The French Chef in America Page 12

  Julia’s plan to film inside the caves was stymied in a very French way. When the “FCiF” team rented a small camera and battery-powered floodlights from a cinema-outfitting store, Daniel Berger asked for a receipt. The request sent the store owner into a rage. He grabbed the equipment and locked the door. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, but, Paul wrote, any American who has lived in Paris has “had some experience which has created in his breast a point of frustration, despair, even dislike, so that in the end—even if one loves living here, as Julia and I do—he ends up having a sort of love-hate relationship with the French.”

  June 4 was the sixteenth day of filming, and Julia declared it Cheese Day. Like wine, cheese is an essential part of the French diet. To explicate it, Julia invaded Androuët, a noted restaurant-store on Rue d’Amsterdam devoted entirely to fromage. As Julia inspected trays holding at least a hundred different kinds of cheese, Monsieur Androuët bobbed his bald dome fringed with curly hair and led the crew into his cellar. There, shelf after shelf was filled with cheese: hard, soft, crumbly, rocky, runny; blue, goats’ milk, cows’ milk, ewes’ milk; heart-shape cheese, moldy lumps, powdered pyramids, enormous wheels of Emmentaler and tiny squares no bigger than a matchbox. The caviste (one who oversees aging cheese in a cellar), Monsieur George, was the spitting image of the farmer-husband in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It took all of Julia’s charm to extract the information from him that her audience would want. After four hours of close-ups, long shots, and repeats, she prevailed. Yet, after all of this effort, the cheese sequence was not used on television, and the films have disappeared. Such is the uncertain nature of a project like “The French Chef in France.”

  On Friday, June 5, Paul and Julia took the crew to Prunier, the famed restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe, to document the cooking of frogs’ legs. Julia was certain this would cause a sensation when it aired in the States, where frog is not a typical comestible. Inside, the kitchen was narrow, dark, and hot, and the chef was unsmiling. With little space for his camera, Hoving positioned himself to shoot through a slot between the stove and countertop. He worried that the heat from the coal-fired stove and his floodlights would destroy the sensitive color film. But they had just a short window to get the job done, and Julia would not be deterred.

  Julia inquires about the preparation of frogs’ legs in the Prunier kitchen.

  The camera rolled and the chef deftly rolled the frogs’ legs in flour, salt, and minced garlic; laid them neatly in a cast-iron pan; and fried them in gobs of fresh butter.

  There was not enough room for Daniel Berger in the Prunier kitchen, so he waited alone in the dining room. A young waiter appeared with silverware and a plate of a half dozen frogs’ legs. Then he poured a glass of pale yellow Chablis. Daniel took a sip and felt his life change. The Chablis was “a sensual wonder…like a crystal punch in the mouth: the point of harmony between the delicate and slightly garlicky flesh of the frogs’ legs and the [wine’s] smell of windfall, and its barely noticeable acidity,” he wrote. “I still remember the emotion all these years later, the first of its kind [for me], like the first kiss of love. My first real encounter with wine happened on that day at that location.”

  When Daniel wrote these words in 2009, he was married with children and had left cinema to become a wine merchant and commentator. He pointed to his lunch at Prunier thirty-nine years earlier as the precise moment he found his “appetite for wine.”

  VII. FRENCH BREAD TWO WAYS

  After their months of research and numerous failed experiments, Julia and Paul considered their clear explanation of how to make French bread in an American home oven the most important element of Volume II and the “FCiF” shoot.

  There are many types of bread made in France, and Julia would demonstrate the making of various loaves in two episodes: the first showed the traditional, handmade approach, which dated to the Middle Ages; the second showed the latest, mechanized techniques used in Paris.

  On June 8, Paris was hot and steamy. It felt cruel to stand in front of a bread oven. But there was Julia, by the ovens at Chez Poilâne on Rue du Cherche-Midi. A chic bread store at street level, Poilâne baked its loaves in two cast-iron ovens in a small basement with rough stone walls. Down there two bakers dressed in only stained shorts worked feverishly, like a pair of goblins.

