Laura Shapiro

PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE PENGUIN LIVES SERIES:

Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse

Edmund White on Marcel Proust. Peter Gay on Mozart

Garry Wills on Saint Augustine. Jonathan Spence on Mao Zedong

Edna O'Brien on James Joyce. Douglas Brinkley on Rosa Parks

Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville

Louis Auchincloss on Woodrow Wilson

Mary Gordon on Joan of Arc

Sherwin B. Nuland on Leonardo da Vinci

Nigel Nicolson on Virginia Woolf. Carol Shields on Jane Austen

Karen Armstrong on the Buddha. R.W. B. Lewis on Dante

Francine du Plessix Gray on Simone Weil

Patricia Bosworth on Marlon Brando

Wayne Koestenbaum on Andy Warhol

Thomas Cahill on Pope John XXIII

Marshall Frady on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Paul Johnson on Napoleon. Jane Smiley on Charles Dickens

John Keegan on Winston Churchill

Robert V. Remini on Joseph Smith

Thomas Keneally on Abraham Lincoln

Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley

Roy Blount, Jr., on Robert E. Lee

Kathryn Harrison on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Martin Marty on Martin Luther

Tom Wicker on George Herbert Walker Bush

Ada Louise Huxtable on Frank Lloyd Wright

FORTHCOMING:

Jimmy Breslin on Branch Rickey

I
T'S A BIG, RAW GOOSE
, naked as a baby, and she's holding it up by its massive wings, gleefully wiggling them before the camera as if she'd like to waltz around the kitchen with her magnificent bird. “A ten-pound beauty!” she exclaims. “You can cut it all up, simmer it in wine, serve it with a delicious sauce—see how to ragout a goose, today on
The French Chef
!”

Julia Child loved handling food. She loved slathering great gobs of butter around a pan with her bare hand and plunging a forefinger into a thick swirl of custard to see how warm it was getting as she stirred; sometimes, while she was showing off an array of ingredients, she couldn't help patting them affectionately. But nothing made her gleam with pleasure like the prospect of getting her hands into the fresh and glistening flesh of an animal—a rump of veal, a goose, a suckling pig, a giant monkfish. When she explained the different cuts of beef on her legendary public television series
The French Chef,
she used her own body as the butcher's chart, twisting to display her back or side as if to make clear the intimate relationship between the cook and the meat. “To Ragout a Goose” was first aired on
The French Chef
in November 1972, long past the time when preparations for dinner in America began with domestic butchering. Most of Julia's viewers encountered poultry only after it had been cleaned, cut into pieces, and wrapped in cellophane—thoroughly denatured, that is, and ready for recipes. Julia never quarreled with convenience measures that would encourage more people to get into the kitchen, but she thought everyone should be able to take apart an animal easily and correctly. She knew there were squeamish cooks out there, not to mention vegetarians, because she got anguished letters from them all the time; but it was difficult for her to believe that people willingly surrendered their appetites to such trepidations. The idea of a self-imposed barrier between the cook and the food—whether that barrier represented physical, mental, emotional, or moral reluctance—astonished and dismayed her. Besides, if you were going to cook goose, one of Julia's all-time favorite foods, you had to bring it home whole, since it wasn't available in America in any other form. And she very much wanted Americans to cook goose. She had planned this lesson in part because it gave her a chance to demonstrate some of the most important tools in her entire
batterie de cuisine:
good, sharp knives and the courage to begin.

“After your goose is all defrosted, the first thing you do is to take out the fat and the giblets,” she explained to viewers, with the goose splayed out on the counter in front of her. Eagerly, she reached inside. “There's lots of fat which is all attached to the back end, or the vent as it's politely called,” she noted, gathering chunks of fat and putting them aside. “You want to save all of this fat, because it's wonderful to render.” Her voice, a warm and hearty foghorn, swooped through each sentence, landing briefly on this word or that as it caught her fancy. To her evident surprise, after groping for the neck and giblets, she came up empty-handed—“For some reason, it doesn't have any”—but she did retrieve the liver, which she displayed for comparison purposes next to a life-size photograph of a fresh foie gras. “The large lobe is about seven inches long, from there to there,” she pointed out admiringly. “The geese in France, in the foie gras country, are raised just for their livers, and that's why you can often buy goose by the piece, which you can't here.”

