Backstage with Julia (9 page)

After she promoted me to executive chef, my involvement with her work increased. We spoke and wrote more often about what recipes she would do for her television shows. In a letter she wrote me that summer, she said, "Recipes, script, etc for the Gd. Morning are on their way to you via Judy Avrett. Please give them a harsh look through, and any critiques, corrections, suggestions, most welcome. I won't pick new shows, but am happy to change details, like spinach topping for the oysters Rockef, giant cookies, etc. etc. (No spinach here, which is strange.)" Me, give a harsh critique of Julia Child's recipes? Seemed to me that she'd done pretty well for herself so far without benefit of my comments. I did thoroughly scrutinize the equipment and food lists; seldom was anything missing, but I did not alter her recipe choices even when some of her ideas sounded a bit weird, such as her suggestion in a later letter that we substitute sauerkraut for the spinach on the oysters. I responded more with curiosity than with criticism: "You will have to show me oysters and sauerkraut—never experienced that!" (Since we never did make them, I'm guessing that Julia tried and discarded the suggestion on her own.)

When Julia asked specifically for suggestions, I gave them. Let me amend that. I zealously gave them. I recently had a good laugh when I discovered copies of my letters to Julia among her papers at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge. In offering my suggestions, I was, as Liz Bishop would say, like the man who knew how to spell
banana
but didn't know when to stop. In response to her program list that began with "I have thought of the following eleven for Gd. Morning (but haven't done anything more than think, as follows: 1) Lentils 2) Sausage cakes 3) Meat Loaf (Do you have any great ideas?? I like beef and sausage, and think it useful for leftover meat)" and ended with "But I don't have any desserts here—any ideas?? . . . would welcome the comments from our Exec. Chef!" I sent back three handwritten pages that contained every thought I had ever entertained about the subjects: "I adore lentils—didn't Esau sell Jacob his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup? My grandmother used to make the most wonderful
pasta e fagioli
soup with lentils, macaroni, sausage, tomatoes, onions—heavenly. Cold lentil salad is good—and of course just lentils hot with butter, walnuts or pine nuts." I droned on about sausage cakes and meat loaf, even suggested having
GMA
purchase a meat grinder, and then I went on to desserts. "You have never made a
crème anglais
on
GMA
. . . you could serve it over poached fruit or macerated orange slices—or stabilize it for something like those wonderful individual size
tarte St. Tropez
. . . or a trifle with bananas and nuts. " I wasn't finished. I still had Indian pudding, the great American brownie, applesauce, flummery, and a fruit fool to suggest. Had I been Julia reading my rambling list of suggestions, I would have thought the fool particularly appropriate. In spite of my babbling suggestions, Julia never stopped asking me to "send them along."

Team
is a real feel-good word—team effort, team spirit, team goals. Biographies can better discern at what point in her life Julia developed an appreciation for and keen understanding of what constituted a team. But she did, and in every sense of the word, she thought of herself and her associates as one team. She was always right there in the thick of things, working along with us. We never questioned that she was in charge, but she made it clear that she valued and trusted our opinions (babbling suggestions and all) by involving us in all aspects of the work we did together. She even created a team motto—"EOT" (eye on target)—and she set very high standards for that target and gave us very large responsibilities in seeing that it was met. But she never sent us onto the field alone; she was always in the game with us.

As soon as she promoted me to head of the kitchen team, she assigned me my first major task. We needed an additional kitchen associate for the fall, and she asked me to choose one. "Whomever you would like to work with would be fine with me—it's you who will be in command, anyway, and must have someone you like and trust there," she wrote me from France that summer. I began to search but was having difficulty finding someone with the necessary experience who had the job flexibility to take two days off every month. Plenty of friends who were gourmet cooks offered their services, but we needed a professional, and in 1980, there was not the large number of trained professionals in Rhode Island that there is today. My contacts in New York and Boston were few. Just as I was beginning to feel that I might not be able to accomplish the task, Julia called me.

