Julia Child Rules (17 page)

If you’re over, say, forty, you know some things. Citing the accomplishments of Bill Gates and the Beatles, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book
Outliers,
posits that it takes practicing for 10,000 hours to become an expert. Why throw away what you’ve become at least good enough at to be a newbie at something else? Even though it sounds all life-affirming and proactive, it feels like just one more case of discouraging women from owning who they are. And if there’s any doubt, consider that reinvention is not something pressed on men.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t make a change; be Julia, and slide into something challenging and novel, but not completely out of your wheelhouse.

Julia, on TV, was the sum of all of the Julias she had been: the popular girl in high school; the crazy college roommate; the emperor on stage, hamming it up; the dizzy newlywed hurling herself into Parisian culture and French cuisine; the cookbook
writer; the scientist and educator. When she first saw herself on camera, she was appalled, calling herself Mrs. Steam Engine. She was always trying to improve her ability to move around the set, explain the steps while handling the ingredients, and make eye contact with the camera. Notes from producers said things like “Stop gasping” and “Wipe brow,” but no one ever suggested she do anything that wasn’t in keeping with who she was.

Find yourself a Paul Child.

The French Chef,
which aired nationally through 1973, first in black and white and then in color (the ubiquitous mid-gray-toned cotton blouse was revealed to be a nice French blue), only
wished
it had had a shoestring on which to be produced. The budget pretty much consisted of the money to pay the light bill. Each show took roughly nineteen hours of pre-production, which consisted of Julia and Paul at home in their kitchen, breaking down each recipe into individual movements and points of instruction, which he would then time with his stopwatch. If Julia felt she needed diagrams to better explain herself, Paul would stay up until the wee hours, rendering something that could have hung in a museum. His drawing of the four stomachs of the cow for the
Tripes à la Mode
episode is particularly nice.

On the day of taping, the Childs arose at 6:00 a.m. It was winter in Boston, so you know how much fun getting out of that
warm bed must have been. The Cambridge Electric Company display kitchen, where the episodes were shot, was on the second floor of the building, and Paul shoveled the snow off the fire escape before lugging in the pots and pans they’d brought from their own kitchen. (Easier, apparently, than taking the building’s freight elevator.) There were no production assistants, no gofers, no interns. There was Paul, and whatever grip or gaffer was standing around the Cambridge Electric Company’s display kitchen with nothing to do. After the taping, the crew would eat, while Paul did the dishes.

Reader, I wish I could offer concrete advice on how to find and land your own Paul Child, a guy who will effortlessly switch roles with you if and when your career suddenly takes off, becoming in a matter of a few short months the wife to you that you once were to him, but I fear it’s mostly a matter of luck.

T
HE EPISODES OF
T
HE
F
RENCH
C
HEF
THAT
I
WATCHED WITH MY
mother were only slightly more interesting than the 1968 presidential returns and, a few years later, the Watergate hearings, except for one episode, which I recall in detail: Julia Child’s
Reine de Saba
(Queen of Sheba) Cake. I’m sure it’s because it had the word cake in the title. I remember Julia cautioning us to make sure we had everything we needed before we began baking, and placing all the ingredients on a special tray, leveling the cup of flour with the back edge of the knife, and checking to see if the cake was done using a toothpick.
*
But my clearest
memory occurs after the show is over, when my mother sighed loudly and flipped her steno book closed with an expression of dissatisfaction I couldn’t name. “Maybe we could make that!” I said. “We don’t
bake,
” she replied, then lit a cigarette and blew two streams of smoke through her nose. We don’t? All that grocery shopping she did, all that recipe clipping, all that menu planning, all those dinners that took hours to prepare and we didn’t
bake
? Then I thought a little more and realized that she was right. The Van de Kamp’s oatmeal cookies I was always trying to sneak were store bought, and so was my birthday cake.

Now I was interested.

In the movie version, at this moment there would be a smash cut to me, decades later, a grown woman, standing in my kitchen with a 7UP bottle inside a flour-covered tube sock, expertly rolling out the pastry dough for my much-celebrated lattice-top blackberry pie. I make one or two blackberry pies a week starting in early July, the week marionberries are available at the local farmers’ market.

A cross between the Chehalem and the Olallie berry, the Marion was cultivated at Oregon State University in 1956 and is considered the “cabernet of blackberries” for its complex taste, both sweet and earthy. It’s perfectly delicious, as Julia would say, and I prefer it to all other blackberries for my pies. I love making pies, because unlike whatever that thing is you’ve got stirring in the saucepan, a pie is a beautiful self-contained object that no one really needs, but that everyone, when presented with one, is delighted to have. When it comes to pies I’m not a Flimsie,
and over the years I’ve developed the sort of seriousness about pie making of which Julia would approve. Baking one makes me tremble with joy.

