Julia Child Rules (13 page)

Is there something you’re dying to attempt, but you manage to talk yourself out of it because it seems like too much work, or will take too much time and discipline? This is your inner flimsy talking. Pat her on the head, but don’t cater to her. You’ll be happier for it.

Do everything humanly possible to avoid housework.

Part of the immense gastro-cultural divide between a hallowed Michelin star–studded French chef and the Servantless American Cook was that the chef devoted every waking hour to his art, and of course had someone at home to cook for him and care for him, while the SAC, as well as her family, which she was there
to serve, considered cooking to be part of her many chores. You know, the ones that are never done, per the old saying.

Over the years, so much snark has been directed at those Franco-American Spaghetti, frozen French cut string bean–serving housewives, who really can’t be blamed for wanting to make their lives a little easier. We are now enlightened, and know about using the best fresh produce, using the caramelized nubs of meat left in the pan to make a sauce, the miracle of cooking something down to intensify the flavor, and all the basics instilled in our grandmothers and mothers by Julia, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and all the other kitchen heroes who rescued America from Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Fish Sticks and Tang. But the end of a long day is still the end of a long day—ask any Busy Stay-at-Home Mom.
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And often the impulse to order a pizza is overwhelming, especially since it’s all your kids will eat anyway.

That said, if you want to devote any time to cooking seriously, or doing anything seriously for that matter, something has got to go, and that something is housework. If hiring someone to come in every other week means giving up your daily latte or buying shoes at PayLess, do it. You are giving someone else gainful employment, escaping the admonition of V. I. Lenin, who railed that “petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades” women, and being like Julia, who did as little as possible.

A
PRIL IN
P
ARIS, IT TURNS OUT, IS A LOT LIKE
A
PRIL IN
P
ORTLAND
. The drear and rain don’t seem like weather, changeable and possibly exciting, but like an occupy movement, here to stay. Kathy and I took the Metro to the Bastille and walked through Place des Vosges to the Marais, having conceived a need to stroll through one of our favorite neighborhoods on the way to the famed E. Dehillerin, about a mile away on the rue Coquillière, where Julia spent a lot of her inheritance outfitting her world-class
batterie de cuisine.
Despite the slanting rain, we had umbrellas—and I had brought along a brown GORE-TEX jacket (with hood) that was so utilitarian it caused several shopkeepers and waiters to address me in German—and we saw no reason to change our itinerary. Especially since you can’t eat as we had been eating and still expect to have anything resembling a waist.

The great unspoken dilemma of cooking as Julia would wish us to is that, arteriosclerosis aside, if you sit quietly you can feel your muffin top growing. Until the very end of her life, when she looks not fat, but rectangular, like a refrigerator box, Julia was slim-waisted as an athlete. Even on
The French Chef
, in her early fifties, with her cotton blouse around her midriff, her apron strings are tied neatly across her flat belly.
*

I have many slender friends who identify as foodies and who spend an inordinate amount of time cooking, but you also never see them eating anything. One acquaintance, who resembles a Modigliani model, never visits anyone without bringing a homemade cheesecake or batch of lemon bars. Another is famed for her stupendous Italian sausage three-cheese lasagna, made with whole-fat ricotta; the last time she served it, she stuck to the dark leafy salad with a whisper of vinaigrette. I’m mystified by this behavior, and suspect it may be cuisinerexia, where the satisfaction is to be found in working your ass off making terrific food and then denying yourself the pleasure of eating it, but at least it makes sense why these women are thin.

But Julia cooked all day, tasting everything, and also ate breakfast, tucked into a nice lunch, and cooked dinner for her husband, as well as the cavalcade of visiting dignitaries, cultural attachés, and diplomats he was obligated to entertain. People who like to eat are the best people, and Julia was one of the best people of all, and Kathy and I wanted to be part of that tribe,
and so we cooked and tasted and ate, and the pounds threatened to pile on like a passel of drunken brothers-in-law at the annual Thanksgiving family football game.

How did Julia manage it? When posed with that question, Julia advocated moderation in all things, even moderation, and we believed her. How did we manage to overlook the fact that she was six foot three—bigger than most men—and probably had the metabolism to match, bringing to mind my six foot two inches father who, the moment he accrued an inch of spare tire, gave up the bowl of Dried Planter’s Peanuts that accompanied his nightly martini for a week or so and off it came.

