Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (44 page)

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ELEVISION’S ALL-STAR COOKS

Julia was not the first to demonstrate her techniques on the little screen. James Beard had made his debut August 30, 1946, on network television: “Elsie presents James Beard in
I Love to Eat!”
announced Elsie the Cow, Borden’s promotional puppet. It was a fifteen-minute spot, expanded to thirty minutes, and canceled by his new sponsor, Birds Eye, the following spring. Beard may have begun in the theater, but he was ill at ease and awkward in front of the camera. Nevertheless, he appeared again on CBS’s
In the Kitchen
that fall, in
At Home with Jinx and Tex
, sponsored by Swift & Co. on May 11, 1947, and, after an interim of fifteen years, in
The James Beard Show, a
chatty, uninformative, and dated women’s talk show filmed in 1965–66 in Canada.

But Beard was not the first television cook. In the early years of commercial television, local home economics teachers would come on in white uniforms and white shoes to illustrate the four basic food groups, most sponsored and influenced by food companies. Commercial television stations had built-in kitchen studios because advertisers were usually food related and the stations produced the commercials. Educational television stations, including WGBH, did not have kitchens.

The first real food-centered teaching was done by Dione (pronounced Dee-o-nee) Lucas, who cooked on local commercial channels from 1948 to 1953. Lucas was in many ways the mother of French cooking in New York City. Born in 1909 in England, she came to New York City in 1942 and ran the Egg Basket, her combination restaurant and cooking school, which failed by the mid-sixties. Her first television cooking classes still stand up with integrity nearly fifty years later. Lucas was a crisp and neurotic woman whose apprentices thought her bossy. Others alleged that she was a veritable soap opera of eccentricities, dramatics, and migraine, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol; but she was generous and kind to Julia and Simca. After seeing one of her live demonstrations for the first time in November 1964, Julia wrote to Helen Evans Brown that “she is wonderfully expert.” Paul concluded she was “marvelously deft manually” despite the confusion of having three helpers on the stage, and he left “feeling bloody good about” their own program.

Poppy Cannon, the can-opener queen, occasionally appeared nationally on CBS’s
Home
show, demonstrating, for example, how to make vichyssoise with frozen mashed potatoes, one sautéed leek, and a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup. The name of the soup and the only fresh produce in the recipe—that one leek!—seemed exotic enough for the American viewing public, most of whom had never seen a whisk before Julia Child made her televised omelet.

“Child’s predecessors in the medium were less Dione Lucas or Poppy Cannon than Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs,” said Robert Clark, Beard’s most recent biographer. Though the comparison diminishes her expert knowledge and teaching techniques—which are on a par with those of Dione Lucas—it does accurately note that she was a natural comedian belonging neither to the stern and serious Lucas approach nor to the glamour girl school demeanor of Betty Furness and Bess Myerson. She “was a droll six-footer with a Seven Sisters tone whose hearty and unself-conscious aplomb was the perfect foil to the pretensions of both fancy food and television,” Clark adds. She “transformed cooking into entertainment,” proclaimed Jane and Michael Stern in their
Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
(1987).

Two other factors, apart from her humor, that distinguish her from other cooks on television then and even now—though there has been a legion of imitators since—are her voice and her mistakes. The
Boston Globe
published the following query:

Q
—Every time I see Julia Child, television’s “French Chef,” she seems to be out of breath. Does she suffer from asthma or emphysema?

—H.B., Everett, Mass.

A
—Miss Child’s response is that her lungs are healthy. The art of cooking is a labor of love and involves a lot of manual labor. Try whipping a soufflé sometime.

Her shallow breathing was reflected also in the high pitch of her voice (which got more pronounced with age), which would unexpectedly drop down, slide up, gasp, and pitch forward with a whoop—covering a full octave in the course of one recipe. Luckily, she found an audience before the television image-makers could discover that she was “all wrong” for television. Certainly today she would probably not have a chance at breaking into television. Despite the warbles, gasps, and breathlessness, she could keep talking—a considerable talent for a live demonstration—and speak in full sentences, interspersing narratives and effective references to France and to food.

