The French Chef in America Read online

  Cambridge was a charming town, intimate enough to provide a genuine community, but just across the Charles River from the city of Boston. Best of all, to Julia’s eye, Cambridge was populated by “eggheads”—intellectuals from widely varied backgrounds, some of whom taught at Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, others who were architects, historians, economists, or restaurateurs.

  The Childs had taken several scouting trips to Cambridge but had yet to find a house that felt like home. Then, in January 1959, Avis DeVoto called to say, “I’ve heard about a special house. It’s not on the market yet, but it will be soon. It’s perfect for you. Drop everything and come up here immediately.”

  The Childs demurred. They were about to depart for the Norwegian fjords, and, besides, there was an icy rain outside. But Avis advised that house shopping in Cambridge was a competitive sport, and insisted that this might be their only chance for a “special” place. Reluctantly, Paul and Julia boarded the train north.

  In Cambridge, they made their way to 103 Irving Street, on a leafy lane behind the Harvard campus. The house was a wide, three-story-tall, gray clapboard Victorian built in 1889 by the philosopher Josiah Royce. It had a short driveway, a modest garden, a full basement, and a long kitchen. As they entered, another couple was exploring the rooms and whispering. Paul inspected the cellar, the fine dining room, two living rooms, a large space on the second floor (suitable for an office/painting studio), the attic, and an adjoining apartment that could be rented out. Julia stood in the kitchen on the first floor and tried to imagine herself cooking there. Eighteen feet wide by twenty-four feet long, it was “ample,” she judged.

  The big gray house needed refurbishment, but Avis was right: there was something special about it. “It spoke to us,” Julia recalled. As a third couple toured 103 Irving Street, the Childs figured they’d never find anything better and made a generous offer—about $48,000—on the spot. Their bid was accepted.

  “Hooray!” they cheered. Then they rented the house out and decamped for Norway for exactly two years and two days.

  On May 19, 1961, Paul Child quit his job after sixteen years in the Foreign Service. “Ah, freedom at last—no more of this hurly-burly, thank you very much,” he and Julia said to each other. Upon returning to the States, the Childs moved into 103 Irving Street and set to making it their own. It was their first permanent home together. While it had good bones, there were many refinements to be made, especially to the kitchen.

  The kitchen of their new house was the ninth that Julia and Paul designed together, though they’d never had such a generous canvas to work on before. “We intended to make it both practical and beautiful, a working laboratory as well as a living and dining room,” Julia said.

  Visitors entered not through the front door facing Irving Street but through a side door that led from the driveway into the kitchen. The first object you encountered there was the “big black monster,” your hostess’s most essential piece of equipment: a six-burner Garland restaurant range, which the Childs purchased in Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s for $400. It hunkered to the left, by the door, produced “a fierce high heat,” was equipped with an oven “large enough for two 25-pound turkeys,” and never needed repair. There was usually a pot of tea on the stove and pans filled with foods in various stages of experimentation; occasionally you’d see handmade sausages hanging from the stove hood as they cured, or a homemade baguette cooling nearby.

  To the right as you entered, an electric self-cleaning oven with a peekaboo window and a thermostatically regulated warming drawer were recessed into the wall. Julia was always tinkering with something in those ovens, such as the slow-roasted pears in a velvety purple wine sauce I encountered one day, which suffused the house with an ethereal aroma.

  The Childs’ architect, Robert Woods Kennedy, suggested they move the double sink from a cramped corner to a more central spot against the right wall, beneath a set of windows, making room for a large butcher block, a dishwasher, and a refrigerator they had shipped from Washington.

  Julia didn’t care about establishing the “golden triangle”—a configuration allowing a cook to take as few steps as possible between stove, refrigerator, and sink—declaring in typical fashion, “the more exercise the better.” But she was adamant that she have as much “working and putting-down space as possible.” Kennedy installed maple work surfaces, one and a half inches thick, along every available wall. The oven and the gas range required countertops nearby, as places for hot pans to rest and where oven mitts and basting brushes were at the ready. The counters were raised to thirty-nine inches from the floor, to accommodate Julia’s height. One lasting regret for Julia was that she did not specify that the counters have a two-inch overhang, which makes it easy to scrape crumbs or chopped vegetables into a bowl held below the work surface.

