Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (31 page)

By March 1954, Julia was so worked up over McCarthyism in America (and Foster Dulles’s capitulation) that she was determined to prove she and Paul would not be intimidated. The event triggering this decision was news that an anonymous “Committee for Discrimination in Giving” fingered five faculty members as “communists” at Smith College and wrote to the alumnae. Julia’s March 14 letter is a classic of reason and fortitude, saying, in part:

According to proper democratic methods, charges of this grave nature should first be brought to the attention of the President and the Trustees. You have assumed a responsibility for which you were not appointed. It is clear that you do not trust your elected officers, and that you do not have confidence in democratic procedures…. In Russia today, as a method for getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States.

With a check doubling her annual contribution to the Alumnae Fund, she adds, “In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for.” Unwisely, she sent a copy to her father (only later understanding that it was directed in part at him), who informed Julia and Paul that they were playing into the hands of the communists.

Paul was hurt and depressed by his father-in-law’s letter and took to his bed. He reported to his brother that “since the USIS has been under attack by Sen. McCarthy, the monthly book-buying has been cut from 20,000 to 1,592.” That summer Paul was asked to compile a list of every book in order that they be cleared, destroyed, or refiled. Though Paul continued to be worried about the growth of communism in Europe, he believed McCarthy made the situation worse. McCarthy, he added, “is a dirty and astute demagogue, advancing himself, like a surf board rider, on a wave of fear.” The French may have a “deep-seated national neurosis” that toppled each new government, but “we have McCarthy.”

Julia’s professional work provided an outlet for dealing with the tension and connected her both to her homeland, through her interpretation to Simca of American tastes and products, and to her new French home, with its hundreds of varieties of fish and fresh produce. She would explain which beans or fish were not available in the United States or that Americans had an aversion to too much butter, and she could clarify the language for their readers. Occasionally she sent Simca copies from American cookbooks, but she was reading
Gourmet
more skeptically since Narcissa Chamberlain had warned her about its unreliability. Though she left the final judgment of French recipe titles to Simca and Louisette, who were continuing their school in Louisette’s big blue kitchen, she did not hesitate to say that something was not “Frenchy” enough or that the French cooking authorities she consulted said this or that. Julia missed their cooking classes and the appearances of Thillmont and Bugnard at the blue kitchen at 171, avenue Victor Hugo.

Entertaining combined her professional work and Paul’s diplomatic responsibilities. It was immediately evident to the consulate that a meal at the Childs’ apartment was both a personal pleasure and a diplomatic advantage in entertaining guests. Three months after their arrival, Julia had the British consul general and the head of the French Chamber of Commerce to dinner.

Whether she served fish in wine sauce or a shoulder of lamb, each dish was an experiment reported to Simca. Officer Roland Jacobs (number two man in the U.S. Consulate), and his wife, Janine, remember a superb
boeuf bourguignon
and the Childs’ “neat sense of humor.” Howard B. Crotinger, in the Department of State foreign service, remembers that he and his bride, Annelie, were treated to “delicious” meals. Lee Crotinger was impressed by Julia’s height and her command of the French language. Crotinger, who was a Signal Corps photographer during the war, admired Paul’s photographs hanging in the foyer. American diplomats, most of whom were not fluent in French, were in awe of the Childs’ command of French, their popularity with the French, their sense of humor, and their “courage” in living in this “dangerous neighborhood,” where no other foreigners rented. Their avant-garde reputation was confirmed when Julia showed the Crotingers a jar of absinthe, wormwood included, that she was preserving in the back of her dark closet. She found an old recipe for this lethal, now outlawed, drink and shared a taste of her brew with adventurous friends.

Despite the demoralizing effects of McCarthyism, Paul maintained the Cultural Center and its library, exhibited the work of American artists, and entertained lecturers and visitors. During this first year in Marseilles, the USIS became the USIA, an independent agency of the government, and Paul was put in charge. He organized fifteen French departments along the Mediterranean between the Italian and Spanish borders and supervised one assistant and eight staff members. In addition to publicity and visiting celebrities, he oversaw sections on management and administration, an information center, press and radio services, motion pictures (including the Cannes film festival), and exchange of persons. Paul’s staff “adored the Childs,” Crotinger remembers.