Reviewers could never place her accent. The first cover story in the
Boston Globe Magazine
(there would be many) described her “charming French accent,” but others described it as follows: “a flutey schoolmarm tone,” “a voice that bellowed its New England regionalism,” “not all that different from standard Californian,” and “that preposterous Boston Brahmin accent.” Many have tried to capture her unique vocal tone: “plummy,” “like a great horned owl,” “trills in that unmistakable falsetto with its profusion of italics,” and “a voice that could make an aspic shimmy.” Others used comparisons: “a combination of Andy Devine and Marjorie Main,” and “two parts Broderick Crawford to one part Elizabeth II.” Molly O’Neill says she “sounds like a dowager doing a burlesque routine,” and Clark Wolf says “it’s the voice of an English cookery lady.” Collectively, the impression was that hers was a voice as recognizable as those of Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, and William F. Buckley, Jr. Her husband wrote a poem to her “mouth so sweet, so made for honeyed words.”

The language Julia used was also a part of her unique character. Her choice of words and phrases reflected in part her age and the period in which she lived (she called her menstrual period “the curse” and homosexuals “fairies”). In conversations she could swear and speak frankly about private matters to the point that one of her lawyers would blush. On television she spoke of the icebox, not the refrigerator (though in her letters she called it the “frigo”), and the “chest,” not the breast, of the duck, and said “eek,” “wang,” or “bang” when she lowered her rolling pin or butcher knife with a thud to the table. She got a permanent every few months, wore falsies, and always wanted to be called “Mrs. Child,” yet she loved gossip, talking dirty, and a good belly laugh. Her favorite dismissive word—for abstract art, as an example—was “balls.”

Among her friends, her expressions are legendary. Paul called it “Julie’s sleight of tongue,” naming double stainless-steel sinks “stinkless stains.” Or saying “blend the bladder” instead of “blend the batter” (or was it bladder blending instead of batter blending?). Of a minor mishap, she would say, “I did not have my glasses on when I was thinking.” In several restaurants she was heard to say, “The wine here flows like glue.” Leaving a noisy restaurant, she said, “It was so noisy I could not hear myself eat.”
Gourmet
magazine’s reviews were “a lot of mushmouthery!” She emphasized the last syllable of “shallot,” probably from the French
é-cha-LOTE
, and told Simca that she was “trying to get back into the grindstone.” When her work was interrupted, she exclaimed
“Fistre, alors!”
misspelling
fichtre
(screw it!) in dozens of letters to Simca. Bad news was punctuated by “Woe!” When she tapped the floured cake pan and flour fell to the floor, she quipped, “I have a self-cleaning floor.” There were many letters after that incident.

She was known for delightful mistakes on her program, which became a frequent motif in news articles. The
Boston Herald
claimed she was blending olives when the top of the blender flew off, then the whole machine broke down: “Oh, well, who needs the mechanical age anyway?” she said. At first Morash could not correct minor problems because they had to keep the film running and did not have time to refilm an episode. He remembers stopping the film on only six occasions, including when the soufflé fell and when the kidney flambé failed to catch fire. Soon Julia realized that her recovery from near-catastrophe was an effective teaching tool and explained this fact to inquisitive reporters. She also explained to Helen Evans Brown that “people enjoy spilled wine bottles, dropped glasses, and potato plopped onto the stove—makes it so homey, they say.” Apocryphal stories have grown up around her accidents, including a story that she dropped a fish on the floor, picked it up, and continued. The only food that ever fell to the floor, according to Ruth Lockwood, was a piece of turkey wrapped in cheesecloth that rolled out from beneath a board. But the story of dropping a chicken (or fish) on the floor was continually embellished until the
Washington Post
in 1992 had her dropping an entire side of lamb.

