The French Chef in America Page 23

  Hit by the gas crisis of the seventies, and a public preference for fast-food restaurants, HoJos’ business slipped into decline. In 2005, upon the demise of his beloved Times Square HoJo’s, Pépin wrote a eulogy: “For me, Howard Johnson’s reliable, modestly priced food embodies the straightforwardness of the American spirit.” The branch was a victim of real estate prices, changing tastes, and pressure from leaner, cheaper fast-food chains. (Ownership of the company has changed hands several times, and as of this writing there is only one Howard Johnson’s restaurant extant.) “It saddens me that New Yorkers looking for this kind of gentleness and simplicity will soon have to find it elsewhere. It won’t be easy.”

  While scooping ice cream and flipping burgers, Pépin had not forgotten haute cuisine, and in his off-hours, Helen McCully—the diminutive, fiery food editor of House Beautiful—introduced him to the small group of gastronomic aficionados in New York, including James Beard, Dione Lucas, and Craig Claiborne.

  Pépin was raised in France during the chaotic years of the Second World War, and at age six his parents sent him to live temporarily with a farmer to keep him out of harm’s way. Though he attended high school, he never earned a diploma. Arriving in New York in 1961, he was a phenomenal cook but rough around the edges. So McCully—Pépin’s “friend, mentor, and surrogate ‘American mother,’ ” as he described her—took it upon herself to instruct the young chef on how to dress, cut his hair, write thank-you notes, and comport himself in polite society. She also tried to fix him up with a succession of editorial assistants, without much success. In New York, Pépin enrolled in an English class at Columbia University “because it was the best school in New York.” He later earned a BA, and nearly added a PhD from the university; he toyed with the idea of becoming an academic, before returning to his “first love,” cooking.

  One evening in 1960, McCully handed Pépin a cardboard box full of 750 typed pages: it was a cookbook written “by a woman up in Cambridge” and two French friends, she explained. Though it had been rejected by Houghton Mifflin, she thought it was “an amazing piece of work,” and added, “I want to know what you think.”

  Pépin lugged the heavy box home and began to flip through the manuscript at the kitchen table. As he went, he passed the pages over to his roommate, Chef Jean-Claude Szurdak, whom Pépin had met while cooking at the Élysée Palace. They read the entire manuscript from start to finish. The authors “had taken the training and knowledge that Jean-Claude and I had acquired as apprentices and commis and codified it, broken it down into simple steps that someone who had never boiled a kettle of water could follow,” Pépin recalled in his memoir, The Apprentice. “I was a little jealous. This was the type of book I should have written.”

  In late 1961, Pépin met two of the book’s three authors—Julia Child and Simca Beck—at a dinner party at McCully’s apartment on the Upper East Side. At that point, Mastering had just been published by Knopf, and Child and Beck had embarked on their self-financed cross-country publicity tour. “I wasn’t in any way prepared for the woman I met that night.” Pépin laughed. “With Julia, who could be?” She was about a foot taller than he was, loud and self-confident, but also sympathetic and accomplished. “She was larger than life in every way,” said Pépin.

  Julia and Jacques spoke mostly in French that evening, comparing notes about food, cooking, eating, drinking, and la belle France. And thus began a friendship that would last until Julia’s death forty-three years later. Along the way, the two collaborated on hundreds of cooking demonstrations, culminating in Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home, which won an Emmy Award in 2001.

  “Julia revolutionized cooking in America, but she was not a revolutionary cook,” Pépin said. “Her idea was to do classical French cuisine well. And, believe me, that’s not easy!” In the great restaurants of France, a young chef will apprentice for six or seven years, trying to emulate the head chef’s dishes as closely as possible, and thereby gain his accumulated knowledge; only then can the young chef begin to experiment creatively on his own. “A head chef will never say to his sub-chefs, ‘Do you agree with my approach?’ ” said Pépin. “It’s immaterial if they agree. They are there to learn the classical approach. Julia agreed with that. She’d make a hamburger the way she learned from chef Bugnard in Paris: mix sautéed onion with the meat, press down on the patty in a skillet, make a little sauce for it, and serve it with a piece of good bread. I cook a burger the way I learned at Howard Johnson’s—don’t press it, salt the meat, serve it with iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato, red onion, on a plain roll. In some ways, she was more French than I was.”