Julia was learning to balance her demanding professional standards with her role as wife to Paul, who wanted her to travel with him when she could. She confided to Simca in early December that if she were able to give as much time as she wanted to her work, “we would soon be having a divorce, I fear. Luckily, however, now that he has his studio, [Paul] is well-occupied during the weekends!”

Their marriage seemed to be happier than ever, perhaps in part because the demands of the book kept Julia’s social life less frantic than in Paris. “We just love living together,” Paul told Charlie, and when apart missed each other “terrifically [for] we clearly have developed a sort of emotional interdependence.” In December he told Charlie, “Julie … is now and then … an unconscious therapeutic agent for me.” She calmed his nerves. Twice this year Paul commented on their like-mindedness: “Julia and I are such twinnies in our reactions and tastes,” and “We are pretty twinnyfied that way, reflecting each other’s atmospheres like two mirrors.”

Paul was keenly aware of the charm that Julia had both on him (“I hate to think what a sour old reprobate I might have been without that face to look at”) and on the French (“I watched with fascination [one] night at Lipp’s as she turned a fat, tired, old waiter into a responsive, gay, flirtatious, pleasure-filled man. [She is an] electric-energizer and responder…. I am continuously conscious of my good fortune in living with her.”

He specifically credited her sensitivity to “emotional atmospheres.” When she was excited, “Julia’s eyes begin to glow like emeralds”:

Her eyes are as sensitive to emotional atmospheres as a coal-mine canary is to fire-damp. If there’s the slightest wonder or sentiment or excitement in the air those curious green orbs develop a phosphorescent sparkle; and that mobile mug takes on a look of pleasurable anticipation—and the first thing you know she’s imbued the atmosphere with her own aurora-borealis.

M
ASTERING THE ART

Julia’s horizon was the future publication of their book. She was convinced that they were writing a precedent-setting work: “What a book this will be, if we ever finish it.” And she was convinced that they must keep their work secret, especially their experimentation with high technology. The letters were often labeled “Top Secret” or “never seen in print before.” Simca must never show the blender to Bugnard, because he had many American students. She was especially concerned that they be the first to incorporate the use of the Waring blender in cooking classic French recipes. “Love that Waring Mixer,” she told Avis. Simca went to a demonstration at a kitchen fair in Paris, and Julia wrote to the American companies who manufactured blenders, just as she had written to the Wine Advisory Board of California the previous year.

A second innovation they hoped to pioneer was directions for cooking some dishes ahead of time (a dimension never introduced by their teachers, who were
chefs de cuisine)
. The women would inform their readers where in the recipe they could stop and how they could reheat. These ahead-of-time tips were uniquely Julia’s contribution, for she did not have a live-in maid or cook and understood the pressure of being both cook and hostess.

Julia was working on soups and then testing Simca’s recipes for sauces. She consulted the authorities (remembering Bugnard’s method or Thillmont’s method or looking up Escoffier); experimented with the ingredients (butter versus oil), with procedures (mixing at the table, cooking a dish ahead of time, cutting down on the milk in Simca’s recipe for
sauce à l’ail);
fine-tuned the language, what Louisette called the “blah-blah” (“holding pan of boiling butter in left hand, wire whip in right hand,
pour …”);
and tested equipment (the pressure cooker did not prove satisfactory for soups). “What minute checking we must do!” she informed Simca. “We must always remember that we are writing for an audience that knows nothing about French cooking.”

Julia’s peculiar responsibility was to translate the book into the American language—a challenge because in the United States there was no culinary vocabulary as there was in France. The name of recipes were in French, but the directions had to be in English. Julia would explain to Simca that “stale” meant leftover; “broken eggs” meant something other than to break an egg; “into” meant closed up inside. Yet when it came to recipe decisions, she insisted (October 25, 1953) that the book “is most definitely a joint book” on which “we all three must absolutely agree on all points…. It is rather like Existentialism, I suppose, in that we alone are responsible for how this book turns out.” She also suggested, and DeVoto agreed, that the ingredients be printed on the left, the method on the right.

