Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (29 page)

Julia hardly noticed the muddy water boiling around tree trunks along the quai. The workload and enthusiasm of the gourmandes rose in February, along with the floodwaters of the Seine. They were gourmandes in the sense of being connoisseurs of good things (not in the recent sense of being heavy eaters). Julia described the purpose and dynamic of the school to Fredericka, her first sister-in-cooking:

L’Ecole … is to be mostly technique, as we feel that once one has one’s tools one can adapt them to [other cuisines]…. I have just been lucky having so much time with two professional chefs [Bugnard and Mangelotte], which has taught me good methods of cutting things up, handling the knife, cleaning and carving and saucery. And my colleagues, with a lifetime in France, and having spent three years over writing a cookbook … it’s a good combo. I can also bring the practical side of being an American, and cooking with no servants anywhere … The atmosphere is … homey and fun and informal, and passionate pleasure from both pupils and professors.

Jeanne la Folle, her housekeeper, got into the spirit by coming in at one o’clock to wash everything up. Dehillerin gave them a 10 percent discount on purchases by their students. And, she added, “my shopping quarter is fascinated with our project. My darling chicken man on the rue Cler is giving us a special price and is most anxious to give a demonstration to us and our pupils on how to pick out a fine chicken; the butcher ditto.”

Initially, each class cost the student 600 francs ($2.00). The school was not affected by the 23.5 percent rise in the cost of living in France during the previous year. Food was up 21 percent and heat and light up 42 percent. But the students were Americans who could afford the expense. Paul, who gave an occasional lecture on wine (the Americans were used to drinking only white wine), worked out the finances so that there was a profit for the school. In April, he designed the logo for Trois Gourmandes, which Julia would use for more than forty years.

A new class began on March 12, after Julia put a notice in the embassy newsletter. The five women—Paul called it a “floating population”—included Anita Littell, whose husband, Bob, headed the European office of
Reader’s Digest
, and Jennifer (Mrs. Samuel) Goldwyn of Beverly Hills. Short-term student-guests for classes and/or lunch included friends of Julia such as Gay Bradley Wright (who with her husband, Jack, was spending a month in Paris) and Harriet Healy (who ran a Florida cooking school and store, for which she was buying goods in Europe’s flea markets). Occasionally Julia invited guests for the class lunch (Bugnard and Rosie Manell) and gave individual lessons. After one such lesson, Julia wrote to Freddie: “I have just given my first solo lesson today, to a French woman in
pâte feuilletée
. … I learned a great deal, and would have gladly paid my pupil … it’s such fun. Really, the more I cook, the more I like to cook. To think that it has taken me 40 yrs. to find my true creative hobby and passion (cat and husb. excepted).”

Scholars of French cuisine, such as John and Karen Hess, have criticized Julia for becoming an “instant chef.” Indeed, none of the three was a “chef,” meaning an administrator with years of training in all areas of cooking. In terms of training, it may have been presumptuous for them to begin a school. Yet they viewed themselves as “home cooks.” Both Simca and Louisette had taken some women’s morning classes at the Cordon Bleu (Simca with Henri-Paul Pellaprat), and when Simca thought about completing her diploma five years later, Julia called it “useless” for someone with her knowledge, assuring her that she did not intend to make any use of her diploma.

Julia’s class time was indeed brief but intense, and she was still studying with Bugnard and using him as her tutor for the school. “We won’t feel good about it until we’ve given at least 100 lessons,” she told Freddie, “and have thoroughly tested everything out. Getting recipes into scientific workability is very interesting.” Metrics could not be automatically translated into teaspoons and ounces, as she learned in making béchamel sauce. Paul described it as the “practical use of General Semantics” or “subjecting theories to operational proof,” and admired his wife for not trusting any recipe, no matter what the source, without testing it. She had found her home with the French, who see themselves as a people who appreciate method and logic, symbolized in René Descartes, their emblem of rational thought.

