Julia Child Rules (15 page)

I
N
J
ANUARY 1961
, J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY WAS INAUGURATED
. H
E WAS
only forty-three, the youngest president in history. He created the Peace Corps, cut diplomatic ties with Cuba, recovered from the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and sent nine hundred political advisors to Saigon, officially kicking off the Vietnam War. His elegant wife, Jackie, had a French maiden name and employed a French chef in the White House kitchen.

“The Twist” was one of the year’s most popular dance tunes, and Bob Dylan made his debut in Greenwich Village. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu. In October,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was in theaters,
The Dick Van Dyke Show
premiered on TV, and
Mastering the Art of French Cooking: The Only Cookbook That Explains How to Create Authentic French Dishes in
American Kitchens with American Food
*
was published to considerable fanfare.

“Probably the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on [French cuisine] was published this week, and it will probably remain as the definitive work for non-professionals … [It is] a masterpiece,” wrote Craig Claiborne in the
New York Times.
Despite those two qualifying probablys, it is a rave. James Beard, the other titan of fine dining, wrote that he only wished he’d written it.

At the same time, Paul retired from the Foreign Service, and he and Julia moved back to the States for good, moving into a big gray clapboard house on Irving Street in Cambridge, down the street from Harvard, a town they chose for its proximity to Avis.

Alas, so much has changed since then. The average American salary was about $5,000 a year.
^†
Gas cost twenty-five cents a gallon; a loaf of bread set you back twenty-one cents. The IBM Selectric typewriter, brand new that year, is now a relic. What hasn’t changed is the way Julia’s recipes still taste, the way publishing works, and the way the general public supposes it works.

Knopf, a venerable house then as now, went to great lengths to produce a beautiful book, which they then failed to promote. Even though Judith Jones, in the tradition of great editors
everywhere and for all time, was passionate about the book, Alfred Knopf himself wasn’t convinced there was an enormous market for it. The house followed the time-honored tradition of tossing it into the world and seeing if anyone would buy it.
*

In retrospect it seems like one day women—my mother being one—were reading and chortling over
The I Hate to Cook Book,
^†
throwing together the Ham-Lima Supper while mixing up a pitcher of cocktails, and the next the clouds parted and a pair of enormous dishpan hands descended from the heavens bearing a copy of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
But there were, in fact, plenty of cookbooks for the housewife-chauffeur or anyone else who was serious about cooking.
Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook,
by Louis Diat, the chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton, had just been published, as had Claiborne’s own tome,
The New York Times Cookbook.

Then as now, book tours were something that other authors always seemed to go on, and Julia and Simca, who’d come from France, set up their own, just as we all do today. In Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, they sat for interviews and did cooking demonstrations in department stores. In Pasadena, they made Roquefort quiche, fish mousse baked in a ring mold, and a Queen of Sheba chocolate cake, on a portable stove in a theater.
^‡
They repeated the same demonstration later in the afternoon. While they were in California, Julia and Paul took Simca to Disneyland. There is no record of what
La Super-Française
had to say about the Magic Kingdom or its cuisine.

The tour culminated in New York, where Julia and Simca knew exactly no one, aside from their editors at Knopf. Dione Lucas, the reigning U.S. diva of French cooking, the first female graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, who already had a few cookbooks under her belt, offered to host a dinner. Julia, who was naive in the ways of publishing, knew a thing or two about the competitive nature of chefs, and was surprised and touched by this display of generosity. Dione made filet of sole in white wine sauce, Julia and Simca prepared a boned shoulder of lamb with spinach and mushroom stuffing, and James Beard provided the guests.

Then, as now, no one was ever really sure how many copies of a book got sold. Publishers now know how many books are shipped to bookstores and Costco, but at any moment some of them may be sitting in cartons at the back of a UPS Store, on their way back to the warehouse, so the exact number is always somewhere around the number of angels you can fit on the head of a pin.
Mastering
may have sold 16,000 copies that first year, or maybe 20,000. In 1962, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and snagged 35,000 copies, but BOMC printed their own, cheaper, less stupendous edition, and so once again, who knows how many “real” books sold? The book only became an “instant” bestseller forty-eight years later, after the release of
Julie & Julia,
when it sold 22,000 copies in a single week. Give or take.

