The French Chef in America Read online

  In the nineties, Julia was in near constant motion. She cohosted Cooking in Concert PBS specials with Jacques Pépin and Graham Kerr, the “Galloping Gourmet.” She launched an eponymous foundation to support the gastronomic and culinary arts. She co-wrote Baking with Julia (1996) with Dorie Greenspan, and starred in a companion show. In 1999, she and Jacques Pépin created the buddy-comedy TV show and book, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, in which each presented his and her own version of a given recipe—for such dishes as roasted leg of lamb, Provençal tomatoes, and profiteroles. While they agreed to disagree about ingredients or approach, their rivalry was good-natured, and Julia and Jacques’s marvelous chemistry won the show an Emmy in 2001. In 2000, she produced Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom as a slim book and two-hour TV retrospective.

  In August 2002, Julia turned ninety years old. Her shoulders were stooped, her knees were weak and aching; she used a walker and eventually a wheelchair. The cold, blustery New England winters without Paul were not much fun, so she donated the house in Cambridge to Smith College, and moved to Santa Barbara, where she had summered as a child.

  Julia, the self-described “kitchen gadget freak,” and Paul in Cambridge

  Before she left 103 Irving Street, though, the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian asked if she’d be willing to donate her kitchen to the museum. “Why would they want my kitchen?” Julia wondered. The answer was obvious to everyone but her, and Julia gave her blessing.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001—at the very moment that terrorists commandeered four airliners in a national tragedy—a team of Smithsonian curators arrived at 103 Irving Street, in Cambridge. They meticulously noted, deconstructed, and packed every piece of the kitchen, from the black Garland range to the gleaming copper pots hanging from Paul’s Peg-Board on the walls, to the prints of fish on the walls. Even the bric-a-brac in kitchen drawers—pencil nibs, bits of string, egg timers, and the signal mirror she helped devise for downed airmen in World War II—was carefully catalogued, wrapped, and transported to Washington, D.C. There, the entire kitchen (save the asbestos tiles beneath its linoleum floor) was faithfully restored. Today, the underside of the Norwegian table in the middle of the room remains speckled with banana stickers from Paul, and a few bits of chewing gum, courtesy of Persons Unknown, who may or may not have been my sisters and me. “Julia’s Kitchen” was unveiled in 2002. It was designed as a temporary exhibit, but proved so popular that it remains in place today.

  EPILOGUE

  A Civilized Art

  I. SLIPPING OFF THE RAFT

  Julia was undaunted by age: “I have no fear of dying,” she said. “It’s something that happens.”

  To live a long life, she advised, you should “eat in moderation, exercise daily, and pick your grandparents.” Her father had lived to eighty-one, and her grandfather to ninety-seven. Her mother, Caro, died young, at just sixty, but like many of the Westons, she had suffered from high blood pressure, which Julia did not. “I think I will go on for another ten years,” she predicted in 2003.

  Over the following spring and summer, Julia and I collaborated on her memoir, My Life in France. She was ninety-one years old, and lived in a small, neat apartment filled with Paul’s paintings and her extensive cookbook collection in a retirement community in Montecito, California. It is a seaside town built on a green slope adjacent to Santa Barbara. The climate there is sunny, dry, and, Julia said, “reminds me of Provence.” Most days, she ate breakfast with a group of friends she had known as girls in Pasadena.

  Julia suffered from various ailments, and her energy waxed and waned. But she still had that gleam in her eye. She was learning to brine olives, loved to sample fresh strawberries, gnaw on lamb chops at a favorite restaurant, or visit friends at a nearby rose farm—where she picked out a hearty yellow flower now sold as the Julia Child Rose. I struggled to convince her to talk about herself, but in her modesty she usually turned the conversation around to me, or someone else. I finally cracked the code by reading aloud from the letters Paul wrote from France to his twin, Charlie, in Pennsylvania, in the fifties. His words took Julia back in time, and allowed her to talk about her loves—Paul, France, food—and, eventually, about herself. At times, she would reminisce in the present tense, as if she was reliving the moment: “I walk along the Seine while Paul takes photographs of the bridges and fishermen. Then we stroll up the hill to Montmartre. I have always loved Sacré Coeur, don’t you? We walk down a little side street, and at the end is a bistro I’ve never seen before. Inside, there is an old doggie wearing a green sweater. Paul orders kidneys…”

  The longer we worked together, the more her memories bubbled up, and the book gained momentum.

