Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (28 page)

After two weeks the Chafred family went to Cassis in Provence near Marseilles, where Julia and Paul joined them at the end of July for three weeks. They stayed in the Marseilles home of Rosie and Abe Manell and visited with Richard E. (Daddy) Myers before returning, on Julia’s thirty-eighth birthday, through Geneva. After the family left by boat train for Cherbourg and the
Queen Mary
, Julia and Paul celebrated a late joint birthday for Julia and Hélène with her Foçillon family at Maranville. They had foie gras,
poulet de Bresse
, and Meursault.

“J. feeling middle-aged,” she wrote several times in her datebook that fall. The autumn rains, the ebb tide of tourists, falling horse chestnuts, the war in Korea, and Paul’s hospitalization all brought on a fall melancholy. Doctors finally diagnosed Paul’s amoebic dysentery (which had plagued him since India and China) and prescribed months of treatment, including a rigid diet that curtailed Julia’s cooking and entertainment. Even the Foçillon group, which launched them into French intellectual life, suspended meetings. (They resumed in December.) While he was housebound, Paul painted one of his best works, the rooftops of Ile St.-Louis, and Julia read Stefan Zweig’s biography of Balzac and the latter’s
Le Lys dans la Vallée
(and she resumed the French-English sessions with Hélène at Closerie des Lilas). Soon she was diagnosed with a milder case of amoebic dysentery (left over from China), and they took medicines together. Nevertheless, they went to Marseilles for Thanksgiving with the Manells, who were to be transferred to Paris in December, because they wanted to “say farewell” to that lovely house and city.

December at last brought better health, the arrival of the Manells, Paul’s USIS Grandma Moses exhibit (with more than a thousand visitors the first week), and a visit from their OSS and Washington, DC, friends, Fisher and Debby Howe and the Walter Lippmanns. A celebration lunch with the Howes included
soufflé Grand Marnier
with Château d’Yquem. The exhibits and parties seemed trivial to Paul, who was distracted by the French fifth column and the communist threat in Europe. While Paul predicted war for many months, Julia did not. (“Julie’s different, thank god. She prolly [sic] truly represents the Hope That Springs Eternal in the Human Breast … I prefer her attitude.”)

Paul was a discreet and sensitive man with an aesthetic sense of appreciation for both wines and his wife. He wrote poetry about the smell of her cooking and the curve of her ankle. As he was storing a new order of wine in his well-stocked cellar, he observed, “It’s like a Harem full of beautiful and eager women—waiting to be ravished.” He later described for Charlie his coming home with Julia after dinner one night: “Going up w/Julie in our little elevator, smelling those fresh lilies-of-the-valley, buzzing gently from Chambertin ’28, and stroking the lovely bottom of a lovely woman—all at the same moment—I thinks to myself, ‘Thaaat’s Paris, Son—That’s Paris.’”

Several grand meals at the end of 1950 reveal Paul’s growing expertise in wines as well as Julia’s culinary skills. As she cooked dinner, he read to her, first Faulkner’s short stories and later Boswell’s London
Journal
. For a dinner party of art historians, they served oysters with Pouilly-Fumé ’49, and
noix de veau à la Prince Orloff
with Château la Mission Haut-Brion ’45. For a three-hour dinner at the Restaurant des Artistes in the rue Lepic, where Mangelotte (one of Julia’s teachers at the Cordon Bleu) was chef, Paul chose to drink with the
loup de mer
(Mediterranean sea bass stuffed with fennel leaves, broiled over charcoal, and served with lemon-butter sauce) a 1947 white wine from the Jura called Château-Chalon, made from dried grapes so the wine had a deep topaz color. With Paul’s venison cutlets with
purée de marrons
and Julia’s roasted
alouettes
(larks) and puffed-up potatoes they had a St.-Emilion ’37. After coffee, Mangelotte talked to them of his academy of professional chefs and projected cookbook (both to rescue the art of French cuisine) as well as his belief that the Cordon Bleu was badly organized and doing a disservice to the métier.

