Julia Child Rules (16 page)

You can also spread the browned onions on steak if you want to forego the soup. “They’re perfectly delicious, just the way they are.”

There is a little bit of confusion over the issue of the stock. She is a firm believer in making your own stock. She suggests beef shanks, chicken necks, and carrots. “It looks awful, but it’s perfectly delicious,” she says as she stirs a huge pot of premade stock. She admits that if you use canned stock, you might as well just eat canned French onion soup, but she’s not going to judge you for it, because then she shows you how to enhance the flavor by adding wine, herbs, and a bay leaf.

Then, you let it simmer, until, yes, it’s perfectly delicious.

After she’s demonstrated making the “croutes” from a loaf of French bread, and shows how to grate some Swiss cheese into the soup to make it extra stringy, the camera suddenly pans up
to the ceiling—whoops!—while Julia, now offscreen, goes about her business demonstrating how to make individual bowls, with their own single croute, grated cheese, and if you’re extra hungry (and hoping to have a heart attack that very day), a poached egg. She then moves to the oven and pulls the casserole from the broiler, where the cheese has been browning. “It’s so hot, I better not forget to use pot holders,” she says to herself, and there’s a brief, harrowing moment where it looks as if she might dump the whole thing on her shoes. She places it on the counter, and from our angle, it looks blackened, not browned. “It’s possibly browned too much,” she trills, “but it gives a good effect!”

She then takes the casserole into the dining room next door. It’s important to serve the soup hot, right at the table, with a big ladle. The table is long and narrow, and when Julia sits down, we can really see how tall she is. This soup is hardy enough to serve with only a green salad, and some nice Beaujolais, or “California Mountain Red.” She reassures us that this is a sensational meal, and then comes the moment that seals the deal, that causes us to bond with this strange cooking teacher now and forever: She leans toward the camera and confides, “When you’ve added all those French touches, who’s going to know?”

Do not apologize.

Who’s going to know?
That simple, rhetorical aside revolutionized American cooking more surely than did any of the French terms or techniques that Julia was so determined to convey. She
was saying, in essence, that this cooking you’re doing?
It’s for you.
You’re expected to feed the family anyway, so why not take charge of it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like an indentured servant, but more like an artist? Why not enjoy yourself, give yourself a sense of achievement and pride, and feel good about what you’ve made? This is where the cooking moved from something done in the name of service, to something done to satisfy and enrich the cook. Don’t apologize, and if something falls on the floor, pick it up. So important is this having fun, feeling good and proud and accomplished, that you mustn’t fret if things aren’t perfect because
Who’s going to know?

The greatest contribution Coco Chanel made to modern style was not the insistence on simple lines, or the invention of the cardigan or the little black dress, but the notion that a woman is most beautiful when she feels comfortable in her clothes. Prior to Chanel, it was all about how good you looked from ten paces. It mattered not whether the fabric was stiff and scratchy, the raw seams poked you, the waist was so tight you lived in a constant state of having stars before your eyes: Beauty was always in the eye of the beholder.

Likewise, Julia turned the drudgery of cooking on its ear.
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Her message was a double threat. First, she insisted that things be done properly, with attention to detail. Unlike the magazine and book editors who disparaged the ability of housewives to do, well, pretty much anything, so timid were they, so afraid of
challenge or difficulty,
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Julia had confidence that if her viewers were “serious,” they could master what she had to teach them. In the same way that a mother bestows confidence on her child by assuming he’s up to the task of say, getting his science project completed and in on time, Julia granted us the confidence to do it because she knew we could.

Second, she knew that mastering anything was a process, and just because you were serious, that didn’t mean you wouldn’t mess up, a lot. Her own show is a real-time lesson on this philosophy: the nonsensical instructions, the occasions when things are overdone or underdone, or something that’s supposed to adhere, doesn’t. This is simply the way of it, or so the unspoken message goes, and there’s no need to apologize,
ever
.