  Food was a constant subject, and sometimes we played a game: “What would you eat for your last meal?” She usually chose a menu beginning with oysters or caviar with Champagne; followed by duck, or the sole meunière she had on her first day in France in 1948; a “lovely green salad,” and a “perfectly aged” wedge of Camembert cheese, paired with a delicious wine; a dessert of poached pears or ice cream with chocolate sauce. To finish, she’d have a café filtre and a snifter of Calvados or cognac.

  One day we bought take-out hamburgers, and she insisted that I drive up a small road past a large sign that said “Private” to an overlook with a dazzling view of the Pacific. When I asked if she realized we were trespassing, she grinned and assured me: “Oh, don’t worry, dearie. If anyone bothers us, we’ll just tell them we’re looking for Mr. Smith!” (We ate in peace.) On another day she asked me to roll her in her wheelchair through a local cat show. She associated “poussiquettes” with France, and as she held cats of every size, shape, and hue, she became enrobed in cat fur and beamed at them with girlish delight.

  On August 15, Julia would turn ninety-two. She had invited friends and family from across the country and around the world to celebrate with her in Montecito. Though she was suffering a kidney infection, and had declined treatment, she was determined to make it to her birthday. My wife, children, and I joined her for lunch a few days before the party, and found her sharp-minded and perceptive. “I viewed our recipes as a sacred trust, a set of rules about the right way and wrong way to approach food, and I felt a duty to pass this knowledge on,” she said. Alerted by her serious tone, I jotted those words down for her memoir. My wife, Sarah, snapped a photo of Julia and me, which appeared on the hardcover dust jacket of My Life in France.

  The following day her assistant, Stephanie Hersh, made one of Julia’s favorite comfort foods, French onion soup, for lunch. In retrospect, it seems that she must have reached a private decision by then.

  In describing the death of others, Julia would say they “slipped off the raft.” On the night of August 13, two days shy of her ninety-second birthday, Julia did just that: she died of kidney failure in her sleep.

  In the meantime, guests were arriving for Julia’s party. The birthday turned into a three-day Irish wake, filled with tears and laughter and songs and stories, and plenty of good food and wine. It was sad and joyous in equal measure, a celebration of Julia’s remarkable life and esprit. She had done it again, attendees agreed: Julia had managed to exit her life as she had lived it, with a touch of drama and exquisite timing.

  “My point is to make cooking easy for people, so that they can enjoy it, and do it, rather than make it a kind of art for the ‘We Happy Few,’ ” she said. “It should be—and is—everybody’s pleasure. And it’s a civilized art, don’t you agree?”

  II. CHILD’S PLAY

  Throughout her career, journalists often liked to note how “childlike” Julia Child could be, and how she loved to “play with food.” And it was true. Her audience laughed when she dropped a potato pancake on the stove, then scooped it back into the pan, saying “When you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s to know?” She flirted with David Letterman while blowtorching a raw hamburger, made winking double entendres on Good Morning America, and summoned Jacques Pépin to the sto
ve with a honking duck call.

  She encouraged this vision of childlike play, to a point, but it could be misleading. As Paul knowingly observed, “Practically every article on Julie…has concentrated on the clown instead of the woman, the cook, the expert, or the revolutionary.” There was another Julia, one who saw something deeper, more profound, and mysterious in our ability to turn raw ingredients into something delicious to eat, and how life altering that experience can be.