  Pépin teased Julia about her Frenchness, and Julia teased him right back: “Of course, you don’t serve it that way in Connecticut, do you, Jack?” she’d say, pronouncing his name in a cowboy drawl. (Pépin had settled in Madison, Connecticut.)

  Like many French chefs, Julia kept a copy of Le Répertoire de la Cuisine, a reference guide to seventy-five hundred classical recipes originally complied by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier’s, in 1914. (It remains in print today.) Le Répertoire is an aide-mémoire, a shorthand list of ingredients and just a few basic steps for the experienced cook to use as a reference to make, say, salmon-in-brioche crust. “Julia’s books were at the other end of the spectrum,” laughed Pépin. “She liked to work in depth.”

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  JULIA ENCOURAGED THOUSANDS of cooks but mentored only a few of them. For someone to be worthy of her undivided attention they had to prove themself, as Julia put it, “sérieux”: she liked people who were serious about cooking. “No flimsies!” she’d insist. Jacques Pépin was one of the chosen. There was not much Julia could teach him about cooking, but there was a lot she could teach him about performing—something that personal circumstances dictated he do more of, and better.

  In 1974, Pépin was driving too fast in upstate New York when a deer tumbled off an embankment onto the road in front of him. He swerved and smashed into a telephone pole, knocking it down; the car was totaled, and he was left with fourteen fractures, including a broken back, two broken hips, and a broken pelvis. After the accident, Pépin found it difficult to stand for hours behind a restaurant stove. So he began to teach classes, do live cooking demonstrations, consult for restaurateurs—like Joe Baum, the impresario behind Windows on the World atop New York’s World Trade Center—and teach cooking on television.

  Julia was twenty-three years older than Jacques, and she was older than his mother and aunt. All three of them were powerful women and excellent cooks, Pépin recalled, “and none of them was too impressed with me.”

  Julia adored and respected Pépin, but was not cowed by his résumé. “She was a very good home cook, and never pretended to be anything else. But she didn’t consider herself any less of a cook than I was,” he said. “When we cooked together, sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong. But she didn’t look at me like ‘Wow, that guy can do things I can’t do.’ She was very secure in her skin. If people asked her about the latest kind of ginger, she had no problem saying, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about—I’ve never heard of it.’ And if she made a mistake, she’d just say, ‘Remember, you’re alone in the kitchen.’ Julia was confident but modest.”

  In 1978, Julia and Jacques began to do live cooking demonstrations before audiences for the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals, a food education group that Child and Pépin helped found with cooking teacher Anne Willan). They developed a freewheeling risk-taking approach, with no set recipes and a lot of mutual ribbing. When Julia explained to the audience the proper way to form an omelet, Jacques would sneak a piece of bread behind her back. While he demonstrated how to turn a mushroom, she’d sneak a little more butter into the pan on the stove. It was fun, but the high jinks were a tactic to keep the audience focused on the cooking lessons. Without saying so directly, their message was that making good food together can be challenging and playful; that mistakes are part of cooking, and fixable
; and that creative tension can push you to extraordinary heights. The public lapped it up.

  Jacques and Julia took their act on the road so often, and so successfully, that producers took note. “We were learning on the job, and having a good time,” said Pépin. “So we were ready to do television together.”