The finale was a series of meals they all cooked—“in our happy British family bosom”—at the home of English architect Peter Bicknell and his wife, Mari, a ballet teacher, and, in Julia’s words, “one of the best cooks I know.” As they did the year before and would do for the next several Christmases, Julia and Paul took the boat train from the Gare du Nord to Victoria Station and, except for a final few days in London with the Nigel Bicknells (their former Washington housemates), they spent the holiday cooking, ice skating, and attending a children’s ballet performance in Cambridge. Minutes after arriving this year, Mari and Julia were preparing potted shrimps on toast, to be accompanied by Alsatian wine, and two Scottish pheasants, by a young Burgundy. Their dessert was
soufflé Grand Marnier
with a Château d’Yquem ’29 they had brought from Paris. Another meal was
sole bonne femme
(Mari made the best, Julia still claimed forty years later) with Hermitage ’29. All four of them would cook in the kitchen of Finella, one of the university’s grand old homes.

Dorothy left with Ivan Cousins for the boat train and New York City on January 12, 1951. In the months before, when Dorothy rented her own apartment and moved into Ivan’s life, Paul accepted the inevitable. Before Dorothy left Paris, Julia threw what she proudly called “a large, wildly successful party,” with Hélène and Rosie helping her create platters of food centering on an “art-galantine made out of boned chicken and farce-fine, decorated with flower design and covered with a layer of madeira-flavored jelly,” the whole platter in turn decorated with geometrical designs using hard-boiled egg whites, red pimentos, leaves, and truffles. When they heard three months later that Dort and Ivan were engaged, they arranged for their leave to coincide with the wedding so they could give her the moral support she needed, for, as Paul told Charlie, her “Papa [is] not wildly enthusiastic about this husband either.” Another incident coincided with their plans to return to the United States: the Blue Flash broke down on the Concorde Bridge, and they decided to sell the Buick her father had given them in Washington, DC.

Julia and Paul took their home leave six months late, sailing on May 4 and returning to Paris on August 5. First they made a large circle by train from Lumberville (where they twice saw Budd Schulberg, Charlie’s friend and a former colleague of Paul in the OSS in Washington, and attended Rachel’s high school graduation) to Pasadena (where they spent a long weekend with her old friends the Hastings, Wrights, and Nivens), to San Francisco (Gay Bradley, Janie McBain, the Davises), and back to New York City and Lumberville. They attended her father’s fiftieth reunion at Princeton, then visited for six days with friends in Washington, DC, checking their house, before moving on to New York City to attend Dort’s wedding on June 23. All the McWilliams family gathered at St. John the Divine (Episcopal) Church for the simple ceremony and a hotel reception nearby. Julia and Paul drove (in a new Chevrolet) to see the Mowrers in New Hampshire before moving on to Lopaus Point, Maine, for the Childs’ annual lobster-filled holiday for two weeks. Soon Paul found himself recoiling when Charlie turned braggart and loquacious. While driving south through Avon and New Haven, Connecticut, they analyzed the Charlie-Paul relationship—an anguish that Paul always suffered through after visiting his sometimes beloved twin.

They sailed on the
Nieuw Amsterdam
(the sea calm and Julia was bored), docked in Le Havre, off-loaded their car, and drove for a second time to have lunch at La Couronne, ordering the same meal that excited Julia two and a half years earlier. This time, she renewed her commitment to making cooking her career.

M
EETING SIMCA

Since January 30, 1951, Julia had been attending the Cercle des Gourmettes, a club of French women dedicated to French gastronomy. She was privately cooking with Freddie Child, Mari Bicknell, and Rosie Manell, but now she wanted the French connection. A woman named Simone Beck Fischbacher, whom she met at a party at the home of George Artamonoff (a Russian-born American, first president of Sears International and now with the Marshall Plan), told her about this French cooking club. Julia resumed her informal French lessons with Hélène and returned to the Cordon Bleu in January to attend pastry demonstrations by Claude Thillmont. After dining at the Restaurant des Artistes one night (she loved the chefs chicken cooked in tarragon), and learning that Mangelotte was teaching another class, she attended his course at the Cordon Bleu for several weeks. When she invited Max Bugnard to lunch on February 20, they discussed her frustration with the failure of Madame Brassart to give her an exam. She also put a notice in the
Embassy News
announcing that Bugnard, now retired from the Cordon Bleu, was available as chef for private dinners and lessons.

The Gourmettes dined together bimonthly, either at one of their homes or at a restaurant such as Maxim’s. Occasionally their husbands would dine together elsewhere. When they dined at the Chambre des Députés, their husbands accompanied them. Despite the strikes that nearly crippled the city that spring, Julia did not miss a meeting. By April 2, when she was formally accepted into the club, her closest friend in the group was Simone Beck, whom she took a liking to at their first meeting—“one of the great encounters in culinary history,” says one of Beck’s students.

