the Marché aux Fleurs (flower market) to shop for wild mushrooms, cured olives, and a bouquet of brightly colored zinnias. From there, she invited viewers into her little kitchen at La Pitchoune, where she prepared ratatouille, the region’s signature combination of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, onions, and zucchini.

  “It can be perfectly delicious when it’s carefully made,” Julia cooed, as she patted a purple eggplant affectionately. While this would not be the legendary “ratatouille done right” that Julia and her friend Jane Thompson had made on Cape Cod (they picked the vegetables from Thompson’s garden, prepared and cooked each ingredient separately, then layered the elements together and baked them in a casserole, a process that took nearly a day), the GMA version was a simplified dish that baked for an hour, by which point, Julia said, “everything bubbles up” aromatically.

  As the segment ended, Julia sat on the simple stone terrace at La Pitchoune, backed by a wall of bright pink bougainvillea. Raising a glass of white wine over the steaming ratatouille, she toasted America from France once again: “Bon appétit!”

  In the next segment, “Behind the Making of Candied Fruit,” Julia toured Maison Auer in Nice—“a culinary delight, and a dentist’s nightmare”—where candied fruits had been handmade since 1820. (In the 1970 series, she had focused on a similar store, Maiffret, in Cannes.) The Auer family had originated in Switzerland, and the experience of stepping inside their store, run by the family’s fifth generation, was like entering a time machine. It was decorated in a swirling, somewhat overwrought Florentine style, with crystal chandeliers, a stained-glass skylight, marble-topped display cases, and pale green floor tiles. In the ornate salesroom, platters of candied oranges, pineapples, pears, and cherries lined glass shelves: “Picture-perfect candied fruits,” Julia narrated. “They take seconds to devour, but long months to make.”

  In the workrooms, the candy makers hand peeled cantaloupes, scooped them out, and pricked them with sharp tines to allow their juices to be released. Following tradition, they were soaked in water and boiled in sugar syrup in large copper pots, up to fifteen times, to raise the sugar content manyfold. Then the melons were transferred to large, glazed terra-cotta terrines for eight weeks of steeping in the syrup. The fruit was then canned, packaged, and displayed.

  Thence to the harbor, where fishermen left well before dawn and returned to Nice as the sun rose to sell their silvery catch of the day: anchovies, sardines, jellyfish, squid, and the famous rouget barbet, a small red fish with a “beard” (barbet) on its chin. Back at La Pitchoune, Julia demonstrated the making of a soupe de poisson—a fisherman’s soup made with a plateful of mixed fish, onions, tomatoes, garlic, and fish stock; it is traditionally served with a rouille—a red garlic sauce, pounded up in a large olive wood mortar with a pestle—and toasted rounds of bread.

  For the next episode, Julia realized a dream by taking her audience into a sanctum sanctorum that most would never have the chance to visit: through the hallowed doors of Le Moulin de Mougins, one of only eighteen three-star restaurants in France. “Eating is one of the French national sports,” she explained. “You plan your trip according to the [Guide Michelin] map.” Dressed in a pink shirt and a beige skirt, Julia led Paul through the big wooden doors of the restaurant, which stood just up the road from La Pitchoune. “What makes it so good, why is it a three-star restaurant?” she wondered to the camera. “So, c’mon, let’s take a look at it.

  “Good food is always enhanced by its ambience,” Julia said in a reverential tone, as if entering a sacred space. As waiters set up the dining room in a precise, unhurried way, she noted that “silver and porcelain are polished daily. The fresh flowers are never yesterday’s leftovers. Everything is spotless in the quest for perfection.”

  In the kitchen, seventeen chefs—“each with his own specialty”—began work at dawn to prepare for lunch. The camera glided by rooms devoted solely to fish, fruits, and butter. “Don’t forget the butter—the French never do!”

  Eating lunch at a corner table adjacent to the restaurant’s crowded terrace, Julia bent to a platter of rouget presented by Chef Serge. “Of course, the true taste of any restaurant is your own taste,” Julia said. She cut the fish, placed it in her mouth, chewed, and thought about it for a moment. “Hmmmm, this is just a lovely dish, Serge,” Julia said with real feeling. “Merci beaucoup.”

  Paul was dressed in a blue shirt and looked thin. He didn’t say a word, but decades of experience kicked in as he raised his wineglass and gamely toasted the camera.

  After lunch, Julia wandered into the Moulin’s busy kitchen and discovered a smiling woman in a pink shirt and a white apron rapidly peeling asparagus spears. “I’d like to introduce you to Kathie Allen, from Long Beach, California,” Julia shouts to the camera over the clatter and din. “She came here for a week, and has been here for two months, and has one month longer.”

