Julia Child Rules (11 page)

Because we could have gone out to eat. Because I’m the kind of person who memorized something Tim Kreider wrote in an op-ed called “The Busy Trap” for the
New York Times
: “The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” Because we were in Paris, and trying to cook this stupid fish was Too. Much. Work. Did Julia really think this was fun? She was insane.

By the time we finally set about poaching the fish, in a skillet and not the suggested baking dish, because, as you know, we were ovenless American cooks, I was losing the will. Kathy was not losing the will. Kathy had uncorked the wine and was merrily chopping the shallots and floating various theories about the mental state of the screaming neighbor.

I leaned out the window and watched while a gaggle of gorgeous young Romanians in skinny jeans and roguishly knotted scarves left the embassy. It occurred to me that in our eagerness
to experience French food the way Julia did when she was learning to cook, we forgot one major ingredient, for which there was no substitution: Paul. Paul! Julia was practically a newlywed when she moved to Paris. She was cooking for Paul, the love of her life, and Kathy and I were cooking for the heck of it. True food people like to say that to be a great chef, or even merely a good one, you must cook with love. It feels churlish to think too deeply about what this means, but I believe my tortured ambivalence gives me license. Are they talking about love for the people for whom you’re cooking? Love of the art and discipline required? Love of ingredients?
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Or, to paraphrase Bill Buford, are the people who cook with love cooking in order to be loved? It hardly matters when we’re talking about Julia Child, because she cooked with every kind of cooking love out there.

“If we could just have the kitchen and the bedroom, that would be all we need,” Julia said, wistfully, to Ruth Reichl, who was interviewing her for the
Smithsonian
magazine, as her iconic kitchen was being packed up for its trip to Washington D.C., where it would be on display at the National Museum of American History. The year was 2001; Julia was eighty-nine and a widow. Paul had died seven years earlier, in 1994.

In her piece Reichl commented that even though Paul had been gone for so long, he remained so present for Julia, and it felt, a little eerily, as if he would walk through the door at any minute.

Admirers of Julia also tend to admire the forty-eight-yearlong love affair that was her marriage to Paul Child. I’ve been married and divorced and have lived with Jerrod, my beloved, for a dozen years and prefer it that way, so I’m either the perfect person or the worst person to parse what made the Childs’ marriage work so well that Julia, at nearly ninety, was still thinking about her long-gone love in terms of the pleasures of the bedroom. The desire—and ability—to see your partner in a sexual light decade in, decade out, may be the only real requirement for a happy marriage, but in the event it really is more complicated than that, here are a few of Julia’s other secrets.

Whatever you do, don’t settle.

Over the past few years there have been a spate of hard-nosed books telling it like it is: If marriage is high on your adult To Do list, you should snag the first reasonably employed guy who doesn’t live with his parents. No one and nothing is perfect, and holding out for someone on the order of Paul Child only puts you further down the road toward having to freeze your eggs or dabbling in animal hoarding.

Hooking your cart to someone you “love” because he rescues you from being single is a bad idea for so many reasons, but the one that concerns us here is this: Had Julia said yes to rich, boring Harrison Chandler—who was still interested in courting her after the war, when the OSS was dissolved and Julia had no choice but to return to Pasadena (now at the ripe old age of thirty-three, an old maid in full) to care for her crotchety, right-wing father—she would have been settling, and she would have been miserable. Chandler, a man of her class, who could have given her a comfortable life and perhaps even children, was not the man for her. Had she married him, most likely she would have gone on to become a Pasadena society lady, active at the local tennis club and in community theater, and maybe a little too fond of mid-afternoon martinis. She would have languished, her genius never realized.

My feminist within would love to be able to make a case for Julia’s having discovered her singular gift for cooking, teaching, “cookery-bookery,” as she called it, and her genius level TVQ, on her own, but it’s impossible. Paul was the final and mostimportant piece of Julia’s self-actualization. It’s not a stretch to say he gave her herself, and Julia was well aware of it. She had no doubt that without Paul she would have failed to find her life’s purpose and passion.

Paul did much more than introduce Julia to the glories of Paris. She may have had the fancy college degree, but Paul
possessed the genuine love of learning. He taught Julia to love Balzac, which she read in the original French, and while she made dinner he’d often read to her.
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She was well aware of the way in which Paul had and was schooling her. In a letter to Avis she wrote, vis-à-vis her intellectual rigor, “except for La Cuisine, I find I have to push myself to build up a thirst for how the atomic bomb works, or a study of Buddhism, etc.”