  While she preached the necessity for “moderation,” Julia admitted that she suffered from a kitchenware “megalomania.” She was rendered helpless by Dehillerin, her favorite shop in Paris, where she would buy armloads of kettles, parfait molds, ice-cream makers, knives, whisks, colanders, and—most of all—copper pots. According to Paul, Julia acquired enough gadgets to outfit at least two medium-size restaurants. “My excuse is that I need this equipment for television and cooking demonstrations and certainly I must try out everything new so that I can have a valid opinion of it,” she wrote. “But even I have almost come to the point where any further acquisition must mean the getting rid of an existing object, and that is a terrible wrench because I love almost every piece. I therefore have no helpful advice to give those with limited space except to suggest puritan restraint, strict discipline, and super organization.”

  Julia was a “hanger-upper” who liked to “see where everything is” in the kitchen. Paul hung her batterie de cuisine on simple Peg-Board, painted a blue green: dozens of copper saucepans and skillets, her serving platters, and whimsical molds in the shapes of fish or hearts. He outlined each with black Magic Marker, so you would know exactly where to return it. “Since we rejoice in the shapes of tools, cooking utensils become decorative objects, all carefully orchestrated by Paul from pots and pot lids to skillets, trivets, and flan rings,” Julia explained to Architectural Digest. “Glass measures and earthenware pitchers are hung just so, while scissors hang in harmony with olive pitters, bottle openers, and nut-crackers…in a stunning array of colors and shapes.”

  Having suffered from the unyielding beauty of red tiles in Provence and large vinyl squares in Cambridge, Julia insisted on an airport-strength vinyl flooring, in a pebble pattern, to ease the strain of hours of standing in her kitchen. The vinyl was comfortable, durable, and required washing only when Julia needed “the psychological release,” she said. (She used the same material to floor the kitchen at La Pitchoune.)

  The Childs turned one of their two pantries into a mini bakery, with a large, thick piece of white pastry marble on a countertop. Julia liked to wham her bread dough, knead her pâtes feuilletées, and roll out piecrusts on that cool, smooth surface. Paul used the back pantry for storage and as a cocktail laboratory.

  To the left of the alcove where the Childs stashed their little television stood a large black refrigerator. It was decorated with a Valentine designed by Paul, along with his colorful photographs of Julia’s boeuf daube en gelée, and a pâté en croûte. To the right of the fridge stood a bookcase laden with dictionaries, atlases, and references like Peterson Field Guide to Birds, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The walls were graced by art made by friends and family—a painting of an artichoke, another of white eggs on a blue background, and a rubbing of a bluefish Julia caught in Maine.

  Though the Childs occasionally used the spacious dining room—for large dinner parties or Thanksgiving feasts, at which they served a rich pumpkin-and-cream soup in a hollowed-out pumpkin, for instance—that was an exception. More often, they ate at the kitchen table they’d brought from Norway.
It sat six comfortably and eight in a squeeze. Julia covered it with a colorful oilcloth, and usually piled it with stacks of newspapers and mail. “I want the dining table in the middle of the room,” she said, “because, like a sheepdog, I need to be right there in the midst of everyone.”

  The Childs had made 103 Irving their own: “a supremely comfortable house to cherish,” Julia called it, though that description doesn’t do it justice. The second floor held her office (decorated with a large typewriter, a mug of tea, precarious stacks of books, a blizzard of papers on and around her desk, and an exercise machine), Paul’s painting/photography studio (impeccably organized easels, paints, camera paraphernalia, negatives, logbooks, and a mug of tea), and their bedrooms; the third floor held a guest room and storage; a small extension held an apartment the Childs often rented to college students. What the fore going omits is the sensation that upon entering 103 Irving Street you were stepping into Paul’s and Julia’s conjoined brains. It was the decoration that gave that impression. The front hallway held one of Paul’s hand-carved wooden chests, while nearly every wall was decorated by his etchings, photographs, and paintings—wartime charts of Japanese aircraft, Cubistic Parisian rooftops, red tobacco barns, watery reflections of Venice, portraits of Julia, and the like.

