Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (10 page)

Connie, who was considered the naive and innocent member of the Gang of Five (“I thought that storks brought babies”), was from Worcester. On a couple of vacation periods, Julia went home with Connie to visit her parents, and she went to Providence some weekends with her friend Anita Hinckley and to Washington, DC, one spring with Roxane Ruhl, her Oregon friend from KBS, who had gone to Vassar.

H
OLIDAYS AND FAMILIES

The major destination for family holidays, however, was west of Northampton in Dalton, her mother Caro’s hometown. Westonholme, built by her grandparents, echoed of the richness of her mother’s New England heritage. In the Queen Anne style, built with one round tower and two octagonal towers and a lookout on the rooftop, Westonholme was an adventure to visit. Uncle Philip and Aunt Theodora presided over what Julia called “this monstrosity” full of cozy corners and towers. Christmas was crowded with cousins. These warm family memories would be spoiled years later in a bitter quarrel over the Weston Paper Company.

In fact, the family waters had already been muddied by Aunt Theodora, who, upon the death of the eldest Weston (Frank, who ran the paper mill), put their Uncle Philip, her husband, “in a primogeniture position” to run the family business. Julia and her sister Dort thought this “grande dame duchess” a manipulating and subtly denigrating “monster.” “I was always careful to tell Aunt Theodora when I felt she was boasting about her illustrious antecedents that John Alden and Priscilla were indentured
servants!”
Though Julia spent many holidays in Dalton, the memory of this aunt never dimmed. As late as 1986, after visiting the Napa Valley, she wrote to M. F. K. Fisher about the “Mafia Mothers” of the winemakers, comparing them in detail to her Aunt Theodora.

When Julia did not visit Dalton and nearby Pittsfield during the holidays, she took the train home to Pasadena. When the train stopped in Chicago she always visited her Aunt Nell—Ellen (Nelly) Weston, who was married to Hale Holden and lived in Winnetka, Illinois. Aunt Nell had a lovely older daughter Julia’s height, who became her stylish role model. “Eleanor was tall and beautiful, a wonderful character, a wonderful dresser who wore Empress Eugénie hats and great clothes. That is why I stopped in Chicago so frequently.” According to her letters to her mother (usually addressed to “Dear Coco,” “Mamy Dear,” “Dear Cocacola,” or “Dear Mother Caro”), she visited the Art Institute in Chicago and attended concerts with her cousins. She would sign off her letters: “be good … sweetie apple” and “love to big J.”

In the summers Julia returned to her California paradise, made more idyllic with the addition of a summer home for the McWilliams family in San Malo, California, near Oceanside, more than an hour’s drive down the coast from Los Angeles. Mrs. McWilliams built the house with a walled patio to keep out the ever-present white sand. Friends of Julia remember the tall doors and handles, built especially for this tall family. Julia had all her friends down for parties, and was sweet (one friend says) on a boy named Charley Crane one summer. Relatives occasionally visited, including her cousin Dana, who had attended KBS with her one year and was now enrolled, along with her sister Alice, at Scripps College for Women in Claremont, California.

Julia knew little about what had happened in her hometown during the years she had been away. Like most college students, she did not read the newspapers. Los Angeles was going through a decade-long building boom (the county population more than doubled, to two million). Yet the Depression was now exposing corruption, and many of the men who built Los Angeles—both businessmen and public officials—were going to San Quentin. The news was full of scandals and receiverships (three hundred businesses, “representing more than half a billion dollars in assets,” according to one historian, would be placed in receivership during the early 1930s).

Though John McWilliams was disgruntled about the scandals and the political climate—Roosevelt’s Democrats swept the country in the fall of 1932—no scandal touched him or the company he worked for, the J. G. Boswell Company. And he continued to support Julia’s Ivy League education. Her brother Johnny graduated from Poly and was going on to Lake Forest Academy, a hope eventually undermined, according to his sisters, by his dyslexia.