The second thing I like to make, and which I am expert at making, is Julia’s Tarte Tatin, invented many years ago by the Tatin sisters in Lamotte-Beuvron, their restaurant in the Loire Valley. It’s a tricky and thrilling dish to pull off, because you construct it upside down, caramelizing the sliced apples on the stove top in a cast-iron skillet, then covering it with pastry dough. After baking it right in the skillet, you haul that baby out of the oven, flip it over onto a big plate, and if you’ve done it right, everything holds together, and the apples, once on the bottom, are now on top, a glistening rich brown. I make Tarte Tatins all fall, stopping only when I can no longer zip up my jeans.

I know a thing or two about making Julia’s Tarte Tatin, as does Kathy, who also considers herself an expert on the matter, and when Marcelline, our own
Super-Française,
finally granted us permission to use her oven, we decided that we must make one.

That day, once again, it was dreary and raining, and before we left our apartment the neighbor was already shrieking her head off. Who was she yelling at? The poor dog? The young lover she had chained to the hot water pipe? The deformed mother in the wheelchair? No one? The morning of the Tarte Tatin was especially dramatic. When we stood with our ears to the wall the only words we understood were “fucking fucking shit.” Also, the Brie de Meaux we’d gaily purchased the day of our arrival
was beginning to stink to high heaven, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to be typically American and throw it out. We were both in a mood.

Marcelline has a small apartment in a high-rise in the 19th, one of the outlying arrondissements where everyday Parisians live, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the big, hilly park where Napoleon planted all the exotic trees he could get his hands on—Siberian elms, lindens, ginkos, giant sequoias, and a few cedars of Lebanon.

Marcelline is tiny and brilliant, an English teacher and writer, and inasmuch as any French person falls into the food-as-fuel camp, she does. Her small, neat kitchen is equipped with only the basics; no million-dollar E. Dehillerin copper pots for her.

During most of our time in Paris, I was Kathy’s sous chef, mostly because a lot of what we cooked fell firmly in the sautéing/simmering/deglazing realm of my mother, and thus it was less interesting to me. But the Tarte Tatin was my territory.

Together we made the pastry dough, peeled and sliced the apples. She then arranged them in a pattern at the bottom of the skillet in the butter and sugar and dropped the circle of pastry dough on top.

“Wait!” I cried. “What about the caramelizing?”

“It happens when it bakes,” she said.

“You need to cook it on the stove first, before you put on the dough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You cook it on the stove first, and baste it with the butter.”

“This is the way Julia does it,” she said.

“No, Julia cooks it on the stove first, then puts it in the oven.”

“No, she doesn’t!”

“Yes, she does!” I cried. A week before we came here I made two Tarte Tatins, and after you arrange the apples in the pan, you baste the apples with the butter to get it to caramelize before it goes in the oven. I’m
positive.
”

Kathy is half-Serbian and half-Albanian and is much more stubborn than I am, but I knew I was right, and she saw my certainty, and then said, “Well, I’m doing it my way,” and slid the skillet into the oven.

“But you can’t do it your way!” I shouted. “The whole reason we’re here is to cook Julia and this isn’t Julia cooking, it’s your cooking!”

“I’ve done it this way for years.”

“You can’t!”

“I’m doing it this way.”

“Well I’m the one writing the book, and I’m going to use your real name.”
*

The Tarte turned out perfectly delicious, if a little pale,
because it was under-caramelized,
which made complete sense, since if you just throw it in the oven without monitoring the tricky caramelization process, you’re just baking on a wing and
a prayer, something of which Julia would never approve. Later, because I couldn’t let it go, I did some research and discovered that in fact both methods were “Julia”; Kathy was making the Tarte Tatin from
Mastering
, and I was used to the recipe from
The Way To Cook,
*
which is, according to Julia, the fourth iteration of the recipe, and, in her opinion, the final and correct one.

That night we took the Tarte Tatin back to the apartment. I held the plate on my lap in the Metro and was disappointed that no one commented on it. I was disappointed in general, because it turned out that cooking Julia was no guarantee that you would be infused with the magic of being Julia. We were just two old friends in Paris squabbling over how to bake a Tarte.