At any rate, Kathy and I are both a mere five foot eight, and to counteract the effects of all the round, yellow, buttery things we were cooking and devouring—various omelets, the Gateau de Crêpes à la Florentine
*
—we vowed that during the day, if we weren’t cooking, we would be walking.

The Marais was crowded, with tourists and Parisians and a gang of Orthodox men and boys in blue suits and big hats and with long Pe’ot on their way to temple. Not blocks from the shop, we passed a girl sobbing on the sidewalk, surrounded by two women who stood very close to her. They were all the same height, all with the same dark hair and dark, chic French clothes, all very upright. It’s unusual to see a Parisian sobbing on the street; we walked on and at the intersection saw lying on the
ground a tall, thin young man who looked as if he had keeled over and hit his head on the curb. An emergency vehicle was there, and two policemen were there, both sort of leaning over and peeking at the side of his face. No one touched him. Was he hit by a car? An aneurysm, maybe? He looked like a tree felled in the forest, and he was clearly dead.

It was Saturday, and E. Dehillerin was packed with shoppers and oglers and their dripping umbrellas. The business is 193 years old, the building much older. Chefs bring their copper pots here to be retinned. The raw-beamed ceilings soar, the wooden floorboards groan and creak, and the aisles are narrow enough to make a claustrophobe break out in a sweat. There’s a mildew-smelling house-parts place in Portland that sells doorknobs and light fixtures foraged from condemned houses and Dehillerin smells the same, and shares the same spirit of We Are above Displaying Any of These Treasures to Their Best Advantage.

It was all there: the stuff Julia geeked out over, everything you would ever need to cook anything, and a lot of things whose uses you wouldn’t understand even after someone explained them to you. The pots, sauté pans, skillets, roasting pans, and sauciers. The aspic molds and soufflé dishes. The enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens and ceramic baking dishes. The colanders, couscoussiers, and crêpe pans. The poultry scissors and brass-plated duck press. An entire aisle of pitted wooden shelves displaying rows of what appear to be tin loaf pans filled with every kind of knife on earth. A wall of whisks, separated according to size—pinky finger to baseball bat—in individual wooden cubbies.

A cream-colored pegboard, not unlike the one Paul made for Julia, rose to the ceiling; dozens of the famous Dehillerin tin-lined copper pots hung in haphazard lines. I pulled down a saucepan, appreciated its heft. There was no price tag on it, but I know from my online research that this size runs about sixty-five euros ($85).

As it happened, I had just finished reading (and loving)
My Kitchen Wars,
Betty Fussell’s great caustic memoir of marriage and cooking. Fussell, a cookbook author, food historian, and, by her own admission, angry, overeducated housewife, is only a year younger than my mother would have been, and
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
changed her life, just as it did my mother’s.

She raved about how Julia gave her, and all of her friends, permission to treat cooking—“the one activity, besides tennis, in which housewives were encouraged to excel”—as an art. She wrote about how Julia insisted that the servantless American cook have proper, professional tools, sending Betty and her friends dashing in their suburban station wagons into Manhattan from the New Jersey suburbs to buy tin-lined copper pots, with the requisite minimum one-eighth-inch-thick bottoms. “This was no undertaking for the poor,” wrote Betty Fussell.

Standing in Dehillerin, holding the copper saucepan, I remember reading that section and thinking,
Huh, really? We weren’t rich,
and then coming to a sentence farther down on the page: “Out went the Revere Ware at the first Hospital Charity Sale.”

Not at our house it didn’t,
I thought. Even though we had a dishwasher, every night I washed our Revere Ware by hand, “to keep it nice.” Nice being maintaining the cheap copper wash on the stainless-steel bottom. My mother watched
The French Chef
in the den of our Southern California tract house in Whittier, with a steno pad on her knee. In the cupboard of her orange and yellow kitchen, gold-veined mirror tiles installed over the sink to “open up the room,” her copy of
Mastering
had folded-back corners and wine-stained pages, just as did the copies of the more educated, much more sophisticated Fussell.