“Julia is woodpeckering the Royal Portable right next to me, jiggling the table like a tumbrel on cobbles,” Paul complained to his brother. When she was not shopping and laboring over the stove, she was typing single-spaced letters of several pages (she was their official typist) and five or six carbon copies of each recipe. “The most difficult part of the cookbook was writing all those letters,” she said later. “Then correcting those six copies. It was terrible, just awful.” (Yet their transfer to Marseilles, which necessitated voluminous correspondence, provides the culinary historian a unique opportunity to study the development of a classic cookbook collaboration.) She used up boxes of onionskin and carbon paper, for she often (but not always) sent copies of letters to Louisette as well. The recipes called for multiple copies because she was having Avis DeVoto in Cambridge, Katy Gates in Pasadena, Freddie (and niece Rachel) in Lumberville—her “guinea pigs”—cook the recipes and report every detail of success and failure. The typewriter and the stove were her daily instruments. But neither were built to her height, perhaps contributing to her stooped back in years to come.

In all things, Julia was a consummate professional. She informed her partners that they must not put their names on any recipe (these were French classics). She consulted them on every matter of business (“We are a team!”). She was the go-between with DeVoto (their unpaid agent) and the Houghton Mifflin editor, Mrs. Dorothy de Santillana, who was happily “overcome” (according to Avis) when she first saw their manuscript. Julia distributed to Simca and Louisette the contracts and composed biographies for their approval. (Houghton Mifflin insisted on dealing only with Julia.) It was Paul’s nephew, Paul Sheeline, who would iron out the contract with Houghton Mifflin. Julia arranged with Waring Blender to get a discount and free cookbooks for their blenders. Because she had a small income of her own, she became the cooking trio’s banker and paid for expenses that seemed necessary (they were to reimburse her from future royalties), including their membership in the order of Tastevins, a famous old wine-tasting society in Burgundy (they traveled to Dijon for the annual Tastevin dinner in November). She called the bank account the “Child French Cookbook Banking Fund.”

She insisted that they be as accomplished as possible, using
Gourmet
, certain self-proclaimed “experts,” and some of the French chefs’ cookbooks (“La Fumisterie” [fakery]) as contrasts: “In other words, we must be Descartesian, and never accept anything unless it comes from an extremely professional [French] source, and even then, to see how we personally like how it is done,” she wrote Simca on November 5, 1953. To be absolutely accurate on ingredients, she persuaded Paul to give her
Larousse Agricole
for her birthday. “If we depart from the French tradition to cater to American tastes, or to our personal tastes,” she told Simca, “we must always so indicate.”

Julia had the classic French cookbooks, such as Escoffier, on hand for constant reference. But from a simple regional recipe book such as
La Bonne Cuisine du Périgord
to the works of Escoffier, recipes were too brief and general for her (“place casserole on a moderate fire” or “add a soupspoon of shallots”). She quickly noted that they “all copy from one another.” She kept up with current reading, noting in her letters that a new review,
Gastronomie le Neuvième Art
, quoted “those two boys,” Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière, on every other page. She half agreed with Baudelaire that Brillat-Savarin was “a kind of old brioche whose sole use is to furnish windbags with stupid quotations [tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are].”

Because they were virtual newcomers to Marseilles, visits from dear friends were important. The Nigel Bicknells, now living in Istanbul, came by with their two children. The Childs visited Dick and Alice Lee Myers several times in nearby Cassis, once just a day after Ernest Hemingway had stopped by on his way to Africa. On a trip to Monte Carlo with the Peter Bicknells, they watched Colette being wheeled to her table near them at the Hôtel de Paris. France’s famous novelist, who would be dead within months, had “an imperial look in her eye,” remembered Julia, and her “gray-white hair [was] moplike and flying in its unmistakable way.” Julia does not remember what Colette ate, but she herself began with consommé because she was working on that recipe at the time.