  The woman’s name was actually Kathie Alex (not Allen), and sh
e was in the midst of a rare stage at the Moulin. Blushing and smiling, while continuing to strip asparagus, Alex said that she appreciated the professionalism required in a three-star kitchen, and loved cooking the cuisine of Provence. “I plan to take [the experience] back with me and expand my catering business. And maybe open a small restaurant in Long Beach,” she said hopefully.

  Kathie Alex did not open a restaurant in California: instead, she stayed in France, studied cooking with Simca at Bramafam, and worked as a private chef aboard yachts in the Mediterranean. In the mid-nineties, she purchased La Pitchoune from the Fischbacher family, and ran it as a cooking school called Cooking with Friends in France, before she retired in 2016.

  The final GMA documentary was called “Snack Foods of Nice.” In it, Julia strolled through the familiar narrow stone lanes of the Old City, chatting with shopkeepers, sampling Niçoise delicacies like the onion-anchovy tarts known as pissaladières, sardines and Swiss chard, onions stuffed with cheese, and soccas, the chickpea crepes. Holding up a large round sandwich overflowing with tuna, tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, hard-boiled egg, and dribbling vinaigrette, she said, “Here’s the Niçoise answer to the American hamburger, called the pan bagnat…You can tell if it’s properly made if [the olive oil] really drips down and falls off your elbow.”

  Wrapping up the segment, Julia declared, “The fast foods in France are certainly wonderful, but when you get tired of all this foreign stuff you can always ask for…le ’ot dog!” Pulling a large pink hot dog from behind her back, she poked it toward the camera, took a hearty bite, then tilted her head back and roared with laughter.

  13

  The Celebrity Chef

  I. A REVOLUTIONARY IN PEARLS

  Julia Child was the nation’s first “celebrity chef.” Though there were other chefs on television, and Julia’s fame was just one aspect of the nation’s growing interest in food, she played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the way Americans shopped, cooked, and ate. Julia, it turned out, had brought the right message to the right place at the right time, and she was the right messenger. She appealed to a broad swath of the public, helped to popularize fine dining, and changed the grocery and cookware businesses. Inventing her career as she went, Julia inspired many people to pursue jobs in the culinary arts, education, advocacy, and journalism.

  Henry Becton, WGBH’s head of cultural programming in the seventies, praised “the Julia model” of how-to television. Until The French Chef, such shows were hosted by slick if inexpert “presenters.” But “Julia was a real authority on her subject matter, and she had a distinctive, uninhibited personality,” said Becton. “To the people at home, that combination was key.” The other key was her continuing refusal to endorse products. While her stance cost Julia untold income, it reinforced the audience’s faith in her: if Julia recommended an ingredient, you could trust her judgment because she was not being paid to say it. “I really respected her for taking that stand,” said Becton. “It influenced our editorial guidelines for that kind of program.”

  The traditional chef—particularly a chef from France—was an uneducated man from the provinces who learned a set of mechanical skills and formulaic recipes under the tutelage of a master. Even if he went on to earn three Michelin stars, the chef was essentially a tradesman, akin to a highly skilled plumber. He rarely left his kitchen, almost never spoke to other chefs or his own patrons, and worked such grueling hours that he was a virtual slave to his restaurant. The more sensitive chefs were high-strung, with a temper that could explode into verbal and physical abuse of underlings. In the hoary cliché, the chef was a miserable, misanthropic drunk.

  Regardless of the accuracy of that profile, Julia was the opposite sort of person. She was a quintessentially American personality: a confident, outgoing Californian educated at Smith College; a worldly diplomatic wife who had lived in Paris and trained at the Cordon Bleu, wore pearls with her apron, and loved to cook with others. I think of her as “a revolutionary in pearls.” As such, she was a tremendously appealing ambassador from the Land of Food to the American public.

  While Julia enjoyed her success, she felt ambivalent about it. She saw herself as “a teacher of cookery” and “an eternal pupil,” rather than as a celebrity to be fawned over. She preferred to carry her own luggage through airports, and to wait in line “like regular people,” rather than to get special treatment (although she occasionally used her name to secure restaurant reservations). Julia was more interested in trying new foods, meeting new people, learning new skills, exploring herself by exploring cookery, than in looking back in self-congratulation. Her philosophy was that few dishes were too complicated for the average cook; all people needed was a little “gumption” and “elbow grease,” and they could make anything their hearts desired. “If I can do it, anyone else ought to be able to do it too” was her mantra.

