Laura Shapiro (11 page)

Early in 1961, as she and Simca were winding down their work on Volume I, Julia looked back on some of the issues they had been wrestling with for nearly a decade. “People are always saying WHAT MAKES FRENCH COOKING SO DIFFERENT FROM OTHER NATIONS' COOKING?” she reflected in a letter to Simca, and she set down four principles that struck her as definitive.

Serious interest in food and its preparation

Tradition of good cooking…which forms French tastes from youth

Enjoyment of cooking for its own sake—LOVE

Willingness to take the few extra minutes to be sure things are done as they should be done

Nothing on this list, except for “French tastes,” distinguishes French cooking from any other noteworthy cuisine. On the contrary, it's a list that perfectly sums up Julia's outlook on food even when she was most deeply committed to
le gout français,
as she was when she wrote this. Her highest term of culinary praise was never
French,
or
professional,
or
delicious,
though she regularly used such words to describe wonderful food. Her highest praise was the word
serious
—the very first word that came to her fingertips when she started to type these principles. A “serious” cook, to Julia, was a careful, mindful, thoroughly knowledgeable cook, whose pleasure you could taste in the food. Thus her great admiration for Diana Kennedy and Madhur Jaffrey in later years, though she had little interest in Mexican or Indian cooking.

And at the opposite end of the spectrum from the serious cook was the dark angel who hovered over the last principle in the list, the cook who refused to put in those extra minutes it took to reach perfection. This cook—male or female, French or American, famous name or anonymous homebody—was fatally associated with the term
housewife.
Julia never did recover from her early, bruising experiences with that word, and she consistently refused to be associated with such creatures. As she put it many times over the years, whenever the subject of housewives came up, “We are aiming at PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO COOK.” Yes, supermarket ingredients could be transformed into authentic French dishes, but not without two ingredients for which there were no substitutes, and Julia named them often: time and love.

W
HEN GUESTS CAME
to dinner at 103 Irving Street in Cambridge, they spent the whole evening in the kitchen. The table was big and comfortable, and Julia liked having everyone around while she cooked: sometimes she invited people to pick up a knife or a whisk and join in. She would play culinary solos if necessary, but what she really enjoyed was chamber music—everyone on an instrument, chopping garlic or pouring wine or chatting, while a kind of Concerto for Food and Company rose up warm and fragrant in their midst. Cooking alone was very different, though in truth Julia was never really alone at the stove. Long before she cooked on television, she was aware of an audience—first her father and sister, impatient for breakfast as she frantically tossed pancakes and spilled coffee, and later the guests sitting politely in the living room, while she probed the beef with anguish and wondered if it was done, or overdone, or raw. As a bride, she practiced and practiced the role she called chef-hostess until she could give a dinner party without a glitch, or at least without any glitch she couldn't smoothly mend, smiling and conversing all the while. “I always feel it is like putting on a performance, or like live TV or theater—it's got to be right, as there can be no retakes,” she told Avis in 1953, nearly a decade before she saw a television camera for the first time. Testing recipes for the book, making the same dish over and over and over, she liked to pretend she was cooking in front of an audience. In part it was a form of culinary discipline, to keep herself from lapsing into casual, unprofessional methods; and in part she just enjoyed the company. When Julia did start cooking in front of a camera, her earliest fans constantly exclaimed over how “natural” she seemed on television, how “real,” how “honest,” how “homelike.” They were right. Performance had long ago become second nature to her.

Her first appearance on television came about shortly after the publication of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
She and Paul had decided some years earlier to live in Cambridge after his retirement, and they were still settling into their big clapboard house when Claiborne's rave review appeared. “Presumably, with this puff, we are made!” she wrote jubilantly to Simca. “HOORAY.” Later that October, Simca arrived in the United States for the book tour, and the two women—suddenly newsworthy—were invited to be on the
Today
show. Julia wasn't particularly nervous, maybe because she had never heard of it. She and Paul didn't own a television set. But when she learned that four million people would be watching, she knew she needed a plan. “The quickest and most dramatic thing to do in the 5 or 6 minutes allotted to us was to make omelettes,” she reported to her sister afterward. “They said they would provide a stove.” What they actually provided was a reluctant hot plate, too feeble to heat up properly. But she and Simca brought three dozen eggs to the studio and spent the hour before their time slot practicing. Five minutes before airtime, they started heating up the omelet pan, and by a miracle it was red-hot by the time they needed it. Julia went away very much impressed with the show—everyone was friendly and informal, but the mechanics of the operation were absolutely professional and perfectly timed. It was exactly what she would aim for in her own television shows.

