The French Chef in America Read online

  In April 1962, shortly after appearing on I’ve Been Reading, Julia typed a memo to WGBH in which she laid out a vision for “an interesting, adult series of half-hour TV programs on French cooking addressed to an intelligent, reasonably sophisticated audience which likes good food and cooking.”

  Each program, Julia suggested, should focus on just a few recipes, and her cooking demonstration—“informal, easy, conversational, yet timed to the minute”—should lead to a discussion of broader culinary matters, such as “a significant book on cooking or wine, an interesting piece of equipment, or a special product.” To keep the audience from getting bored of the same old chef nattering on, Julia suggested that other experts, such as a pastry chef or a wine sommelier, appear as guests, and that well-known chefs—such as James Beard or Joseph Donan (a master French cuisinier)—cook side by side with her on the show.

  French food was particularly well suited to teaching, Julia thought: not only was it the best tasting, it had a clear set of rules to follow. The master chef Auguste Escoffier, whom Julia referred to as “the great codifier,” had established a set of procedures to cook by in his reference book Le Guide Culinaire, which is still in use today. Explicit rules appealed to Julia’s need for order and respect for “the scientific method.”

  “Because the French have treated cooking as a serious profession as well as an art, they are far more precise about their methods than any other national group,” she wrote. Once a cook learned the basics of French technique, she taught, they could be applied to Spanish, Russian, Italian, Japanese, or any other cuisine.

  “As I conceive of cooking…the whole business boils down to a series of themes and variations in which one learns the basic techniques, then varies the ingredient,” Julia wrote. “Once you have learned the coq au vin, you can make any similar type of stew, whether it be beef, lamb or lobster.” This focus on theme and variation, which had been ingrained by Chef Max Bugnard, her mentor at the Cordon Bleu, would prove a hallmark of Julia’s teaching throughout her career.

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  WGBH HAD NEVER PRODUCED a cooking program, had a small audience, was largely run by volunteers, and operated on a shoestring budget. But encouraged by the public’s strong response to Julia on I’ve Been Reading, the station arranged for her to shoot three pilot (or trial) episodes of a televised cookery show.

  On June 18, 1962, the Childs arrived at a borrowed “studio” in downtown Boston—actually, the demonstration kitchen of the Boston Gas Company—to shoot the first pilot, “The French Omelette.” (Julia preferred the French spelling of that word.) Julia brought her own frying pan, spatula, butter, and eggs. The lights flicked on, and the show’s producer, twenty-eight-year-old Russell “Russ” Morash, directed two stationary cameras. Because videotape was so dear, the show was essentially shot “live” in one continuous half-hour take. “I careened around the stove for the allotted twenty-eight minutes, flashing whisks and bowls and pans, and panting a bit under the hot lights,” she recalled. “The omelette came out just fine. And with that, WGBH-TV had lurched into educational television’s first cooking program.”

  Julia on the set at WGBH, Boston

  The second and third pilot episodes, “Coq au Vin” and “Soufflés,” were both shot on June 25. This time, Julia had rehearsed the shows at home. Paul built a replica of the set in their kitchen, labeled utensils, made sure the ingredients were measured beforehand, and coached Julia with a stopwatch. Though she continued to gasp and misplace things, she grew more self-assured with each performance.

  Julia’s special sauce—her ability to blend deep knowledge, broad experience, precise technique, self-deprecating humor, and infectious enthusiasm—won the public’s heart. There was simply no one quite like her on TV. Julia loved this “high-wire act,” but admitted that she was “a complete amateur” and had no idea how she came across on TV. The answer was simple: the camera, and audience, loved her.

  In response to the “Coq au Vin” show, a viewer named Irene McHogue wrote:

  Not only did I get a wonderfully refreshing new approach to the preparation and cooking of said poultry, but really and truly one of the most surprisingly entertaining half hours I have ever spent before the TV in many a moon. I love the way she projected over the camera directly to me the watcher. Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter; loved her looking for the cover of the casserole. It was fascinating to watch her hand motions which were so firm and sure with the food. And her to-do about the brandy-firing was without parallel for that rare tongue-in-cheek sort of humor the viewer longs for in this day of the over-rehearsed ad-lib.

