Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (35 page)

“Your old prince is but an unhappy octogenarian,” Curnonsky replied to a Christmas card from the Julia. The great man had taken a terrible fall and broken several ribs. The doctors put him on a
un régime terrible
that excluded wine, salt, sauces, and cream. He had “been around too long” and was awaiting death, he said, but “with no regrets,” for he had tasted the wonderful joys of life. He asked her to visit again on her next trip to Paris, for her presence would bring great joy.

Julia and Paul’s most daring Valentine card was sent in 1956. Instead of an original artwork prepared months in advance and colored with a spot of red by Julia and Paul, they sent a photograph of themselves in a bubble bath with a red stamp above their heads that read: “
WISH YOU WERE HERE
.” Their bare shoulders and upper chests showed above the bubbles. Stamped on the bubbles: “Happy Valentine’s day from the heart of old downtown Plittersdorf on the Rhine.” In retrospect the photograph seems an implicit retort to the special agents’ earlier charges against Paul. Julia inscribed one card to an OSS friend: “Your old CBI companions in one of their more formal diplomatic moments.”

Good health was very much on their minds this spring, both because of Paul’s lengthy recovery from hepatitis and because Julia, at the age of forty-three, was having to deal with weight gain for the first time. Since the long and successful treatment of their amoebic dysentery in Paris, Julia had added some weight (she weighed 155 pounds, Paul 165). “My stomach keeps getting fatter and fatter … which is probably only the onslaught of
un certain âge,”
she confided to Simca. The previous May she had five polyps removed and this April they returned, so she had a curettage
(“les malheurs d’un certain âge”)
, but not without taking her duck manuscript to the hospital. “Back on the old regime,” she would say about dieting at the end of a trip. After a series of articles about cancer and smoking in the
International Herald Tribune
, Julia and Paul gave up smoking. “I have always smoked too much anyway,” she wrote Louisette, “but I did enjoy it so much.” What began as rebellious play in a Pasadena treetop, was now to be regarded, she said with her typical strong will, “as a poison, pure and simple, not a pleasure.” Their resolve would be short-lived.

During her last five months in Germany, from February to May, Julia focused on duck. While she had frequently served
caneton à l’orange
to guests, now she experimented with various techniques: boned stuffed duck, braised duck in a crust (which they eventually put with a terrine section in a cold buffet chapter),
salmis
(partially cooked duck, cut up and cooked again in sauce), and
civet
(stewed in a sauce thickened by duck blood), which did not make the cut. Her experimentation even extended to dehydrated potatoes. After turning away when she first spotted them on the commissary shelf, she bought two packages of instant potatoes and after adding butter and cream served them to Paul, who noticed nothing. Though there was no question of ever including them in their cookbook, she sent a package to Simca to get her reaction.

Articles and advertisements reinforced what Julia had noticed on her last visit to the United States: the country was in the middle of what social historian Harvey Levenstein would label “the golden age of food processing,” referring specifically to frozen food, even frozen meals in restaurants. She wondered in a letter to Simca as early as March 2, 1954, if in fifty years cooking would be only a handicraft hobby such as bookbinding and hand weaving. “Too bad for our cook-book [if we] face such ‘progress.’”

She was almost done with the duck portion of the poultry chapter (and was looking ahead to goose and vegetables) when they joined Avis DeVoto, whose husband, Bernard, had died the previous November, for a trip that Paul had planned to cheer her. From London, they took her to meet Peter and Mari Bicknell in Cambridge, and together they made the traditional
soufflé Grand Marnier
, drunk with Château d’Yquem ’29. They then took her to Paris for a series of classes at L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes taught by chefs Bugnard and Thillmont and a luncheon with the Gourmettes with Julia’s two partners. Simca carefully planned the Paris visit to impress Avis, the “godmother” of their book. Julia made a special visit to see the ailing Curnonsky, who would die this July. When Julia and Paul took Avis to Bonn for three days, she read the manuscript (one hundred pages on poultry alone) and was slightly overwhelmed. They talked about publishing sequential volumes.

Julia, always curious about German cuisine and history, decided she would learn more about its literature by taking a course on Goethe, the national poet. She took a three-week course at the University of Bonn, wrote a paper (though “it is a bit over my head”), and passed the examination. She also had the entire university class over for a party. Paul, off planning seven international exhibits (on police work, therapy, peaceful uses of atomic energy, American painting, architecture, social work, and the Berlin industrial fair), returned to find, he wrote Charlie, “Cat’s away—mice get out of hand (they begin to go intellectual).” Home in time to take her to her birthday dinner, he told her of the rumors that Washington would be asking him to return for a new assignment.

