Julia Child Rules (2 page)

When was the last time you heard or said “bon appétit” and didn’t think of Julia Child? Come to think of it, who in America has said “bon appétit” in his or her normal voice since about 1964?
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Oh, I know. History is full of exceptional chefs who were committed to educating Americans about the glory of good eating long before Julia Child came along. Chefs who were more exceptional than Julia,
^†
and who also had their own cookbooks and TV shows. James Beard comes to mind. Actually, he’s the only one who comes to mind, as every other good, hardworking, dedicated cook has been thrust into the deep shadow cast by the massive klieg light that was
The French Chef.

My theory is that our real attachment to Julia is less about her cooking, or even about what she did for the cause of serious cuisine, and more about our admiration for her immutable aptitude for being herself. Julia’s real genius wasn’t in breaking down the nine million steps in cooking a mind-blowing beef bourguignon, or assembling a thousand-page cookbook,
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but in having the confidence to stand in front of a camera, week after week, without trying to change one thing about herself.

Is there anything more radical or attractive? A woman who’s not particularly pretty, who’s as tall as a man and has a voice like a cartoon character, but who, nevertheless, lives in her own skin with self-assuredness and joy?

During her time at the head of the culinary pack, she certainly had her detractors. In 1966, the year Julia was christened Our Lady of the Ladle on the cover of
Time
magazine
^†
and made the leap from best-selling cookbook author and popular star of a cooking show on educational TV to Most Famous Chef in America, a lesser-known Frenchwoman named Madeleine Kamman, who’d also graduated from Le Cordon Bleu, and who had slaved away in the kitchen in the bowels of a one-star French restaurant and was technically better trained than Julia, sniffed loudly and publicly that Julia was neither French
nor a chef. Cantankerous food historian Karen Hess, who made a name for herself by being against celebrity cooks, elite foodies, people who knew nothing about food, and everyone who wasn’t her, told David Kamp, author of
The United States of Arugula,
that she thought Julia was a dithering idiot.

I’m sure there were others. Julia may have ushered in the Age of Cuisine in America, but foodie infighting has been around since at least 1765, when a certain Monsieur Boulanger opened the world’s first restaurant in Paris and was promptly sued by a local food guild, claiming his single menu offering of sheep’s feet in white sauce violated their right to be the only group in town licensed to serve cooked food.
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Every generation imprints on a slightly different Julia. The first knew her as the serious, exacting author of the exhaustive
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
Volume One, while its younger sisters grew attached to the slightly goofy cheerleader known as “The French Chef,” first in black and white, then in color. The Julia of the late 1970s was the one immortalized in Dan Aykroyd’s iconic
Saturday Night Live
impersonation; her resultant vaguely Monty Pythonesque reputation had no hope of being rehabilitated by the short, perky spots she did on
Good Morning America
and the often awkward cooking shows that never quite lived up to
The French Chef.
There was a half decade or so near the end of the twentieth century when she fell off the radar. Then, Julie Powell, a girl in a dead-end job
looking to give her life meaning, single-handedly engineered a Julia comeback by cooking and blogging her way through
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
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. Her
Julie and Julia,
which served as the inspiration and template for Nora Ephron’s movie of the same name, reintroduced Julia to a whole new, hip home-cooking crowd.

But for most of us, Julia is primarily The French Chef. TV Julia was organized, efficient, yet breezy, with her kooky warble, effortless confidence, and endearingly never-quite-right hairdo,
^†
chopping onions, grating cheese, whacking frozen pastry crust with a wooden dowel, giving pointers on the wrist action involved in flipping an omelet, and demonstrating with glee the fascinating, mildly revolting innards of a lobster.

She came off as a woman not unlike her viewers, who, before she became famous, was cozily married to a nice man who went off to his government job every morning while she, in pearls and twin set, puttered around the kitchen. She spent her hours grocery shopping, preparing meals for her husband, hosting dinner parties for his business associates, writing newsy letters to friends
and family, purchasing copper saucepans, and, when she had the time, catching up on her magazines. She was Everywoman, if every woman could thrive in Paris despite speaking almost no French, eat everything she pleased, put in fourteen-hour days for years on end creating a cookbook for which there was, as far as anyone could tell, no market, and, deep into middle age, train herself to cook, instruct, and entertain in front of the camera, something for which in 1963 there was little precedent and no official handbook.

Which is to say that, however average and normal she may have looked, she was like no one else.

Not long after Julia’s famous conversion luncheon of sole meunière in Rouen on the afternoon Paul and Julia arrived in France, she enthused to Avis, “I’ve finally found a real and satisfying profession which will keep me busy well into the year 2000.” Julia was a self-professed exaggerator and must have thought, as George Orwell did when writing
1984,
that 2000 was eons away, that people would be vacationing on Mars by then. Instead, she would have exactly that career. In September 2001, at the age of eighty-nine, she would still be in front of the camera, filming a video to run alongside an exhibit of her famous kitchen at the Smithsonian Institution.

Julia was able to convince an entire nation that cooking could be creative and endlessly absorbing because that was how
she
experienced cooking. If there was ever an evening when Julia was feeling tired and grouchy and simply could not bring herself
to throw a chop in a pan, it has been lost in the mists of time. For Julia Child cooking was fun, and fun was something Julia, from the time she was a girl breaking into the homes of neighbors just for kicks, never said no to.

I cannot, in good conscience, allow that word “fun” to sit there on the page unmodified. One of the great misunderstandings we hold about Julia Child—the first being that she was housewifey in the aforementioned manner, when really she was Che Guevara armed with a pound of butter and a sauté pan—is that most of us share with her the same definition of fun.