This was an attitude she adopted after she’d been at the Cordon Bleu for only a few weeks. She made eggs Florentine for a friend, neglecting to measure the flour and substituting chicory for spinach, proclaiming them afterwards to be the most “vile eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” You didn’t apologize because it put the guest in the uncomfortable position of having to lie to reassure you, but you also didn’t apologize because this was just part of the rigors and challenge of cooking: Sometimes it just didn’t work out and there was nothing for it.

By the time Julia became The French Chef, she had finally figured out her audience. The “servantless American cook” that
she, Simca, and Louisette had arrived on sort of haphazardly as their target audience had morphed first into the mythic loathsome housewife/chauffeur and finally “into a readership that not simply enjoys cooking, but was also excited by the challenge of making something fabulous and difficult, the effort made more seductive still by the fact it was French.” This was the person she was addressing when she looked into the camera.

For all of the equality feminism has wrought, women are still the Apologizing Gender. Not long ago I did an inventory on how often I apologized for something. For a week I wrote down everything I said I was sorry for. I don’t especially consider myself someone who’s eager to please. Around our house, which is now just Jerrod and me, my daughter having gone off to college, I do pretty much exactly what I want. I do laundry when I feel the need to do something that occupies my hands and not my mind, make the bed most, but not all, mornings, cook when I feel like it, order out when I don’t. If I’m really feeling wild, I go outside and prune the roses and tug a weed. As my own boss, I’m never late for meetings, never fail to get the memo, or send one for that matter, and I have no one but myself to answer to when I screw up. I meet friends for drinks or for a walk when the mood strikes; Jerrod and I grab a movie when the spirit moves us, or go for rides on his motorcycle. Sometimes, we borrow his parents’ RV and head out somewhere where we can ride horses. My major day-to-day obligation is feeding the dogs.

You would think someone with this much agency would not have so much for which to apologize. These were the things I was sorry for, that week:

• Answering an e-mail late (it had been three days)
  
• Walking out of the library with a book that I thought I’d checked out but hadn’t (an honest mistake)
  
• Taking the trash cans to the street for garbage pickup and not lining them up so that it was easy to back out of the driveway (a little lazy, but look who was taking out the trash)
  
• While playing World of Warcraft, failing to reapply Blessing of Might, thus making it more difficult for Jerrod’s Druid tank to hold aggro (everybody died)
  
• Being less than five minutes late meeting a friend for a coffee (“I’m sorry!” by which I mean, “Hey, how are you?”)
  
• Accidentally making some garlic bread with butter and ginger paste instead of garlic paste (Ugh, sorry)
  
• Texting at dinner (justified)
  
• Sneezing (I said excuse me, a form of “I’m sorry”)
  

Why all this apologizing? Except for the texting, which admittedly was rude, I had nothing to apologize for. It’s a terrible and silly tic, and it’s not remotely polite. Instead, it creates the mental habit of feeling apologetic.

I don’t doubt that Julia apologized when she was wrong. Part of her upbringing as an Upper Middle Brow–girl in Pasadena would have dictated that she had good manners, but she was not about to apologize when she’d done nothing wrong. One could argue that failing to measure the flour in that long-ago eggs Florentine was “wrong,” but mastering cooking—or anything—is a process to be both accepted and respected, and the people who benefit from your practice—your friends and family—must also accept and respect it.

There is no need to reinvent yourself.

If you are old enough to have watched
The French Chef
as a child, it’s nearly impossible to watch it today free of the miasma of nostalgia. The perky vintage 1960s theme music.
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The grainy black-and-white film. The often lame introduction. (Who can forget “These are the chicken sisters!”) Front and center, Julia herself, wearing her uniform of cotton-blouse-with-strange-badge,
^†
pearls, and apron tied at the front.

I set my college-age daughter down to watch some Julia, to see if it resonated. She doesn’t watch any of those chef
shows—Master, Iron, or Top—or
Cake Boss,
or
Kelsey’s Essentials,
or that show with Paula Deen’s son. The entire food-show phenomenon—spawned, of course, by the success of
The French Chef
—holds no interest for her, at least not yet.

She watched the quiche episode and was surprised. “Julia is so natural and normal,” she said. “I felt like I was in the kitchen with her. I wanted to be in the kitchen with her!”