Julia and Paul entertained often, but the only lasting friendships they made in Bonn were with Lyne and Ellen Few, who were stationed in Düsseldorf (“very nice people,” Julia called them at the time, “our type of people”). They were also fond of Elizabeth and James McDonald, she a sculptor and he director of the U.S. Information Center in Nuremberg and then Cologne, nearer Bonn. Julia had come to McDonald’s rescue by mobilizing a half dozen women to help prepare the food for the Cologne Amerika Haus inauguration.

Not long after Julia and Paul celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary in Berlin (ten hours’ drive away), where Paul was supervising three exhibits (Conant, now ambassador to West Germany, singled him out for praise), they received the order to return to the United States for home leave and transfer by November. “Won’t it be fun to have friends again! What effect will this removal have on THE BOOK?” he wrote Charlie. Julia informed Simca that the return to the United States “would be useful indeed for the final going over of our finished chapters.” In a sort of grand finale for them both, Paul had a one-man exhibition of his photographs in Cologne in October 20 (the packers had already come and gone), and Julia concluded the poultry chapter with several recipes (from Simca) for goose. Only two goose recipes would be included in the book, one with prune and foie gras stuffing
(oie rôtie aux pruneaux)
and one with chestnut and sausage stuffing
(oie braisée aux marrons)
.

“We really enjoy working together very much and make an excellent team,” Paul reported during their move. Though they had expected to spend another two years in Germany, they were glad to be leaving and to be stopping in Paris before going home. “My, how we long for Paris and our friends … in this desert!” she wrote to Louisette. As they drove toward Paris, Paul reported, “our European impressions are heightened, magnified and made potent.” They tried, “almost desperately,” to absorb and fix every sight and taste and sound of France. Their last ten days in Europe were spent in the Hôtel du Pont Royal, where they had lived almost eight years earlier when they began this great European adventure.

Chapter 14
B
ACK
H
OME (AND
C
OOKING)
ON THE
R
ANGE
(1956 – 1958)

“We lived in an age … of the decline and pall of the American palate.”

JAMES BEARD
, New York Times,
1959

B
EFORE JULIA
and Paul settled into Eisenhower’s Washington, more specifically into the Georgetown of Stewart and Joe Alsop, they reacquainted themselves with their country. Itinerants in their own land for the last two months of 1956, Julia and Paul moved from rural Pennsylvania to Boston, from Chicago to Southern California, from Northern California to Boston, and back through Pennsylvania to the District of Columbia, reuniting with family and friends. But they began and ended their travels with Charlie and Freddie at their house in rural Pennsylvania, where they had wed ten years earlier. Finally, their Georgetown house, rented out while they were in Bonn, was available, and their goods and furniture arrived from Germany.

One of Julia’s initial observations was that the country had become partial to flaming food, either in pretentious restaurants or on the backyard barbecue (three million dollars were spent the following year on barbecue equipment alone). On top of that, James Beard, now the dean of American cooking, had published
The Complete Book of Outdoor Cookery
two years before. Had Julia stayed longer at her father’s Pasadena home, she would have learned of Joseph Broulard, a native of the Jura in France, then the reigning chef in Los Angeles, a city whose top restaurants were French. Broulard, she later discovered, spawned several Los Angeles restaurants and chefs from his Au Petit Jean.

They also discovered the boom in population and building in Los Angeles, along with the quality of the wine at the Charles Krug vineyard in the Napa Valley. Though it took many years before Paul would acknowledge domestic wines in the same sentence with French, he found the bottles they sampled surprisingly good and bought a case.

Julia was astonished to realize how many Americans were letting Swanson do their cooking and eating on tin trays in front of the television. Twice in their wanderings, families turned on their television sets after a meal, much to Julia’s amazement. At the Childs’ in Pennsylvania they enjoyed
The $64,000 Question
, but found the TV game show “a waste of time.” The country had turned to prepackaged quiz shows and prepackaged food.