  Julia with the photographer Jim Scherer and her editor, Judith Jones

  Perhaps that is true of her recipes, but it is not true of her career. When I asked if she understood what a huge impact she had had on America, Julia shrugged and demurred: “Well, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.”

  But it was her. And it is unlikely that anyone else could have done what she did, when she did, and how she did it. Julia Child changed the nation, even if she didn’t like to admit it.

  “The more you do, the more you learn,” she told Boston magazine. “We always say there aren’t any set rules. If you’re persistent and enthusiastic, you’ll find a way. We just tell [people] to follow that gleam.”

  II. A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WORLD

  One day in 1979, Julia, Paul, and four friends arrived for lunch at the Parker House Hotel, in Boston, and said to the eager young assistant sous-chef, “Why don’t you create something different for our table?”

  The young man’s name was Emeril Lagasse. He viewed Julia’s offer as a friendly challenge. “I went back into the kitchen and I was psyched, but I was as nervous as crap!” he recalled. “I took the idea of snails, which were popular in French restaurants, and Julia liked them. So I did a thing with periwinkles—steamed them in parsley, oil, garlic, and Portuguese chiles—and she loved it. And Julia, she didn’t forget much, so after that we became friends. Out of the blue she’d call me and say, ‘I need you to help me with this or that event.’ We broke a lot of bread together, all over the place. Julia was really my influence, from books to television.”

  Raised in gritty Fall River, Massachusetts, Emeril was a devotee of The French Chef as a teenager in the seventies. He was inspired by Julia’s stories about learning to shop in Paris and cook seafood in Marseille. “That was a big reason why I went to study in Paris and Lyon,” Lagasse said. “No one had more passion for the art of culinary than Julia. She was so intellectual about it, and she wanted to share. She cared more about teaching than celebrity.”

  In 1982, Lagasse was named the executive chef of Commander’s Palace, in New Orleans, where he mastered Cajun and Creole cooking; in 1990, he opened his own restaurant, Emeril’s. In 1993, Julia invited Lagasse to appear in the TV series and book Cooking with Master Chefs. Filming in New Orleans, Lagasse taught Julia how to make a traditional crawfish boil and how to cook étouffée (crab, shrimp, or crawfish in a spicy roux over rice).

  “Julia’s advice was: Be who you are. Be true to what you are, and to your craft,” Lagasse said. “It was never about coming up with some persona.”

  Today, Lagasse is considered the prototypical celebrity chef—a manager of television shows, restaurants, and cookbooks, and purveyor of products like knives, steaks, and spice blends. He is the most direct link between Julia’s television cookery in the 1960s and ’70s and the twenty-first-century breed of celebrity chef CEOs.

  With his Julia-esque performing style—she called for “more butter,” he called for “more pork fat”—Emeril became one of the original stars of the Food Network. It debuted in 1993, and shone a bright light on chefs, their work, their rivalries, and their per
sonal struggles. It was a different kind of television from what Julia had done.

  While The French Chef was documentary in nature, the Food Network focused on the drama and competition in kitchens, and turned cooking into entertainment and spectacle. “The Food Network made being a chef cool and sexy,” said the cookbook author Dorie Greenspan.

  Suddenly, high-school kids aspired to have their own food shows on TV or the Web, even before they had learned to cook properly. And established chefs were not simply food providers; they became entrepreneurs, CEOs of global multimedia corporations worth millions of dollars, and were seemingly ubiquitous on the page, airwaves, and screens, not to mention the stock market.

  “Food is the new tech!” hollered investors. A new cadre of entrepreneurial chefs, whose primary focus was the boardroom rather than the kitchen, sprang up. “Plating food and running a corporation are completely different skill sets,” said Russ Parsons, the former food editor of the Los Angeles Times. For the super chefs, “it’s become a CEO culture rather than a chef culture.”

  The chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud arrived in New York from France in the mid-eighties as country boys who had been trained in the guildlike system of France. They dreamed of nothing more than owning their own restaurants. Vongerichten’s trip to the United States was sponsored by Louis Outhier, the chef at L’Oasis. Outhier would fax his protégé menus, allowing Vongerichten to experiment with one (and only one) daily special. Vongerichten quickly took to the Big Apple, and at age twenty-nine won four stars from The New York Times for his cooking at Lafayette. In 1991, he opened JoJo, which was named best new restaurant of the year. Now he oversees a food empire that extends from New York to Las Vegas, London, and Shanghai. Boulud, meanwhile, operates restaurants from Palm Beach to Washington, D.C., New York, and Montreal; has authored books and is a frequent presence on television. Today, the two country boys are known around the world simply by their first names, Jean-Georges and Daniel.