Be prepared to dust off the pom-poms.

I’m as guilty as anyone of making perhaps too much about Paul’s enrichment of Julia’s life. Perhaps it’s because
she
never failed to give him credit. But in her continuous praise and expression of gratitude, as constant as a heartbeat, we see what she gave him: full-time access to her
joie de vivre
, sense of humor, and optimism.

For Paul, it must be said, could be a sourpuss. When they met, he was going through a full-fledged middle-age crisis, and he despaired that he had done so many interesting things in his life but had nothing to show for it. He was conflicted about his art, his relationship with Charlie, his twin, who he felt was the picture of success, and his various Foreign Service jobs, where he felt underappreciated.

Paul was more like an average person, going about his life in a light drizzle of dissatisfaction, with a few sun breaks of joy. But Julia shored him up, buoyed his spirits, endlessly championed what was great about him, and ignored the other stuff.

Please appreciate the word endlessly.

Part of the secret of their great marriage—or any great marriage—is shoring up the other guy, regardless. You are always not simply on his (or her) team, you’re his head cheerleader. Julia had Paul’s back in a way no one else did, not even his twin brother. Even when they were going through the “or for worse” part of the vows, Julia was devoted to doing everything she could to move them into “the better.”

Before Paul retired in 1961, the same year
Mastering
was published, and the unlikely switcheroo occurred, where he devoted his life to her career, Julia was the perfect Foreign Service man’s wife, attending countless cocktail parties, dinners, receptions, and cultural exhibits on her husband’s arm; hosting luncheons and dinners—sometimes every evening, depending on which mucky-muck was in town; and making an effort always to be positive, charming, and full of laughs. Once, she returned home from her morning shopping around 11:30 a.m., intending to cook all day, and had a message from her husband that he was bringing home members of the visiting U.S. Fencing Team for lunch. Every dish in the place was dirty, the beds were unmade, books and papers were strewn around the living
room, and clouds of cat hair scudded around the baseboards. She tidied up and put up a pot of
Soupe de Pistou
without a syllable of complaint.

Can you imagine doing all this for someone you’d settled for? He better damn well be the love of your life.

Practice husbandcentricity.

In fairness to all of us with children, Julia was able to tend to Paul the way she did because they didn’t have children, only a cat, Minou. Thus, her attention was divided only between her work and her man, not, like so many of us, between our work, our man, and the impossible demands of contemporary hothouse parenting.

This may seem obvious, but if you want to have a successful, world-class marriage, you need to pay attention, and I mean a lot of attention, to your spouse. I know not one, not two, but
three
grown men who confessed to having shed a tear during the movie
Avatar.
All of them cited having been wrecked by the Navi greeting “
Oel ngati kame
” (“I see you.”)
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It could be because the greeting was delivered mostly by Neytiri, the hot Navi chick played by Zoe Saldana, or because these guys, all husbands and fathers of young children, felt less like men and lovers and more like the unpaid nanny. Nothing bums out the man of the house more than being the object of your lust and
adoration, only to be transformed overnight into a pair of extra hands once the baby is born.

When people say marriage takes work, this is the work they mean, taking the time every single day to actually see the person you loved enough to marry. The best places to do this? The kitchen and the bedroom.

P
OSTWAR
P
ARIS WASN’T ALL CRÊPES SUZETTES AND LADIES SWANNING
around in nip-waisted dresses. Not surprisingly, we have the movies to blame for this impression. Pretty much every American movie set during the early 1950s in Paris achieves its historic magic by putting the actors in fedoras and parking a few beautiful old Peugeots on the street and calling it authentic, which it was, minus the shell shock and pieces of cardboard people were still lashing to their feet in place of shoes. During the first years Paul and Julia lived there, there were endless shortages; days would pass without enough coal for the stove, so that preparing a simple lamb chop and a pan of peas was an ordeal. There
was a fierce drought in the summer of 1949; vegetable crops and vineyards were withered and wasted by September, causing a steep rise in produce prices. Then, just when Paris seemed to be regaining her mojo as a world-class city, the General Strikes of 1951
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meant weeks without public transportation. Paul and Julia rose to the occasion, employing the Blue Flash to shuttle their friends and Paul’s colleagues at the embassy wherever they needed to go.