  I was reminded of this when I happened to glance at a postscript at the end of the “VIP Lunch” chapter in Julia Child & Company. It was a short, easily overlooked aside, titled “On playing with your food.” I read it expecting to laugh. Yet something about it—the tone, the celebration of cooking as art, the encouragement and inclusiveness of its message—caught my attention. I read it again, and then again. I realized that Julia’s lighthearted title masked a heartfelt cri de coeur. One that makes a fitting epitaph:

  Some children like to make castles out of their rice pudding, or faces with raisins for eyes. It is forbidden—so sternly that, when they grow up, they take a horrid revenge by dying meringues pale blue or baking birthday cakes in the form of horseshoes or lyres or whatnot. That is not playing with food, that is trifling.

  “Play” to me means freedom and delight, as in the phrase “play of imagination.” If cooks did not enjoy speculating about new possibilities in every method and each raw material, their art would stagnate and they would become rote performers, not creators. True cooks love to set one flavor against another in the imagination, to experiment with the great wealth of fresh produce in the supermarkets, to bake what previously they braised, to try new devices. We all have flops, of course, but we learn from them; and, when an invention or variation works out at last, it is an enormous pleasure to propose it to our fellows.

  Let’s all play with our food, I say, and, in so doing, let us advance the state of the art together.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is dedicated to Judith Jones because without her dogged support Julia Child might not have had her career—or at least not the career that she did have—and I would not have had the fun of writing My Life in France and The French Chef in America. Judith has been an indispensable friend, editor, resource, sounding board, dining companion, and shining example of how to live a rich and meaningful life.

  It is thanks to my editor at Knopf, Lexy Bloom, and her able assistant, Tom Pold; and my literary agent, Tina Bennett, and her assistant Svetlana Katz, of William Morris Endeavor, that The French Chef in America has come to pass. To all four I owe a great debt of gratitude.

  This book grew out of my work on My Life in France, but unlike Julia’s memoir, this is a journalistic project that required months of research and interviews with Julia’s colleagues, friends, and family. It was a sometimes difficult but always rewarding process, and I am indebted to those who offered their time, resources, and the occasional meal or bed along the way.

  Julia and Paul Child donated their papers to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is an unparalleled collection that is valued by scholars and accessible to the public, and it was essential to my work. Reading the Childs’ letters and looking at their photographs brought them immediately to life. The Schlesinger’s staff has been patient and helpful, and I salute Dean Lizabeth Cohen, Marilyn Dunn, Diana Carey, and their colleagues. Moreover, Dean Cohen’s husband, Herrick Chapman, associate professor of history at the Institute of French Studies at New York University, provided welcome insights on modern France. The two of them went above and beyond the call of duty by welcoming me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on numerous occasions.

  Julia’s home kitchen from 103 Irving Street has been preserved and displayed at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. It includes a popular video loop of Julia in action, and a trove of her cookbooks, furnishings, and kitchen gadgets—including TV props, such as her giant mortar and pestle, a “fright knife,” a bottle of “Château Gravy Masteur,” and the like. This display has helped to increase public awareness of Julia’s teaching, inspired thousands of visitors, and furthered her legacy. At this writing, “Julia Child’s Kitchen” serves as the anchor to the NMAH’s first major exhibition about the history of food in America. The success of this presentation is thanks to a caring and dedicated team, including the curator emerita Rayna Green, the curator Paula Johnson, and the museum’s charismatic director, John Gray.

  For years, Julia’s television “home” was WGBH, the public TV station in Boston. The staff there was welcoming and helpful, and I bow in gratitude to Russell and Marian Morash, Keith Luf, Henry Becton, and Alison Smith. I am especially grateful to the WGBH crew who shot “The French Chef in France” documentaries, and shared their stories and photographs with me: merci, David Atwood, Peter Hoving, Willie Morton, Nancy Troland, and Daniel Berger.

  At The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts, I am grateful for the friendship and support of Eric Spivey, William Truslow, Philadelphia Cousins, Todd Schulkin, and Jennifer Krauss. A big thank-you to Julia’s friends and colleagues on the Foundation’s Advisory Council: Anne Willan and Jim Dodge. For their encouragement, thanks to Tanya Steel and Julia’s longtime producer-director Geoffrey Drummond.

