The French Chef in America Read online

  “How many times has this happened to you? You have a bass. You’re trying to find an exciting new way to prepare it for dinner. You could scale the bass, remove the bass’s tail, head and bones, and serve the fish as you would any other fish dinner,” he exhorts at maximum speed. “But why bother—now that you can use Ronco’s amazing new kitchen tool, the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76!”

  The skit was inspired by the real infomercial pitchman Ron Popeil, who hawked items such as the Veg-O-Matic (“It slices! It dices!”), GLH (Great Looking Hair) spray-on hair, the Pocket Fisherman, Smokeless Ashtray, and the tagline “But wait, there’s more!”

  Julia’s antics inspired Dan Aykroyd’s famous skits.

  Aykroyd channeled Popeil’s manic energy and ratcheted it into the absurd: “The days of troublesome scaling, cutting, and gutting are over. Because the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76 is the tool that lets you use the whole bass, with no fish waste, without scaling, cutting, or gutting. Here’s how it works: catch a bass, remove the hook, and drop the bass—that’s the whole bass—into the Super Bass-O-Matic ’76. Now adjust the control dial so that that bass is blended just the way you like it.”

  With that, he drops a “bass” (the fish looks more like a porgy) into a standard blender, turns it on high, and liquefies it into pale brown goop. “Yes, it’s just that simple!” he exhorts. “The Bass-O-Matic ’76 works great on sunfish, perch, sole, and other small aquatic creatures…it’s clean, simple, and after five or ten fish it gets to be quite a rush!”

  Although Julia’s name is never uttered, Aykroyd credits her with inspiring the skit, via a semitraumatic piscatorial experience of his own. Both his mother and aunt were excellent cooks, and devotees of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In fact, his aunt, Helen Gougeon, was “a Canadian clone of Julia Child, if you will,” said Aykroyd. She was a French Canadian who ran a cookware store in Montreal, wrote books like Cooking…with an Accent, and hosted a radio and TV show on the CBC called Bon Appétit.

  Julia befriended Helen Gougeon and gave her an early version of the Cuisinart food processor before it had arrived in North American stores. Gougeon immediately took to the machine. When Aykroyd was visiting Gougeon at her lake house, she decided to make bouillabaisse, the famed fish stew of Marseille. Instead of chopping her freshly caught trout into chunks and stewing them first, Gougeon simply dropped the entire uncooked fish—head, tail, fins, gills, and all—into her new Cuisinart and blended it to a pulp.

  “My eyes went wide, and I was stammering, ‘Wh-wha-what just happened to the fish?!’ ” Aykroyd recalled. “Years later, I remembered that for the Bass-O-Matic.”

  In the seventies, Aykroyd was fascinated by Julia as “a go-to cultural figure,” and would rush home from SNL rehearsals to watch her on PBS. It was this devotion to Julia that inspired one of the most iconic skits in SNL’s history, one that defined his career and cemented Julia’s celebrity status.

  It was Thanksgiving 1978 when Julia and Jacques Pépin appeared on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. The show aired at 1:00 a.m., and was billed as a “conversational chat show” with Snyder, an idiosyncratic, six-foot four-inch, cigarette-smoking host. Moments before airtime, Child and Pépin were backstage, rushing through their preparations for volaille demi-désossée—a chicken that has had the backbone removed, is stuffed, and then sewn back together again.

  Julia borrowed Jacques’s razor-sharp knife, and as she surgically sliced the chicken, she lopped off a fingertip. Blood gushed, and her finger clearly needed stitches. But the producer was already counting down the final seconds before they were to go on air. Julia was a seasoned performer and, in “the show must go on” spirit, pushed the flap of skin back onto her fingertip, stanched the blood with a clean kitchen towel, and bound her finger with a bandage.

  “Don’t worry, Jacques will cook, I will explain, and it will all work out fine,” Julia told a worried Snyder. She asked him not to mention the accident on air because she wanted to focus on the chicken.

  They walked onstage, and within minutes Snyder blurted out, “Julia, do you mind if I tell people you just cut your finger?” As the camera zoomed in for a close-up of her bandaged hand, there was little she could do but smile. After the show, Julia, Paul, and Jacques went to a hospital, where she was given eight stitches. (Julia then led a late-night charge to L’Ermitage, a French restaurant in Los Angeles.)