  Encouraged, WGBH signed Julia up for a twenty-six-episode series. Ruth Lockwood, the assistant producer, scrounged up a track of bouncy French theme music. Unable to decide on a name for the program, Julia called it The French Chef—though she was neither French nor a professional chef (she called herself “a cook”)—until she could invent a better title. Taping of the new series would begin in January 1963, and the show would start broadcasting in February.

  Julia was fifty years old. And her stated goal was to teach people “how to make cooking make sense.”

  IV. A NEW WINDOW ON THE WORLD

  After years of scrimping through the breadlines of the Depression, and subsisting on canned basics during the war, Americans craved something more—to open their senses, luxuriate in taste, and experiment with new ingredients and flavors—after the Second World War. In 1947, Pan Am introduced affordable transatlantic flights, which made travel more achievable than ever. As Americans investigated other cultures, they tasted a wide range of new cuisines and wanted to replicate them at home.

  Fueling this curiosity was a burgeoning food media. In 1941, Gourmet, the first American magazine to cover food and wine in a serious way, was launched. That same year, Henri Soulé and Pierre Franey—who had cooked at the French pavilion during the 1939 World’s Fair, in New York, and stayed after the outbreak of war—opened Le Pavillon. It would become a temple of haute cuisine, and the training ground for many star chefs.

  As they traveled abroad, Americans harbored a special, romantic fondness for France above all other destinations. This reverence was perhaps tinged by an unspoken, big brotherly sense of superiority: America had once again saved France from the Germans, after all, and were welcomed as saviors who delighted in the pleasure of the French table. In 1942, Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris,” in Casablanca. In 1943, Samuel Chamberlain published Clementine in the Kitchen, about the French chef who charmed his Massachusetts neighbors. In the postwar years, members of the Lost Generation, such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Alexander Calder, spent time in France and produced art inspired there.

  In the meantime, another type of revolution was under way: between 1948 and 1955, nearly two-thirds of all American families bought a television set. The “boob tube” would have a profound impact on people’s daily lives, and on the culture at large. With millions of people watching the same shows at the same time, TV created a virtual community. It brought an exciting blend of travel, art and science, politics, sitcoms, space travel, and the Vietnam War into the nation’s living rooms, and provided a new “window on the world.”

  It was against this backdrop that WGBH launched The French Chef. In the first episode, which aired on February 11, 1963, a slightly nervous, fresh-faced Julia Child demonstrated how to make boeuf bourguignon, the venerable beef stew that would run as a leitmotif through her career. At the end of the show, she tucked a dish towel into her apron, and spontaneously said: “This is Julia Child. Bon appétit!”

  V. THE FRENCH CHEF

  Many people assume that Julia had the first cooking show on television, but that was not the case. While the broad success of The French Chef understandably led to this impression, Julia had benefited from two decades’ worth of culinary programming.

  The earliest TV cooking shows appeared in the 194
0s—such as Florence Hanford’s Television Kitchen, in which the host dispensed menu-planning tips for dinner parties on Philadelphia’s WPTZ. Other shows, like Shirley Marshall’s Ladies Fare, in the mid-fifties, explained “how to make average food appetizing” on WAVE-TV in Louisville, Kentucky. Mary Wilson interviewed celebrities, dispensed kitchen advice, and sang songs on Pots, Pans and Personalities on WPTZ. Trudy McNall gave us Home Cooking on WHAM-TV, in Rochester, New York. And Marjorie Hume presented What’s Cookin’ on KFMB in San Diego.

