I was watching PBS yesterday and they had a special on Julia Child. The special featured her “Omelette” episode from The French Chef series. It was amazing how she could create an omelette in 20 seconds flat. I want to try it but I know it would still come out a sad, gooey little mess.

I am also reading, “My Life in France”, Julia’s memoirs of living in France. It’s a really good book and makes me very hungry.

OK! Marc and Ruth are a little busy today, as you might imagine, so for today their tenant’s taking over again! (You remember me from when I made Apple Turnovers? Or not? Well, anyway…) Today’s Julia Child dish is Spaghetti Marco Polo, and if you’ve never heard of it, no — it’s not spaghetti you eat in the pool, and you don’t have to eat it with your eyes closed while blindly feeling around for the plate. No, as my research reveals, it’s a dish that goes back to a long-held myth about the origins of spaghetti.

If you’re like me, you probably recall learning at some point that Marco Polo introduced Italy to pasta by bringing spaghetti home with him from his travels to China, where the people were already eating the long, stringy stuff. However, if you Google it, you’ll find a jumble of history, stories and evidence implying that he most likely didn’t, and that Italy may have acquired both durum wheat, the basis of dried pasta, and a method for making it into pasta from the Arabs, not the Chinese. Anyway, the Italian climate turned out to be perfect for growing durum wheat, and Italians were probably the first people to serve pasta with sauces. Ancient methods for kneading pasta dough had a lot in common with preparing grapes for wine — people did both with their feet!

So, the Chinese may not have invented spaghetti after all, and Marco Polo probably didn’t introduce it to Italy. (Wow. The next thing you know, they’ll tell us he didn’t invent the swimming-pool game either.) But somehow, that story that he did sticks with us. And that story inspired Julia Child to present a dish she called Spaghetti Marco Polo on her show The French Chef.

Julia’s dish included chopped walnuts, olives, pimiento and basil, and she encouraged her viewers to eat the completed dish Chinese-style: with chopsticks. (In fact, Ruth told me that she first taught her sons how to use chopsticks by introducing them to Spaghetti Marco Polo.) Some viewers didn’t think that it met the criteria of “French” cooking implied by the show’s title, and wrote letters telling her so, but Julia disagreed. To her, the essence of French cooking was “Taking ordinary everyday ingredients, and with a little bit of love and imagination, turning them into something appealing.” It wasn’t the ingredients or the origins of a dish that made it “French,” but the approach and the methods used to cook it. Once you learned French technique, in her eyes, you could apply it to any set of ingredients — even foods we don’t think of as “French.”

Julia’s experience living in China during her employment by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, had left her with an appreciation for Chinese food, and in her heyday the story of Marco Polo introducing pasta to Italy from China was even more widespread and not well challenged. So it’s not surprising that she saw no problem with preparing a traditionally Italian dish on a show called The French Chef and advising her viewers to eat it Chinese style!

How’s the Bistro planning on doing it? Here’s the lowdown they gave me: the black olives in their recipe will be kalamata olives, and assorted colored peppers will substitute for the pimientos. Otherwise the dish is largely the same and fairly simple: spaghetti tossed with olive oil, the olives and peppers, walnuts, parsley, garlic, rooftop basil, salt and pepper, and garnished with Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese. Whether or not you want to eat it with chopsticks is up to you! (And if you do, you may have to bring your own!)

Charles Elmé Francatelli

Carrying on our examination of the written recipe and its significance in what usually was an oral culture (in more ways than one) — the kitchen and cooking — it’s time to turn to a nineteenth-century English chef named Charles Elmé Francatelli, who briefly cooked French food for Queen Victoria.*

But before we get to the man of the moment, the meat of the matter, let’s pause for a moment and revisit Mr. Manfred Görlach, who undertook one of the few linguistic analyses of the written recipe as it appeared in English. Happily, Mr. Görlach recognized the importance of Chef Francatelli and his work, particularly his A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852). Görlach contrasted Francatelli with that doyenne of English cookery writing, Mrs. Isabella Beeton (who revealed her own fondness for French cuisine in her door-stop-sized tome, Book of Household Management (1861)).

His conclusions?

He [Francatelli] wrote various cookery books, such as The Modern Cook 1845 — but his Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852) is unique. There is no indication why Francatelli “stooped” so to speak to the social classes diametrically opposed to the court. We can guess that he intended to provide some practical guidance to those who severely needed it.

