Julia Child Rules (22 page)

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From the introduction: “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.” Ha!

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The menu is from Julia’s introduction to
Mastering.
She fails to mention how they were able to bake a cake without an oven.

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Simca’s Cuisine
(with Patricia Simon) (1972);
New Menus from Simca’s Cuisine
(with Michael James) (1979);
Food and Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine
(with Suzy Patterson) (1991)

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According to the
New York Times
in 1954.

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Written by Betty Friedan, and thought to be the clarion call for the second wave of feminism.

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The argument could be made that she raised the bar, and I’ve made it, but that came later.

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Given all this impairment, why anyone would marry them is a mystery.

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Composed by John Morris, who worked mostly with Mel Brooks, and who also composed the music for
Dirty Dancing,
which was also set, ironically, in 1963, the same year
The French Chef
premiered.

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She faithfully wore the École des Gourmandes badge from the little cooking school she had with Simca and Louisette in her attic kitchen on the Roo de Loo. I don’t think anyone knew what it was for years.

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Except, obviously, the low-rise jeans. The alternative to low-rise jeans are the heinous, hateful mom jeans. A woman in mom jeans, even if she is a mom, is the most pathetic creature to walk the earth. Whoever is the current Sexiest Woman Alive, were she to don a pair of mom jeans, would instantly become a frightful hag.

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How weird was that? My dad used a toothpick after dinner, while he sat and drank his coffee and read the paper.

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It’s Kathy Budas.

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page 435, see
Preliminary Stove-Top Cooking

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Called, nonsensically, French Tarts, Apple Style. Shouldn’t it be Apple Tarts, French Style?

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One of the most depressing parts about writing about someone’s life is that sometime during the last chapters you have to say she died. And while death might be one of life’s realities, we builders of narratives can choose to downplay it. A week before her death in Montecito, California, in the summer of 2002, Julia was still working on her memoir
My Life in France
with her great-nephew, Alex Prud’homme, a task she adored because, she said, Alex reminded her so much of Paul. When she died in her sleep on August 13, 2004, two days before her birthday, the party went on as planned, and people arrived from around the world to drink and eat and celebrate. There. Now let’s not speak about it again.

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Just yesterday a friend, a mother of four children under the age of eleven, said that she and her husband believed the best parenting was “getting out of the way” and just allowing her kids to “be.”

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The groove that runs between your nose and lip.

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Which does beg the question, if it was in private how could anyone be sure?

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The recipe is seventeen pages long. You owe it to yourself to bake it, just to appreciate the sheer lunacy it must have taken to perfect it.

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Totaling about $45,000; about $388,500 in 2012 dollars.

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Kathie Alex, a onetime student of Simca’s, lives there now and runs a summer cooking program called Cooking in France with Friends.

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In a story by Marya Mannes, who also observed that as food is the domain of women, it’s not that big of a surprise.

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Jane Friedman, as she would soon become, went on to have a staggeringly successful publishing career, and was for many years president and CEO of HarperCollins.

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On my Facebook newsfeed some “friend” started a long thread about some food fetish—vegetarian locavorism or something—and I quipped, “I’m an Eat-What’s-Put-in-Front-of-Me-ian,” and she shot back in a second, “You’re what’s wrong with the world.”

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Often attributed to Julia; actually, one of her guests said it, and she thought it was a fine idea.

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A word not yet in use, but that’s how she thought of it.

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Julia never liked pasta and didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

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Like Planned Parenthood, which was as controversial then as now. Once she caused a stir by noting that if women had easy access to more birth control there’d be less abortions.

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She received honorary degrees from Brown, Harvard, Boston University, Smith (Ha!), Rutgers, Johnson and Wales University, The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, Newberry College, and the California State University.

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Not one of them was Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.

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Picketed by vegetarians who carried signs that said Animals beware! Julia is hungry! Even though she had publicly apologized in 1987 for anything she might have said to insult them, they remained incensed at her treatment of animals.

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Truffles, they always have truffles.

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However gifted, no mere mortal can make haute cuisine, you must be a classically trained chef.