The United States of Arugula (16 page)

Even without Judith Jones’s cajoling, though, Claiborne would have fallen for
Mastering.
One after another, the members of the food establishment lined up to sing its praises. Beard gave the book his blessing and had the Childs and Beck to the town house on West Tenth Street, where he now conducted his cooking classes. Though he didn’t yet fully grasp the book’s significance—he confided to Helen Evans Brown that the “Knopf French book” was “wonderful until they get into the chicken and meat department,” which he criticized for overlong cooking times—he adored Julia and Simca personally, and, a few weeks later, took them to dinner at the Four Seasons, where they were introduced to the restaurant’s mad-scientist visionary, Joe Baum, and its ornery Swiss chef, Albert Stockli. Beard and Dione Lucas, the incumbent French-cookery expert in the United States, also threw a party for Child and Beck at Lucas’s restaurant, the Egg Basket, with Clementine Paddleford in attendance. Child and Claiborne never became close—“really just acquaintances,” she later said—but she and Beard, similarly exuberant, generous of spirit, and endowed with enormous hands that made even their ordinary gestures seem theatrical, became quite
ahn-teem
, as Julia was wont to say. In the years to come, Child was a frequent guest instructor at Beard’s cooking school. And as the sales of
Mastering
allowed the Childs to build a getaway home in Provence near Beck’s that they named La Pitchoune (the Little One), Beard became a frequent houseguest, spending entire days in the kitchen with Julia, conjuring what Paul called
la cuisine de l’enfant barbu
, “of the bearded child.”

While the food establishment’s embrace no doubt helped along its
sales,
Mastering
took off of its own volition, going through five printings and selling more than 100,000 copies within a year of its publication. Fortuitously, given its long gestation and delayed publication, the book captured an aspirational spirit newly afoot in America’s middle-class homes and in the White House, where the young Francophile First Lady (née Jacqueline Bouvier) had hired a French chef, René Verdon.
*
The
Times
, in its evolving role as not only the paper of record but the lifestyle manual of culturally correct postwar upper middlebrows, played Verdon’s hiring on page one, with an article by Claiborne that described Verdon’s first official assignment, a luncheon for the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, that included trout cooked in Chablis, fillet of roast beef au jus, and “artichoke bottoms Beauçaire—filled with a fondue of tomatoes simmered in butter.”

Even Verdon himself seemed surprised by how fashionable French food was becoming. “When I came to America in 1958, people were talking more about gravy than sauces, but that changed fast,” he says. “Mrs. Kennedy, she was like a lot of wives, very interested in understanding French food. She really wanted to talk about it and learn about it. Like, she would ask for a soufflé with asparagus. She would also want noodles. I would have to tell her, ‘You cannot have two starches, soufflé and noodles, in the same meal,’ but she understood.”

Twenty years after the opening of Le Pavillon, the notion of an asparagus
soufflé wasn’t as intimidating as it used to be. “In food terms, we middle Americans were all nouveaux riches, giddy with a cornucopia of goods and techniques that poured in from Europe, along with its refugees, after the Second World War. To put it another way, we didn’t know how poor we’d been until we hit it rich,” writes Betty Fussell in her 1999 memoir,
My Kitchen Wars.
Fussell was, in the sixties, one half of a New Jersey couple that went out of its way to showcase its erudition, worldliness, and exquisite taste; her then husband, the historian Paul Fussell, was a professor at Rutgers University, and the Fussells lived an
Ice Storm–
like life of suburban status consciousness and adulterous intrigue in tony, verdant Princeton, where they and their professorial-class ilk competed to see who could put on the best, most menu-accomplished dinner party, with the finest selection of French wines to match.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
functioned as a sort of domestic equivalent of Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
, and the French term for kitchen equipment,
batterie de cuisine
, never sounded more appropriately martial.