And the language Francatelli used in Plain Cookery reads far differently than the language he used in his other books, according to Mr. Görlach, who lists eight criteria for examining cookery books and their recipes linguistically.**

In contrast to his other books and to Mrs. Beeton his language shows obvious accommodation to the class of expected readers; the most striking feature is probably the extreme variation in form, as if he is intentionally flouting the conventions firmly entrenched in culinary handbooks, by the time. … Although Francatelli talks down to his readers, he is not free of inkhornisms (91 mucilgainous).

Inkhornisms? Wonderful word!

Some of the dishes Francatelli included definitely did not sound French: “cow-heel broth, bubble and squeak, sheep’s pluck, and a pudding made of small birds.”

So who exactly was Charles Elmé Francatelli?

Charles Elmé Francatelli (1805-1876), an Englishman with Italian ancestry, studied French cookery in France under famed chef, Antonin Carême. At one point, Francatelli briefly served as chef to Queen Victoria. But his primary love was cooking (mostly for private clubs like The Reform Club) and writing. His numerous cookbooks — the above-mentioned The Modern Cook (1845) and A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852),  as well as French Cookery: The Modern Cook (1846), The Cook’s Guide and Housekeeper’s & Butler’s Assistant (1861) and The Royal English and Foreign Confectionery Book (1862) — reflected the many changes that occurred in the known world after the French Revolution.

Let’s not forget that French cuisine enjoyed a long history in England. Francatelli simply fell into the pattern established since after the Restoration, when French cooking became associated with Papism and Jacobites. Roman Catholic families of the seventeenth century, like the Carters and the Verralls, hired French chefs, who could quite authentically, apparently. Chefs like Louis Eustache Ude remained aware of Roman Catholic fast days, as he added variations accommodating those days in his stellar work, The French Chef (1813).

Of course, by the second half of the nineteenth century, nobody remembered those pesky little details. And so Victorians like Francatelli oversaw the heyday of French cooking in England. Their influence spread far and wide, across the globe to India, to Kenya, to Ghana, etc.

Colin Spencer sums up the whole issue of French cooking in England:

What the British thought was French cooking was a radical adaptation towards their own tastes; as much as an Indian restaurant gives a British interpretation of curry today. Secondly, many of these so-called French influences were medieval, and had been enjoyed here for hundreds of years; after the Reformation we had forgotten about them.

Sheep Pluck

Especially sheep’s pluck, one would hope … but not if haggis is your pleasure.

*For more on Francatelli, see Chef to Queen Victoria: the Recipes of Charles Elmé Francatelli, ed. by Ann M. Currah (London: Kimber, 1973) and “Charles Elmé Francatelli,” written by Mary Snodgrass, in Culinary Biographies, ed. by Alice Arndt (Houston, Texas: Yes Press, Inc., 2006, p. 169-170).

** Görlach’s eight criteria are as follows:

Analysis of eight main features, and their development through time (and correlation with the type of user):

1)     Form of heading

2)     Full sentences or telegram style

3)     Use of imperative or other verbal forms

4)     Use of possessive pronouns with ingredients and implements

5)     Deletion of objects

6)     Temporal sequence, and possible adverbs used

7)     Complexity of sentences

8)     Marked use of loanwords and of genteel diction

© 2009 C. Bertelsen

Dedicated food nerd that I am, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of the new movie Julie & Julia for months. Being of a social disposition, I thought it only right that my personal premiere should include food—and not just any food, but dishes from Julia Child’s seminal work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

After scaling back my original party vision (handmade invitations, houseful of people, 5 course meal, Julia Child impression contest, fabulous prizes…) due to budget constraints, I ended up inviting a few friends over for a Julie Child pot-luck and trip to the movie.

My guest list included two of my Dallas Symphony Chorus foodie group friends. We’ve been singing together for 15 years, give or take, and for something like 8 of those years we’ve held several dinner parties each season, all themed around the music we were performing. Menus have included everything from schnitzel and spaetzle (we sing a lot of German music) to New York-style pizza (Bernstein) and borscht (Tchaikovsky). With all this experience (literally) under our belts, we felt pretty confident tackling The French Chef.

Unfortunately, only one of us actually owned the cookbook—and that someone was not me. On the plus side, the fabulous McKinney library does own a copy, and it was even on the shelf when I went to look for it. Considering this was the week before J-Day (August 7, the day Julie & Julia released), I took that as a sign of divine favor and left the library rejoicing.

After several phone calls, we had our menu. Rosemary would make vichyssoise, which while not actually in Mastering the Art… was a JC recipe. Vikki, who does have the book, offered to make coq au vin. Holly, who is not a foodie, brought a wonderful whole-grain baguette.

