Laura Shapiro (5 page)

Cooking from scratch remained the standard in most households, but what women meant by “scratch” was continually changing. By the time Julia enrolled at the Cordon Bleu, an American dinner made from scratch might include beef that had been ground into hamburger before it arrived in the kitchen, bottled ketchup, fresh potatoes, canned peas, and a Jell-O dessert in the most popular flavor, namely red. In France, by contrast, to cook meant to sustain an intimate relationship with ingredients. Julia had to learn how to feel her way through a recipe even while she was following written directions, how to leave enough space from step to step to let the food itself tell her what to do next. How should the rice smell when it came out of the oven after its long baking in milk? How would the egg whites look when they had been beaten just enough? How much nutmeg would make the dish taste right—with no taste of nutmeg? She took to this approach avidly. She may have lacked the instincts of a born cook, but she was blessed with an excellent palate and skillful hands. And she loved the feel of food, loved letting her senses run riot at the kitchen counter, loved handling raw meats and vegetables and inhaling the aromas as they cooked. Learning to cook was an intoxicant; she could have been sipping her first glass of champagne. “It is beginning to take effect,” she wrote home after three months at the Cordon Bleu. “I feel it in my hands, my stomach, my soul.”

Yet the more she learned, the more she could see what a long way she had to go. If she were trying to play the violin, she reflected, the challenge would be the same: training and practice, training and practice. The fishmongers and butchers were nerve-rackingly good at identifying customers who didn't know what they were buying (“Bluff is no good, you've got to KNOW,” she wrote home) and she was determined to “KNOW” every single thing about market and kitchen. One day she spent four hours on a lobster recipe—at the typewriter, not the stove. She had already worked on the cooking; she could prepare it just as it should be, and now she wanted to put the whole procedure into words. “Good practice, to make it absolutely exact and water-tight,” she wrote the family. She did a massive round of research on mayonnaise and wrote it up in more detail than any of her sources had, then went to work on béarnaise. These mini dissertations were for herself. She wanted to have in front of her the most explicit, flawless recipes ever written, so that she would never lose touch with what she had mastered. Failure still had a horrible way of seizing control of a meal. One day, after she had been several weeks at the Cordon Bleu, she made lunch for a friend and ended up serving “the most VILE eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” She didn't measure the flour, which made the sauce thick and horrid; she couldn't find spinach so she substituted chicory, and the whole mess was disgusting. Would she ever outgrow these bursts of ineptitude? Maybe not, but she wasn't about to share her guilt and misery with the guests. It was bad enough that they had to eat the stuff; they shouldn't be forced to claim it was delicious. “I carefully didn't say a word, while they painfully ate it, because I don't believe in these women who are always apologizing for their food,” she wrote home. “If it is vile, the cook must just grin and bear it, with no word of excuse.” Her famous advice to the hostess—“Never apologize”—was forged in crucibles like this one.

