The French Chef in America Page 17

  His mother arranged for Jim to take a European tour, and in 1937 he moved to New York to study acting and opera. But he soon found his calling backstage, where he prepared elaborate cast dinners. That led Beard and a partner to open a catering company, Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc. Beard began to teach cooking classes, and in 1940 published a cookbook, Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés. It was the first of what would become a Herculean outpouring. Between 1940 and 1983, he authored thousands of recipes in more than twenty books, including Fowl and Game Cookery, How to Eat (and Drink) Your Way Through a French (and Italian) Menu, James Beard’s Fish Cookery, How to Eat Better for Less Money, Beard on Bread, The Casserole Cookbook, Delights and Prejudices, and the posthumous Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles.

  Julia first met Jim Beard in 1961, at a publication party for Mastering. By then, Beard was America’s most famous cook: he taught classes across the country, and from 1946 to 1947 hosted the nation’s first network cooking show, I Love to Eat, on NBC. Upon the publication of Mastering in October 1961, Julia and Simca, who were complete unknowns, arrived in New York to promote their book (Louisette Bertholle remained with her family in France). Judith Jones—who “rather cheekily” cold-called Beard—asked him to read their new book. He did, and was so impressed that he offered to host a book party at Dione Lucas’s restaurant, the Egg Basket. The evening featured everyone of note in New York’s small food and publishing worlds, including Craig Claiborne; Helen McCully, the powerful food editor of House Beautiful; and her protégé, a young French chef named Jacques Pépin. Jim and Julia hit it off right away. “After the party he said, ‘I wish I had written that book,’ ” Jones recalled. “High praise indeed.”

  By 1975, Jim and Julia were great pals, and he was a frequent guest at La Pitchoune. They loved to cook together, and made a natural and charming duo in their live performances onstage. So hopes ran high for the pilot for “Thirteen Feasts for Thirteen Colonies.”

  The title referred to the British colonies along the East Coast, stretching from Virginia to Georgia to the New England enclaves. In 1776, those colonies declared their independence from Britain and later banded together as the United States of America. The colonists had arrived in the New World bearing tastes, sensibilities, and utensils from the Old World. They settled in rugged areas, some of which had short growing seasons. As the Europeans adapted their recipes and cooking styles to local clams, lobster, cod, venison, pheasant, wild turkey, corn, cranberries, wheat, and the like, the combination of Old World techniques and New World ingredients led to a distinctly American cuisine.

  As Julia put it, “The persecuted Puritans came to New England ‘to serve their God and to fish.’ ”

  “As Massachusetts is the mother of American cooking, so Boston is the mother of American cookbooks,” wrote José Wilson, a South African English editor hired to research “Thirteen Feasts.” The first cookbook authored by an American was Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), which led to Mrs. D. A. Lincoln’s Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (1884) and Fanny Merritt Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896). The food lore of Massachusetts had a strong influence nationwide, “unlike the Southern states, what they cooked in the northeast translated easily to the Midwest and west.”

  To set the scene, Wilson quoted from America Cooks:

  When young daughters who trekked across the mountains recovered from the first hardships of setting up housekeeping in their own log houses, they wrote back home asking mother how she did this and that, and pasted mother’s recipe in a blank book along with father’s directions for killing potato bugs and curing the horse of heaves. Many a fine old dish, like the original Pan Pie which one of our great-great-grandmothers wrote down as a popular Michigan recipe of her day, might have been lost to posterity had it not been preserved in the Midwest. Thus, as many Massachusetts recipes, modernized and adapted, of course, turn up in the other states as have survived in the Mayflower Colony itself.

  Julia loved this kind of history, and “Thirteen Feasts” gave her an excuse to return to one of her favorite subjects: her family’s roots, and the foods they ate as they migrated across the country from East to West.

  —

  JULIA’S MOTHER, Julia Carolyn “Caro” Weston, was a tall, orange-haired, warm-spirited native of Massachusetts. Her father, Byron Weston, traced his lineage back to eleventh-century England, and to Edmund Weston, a Plymouth Colony settler. The family were Congregationalists, Republicans, and, as heirs to the Weston Paper Company fortune, New England gentry. Byron founded the company in 1863 to produce high-quality paper. In 1865, he married Julia Clark Mitchell, who was descended from Plymouth Colony settlers and a Massachusetts governor. Byron and Julia Weston had ten children, and he served as the state’s lieutenant governor.