V
ILLAGE LIFE IN GEORGETOWN

Julia bought a new range, an enormous black restaurant range, on which she would cook the remainder of her life, during two months of major renovations on their house at 2706 Olive Street, the last house on Olive before it curved into Twenty-seventh Street at the little green parkway. They were on the outskirts, in an area of smaller houses, of the most elegant place to live in the city. Georgetown had a village atmosphere in the middle of a city of monuments, and everyone knew each other because they went to the same market, post office, and barbershop.

They exchanged the third floor of a modern housing development in Plittersdorf on the Rhine for a 150-year-old three-story wooden house. Julia finally got her gas range, and instead of the cold, wet winters, they enjoyed the comfort of an air-conditioning machine on each floor. Though there would be snow this winter, Washington, DC, summers were unbearably hot and humid. With the rent money Paul had wisely collected and banked for eight years, they had enough to redo bathrooms and ceilings to stop the leaking, take out a partition to make the kitchen larger, replace the wiring to avoid any possible fire, and repaint the house. Even the walkway above the ground-floor kitchen, which connected the street to the sitting- and living-room floor, had to be rebuilt. But the first room Julia finished was her bedroom/office (on the top floor with Paul’s tiny studio and the guest room), where her typewriter and books awaited her.

If the rent money financed the renovations, the estate of Julia’s mother underwrote her career, including the gas range and the cooking equipment from Dehillerin. She bought a new dishwasher (to save on a maid, she told Simca) and a sink with a grinder to dispose of the waste. She informed Simca that her mother’s inheritance “allowed me to carry on extensive cookery work. My, I hope we don’t have to move out of here in 2 years … I couldn’t stand it! … I shall … cut my throat.” Caro Weston McWilliams, who cared little about high cuisine or cooking, would have been thrilled with her daughter’s enthusiasm and sense of fulfillment.

Julia and Paul would have preferred to be living in Paris. Yet, in retrospect, it was fortuitous for her book that they were home again, where she could cook each recipe with the food available to the people who would buy their book. They were also enjoying being homeowners, especially since they could afford to fix it up with style; both took pride in their little nest. Paul’s aesthetic sense turned each room into variations on a different color, and he became a “madly enthusiastic gardener,” Julia confided to Simca:

It is great fun being back here to live. I never could get the feel of it when we just passed through on vacations. One thing I do adore is to be shopping in these great serve-yourself markets, where … you pick up a wire push cart as you come in and just trundle about looking and fingering everything there is…. It is fine to be able to pick out each separate mushroom yourself…. Seems to me there is everything here that is necessary to allow a good French cook to operate.

The new supermarket around the corner on M Street (which curved into Pennsylvania Avenue) was not the only discovery: there was now scouring powder for copper pots, which she sent to Simca, and an electric skillet with a thermostat and timer, ready-mixed pie crust, and Uncle Ben’s rice (she had no use for ready-made pie crust or soup). Each new invention was tested and reported to Simca, who promised to visit early in 1958. Julia’s curiosity and enthusiasm were infectious.

Paul shared Julia’s professional passion, but no longer had much enthusiasm for his own career. He liked the art work and the perspective it gave him on the international political scene, but he mainly worked for the income and the occasional pride he could still take in his work. In December, while he was in California, he had finally been promoted to foreign service rank three (FSS-3), where he made a modest $9,660 a year.

“Julia thinks I should be President,” Paul once told his brother. His efficiency reports (one acknowledged he was “underrated”) gave him the highest rankings for character and ability, dependability and thoroughness, organization, and his wife: “Mr. Child has an intelligent and charming wife who is an asset to him professionally as well as representationally.” Other evaluation phrases explain why he remained at rank four so many years: “interests primarily cultural” and “impatient with certain administrative details … and tendency to be self-effacing.” That he ranked low in “knowledge of administrative practices” and was thought “to doubt his ability as an executive” reflect his disdain for office politics and the bureaucracy. Thus he lacked ambition for promotion (though his letters to Charlie through the years reveal that he expected promotion). In 1959 he was promoted, nevertheless, to Acting Chief of the Exhibit Division.

Because Washington was a hub through which many passed, Paul and Julia entertained a number of people they knew earlier in Washington and in India, China, Paris, Marseilles, and Bonn. There were also, of course, Julia’s friends from California and Smith (Mary Belin lived in nearby Evermay mansion) and Paul’s Connecticut connections. As always, Julia was interested in political and social issues. With Nancy Davis, who had worked for Adlai Stevenson, Julia went to hear Dean Acheson address Congress, attended
Inherit the Wind
starring Melvyn Douglas, and sat in the front row to watch Eisenhower’s inaugural parade. (“I find I am a mad parade watcher,” she wrote Simca the following October when Queen Elizabeth came to town, “and besides I have never seen a queen.”) She awakened early to try (unsuccessfully) to see Sputnik circle the globe and watched the squabbles on Capitol Hill with keen interest.