The harder she worked, the more impatient she became with her class at the Cordon Bleu. The GIs weren't making much progress, and the course was slowing down and becoming repetitive. “After 6 months, they don't know the proportions for a béchamel or how to clean a chicken the French way,” she complained. Finally she decided she'd had enough of the school but not nearly enough of Bugnard, so she dropped out of the course and hired the chef to teach her privately for another six months, while she practiced between lessons. Then, with a year of study behind her, she decided she was ready to take the exam and receive a Cordon Bleu diploma. Here she ran into a problem. Madame Brassart, director of the school, had always disliked the big American woman who thought she was too good for the amateur course, pushed her way into the professional program, then dropped out before completing it. Now she had the effrontery to demand a diploma. The director refused to schedule the exam. It took months before an increasingly furious Julia was allowed to take the exam, and Madame Brassart relented only after Julia sent a letter hinting that the embassy would soon start wondering why an American student was being treated so badly by the Cordon Bleu. When Julia finally received her certificate—Madame Brassart wouldn't issue a real diploma, since Julia hadn't finished the course—it was dated March 15, 1951, some two weeks before the date on the warning letter. The director was covering her tracks. For many years, Julia included Madame Brassart on the very short list of people she hated, which was headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The exam itself sorely disappointed her, for it was superficial and made no reference to the complicated procedures she had practiced with zeal. Madame Brassart had decided to give this uppity student a beginner's exam, the sort given to housewives who took a six-week elementary course. Julia was outraged, all the more so because she flubbed quite a bit of the test. She did well on the written section, in which she had to describe how to make a brown stock, how to cook green vegetables, and how to make a béarnaise sauce. But in the cooking section, she made mistakes everywhere. Asked to prepare an
oeuf mollet,
she made a poached egg instead of a soft-boiled one; she also put too much milk into the
crème renversée,
or “caramel custard,” and she forgot what went into an
escalope de veau en surprise
(veal, duxelles, and sliced ham, cooked and then reheated in a paper bag). Julia sautéed the mushrooms instead of making duxelles and left out the ham entirely. “All my own fault, I just should have memorized their little book,” she admitted in a letter home. “My mind was on Filets de sole Walewska, Poularde Toulousiane, Sauce Venetienne, etc. etc. etc. and I neglected to look at the primary things.” Her mistakes in the paper-bag recipe didn't bother her, since it was an idiotic dish anyway—“the kind a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner to ‘épater' the boss's wife.” The whole experience was frustrating: she could turn out flawless sauces, pâtés, and mousses; bone a goose without tearing the skin; clean, eviscerate, and cut up a chicken in twelve minutes—and she had tripped over her own feet when asked to take a baby step. When she opened her own cooking school, she vowed, she would turn people into cooks “through friendliness and encouragement and professionalism,” not the nasty methods of the mean-spirited Madame Brassart. Who, she added pointedly, was a Belgian, and not French at all.

During these months of intensive cooking, a friend who thought Julia might like to meet another food-struck woman introduced her to Simone Beck Fischbacher—a meeting as momentous for Julia as the day she encountered Paul. Here was her first culinary soul mate and a woman who could balance Julia's classroom cuisine with real-life French home cooking. Simca, as everyone called her, had grown up in Normandy in a wealthy household with servants, but as a child she found the kitchen irresistible and soon began trying her hand. She became a brilliant, intuitive home cook, self-taught apart from a brief period of study at the Cordon Bleu, with a vast repertoire of recipes and techniques that she was continually expanding. Everything she tasted seemed to inspire her; Julia used to say she threw off ideas like a fountain. Like Julia, she was married and had no children, and cooking was at the center of her life. As soon as they were introduced, the two women started talking about French food and didn't let up until Simca's death forty years later. Their friendship, renewed year after year on the hillside in Provence where they both made second homes, launched both of their careers and spawned a huge correspondence that dissected every aspect of French cookery. They were
“ma sœur”
and
“ma grande chérie”
to each other, sisters whose volcanic arguments never quite shattered their bond. To Julia, in those early years, Simca was France itself—beloved, inspiring, wildly irritating, and fundamental to everything.

Simca belonged to a women's gastronomical club, the only one of its kind in a country where haute cuisine was a well-guarded male preserve. No women cooked or even waited on tables in the great three-star restaurants; no women were invited to join the elite dining clubs that met over grand lunches and elaborate banquets; and the most revered authorities on classic cuisine were male. Out in the provinces, of course, women did some of the most distinguished and characteristic cooking of France; and it was a reflex among chefs to honor their mothers' cooking above all other influences. But if women's cooking was the sentimental favorite, men's had the prestige, the exclusivity, and the cash value.

The lone exception to this gender divide was Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a group of food-loving women who began meeting in 1927, prompted by an incident at a sumptuous banquet held by one of the men's gastronomical societies. Women were sometimes allowed to attend these feasts as guests, and on this occasion both men and women were at the table when a man was heard declaiming the ancient truism that women, of course, understood nothing about fine food and wine. A certain Madame Ethel Ettlinger—an American who had been living for decades in France but clearly hadn't adapted—jumped up in fury to remind the men that in all their homes it was women who ran the kitchens, ordered the meals, and trained the cooks. The women then got the idea to stage a magnificent banquet of their own and invite the men. They held the dinner in a borrowed château, arranged to have each course introduced with a trumpet fanfare, and easily demonstrated that women could spend money on glorious food and wine just as knowledgeably as men could. (The women themselves didn't cook, any more than the members of the male club would have.) After that, the women chose a name for themselves and met regularly for decades, most often at an elaborate lunch prepared by a chef. Any Gourmettes who wanted to come at 10:00 a.m. to watch the chef and act as his assistants were invited to do so. Simca showed up regularly for these cooking sessions; and Julia, who joined the group soon after meeting Simca, never missed one if she could help it.

