Backstage with Julia (16 page)

Of course, Julia did not personally create all those categories. What she did do was change the image of the profession so that it became a desirable one. Before Julia, outside of the commercial food industry that fed America, a culinary career usually meant cooking in a restaurant or teaching those who did. Neither was considered glamorous. Julia used to say, and rightly so, that "the cooking end of gastronomy was strictly a blue-collar job." The celebrity chef was nowhere in sight. And although Americans could list their favorite restaurants, they could rarely name the person in the kitchen who was turning out the meals that made them swoon. They fondly named Delmonico's, the 21 Club, and the Palm as places not to be missed, but the man—and it almost always was a man—behind the stove remained nameless. There were but a few professional culinary schools in the country, and they were not well known. Today's prestigious Culinary Institute of America with impressive campuses on two coasts was in the 1960s located in a nondescript building on a New Haven, Connecticut, street that I walked along every day when I was in college in the same city. We all thought the CIA on the building meant it was a Secret Service outpost. Johnson and Wales University, now one of the world's largest cooking schools, with campuses in six states, did not exist until 1973.

Back then, the prevailing benchmark for a great meal was lots of food at a reasonable price, so few Americans noticed the lack of culinary erudition. Moreover, the food industry as a whole was dedicated more to getting the housewife out of the kitchen than to putting her in front of the stove. Television commercials spoke of ovens that turned themselves on and off and efficient electrical appliances that "got you out of the kitchen in a jiffy." Those too busy to cook at all were encouraged to reach not into the prepared-food section of a gourmet specialty store—of which there were few to none—but into the freezer for TV dinners.

The culinary scene that Julia discovered in France when she fell in love with gastronomy was entirely different. Eating well was a national pastime for the French and Julia thought that was exactly as it should be. The yardstick for fine dining was the careful selection of excellent ingredients cooked with care—at home and in restaurants. Although a chef's position was artisanal as opposed to professional, it was more respected in France than in America. Boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen—they were always boys—considered it a great coup to gain an apprenticeship under a known chef.

Julia was acutely aware of the differences between the French and American attitudes toward what they ate and who prepared it, and she devoted her professional life to obliterating those differences. As New York columnist Regina Schrambling wrote in her column headlined, "Julia Child, the French Chef for a Jell-O Nation," Julia "brought cassoulet to a casserole culture." Julia not only wanted to raise America's awareness of and demand for good food, she wanted to bring the French concept of cooking as a respected career to America. The one notion of the French kitchen she had no desire to replicate was the sex of the chef. She saw no reason why women as well as men should not pursue that career.

Julia did not begin her career with the intention of changing an entire profession. She had learned something wonderful about eating well and wanted to share it. But her very presence on television inspired young men—and women—to choose culinary careers. At book signings across the country chefs, teachers, writers, and several food industry executives thanked Julia for being responsible for their careers. Numerous authors whom she had never met credited her in the acknowledgments of their cookbooks as the person who made it happen.

When Julia realized how much she could bring to gastronomy, she used her renown to mentor not only the industry as a whole but the individuals in it. She gave chefs and cooks the respect she felt they deserved. Seldom do I recall a restaurant meal that did not end with her going into the kitchen to speak with and encourage the chef and the entire staff, most of whom removed sweat-covered hats or food-stained aprons and asked her to sign them. She listed her telephone number in the local directory and answered the phone herself; anyone could call and ask her questions, whether it was about how to stabilize whipped cream or what to do with their professional lives. She personally responded to the multitude of letters she received from those who wrote to ask her advice on topics from what to serve for Thanksgiving or where to go to culinary school.

Where did all this mentoring lead? Today, chefs are megastars. No longer are restaurants staffed with a diffident group of cooks who remain nameless in the kitchen. We speak of Mario, Jasper, Wolfgang, and Emeril and sometimes have to ask ourselves, "What
are
the names of their restaurants?" We have a cable television station totally devoted to food, twenty-four hours a day. In 2006 alone, cookbook sales were projected to reach $519 million. Dunkin' Donuts sells croissants—of a sort. Culinary education, food writing, and product development are big business. Unlike in the days when it was a blue-collar job, a great many of those who enter the profession are augmenting already-earned college degrees in history, literature, art, engineering, biochemistry. Like Julia herself, the "new culinary professional" is intelligent, well educated, and above all, passionate.

If Julia had a conscious strategy in establishing a new culinary order, it was to organize the troops. While she was introducing TV audiences to the joys of fine cooking, she was also rallying a new generation of food professionals to prepare and educate themselves to meet the needs of an eating public with higher expectations. "Ours is a really serious profession and a discipline and an art form," she said in an interview for the video magazine
Savor
. And Julia did all she could to validate her comment. Together with Rebecca Alssid and Boston University, she succeeded in establishing the first American degree program in gastronomy. She joined and supported the growing numbers of national, international, and state culinary organizations that cropped up to support those flocking to culinary careers. In some cases, Julia was an active worker bee in these associations. At the very least, she made it a point to attend as many meetings as she could. To neatly tie together professionals with nonprofessional but dedicated culinary advocates, she joined forces with Robert Mondavi of Mondavi Vineyards in 1981 to form the American Institute of Wine and Food, open to anyone serious about gastronomy.

The extent of her influence is impressive, but it was futile to suggest to Julia that she was so remarkable as to be responsible for altering the culinary path of America. While she never denied her influence, she claimed that luck had just put her in the right place at the right time. Luck and timing undoubtedly played a major role in making her famous, but her exceptional attributes were what changed the face of the culinary world.