  As Julia stooped in the low space and asked questions, the men demonstrated the ancient system of making bread—from the development of the levain (a leavening agent used in place of yeast to rise bread dough) to forming the loaves by hand and shuttling them into the wood-fired oven, and sliding them out on long wooden paddles. Julia sniffed the aroma, cocked her head attentively, and smiled as the boules’ crusty skin crackled as the loaves cooled.

  The next day, the crew shot an episode about modern baking in a large, bright, air-conditioned bread laboratory with a sleek stainless-steel oven with a conveyor belt attachment. Julia’s tutor was Raymond Calvel, the esteemed professeur de boulangerie, École Française de Meunerie, who had guided the Irving Street baking research.

  A handsome man, and a master bread maker, Calvel rolled, kneaded, slashed, and pinched the dough. Julia followed suit, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence. She was surprised to discover that his lessons had never been captured on film before, and so she asked him to repeat the process to be sure every step had been documented. “It is a very earnest and somehow fundamental scene, the passing of one of mankind’s oldest life-sustaining techniques from one person to another,” Paul wrote. “I wish our records were on clay tablets, or bronze, or granite. Films, like people, are so evanescent.”

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  IN THE MIDST OF a prickly-hot, thundering deluge in Paris, another kind of storm arrived in the form of Ninette Lyon, a French food writer who had materialized at Simca’s apartment. McCall’s had deputized Lyon to oversee the creating and photographing of food from the recipes in Volume II, and Lyon enlisted Simca to summon the Childs away from the bread laboratory.

  It was in Julia’s and Knopf’s interest to cooperate with the magazine, which would generate valuable publicity for the book’s launch. But Julia was filming Calvel’s baguette-making technique. Time was of the essence. She had already said “Non!” to posing for McCall’s, but to Paul’s mounting frustration Julia was reluctant to stand her ground. With Simca’s pleading, and with Judith Jones and Alfred Knopf in the back of her mind, Julia reluctantly agreed to cut the bread sequence short.

  Ninette Lyon was neither a cook nor a photographer, but she was amiably pushy. She had ostensibly called the meeting to choose which dishes from Volume II to photograph, but, Paul suspected, the decision had already been made by someone in New York: Lyon’s real agenda was to convince Julia to participate in the photo shoot with Arnold Newman.

  Angry that McCall’s was manipulating Julia and had chosen the celebrity lensman over himself, and concerned about the time and energy required of Julia, Paul fiercely resisted Lyon’s entreaties.

  A boxing aficionado, he saw his role as being akin to Julia’s manager and “cornerman.” An important aspect of a manager’s job is to keep his fighter fit, pace her, and conserve her energy to ensure she will last the entire contest. Paul was growing worried about Julia’s stamina. Over the winter she had worked nonstop on Volume II, rising at 6:30 every morning and going all day, every day, without a break. As soon as the book was finished, she began preparing for “The French Chef in France.” Now they were in midshoot, with many scenes left to film in Paris and Normandy, and Paul feared the “attacking battalions of McCall’s Army” would exhaust his charge. The dilemma was further strained by Simca’s increasingly vocal calls for attention.

  Julia waffled. While she agreed with Paul in theory, she understood the pragmatic need for book publicity and Simca’s emotional need for inclusion and validation. It was a quandary.

  Paul wrote a script for Julia, which she more or less stuck to in a phone call with Lyon: “I am finished with the book. My time and
energies must now be devoted entirely to television. I therefore will NOT cook anything” for McCall’s.

  Lyon responded with charm, telling Julia, “You are like Brigitte Bardot: you do not need publicity…I myself am dying to see you perform in front of the camera. I hear you are stunning!”

  Paul smirked at such transparent cajolery: “How pitifully far they are from judging the kind of woman Julia is! As though these puerile appeals would mean anything to her…But still they will keep pushing.”