Then she picked up a huge cleaver and began to butcher. “Whang!” The end of a wing flew off. With a smaller knife she slit the goose down the backbone and removed a leg and the rest of the wing (“As you notice, I've taken off a little bit of the breast along with the wing to make a better serving”), but instead of finishing the job on that goose, she pulled a second goose out in front of the camera. This one was further along in the butchering process; hence she was able to hold up its raw, gaping body to show exactly how the leg and wing had been attached. Then she attacked the second goose with one bare hand and a knife, scraping vigorously through skin and fat and meat, feeling her way around the body as she sought the precise location of various joints. “Here's what you're looking for: it's that ball joint that attaches the wing to the shoulder,” she reported as the camera focused on her fast-moving hands. “There's the small of your back there, so get that out first, and there's your knee—and lifting up the knee, slit the skin. And you're raising up the thigh and the leg at the same time.” When she had the bird in pieces, she swiftly knifed away the fatty skin—“Look at all the fat there, that's about…heavens…almost half an inch of fat”—and then proudly displayed the results. “You have three and a half pounds of fat and fatty skin pieces, and you have about two and a quarter pounds of carcass and wing ends and scraps. You have really less than four pounds of meat, but you're paying for all of this so you might as well use it. Render the fat and turn the scraps into soup stock, because it makes a delicious soup.”

The pile of goose parts on the counter looked remarkably fresh and tidy, considering what they had gone through. “Now you're ready to cook the goose,” she announced, and deftly floured the pieces by hand, turning and daubing them until each was lightly coated. “I never like to shake things in a paper bag with flour. It seems too ladies' magaziney for me.” While the pieces were browning in goose fat, she brought out other elements of the ragout in various stages of completion—the onions, the lardons, the cabbage—and concisely demonstrated the crucial steps in their preparation. When the goose was browned, it went into the pan with the onions and lardons, and Julia added the wine, the stock, and the herbs. Her bird was now all set for a long simmer in the oven. Smiling down at the pieces that were jutting out from their cozy, aromatic bath, she tucked a sheet of wax paper over them. “Particularly because the goose was peeled, I like to protect it,” she said fondly.

As soon as the goose went into the oven, she turned to a second oven and triumphantly pulled out her “ready” goose—a ragout that had been fully prepared before the show. Arranging the tender, fragrant pieces of goose on a bed of noodles, spooning the cabbage alongside them, she became so absorbed she sometimes fell silent until she remembered she was supposed to be talking. Yet even her silence was energetic: the attention she was pouring into this luscious-looking ragout as she readied it for the dining room was as vigorous as the actual cooking had been. “I like to serve things all on the same plate if there's room, because I think it's more attractive, though it's often difficult to get a big enough platter,” she mused aloud as she worked. “Last time we were over in France I got some down near Nice and sent them over.” She reached for a dish of parsley. “And then if you feel it needs a little more decoration—a typical parsley garnish.”

Seated in the dining room with the platter in front of her, she was glowing: this was the culmination of the whole ardent enterprise. She picked up a plate and showed how to serve the ragout, and as she did so—perhaps it was the lighting, perhaps it was a trick of the imagination—suddenly we were seated at the table with her. Before our own hungry eyes, the camera zeroed in on the plate while Julia filled it, and we listened to her avid description of what we were going to eat. “This person is going to get a lovely big drumstick, and a nice handful of noodles, and some of this beautiful fresh cabbage. And then a little bit of your sauce on top.” We could taste every morsel as she lifted it, we could taste the wine—“your very best red Burgundy.” During the last moments of the show, she was so absorbed in serving a second portion that she almost forgot to look up for her sign-off. “This is Julia Child.
Bon appétit!
”