When Julia returned for her sophomore year, she arrived with a drum she bought when the train stopped in Albuquerque. When others were trying to study, she pretended to be a Navajo chief and beat out her rhythm on the tom-tom. Mary Case had already suggested that they live separately this year so that she could study better (“I couldn’t play all night and laugh with Julia and stay in college…. Julia did not really worry much about anything”). The previous year, when Mary had hung a green rug on the fire rope between their two beds to protect her study time, Julia tossed a jelly donut over to her roommate. She also fed her ravenous hunger on brownies with chocolate sauce, toasted cheese sandwiches, and chocolate ice cream sodas from across the street.

A
CADEMICS AND DORMITORY FOOD

Julia’s grades dropped during her sophomore year in part because she no longer shared a room with the studious Mary and in part because she became very active in campus activities. She served on the elite Grass Cops (they blew whistles when someone walked on the lawns) with her former roommate Mary Case, with Marj Spiegel, the pretty daughter of the Chicago retail merchant, and with Dickie Fosdick, the daughter of Harry Emerson Fosdick, New York City’s famous minister and member of Smith’s Board of Trustees. Fosdick “was our class star,” said Mary, “class valedictorian who lived on a complete schedule and could do all sports.” Julia also was chosen to be on the Sophomore Push Committee, another great honor, with Charlotte Snyder, Madeleine Evans, and Dorothy Fosdick—all three campus leaders. The Push Committee helped people get through commencement, even if it meant picking all the thorns off the roses. As one class member pointed out, among the aggressive girls there were those who partied with their dates at the Dartmouth carnival and those who were the campus leaders.

Julia was a leader but a casual student and had not even taken her college boards or aptitude tests seriously. Though she ranked in the high eighties percentile in intelligence in her class, her aptitude tests were only above average (highest in plane geometry, 82; in physics, 78). She assumed that as the daughter of a graduate she would be safe if she just passed her courses. Years later, in an interview with the Smith College
Sophian
, she offered the following suggestion: “My father was a conservative antediluvian Republican who thought that Phi Beta Kappas were up to no good.” In the college’s oral history she expressed it in stronger words: “For my father, intellectuality and communism went hand in hand. So you were better off not being intellectual. And if you were Phi Beta Kappa you were certainly a pinko.” What he valued was friendship and good citizenship, and she excelled in each. Moreover, girls her age were not ambitious and few graduated from college. Even in 1940, only “five percent of the female population” had a college education. It is remarkable that she persisted to graduation, for of those who did go to college, only a third graduated. The statistics were considerably better at Smith, where only one-third of her Smith class of 654 dropped out before graduating (perhaps in part because of the Depression). “I never thought of leaving Smith; it would have killed my mother,” said Julia. In her self-deprecating way, she added, “I was always one of the crowd. I had a good time and, in spite of myself, I learned something.”

As a sophomore, Julia began the fifth of her six years of studying French grammar and literature. For her and her parents’ generation, reared to be Anglophile, the study of Western and Northern Europe was the civilized pursuit. They studied European languages, museums, and cathedrals—but not the sensuous elements of daily French life. Cold climate, hard currency, Northern respectability, and hearty food—these were the keys to virtue. At the time, Julia did not question these values, nor was she as yet aware of her hedonistic nature. Several of Julia’s acquaintances were planning to spend their junior year in France, including Charlotte Snyder of Boston and Catherine Atwater, who later in life would be closer to Julia when she married John Kenneth Galbraith and the Childs became their neighbors. Julia did not have the proficiency or interest to consider a junior year abroad. She took one more year of French after completing two years of Italian (Smith required two languages), never knowing how valuable the learning would become.

If Julia picked up bad eating habits in college, she did so in a positive way, associating her dining experience with the fellowship of friends. Hubbard Hall had a kitchen and a cook and the girls had to show up promptly for their meals, over which Gilley presided. The fare was all-American, which meant “real New England food, meat and potatoes and traditional food,” said Charlotte Snyder. It also meant, in the trend of the day, shelves of products from General Foods, a company that already owned Jell-O, Postum, Baker’s Chocolate, Minute Tapioca, Post cereals, Log Cabin syrup, and Maxwell House Coffee (and soon Birds Eye frozen foods). The disastrous effects of the Depression on small retailers and farmers had only encouraged these national companies and the large supermarkets.

