Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (61 page)

When the first book appeared in 1978, Knopf printed 190,000 copies, and it was an alternative selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Peggy was surprised: “I read the proof and saw my name on the title page [“In collaboration with E. S. Yntema”]. It would have been terribly ungracious to say no, thank you, but I would have preferred not to have my name used.” Indeed, the copyright page rightly lists her as “joint author.” After anonymously serving as midwife to a number of noteworthy books at the Atlantic Monthly Press, including a famous novel of the decade, she preferred anonymity. She was also surprised by a large royalty check (Julia had added a share of the royalties to Peggy’s contractual flat fee) and gave $2,000 to the Schlesinger Library in Julia Child’s name.

Peggy Yntema, who preferred the first volume (“fresher and less strained”) to the second, said of Julia’s organizational skills: “She could have been a general.” Of her character: “There is absolutely no falsehood to Julia at all; she cannot gild the lily; perfectionism is very important; she will make any number of tries to get it just right.” Of her style: “Her conversational style was born before she met Paul; her conversational style is so much like her books.” A good example of the style (“Julia wrote this section herself”) is found in the recipe for cassoulet, where she discusses what in private she would call farting: “Intestinal motility is polite gobbledygook for flatulence, which in turn means gas,” then quotes the scientists at the USDA on beans and their digestive qualities.

WGBH made a one-time payment to Julia for each program (most of which was used to pay her extra assistants) and no residuals, though the programs ran for twenty years. Julia did not make money on any series, but she did on the books based on the series. At this point she had combined sales of more than a million books. As she told food writer Barbara Sims-Bell, “I don’t think that I made fifty dollars a television show; there is no money on public television. Caterers probably make more money.” She told the
New York Times
the same thing, adding, “I don’t do anything commercial except selling books of mine.” In 1991, Wings Books (distributed by Knopf) combined the two books—hurriedly, it would seem, from the number of typographical errors—in a big slick book entitled
Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook
.

T
HE RESEARCHER AND THE CRITICS

Jack Shelton in San Francisco, whom Clark Wolf calls the first food writer (pre-Claiborne) to call himself a “restaurant critic,” was Julia’s most devoted reviewer. He praised two qualities in her: “Julia knows how to listen” and she possesses an “unslakable thirst for greater knowledge.” The women who worked with her all recall her intense curiosity and her investigation of food-related issues, contacting national scientific groups such as the Bureau of Weights and Measures when she went on a losing crusade to promote the metric system. She told an exhausted Marian Morash, who was going home to her family, that Marian should “work on a fish terrine a certain way” and Julia would try another way and they would compare notes in the morning. Julia herself remembers trying to get a certain recipe from “a nasty French pastry woman who had a world-famous flourless cake.” When the woman refused, Julia spent years of experimenting until she made her own
gateau Victoire au chocolat
with whipped cream in time for
Julia Child & Company
.

A passage in a letter to Louisette at the end of 1978 reveals another reason for Julia’s persistent research: “There are now so many people in this country, teaching and writing, who have had wonderful training such as working in restaurants in France, taking courses at Lenôtre, etc. I can’t pretend to keep up with them. It is amazing what a revolution in cooking has taken place in this country—I wonder if young people in France are that much interested? Or as expert? It has perhaps not yet happened there as it has here.”

“I learn something new every day,” she told one reporter. “It’s endless. You’re never going to live long enough. I would very much like to go over to Paris to go to the Lenôtre pastry and catering school.” She also wanted to study charcuterie. Again she told a Chicago reporter, “I’d like to get some more training…. Maybe I could work as an interpreter at La Varenne.”

When Marian Morash suggested Julia come to Nantucket, where she was chef for three years at the (summer-only) Straight Wharf restaurant, Julia spent a weekend in mid-August cooking on-line with the crew, serving 80 to 90 customers for lunch and 125 for dinner. With delight, she reported to Simca that she had done “actual on-line cooking” for the first time, detailing the dishes she helped to prepare. She reveled in the adventure, the learning, and the camaraderie.

