Backstage with Julia (24 page)

We left for Italy in September 1985, and for the first time since I began working with Julia, Paul was not with us. His health had been failing, and Julia thought the hectic pace of the trip would be too much for her eighty-three-year-old husband. So he remained at home with a relative. It was the right decision, but I missed my Italian tutor and Julia missed her partner. She telephoned him daily, sometimes twice.

My job in Italy was to work with the chefs in the kitchens setting up the food for the camera. In some cases, Julia cooked with a chef on camera and I had to prepare swaps and backups just as I did in the
GMA
studios. For other segments, the cameras only shot footage of Julia tasting the food, so all I needed was a finished dish that looked appetizing. Sonya worked out the schedule: we met the film crew each morning to shoot Julia in a scene that established our location, and then Sonya, Julia, and the crew left to tape segments on the culinary specialties of the area while I left for the restaurant to oversee the food preparation.

We began shooting "Julia Child in Italy" with a cultural segment in Parma. Framed by the historic nineteenth-century opera house Teatro Regio, treasured especially for performances by Verdi and Toscanini, Julia walked across the old stone-paved street toward the camera while the melodic strains of a Verdi opera played in the background. As in the ABC studios at home, neither she nor anyone else ever definitely scripted what she was to say. Sonya could always count on her to come up with whatever fit the moment. I don't recall what pertinent comment she made about the city or opera, but I do distinctly remember that she warned any would-be divas to beware: Italian audiences in Verdi's times critiqued unsatisfying concerts by hurling rotten tomatoes.

Julia, Sonya, and the crew then left the scene with a representative from the Parma del Consorzio
—
the association that oversees the production and controls the quality of the Parmesan foods. Their schedule included footage of Julia learning the two-thousand-year-old art of making Parmigiano-Reggiano—"the crown king of all cheeses," as the local Parmigiani call it—and then the patting of the great fat pigs that ate the whey from the same cow's milk whose curds went into the cheese. The shooting continued in the air-drying rooms, where the breezes from the nearby Po River converted plain old ham into exquisite prosciutto di Parma and another type of ham called culatello. I visited both on previous trips to Italy and learned that the exceptional flavor of the products was a result of the unique air from the nearby Po River and that the flavor was not only irreproducible but also unrivaled anywhere else in the world. Who's going to argue with an Italian? Anyway, the flavor of the pork products was far superior to any other we had tasted.

Meanwhile, fortified with my rudimentary new second language, I ventured into my first restaurant kitchen in Parma. It wasn't really a restaurant, not even the small one that the Italians call a
trattoria
. In fact, when a local Parma newspaper published an article about Julia and American television being in their city, they referred to Al Vecchio Molinetto as our stop for "fast food." Sonya didn't plan to show any cooking in the restaurant, just Julia enjoying a local specialty,
torta fritta
. So I needed a finished dish as well as the recipe in case viewers wrote in for it. My small book of Italian foods told me
torta fritta
translates to "fried cake," and in other regions of Italy, with slight variations of ingredients, they were called
crescentine
,
gnocchi fritto
, or
chizze
. But my book did not explain exactly what they were. It wasn't until I walked into the kitchen and met the four women, all clad completely in white, that I realized what they were making was good old-fashioned fried dough. Every Italian American street festival in the United States has at least one stand selling deep-fried dough, usually dusted with sugar.

Three of the women were standing at a long wooden counter that held several towel-covered mounds of what I surmised was the resting dough. They were rolling ready dough into large thin sheets and swiftly cutting them into rough triangular shapes. Signora Ermina, apparently the executive woman in white, was standing at the stove and slipping two or three triangles at a time into a large pan of simmering fat. She nudged the frying pieces tenderly here and there and turned them over carefully until in no time at all they turned a golden brown and floated to the top, revealing that they were now delicate pockets. She transferred the pockets to paper towels to drain, split one open in the middle, filled it with the prized products of Parma—wispy slices of Parma ham and slivers of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese—and handed it to me. I had eaten more than my share of street-festival fried dough, but never had I tasted the ethereal likes of the fried heaven those women were making.

I wanted the recipe, not just for viewers but for myself. Since all the dough we needed for the shoot was already made and resting under those towels, I had to ask them to start from the beginning. It was no easy task. None of the women spoke any English, and when I addressed them in my elementary Italian, they didn't seem to understand that either. Turns out they spoke not standard Italian but a local dialect, unfamiliar to me. I was clueless as to what they were telling me.

Undaunted and on a mission, I resorted to my most fluent form of Italian—gesturing, shrugging, and raising my eyebrows. I made them understand that I wanted to see them make the dough from the start. Signora Ermina understood when I removed a towel from a mound of dough, pointed at it, then lifted my shoulders and said, "
Come fa?
"—close enough to
"
How is it made?" She put flour on the counter and added salt and lard. Several times I said,
"Aspeta"
(wait) with my hand held up and
"Quanto?"
(how much) with raised shoulders. She understood. She pointed to the flour and then to the 500-gram mark on a nearby scale. She held up the other ingredients for me to see and said something in dialect that could have been a measurement but most likely was my nonna's standard reply: "This much." Ermina was on to me by then, and before she dissolved the yeast in water, she motioned for me to put my finger in the water to feel that it was warm. By the time she added the yeasty water to the flour, we were conversing like old friends. She pointed to the liquid, raised her shoulders, and tilted her head back and forth, which I understood perfectly: sometimes you need more, sometimes less. We gestured our way through kneading, and when she set the dough aside under a kitchen towel, I pointed at my watch and asked,
"Per quanto tempo?"
She raised one finger, lifted her shoulders, and wrinkled her forehead into a questioning expression. Easy translation: about an hour, maybe more, maybe less. I looked at the dough we made and those ready to roll and wrote down, "Let rest one hour or until doubled in size." I had my recipe.