  Julia considered the finger cut a minor incident, but thanks to Snyder, news of her julienned digit quickly spread. When she appeared on The Tonight Show a week later, Johnny Carson asked about the injury; and when she made an omelet on The Kathryn Crosby Show in San Francisco, she was mostly asked about her mishap.

  Dan Aykroyd, meanwhile, had parodied Tom Snyder on SNL for years: the host’s honking laugh, occasionally brusque manner, awkward questions, and contrasting gray hair and jet-black eyebrows made him an easy target. “We saw Julia cut herself on Snyder,” Aykroyd explained, “and thought it could be something funny.”

  Within days, SNL writers Al Franken and Tom Davis cobbled together a sketch based on the incident. Although SNL had women such as Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, and Laraine Newman in the cast, “for some reason they asked me to read the part,” Aykroyd recalled.

  In the skit, Aykroyd’s “Julia Child” was dressed in a curly brown wig, pearls, earrings, a pink shirt, and a blue apron. (“I look like a busty version of my mother,” he said to me with a laugh.) As he demonstrated how to make a holiday poularde with a demi-désossée—“a fine, fat roasting chicken” that has been partly deboned—he narrated in a high-pitched warble: “You can save the liver and fry it up with some onions for a little snack. Or, if you have a number of livers, you can make a lovely liver pâté. Or a delicious liverwurst, which you can spread on a cracker—a Ritz cracker, a sa-a-hhaa-ltiiine—or on a bread, a rye bread…Or, if you have a pet cat or a dog, they love liver. Save the liver. Don’t throw it away. I hope I’ve made my point: don’t throw the liver away!”

  As he prepares to bone the chicken, Aykroyd’s Julia says, “For this you need a very sharp knife—you can’t do nothin’ without a sharp knife!” Operating on the chicken, he adds, “You cut along the backbone to the pope’s nose, like so—rrrrrraaAHHH! Oh! Oho! Now I’ve done it. I’ve cut the dickens out of my finger!”

  Blood begins to squirt vigorously from his hand onto the chicken, and pools on the countertop.

  “Well, I’m glad, in a way, this has happened. We have never really discussed what to do. First, we must stop the bleeding.” As blood spurts across his chest and runs down his arms, “Julia” attempts to stanch the flow with his apron while attempting to smile and keep things upbeat. “You want to raise your hand over your head…”

  As blood arcs through the air, the audience’s squeals and nervous laughter grow louder and louder. Aykroyd carries on: “I recommend natural coagulants, such as chicken liver. Another reason not to throw away the liver…Oh, God, it’s throbbing!” he wheezes.

  Pink blood sprays across the counter in great jets.

  He suggests making a tourniquet from cheesecloth and a chicken bone. When that doesn’t stop the torrent, “Julia” grows woozier and says, “I’m remembering a time when I was a little girl and I had a dog named Amber…I used to give him liver. And my mother gave me a doll…Why are you all spinning? Uhhh, I think I’m going to go to sleep now…Bon appétit.”

  He falls face-first across the bloody counter. With a final twitch, he raises his head to cry, “Save the liver!”

  The audience laughed hysterically, unaware that the skit had almost failed.

  In order to pump the fake blood through Aykroyd’s hand, the SNL prop department had filled an old, brass fire extinguisher with stage blood, and rigged a long black rubber hose down Aykroyd’s arm. “We had to get the rhythm of the blood perfectly timed, but it wasn’t working at dress [rehearsal],” he remembered. When it came time to perform the show live, the script’s writer, Al Franken (now the Democratic junior U.S. senator fr
om Minnesota), was determined to make it work: he hid under the counter and enthusiastically pumped the blood himself.

  The skit was a silly “blood joke, a fluid joke,” Aykroyd admits, and he had “no idea it would become a classic.” But then he makes sure to add, “It came from a place of total respect for Julia Child. I was a huge fan of hers, of course. It was a tribute.”