The working relationship of Julia, Simca, and Louisette was best expressed by Paul: “Louisette appears to have a Romantic approach to cooking, while Simka [sic] and Julie are more ‘scientific’ [they measure quantities]…. Simka and Julie are both hard workers and good organizers.” In private letters they shared the belief that Louisette did not know enough about cooking. Hélène believed that “Simca was somewhat pedantic and a perfectionist and Julia was not.” But they both practiced “operational proof” in testing—for example, the different results from making pie crust with French and American flour (American flour needed one-third more fat) and with butter, Crisco, and margarine. They also, Paul noted during a trip to the Normandy home of Simca’s mother in March, were “relentless sightseers.” Temperamentally, they were driven women with boundless energy. Neither, unlike Louisette, was inhibited by domestic responsibility, which in part triggered a compulsive urge to create. Each called the other
une force de la nature
. Julia also called Simca
la Super-Française
.

Louisette, it seems clear now from the beginning, did not have the drive for professional success that her partners did. She had children—indeed, two of her daughters (from her first marriage) got married that year—and homes in Passy and Chinon. But it was she who had the initial idea to teach Americans how to cook French food, and it was she who had the best social contacts. The three couples enjoyed each other’s company, though Paul believed the “fat and charming” Paul Bertholle was a “preening egocentric.” Jean Fischbacher, on the other hand, had “sensitivity wedded to physical vigor and generosity.” He was a forty-six-year-old Protestant, a chemical engineer
(parfumeur)
, “vigorous and intelligent,” who had spent five years in German prison camps.

When Brentano’s windows began filling with maps of Paris and displaying banned books such as Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, they knew it was spring and tourist season. Though Paul declared they “dove for the bomb-shelters,” in fact they did not; Paul’s USIS window exhibits increased to fourteen in one month and Julia hosted lunches and dinner almost daily. A rising tide of visitors came from Pasadena and Pittsfield, from Smith College, from the OSS days (Rosie and Thibaut de Saint Phalle, Jack and Hedi Moore, Joseph Sloane). Smith classmate Kitty Smith remembers Julia driving them to Chartres and stopping at a poultry shop to choose a chicken to be killed for lunch on their return trip. After their eighth trip to Versailles in six weeks, Paul revolted.

The best arrival of spring was baby Phila, Dorothy’s baby, named after their stepmother, Philadelphia McWilliams. Phila would become, in many ways, the daughter that her Aunt Julia never had: tall, freckled, and Celtic. Ivan, who had his Navy pension, began working with the government, then started a job with Garfinckel’s Department Store in Washington, DC.

Knowing that his four years in Paris would be over this fall, and with it the government funding for his position, Julia and Paul traveled extensively when the Gourmandes’ classes were not meeting. Except for a train trip to Lucerne (where a few of Paul’s photographs were on exhibit) and Venice (Paul’s “beloved city”), they drove the Chevy, which they called the Black Tulip or La Tulipe Noire. Julia knew, as Balzac did, that one dines best in the provinces. They made friends with chefs, innkeepers, and vintners (helping the son of one go to dental school in Iowa) as they traveled west to the Atlantic, east to Alsace, and south to the Loire. When they visited Julia’s Smith chum Mary Belin in her Château Andelot in the Jura, Paul designed a wine label for her cellar.

Another session of the cooking classes was announced in the
Embassy News
on June 20, emphasizing the informality and the “cook-hostess” angle [that is, no hired cook]. The fee was now 2,000 francs, including lunch, “which is prepared and served by” the five students and three teachers. According to Louisette, Ann Buchwald was in their class. They taught “basic recipes, cuisine bourgeoise or haute cuisine.” By contrast, women in the United States were learning to cook chicken pot pies, corned beef hash, confetti Jell-O, carrot-raisin slaw, and macaroni and cheese.

Paul had mixed feelings about his own job: “I love living in Paris w/ Julia. My job makes it possible. I believe it is useful work.” Other times Kafka-like frustrations at the embassy reminded him of Menotti’s
The Consul
, an opera that gripped him. Yet the work gave him an opportunity to meet leaders in the art and political world: Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Jackson Pollock, Nadia Boulanger, and Edward Steichen (head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City). With Darthea Speyer, who was in charge of exhibits, Paul helped plan numerous photography and art exhibits. But he was no workaholic; he was always a balanced person. People like Abe Manell worked weekends, but Paul always went home by seven and had time to paint, photograph, and write carefully crafted letters to Charlie, Daddy Myers, or George Kubler. He finished a couple of paintings this year (one for the Bicknells and one for the Littells) and bought a Foujita painting of a girl in a French kitchen for Julia’s kitchen.