As a writer, I want to say the number of people who bought and used the book matters, but the truth is that without TV Julia Child would have gone the way of, well, Simone Beck. Simca cooked, taught, and wrote books for the rest of her life,
*
but few people who aren’t committed cooks know her name. Or the aforementioned Dione Lucas, who had not one but two cooking shows, predating Julia by a good ten years. But Lucas, whose technique was flawless, was severe and a little scary. James Beard, “The Dean of American Cookery,”
^†
who was also a good decade ahead of Julia when it came to educating the everyday, can-opening, frozen-thawing, mix-using American-cooking ignoramuses on the deep, simple joys of making and eating good food—and who had studied acting in New York before opening a catering company, which then led to the publication of his first cookbook in 1940,
Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés
—also couldn’t quite make it on television. Like Julia, Beard was warm and charismatic, and he loved everything associated with food and cooking, but his 1946 show
I Love to Eat
suffered on several fronts. Whereas Julia would put instruction first, Beard was more interested in entertainment value: Without a moment’s thought, he drew lines with blue ink in the veined Roquefort cheese to make it read better on camera and also had the makeup artist pencil in “hair” on top of his head. Then there
was the overacting. But a main part of his problem was simply that the time wasn’t right.

But by the early sixties, the time was right. Julia simply lucked out in the way that James Beard did not. Cultural historians posit that it was because there was a French chef in the White House, or because Upper Bohemians were suddenly going to Europe, but I suspect it was the housewife/chauffeurs, the same ones who’d purchased the
I Hate to Cook Book
in droves and were sniffing around a new book called
The Feminine Mystique,
*
and starting to think
Now that you mention it, I hate that the highlight of my day is ironing the sheets.
Then Julia showed up with the grand, life-consuming distraction called French cooking, and the housewife/chauffeurs were, for a time, intrigued, not to say placated.

The show premiered in 1963, and by January 1965 all ninety stations on the public television network were carrying
The French Chef.
Local stores began stocking and selling out of the utensils Julia used on the show, and the
Boston Globe
called her “the talk of New England.” Julia was not without her detractors. Someone concerned with hygiene criticized her for tasting with the same spoon with which she stirred, and more than one teetotaler thought there was altogether too much mention of wine, which was actually Gravy Master mixed with water.

WGBH ordered three pilots of
The French Chef
in late 1962, in response to Julia’s appearance on a book-chat show called
I’ve Been Reading.
Public television in the early 1960s was educational television, the redheaded stepchild of what would soon be called the boob tube. WGBH was so little watched that when Julia showed up to discuss
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and, with eggs, a big copper bowl, and balloon whisk—strange implements, those—proceeded to whip up an omelet instead, the twenty-seven fan letters that “poured” into the station launched Julia to celebrity status, and the station, anxious to please those twenty-seven viewers, as well as the hundreds of others who had not written in, ordered three pilots of
The French Chef.

At the end of her life, Julia would remember that first year of taping as being the hardest she’d every worked in her life (recall, please, the long hours she put in on The Book), taping thirty-four episodes in six months. She was paid $50 per show, which she spent mostly on ingredients.

“We’re doing making your own onion soup today on
The French Chef,
” Julia says, rather awkwardly, at the beginning of “Your Own French Onion Soup.”

The first third of the episode is devoted to chopping onions, which can’t be accomplished without the proper type of knife,
honed to the proper sharpness. Julia loved her knives. She preferred an eleven-inch chef’s knife of carbon steel. She looks straight into the camera to emphasize an important distinction: “People may try to tell you that the most important thing is for a knife to
hold
its edge … but really a good knife needs to
take
an edge.” And for that she recommends basic carbon steel. Then she whips out her butcher’s steel, which she loved almost as much as her knife. Then she shows us how to sharpen the knife on the steel, taking care not to “cut your hand off.”

“The knife is so sharp so that when you feel it, it feels very sharp,” she tells us. It’s not the first time she will make absolutely no sense. And yet we are reassured. Also, a little turned on by all this knife play. There is no sawing away at the side of an onion with a dull little paring knife for Julia. Even chopping onions can be exciting, especially if you’re a swashbuckler like she is.

“Knives are your life in the kitchen,” she says. “You have to care for them like a baby.” You must never put it in the dishwasher, or throw it into a drawer with other utensils, for fear of dulling the edge. She recommends a magnetic strip hung on the wall. The camera goes in for a close-up as she whacks the blade a little too forcefully onto the strip.

She is a little stern on the matter of onion slicing. You must learn to do it right, if you want to be serious. It may take one or two weeks to master, but you should be able to chop two to three pounds of onions in five minutes. “If you’re serious about cooking, this is the dog work you should practice,” she says, but then reassures us that it will all be worth it, because once you are faced
with a daunting recipe for, say, French Onion Soup, that calls for about a pound of onions per person, “you’ll enjoy it because it’s something you enjoy and take pride in.” “You’ll notice I didn’t cry at all,” she says, triumphant. “That’s because I had a great sharp knife … and the juice didn’t splatter up in my eyes.”

Perhaps more exciting than knife sharpening is cooking down the onions, then browning them, which is accomplished with half a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. She tips the saucepan toward the camera so we can see how those pounds of onions have shrunk to perhaps a handful of beautifully browned threads. “Look at this! It’s amazing … That’s because onions have so much water in them,” she explains.