  II. “THE CAMERA IS YOUR FRIEND”

  Television is a medium with its own peculiar set of requirements and skills, and performing well on air does not come naturally to everyone. James Beard was a deeply knowledgeable chef who had trained as an opera singer and hosted cooking shows for years, yet he didn’t have the knack for broadcasting. He spoke in rapid-fire bursts or lectured in a monotone, looked everywhere but at the camera, and wordlessly stared at the countertop for long stretches: in the audiovisual realm of TV, this was deadly. Even the charming and eloquent New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne “would get the shakes before going on set,” Pépin recalled. “He needed to drink three scotches, and then he’d forget to add the olive oil.”

  Julia, on the other hand, would wink at the lens, address her potatoes as “neuOrotic vegetables,” snort at limp cookies and toss them into a garbage can. Then she’d veer off-script to pontificate on why, say, homemade English muffins are so much better than store-bought: “They taste better, they cost less, and they are such fun to make”—plus, “they are butter mops!”

  Pépin noticed that Julia would taste and correct the seasoning of a dish a half dozen times in thirty minutes. “She was always tasting-tasting-tasting,” he said. “She was very concerned about correct seasoning, and she was good at it.” Although viewers couldn’t actually taste the difference a dash of salt made to Julia’s cake, she made them feel as if they could, and they emulated her.

  Julia was not afraid to ask Jacques for advice, or to offer it right back: “You’re pretty good on TV, but you’re too tight and serious,” she advised Pépin when he started to do TV spots in the 1970s. “This is television. Loosen up. Have some fun.”

  Julia “tasting-tasting-tasting”

  “The camera,” Julia coached him, “is your friend.”

  While humor was crucial to her appeal, so was her underlying seriousness. Julia considered herself “a teacher of cookery,” and at the end of a shooting day she always wanted to know: “What did the audience learn?”

  She drilled these lessons hard, and Pépin was a quick study. He taught himself to smile, look into the camera, pause a beat now and then, to show and not just tell the audience about technique. He worked and worked on these skills in the same dogged way he had learned to speak English or teach and write about food in America: by doing a lot of it.

  In the seventies, Pépin began contributing recipe articles to Helen McCully’s House Beautiful, and in the fall of 1976 he published an influential book, La Technique, a step-by-step demonstration of more than 150 basic cooking techniques. (It remains in print.) On his first book tour, he’d typically pull into a town, do a live cooking demonstration, sign copies of his book at a bookstore, and end with a few radio shows and a cooking class on the local television station.

  “This was the age of guerrilla TV,” he chuckled. “Not sophisticated at all.” At a tiny TV station in Eureka, California, where the general manager was also the mayor of the town, the show was taped by a single unmoving camera, and the “teleprompter” was a man lying on the floor unspooling notes scrawled onto a roll of paper towels. “It was hard to do my recipe and not laugh,” Pépin fondly recalled. “But I survived. I learned a few tricks out there.”

  He and Julia first cooked on TV together in 1993, for a PBS series called Cooking in Concert. Pépin quickly learned that Julia’s humor could be as naughty as Paul Bocuse’s, and sometimes tilted toward the bawdy or obnoxious. Making a lobster soufflé, she’d say, “Now, Jacques, there’s a nice piece of tail for you.” When a turkey needed to be deboned, she’d say, “Jacques is a great boner.” If he objected to one of her jokes—“No, Julia, stop!”—she’d say it again and again, with a widening grin. “You didn’t ever tell Julia what to do,” he said. “If you did, she will only do it more.”

  It was a lesson that he, Julia’s sponsors, and her putative bosses learned many times over. Julia was relentlessly courted by advertisers, yet she remained adamantly independent and noncommercial for most of her career. Even in the gray area where private money met public television she pushed the envelope of acceptability, and was not beyond subverting her show’s underwriters.

  On a TV show sponsored by the Kendall-Jackson winery, for instance, Julia suddenly announced, “I am in the mood for a beer,” and pulled a bottle of Samuel Adams beer from the prop refrigerator. (Samuel Adams was not a sponsor. The brewery was in Boston, and Julia knew some of the people involved; she pulled this prank entirely on her own.)