Julia did not see herself as exceptional. If you said she was, she'd reply, "I'm just good old pioneer stock," alluding to the fact that her grandfather, as a teenager, had headed West in a covered wagon. It often surprises even some of her most ardent fans that Julia was a California girl, born and raised in Pasadena and not in Boston, as so many thought. She did have a New England air about her, most likely inherited from her mother, Julia Carolyn (Caro) Weston McWilliams, who was descended from a long line of blue-blooded New Englanders of impressive pedigree. But Julia was not one to assume airs about lineage. She preferred telling stories about her grandfather, John McWilliams, instead of dry and dusty accounts of her Massachusetts colonial ancestors. When he was only sixteen, McWilliams attached four oxen to his wagon laden with bacon and flour and set out to pan for gold in the Sacramento Valley. "My grandfather was a good, tough old boy who fought in the Civil War and died at ninety-three."

Paul was less reticent about his wife's outstanding qualities, and he said it well in Julia's debut
Parade
issue in February 1982. The magazine published an interview that included Paul's answers to what attracted him to her. Along with "the sound of her voice" and "I thought she was beautiful," Paul said, "Brains . . . guts . . . ability . . . I liked that she was tough and worked like mad and never gave up on things." Those were the strengths that converted culinary hobbyists and blue-collar cooks into professional culinarians.

For those of us working with her, the conversion was personal. We had a private Merlin, a one-on-one mentor, our own Yoda. She never stopped encouraging and promoting us along a path that would grow our professional lives, never stopped introducing us to the infinite opportunities that the cooking business provided. Being a Julia Child associate was the culinary equivalent of being a graduate student, and I was right to have thought that I should pay her for the education.

"Aren't we lucky to be in this profession?" Julia said repeatedly over the years. Well, yes! She made it stimulating and exciting far beyond the challenges of mastering the art of cooking. She offered us the opportunity to be part of the new world of American gastronomy.

For all I knew about cooking techniques when Julia hired me—and believe me, Madeleine taught us well—I was a neophyte in the new world of Julia's vision. I was completely unaware of all those culinary organizations that existed. Julia not only let me know about them but encouraged me to get involved. And she made me want to. Once alerted to the expansive nature of the profession that I'd begun as a hobby, I was a most eager soldier under her command. Her goals became mine, not just because they were hers but because she so ably convinced me of their wisdom and necessity.

I joined and began to attend meetings with her of the Boston Women's Culinary Guild, which Sara Moulton had helped found; a few years later, because we worked in New York, we qualified for and became charter members of the New York Women's Culinary Alliance, of which Sara was also a founder. Julia introduced me to the International Association of Culinary Professionals (at that time called the International Association of Cooking Schools) and I became a member, traveling with her to meetings across the country where I met large numbers of people who had also turned cooking hobbies into culinary professions. When the IACP instituted a professional certification program, Julia and I both took the exam and passed, thereby giving us the right to place the professional affirmation CCP (Certified Culinary Professional) after our names. When the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food was formed, I was there with my checkbook, and I eventually worked on establishing a chapter in Rhode Island. Within two years of meeting her, I had become an actively involved culinary professional.

Seeing that I was such an avid convert to the cause, Julia involved me in her objectives, which she always clearly defined. Better food in America was her overall goal, but she concentrated her efforts on education—teaching, writing, and learning. She demonstrated her commitment to that area of gastronomy in her own work and in her financial support of organizations that shared that goal. She donated an annual scholarship to the IACP's foundation, stipulating that it was available only to those seeking to further their culinary educations. In the summer of 1982, she wrote asking me if I "would be so kind in helping to interview a prospect for our scholarship—we've changed it from 'fellowship' and are directing it to those interested in teaching, writing, or research of a scholarly nature—no restaurant types . . . Seems simpler to make limits, and those are my interests, anyway—and yours too."

So characteristic of who she was, she didn't just urge others to educate themselves but continued to school herself, and encouraged me to do the same. When conference programs and registrations arrived in the mail, she would call me and we would go over which lectures and seminars sounded most interesting. Together we attended several sessions of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, where she participated fully in the required writing exercises. We attended numerous cooking classes at which she listened attentively and took notes. In England, we joined the culinary intelligentsia at the Oxford Symposium on Food, where we attended lectures on such topics as the significance of the shish kebab skewers in the corner of the ancient 214-foot-long Bayonne Tapestry and the prevalence of cannabis (marijuana) as an ingredient in biblical-era cooking.

"That was fascinating" and "I always learn something," she would say after classes, and always learning something was essential to her. Samuel Johnson wrote, "Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of the vigorous mind." Vigorous indeed, and keen. She was curious about so many things, not just about food. She was interested in and savored every substantial morsel of life, whether it was about people, politics, or technology, and hers was not idle curiosity. At a time when even those in the industry were saying home computers would never catch on, she was already using one. She was intrigued with the remote to my Jeep and would ask me to test its range in parking lots, from the windows upstairs and downstairs in her house, from her car to mine. The exacting, minute details of a person's life, the state of the country, and the love life of Pamela Harriman were all equally interesting to her. If the story involved sex, all the better. She by no means dwelt on prurient things, but she was unashamedly void of prudery and things of a sexual nature did not embarrass her. She loved a good raunchy joke and a bit of lascivious gossip.