But Julia was always at her best when she had to buck up and make do. Whether she was aware of it or not, a life of ease failed to bring out her best qualities. Difficult circumstances never seemed a reason not to do what you wanted to do, and after a few months at Le Cordon Bleu, with its own shortages of basic equipment and ingredients, cooking became the only thing Julia thought about, aside from Paul. Her days began at 6:30 a.m. and ended at midnight. She cooked in class all morning, returned to her Roo de Loo attic kitchen and cooked between classes, went back to Le Cordon Bleu in the afternoon, where she paid extra for special demonstrations, then came home in the evening to serve dinner and entertain. As we all know from
Julie & Julia,
most days she and Paul had a nooner.

The making of Julia Child is such an oft-told tale that it bears reminding ourselves that Julia’s enthusiasm and commitment to cooking was a little bizarre. We tend to forget, I think, that she did not have a Julia Child to inspire her to scale the Everest that is
Pâté de Canard en Croûte
. Few women of her class
in Paris did their own cooking. Most bourgeois Parisian households had live-in maids and at least a part-time cook. What Julia was doing in the attic kitchen on the Roo do Loo was to her time and place as a friend’s architect husband who makes charcuterie
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is to ours: cool, but a little over the top. That the apartment Kathy and I rented in one of the best zip codes in Paris didn’t have an oven proved that while the French revere
haute cuisine,
everyday people aren’t really expected to master cooking it.

When Julia wasn’t cooking she attended luncheons and lectures at Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a ladies culinary club that existed primarily because no women were allowed in Le Cercle des Gourmets. In France, not only were men the only humans who truly knew how to cook, but also they were, apparently, the only ones who knew how to eat. Normally, Julia wasn’t a fan of all-female groups—perhaps she’d had enough after her all-girls high school and college—but so eager was she to avail herself of every culinary opportunity in Paris, she thought
Why not?
Members were invited to show up at 10:00 a.m. on the days of their luncheons, and Julia rarely missed the opportunity.

Around the same time, Julia met Simone Beck. Simca,
^†
whose “family” recipes she’d learned at the knee of the family’s cook in Normandy, had already published one slim book about prunes and prune liquors, and when she and Julia became acquainted,
she was working on another book with Louisette Bertholle, translating French recipes for an American audience. The first draft had been rejected by the original American publisher, who felt it was too dry, and lacking in any background or instruction in French attitudes about food and cooking. They needed an American who understood the degree to which American cooks were clueless when it came to
La Cuisine,
and Julia agreed to see what she could do in order to make the book more accessible, i.e., create the “blah-blah” (Louisette’s term for the friendly background explanations Americans seemed to require).

Meanwhile, the three also hatched a plan to give cooking lessons to Americans. They named themselves L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, Paul designed their stylish badges (the same one Julia faithfully wore on
The French Chef),
and they corralled three students for their first class. They were in business!

I must pause here for a side note: How on earth did three wealthy women who grew up in households with at least one live-in cook come to focus on the humble needs of middle-class women like my mother, who was required by the middle-class mores of her day to produce breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year? Simca had the classic French aristocratic upbringing, including the requisite servants and English nannies, while Julia experienced the more rustic Southern California version of same. Even Avis DeVoto, Julia’s pen pal and confidant, herself an avid cook, could pursue her culinary passion because a maid came in three days a week. Mary would come at 10:00 a.m., clean the house, and
serve dinner at six-thirty, “a perfectly horrible hour,” Avis once groused. Furthermore, Louisette, the weak link in the collaboration, was unable to share Julia and Simca’s fierce time-consuming obsession, because her impending divorce and financial instability impelled her to think about something other than writing a cookbook. She had the usual messy life, in other words.

Even the now infamous rallying cry from the introduction to
Mastering
—“This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent–chauffeur–den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat”—presumes that the “occasion” during which a regular housewife and mother can be “unconcerned” with all of those tasks at once is more frequent than the reality, which was close to never.

And yet, they had to address their book to someone, and the American “housewife-chauffeur,” who read women’s magazines and whose highest culinary aspirations consisted of entering the Pillsbury Bake-Off,
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must have seemed as good a person as any. What could they possibly have known of the servantless American cook? Other than, like the savages in deepest Africa who were the object of Christian missionary zeal, she was in desperate need of enlightenment.

Julia’s true motives might be that of the natural-born educator that she proved to be, or maybe something more complicated—there but for the grace of Paul Child go I—but in any case she gets a pass, in part because we adore her beyond all reason, and also because she never asked anyone to do anything that she hadn’t done at least a hundred times herself.