Julia’s ability to be herself in front of the camera hypnotized us, and still does, apparently. Who was this large, occasionally breathless, excitable woman who had no ability to put on airs? It wasn’t as if she forgot the camera was there—every once in a while, especially in the early episodes, she looks up and into it with a startled smile—but she possessed no ability to alter behavior because it
was
there. She would sometimes crack herself up and do nothing to disguise her glee. In the episode on how to roast a chicken, when describing the age of an old stewing hen, she said, “This chicken is beyond the age of consent” and practically laughed out loud at her own improvisation. Each show was filmed in one take, and some were rougher than others. The aforementioned “To Roast a Chicken” was particularly rocky. The sentence “This chicken weighs five and a half to nine months” was followed moments later with information on how much you might expect to spend: “It’s twice as much more expensiver than.”

Viewers not only didn’t mind her mistakes, they loved them and found them comforting. They loved watching her taste something. She lowered her eyelids, her gaze softened, then
she slurped or licked or bit. She was somewhere else, focused within, feeling the food in her mouth, evaluating it, reflecting upon what needed to change. We were transfixed.

Even though TV was in its toddlerhood, viewers could still smell a phony. It’s what sunk James Beard, who misread the medium and believed that showmanship and being “entertaining” was all that was required. WGBH was besieged with fan mail raving about Julia’s “honesty,” “forthrightness,” “naturalness,” “lack of that TV manner.”

The obvious lesson here is to “be yourself” just like Julia was, but the degree to which that’s easier said than done cannot be underestimated. For one thing Julia, because of her staggering height and unusual voice, had, from a very young age, no choice but to be herself. There was no radar beneath which she could fly, no opportunity for her, ever, to adopt the affectations of a conventional woman and get away with it. Who she was, was who she had to be; when the camera was turned on her at the age of fifty, she had no experience being anyone else.

This isn’t true for most of us. Most of us fit in better than Julia did, and the pernicious urge, from the time we are small, day in day out, week in week out, in order to keep fitting in, is to succumb to the society-pleasing parts of our personalities. Most of the time you think, Where’s the harm in acting more accommodating than I really am? Or feigning an interest in soccer or locally grown produce that I don’t really possess? Or pretending to be superinvolved in my kids’ enrichment activities? Or overpaying for a pair of low-rise jeans that don’t really fit,
aren’t comfortable, and prevent me from sitting on a bar stool without my ass hanging out? Or laughing more than is entirely necessary at that hot guy’s joke? And speaking of being hot, as long as you’re able to work your hotness every waking moment, you’re exempt from everything listed above.
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My point is that the average woman’s inclination to obey her culture’s imperatives is a tiny, constant stream that eventually creates a majestic, postcard-worthy canyon of
Who the hell am I?
And if, perchance, you’ve decided you’re alternative and edgy, with a snarky blog, chipped dark brown nail polish, and a fashion pieced together from the thirteen cents a pound bin at the Goodwill, you’re fighting the same losing battle. Sorry.

All this said, usually by age fifty—Julia’s age when those first pilots were filmed—if we’re ever going to figure out who we really are, now is the time. We’ve lived a little, have accepted that we’re never going to go to the Olympics in any sport other than dressage or shooting, and that we do, in fact, have a favorite child.

And what does society, by which I mean women’s magazines and the
Huffington Post,
think we should do just as our real personality is throwing aside its chains? Reinvent ourselves.

Do not reinvent yourself, that’s the lesson behind this section. Reinvention is code word for using all your God-given
brute female mojo—your intuition, perception, stamina, resilience, wisdom, and perhaps cash from your IRA—to do something so new, your personality has to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt. Give up your job as head of human resources at that Fortune 500 company and open that dude ranch in Wyoming. Give up teaching cha-cha to seniors and go to law school. Close your law practice and move to Cambodia, where you do something or other with children. What you are doing here is disrespecting all of your hard-won experience and knowledge and turning yourself back into a beginner, a neophyte, someone with “girlish” enthusiasm, but no expertise.