Child’s recipes, as plainspokenly and patiently as they were explained and laid out, were still elaborate and time-consuming, and the Betty Fussells of the world deliberately chose the most difficult of them to execute when company was coming. “
Veau Prince Orloff was
[a] display piece consumptive of enough money and time to garner status,” Fussell writes. “This one, Julia assured us, could be made in the morning and reheated the same evening—provided, you did nothing else all day. It required you to bone and tie a five-pound roast of veal, prepare a
soubise
of rice and onions, a
duxelles
of mushrooms, and a
velouté
from a
roux
enriched with heavy cream and a pinch of nutmeg. You puréed the
soubise
and the
duxelles
together to spread on each slice of the roasted meat, then covered the entire roast with thick sauce and grated Swiss cheese so that it would brown when you reheated it. The dish was so rich that after the first two mouthfuls you were ready to gag or go home, but these were headier times, less obsessed with cardiovascular health and liposuctioned bodies than with strutting your stuff with the best ingredients money could buy.”

“It wasn’t about entertaining, it was about showing off culinary skills,” says Fussell now, somewhat chastened in old age but still in proud possession of her sixties-vintage KitchenAid mixer and the copper pots she picked up at E. Dehillerin, the upscale kitchenwares shop in Paris, near the old Les Halles, that became a pilgrimage destination for hardcore American gastro-tourists and Juliaphiles. “And
absolutely
competitive,” she says, “because Julia was supplying us the tools for astonishing our friends.”

Kitchenwares suddenly attained the status of fetish objects in certain American circles, where you just
had
to have a Le Creuset casserole dish and a crepe pan the size of a manhole cover. Chuck Williams saw this phenomenon unfold in his store, Williams-Sonoma, which had migrated from bucolic Sonoma to the heart of San Francisco, on Sutter Street near the expensive shops of Union Square. “We were on the same block as Elizabeth Arden, which in those days was where all the ladies got their hair done,” he says. “Across the street from the best women’s club, the Francesca Club. On the next block was the Metropolitan Club, another women’s club. I became part of their beat.”

Fussell points out that men, too, were caught up in the
Mastering
craze, graduating from being mere grazers and grill meisters to being wine collectors and foie gras aficionados. “That lent the Julia book even more prestige,” she says. “For the first time, the men really had to know what was being served them, even if they weren’t cooking it. It had to be part of the conversation, so you better not be stupid, because it also had to do with the prestige of travel. And people were also saying, ’Oh, have you read Craig today?’—calling him ‘Craig,’ this person who none of us had met. Because everybody read
The New York Times.
We would have long, professorial discussions about that day’s restaurant review.”

Fussell isn’t overstating how seriously she and her husband took their Julia and their Craig—their Princeton kitchen and Paul’s French wine collection became so fabulous, and their culinary skills so brilliant, that the great Claiborne himself, with his nose for news, found out about them and wrote them up in the
Times
in 1969 as part of his home-cooks series. As was the
case in Claiborne’s write-up of the Evan Joneses, Betty was never identified by her first name, only as “Mrs. Paul Fussell,” and her beauty was ignored while Claiborne admired the “pipe-smoking, tousle-haired, tweedy” Paul—though it was Betty’s recipes for charcoal-grilled lamb
Provençale
and
soupe au pistou
(the latter a
Mastering
standout) that the
Times
printed.

“
YOU KNOW, THE OTHER
day, when I was
mmmucking
about in the supermarket, looking for something to eat—I was sort of in a
bad mood
and nothing I looked at appealed to me a’
tall.
I looked at all the chickens and the ducks and the fish and the steaks and the lamb, and I just didn’t want to cook any
bit
of it! I found myself staring at a fresh
beef tongue
, and I said to it, ‘You
ugly
old thing, I’d like to
fix you up
!’ And I thought to myself, ‘Why not? It will be a change, anyway!’ So I
trotted
home with my tongue under my arm—and I
braised
it!”

How could TV viewers not be mesmerized? There stood a towering, skinny, middle-aged woman in pearls and an unreconstructed Smith ’34 hairdo, hovering behind a kitchen counter that rose only as high as her thighs, unspooling this bizarre monologue in a fluted voice and uncertain cadence, gasping for breath in the wrong spots.