  He was also an enthusiastic hunter, who liked to serve the rabbit, goose, duck, and partridge he shot for dinner. This was in stark contrast to his neighbor, the Reverend Sylvester Graham, a zealous Presbyterian minister and temperance leader who inveighed against meat, preached that vegetarianism would quell alcoholism and sexual urges, and is remembered as the inventor of graham crackers. Weston’s granddaughter, Julia McWilliams Child, would inherit Byron’s love of meat and disdain for fervent preachers of ascetic diets.

  Julia’s paternal grandfather, John McWilliams, was descended from a line of tall, strong, quick-minded, thrifty Scottish Presbyterians who had settled in Illinois. In 1849, when he was sixteen, stood six feet two inches tall, and weighed only 121 pounds, he became a forty-niner, running off to join the gold rush in California. He panned for gold in the Sacramento Valley for three years, gained thirty pounds, and returned home with a gold nugget in his pocket.

  Back in Illinois, he married and then parlayed his gold into successful investments in Arkansas rice fields and land in the California Central Valley. One of his sons, “Big John” McWilliams Jr., was Julia’s father. Big John graduated from Princeton in the class of 1901, moved to Chicago, where he married Caro Weston, and then to Pasadena, to manage his family’s properties.

  On August 15, 1912, Caro gave birth to her first child, Julia Carolyn McWilliams, in Pasadena. From her father, Julia inherited drive, intellect, and organization; from her mother, she inherited the “Weston twinkle,” an exuberant and accepting nature. Julia (known in the family as “Juke” or “Juke the Puke”) was followed by her brother, John, in 1914, and sister, Dorothy (called “Dort”), in 1917. The children attended the local Montessori school, where they practiced hand exercises—ringing bells, buttoning buttons, opening and closing latches—which Julia credited with teaching her the dexterity she relied on as a cook.

  The McWilliams family had a driver, gardener, and cook at their large house in Pasadena. Caro rarely stepped to the stove, but when she did it was to make classic New England dishes: baking-powder biscuits, codfish balls, and Welsh rarebit. To young Julia, the kitchen seemed “a dismal place.”

  —

  DESPITE HER CALIFORNIA UPBRINGING, Julia was proud of her Yankee lineage. Researching “Thirteen Feasts,” she spent hours leafing through old American cookbooks and developed a good understanding of how our national cuisine evolved. She began to tinker with American ingredients and recipes in the kitchen, and naturally felt the urge to share her discoveries with her audience.

  Julia planned thirteen episodes of the show, one per colony. She and Jim would begin every program with an overview of a state’s eighteenth-century landscape, buildings, kitchens, furniture, and cookware. Then they would move into a period studio kitchen to demonstrate two principal recipes. Each episode would end with a dramatic finale, in which the dishes were served in a period dining room.

  Julia carefully worked out the details of the collaboration in what she called the “Bearded Child Manifesto” on a yellow legal pad. In a note about important elements for the show, she listed: “local ingredients, inventiveness, frugality, visual fun, rediscovery of American roots, and pride in our heritage.”

  S
he would show oysters and clams heaped in woven baskets, Boston baked beans bubbling in a traditional bean pot, corn and bean succotash in a rough iron pot, bread sliced on a wooden cutting board, red flannel hash served in a cast-iron “spider” (a metal pan with three stubby legs, which held it steady just above the fire coals), and pumpkin pie on a brown-glazed hand-potted plate.

  In one program, Julia and Jim planned to visit Monticello, where they would show the ingenious kitchen mechanisms Thomas Jefferson invented, tour Jefferson’s garden, and demonstrate the making of traditional Virginian dishes, like Smithfield ham and beaten biscuits. In another episode, they would go to the nation’s oldest operating inn, the three-hundred-year-old Longfellow’s Wayside Inn, in Sudbury, Massachusetts, to explore the history of New England through specialties such as fish chowder.