But when we turned onto rue de l’Exposition, we almost ran into our neighbor, out walking her dog. She was tall but thin and wore a short, chic brown wig. We’d caught her placing something just inside the gate at the Romanian embassy. We pretended to window-shop, looking with feigned interest at the shampoo on display in the Confidence beauty salon, waiting for her to go inside. Once she did, we ran across the street, careful not to drop our Tarte Tatin, to see what she’d left. It was a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce.

So absurd was this, we forgot our argument, went upstairs, and devoured the tart straight out of the baking dish.

By 1966, Julia was
it.
That year she won an Emmy and appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine. The illustration showed Julia with redder hair than she’d probably had in thirty years, surrounded by her glimmering copper pots; beneath her chin is a plate of some kind of cartoon-looking fish with orange spots, displayed on a bed of something green. “The Lady with the Ladle,” they called her, and saluted her for single-handedly rescuing Americans from their wretched Miracle Whip salads and gloppy frozen chicken pot pies.

The celebration of Julia as The One was simplistic and inaccurate. Julia’s friend M.F.K. Fisher had been writing about fine dining and gastronomy since the 1930s,
Gourmet
magazine had been around since 1941, and James Beard, while not a French cook, was a believer in all the things Julia championed: taking your time, cooking with love, having a care for the outcome. Craig Claiborne, who’d trained in French haute cuisine in Lausanne, Switzerland, and who brought major food coverage to the nation’s paper of record, had been reviewing cookbooks and restaurants, and writing columns about fine dining for years.

Still, none of them were Julia.

There is possibly no better middle-aged woman in twentieth-century history than Julia Child. That’s what
Time
magazine should have celebrated her for. Compared with the mundane yet agonizing minute-to-minute struggles of the regular fifty-four-year-old woman—her age when she was crowned Our
Lady of the Ladle—anyone can write a three-pound cookbook and film thirty-four television episodes in a single take over a six-month period, not to mention cook for her husband every night of the Lord. (You didn’t think Paul grilled up his own lamb chops, did you?)

And speaking of Julia’s apple tarts, in an early episode of
The French Chef,
*
watch the first few minutes, and you will see a close-up on Julia’s hands as she prepares the pastry crust, measuring out the flour and cutting in the cold butter. Do you see those spots on her hands? Those are age spots, Reader. And yet, there are her capable hands, working away, and her voice tootles and trills offscreen above them. Her hands have age spots, and yet Julia still thinks what she has to say has merit.

I’m willing to believe that this wasn’t so astounding in the mid-1960s. For one thing, Tina Fey hadn’t yet made the observation that in Hollywood older women (thirty-nine and up) are considered crazy because “the definition of crazy in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

I want to say Fey’s observation wasn’t true in Julia’s day, or if it was no one admitted it. I want to say, “In Julia’s day people had more respect for their elders,” but Julia was so long-lived—she lived to be ninety-one, dying in her sleep two days before
her ninety-second birthday
*
—it would be unclear the “day” to which I’m referring. Also, I remember a moment in 1968, in Laguna Beach, where we had a beach house for a time, when my father, having just come from work in his shirt and tie, was spit on by some hippies sitting on the sidewalk in front of a juice bar, and that’s not very respectful now, is it? But I won’t say those things because it’s the twenty-first century now, and anytime a woman references the past, she renders herself instantly irrelevant. Is this also true for men? I don’t know. Somewhere they have their own apologist tackling this issue.

Julia, the Best Middle-Aged Woman Ever, at least had the advantage of being famous during a time when being middle-aged wasn’t considered an embarrassing display of bad character worthy of shunning. Being an adult was still something to which children and teenagers aspired. Did they sit at the feet of their elders seeking wisdom? Of course not, but they saw that becoming an adult was a prison break. To be an adult meant staying up as late as you wanted, ignoring your chores, spending
your money as you pleased, not having to wash your face and brush your teeth, and, best of all, getting stoned without having to roll up a towel and stuff it beneath the door.

Now, because everyone from toddlerhood on up is allowed not only to do whatever they please, but also encouraged to do so in the name of “being who they are,”
*
middle-aged people rightly see that life is much better when you’re underaged and your skin is rudely smooth, your torso is a taut, flexible stem, and your parents are still footing the bill. When you walk through the world, people admire you for being young and free, consumed with texting and hooking up. No one gazes upon the average fifty-year-old and admires her for supporting those children, for making sure there’s food in the house and on the table, and, possibly, for paying for that house. Wisdom is merely the consolation prize for aging. One could go on, but of course, in going on, one just reaffirms one’s status as a crazy woman in “mid-life,” the new euphemism for middle-age that’s meant to sound more like an expensive blue jean than the depressing reminder of mortality that it is.