"I've asked someone named Susy Davidson to call you. She studied with Anne Willan at La Varenne and worked with Simca [Simone Beck]. Simca's very fond of her and she may be just who we are looking for. Talk to her and see what you think." Perhaps it's a subtle bit of leadership, but it did not go unnoticed to me. Julia did not relieve me of my responsibility to find a new associate because I hadn't accomplished what needed to be done; she left it in my hands while giving me the assistance I needed.

I liked Susy immediately when she called, and could tell that she was more than qualified to be a JC associate. I relayed my opinion to Julia, and we agreed to give Susy a trial run. That fall when Susy joined us, I quickly saw that she was truly qualified for the job. Moreover, the minute she walked into the prep kitchen, I was immediately aware of just how eager she was to do her job well—and how resourceful she was. On the mornings that Julia was on live, we were at the studio no later than 5:30 a.m., so there was no time to eat at the hotel beforehand. Not a problem. There was always a huge buffet waiting for us; Paul could have his banana and Julia usually some melon and maybe an English muffin, "well toasted, please." I had relayed this information to Susy during our phone conversation, and at five-thirty that morning, into the kitchen walked this tall, striking twenty-nine-year-old brunette carrying an artfully arranged platter of neatly sliced bananas, melon sections with the rind carefully cut away, and a thoughtful assortment of other fruit. Whether or not there were decorative garnishes, I don't recall; I only know it was a presentation decidedly more attractive than the simple whole banana and half melon I regularly served Paul and Julia. When had she had time? How had she found the buffet and the utensils?

"Good morning, America!" she exclaimed, lighting up the tiny kitchen with her smile. Julia had invited her to join us "on trial," and Susy came prepared to do the best job possible so that we would keep her. And she was a keeper. She became a cherished friend to Julia and still is to me today; I always think of her as Julia wrote and spoke of her: "that darling Susy."

Susy was young, effervescent, and ready to gobble up, in the dearest way, all that New York had to offer. A native of Portland, Oregon, and just back from Paris, she seemed a bit like Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina—a sweet, generous girl who had been broadly painted but not tainted with Parisian sophistication. I suspect that Susy's joie de vivre reminded Julia of herself so many years before when she had discovered the joys of Paris.

Julia queried Susy about every detail of what was going on in the Parisian food world, and Susy filled her in on who was who and what was what in culinary France. Julia would recall—as she said, with "trembling nostalgia"—her early days in Paris, when she first sampled the evocative flavors of French cuisine that had so overwhelmed her appetites. She spoke with wistful reverie of the lessons she had learned under the tutelage of chef Max Bugnard at the Paris Cordon Bleu. I didn't have much to contribute during those conversations since my one trip to France had occurred prior to my epiphanies with chicken Kiev and deep-fried parsley and I had spent more time drooling over haute couture than haute cuisine. But I was a greedy listener, and when I returned to Paris a few years later, the passion of their conversations inspired my trip. I ate in their suggested restaurants and purchased so much cookware at E. Dehillerin and foodstuffs at Fauchon that my customs inspection back in the United States was interminable.

Talking about Paris seemed to stimulate Julia's memories of the useful French
trucs
or tricks that Bugnard had shown her, and she decided she should show more of them on the show. Throughout her television and teaching career, everything Julia cooked followed the principles of classic French techniques according to Escoffier. Legendary among chefs and gourmets, George Auguste Escoffier simplified, modernized, and wrote down the lessons of haute cuisine that Antoine Carême had pioneered before him. Escoffier's 1903
Le Guide Culinaire
became and remains every serious culinary student's definitive text on how to cook. Julia's way to cook always adhered to the Escoffier method, but in the years following her original shows and initial books, she expanded her recipe repertoire to show that those techniques could and should be applied to "good, plain old cooking," whether it was American fare, Mexican cuisine, or that of Timbuktu. She made meat loaf, hash, guacamole, and hummus with the same Gallic care with which she made the staples of classic French cuisine.