  And here’s a tip of the hat to Julia’s treasured friend and colleague, Chef Jacques Pépin, who was the first recipient of the Julia Child Award in October 2015.

  Julia influenced many cooks, and mentored a few of them: a grand merci to Sara Moulton, Emeril Lagasse, and Barbara Lynch. I would also like to thank the food writers Dorie Greenspan and Russ Parsons for sharing their memories of Julia and thoughts on celebrity chefdom.

  For their patience and hilarious stories, I’d like to thank Dan Aykroyd and Judy Graubart. In wrangling those interviews, I appreciate the assistance of Fred Specktor, Susan Patricola, and Frank Oz.

  For their insights on the relationship between Simca Beck and Julia, I sincerely appreciate the help of Jean-François Thibault and Jean-Max Guieu.

  In Cambridge and Boston, the Childs’ great friends—Pat and Herbert Pratt, Jane Thompson, Dorothy Zinberg, and Rebecca Alssid—were unstintingly generous. I’d like to acknowledge the help of Julia’s friend Susan Davidson, Julia’s former assistant Stephanie Hersh, the former owner of La Pitchoune Kathie Alex, and to everyone at Casa Dorinda.

  Finally, I deeply appreciate the patience, support, and inspiring meals that sustained this project. To my family: Sarah, Hector, and Sophia; to my parents, Hector and Erica Prud’homme; Jon Child and Julie Winter; Merida, Olivia, Julia, and Emily Prud’homme; and to the memory of Rachel, Fredericka, and Charles Child. Merci encore.

  And last, but foremost, to Julia and Paul Child: toujours bon appétit!

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS OF NAMES IN THE NOTES

  JC Julia Child

  PC Paul Child

  CJC Charles Child

  SB Simone “Simca” Beck

  LB Louisette Bertholle

  JBJ Judith B. Jones

  RJL Ruth J. Lockwood

  RM Russell Morash

  JP Jacques Pépin

  ADeV Avis DeVoto

  First, a note about my conversations with Julia Child and about her memoir. Over the course of eight months in 2004, I interviewed Julia while helping her write her memoir, My Life in France; she died that August, and the book was published in 2006. The notes below attributed as “JC to the author” are drawn from those conversations, and her memoir, which is referred to as MLiF.

  Second, a note about Julia and Paul Child’s papers, which include most of the letters, memos, TV scripts, articles, speeches, cookbooks, and Paul’s photographs and paintings referenced herein. The collection was donated by Julia and is archived as The Julia Child Papers at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter: Julia Child Papers). The collection is open to scholars and the public by appointment. A finding aid is available online at http://​www.​radcliffe.​harvard.​edu/​search/​site/​Julia%20​Child.

  Finally, I have occasionally drawn details from a set of Julia and Paul’s date books (referred to as JC or PC date books below), copyright the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. Used with permission.

  INTRODUCTION: JULIA’S SECOND ACT

  “a great bouillabaisse”: JC date book, July 21, 1976. Copyright the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, used with permission.

  (they had tried but it “didn’t take”): JC to the author, 2004.

  they “ ‘sleep’ late”: PC date book, July 25, 1976. Copyright the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, used with permission.

  The inn was established in 1920: James McAuley, “The Artful Lodgers,” The New York Times “T” Magazine, May 10, 2015.

  “the mental scrambles”: JC to the author. And JC to SB, September 6, 1975.

  1. DINNER AND DIPLOMACY

  “Welcome to Washington. I’m Julia Child”: JC voice-over, White House Red Carpet, WGBH, Boston, 1968.

  “the kitchen magician”: Percy Shain, “2d Helping Near for French Chef,” The Boston Globe, April 12, 1968.

  “the year that everyone seems to be cooking in the kitchen with Julia”: Marshall Burchard, Ruth Mehrtens, et al., “Everyone’s in the Kitchen,” Time, November 25, 1966.