Her ability at improvisation helped turn uncarveable suckling pig, flaming pot holders, and a melting dessert into human and humorous moments. One example of her improvisation that both Lockwood and Morash remember is the ringing of the freight elevator bell. Though they left a note downstairs saying they were taping, a loud ring sounded in the middle of a program and, without skipping a beat, Julia said, “Oh, that must be the gas man. But I am too busy and cannot answer it.” (Morash remembers her saying, “That must be the plumber, about time he got here. He knows where to go.”) Whatever the line, it was a great save. The melting dessert was
charlotte aux pommes
, made with bread and apples, rum and apricot preserves. Because she had used Gravensteins or McIntosh instead of the firmest apples, when she lifted the mold, the cake gave a sigh and slowly began to collapse. “Oh well, I don’t like these things too rigid,” Ruth Lockwood remembers Julia saying, picking it up and taking it to the dining table. It “began to sag,” as Julia described the incident a decade later, “and the whole dessert deflated like an old barn in a windstorm.”

The other factors distinguishing Julia Child as a television cooking teacher are interrelated: she was noncommercial and she was located in Boston. Julia refused to become commercial, especially when what Paul called “the Madison Avenue hounds” began calling in 1964. Olivetti offered her $2,500 to be photographed with their typewriters, but she declined. She represented public television: she believed she could never endorse a product or accept money to represent a profit-making institution. This stand lent credibility both to WGBH and to her own opinions. She could not be bought. In later years, her lawyer would stop anyone who tried to borrow the Child name for promotion purposes.

Her choice of Boston as her home base kept her out of the food wars and competition of New York City, though Barbara Kafka believes that “the competitive atmosphere in New York was not that bad then.” New York City thought of itself as the center of food and cooking and television. Boston was a smaller town with a greater reverence for history and tradition, if not a sense of intellectual superiority. Boston “suits her to a T,” adds Kafka. Most significantly, it was the home of WGBH: “New York City could not have afforded to bring her in,” Kafka remarks. “Her proximity to WGBH was critical to her career.”

Boston was also the home of Fannie Farmer, the maiden aunt of home economics and “scientific cookery,” as well as
The Boston Cooking School Cook Book
in the late nineteenth century. Julia Child brought a new aesthetic to food, one based on the centrality of pleasure and taste. Though Boston named some of the streets in its older neighborhoods Fish Lane, Bean Court, Corn Court, Grouse, Quail, Milk, Water, Fruit, Berry, Millet, and Russet, the food tastes of its natives were as simple as the street names suggest. Privately, Julia complained that Boston was “a gastronomic wasteland.” Yet the city took its new celebrity to its heart, and in the decade to come, like Boston Pops director Arthur Fiedler, she would become a beloved institution along with Faneuil Hall, Durgin-Park, and the Red Sox.

L
IGHTENING UP THE DARK AGES

“We did not have freshly ground pepper or leeks, copper bowls or whisks, fresh garlic or herbs other than parsley. And our wine had screw tops,” says Russ Morash. “Except for a few gourmet shops in New York City, we lived in the Dark Ages.” Culinary historian Barbara Wheaton says that when she returned to the United States from Europe in 1961, she could find leeks only at a farm stand near Concord. For those with gardens, the produce was excellent, the preparation simple. Salt cod and baked beans were the dishes most revered in Boston, and fish was eaten every Friday, no matter how it was cooked or what your religion was. Across America, consumers were being urged to buy canned and frozen TV dinners, and their TV tables stood in the corner of most living rooms or family rooms. Though there were regional specialties, such as Boston’s beans and cod, there was no American cuisine. Such was the cooking world that Julia was trying to change.

Disinterest, ignorance, even fear of food were endemic in suburbia. Every new health warning
(Poisons in Your Food)
reinforced America’s puritanical relationship to food and wine. Food was either sinful or a bothersome necessity. The most popular food books in the early 1960s were
Calories Don’t Count
and the
I Hate to Cook Book
, though every bride received the red-and-white-checkered
Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook
. Peg Bracken was the author of the
I Hate to Cook Book
, which, like Poppy Cannon’s
Can Opener Cookbook
, came with attitude, saucy and satiric, and an attack on both home economists and gourmets. Surprisingly, when Peg Bracken, who sold three million copies of her book, reviewed Lyndon Baines Johnson’s barbecue recipes in 1965 she made the following suggestion: “Elect Julia Child—if we want a cook for President, let’s get a good one.”