  The SNL sketch aired on December 9, 1978. It happened that Julia and Paul had been out to dinner in Cambridge that night. They returned home to 103 Irving Street, switched on the little television in the kitchen—“just so that it would make a noise,” she’d recall—and there was Aykroyd’s Julia, spraying blood and warbling about livers.

  The Childs settled in to watch. While Julia loved a good laugh, she didn’t like mean-spirited comedy. As the skit ended, the phone began to ring: it was friends and family members from across the country calling to ask if Julia had seen the send-up and what she thought of it. “We thought it was terribly funny,” she replied.

  The Childs kept a videotaped copy of the SNL skit by their TV, and would occasionally break it out for friends. Dorie Greenspan, who co-authored Baking with Julia in 1996, recalled one high-spirited evening when Julia acted out the Aykroyd skit, crying, “Save the liver!” at the top of her lungs.

  11

  Bursting Out of the Straitjacket

  I. THE AMERICAN WAY OF DOING THINGS

  By January 1978, Julia had sold more than 1.2 million copies of the four books she had written or co-written: volumes I and II of Mastering had sold more than 800,000 copies (Volume I accounted for more than 560,000), The French Chef Cookbook had sold more than 250,000 copies, and From Julia Child’s Kitchen had sold nearly 140,000 copies. They would continue to sell, as they do today, providing the Childs with a comfortable annuity. Yet, she had not published a new book in three years or produced a new TV series in five years.

  As Paul’s health gradually improved, Julia had more time to think about her next project. The demise of “Thirteen Feasts for Thirteen Colonies” in 1975, and the mixed success of the White House bicentennial show in 1976, left her dissatisfied. She could have comfortably retired, but that was never a prospect she relished. In September 1978, at age sixty-six, Julia Child was ready to launch a new kind of book and TV series. This project would be a step further away from French cooking, and would expand on the polyglot approach she used in From Julia Child’s Kitchen.

  While that book had included both French recipes and dishes from Italy, Belgium, and India, they were similar to what Julia had done on The French Chef. In the new project, she fully embraced her roots and a forward-looking, American-style approach to food. “In French cooking…you only have such and such [ingredient] that you can serve with such and such, or they say you are an ignoramus. So I’ve decided I’ve had enough of that,” Julia declared. “I’m not tired of it. I just feel like I’d like to burst out of that straitjacket into something else.”

  The something else she was bursting into was a TV show and companion book called Julia Child & Company, a project with an unapologetically American flavor. “We felt it was time to…go in for general cooking where we could draw from anywhere and everywhere,” she wrote in the book’s introduction, “since that really is the American way of doing things.”

  As she was wont, Julia ratcheted up the ambition, risk, and difficulty of the new project. She decided to tape the Company TV series at the same time that she wrote the Company book, in order to release them to the public contemporaneously. It seemed crazy. But there was a method to Julia’s madness: in combining the action and visual flair of a TV show with the printed recipes, detailed instructions, and still photographs of a book, Julia was providing her audience with the most comprehensive, in-depth, mutually reinforcing cooking instructions possible in those pre-Internet days. A secondary function of the TV/book project was, in essence, to relaunch Julia’s “brand” as a cook in tune with her nation and time, using the latest multimedia tools.

  The title for Company was a fitting nod to several definitions of the word. The book and TV episodes were built on a series of complete menus for guests (or company) rather than on individual recipes. With a significant budget from Knopf and WGBH, Julia was able to build two teams: one to write and photograph the Company book and the other to cook, stage, and videotape the Company TV series; the teams worked side by side, and occasionally together (like a repertory theater company). To keep the enterprise rolling forward, Julia played impresario and ringmaster, juggling dozens of people and elements while keeping an eye on the bottom line (as a CEO manages a company). This high-energy, sometimes raucous collaboration was the opposite of the enforced calm and quiet of the last few years, and for Julia it came as a welcome relief.

  II. COMPANY

  Other than the fact that Julia Child & Company was a cookbook by Julia Child published by Knopf and edited by Judith Jones, nearly everything about the project was a departure from her previous work. Most fundamental, it was a book built around a TV show, rather than the other way around. Julia’s first words in the book are: “It didn’t take too much persuasion to induce me to do another television cooking series…” This was a statement of fact, a tacit acknowledgment that print had taken a backseat to television in American media by that point.