  VIII. ARTISANAL MIRACLES

  The oppressive heat continued to wilt Paris on June 10, but Julia was perfectly comfortable in the large, well-lit, air-conditioned supermarket Suma (for “supermarché”) in Parly 2, near Versailles. There, a “fish professor” named Madame Pasquet cleaned trout and lectured insightfully about cooking technique. A thin, self-contained woman of about forty-five, she had the aspect of a schoolmarm. In fact, this professeur had lectured about fish for twenty-seven years. Even slicked with fish blood and slime, Madame Pasquet kept her dignity. Julia, dressed in pale green, asked questions and smoothly translated Madame Pasquet’s answers for the camera. “Watching those two expert women cooperating…was as exciting as watching a computer read out ten thousand bits of accurate information,” Paul wrote in his diary (this was 1970, after all). “And we have it all on ever-living film, ladies and gentlemen, an artisanal miracle, preserved forever.”

  Julia turned from the fish counter to the meat department. Concerned that French butchers were giving up the hand carving of meat in favor of “la coupe américaine” (“the American cut”)—or band-saw transverse cutting—the Childs spent the afternoon documenting the butchering of a steer. “In our culture when hand-work competes with machine-work the latter usually wins,” Paul wrote, as if documenting the contest between John Henry and the steam-powered drill. “There is no question that for speed and ease the band saw licks the knife.” But Monsieur Guyon, Suma’s master butcher, demonstrated the value of skilled knife work. His sharp blade didn’t cut across the grain, but flowed sinuously along the muscles of a veal leg, creating beautiful pieces of meat that would cook and eat well.

  On June 12, the crew jammed into Claude Deblieux’s petite workshop on the Rue de l’Étoile in Paris. It was a nook ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, stuffed with stoves, sinks, shelves, refrigerators, a table, and a long marble slab. Deblieux was a pâtissier (pastry chef) and a maître sucrier (sugar master) who sold handmade desserts. A compact man of perhaps sixty-five, Deblieux had white hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, a toque, and a soft voice. He had been awarded an MOF, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, or “Best Worker in France.” And he took the same childlike delight in making pastry as Professor Calvel had in the making of a perfect loaf of bread.

  With patience, Deblieux guided Julia through the making of chocolate “cigarettes,” chocolate leaves, palm trees, camels, and fish. But the pièce de résistance was a “gateau in a cage,” an amazing creation made of three round layers of sponge cake; each layer was slathered in whipped cream, cut strawberries, and sugar syrup. It was topped by three white doves made of sugar, and surmounted by a magnificent golden “cage” made of spun sugar.

  “We do feel that a lot of what we are filming is historic,” Julia wrote to Avis DeVoto, “that much of the artisan skills will die out with the passing of the present generation, like the hand-forming of French bread, the hand-cutting of meat, and the pâtissier’s decorative skills.”

  Julia had saved the best shoot in Paris for last: Dehillerin, a century-old, family-run cookware store that she had patronized since 1948. She called the store one of her favorite places on earth, “my addiction.” Paul called it “crazy.” Dehillerin would not be out of place in Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley: a long narrow space, in which every centimeter was festooned with copper pots, cheese graters, bread pans, spoons, ladles, whisks, mortars and pestles, and every other kind of culinary gewgaw imaginable. To film this pirate’s treasure, Peter Hoving took the heavy camera off its tripod and perched it on his shoulder, to rove through the aisles, ducking under, over, and around utensils in the crowded store. There were three Dehillerin brothers, but Julia chose a good-looking salesman named Gaston as her on-camera guide, and they discussed the merits of copper versus aluminum pots, the care of wicker breadbaskets, and the best way to sharpen steel knives.

  It was now mid-June, and “The French Chef in France” shoot was nearing its end. A few days in Normandy—to document roast duck, tripe, and Camembert cheese—were left. The “FCiF” had gone better than anyone could have hoped. “We have, like Pollyanna, the Glad Girl, much to be thankful for, but particularly that we have really excellent footage on certain classical techniques [that] have never before been filmed in this intimate and fascinating way,” Paul wrote. “Most of them will die out within 25 years. So our films…will be all that’s left to show how food was once processed by human beings rather than machines.”