Simone Beck was nicknamed “Simca” (the name of a French car, and the name she preferred) by her husband, Jean Fischbacher. She was a Norman who liked Americans, and Julia especially. Her father was an Anglophile. Julia described her as “a tall blonde with a remarkably vivid pink-and-white complexion; she was good-looking and dashing in a most attractive and debonair way, full of vigor, humor, and warmth.” Simca, in turn, admired the joy that Julia brought to every location, calling it “la Juliafication de la vie.” In a videotape made by Peter Kump in 1990, Simca says:

Julia told me she got her Cordon Bleu certificate because she could skin an eel. She was always a very funny person. A very, very good actor. She is a very clever person … [with] a fantastic palate. She was the first person to really excite me. She impressed me in many ways.

Simca’s friend Louisette Bertholle (both were about seven years older than Julia) had had an English governess when a child, traveled extensively in the United States, and wrote, with Simca, a little French cookbook for Americans. Each had a household cook in residence, unlike their American friend. They both saw in this tall and food-obsessed American a potential partner in their plan to write a larger book. Perhaps they were convinced by a meal Julia served at her apartment.

Julia asked Bugnard to help her prepare a lunch for her favorite Gourmettes, Simca and Louisette, and their husbands, on Friday, April 13. On the twelfth he helped her pound the crab and on Friday morning he assisted again. In her datebook she mentions only the crab, but says their lunch was “great fun.” On April 27 they dined chez Bertholle, as they would frequently during the coming months.

In her heavy schedule of lunches and dinners this fall and winter, Julia records only one detailed menu in her datebook and letters. This one she prepared before a 1951 Thanksgiving week in Bruges, Belgium, and the leftovers fed the Bicknells when they arrived for a visit:

Terrine de Canard (boned duck, meat farce, truffle, etc., duck and veal strips, all wrapped in duck skin after marinating in cognac) baked, cooked, then sliced and decorated with jelly; Roast leg of venison (marinated for 3 days in red wine, cognac and spices) served with purée de céleri rave, and prunes stewed in white wine and meat stock. It was a superb dinner, if I do say so.

She entertained nephew Paul Sheeline, Alice Lee Myers, Robert Penn Warren, the Fischbachers, chefs Bugnard and Mangelotte, the Teddy Whites, and Narcissa Chamberlain; picnicked with the Manells and Baltrusaitises; and socialized with Judge and Mrs. Learned Hand and, in a lunch for embassy wives, with Evangeline Bruce and Mrs. Dean Acheson.

The collaboration with Simca and Louisette was building. Julia soon learned that Simca’s specialty was desserts and pastries. In early December the three women lunched with Mangelotte at the Artistes one week and the next he joined them for
pâte feuilletée
at Julia’s apartment. By December 17 they met at the Bertholles’ apartment to discuss the idea of a cooking school and Louisette’s plans to renovate her kitchen, which they would use for classes.

After Julia and Paul’s Cambridge Christmas and a big dinner to celebrate Paul’s fiftieth birthday—a dinner for which Bugnard cooked (freeing Julia to be with the guests)—the three women got down to business over a dinner for them and their husbands at the George Sand restaurant. L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes they would call their cooking school, and each would credit the other for pushing through the idea: Louisette said it was Julia’s idea, Julia said it was Simca who hurried it along, when she herself claimed she was not ready to teach.

On Wednesday, January 23, 1952, they gave their first cooking class for three women in Julia’s kitchen. They had not planned to begin so soon (Louisette’s kitchen was not ready), but Mrs. Martha Gibson, a wealthy widow from Pasadena, insisted upon having a class and recruited two friends, a Mrs. Mary Ward (also a widow) and Miss Gertrude Allison, who owned an inn in Arlington, Virginia, and was studying at the Cordon Bleu with Bugnard (she was not happy with the Cordon Bleu, or with Dione Lucas in New York City, whom she found not very scientific). For the next five days, Julia, Simca, and Louisette met nearly every day to plan the physical arrangements and do food preparations. This time Julia typed up seven detailed pages, including menu, steps in preparation, and detailed ingredients and techniques for poached fish, beef knuckle, salad, and banana tart (the menu for January 29). Their class commenced at 10
A.M
. with lunch at 1
P.M
. every Tuesday and Wednesday from January 29 through May 7, 1952.