These lunches glowed in her memory long afterward. She once said they marked “the real beginning of French gastronomical life for me.” The tradition she had been pursuing so ardently now sprang up before her like an edible diorama, complete with authentic chefs and guests. “I soon realized I had never really lived before,” she recalled. “There was always an elegant first course, such as fresh artichoke bottoms stuffed with sweetbreads and served with a truffled Béarnaise, or a most elaborately poached fish garnished with mushroom duxelles and lobster tails, and sauced with a creamy puree of crab. The main course might be boned duck, or game in season. Then came dessert, a sorbet aux poires, garnished with pears poached in wine and served in a meringue-nut shell, or a fancy mousse, a molded Bavarian structure, or a Vacherin with exotic filling.” And wines, of course, in abundance. What she liked most about the gatherings, along with the busy, gossipy cooking sessions and the dazzling food, was sitting down among women who talked food as intently as she did and ate with a gusto like her own. She was especially fond of the original members, a cluster of old-world dowagers in their seventies who dived into their lunches like ravenous teenagers. Normally Julia disliked all-female social events—she always came home grumbling afterward about how there hadn't been any men in the room—but Le Cercle was different. She had never known so many women to whom she felt kin, and she identified herself as a Gourmette with pride.

One of Simca's friends at Le Cercle des Gourmettes was a Parisian named Louisette Bertholle. Although she was a less-impassioned cook than Simca, and had none of Julia's intellectual zeal—Paul Child called her “a charming little nincompoop”—Louisette was bright and chic and full of enthusiasm. Together the three women hatched the idea of opening a school, perhaps in Louisette's kitchen, where they could teach cooking to Americans. But before they could do much more than think about the possibility, a couple of Julia's friends from California turned up in Paris and asked Julia if she could give them cooking lessons. In January 1952, Julia, Simca, and Louisette hastily opened their school, using Julia's kitchen because Louisette's was being renovated. “A small informal cooking class, with emphasis on the ‘cook hostess' angle, is ‘L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes,' which is open for five pupils,” ran a notice in the embassy's in-house newsletter. “The meetings are Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m. through lunch, in the home of Mrs. Paul Child. The fee is 2,000 francs including lunch, which is prepared and served by the group. There are three experienced instructors, who teach basic recipes, bourgeoise or haute cuisine.” The three instructors were not quite ready for showtime, Julia admitted to her family, but they were learning as fast as they could. She knew that her life's work had begun.

These classes became the template for all the teaching that followed, both on television and in books. The atmosphere was “homey and fun and informal,” and every time a student made a mistake, Julia launched a discussion of what had gone wrong and how to avoid it. After the school had been in operation for a few months, Julia typed out for herself a
“petit discours”
—a little speech she could give at the opening of each two-day course. Though it's unlikely that she used these exact words when she addressed the pupils, it's clear that her principles had settled into place. “Our aim is to teach you how to cook,” she started out. “We are prepared to show the basic methods of French cooking, which, when you have mastered them, should enable you to follow a recipe, or invent any ‘little dish' that you want. We feel that when one has learned to use one's tools quickly and efficiently one can then provide one's own short-cuts…. The recipes we give you are basic recipes, with practically no frills. We want them to be as clear and complete as possible. And we want you to feel, after we have done something in class, that you really have understood all about doing it.” Everything was here—the emphasis on fundamentals, the commitment to precision and clarity, and the ultimate goal of instilling self-confidence in the cook. Later on, Paul designed an insignia for the school: a “3” in a circle, with “Ecole des Gourmandes” in flowing script around it. Julia wore it as a badge for decades, and it was always pinned to her blouse when she appeared as the “French Chef.”