The next TV invitation came along several months later, and this was the one that changed her life. A penciled note is the only thing that remains:

Beatrice Braude was an old friend of the Childs' who had been fired from the USIS in Paris during a McCarthy purge. Now she was working in Boston at WGBH-TV, the fledgling public television station, where she arranged for Julia to be a guest on
I've Been Reading,
a book review program. “They wanted something demonstrated and had a hot plate!” Julia reported to Simca afterward. This time she had a full half hour, so she not only made an omelet, but gave a short lesson in beating egg whites and showed how to cut up vegetables and flute mushrooms. As far as she knew, the only people who saw the program were five of her friends and Jack Savenor, her Cambridge butcher. But twenty-seven ecstatic strangers wrote in to say they loved that woman who did the cooking, and begged the station to bring her back. At WGBH, twenty-seven letters was an avalanche. Startled and impressed, station executives asked Julia to work up a proposal for an entire series on French cooking.

It's possible that
Mastering,
and with it Julia, would have drifted into relative obscurity if she hadn't been discovered by WGBH. She certainly wasn't about to be discovered by anyone else. Even the other stations in what was called educational TV would have been unlikely to take a chance on a plain-faced, middle-aged woman who did difficult cooking with a lot of foreign words in it. But WGBH was in Boston, and that made all the difference. Dozens of colleges and universities, long-standing Brahmin institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts, and an unusually well-educated, well-traveled population made the area unique in the nation. The founders of WGBH intended the new station to be yet another jewel in the city's cultural crown. French cooking fit right in; and, as viewers quickly made clear, so did Julia.

During the summer of 1962, she taped three pilot programs—omelets, coq au vin, and soufflés—and watched them at home on their new TV. She was horrified to see herself on-screen for the first time, swooping and gasping—“Mrs. Steam Engine,” she called herself—but she was determined to master the medium. “The cooking part went OK, but it was the performance of me, as talker and mover, that was not professional,” she told Simca. Everything had to be done more slowly, she decided, as if she were under water.

Those pilot programs have been lost, but judging from the letters that poured in to the station, the Julia who ventured in front of the camera that summer had already tapped an instinct for television. “I loved the way she projected over the camera directly to me, the watcher,” wrote one of these original fans. “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter; loved her looking for the cover of the casserole. It was fascinating to watch her hand motions, which were so firm and sure with the food.” Years later, when a friend mentioned that she was about to cook on television for the first time and felt nervous, Julia's advice was simple: “Think about the food.” Whether she was flipping an omelet on a hot plate or holding up an unwieldy length of tripe in a beautifully equipped TV kitchen, food was the spark that ignited her performing personality and set it free.

Taping for the series began in January 1963. For her official debut as the “French Chef,” Julia chose boeuf bourguignon—a hallmark dish, resonant in her own memory and familiar to anyone who had ever been to a French restaurant. Besides, it was just beef stew. Surely even a housewife couldn't be intimidated by that. And it would illustrate wonderfully well her favorite teaching topic: how French cooking was simply a matter of theme and variations. As soon as home cooks learned to brown beef, deglaze the pan, and set the meat to simmering in wine, they could do the same with lamb, veal, or chicken. Back in the nineteenth century, Julia's long-ago colleagues in domestic science had been equally entranced by the marvelous logic of culinary structure, and were inspired just as she was to make it the basis of their gospel. Of course, they were teaching variations on white sauce, not variations on French stew; but Julia's radiant faith in the message was kin to theirs.

Julia practiced hard: she wrote and rewrote the script, cooked and recooked the stew, figured out the timing for each step of the recipe, plotted her way around the TV kitchen, and tried to memorize the first few sentences she would say. Once the cameras started rolling, they wouldn't stop—the budget didn't allow for breaks and splices—so the show had to be choreographed as tightly as a high-wire act. On Monday evening, February 11, at 8:00 p.m., a large covered casserole appeared on black-and-white television screens across New England, and a breathy voice exclaimed triumphantly, “Boeuf bourguignon! French beef stew in red wine!” A hand lifted the lid from the casserole. “We're going to serve it with braised onions, mushrooms, and wine-dark sauce,” the voice went on, lingering fondly over each word in
wine-dark sauce,
while the hand moved a spoon gently through the stew. “A perfectly delicious dish.” Then the voice dropped to a mumble—“I'm gonna…”—and abruptly stopped. The camera followed the spoon as it emerged from the stew and traveled higher and higher until it reached a mouth. Now a woman's face appeared on-screen, eyes lowered as she leaned intently over the casserole and tasted. Then she straightened up with a satisfied expression, covered the cassserole and put it in the oven, and set a platter of raw meat on the counter. She looked pleasantly into the wrong camera, looked pleasantly into the right camera, closed her eyes for a second, and said, “Hello. I'm Julia Child.”