  When Edith Efron of TV Guide visited in 1970, she was stunned by the house, which appeared to be a complex nineteenth-century artwork. “Why has no one written about you?” she asked Paul (“an attractive gentleman who is actually 68, looks to be about 55, and assures us that he feels like 40”). He smiled and quietly replied, “They don’t see me. They only see Julia.” But, Efron noted, “the joke is on them. If you don’t ‘see’ Paul, you don’t ‘see’ Julia either. This beautiful world that Paul Child has created is the world that Julia lives in. And the ‘pale, assistant/husband,’ whose paintings are eagerly bought by the Boston University population, is the creative lord of it.”

  Conversation in the Child house would flow from Robert Frost to Frank Lloyd Wright, Goethe, Ibsen, Mozart, Chopin, and—Julia’s favorite—Balzac. The Childs said they wanted to make documentary films about woodworking and silversmithing, to preserve traditional artisanal skills before they disappeared. As Vietnam raged, and race relations worsened, and the Nixon White house plotted, the Childs debated good and evil. “Julia,” Paul told Efron, “is an essentially con-able woman. She’s naïve in the nicest possible way. She just can’t believe people have bad motives, when it’s a palpable fact…The problem is that the baddies have pre-empted the good symbols, like peace…You know, Korzybski said that those who control the symbols control society.”

  Julia listened to this, walloped veal cutlets flat with a mallet, and, with a grin, digressed: “I’ve never met Mary McCarthy, but I suspect she’s an intellectual snob. I have a feeling she’d go after my husband and ignore me. I’d scratch her eyes out!”

  Inevitably, guests would end up in the kitchen, which Julia described as “the beating heart and social center” of the house. “It was certainly the most-loved and most-used room.” Friends felt free to knock on the door at 103 Irving, and when they did, Julia would usher them into the kitchen to chop cold butter into cubes, baste the goose, or haul wine up from the basement:

  They walk about, then sit at the table, and we have aperitifs and talk while I am finishing the dinner. It is easy and pleasant, and I am one of the party the way I like to be. Food is better, too, infinitely better, because the cook is in the kitchen, the way a chef is in his restaurant. No fresh green beans sit to warm up, losing their texture and color while I am in a dining room; no sauce will boil away nor custard curdle. Furthermore, nobody minds a bit of public stirring, tossing, and tasting…[After eating] I pile the plates in my double sink and hide them under big stainless trays, while all finished pots are covered discreetly, and the stove light doused. Everything looks shipshape, in other words…Then out we go…to have coffee in the clean and well-ordered living room. That is my idea of a proper kitchen.

  II. FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS, CANTABRIGIANS

  After moving into 103 Irving Street in 1961, Julia met Dorothy Zinberg, a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, at the Legal Sea Foods fish market. Looking over the haddock, lobsters, and clams, chatting with the store’s owner, George Berkowitz, the two conversed as any other housewives might. Except that Julia Child happened to be unusually inquisitive and well informed about food.

  The postwar culinary revolution was just getting under way in New York. French classics like coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon gave way to the “gourmet trend” of Spanish paella, Peruvian seviche, Indonesian pork satay, and Arabian chicken roasted with cloves and honey. But Cambridge was essentially a provincial New England town, Zinberg recalled, “like living in the country.” While Boston had some fine establishments, Cambridge restaurants tended to serve meat-and-potatoes basics, or red-sauce Italian food, though there was one first-rate French restaurant, the Henri IV, a favorite of artists such as Joan Miró, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, and Alexander Calder. “This was an era when dinner party menus consisted of grilled Spam, pineapple chunks, and gelatin-mold salad stuffed with marshmallows,” Zinberg said with a shudder. Yet, as home to Harvard, Radcliffe, and MIT, Cambridge became a magnet for European academics, who brought Old World foods, like borscht, dark bread, and kielbasa with them.