The allure of Julia Child, my mother once said to me, was that she believed in doing things right. My mother cooked like a mad fool with her Revere Ware and “oven-safe” Pyrex baking dishes, and even though I longed only for Taco Night, I knew my mother’s food, her coq au vin and veal scallops, her beef bourguignon and Dover sole sautéed in some damn thing, was good. I imagine it’s a tribute to both Julia and my mother that she managed it with such crappy, low-brow cookware.

I put the saucepan back on the pegboard, although for a minute I thought about putting it on my head, as I used to my mother’s Revere Ware, when I was in a mood. I remembered that my own daughter used to wear my Revere Ware on her head as well. Was it genetic? Or a silent, subconscious reminder from little daughters to dutiful mothers throughout the ages: Remember the silly fun to be had with these pots and pans?

There’s no checkout counter to speak of at Dehillerin. There are frazzled Frenchmen with rolled cuffs and stubby pencils
behind their ears who figure out how much you owe on a scrap of paper and then send you with your items and the bill to a desk, over which hangs a faded black-and-white still of Julia as The French Chef, behind not one, but two protective plastic covers.

At the end of 1956, Paul was summoned home by the State Department for home leave, and he and Julia resettled in the house they’d purchased just after they were married on the outskirts of Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. Julia used some of her inheritance money to renovate the kitchen: new gas range, dishwasher, and a “pig” (an in-sink garbage disposal), readying herself for the final push in completing what she and Simca had come to call, simply, The Book. Simca came from France,
^†
and they worked fourteen-hour days, completing the final poultry recipes and retesting some of the first sauce recipes they’d concocted five years earlier. They enjoyed that special hell reserved for people who’ve spent so long on a project that the sheer effort of creating it has forced them to evolve into such different people
from the ones who’d launched into it years earlier; all the early work, once thought to be excellent, is seen for what it is: the work of someone just starting out.

At the same time, prompted by both Avis and the people at Houghton Mifflin, Julia tried to place some of their recipes with
Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal,
and other women’s magazines. Julia gave it a shot, but she disparaged the “ladies magaziney” approach to a lot of cooking—like using a paper bag to dredge a piece of poultry in flour instead of just using your hands—and she was disappointed when she found no takers. Even her simplest recipes were deemed too difficult. Editors replied saying that not only were Julia’s highly detailed, complex instructions a waste of time but also in some cases they were, frankly, a little demented.

One of her original motivations in writing the book was to clarify and unpack confusing instructions that had become accepted as part of cookbook vernacular. “Brown the chicken” means what, exactly? “Sauté the mushrooms”: Is that like browning the mushrooms in the same way you brown the chicken? Do you cover the pan? Do you stir them or bounce them around, or what? “Add the cream and wine”: Which one goes first or does it matter? Do you stir them in?

In her recipes, “detailed” and “complicated” as they were, Julia was attempting to banish forever the vague language that tripped up home cooks, giving them a way to re-create the same perfect dish now and forever more. Before Julia, recipes were not unlike the one for gingerbread that M.F.K. Fisher rhapsodizes
about in
Serve It Forth.
After the “old black honey, the older and blacker the better” is heated and combined with flour, the cook is instructed to put the resulting paste in a cold place for as long as she can.
*
When she can stand it no longer, she retrieves the bowl, adds the rest of the ingredients, and then is instructed to beat it “for a painfully long time.”

That said, as right as Julia would turn out to be, she wasn’t always as in touch with her audience as she imagined herself to be. While magazine and book editors tended to view housewives as being only a few IQ points smarter than a well-trained Labrador retriever, and with much less daring,
^†
Julia sometimes overestimated their dedication and underestimated their degree of squeamishness.
^‡
In her effort to help home cooks with their pressed duck, she suggested that since it was unlikely they would be able to find a duck that had been suffocated rather than shot—there is too much blood loss when they are shot; duck blood is necessary for enriching the taste of the sauce—“go ahead as so many French restaurants do now, and add fresh pig’s blood mixed with wine to the duck press.” A terrific suggestion, had her goal been to create a nation of vegetarians.

The first deadline for The Book was February 24, 1958. The official title was
French Cooking for the American Kitchen,
and it was nearly eight hundred pages long.