The French Chef
, produced by Boston’s public television station, WGBH, in two spurts, from 1963 to 1966 (in black and white) and from 1970 to 1972 (in color), expanded Child’s already considerable following exponentially. The show’s genesis lay in Child’s 1962 appearance on WGBH’s book-chat program,
I’ve Been Reading
, hosted by Albert Duhamel, a professor of English at Boston College. Correctly deducing that programs of this sort tended to be dull, static affairs, Child, with Paul in tow, arrived at the studio with a copper bowl, a whisk, and a dozen eggs, so she could merry up the proceedings by preparing an omelet as she and Duhamel chatted. The episode was broadcast live and not committed to tape, meaning its proto-
French Chef charms
are lost to the ages, but it’s well documented that WGBH was surprised by the passion of its audience’s response; unused to
feedback from its viewers, the station received twenty-seven letters demanding more cooking lessons from the loony tall woman. By 1963,
The French Chef
was on the air in Boston, its first half-hour episode (of more than 200 that were eventually made) devoted to
boeuf bourguignon.
Though Child never claimed that she herself was a chef, she agreed to the title because it was catchy and concise enough to appear in full in the
Boston Globe
TV listings.

Like all public television stations, WGBH operated on a shoestring, with corporate benefactors kicking in some dollars here and there. Julia did her shows on a rinky-dink budget, in a demonstration kitchen borrowed from the Cambridge Electric Company, with groceries that she and Paul bought themselves. He carted in the food and did the dishes. The low-budget, low-tech aspect of
The French Chef
actually worked in the program’s favor, necessitating that the focus remain squarely on the cooking and on Child herself, with no travelogue filler or postproduction jiggery-pokery. Child was all the show needed; unlike Beard, who froze up on TV, she was a natural. She called tomatoes “to-MAH-toes” and shallots “shuh-HAL-ots.” She never met an oversize kitchen implement she didn’t like, whether it was a mallet, a potato ricer, a cleaver, a rolling pin, a bow saw (to cut an enormous tuna into steaks), or a blowtorch (for caramelizing the top of a crème brûlée). She held up a roasting chicken and promised to help it realize “the full glory of its chickendom.” She unapologetically patched back together a potato fritter that had fallen apart as she tried to flip it, saying “You can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?” She editorialized that “I think a lot of us get into a terrible
meat rut
! It’s always steaks, chops, saddle of lamb, beef Wellington, or hamburgers. Well, here’s a little
[breathless gasp]
change of pace. With
sweetbreads
and
brains!”

Like Howard Cosell, an unhandsome, querulous Brooklyn lawyer who, in the same era, somehow circumvented TV’s vetting process and became the biggest star in sports television, Child was theoretically ill-suited to the medium, which is precisely why viewers were drawn to her. (Indeed, no broadcast personalities would prove more imitable to comedians than Cosell
and Child.) Having lived abroad for half of her adult life and only just returned to America in 1961, and having long moved in intellectual circles that paid little heed to glitz and popular culture, she was oblivious to the lacquered, c’mon-a-my-house ethos of contemporary showbiz, and stomped about her stage with the goofy, anachronistic enthusiasm of a Roaring Twenties girl in a summer-camp revue.

Child’s antics and locutions were so alien that many viewers presumed she was drunk,
*
respiratorily unwell, or actually French. Still,
The French Chef
was anything but slapdash: according to her biographer, Noël Riley Fitch, Child put nineteen hours of preparation into each half-hour episode. She was both a bracing entertainer and an excellent cooking instructor, and quickly became the most popular attraction on WGBH.
†
What’s more, Child’s half-hour shows proved so durable and repeat-watchable that
The French Chef
would enjoy a long afterlife in reruns, to the point that even in December 1978, when Dan Aykroyd did his famous gross-out Julia parody on
Saturday Night Live
(“Now I’ve done it! I’ve cut the
dickens
out of my finger!”), the premise seemed fresh rather than shopworn.

Within a year of its 1963 premiere,
The French Chef had
become a word-of-mouth sensation, picked up by public television stations throughout the country. If Chuck Williams thought that the publication of
Mastering
had caused his sales to spike, now he was really in for something. “The program was aired on KQED in San Francisco once a week, but we never knew what was gonna be on,” he says. “But by the next morning, we’d know, because our customers were watching it. They’d come into the store demanding
a charlotte mold or whatever pan Julia had used, and it had to be the exact size. Because they had to make what she’d made
that night
.” Likewise, grocers found themselves facing demand for shallots, then not a common item, because Julia had used them on TV.