Hard work does not immunize one to criticism; indeed, and publicity attracts it. The first reviews in October 1978 brought a new attack by Madeleine Kamman, who sent Julia a copy of a letter to a Boston periodical in which she said Julia opened her oysters with “a can opener,” but “I will continue clicking an oyster open every fifteen seconds with an oyster knife.” Julia did not reply, as usual, but noted at the bottom of Kamman’s missive that fifteen seconds was slow. Through the years Julia did not write or utter Kamman’s name, yet never failed to report to Simca every appearance in the media of “your French pupil from Newton.” The following year Kamman informed Julia by letter that she was professionally dying in the small town of Boston, where Julia’s celebrity made her the only person to know. Soon afterward Kamman made the front page with news that she was returning to her native France to “battle the sexism of the French cooking establishment”—because the people of Boston did not appreciate her restaurant. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported that she was going back to France to open a restaurant run entirely by women. When asked if anyone cooked better than she, she replied perhaps Frédy Girardet—maybe not better, but as well as she. (Many considered Girardet, in Crissier outside Lausanne, the best chef in the world.) Julia, in reporting this to Simca, added that “life will lose much of its savor without her, that’s for sure.”

Privately to Simca or Ruth Lockwood, Julia could refer to Simca’s former pupil with some favorite epithet, but she also acknowledged Kamman’s talent and teaching skills. Chez la Mère Madeleine at the Modern Gourmet cooking school in Newton Center, which was opened in 1974, was sold to several of Kamman’s cooking school pupils in 1980 (at which point Julia and Paul visited, but were disappointed). One magazine called Kamman a “Woman with a Vision” and pictured her in Annecy, but the
Boston Globe
called her “the Cast-Iron Lady.” By 1983 she had opened a school in New Hampshire as well as Annecy and several years later settled in the Napa Valley to teach chefs. Eventually, her resentment against Julia abated somewhat as her reputation as a teacher of teachers became secure.

Julia Child & Company
, which focused on occasions, sold very well and won the 1978 Tastemaker Award (voted on by a nationwide panel of book and periodical editors) as well as the American Book Award (“the only cookbook to win a major literary prize,” Jane Davison noted). Marcella Hazan’s
More Classic Italian Cooking
and the Troisgros brothers’
The Nouvelle Cuisine of Jean and Pierre Troisgros
were runners-up.
Julia Child & More Company
, which focused on specific dishes, was not bought by New York public television and sales of the book were poor until she began a cross-country tour. Nevertheless, she was named Woman of the Year in 1979 by the New England chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The following year, the Katharine Branson School, at its sixtieth anniversary celebration, bestowed on her one of its Distinguished Alumnae Awards.

Reviewers of her books praised the variety of her dishes and the clarity of her recipes. In the
New York Times Book Review
, Mimi Sheraton praised Julia’s streamlined (from four- to one-hour) puff pastry recipe (“alone worth the price of the book”), but mentioned “some unnecessarily gimmicky recipes (skewered vegetable salad) that smack of ladies’ magazine cookery.” Because Julia had said it was silly to fawn over the French, she was accused of a “patronizing view of the French.”

Another criticism of the first book by reviewers was of its use of older recipes to fill out a menu (though only new recipes were demonstrated on the tapes). Between the two series and their books, Peggy Yntema composed a detailed assessment of the recipes, at which time Julia hired more assistants. A careful look at the dishes that were repeated in these volumes, however, reveals that Julia’s recipes evolved and improved. They were “recast into the prevailing food style,” one food writer noted, giving as an example the bouillabaisse made with chicken as the centerpiece of a low-calorie dinner. Julia did not just copy recipes. The most striking example, other than the new puff pastry, is her cassoulet, which she says of the second volume is her fourth version, each “lighter and leaner.”

Ratings for the television series were modest (the time slot was not prime) and the book reviews were sparse, but rarely negative. The
Chicago Tribune
said her meals were “syncopated like jazz.” All reviewers noted the emphasis on shopping, preparing a full meal, and serving the meal, with most preferring the highly personal approach; another reviewer, however, thought the books were “too chummy.” Most newspaper writers focused on Julia herself, for her honest directness always gave the reporters a good quote. For example, Jeannette Ferrary featured the reasons why America found Julia Child so interesting—everything from her eccentricity to her feeling comfortable with being a woman. Ferrary adds: “She gives us a Magic Show every week, with slapstick (she’s a little like
I Love Lucy),”
and always seems to be having a good time. Of course, the last line in Julia’s very first book was “Above all have a good time.” Julia wrote in the introduction to
More Company
, “It’s more fun cooking
for
company
in
company.”