They missed the Washington of Dean Acheson, believing the government was now run by lesser men. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Acheson’s “despised” and “untrustworthy” successor, seemed to have a callous absence of loyalty to the professionals of the State Department, firing many, and supporting the rule of Chiang Kai-shek. The closest Julia came personally to the government was on February 14, 1957, when the FBI interviewed her about Jane Foster, though all she remembers telling them was that she did not “think someone that funny and that scattered could be a spy.” In her datebook she pronounced the visit “very pleasant,” which reflected both relief and the influence of her proximity to the seat of government.

All Washington loved to dine out, though few took to cooking as a serious profession. For several months after Julia’s kitchen was finished, they entertained “like mad”: dinner or cocktails for Cartier-Bresson (the French photojournalist); Walter and Helen Lippmann; Nancy Davis, who was marrying Wing Pepper of Philadelphia; Helen Kirkpatrick, former Information Officer for the Marshall Plan in Paris and recently Assistant to the President at Smith College, who was marrying Robbins Milbank; Sherman and Nancy Kent, whom they had last seen in Marseilles; Avis DeVoto from Cambridge. Several OSS buddies, including Guy Martin, were living nearby.

During their wanderings, they had seen all of Julia’s family, but now they looked forward to their frequent weekends at Coppernose in Pennsylvania, where Julia and Freddie cooked seriously, most often a large turkey (poultry not readily available in France, thus requiring careful changes in timing and cooking temperature). At the wedding the following spring of Erica, the eldest of the Child children, Julia arranged the flowers, Charlie decorated the cake, the Kublers provided the music, and Paul took the photographs. Her wedding to Hector Prud’homme (Rachel Child married Anthony Prud’homme several years later) was indeed a family matter, for now the Childs were connected by marriage to the Bissells (Marie and Richard Bissell’s daughter Anne Caroline was married to Hector Prud’homme, Sr.) and to the Kublers (the elder Bissells’ son Dick Bissell was married to Betty Kubler’s sister). This tight band of people (Julia called it an “ingrown,” happy family) remained their emotional support as well as the best company for holidays, including the traditional August in Maine.

Julia and Paul’s new red Ford pounced out onto a rocky point of land which stuck out into the sea on Mount Desert Island. They were surrounded on three sides by ocean, rocks, and lobster pots. With the excitement of being “home,” they drank in the sea smells and familiar surroundings of Lopaus Point, examining every improvement, the new addition, and Freddie’s herb garden. This was the first real herb garden Julia had seen; “I found it just heavenly,” she wrote Simca. They picked blueberries and raspberries and reminisced. They waded out into the surf and sea spray to take the lobsters out of their anchored cages.

They hardly had their fill of lobsters when it was time to drive down to Cambridge for book and cook work, taking ten lobsters along with them to Avis.

I
N NOTHING ELSE SO
HAPPY OR SAD

Julia’s greatest joy was in the kitchen, testing recipes, discussing tastes and results with Avis or Freddie—if she was in their kitchens—or taking notes for Simca—if she was home. She had less success cooking with Freddie (“It must be something psychological,” she said about working with her sister-in-law). She shared everything with Simca: variations in cooking techniques, ways to bring down Simca’s high blood pressure, America’s feelings about the racial tensions in Little Rock, Simca’s servant problems (with her prickly temperament, she had trouble keeping a maid), and the wisdom of Simca publishing some articles and recipes in French periodicals (Julia frequently encouraged her to assert her professional authority).

The Houghton Mifflin people and Avis (who was working as a scout for the publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf) encouraged Julia to place recipes in
The Ladies’ Home Journal
(the food editor said the recipes were “too involved”),
House & Garden
, and
Town & Country
. Julia sent several recipes to
Woman’s Day
, a publication of the A&P grocery store chain, but never heard a word back from them. The
Washington Post
called because they heard of her kitchen, but when the article appeared she was disappointed they had not used any of her recipes or made any mention of Simca. By the fall of 1957 the manuscript was so dog-eared, they had to get it retyped.