Despite the easygoing warmth that came naturally to her, this debut never quite shook off an air of nervous tension. Julia had no gift for artifice: she could perform, but she couldn't pretend, and not until she turned to the platter of raw beef did she palpably relax. The sight of raw ingredients always restored her equilibrium. “This is called the chuck tender, and it comes from the shoulder blade, up here,” she explained, indicating the location on her own body. Apparently the director hadn't expected such a graphic show-and-tell, because the camera remained fixed on the beef. “And this is called the undercut of the chuck, and it's like the continuation of the ribs along here, where it gets up to your neck.” Finally, the camera reached her, just in time to see Julia running her hand up her own side. She cut the meat into chunks, chatting comfortably about quantities per person and handling the meat as affectionately as if she were powdering a baby. Then came the browning of the beef, three or four minutes that strikingly illustrated how television—at least as Julia conceived it—could be a great teacher of cooking. Browning is a simple procedure, but there are many more ways to do it wrong than right; and mistakes can ruin the meat. In her methodical way, Julia discussed the pitfalls and how to avoid them, browning the meat properly while an overhead mirror made the contents of the pan clearly visible. To a novice cook, or an experienced cook with bad habits, this lesson would have been life-changing.

After deglazing the pan with wine, she poured the wine over the meat—“just enough liquid so that the meat is barely covered,” she instructed, and added tenderly, “It's called
a fleur
in France. When the meat looks like little flowers.” Julia had long ago acquired a correct if unmusical French accent, but here she deliberately lapsed into the vulgate.
“A fleur”
became “ah flerr” and
“beurre manie”
came out “burr man-yay,” both pronounced in careful Americanese. Perhaps she was trying to sound unpretentious, but she needn't have worried; she was incapable of sounding anything else. In later programs her accent returned to normal.

Here, right at the start of her long career on television, Julia was already recognizably Julia—straightforward, intelligent, relishing the work, and giving star treatment to the food. Her all-important butter dish, the size and shape of a small rowboat, was at the ready; and though she praised her nonstick pan, she made it clear that a nonstick pan was no excuse for cutting back on the butter and oil. Standing at the dining table in the last moments of the show, a ticking clock all but visible in her eyes, she summed up what the program had covered—reminding viewers for at least the third time that they could do lamb, veal, and chicken exactly the same way—and invited them to return for French onion soup next week. She had composed a sign-off—“This is Julia Child, your French Chef.
Bon appétit!”
—but it disintegrated in the flurry of the final seconds. “This is Julia Child, welcome to
The French Chef,
and see you next time,” she said, rather confusingly.
“Bon appétit!”

Throughout the WGBH broadcast area, audiences fell in love. “We have gotten quite a few calls, etc., and people seem to like it,” Julia told Koshland after “Boeuf Bourguignon” was aired. “It went quite well, I thought, though a bit rough and hurried in spots.” Nobody seemed to mind the rough spots. By March, some six hundred letters had poured in, many asking for the recipes, and others simply expressing rapture. “The station is getting a bit worried as it costs them about 10 cents an answer, but luckily quite a few of the letters enclose contributions to the station. I think we are luckily in at just the right time, as there have been no cooking shows for years, and people are evidently just ripe for them,” she wrote to Koshland. Julia often attributed her success to luck and good timing, but the onslaught of mail made it perfectly clear why people responded to
The French Chef:
it was Julia.

“We love her naturalness & lack of that T.V. manner, her quick but unhurried action, her own appreciation of what she is producing. By the time she gets to the table with her dish and takes off her apron, we are so much ‘with' her that we feel as if someone had snatched our plates from in front of us when the program ends.”

“I love it where you say, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you thus and so' (so
human
and
consoling
to amateur cooks).”