  While Julia’s previous books were collections of recipes organized by food group (bread, meat, vegetables, dessert), Company was a “menu book” designed to teach people how to cook entire meals, from planning and shopping to preparing appetizers, entrées, and desserts, to tips on cleaning up. The book was structured around thirteen “special occasions”—such as a breakfast party, a VIP lunch, a birthday dinner, and a backyard barbecue. The recipes were supplemented by a welter of shopping lists, advice on timing, hints for using leftovers, and other addenda and arcana.

  “Whatever the occasion, Julia Child takes all the stage fright out of cooking for company,” the book flap promised. Inside, Julia wrote, “What do you feed to 19 people when you’re the cook and butler combined?…Or, the big boss is coming to dinner; you don’t know him (or her!) very well…What do you plan for them? Or you are to have a comfortable family-style Sunday night supper, with both grown-ups and children. What would be fun for all?”

  (Simca had taken a similar, menu-driven approach in Simca’s Cuisine, published in 1972 and co-written by Patricia Simon, which included chapters with titles such as “A hunt breakfast,” “A carefree luncheon,” “A high tea,” “A spectacular dinner with Champagne,” and “An earthy dinner for high-spirited friends.”)

  Julia focused on developing, testing, and perfecting recipes for Company, and left much of the book writing to E. S. “Peggy” Yntema, an editor at Atlantic Monthly Press. Each menu in the book was introduced with a short preamble, or what Julia referred to as “the blah-blah.” Yntema would write a draft and then Julia would rewrite it in her own voice—deleting a too-literary reference to Henry V here (“not my style at all”), or adding a Julia-ism there, such as “Like the ‘Blue Danube,’ [roast beef] may be square, but it’s wonderful and everybody loves it.”

  When Houghton Mifflin rejected Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the 1950s, the editors had said it was too long and complicated: “Americans don’t want an encyclopedia, they want to cook something quick, with a mix.” Julia was despondent at the time, but vindicated by Mastering’s eventual success. Yet, one could argue that by 1978 the Houghton Mifflin/“quick, with a mix” mind-set had triumphed. Julia would not succumb to baking mixes, but in explaining her approach to Company she told reporters: “You’ve got to make it as easy as possible so that you can encourage people to cook. It’s like the difference between using a pocket calculator and adding up a huge column of figures yourself. If you give someone a calculator, suddenly mathematics becomes fun.”

  Company was roughly a third of the length of Mastering—which clocked in at 684 pages—and From Julia Child’s Kitchen. It was also physically larger: Company measured eight and a
half inches wide by eleven inches long, compared with the six-and-a-half by nine-inch dimensions of From Julia Child’s Kitchen. And the new book was graphically bolder and brighter than Julia’s previous efforts.

  These changes were a reflection of the times. Not only were books competing with the visual jazz of television, but in the sixties and seventies magazine design had become a celebrated art form, a graphic analogue to New Journalism; they grew bigger and bolder, and art directors such as Esquire’s George Lois or New York’s Milton Glaser were stars. Company was designed by Knopf to approximate the look of food magazines. The pages had eye-catching headlines and amusing subtitles set in large type. There were blocs of type surrounded by lots of white space on the page. Sidonie Coryn’s line drawings in Mastering and Paul’s photographs in From Julia Child’s Kitchen had been supplanted by color photographs of Julia and her crew in action, or seductive portraits of their food, taken by Jim Scherer.

  The Company menus strove to be up-to-date. The Lo-Cal Banquet—“Light food for sharp appetites”—for instance, tipped its hat to nouvelle cuisine by including a shrimp, green bean, and raw mushroom appetizer; chicken bouillabaisse; rice; and a steamed apple dessert. “This meal is so delicious, they’ll take big helpings and return for seconds,” Julia promised. “But a moderate portion of each dish, though you’d hardly believe it, adds up to a sensible 678 calories. There’s no trick to it, and no secret—only a well-considered application of the simplest principles of sound gastronomy: contrast, balance, beauty, savor, and style.”