Julia Child was unlike any other celebrity in America. People gawked at her in restaurants, of course; greeted her joyfully on the street; excitedly pointed her out to one another when they glimpsed her in an airport; and crowded into bookstores whenever she arrived to sign copies of her latest cookbook. None of this was out of the ordinary in the realms of fame. What was unique about Julia was the quality of the emotion she inspired, which was remarkably direct and pure. Julia attracted love, torrents of it, a steady outpouring of delighted love that began with the first pilot episode of
The French Chef
in 1962 and continued through and beyond her death in 2004. As a fan in California once wrote, “Whenever your name comes up, people smile.” And whenever her name came up, it was Julia, just Julia. “I feel that I know you so well that I take the liberty to call you by your first name,” wrote one of the thousands of people who after discovering
The French Chef
sat down to thank her. “I say Julia, as I have come to know you personally thru Television….” “I call you by your first name since I feel I know you so well from your program….” “Perhaps you do not mind that I refer to you fondly as ‘Julia' because to me you are a very dear friend….” Letters piled up at every public television station that aired her series—letters, handwritten and typewritten, from men and women, often from children, and sometimes in verse. Most often people asked for recipes; other times they reported on what they had successfully made for dinner, thanks to Julia; many wanted to find out what kind of electric mixer or blender she was using, or where they could buy a whisk and a copper bowl for beating egg whites. But again and again, they wrote about love. “We love every swipe of your sticky hands….” “Our mouths water ever so often and our hearts laugh….” “PLEASE CONTINUE AS YOU ARE!” “Let me start first by saying—we love you, we love you, we love you!” “We love you, Julia!” Every television star had a following, but Julia was the only professional on screen whose appeal sprang directly from her own personality, unmediated by scriptwriters or guests. She played no role, not even the role of cooking teacher; she portrayed no fictional character; no political or religious agenda drove her contagious passion; she never gazed into the camera to discuss war and politics and thereby acquire the gravitas that made newscasters appear important. What viewers loved was the Julia they saw on television and believed in wholeheartedly—“your natural manner,” “your honesty”—and they were not mistaken.

Julia on television was Julia cooking; and to watch her cook was to see every dimension of herself fully engaged. She cooked with mind, body, and spirit—the way dancers dance and musicians play their instruments—though Julia's work on-screen was more like a dancer's rehearsal session than an actual performance of
Swan Lake.
The goal was not to create a flawless fantasy, but to summon the technique and wisdom that are the essential elements of the discipline. Cooking was fun for Julia, and she wanted everyone else to experience it that way, too, but fun didn't mean frivolity to her. It meant that you knew what you were doing, that you had absorbed the skills and understood the procedures and now took great pleasure in the demands of the work. From the beginning, Julia was determined to prepare food on television in such a way that viewers would take cooking seriously even if the show itself was lighthearted. The “ladies' magaziney” element in cooking—an approach that fussed endlessly over shortcuts without teaching anything useful about either cooking or eating—struck her as a Pied Piper, all too capable of enticing Americans to their culinary doom. A few months before the series made its debut, executives at WGBH-TV began tinkering with the proposed title, trying to come up with something that sounded breezier and less intimidating than
The French Chef.
How about, for instance, “Looking at Cooking”? Julia stood firm.
The French Chef,
she told them, was a title that said exactly what she wanted to say. “It is short, to the point, dignified, glamorous, and appeals to men as well as women…. Something like ‘Looking at Cooking,' or variations, sounds cheesy, little-womanish, cute, amateurish.” Not that she ever represented herself as being, literally, either French or a chef. On-screen and off-, she was an American home cook, and a proud one. But she was also an expert with years of study and experience behind every recipe she prepared, and she had no intention of allowing herself or her chosen work to appear trivial.

The WGBH executives were wrong: nobody was intimidated by
The French Chef,
though there were certainly viewers who were quite content to stay right there in the living room and let Julia do the cooking. Even her friends, most of whom were very good cooks themselves, drew the line occasionally. “Quenelle show was absolutely marvelous,” one of them wrote to her after seeing the program. In it Julia ground fillets of fish, mixed the fish with a cream puff batter, beat in dollop after dollop of cream until the mixture was holding as much cream as it possibly could without becoming too loose to handle, then shaped the mixture into cylinders and poached them—a fairly intense series of procedures, with pitfalls lying in wait around every corner. “Very very interesting watching the process and all quite clear,” Julia's friend complimented her. “Would never make them in the living world.” Neither would most of the other fans in the audience, but that didn't stop them from heading for the television when it was time for Julia every week. Quenelles weren't necessarily the point. “We love to watch you cook—myself especially—with your mouth-watering recipes—positively
‘Smell' them cooking!
Delicious—I'll bet!” wrote a viewer. “You sure make them sound that way as well as
look
—and best of all you are not afraid to taste as you cook—to me that's cooking!”