  Jessie DeBoth, of Detroit, established herself as what might be called a vaudevillian–home economist in the 1930s. She performed a live show that mixed cooking with song, dance, comic patter, and prize giveaways. In 1951, she appeared on TV, hollering “HiYo!” and wearing fashionable hats while mixing flour. In a raucous show featuring Pino and Fedora Bontempi, on New Haven’s WTNH, a dog wandered onto the set while Pino hectored Fedora, she cooked and yelled at him, and he would exit the kitchen singing opera. Perhaps the most unusual cooking show was aired in San Francisco in the 1950s, starring the blind Mexican cookbook author and restaurateur Elena Zelayeta and her son Billy. While she stared straight at the camera and presented a dish as if she were sighted, he would silently chop, stir, and cook around her.

  There were a few male presenters, such as Chef George Rector, who ran a culinary segment on Radio City Matinee, a 1946 show on WNBT in New York. His segments were aired in daytime for women, and presented cooking as a means of self-improvement and social advancement. Rector was replaced by James Beard, a rising chef from Portland, Oregon, whose show, I Love to Eat, ran on NBC from 1946 to 1947. In an audio recording Beard said he was commonly asked: Should fish be cooked with the head on? To which he replied yes, since “the people who cook better than any other people, the Chinese and the French, always serve their fishes like this, and why not follow their example?” (Julia and Paul Child held the same view.) Like Julia, Beard made silly jokes—“Chicken, I’ve got you under my skin,” he’d sing. But also like Julia, he emphasized that joy in one’s food trumped expediency.

  In 1950, the rubber-faced comedian Ernie Kovacs took over the cooking show Deadline for Dinner (which he pronounced “Dead Lion for Dinner”) on WPTZ. One of his gags was to invite a local chef onto the show and engage in wacky banter while they cooked together. Kovacs portrayed a kitchen naïf who assaulted a recipe, and it was up to the sober-minded chef to talk him through it. Kovacs used this stooge versus straight man shtick to demonstrate that a delicious meal can be made despite various (self-inflicted) challenges.

  By 1962, when Julia’s pilot shows ran on WGBH, the food and home economics program was an established genre. Most of the hosts were women of a specific type: the wise older matron or the cheerful wholesome housewife. Some would address the camera as if lecturing naughty children; others mixed showbiz with pedagogy. In both cases, their aim was to teach homemakers how to provide sustenance for the family. Julia Child, on the other hand, was focused on making cooking “fun” and “attractive” for men, women, and children, and produced food that she happily declared was “toothsome” and “delicious.”

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  WHILE JULIA BUILT her show on the scaffolding of earlier programs, there was no exact template for The French Chef. Operating on instinct, Julia invented her own, exuberant-yet-exact style of presentation, trusting herself and her small team to complete each recipe in just under thirty minutes, week after week.

  A big part of Julia’s allure was her natural ease on TV. Her combination of grace and awkwardness built a sense of trust and intimacy with the audience, which was reinforced by her deep knowledge and sure technique. Like Kovacs, she used humor to keep her viewers engaged, but because she was so technically adept Julia (usually) managed to triumph over adversity in the end, sometimes in the waning seconds of an episode.

  She would start making a quiche, misplace her glasses or lose her train of thought, find them again, and carry on. She would rapidly and expertly dice a pile of mushrooms, fillet a trout, and demonstrate how to encase poached eggs in a delicate consommé gelatin (oeufs en gelée). But in the next instant, a spoon would go flying offscreen, an apple charlotte would collapse and she’d mash it back together with her fingers (“It will taste even better this way”), or she’d incinerate the croutons atop a French onion soup into charcoal briquettes (“That’s beautiful! There you are. I think that possibly that browned a little bit too much. But I don’t know. It gives a very good effect.”)

  Confronted by a mishap, Julia would look momentarily befuddled, cuss under her breath, or just tilt her head back and laugh.

  Many established TV chefs, such as Jim Beard or the English chef Dione Lucas, were accomplished cooks but stilted performers who delivered their recipes like sermons from the Mount. Julia took the opposite approach: smiling into the camera, clearly explaining what she was doing, burning her fingers, and waving around a giant rolling pin, she seemed to implicate her viewers in a mischievous caper. She would lift a gargantuan monkfish up by the tail and talk to it (“Hello, you ugly old thing!”), mention that she had brushed the teeth of a roast suckling pig, demonstrate the making of a liver-filled omelet for a mother-in-law (“that’ll fix her up!”), or identify cuts of beef by pointing to parts of her own body—neck, shoulder, rack, fillet, loin—with dramatic acrobatics.

