Julia Child Rules (8 page)

I envy people for whom cooking is their true, abiding creative outlet, people who arise every morning and as their coffee is brewing plan what they’re going to cook that day. Julia famously said, “People who like to eat are the best people,” and presumably she’s not talking about the people who stand in the middle of the kitchen eating Wheat Thins with a squirt of aerosol cheese.

When Nora Ephron died, Joan Juliet Buck, who played Madame Elisabeth Brassart, the director of the Cordon Bleu, in Ephron’s
Julie & Julia,
wrote a droll, fond remembrance of her friend for
The Daily Beast,
in which after extolling her Renaissance woman genius, she said, “She also had a real life, two early marriages and then one great one, and two sons, one of whom I know and adore. And she cooked.”

And she cooked
.

There are few three-word sentences that so perfectly evoke a superior sort of down-to-earth femininity. Nora Ephron cooked. This did not mean she threw some Annie’s white cheddar mac ’n cheese into a pot of boiling water and emptied a bag of pre-washed romaine hearts into a bowl and called it dinner, like some people I know. Nora cooked, which meant she was warm, generous, sexy, sensual, passionate, and life-loving.

There’s a little shop not far from my house that describes itself as “a home decor and flower store in Portland, Oregon, offering a clever mix of modern, vintage, and organically inspired products.” Among the clever inventory are cookbooks where every author is a windswept blonde who looks as if she stepped straight from the pages of Robert Redford’s Sundance catalog, in jeans or a vintage dress, her white chef’s apron tied snugly around her waist. And she always has a waist, this hip and competent cooking beauty, giving testament to her ability to spend her life cooking fantastic food, but never eating too much of it.

If I could genetically modify myself, I would make myself over as one of those people who feels joy at the thought of food every minute of every day, in the hopes that I might capture some of the joy that everyone who loves to cook—and everyone who enjoys cooking
loves
to cook—seems to have. Am I the only one who’s noticed this? These days there seems to be an unspoken competition among people who consider themselves to be cooks. No one says “Sure, cooking’s okay,” or “Yeah, I like to cook,” or “Cooking’s a nice way to pass the time,” or
“Sometimes I’m in the mood to cook, but just as often I could go for take-out Chinese.” These days, cooking is a sacred calling that must be pursued with religious zeal. So intense is even the home cook’s love of cooking that Jerrod, the man of the house, and I have devised a TV cooking show drinking game wherein every time a contestant proclaims his or her passion for cooking we drink. Fifteen minutes into every episode of last season’s
Master Chef,
we were slurring our words.

I read and admired Bill Buford’s
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
about his own obsession with cooking (unlike me, he suffers no tortured ambivalence), and the time he spent working in the kitchen of super-celebrity chef Mario Batali. Once, after a long and brutal shift,
*
he rhapsodized: “I was a member of a team of cooks, closed away in this back room, people’s knives knocking against cutting boards in the same rhythmic rocking way: mine as well; no windows, no natural light; no connection to the outside world; no idea, even, what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable—a great comfort, surrounded by these intense association of festive meals.”

I long to be one of these passionate people, but I can’t help but wonder whether they possess the same passion for kitchen cleanup, because that crap ton of work accompanies every great meal ever made unless it’s this one, perfected when I was a junior
in college and had my first apartment and had vowed never to learn how to cook:

Several summers ago we hosted an exchange student from Spain. Her gift to us upon her arrival was a small cookbook featuring authentic tapas recipes. Little did Lucia know that one of our favorite local haunts was a tapas place; that her host family was, in fact, a little mad for tapas.
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We decided we were going to have a Spanish-American tapas-themed Fourth of July. There was going to be
Patatas con Chorizo
(potatoes with chorizo) and
Tortilla con Alcachofa y Jamon
(artichoke and ham tortilla),
Pinchos Morunos
(pork brochettes), and
Tartaletas con Pisto Manchego
(ratatouille tartlets). We also made four batches of Lucia’s
favorite,
Croquetas de Queso
(cheese croquettes), as well as a few other things I’ve forgotten. Creating this feast required every cooking implement we have in the house, in part because Jerrod, who fashions himself a great cook when he’s in the mood, is also impaired when it comes to eyeballing how big a bowl or pan one might need for any given mixture; if a dish like, say, the
croquetas
, requires something to be mixed, then browned, there will always be at least two extra too-small bowls and pans per cooking step.
*

The tapas feast was memorable because it was delicious, and also because it took me four hours to clean the kitchen, including using a butter knife to scrape the flour/water paste
^†
off the counters, stove top, table top, refrigerator handle, and yes, ceiling. The kitchen was over a hundred degrees and I was sweating like … a person cleaning the kitchen in the middle of summer, when turning on the oven makes as much sense as turning on the furnace.

And yet, we hear nothing about this from all these passionate cooks, home and professional alike. Do they all have a personal dishwasher? Who scrapes and scrubs and loads and unloads the machine and swabs down the counters and the floors and scrapes the flour/water paste off every blessed surface with a butter knife? Because that takes me at least as long as it does to cook something.

Never mind the three minutes it takes to eat it.

Even Julia once said, “I do love to cook. I suppose it would lose some of its glamour if I were married to a ditch digger and had seven children, however so.” Meaning, of course, if you had to cook for that many people day in day out, there would be so many dishes to do you would lose the will to live, much less cook.