Often reviews indulged culinary metaphors, but few as cleverly as Stephen Wadsworth, who was once editor of
Opera News:
“She’s a serenely gawky six feet one [sic] inch, a ripe roast of
gourmande
stuffed with fresh chortle, chesty guffaws, and twenty cloves of humor. She’s wrapped in a no-nonsense dress and poured into two one-quart sensible shoes, and she serves herself with quantities of élan.” Ferrary and Wadsworth were exceptions to the journalists who for decades covered Julia using the same profiles and clichés. Julia never made a meal of her past, yet was asked by reporters for the same basic menu over and over.

If journalists were soft, her colleagues were not. One friend called the second volume “not up to her standards.” Yet, M. F. K. Fisher, who did not like the first volume, praised the language of the second: “1,000% better
in every way
… more pure class … more true spirit of Julia’s own spirit.” The innovative use of ginger in butternut squash, the inclusion of a vegetarian dinner and a low-calorie dinner, and Julia’s reinterpretations of classic dishes such as chicken melon and vegetarian gâteau are all praised twenty years later by Betty Rosbottom, food writer and cooking school owner. Rosbottom particularly commends Julia’s wit, illustrated by her
poulet de Charente à la melonaise
in the first volume and, in the second, “Una furtiva lagrima,” a postscript on ways to peel an onion (echoing the opera
L’Elisir d’Amore)
.

T
AKING THE POSSE ON THE ROAD

Julia, Sara, and Marian stood behind a long table on the stage in a contest to see who could make the fastest and best spun caramel cage. They were giving a benefit for the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College in 1979, and Julia knew how to put on a good show. Recalled Marian: “She used a glass bowl, I used one covered with Saran Wrap, and Sara used something else. The audience of five hundred went crazy. The suspense was breathless as Julia said ‘okay,’ and we dribbled the warm caramel. Mine came off first and people screamed with joy, but Julia did not care that hers was not perfect; it was a performance. She did not have to have the perfect dish, as other cooks would have insisted upon.”

When the familiar seasonal rhythm called for her Provençal interlude, she and Paul were eager “to sit under our olive tree and breathe in the air of Provence.” Julia brought all their Christmas cards unopened for five months and had them answered by mid-June. She took time out for a week in Spain and a week in England, where she made brief television spots for the release of the English version of
From Julia Child’s Kitchen
(“Nobody will take me for a home economist!” she told Elizabeth David). Her sense of the contrast between the two countries (she had never been in Spain before) says much about her: she loved the people (if not the food) of Spain, a country reminding her in its broad plains and scattered great oak trees of Southern California, whereas in cold, damp England, there was a “lack of openly expressed gutsy sensuality,” she informed Mary Frances. “Things just don’t work very well there in old Blighty, but we adore our English friends.” After a dinner with Mark and Anne in Paris, Julia and Paul took the Concorde home because Bob Johnson told them to spend more money.

Though Julia was not one to rush back for reunions, she returned for the hundred-year celebration of Hubbard House at Smith, where she and roommate Mary Warner reminisced about Julia’s trip to the speakeasy in her convertible. When she told a local reporter she would “rather eat a tablespoon of Charlotte Malakoff than three bowls of Jell-O,” she was revealing how far the young, jelly-donut-eating coed had come.

“She is a tomorrow person, not a yesterday person,” said Russ Morash. “I frankly love that about her.” Julia’s present and her future would be as a public person, the representative of good cooking and eating and a major television personality. Her public appearances included a nomination at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in 1978 and speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Culinary Institute of America in 1979. She also judged the national Beef Cook-Off in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1979 and in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1980 (“I need my beef,” she was fond of saying, much to the dismay of a growing number of vegetarians in America). She taught with Rosemary at a weekend school called Cooking at the Cove, on the Sonoma peninsula in California. For the
Boston Herald American
, she judged the food at Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park (the hot dog was “thin and pale,” but she liked the beer and popcorn). If she could join 30,000 fans to taste their food and watch the Red Sox, perhaps they would watch her in their homes. Indeed, most did, even if they had no intention of preparing one of her recipes.