I once worked as a cook for a rich old man who couldn't bring himself to give his staff an order. "I think we'll have a fire tonight," was his way of telling the butler to build a fire. "Wouldn't it be nice to have lamb for the Bridge supper," was his way of telling me to cook lamb. No parvenu barking at the help for him. He'd had people wait on him all his life and he knew that an order phrased as a request was the sort of delicacy a servant appreciates. And we did.
There was a well-thumbed original edition of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" on the kitchen bookshelf and from time to time he'd surprise me with his knowledge of its contents. "There's a good recipe for cherry clafoutis in Julia Child," he'd say. This, of course, was a request for cherry clafoutis, and I always got a kick out of it because telling your private cook which Julia Child recipe you wanted made so missed the point of Julia Child.
"This is a book for the servantless American cook ..." are the very first words in the foreward of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Just as homeless implies that one once had a home, servantless implies that one once had servants. Julia Child did. On her mother's side she could trace her lineage to the founders of the Plymouth Colony. Her father's side were Scots who'd moved westward, securing Midwestern acreage and Western mineral rights until they settled in Pasadena.
Until the Second World War intervened, Julia McWilliams (her maiden name) was a type: a taller than average, very good-humored young woman trying her hand at various jobs with incomes that she did not particularly need. One of the Chandler boys -- the owners of the Los Angeles Times -- asked for her hand and she turned him down. That was her circle. In the natural course of events, by her own admission, she probably would have remained in Pasadena and become an alcoholic.
But the Second World War did intervene, loosening up destinies and creating opportunities to break one's circle and change one's fate. The sometime Junior Leaguer joined the OSS -- the precursor to the CIA -- where she met and fell in love with Paul Child. He was 42 years old to her 32. He'd worked on freighters, lived in Paris in the 1920s, taught at New England prep schools and, most importantly, loved food. When the war was over, they married.
It was the most determining decision of her life. He made her comfortable with her size, he helped her escape from the shadow of her father's Republicanism (so much so that on return visits to Pasadena she jokingly datelined her letters "Enemy Territory") and he encouraged her cooking education, her culinary research and her cookbook writing. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961. In 1962, with Paul at her side, Julia walked into an auditorium of the Boston Gas Company for the taping of a pilot show for WGBH and, in a moment that today seems preordained, she faced the television camera and started talking.
Nodl Riley Fitch has taken on the unenviable task of writing Child's biography to date. I say unenviable because with Child the standard for charm has been set very high. Appetite for Life is a mixed bag. At times one wishes that the names had been thinned out of several paragraphs, and at others that there'd been a sharper eye for the meaningless phrase: "Rombauer wanted to find a balance between French bearnaise sauce and American pancakes." (Eggs Benedict?) The book's factual approach, however, is an immense help in understanding how a 6-foot-2 woman with a voice that can span octaves and a routine two shakes away from custard pie immediately became a character that half the country could do an impersonation of -- and a national treasure.
Until Child's arrival on the cooking scene, the American middle class's relationship to European food was curious but unsure. We knew that how we ate said something about ourselves, but we didn't know how to phrase it. "Shall I light the candles?" a nervous Shirley MacLaine asks Jack Lemmon in the 1960 movie "The Apartment." "It's a must, gracious livingwise," he answers, and then proceeds to strain the spaghetti through a tennis racket. When it came to gracious living, we knew more about it in theory than in practice. In The New Can-Opener Cookbook (1951), the editor of Ladies' Home Journal, Poppy Cannon, urged her readers to simulate Hollandaise Sauce by mixing together sour cream, butter, lemon juice and cayenne. Gourmet Magazine, meanwhile, went straight for dissimulation. According to Craig Caliborne, the highly respected food editor of the New York Times, the Menus Classiques of Chef Louis Diat were actually written by a certain Helen Ridley.
What Claiborne praised about Mastering the Art of French Cooking was its thoroughness. The Cassoulet recipe, for example, took a whole six pages. If Claiborne was something wholly original himself, an incorruptible food critic, so was Child: a recipe writer who didn't reassure the American housewife that French cooking was brainlessly easy, but rather that it was often hard work and usually worth it.