Julia tossed off seven as the number of children it would take to dampen the glamour of cooking, but in my experience it takes only three, plus one father-in-law. Yes, I have done my time as a galley slave. For a half decade I was married to a guy with kids, and our blended family was comprised of my four-year-old, his five- and eleven-year-old, and his father, who lived with us for a year while doing some contract work for the phone company in Portland. In their defense, my husband and my father-in-law ate whatever I put in front of them. Indeed, they ate
a lot
of whatever I put in front of them. A dozen enchiladas would be hoovered up before I’d returned to the table with the napkins. Seconds, and thirds, were the rule of the day with spaghetti, mac ’n cheese, anything that could be self-served with an overflowing ladle. Another woman might have felt gratified; instead, since I was also the alpha breadwinner at the time, I marveled at how fast thirty bucks worth of organic free-range chicken breasts could disappear.

Every night I tried to make something that everyone could tolerate, since we’d laid down the law that what was for dinner was what was for dinner. The kids could choose not to eat it, but that was all there was to eat. I would spend hours creating
menus that took into account one kid’s hatred of red meat and fruit, another’s hatred of fish and pasta (except plain, with salt and butter), and another’s hatred of chicken and all vegetables. I felt like I was training for the World Rubik’s Cube Championships, and no one was ever satisfied.

The kids learned to circumvent our strict law against saying “Yuck” when faced with what was for dinner by developing their inner food critics. Not a minute after they’d each taken a bite or two, one would say, “I don’t really care for this steamed broccoli, it’s a little rubbery.” Or, “Pork chops aren’t really my cup of tea, but if they were, I’d say these were a little tough.” Or, “If I was a veggie burger person, which I’m not, I’d say this one could use a little seasoning.”

I’ve come a little far afield here. My point is this: If your relationship to food and cooking is largely positive and uncomplicated; if, unlike me, you harbor no tortured ambivalence in relation to cooking, then every day provides at least several wonderful opportunities to follow a whim. It’s a little thing, opting to make beef pho when you thought you were headed in the direction of a nice lasagna, but it keeps your impulse-following muscle in good shape for the day when something more momentous comes your way.

Given the stupendous success of the marriage they created, it’s hard to imagine the degree to which Julia and Paul were
ill-suited for each other. Look up the word
sophisticate
and there you might find a picture of Paul Child. He was also an accomplished photographer—some of his pictures are in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art—and his various positions during the war always involved “visual presentation,” mapmaking, or designing and creating war rooms. In the 1920s he’d hung out with artists in Paris, painted movie sets in Hollywood, taught sailing, and in pretty much all ways lived the kind of peripatetic life immortalized by Hemingway, minus the bullfighting and big-game hunting. He was a black belt in judo and read books in their original French. He wore a cravat.

By the time he was assigned to Kandy, he was forty-four years old and still reeling from the death of the great love of his life, Edith Kennedy, a small, chic intellectual twenty years his senior, with whom he’d spent the last seventeen years. Even though they’d been desperately in love, they were bohemians and had no use for traditional marriage.

Still, Paul thought about love more than the average sixteen-year-old girl. Every night while he was stationed, first in Kandy, and later in Chungking and Kunming, he wrote to his brother Charlie, parsing the various charms of the women on the base. He was persnickety about the traits he required in a mate, but once he thought he’d found someone who met his standards, he had a habit of pouncing. He fell in love with Rosie Frame, the child of Chinese missionaries, who was fluent in Mandarin and recruited by the OSS to infiltrate Chinese social circles; and with San Francisco socialite and wild-child Jane Foster, who would in
1957 be indicted for being a Soviet spy; and outdoorsy Marjorie Severyns, who hailed from Yakima, Washington, and loved hiking and double entendres. They were all very young and had their pick of the various young, dashing scholars, reporters, and intelligence officers. When Marjorie threw Paul over for a married man, and not just any married man, but the same one who stole the heart of an earlier crush, Paul became depressed.

Paul liked Julia, even though she wasn’t his type. He found her to be warm, droll, and fun to pal around with, but neither well-read nor worldly enough. Once they had a conversation about Gandhi, and Julia said she thought he was a horrible little man and didn’t know what all the fuss was about. If this bone-headedness wasn’t enough to put him off, she also possessed a somewhat frantic virginal quality that communicated to him that regardless of her good qualities, she was simply too much of a fixer-upper.

Julia, provincial as she may have been, wasn’t stupid. In a letter she would write years later to Avis DeVoto, she characterized their main difference thus:

“He is an intellectual, as I interpret the word … meaning he is interested in ideas, and is ready to dig for information and is always trying to train his mind (like with General Semantics), and has a thirst for knowledge. Me, I am not an intellectual, though I had 4 years of college. But the people I admire most are the intellectuals; I am trying to train my mind, which is sometimes a fuzzy sieve.”

Near the end of the war, in early 1945, they were transferred first to Chungking, then to the medieval city of Kunming, at the rough, mountainous end of the Burma Road. Kandy was a five-star resort compared to Kunming, where the electricity was less dependable, the city outside the station more dangerous, the mud beneath their feet during the rainy season more fetid. In their quarters, they had no furniture aside from army cots. The war felt closer here; on the other side of one of the mountain ranges that surrounded the city on three sides, warlords led peasant armies in skirmishes against the Japanese. Outside the walls of the field station, the citizenry took advantage of the general chaos; there was smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, and a thriving black market.

Except for suffering from unrequited love for Paul, Julia thrived; difficult circumstances brought out the best in her. Without breaking a sweat, she organized and managed the new Registry and was in charge of doling out the opium with which to bribe Chinese officials. The caramel-colored block arrived in a diplomatic pouch and was stored inside the Registry safe.

Paul’s love interests came and went, but Julia was always around and available to drink vodka or venture out for a hike around the rice paddies or a visit to a local temple. Together they ventured forth and discovered authentic Chinese food. It was beyond adventurous. Chinese farmers fertilized exclusively
with night soil,
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and every meal was inevitably accompanied by a chaser of dysentery. Paul had been averse to playing Pygmalion, and yet he found himself visiting Julia’s quarters most evenings, sharing books, poetry, music, and art with her.