For nearly five years now, Julia had been tasting the artistic life of postwar Paris, a period which saw a new generation of Americans, many of them black, come to Paris. Though New York City was to take Paris’s place as the center of art, the residual fame of the great School of Paris was still luring young artists to the Seine. Julia and Paul always seemed to be going to one embassy or French vernissage or another: Raymond Duncan came to the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit in his dirty toga and sandals. At a New York City ballet performance in Paris, they chatted with Janet Flanner and Glenway Westcott. After Steichen judged the American photo exhibit and acquired five of Paul’s photographs for MOMA, Julia and Paul drove him to Luxembourg, where he had been born seventy-two years before. Among their friends who painted seriously were Rosie Manell and Jane Foster (newly discovered), with whom Paul exchanged paintings.

“We have finally tracked down Jane Foster (Mrs. George Zlatovsky),” Julia wrote on their next Valentine’s card to Ellie and Basil Summers and other OSS colleagues. They found her through an advertisement for an exhibition of her paintings. “She is still just as much fun as ever, and doing wonderfully good paintings. They’ve been here three years, but everyone thought she was lost.” Jane had worked for the USIS in Austria, was now married to a Russian, and (according to Betty McIntosh) was reporting the names of all CIA people, as well as Paul’s name, to the communists. Eventually Jane Foster would disrupt their lives.

Julia was forty years old on August 15, the calmest Parisian day of the year, when everyone who had not already left the city was doing so. They tried a dozen restaurants, which were all closed, and settled on the Ritz Hotel with the Manells. Afterward they sat on the balcony of the Manells’ Ile St.-Louis apartment, and, while Paul sketched yet another scene of Paris rooftops, Julia went to the movies with Abe. The next day Julia and Paul alone ate at Lapérouse: sole in a cream sauce with truffles and a half bottle of Chablis, followed by roast duck and Chambertin ’26. As the famous American diner Julian Street
(Where Paris Dines
was Paul’s first guide to Parisian restaurants) said about the place: “I had there one of the finest dinners I have ever eaten.” Lapérouse, not Le Grand Véfour (where Paul had recently gotten ptomaine poisoning), was now their luxury restaurant of choice. For the best bistros this year, they chose the Restaurant des Artistes, La Grille, Au Grand Comptoir, Chez Anna (the old lady had seven cats), Chez Marius, and La Truite.

Julia was reading the
Herald Tribune
carefully one day because their autumn was filled with worries about the elections (they preferred Adlai Stevenson to Dwight Eisenhower), McCarthyism, and Nixon’s Red-baiting. Suddenly she burst out laughing when she read the front-page story of the Nixon Fund, which listed the businessmen who had contributed to his secret slush fund. There it was: “John McWilliams, Pasadena Rancher.”

Soon her stepmother and brother wrote to ask that Julia not write anything more in defense of Charlie Chaplin and against Nixon. Her father canceled his subscription to
The New Yorker
when they ran a profile of Mrs. Roosevelt. Julia was just as uneasy with her father’s politics as she was with the anti-Semitism of some of their upper-class friends. The Childs’ enlightened liberalism extended to lesbians (such as Cora DuBois), but Paul shared his generation’s scorn of male homosexuals (“fairies,” he called them). Paul seemed to be comfortable with what Joseph Alsop called the “Wasp Ascendancy” in U.S. foreign policy following the war, for some of his dynamic friends (Dick Bissell and Charles Bohlen) were helping to run the world. Ambassador Bruce, who came to France to head the Marshall Plan and then serve as ambassador, left Paris (for Washington, then Bonn and London), and was replaced by, in Paul words, “careful and colorless Jimmie Dunn.”

When the end of Paul’s USIS assignment came, he was appointed to the regular foreign service in order to keep him on the job. There was much talk about him being assigned as Public Affairs Officer in Marseilles or Bordeaux (“both Julia and I are good at public relations”) or Exhibit Director in Vienna. They preferred to stay in France.