When she decided to demonstrate some of the useful lessons from Chef Bugnard, she chose a French
truc
of how to make end-of-the-season, slightly over-the-hill garden peas taste sweeter by cooking them with a few of their pods and some shredded lettuce, and I ran into my first snafu as executive chef.

It was a taped segment, and that meant we needed three backups for every stage of the recipe Julia would demonstrate. The script called for her to begin by shelling a few peas and adding those to a pan of peas sitting on the stove. So we needed four times enough peas in their pods for her to shell, four times enough shelled peas to fill the pan on the stove, and one set of cooked peas to put on a serving plate. The problem was that it really was the end of the season, so we could find only enough peas in the market for one backup for every stage instead of our normal three. But it was a simple spot—what could go wrong? Scary words in television.

Paul Child offered to shell the peas and sat on a stool quietly removing the pods and then dividing the peas into the two setups. At one point, I heard him say, "Forgive me, but I'm peeing on the floor."

Excuse me? Had I heard right? I turned and immediately saw the twinkle in his eyes. He was referring to the occasional wayward pea that slipped from its pod onto the floor. He was pea-ing, not peeing, and I thought it was a terribly funny thing to say, but Julia, who usually gave such comments her great hoot of a laugh, merely smiled, and I realized it was probably a quip they had shared many times while shelling peas. I also realized that we needed those peas that were scattering hither and yon, and I crawled around on my hands and knees to capture them as they rolled under stools and nested next to cable wires. Such is the lot of an executive chef.

With the cameras rolling, Julia shelled a few peas, put them in a pan with the ones we had placed there, added pea pods and a healthy handful of finely shredded lettuce, and then something—I don't recall what—went wrong. The director yelled, "Cut," and asked that she start again. Starting again meant using the last of the pea crop. If something went wrong with the next take, we had no backup, and directors and producers don't want to hear that the segment has to be scrapped because someone (me) has run out of peas. Furthermore, when the director tells the talent to start again, he or she means immediately. Time is money in network television.

Stagehands rushed our one and only backup to the set and then raced the "used" peas to the prep kitchen, where I tossed them out onto a cookie sheet. As Julia began her second take, we began frantically and painstakingly to pick pea pods and tiny shreds of lettuce out of the peas that she had started to cook in the first take. Again, after making it through the addition of lettuce and pods to the second pan of peas, something went wrong, and we whisked
those
peas back to the kitchen for lettuce removal. That oh-so-simple spot took five takes, and today I have a Pavlovian reaction to cooking old peas: I add the lettuce and pods to the peas and then immediately pick them out.

"Hooray! We did it," Julia said, enthusiastically cheering her team for hitting the target in spite of the chaos. It was, of course, what she expected her team to do, and no more than she herself always did. What felt so good about her response to overcoming what could have been a failure was the way she acknowledged that it was a team effort. Other than having us jump on the field in a large pig pile, she couldn't have done more than exclaim, "We did it!"

No segment we did for
Good Morning America
gave us more trouble or more satisfaction than the one on the complex making of a Tarte Tatin. The famous upside-down apple dessert, known classically as
tarte des demoiselles Tatin
in honor of its creators, the spinster Tatin sisters, is a lovely dessert with a good story. Supposedly, the two Loire River restaurateurs forgot to put the pastry in the bottom of the pan before layering the apples in it, so they put it on top instead and reversed the dessert after it was baked. Another version of the story says the sisters dropped the tart after it was baked and it landed upside down—a more amusing story but doubtful.

Making the dessert calls for a number of steps—swaps in our case—and, because it was a taped segment, three backups for each swap. The first step is to melt sugar and butter in a cast-iron skillet until it turns to a bubbly brown caramel. The next step is to arrange several layers of sliced apples in a decorative pattern of concentric circles over the caramel, then cook and baste them with the caramel until the apples are soft and the juices are thick and syrupy. After a brief cooling period, on goes a circle of pie dough and the tart is baked until the crust is golden and the caramel rich and thick. Then the drama: turn the pan upside down on a large plate and lift it away to reveal buttery, caramelized apples sitting atop the crisp pastry crust.