  On a show sponsored by Land O’Lakes Butter, Julia and Jacques were preparing to make dough for chicken potpie and an apple galette, when she suddenly announced that she wanted to use Crisco instead of butter. Jacques was taken aback. “But Julia, we have plenty of butter and no Crisco,” he protested. “Oh yes we do,” Julia replied with a gleam in her eye, whipping a tin of Crisco out from beneath the counter. “I happen to have some right here!”

  Telling this story, Pépin gave the weary smile of a straight man, and muttered, “She did that many, many times to me…”

  He wasn’t alone. Now that Julia was a celebrity, people and organizations frequently wanted her to conform to their idea of who she was, or tried to use her fame to promote their own agendas. But Julia had a deep aversion to being coerced, and usually found a humorous way to confound those who tried to co-opt her. Julia was infinitely patient with her public and put up with the usual questions about how much wine she drank on TV (“None,” she said. “I couldn’t cook if I did”) or the time she dropped a chicken on the floor (“I never did that”); but when interviewers pressed Julia to name her “favorite” restaurant or food processor or chef, she’d wag a finger and say, “Oh, those are media-type questions, and we don’t answer those.”

  “It was like she said ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ ” said Pépin. “People respected that…Well, most of them, anyway.”

  III. SPEAKING OUT

  Julia was comfortable with her stature and understood its power (though she rarely talked about it), and in the mid-seventies—when she was in her mid- to late sixties—she was increasingly willing to “speak out on any subject I feel strongly about.”

  By that point, the choices people made about what foods to buy, cook, and eat had become political statements that divided America into opposing camps. On one side were those who relied on conventional supermarket fare, largely produced by “agribusiness.” On the other side were converts to local, natural, organic, macrobiotic, or other “health foods.” Underlying these two fiercely defended positions were strata of educational, class, and racial divisions. Somewhere in the middle stood Julia Child, outspoken, and not always politic.

  When food activists began to ask pointed questions about the pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones used by the food industry, Julia—who was suspicious of orthodoxies in general, and food fads in particular—was vehement. “I just hate health food,” she said, because it seemed to be a diet of “nuts and berries,” akin to “bird food,” that tasted bad and left her hungry. She worried that nutritionists—especially “that dreadful woman” Adelle Davis—were cold-blooded scolds who considered food merely as fuel, or worse, medicine. “I have never met a healthy, normal nutritionist who loves to eat,” Julia declared.

  At a moment when Americans began to worry about cholesterol and cancer, and embraced vegetarianism, bottled water, and distance running as prophylactics against those diseases, Julia denounced “the food police” and “the fear of fat mania.” She lamented that “the dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure,” and predicted that “if fear of food continues it will be the death of gastronomy.”

  At times, Julia could be down
right provocative, as when she declared, “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”

  Looking back on the vegetarian movement, she said in 1999:

  Personally, I don’t think pure vegetarianism is a healthy lifestyle. It’s more fear of food—that whole thing that red meat is bad for you. And then there are people who don’t eat meat because it’s against their morals. Well, there’s nothing you can do with people like that. I’ve often wondered to myself: Does a vegetarian look forward to dinner, ever?

  I don’t think we were as afraid of food in the early days, except for pesticides. I do take some steps—I wash everything I eat in hot water…Now there’s worry about irradiation and bio-engineering, but I think the critics are often short on facts.

  Such pronouncements upset and confused many of her followers, who wanted to believe that Julia Child was always perfect, according to their worldview. When she declined to criticize irradiated food, for instance, one fan felt betrayed: “You, of all my favorite people!”

  Julia’s stridency was rooted in her determination to popularize excellent cooking and “hearty eating” in America. She believed that good food took “time, and care, and a little extra effort to do things right,” as her mentor, Chef Max Bugnard, had taught in Paris. Julia wanted Americans to think of their meals as fun, exciting, and delicious; a sensory adventure that nourished and inspired. Unless something was actually dangerous, such as tainted shellfish, she wanted to increase rather than restrict people’s culinary options.