Judith Jones, the renowned cookbook editor at Alfred A. Knopf, was the first person to realize the seminal importance of the manuscript that came across her desk. (Houghton Mifflin, to its eternal regret, rejected it for the telling reasons of both its size and its depth.)
She was also the first person in the publishing world to grasp the power of Child's personality. "Julia Child is a marvel," she wrote two months before publication to Avis de Voto, the woman who had sent the manuscript Knopf's way, "and if we can get her out in stores and on the air she would be our best possible advertisement."
The book tour that followed was a personal watershed of sorts, marking both the retirement of Paul Child from a diplomatic career with the United States Information Agency and the launching of Julia Child's career at age 49. True to Jones' prediction, Child had a natural gift for book promotion. Radio appearances she called "interview with chit-chat." Department store demonstrations were "cooking and chatter." Years of dutiful attendance at Embassy cocktail parties had taught her to never allow a conversational silence to settle. She had ad-libbing abilities that news anchors would kill for and the social graces of someone who knew more people in the Kennedy White House than the New York food world. It didn't take long for someone to think of putting her on television.
The irony of television in 1962 was that the less you cared about it the better your credentials were for using it as a teaching tool. The Childs kept their television set in an unused fireplace of their Cambridge, Mass., home. Keeping the TV out of sight then said more about one's pedigree than any amount of chintz or monograms could today. If food was to be about upward mobility, then Child had the credentials to lead the way. America took one look at her in 1962 and saw someone who was charming, funny, knowledgeable -- and also upper class. She looked like she'd spent years attending the sort of parties we were nervously preparing for. And her voice confirmed it. The moment she opened her mouth we knew she knew better than we did.
I have met Julia Child three times, and each time it struck me as a definitive moment. The first time she came into a kitchen where I was working to thank the chef for cooking her lunch and all the young cooks spontaneously burst into applause. The second time was at the Aspen Wine and Food Classic. Here, surrounded by goateed young chefs-of-the-year, publicists frantically handing out business cards and wine experts snorting into glasses of wine, Child was holding forth to CNN and looking very amused at the food world she'd played such a monumental role in creating.
The third time it was just the two of us. I came upon her weeding in her Cambridge garden. "Mrs. Child," I said, knowing I was being a pest but unable to help myself. She straightened up and peered at me. "How nice to see you," she said kindly, with no idea who I might be. We spoke for a few moments and then she returned to her gardening. Walking away down the tree-lined street, I realized how good she'd made me feel. Call it breeding, call it manners: Whatever it was, it allowed her to take the airs out of French food before we could dare to. --SALON Nov. 7, 1997
Riley (Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin, 1993, etc.) offers a loving, overstuffed biography of the cook from Pasadena who introduced French cooking to the American kitchen.
Julia McWilliams, a leggy California girl, was an adventurous child with a huge appetite who rarely strayed into the kitchen. Equally adventurous as a young woman, and bored with her career in advertising, she joined the OSS. In 1944, while in Asia, she met the dashing Paul Child, an OSS officer and artist with a love of women, food, and poetry. After a rocky start, the two fell passionately in love. Paul introduced Julia to the pleasures of the table, and she became fascinated with food and its preparation. When Paul's new role as an American cultural attaché took them to Paris after the war, Julia began cooking in earnest, even attending the famed Cordon Bleu school, where she wedded her American enthusiasm and sense of fun to the serious world of the gourmand. In Paris she met her lifelong collaborator, Simone ("Simca") Beck. The two set out to create a cookbook. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, proved to be an immediate success. American cooks used it to escape the tyranny of frozen foods and grew to appreciate Childs's reliance on good food, not food snobbery. With her husband watching proudly from the wings, she went on to do television shows. Audiences loved her quick wit, her vibrant voice, and her slightly awkward presence in the kitchen—she was famous for getting splattered. While Riley's book is short on recipes, her details are exquisite: Julia and Paul's defense of a friend accused of communism in 1955, despite the threat to Paul's career; Julia telling her lonely sister to "get a diaphragm and move to Paris to complete your education"; and Paul's gorgeous love letters to Julia.
An exhaustively researched, charming story of a life well lived, and an admiring portrait of a good marriage.