A
COOKBOOK FOR AMERICANS

Though she was studying with two chefs (the Cordon Bleu distributed no recipes), Julia was very aware (as well as skeptical) of cookbooks. On July 4, Louisette introduced Julia to Irma Rombauer, the author of Julia’s first cookbook as a bride:
The Joy of Cooking
. Rombauer was in France for a ten-day visit on her way to Germany, dining at the Bertholle home, and very interested in Les Trois Gourmandes. Her book—the latest editions revised with her daughter—she told them, was written for the middle class and avoided anything too fancy. “We all have copies of Mrs. Joy,” Julia wrote a friend the next year. “Somehow, old Mrs. Joy’s personality shines through her recipes…. She is terribly nice, but pretty old, now, about 70 or so; and just a good simple midwestern housewife. She said she’d been in some way weaseled out of something like royalties for 50,000 copies of her book, and was furious.” Julia claimed also to have a copy of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, though she did not use it, and a 1909 edition of Mrs. Beeton (as a collector’s item). Such were the offerings in the United States.

Julia was much more interested in French cookbooks, and owned the encyclopedic
Larousse Gastronomique
, the Chamberlains’
Bouquet de France
(she found a number of “unprofessional” mistakes), and
Le Livre de Cuisine
, by “Madame Saint-Ange”—“sort of
The Joy of Cooking
for France,” Julia said about what she called “one of my bibles then.” Marie Ebrard (her husband’s first name was Saint-Ange) had, according to her granddaughter, rewritten the recipes in her (and her husband’s)
Le Pot-au-Feu: Journal de Cuisine Pratique et d’Economie Domestique
, founded in 1893 as a monthly.

But Julia’s greatest reverence was for Georges-Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), the world-famous chef who cooked for royalty and high society during the Belle Epoque. Escoffier invented assembly-line cooking, stock reductions for sauces, and food endorsements (“foodiebiz”), as well as further codifying conduct and recipes
(Guide Culinaire
, 1903, and
Ma Cuisine
, 1934). Fifty years later she would call him her greatest hero, the man under whom her chef Max Bugnard studied. She now added two great French chefs—Carême and Escoffier—to Balzac and Beethoven as her supreme heroes. Her choices reveal her traditional approach: her moment in French culinary history fell at the end of the classical approach (Thillmont and Bugnard were both in their seventies).

The current god of the food world in Paris was Curnonsky. For the Great Gastronomic Banquet celebrating Curnonsky’s eightieth birthday, all eighteen French gastronomic societies were invited, including Julia’s Gourmettes and Paul’s Le Club Gastronomique Prosper Montagne. Nearly four hundred people who, in Paul’s words, “whirl around the French food-flame” attended, many bedecked in decorations, and each with nine glasses in front of his plate. During one of the final speeches, about quarter to one in the morning, Paul and Julia drifted out.

Ten days later, Julia and Simca called on Curnonsky at 14, Place Henri Bergson. He greeted them in his pajamas and bathrobe at four in the afternoon. He was a spirited and charming old man, Julia discovered. As a gesture of admiration and friendliness, Julia gave him a carton of Chesterfields. He had written an introduction to the forty-eight-page, spiral-bound book that Simca and Louisette self-published (Editions Fischbacher) in April. It was written in French and translated into English.
What’s Cuisine in France
, consisting of fifty recipes for Americans, sold about 2,000 copies. Louisette took it and a larger manuscript to New York, and Sumner Putnam of Ives Washburn bought it for $75.

The same booklet in its blue, white, and red cover, was published in New York City by Ives Washburn. But this sixty-three-page edition was entitled
What’s Cooking in France
and had three authors’ names: Louisette Remion Bertholle, Simone Beck, and Helmut Ripperger, identified as the author of many books on cookery. Ripperger, the “food adviser,” chose the recipes and wrote the bridge passages from the recipes by Simca and Louisette, who were identified as “Parisian hostesses and expert amateur cooks.” The book was dedicated to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who “loves France,” and stated that the three authors were “preparing a larger volume.” Even at $1.25 the booklet did not do well.

When Ripperger gave up on editing their volume in the summer of 1952, Simca and Louisette had already prepared six hundred typed pages of recipes entitled
French Cooking for All
. “I am the one who had the idea … after one of my trips to America,” says Louisette Bertholle. Putnam informed them that they would have to get an American collaborator and adapt their French recipes to the American method. Naturally, Julia would become their coauthor. “Julia is exceptional,” Bertholle said in 1992. “You will never find another Julia for maybe half a century.” Putnam agreed with their proposal and wanted to deal directly with Julia, but sent no contract.