  Julia loved hearty French fish stews like bouillabaisse, and was excited to discover the word “chowder” originated with “chaudières,” the giant cauldrons used to cook fish caught by French Canadian fishermen. She decided to use a recipe that came from England to Camden, Maine, to Boston, to Paul Child, via his sister, Meeda. This simple formula called for chunks of fish simmered until tender, potatoes cooked in milk, salt pork, onions, and crumbled crackers.

  Each recipe was designed to tell a larger story about the exigencies of early American life. Within the basic narrative of chowder, for instance, they found numerous substories that they could banter about on air: Cape Cod was named for the fish, and a golden cod hangs in the State House in Boston; codfish was known as “Cape Cod turkey,” and salted cod (or bacalao) was traded to the West Indies and led to great wealth among the “codfish aristocracy.” But cod fishing on the Grand Banks was dangerous, and many coastal houses were equipped with widow’s walks, small porches on which wives waited for their husbands to return from the merciless sea.

  Boiled salmon with egg sauce was another intriguing recipe, a “Thanksgiving-in-spring” dish that took advantage of the raw materials available in season: the salmon spawning in rivers, hens laying eggs, cows producing milk, and gardens producing new potatoes and green peas. Pork cake was an economical dish that allowed Julia and Jim to talk about the use of cured salt pork in cakes and chowders in wintertime. Hedgehog pudding was based on a German Rehrücken, a cake baked in a rounded form, then studded with almonds to look like a larded saddle of venison. It was an evocative-looking dish that could lead to a discussion about German immigrants in the colonies.

  In a note to herself Julia scribbled: “12 recipes for 13 states=156 recipes” for the companion book.

  There were many factors to take into account when choosing which dishes to feature. Each one should be authentic, economical, worth doing, and capable of being made by viewers across the country. Each should also use balanced ingredients (that is, not overrelying on staples such as cornmeal), provoke conversation, and be visually interesting.

  Julia learned that the Dutch brought coleslaw, pancakes, and doughnuts to New York; the Swedes brought meatballs to Delaware; and the Germans brought sauerkraut and scrapple to Pennsylvania. The English enjoyed giving their foods funny names—like toad in the hole (sausage in Yorkshire pudding batter), spotted dick (a suet-and-dried-fruit pudding), and bubble and squeak (fried leftover vegetables). Julia and Jim would demonstrate such evocatively named dishes as soup in your pocket (from Rhode Island); apple Jonathan (New York); pigeon stew and scripture cake (New Jersey); slump, buckle, and grunt (New Hampshire); and limping Susan and hopping John (North Carolina).

  There would be eel stifle (New England eel chowder), pork cake, salt pork and cream gravy, pickled pork and cabbage, and fried dough. Julia and Jim would also consider Charleston shrimp and Carolina rice pudding from South Carolina; funnel cakes and sticky buns from Pennsylvania; fried chicken, Sally Lunn, and crab cakes from Maryland; peach cake from Georgia; and election cake from Connecticut. But, José Wilson discovered, it wasn’t always easy to connect the historical dots: “No one could think of one dish that was Delaware’s alone, except for slippery dumplings, which are some form of noodles that no one admitted to liking,” she wrote.

  As any storyteller knows, stirring up controversy helps draw attention to a project. In this spirit, Wilson suggested that “people feel very strongly about Indian pudding, which makes it a good choice” to highlight. “We should get some fascinating reactions.”

  In February 1975, Craig Claiborne wrote an article in The New York Times entitled “The Great Indian Pudding Controversy.” He noted that while Americans are not generally ardent epicures, there are a few dishes that people care so passionately about they are willing to take up forks and cleavers and do battle over the “real” recipe. These battle-worthy dishes include clam chowders (white, red, or clear), chili con carne, Boston baked beans, mint juleps, oyster stew, and, on the eastern tip of Long Island, clam pie.