For the next eight years, give or take, Julia hurled herself into what she called “cookery-bookery.” There is no other appropriate noun. She and Simca (and sometimes Louisette) cooked and tasted and re-cooked and re-tasted and re-re-cooked and re-re-tasted enough recipes to comprise a first-draft manuscript of more than five hundred pages—and this covered only soups and poultry. They worked with the zeal of law school students determined to graduate at the top of their class, cooking and writing upwards of eighty hours a week.

Simca and Julia grew to love each other like sisters. Theirs was a relationship of deep devotion interrupted by the occasional homicidal fantasy. Simca’s bursts of irrationality combined with her general lack of tact and attention to details tried the endless patience of the organized, methodical Julia.

Their need for each other was like something out of an O. Henry story: Without Simca, Julia would not have access to the hundreds of authentic French recipes that only Simca—or someone like her—could provide; and without Julia, Simca had no access to an American sensibility that could make sense of her classic, complex, never-before-deconstructed dishes.

Julia dubbed Simca
La Super-Française,
and she was, indeed, one of those energetic, exacting, relentless European women who, after a while, can drive even someone as sunny and diplomatic as Julia Child around the bend. One of the things that irritated Julia beyond measure, aside from Simca’s habit of sputtering “But it’s not French!” when there was some aspect of a recipe of which she disapproved for no reason that she could articulate, was that, like almost all French women of a certain age, she deferred to men.

Over the eight years it took to complete the book, they prepared, adjusted, tasted, and re-tasted hundreds if not thousands of recipes, and yet, if they found themselves at odds over say, a tomato sauce in which Julia experimented by adding green peppers or carrots, Simca would insist upon deferring to some doddering one-star male chef to settle the matter, rather than relying on their own findings. This drove Julia exceptionally mad, since behind every
Guide Michelin
chef there was a woman, usually a precious, four foot five, cataract-ridden old granny from whom he’d filched his best recipes.

Julia was fortunate in carrying the genes for both Yankee self-reliance and the American West pioneering spirit, and she believed completely in their own “operational proof,” a term she’d picked up from Paul, who learned it from his physicist father. She tried to impose her American character on Simca, encouraging her to stick up for herself and to trust her own experience.

The general wisdom about following your bliss suggests that most likely you’ll be happy pursuing a field for which you have a natural aptitude, but Julia Child wasn’t a natural cook, nor for a long time was she even a good cook. It’s an imaginative exercise to see past the formidable expert she became, to imagine her in her cold Paris apartment, bent over her typewriter, struggling to write the recipes that would one day comprise
Mastering,
which for years she called her “scratches.”

One of the reasons she felt the need to devote an entire morning to writing a recipe for cooking lobster, as a way of documenting exactly what needed to be done, step by step, was so that she could follow that particular trail back into the woods the next time she wanted to make it. She needed to have a perfect, highly detailed recipe because she feared she lacked perfect culinary pitch. Had she been a more instinctive, “natural” cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death. The recipes are so infamously long because Julia herself required such details.

Evidence of her obsession, and the ecstasy it produced, would fill an entire book, and did. Page after page of
As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto
is filled with lengthy passages attesting to Julia’s near-manic joy about food: eating it, cooking it, and everything associated with it: “We also ran into a beautiful
Bordeaux 1929, that is just perfectly matured, and is everything one reads about that a wonderful Bordeaux should be but rarely tastes. It is really something to swoon over, the wonderful rich exciting bouquet, that excitement as it fills the mouth … I’m swooning over the typewriter just at the thought of them.”

In 1952, while Julia was still hoping, somehow, to make a career around cooking, she wrote a fan letter to a journalist and historian named Bernard DeVoto in response to a piece he’d written in
Harper’s Magazine
bemoaning the mediocre stainless-steel knives found in most American kitchens. So grateful was Julia that someone had brought this egregious problem to light, she sent along a “nice little French model” from her
batterie de cuisine.

Avis DeVoto, Bernard’s wife, handled all of his correspondence. The thought of the gifted, sage, and canny Avis handling her husband’s fan mail a la Vera Nabokov who, I read once, also escorted her husband around when it rained, to save him having to clutter his mind with learning to open an umbrella, is another rant for another time.
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In any case, Avis answered Julia’s letter, and the two became devoted pen pals, then best friends, confidantes, and colleagues. Julia would refer to her, alternately, as her “wet nurse” and her “mentor.”