  Not only was Julia entertaining, she was unapologetically sensual. Sipping a spoonful of bourride à l’aïoli (fish soup), she would close her eyes and moan a deep “yuummmmmm.” That lusty enthusiasm was fun to watch. The sight of Julia sipping, nibbling, grunting, adding a dash more salt or garlic to her food inspired people to do the same at home. If tarragon was important to Julia, then it suddenly became important to her viewers, who demanded that their grocers carry fresher, more varied produce. Julia egged them on, and her words bore results almost instantly.

  “Through your efforts, our stores are now stocking leeks and fresh mushrooms, something unheard of 3 months ago,” a fan from Oklahoma wrote in the mid-1960s.

  In this disarming way, Julia became a cultural translator of sorts who mediated between French gourmets and regular Americans. She took the starch out of cookery with her own breezy version of Franglais—pronouncing the word cuisine “kweezeen,” and reminding viewers that highfalutin coq au vin was just “good-old chicken stew.” Having discovered cooking “late,” while in her thirties, Julia empathized with her viewers and was unafraid to ask obvious, “dumb” questions, which made cooking comprehensible: What’s the best way to boil an egg? How do you make a chocolate cake? What kind of wine should I serve with cheese?

  “The idea was to take the bugaboo out of French cooking, to demonstrate that it is not merely good cooking but that it follows definite rules,” Julia said. “One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.”

  The audience responded viscerally. “You are a delight!” wrote housewives, hippies, taxi drivers, MIT scientists, and Wall Streeters. The French Chef was “educational TV’s answer to underground movie and pop/op cults,” Joan Barthel wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “The program can be campier than ‘Batman,’ farther-out than ‘Lost in Space,’ and more penetrating than ‘Meet the Press’ as it probes the question: Can a Society be Great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?”

  There was something intimate and subverbal, even primal, about the experience of watching Julia cook. Her food was so lovingly portrayed that there are moments, even now, when it transports you. Julia liked to point the TV camera straight down into a pot of softly bubbling boeuf bourguignon to show you what it should look like as it cooked. It was instructive, but it also activated your taste buds, and tempted you to dive right through the screen to dig into a heaping bowl of that succulent comfort food.

  Julia having fun on the set of The French Chef.

  “To do that is not easy,” observed the chef Jacques Pépin. “She had a very rare quality.”

  An important, if litt
le-remarked-upon aspect of The French Chef was the implied narrative of each episode—from Julia’s often-humorous opening (“Julia Child presents the chicken sisters!”), through the instruction, to the triumphal digestion of a meal. While TV chefs like Beard and Lucas would end their shows by holding up their handiwork for the camera’s clinical inspection, Julia would proudly march a pot of ratatouille from the kitchen to the dining-room set—“bearing the finished dish like rubies on velvet,” Barthel noted—place it on a table decorated with actual candles and silverware, pour a glass of “wine,” serve herself a plateful of the vegetable mélange, and dig in with palpable hunger. This seemingly logical coda to a cooking show was an innovation. It completed the “journey” of the meal from conception to creation to consumption.

  “Julia was revolutionary,” said Judith Jones. “The first time I saw her on TV, I just knew, ‘She’s got it.’ People ask: ‘How can you be so sure?’ Well, you just know. When you are passionate about something and it arouses something in you, it’s just instinctual. It was like having a teacher right there beside you in the kitchen, and everything really worked.”

  Though she disliked “tooting my own horn,” Julia had a messianic zeal for spreading culinary knowledge. In championing the pleasure of shopping, cooking, eating, and even of cleaning the dishes, she became a role model for people of all genders, races, ages, and creeds. For Julia, kitchen work was not “domestic drudgery,” it was “such fun!” With the battle cry “Bon appétit!,” she reinvented what it meant to be a television chef, and brought a growing audience along for the ride.