  But Indian pudding seemed to exist in a food-fighting category of its own. When he included a recipe—essentially Native American cornmeal added to traditional English pudding and saturated with molasses—based on a two-hundred-year-old recipe from Connecticut, it provoked such “good-natured wrath” from readers that he followed up with a second column. In the latter piece, he included another traditional recipe for the dish, which inflamed his correspondents further. “Why all the talk about the proper Indian pudding, and then nothing but a nontraditional recipe?” wondered Dorothy Kamen-Kaye, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Traditionally, Indian pudding was composed solely of corn meal, molasses, milk and spices with no eggs, raisins or anything else,” wrote Mrs. Ivy Dodd, of Rockland, Maine.

  “I will mercifully withhold comments on the use of tapioca—and non-use of eggs,” sniped Mrs. Lewis Cage, of Rowayton, Connecticut. But John R. Cole, a professor of anthropology and sociology at Hartwick College, responded: “The heretical tapioca recipe is certainly ‘Indian’ since Indians ‘invented’ tapioca—the first domesticated manioc, the source of tapioca, 6,000 or more years ago in South America where it is still the staple food in many areas.”

  Julia enjoyed such gustatory donnybrooks, both for the sheer drama and because they got people to think and talk about food in a new way. She and Beard knew that the history of American food raises other, far more sensitive issues than the role of tapioca. While they didn’t delve into white settlers’ exploitation of Native Americans, they fleetingly acknowledged the ghosts of slavery. In one script Julia said, “Within a generation after their arrival, the industrious settlers of Massachusetts Bay were engaged in a brisk trade with the West Indies, exporting salted codfish in exchange for much needed cotton…”

  Julia and James Beard prepare to cook together.

  To which Beard added: “By the early 1700s a network of international trade called the Golden Triangle was in bloom. With cash in their pockets from selling codfish in Europe or rum in West Africa, Yankee captains bought slaves. This human cargo they sailed to the Indies, where they loaded on stores of sugar and molasses to distill into rum and sell as seasonings to spice up the menus back home.”

  Having done all of this preparatory work, it was time for Julia and Jim to film a “Thirteen Feasts” pilot, which would be used to entice public television stations across the country to support the program.

  II. THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN COOKING

  “This is the colonial kitchen of the Wayside Inn, which was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who slept here. It’s on the Boston Post Road. And by law, in Massachusetts, if you come with a horse, or a pig, or a dog, the inn has to put it up!” Julia said in an excited, slightly breathless voice. “So there’s a barn to put things in.”

  “I’m going to try it with my pig someday!” chortled Jim Beard.

  Julia laughed, saying, “That would be lovely.”

  It was October 1975, and the two were standing in a dim, wood-paneled, eighteenth-century kitchen in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Before them spread the inn’s large brick hearth with a fire burning inside. A metal “crane” attached to th
e fireplace wall suspended a large cauldron filled with burbling, creamy codfish chowder. A metal “spider” hunkered in the coals. As the camera zoomed out, a long table was revealed, groaning under a feast of colonial-era foods—roasted wild turkey, silver cod, red lobster, gray oysters, yellow corn bread, chunks of Boston brown bread, a heap of beets, carrots, and onions, a terra-cotta pot of Boston baked beans, and sweet desserts like hedgehog pudding and apple pudding pie. The table was lit by green, hand-dipped candles.

  The screen showed a dozen men and boys dressed as Revolutionaries, in britches and tricorn hats, playing flutes and drums as they marched along a road. Then the scene shifted to show Julia and Jim in a modern kitchen. She was dressed in a purple-hued shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, the familiar blue apron tied around her waist. Beard—as tall as Julia, but far wider, entirely bald, with a mustache—was dressed in a mustard-yellow shirt and a red bow tie, and wore a blue apron around his neck.

  “Julia and Jim will take turns leading the recipes, one leading the way, the other kibitzing,” the narrator said. “The climax of each show will be the cooking and presentation of the principal dishes.”

  Julia looked into the camera with eyes humorously agleam. “Today we’re going to make Indian pudding—it sounds awful, but it’s very good!” She put her left hand on her hip and cocked an eyebrow at Beard. “It’s a cornmeal mush that is flavored with molasses and spices, and baked a long, slow time.”

  “Hours and hours and hours and hours…,” Beard said in a monotone.