Chances are, if you’re one of those people who define fun as any activity that includes a cocktail and putting your feet up, you’re not a cook on a par with Julia Child. This is not to say you might not be a devotee. This is not to say that you don’t have a few terrific recipes. This is not to say that you refuse to answer the clarion call to pickle your garden’s bounty in August or, as we do in my house, spend three weeks baking cookies in December. This is not even to say that you, like me, have been known to be lazy.

But fun for Julia always involved breaking a sweat. It may have involved a few swigs of wine while she worked, but it never involved kicking back. Like people who fancy ultramarathons and Ironman contests hosted in tropical climes, Julia loved endless exertion.

I’m tap-dancing here. Can you sense it? Readers are so sophisticated these days; they can tell when a card is yet to be played, a shoe to drop, when something is being withheld.

Here I am, setting out to write a book about our beloved Julia’s many inspirational and aspirational qualities, but, if I’m to be honest, when I say her name—Julia!—I’m not infused with feelings of warmth and joy, but with a low-grade feeling of dread.

My problem with Julia is that it’s impossible to extricate her from the main problem I had with my mother, which is that she was an early devotee of Julia. Every time I think about French Chef Julia lustily chopping off a fish head with what she called her “fright knife,” or closing her eyes and tasting some beurre blanc, I can smell the buttery, floury, slightly blood-infused smell of browning beef in our yellow and orange kitchen in Whittier, California, not fifteen miles from where Julia grew up in Pasadena. In my memory it is always a day during the triple-digit heat of September, my mother—redheaded, like Julia—red-faced before the stove, stirring and tasting and stirring and tasting and stirring and tasting. Then stopping for a cigarette.

Every morning my mother sat at our Formica breakfast bar, smoked a Viceroy in her orange quilted bathrobe, and planned the evening’s menu. Cooking was not easy for my mother, a redhead with fragile skin who suffered from raging allergies to
citrus and even carrots, which she was forced to peel wearing rubber gloves.

The longer something took to cook, the more it required simmering, reducing, deglazing,
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the more my mother liked it. I think she found the standing and stirring, while puffing on a ciggie, what we would now call meditative. Looking back, I suspect she stood and stirred when it wasn’t entirely called for.

I came home from after-school sports practice around five o’clock. At my big public Southern California junior high and high school, it was pretty much an all-comers meet. If you were moderately coordinated and were willing to stay after school every day for practice, there was always a spot for you on the Junior Varsity whatever. I played field hockey, basketball, and volleyball. I was a long jumper on the track team and swam the breaststroke on the swim team. But most of all, when I came home at five, I was starving.

My mother would be standing at the stove, wearing a pair of capri pants and a short-sleeved cotton shirt (not unlike those worn by Julia on
The French Chef
), smoking her Viceroy and stirring. The kitchen smelled of onions and butter, or garlic and butter, or what I know now to have been wine and butter. I’d ask when we were going to eat, and she would say
soon.
But it didn’t mean soon. It meant whenever she was finished stirring. My father would come home around six-thirty, kiss my mother on the cheek, and make himself an Old Fashioned. Under cover
of his cocktail preparations—the opening of the cabinet to fetch a glass, the opening of the refrigerator to retrieve the lemon peel—I would try to steal a cookie from the treat drawer.
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The treat drawer was separated from the stove top by the sink. If I waited until the exact moment my dad opened the fridge, there was a chance my mom would be distracted and I could dip into the drawer and snag a cookie. But usually she saw me coming out of the corner of her eye, reached over, and pushed the drawer shut on my arm. For years I sported matching indentations where the edge of the drawer got me.

We usually ate around eight-thirty. I had finished my homework hours earlier, and some important TV show was inevitably on at that very moment. I had long since stopped being hungry and had entered the state where your body starts digesting its own organs to stay alive. My mom liked to focus on one impossibly difficult Julia dish at a time, so her
Porc Braisé aux Choux Rouges
would be accompanied by Birds Eye frozen squash, the bright orange variety that looked exactly like the baby food I would one day serve my daughter. Her
Tranches de Jambon Morvandelle
was served with frozen succotash.

Even so, it was all the same to me. Unless it was Taco Night,
^†
what we had for dinner was immaterial to me. As it was to my dad, who was the ultimate food-is-fuel guy. But I was not so hungry, nor worried about missing
Sanford and Son,
nor wrapped
up in schoolyard drama, that I did not see what my mom was up against: Night after night she went to all this trouble for two people who didn’t appreciate her food.

I’ve come to understand that my mother threw herself into cooking like Julia for complex personal reasons. She’d always wanted to go to Europe, and this was a way of participating, however modestly, in what she thought of as High Culture. I imagine she was also “cooking Julia” because it was creative and challenging, because she knew she was responsible for dinner anyway, and she might as well amuse herself in the process of making it. Hindsight, however, does nothing to change the truth that at the time I was deeply annoyed. I was the one who did the dishes. And what the number of dishes conveyed to me was that what my mother spent the afternoons of her life doing was a hell of a lot of work, for little reward.

As a result, the Julia I prefer to hold in my heart is a strapping California party girl who crowbarred herself out of the comfy life in Pasadena, who forced herself on France and won over the French, the woman who lived with abandon.

Julia’s genius for throwing all caution to the wind served her the entire length of her long life. Given that she worked harder than most of us, and believed in rigor and discipline, how did she also live with abandon?