Charlotte Snyder was the only classmate of Julia’s who remembered the food, beyond a general comment about its fat and sauce content. Charlotte’s father owned Batchelder and Snyder, a large meat distributor/wholesale food business in Boston (much later bought by Birds Eye), and when he visited the college he was mightily impressed when he was served sweetbreads. Though Charlotte would eventually go on to the Cordon Bleu (before Julia did) and make a career in the food world as an editor of the
Larousse Gastronomique
(1961), she claimed that “none of us was into food then.”

While Julia and Charlotte were eating tasty junk food, Americans were being sold foodstuff for its purity, uniformity and “scientific” goodness. Crisco advertised its product as “used wherever a housewife takes pride in a clean, sweet kitchen.” Baker’s cocoa was “scientifically blended” and “corrects the action of the digestive organs.” Nothing in the official advertising about freshness, taste, aroma, or pleasure. Little wonder these students did not care about food preparation or careful dining. They had a kitchenette on the second floor of Hubbard Hall, but no one remembers any cooking: they stored ice cream in the refrigerator; Julia had a reputation for never doing the dishes.

Nevertheless, during Julia’s freshman year, an event occurred in St. Louis that would eventually make a major impression on her life. Irma Rombauer, a German-American widow, and her friends put together a collection of recipes that they self-published:
The Joy of Cooking
. Five years later, after many rejections, it was printed by Bobbs-Merrill, and its sales, thanks to its accessibility and practical approach, increased steadily to more than a million a decade later. It would become Julia’s first cookbook after she herself discovered the joy of cooking.

Rombauer’s book, emphasizing the pleasure of cooking and eating, went against a trend dominating American cooking for two generations: domestic science, which tried to marry science and cooking. It was a trend stoked by the food-processing companies and factory farms, which emphasized sanitation, uniformity, and “health.” Perhaps the Depression Dust Bowl helped undermine an agrarian society and fresh produce, but it was greed and the hair-netted “scientists” in the lab (no cooks need apply) that destroyed American eating habits. Their crowning achievement, suggests Laura Shapiro in
Perfection Salad
, was the invention of Crisco, advertised as an “Absolutely New Product” of scientific cookery. Crisco ads pointed out its “pure cream white” appearance and the fact that it never spoils (but not that it never leaves the arteries). This “model food of the twentieth century” is probably what Julia’s jelly donuts were cooked in.

Ironically, it was the work of the grandfather of her classmate Catherine Atwater that laid the foundation of the domestic science movement. Catherine Galbraith would discover decades later that Wilbur Olin Atwater, who had studied in Germany and was professor of chemistry at Wesleyan before he became the head of the Office of Experiment Stations in Washington, DC, was the pioneer of nutrition, the popularizer of the word “calorie,” and the developer of food composition tables. His numerous books, published between 1887 and 1898, made him the first to investigate food and digestion; he became the “mentor of scientific cooks.” (Atwater’s father was a Methodist preacher who founded a temperance newspaper near Burlington, Vermont.)

T
RADITIONS

When the chapel bell rang, as it did unannounced every October, Julia jumped for joy. It was Mountain Day, and by tradition everyone left the campus to go out into the New England foliage. Julia’s gang grabbed their sandwiches and went to the Mount Tom recreational area to hike. Smith’s traditions were much older than those at KBS, and even more effective. Rally Day was a day of skits, mostly ridiculous, put on by each class, along with singing on the steps of Hubbard Hall. Julia was always in the skits and was by nature a ham, said one of her classmates.

Although she had “retired” from the basketball team, Julia remained physically active. The gymnasium was across Green Street, and the playing fields with tennis courts and riding stables were up Green Street and across the bridge. She engaged in hockey, tennis, archery, and baseball as well as swimming and riding. “I did not do as much in [organized] sports at Smith. I played hockey, which I had never played before; lacrosse I did not like because there were no boundaries and you ran your legs off.” She did play in a junior/senior game her last year and told her mother, “They were awfully mad at me for being so big.”

The spring of her sophomore year the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and the girls rallied around Connie Morrow, the baby’s aunt. Constance was a Smith freshman and friend of Anita Hinckley when they both attended Milton Academy. When the baby’s body was discovered about eleven days later, the campus was devastated. Reality had intruded into the idyllic world of Smith.