  IX. THE BATTLE OF THE DUCK

  On June 16, Julia, Paul, and Ruth Lockwood climbed into one of the white Peugeots and drove northwest to Rouen to film the scene Julia had been looking forward to for months: Monsieur Dorin and his silver duck press. Twenty-two years after her first meal in France—the life-defining lunch of sole meunière—Julia was returning to La Couronne to learn how to prepare Canard à la Rouennaise.

  The plan was to eat dinner at 9:30, then start filming at midnight, after the last customer had left. Once they started they wouldn’t be able to stop. As the Childs strolled to their hotel, the junior members of the “FCiF” team rolled to a stop. They looked shaken. Peter Hoving was buckled in pain, his left leg immobilized. “I’m not sure I can carry on,” he said. “I’ve had this pain on and off the whole time we’ve been in France, but never anything like this…”

  “We’re going to the hospital,” David Atwood said.

  Julia was concerned but remained calm. Paul was aghast: the cameraman was “the beating heart and center of this whole expedition…and only now he tells us he has been having recurring pains.”

  Paul, Julia, and Ruthie decided to eat dinner and mention nothing to Monsieur Dorin until they knew more about Hoving’s status. Finally, the restaurant’s phone rang: X-rays showed that one of Hoving’s vertebrae had been dislocated—probably by the heavy camera on his shoulder—which pinched a sciatic nerve and sent an excruciating charge down his leg.

  It was a moment of crisis. The doctors told Peter to “lay off all camera work for six months.” But the “FCiF” team was out of time. Paul and Julia decided to proceed with “The Battle of the Duck,” come what may.

  At 2:00 in the morning La Couronne’s rustic dining room was sweltering from the summer heat, the roaring fire, a half dozen bright camera lights, and the crowd of anxious filmmakers, chefs, and waiters. Dorin had built a large, visually dramatic fire for the camera: as the heat rose, it spun a fan that turned a gear and rotated the ducks, which had been basted in butter.

  M. Dorin and the duck press at La Couronne

  Suddenly, Peter Hoving, who had been given antipain injections at the hospital, appeared. Toting the heavy camera, he sat, stood, panned across the dining room, kneeled below a table, and gazed down on the fire from a ladder.

  Julia and Dorin talked, cooked, and ate duck through the black night and into the blue-pink dawn. As Le Gros Horloge, the clock in the center of town, chimed 5:00 a.m., roosters crowed. The crew rolled up cables and placed their cameras and lights into padded travel cases. Their faces—flushed by the fire, the exertion, the wine and food—were cooled by a light breeze.

  “Everybody feels great,” Paul noted. “It may well be one of the most successful filming sequences we’ve done.”

  They slept until 11:00. Then, basking in the afterglow of the night’s work, Ruthie, Julia, and Paul drove toward their final destinations. First, to the town of Thury-Harcourt, for “All About Tripe,” and then to a Camembert cheese maker in Aunay-sur-Odon. On Friday, they would hold a wrap party in Caen, the
famed capital of Lower Normandy, which was founded by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century and largely destroyed during the Allied landings in 1944.

  Arriving in Thury-Harcourt, they were told to call the team in Rouen: “Peter has a hideous pain in his leg,” Atwood reported. “He can’t continue. He’s flying to the hospital in Amsterdam this afternoon.”

  Boom! With that, “The French Chef in France” adventure ended. There was not enough time or money to find a replacement for Peter; and while the tripe and Camembert segments would have been instructive, they were not essential.

  The exhausted crew had no energy for a wrap party and quickly dispersed. Ruthie Lockwood would arrive on Cape Cod by the morning. Willie Morton and his wife, Jane, would take a belated honeymoon through Europe. David and Nancy had plans to sightsee in Denmark. As for Paul and Julia? “We will be off at once, driving slowly southeast for the next five or six days, and will stop finally when we reach our little house. There we hope to have a fortnight’s peace, though that is unlikely…damn it,” Paul wrote, anticipating a showdown with McCall’s. “I fear there will be little rest for us.”

  5

  That’s It