Meanwhile, Julia, who thought the recipes were “not very professional,” began testing, organizing and typing the sauce recipes for
French Cooking
. To a confidant she said it was “just a big collection of recipes” and “not one of the recipes will stand as they were written.” It was her job to rewrite the original technical instructions and get everything into readable English. Because none of the recipes stood up, she confided to her friend Avis DeVoto, they were going to write an entirely different book: a book for American home cooks that would present cuisine bourgeoise using the techniques of haute cuisine—that is, the techniques their chef teachers had taught them. “Julie is girding up her loins and spitting on her Underwood,” Paul reported.

La Julification des gens
, Paul called her “special system of hypnotizing people so they open up like flowers in the sun.” She went to Chez la Mère Michel, which specialized in
beurre blanc nantais
, in order to learn how the woman herself made the
beurre blanc
. Indeed, Julia talked her way into the kitchen and watched them make the foaming white butter sauce. Disappointed that
Larousse Gastronomique
, Flammarion, Curnonsky, and others were vague on the subject, she went to the source and then perfected the method in order to write it up for their book.

Julia typed for weeks and experimented with sauces, during the winter cold and fog. They now called the book
French Home Cooking
(a title chosen by Putnam). When the publisher wrote on November 20 to say they were returning the Simca-Louisette manuscript by embassy pouch, Julia wrote a joint letter informing them the book was entirely changed and the sauce chapter was being sent.

Before their annual Christmas in Cambridge with the Bicknells, Julia finished the chapter on sauces “as a sample of style and method,” then sent it to Paul Sheeline, Paul’s French-born nephew, and their lawyer, who gave it to Putnam. She also sent copies of her sauce chapter to Avis DeVoto (her Boston “pen pal”), Freddie, Katy Gates and Susy Hastings (the latter two old Pasadena pals), and others “for critical and helpful comments.” She kept out three “top secret” recipes and warned these friends to keep the recipes and format secret, for “the cooking business is as bad as Georgetown real-estate or La Haute Couture … it’s cutthroat.”

Immediately Julia began on soups, which she thought would make a better first chapter (sauces being too Frenchy). Her approach was to prepare one soup each day, beginning with
soupe aux choux
(cabbage), and spread out for comparison Montagné’s
Larousse
, Ali-Bab’s
Gastronomie Pratique
, Curnonsky, and several regional cookbooks (probably the monthly
La France à Table)
. She made two traditional recipes and one experimental, preparing the latter in a pressure cooker. (“Stinking, nasty bloody pressure cooker, I hate them! I can spot and taste a pressure cooker dish anywhere,” she said.)

Though Louisette was discouraged by Putnam’s failure to respond to the sauces chapter, Julia and Simca were not. They were hoping that Julia’s “pen pal” would interest Houghton Mifflin, with whom she had connections, to take the book. At the end of December 1952, Mrs. DeVoto responded enthusiastically to their professional recipes and asked their permission to show the manuscript to her husband’s publisher.

Avis DeVoto was an invaluable link in the career of Julia Child as well as a precious friend. They had corresponded since Julia sent a French knife to Bernard DeVoto. Julia read DeVoto’s “Easy Chair” column in
Harper’s
in which he asserted (at his wife’s behest) that stainless-steel knives were no good because, though they did not rust, they could not be sharpened. Julia heartily agreed, sent a fan letter with a French carbon-steel paring knife, and the correspondence about food began. Avis, a very good cook, received and tested Julia’s recipes for months.

Julia’s long letters to Avis reveal their growing friendship as “heart-to-heart” correspondents. In addition to sending photographs of themselves and their husbands, Julia included on February 23 a written description of herself:

Julia, 6 ft. plus, weight 150 to 160. Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed the Botcelli [sic] bosoms are not big either. Legs OK, according to husband. Freckles.

By the end of January, encouraged by Avis’s confidence and connections, they broke with Putnam, who rejected the book as too unconventional. Julia received a contract and $200 advance from Houghton Mifflin in February. She was to draw up a separate contract between herself and the other two women. Avis assured her, “I am in a state of stupefaction…. it is going to be a classic.”

The transfer to Marseilles came suddenly that month. Julia and Paul left Paris with reluctance, he recorded. “Our hearts have been infected and will always skip a beat at the mention of our city.” Julia said, “How lucky we have been to live here this long, and I shall never get over it.”