  The Childs had a remarkable set of neighbors, most of whom lived within a few blocks of one another. The economist and former ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, and his wife, Catherine (“Kitty”), lived behind Paul and Julia. Avis and Bernard DeVoto lived close by, as did Dorothy and her husband, Norman Zinberg, who was an influential psychoanalyst at Harvard. Not far away were historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and his wife, the author Marian Schlesinger.

  Some friends became professional collaborators who influenced Paul and Julia as much as the Childs influenced them. Ben and Jane Thompson, for instance, ran the influential home furnishings store Design Research in Cambridge, which would later supply cookware and Marimekko prints for The French Chef set. In the early seventies, the Thompsons opened Harvest, a modern American restaurant on Harvard Square that operated in the same spirit as Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and trained many of Boston’s leading chefs. (Harvest remains in business today.) And, in 1976, the Thompsons and the developer James Rouse—with the Childs’ vocal support—renovated Boston’s decrepit Faneuil Hall into a “festival marketplace” inspired by Les Halles.

  In Cambridge there was a vast corps of overeducated, underemployed women who “were ready for Julia,” said Zinberg. “We didn’t know who she was, at first. But then she changed our lives—in every way you can imagine.”

  —

  Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in October 1961. It was intended, Julia wrote, for “the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.”

  Those last few words are the key to understanding Julia’s ethos. For, she added, in what could be a credo to her career: “All of the techniques employed in French cooking are aimed at one goal: how does it taste?”

  With a rave review in The New York Times, Craig Claiborne launched Mastering into the American mainstream, calling it “probably the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work” on French cooking in English, and predicting that it would “remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals.”

  Mastering arrived at an auspicious moment. The economy was booming, Americans were traveling abroad and eager to embrace new foods, and the Kennedys had hired René Verdon to cook for them. Years later, Julia recalled, “With the Kennedys in the White House, people were very interested in [French food], so I had the field to myself, which was just damn lucky. It would be very, very much more difficult now.”

  B
y early 1962, Mastering went into its third printing of ten thousand copies, and Julia received her first royalty check, for $2,610.85. “Yahoo!” she crowed, noting that she, Simca, and Louisette were now within $632.12 of paying off the expenses they’d incurred writing the book.

  On February 20, 1962, Paul was transfixed by radio accounts of John Glenn’s orbit of Earth aboard the Friendship 7 capsule. Julia, meanwhile, appeared on “an egghead TV show” called I’ve Been Reading. It was hosted by Boston University English professor Albert Duhamel and aired on WGBH, Boston’s fledgling public television station. Duhamel put Julia at ease, and she proved naturally comfortable in front of a TV camera. Perhaps too comfortable. So intent was she on demonstrating how to “turn” a mushroom and flip an omelet the French way that she forgot to mention the title of her book. But it hardly mattered. Twenty-seven people wrote to the station to say, “Get that tall, loud woman back on television. We want to see more cooking!”

  This was an unexpectedly warm response. The WGBH honchos looked at one another and wondered: Is there enough interest in this Julia Child to warrant a cooking show on public television?

  III. THEMES AND VARIATIONS

  Though she did not own a TV set, Julia had been bitten by the television bug from the moment she set foot on a studio set. In October 1961, she and Simca had appeared on NBC’s Today show to promote Mastering, and afterward Julia wrote: “TV was certainly an impressive new medium.” (She would soon buy her first television with the proceeds from book sales.) By then, she had been teaching cooking for nine years, and was on a mission to spread the gospel of “le goût français”—the very essence of French taste—which she fervently believed could be reproduced by American cooks in their home kitchens. All that was needed, Julia said, were a set of clear instructions, the right tools and ingredients, and a little encouragement.