The crew arrived, and before the cameras were finished setting up, Julia had devoured at least three
torta fritta
along with a glass of local Lambrusco wine. "These are absolutely delicious," she said. "How do they make them, Nancy?"

I told her exactly how, and she said, "I'm so glad you've learned to speak Italian." Indeed!

I made out better linguistically at our next restaurant stop, Ai Tigli in nearby Pilastro, where Carla Cantoni spoke the Italian I knew as she walked me through the secrets of
tortelli alla parmigiani
, elongated ravioli filled with ricotta and herbs. At first, she hesitated to allow me to help her with the several pieces of
tortelli
we needed for the setup. But I knew I could do it her way. She did not use ravioli trays but formed them by hand, just as my nonna did. And she rolled the dough with a hand-cranked pasta machine, not the four-foot-long pasta pin Marcella had taught us to use in Bologna. Hand-rolling pasta is an art not easily mastered. Italian women who are able to transform a pound of flour and eggs into a perfect, thin pasta circle as large as a hula hoop are called
sfogliarine
, from the Italian word for "sheet of pastry,"
sfoglia
. The legend is that you can recognize
sfoglarine
by their wide hips since the process of rolling requires a constant back-and-forth rocking motion. I bought a pasta pin when I was in Marcella's class, but the hip thing discouraged me from using it very much.

Carla and I were still making
tortelli
when Julia and the crew arrived. Now, here is the tell-all part of this book. Julia Child had a checkered past—with pasta. She didn't really love it. She never quite understood its pervasive appeal , especially to American restaurateurs whose only association with Italy was a couple of waiters named Angelo and Giovanni. She made an occasional concession to its popularity in her work, but when she created Lasagne à la Française for one of her early TV programs, she claims she was "almost lynched by the Italian anti-defamation league." Although children showed no such hostility when she made her Spaghetti Marco Polo on the
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
TV show, horrified pasta chauvinists wrote angry letters after seeing her eat the spaghetti with chopsticks. She defended her method by saying she'd chosen it in tribute to Marco Polo's journeys in China. "It's more fun with chopsticks, and they truly eat spaghetti that way in China; I've seen them do it," she wrote in
From Julia Child's Kitchen.
But, with all that talk of lynching, Julia remained a bit gun-shy—or I guess in this case rope-shy—about making pasta for her audiences. When for a Christmas issue of
Parade
Rosie suggested that we make green and red lasagna, Julia asked me to develop the recipe. I created a nontraditional spinach and roasted red pepper lasagna for the issue, and Julia clearly stated in print that it was my recipe and included my photo so there would be no question of its Italian authorship—or perhaps, if there was to be a lynching, it would be my head in the noose.

So on that
tortelli
day in Parma, Julia stood back for a while and watched as Carla and I made pasta. But she never could resist trying her hand at kitchen machinery, so she hijacked the pasta machine and rolled out the dough. The mechanics of the machine intrigued her more than the sheets of pasta she produced. In the end, she did not experience the epiphany my Italian passions hoped she would. She continued to think that too much hoopla surrounded our fascination with pasta, and I don't recall her ever making it again, although she did enthusiastically consume Carla's
tortelli
, which were swimming in butter and Parmesan cheese.

In Bologna, we shot footage of Julia and Marcella Hazan enjoying an al fresco lunch of a veal chop pounded until it was the size of a small plate, then breaded and fried until golden. Marcella explained that this was the traditional Milanese manner of preparing a perfect
cotoletta
. Julia agreed with the "perfect"; not only was it a beautifully simple preparation, but as Julia said, "the meat was real baby veal and not small cow."

Julia cooked on camera in Bologna with a local cookbook author who demonstrated the long-cooking, classic method of making a Bolognese sauce using finely chopped beef and not hamburger, as so many recipes specify. Julia thought the sauce was delicious but had a less positive reaction to the talent. In his preproduction letters to Sonya, he claimed he was fluent in English. He neglected to mention that his pronunciation was so bad that he might as well have been speaking Chinese. Julia had so much difficulty understanding him that she took to a lot of atypical nodding instead of her usual pertinent comments or playful bantering.

My prep area for readying the veal and the sauce was the kitchen of a local restaurant where the language barrier was the least of my problems. The entire staff was male and had never had a woman work in the kitchen with them. They could think of only one reason for a woman to be in their midst, and it had nothing to do with cooking. In most ways, they were simply playful. They made the large amount of Bolognese sauce we needed in a very tall pot, so tall that I could not see into it or reach the bottom with a spoon to stir it. So they provided me with a chair to stand on—was I forever going to have to cook standing on a stool?—and then hovered suggestively in a grinning group around me. At worst, they would not let me cook. I was by no means a militant feminist—I liked men to open doors for me, enjoyed flirting, and chuckled at wolf whistles—but their antics were interfering with my work.

I took a cup of espresso outside to the patio and told Julia that I thought my honor was in jeopardy in there. She told me that was how it was in French kitchens and obviously Italian ones as well. She spoke from her own experience, since she'd studied in a male-dominated arena when she was the only woman in a class of male ex-GIs at the Cordon Bleu. She held her own in Paris, but of course, six feet two inches of Julia Child was a lot more imposing than five feet two inches of Nancy Barr. Besides, she spoke enough French to declare her seriousness of purpose and to discourage unwelcome advances in two languages.