I—surprise, surprise—tackled dessert. But which dessert? I bake cakes all the time, so I didn’t want to go there. The apple tart sounded delicious but. . . I eventually decided on cream puffs. I really wanted to make a croquenbouche—it’s kind of a Christmas tree-shaped tower of cream puffs decorated with lacy sugar garland—but apparently one has to have a special form, along the lines of a metal traffic cone, to pull that off. So plain old cream puffs—filled with Cream St. Honore flavored with crème de cacao and topped with homemade caramel—would have to do. Cream puffs are ridiculously simple, btw, so if you’re thinking of trying to make them: do.

While I would have preferred opening night, we couldn’t give proper attention to both a gourmet dinner AND a movie after work on Friday. Saturday, August 8, it was, then. And what a fabulous evening. Vikki came in costume with a vintage apron over her dress and pearls; the rest of us made do with wearing my collection of bridesmaid pearls to the movie. And the food? Oh. My.

Vichyssoise

Coq au vin

Roused from a food-induced coma by the sight of the clock, we dashed to the movie. Fortunately the theater is just 5 minutes from my house. It was delightful—but we were SO glad we’d eaten before we got there. It’s a rare and beautiful thing to find a film that has very little bad language, no nudity—except for a couple of chickens—happily married couples, and a satisfying ending. Not to mention the food porn…which is why we were so glad to be well-fed.

Cream Puffs

I must be the only food blogger in the world who hasn’t yet seen Julie & Julia.

You know. The movie about real life Julie Powell who in 2002 decides to cook the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and archive the experience in a food blog. The blog then becomes a book. The book becomes a movie. A movie starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell. Not bad!

Julie & Julia arrived on the big screen a week ago and apparently foodies and food bloggers everywhere have been dropping their whisks and widgets to run to the theatre. Every one of them but me.

I’ve promised myself I’ll make time to see it this weekend, but until then I’ve had to be content watching reruns of Julia Child’s classic TV cooking show The French Chef. You can view them online at PBSonline.

Here’s the link to watch Elegance with Eggs, the episode in which Julia demonstrates poached and shirred eggs, and omelettes. I’ll admit I was in awe of the generous amount of sauce she ladled over the mushroom omelette she makes near the end of the show. And then she spoons melted butter over the sauce before briefly browning the omelette under the broiler! I’m sure that omelette tasted really good!

As for Julie, she didn’t eat eggs for the first 29 years of her life (WHAT??), but learned to like them – and make a mean poached egg while on her year-long Julie/Julia Project. (To read the blog posts about her cooking experience, click on the highlighted dates in the calendar on the right side of the Julie/Julia Project link.)

Julia Child

I started watching Julia Child’s show “The French Chef” at 6, while visiting my grandparents in North Carolina, and started cooking not long afterwards.  While I don’t remember the first show I saw, the first one I took detailed notes on concerned puff pastry. My grandmother wanted to make croissants; in lieu of sending money for the recipe, she ordered me to write everything down. I dutifully filled several notebook pages with instructions, which involved lengthy breaks for refrigeration between rollings and a mindboggling amount of butter. As far as I know, my grandmother never tried it. When I finally got around to making puff pastry years later, I used Lindsey Shere’s recipe. But it was Julia’s cheerful, can-do manner that guided me through the process.

Seeing the film ”Julie and Julia” this weekend not only brought back memories but made me miss Julia Child more than ever. A big part of the reason is Meryl Streep’s uncanny performance, which is less an act of impersonation than a resurrection. Streep goes beyond mastering Julia’s concertina-like vocal cadences; among other feats, she somehow manages to walk exactly like Julia despite lacking her tremendously long legs.

I can attest to that fact that Streep replicated her gait perfectly because I once found myself walking directly behind Julia and Paul Child as they made their way along Massachussetts Avenue in Cambridge. I was twenty, a visiting scholar of Japanese studies at Harvard and an avid cook revelling  in my first, bare bones kitchen. Harvard’s relaxed schedule (compared with that of Wellesley, where I had spent the past two years) gave me plenty of time to cook and bake, while the TV my father had insisted on buying for me brought Julia Child back into my life. Between studying all things Japanese and cooking with Julia, I was in heaven.

But because she was a Cambridge neighbor, Julia Child was more than a TV personality or a name on a cookbook. A slight detour on the route that took me from my Mt. Auburn Street apartment to Japanese class on Divinity Avenue took me by the Childs’ house on Irving Street. That sprawling clapboard house–its location was common knowledge–contained the famous kitchen that now resides in the Smithsonian; passing by, I had to fight the urge to peer through the window at it. To the extent I could afford to, I also shopped where Julia did, at  Savenour’s, a specialty market famous for its meat. The hugely flirtatious proprietor would report to me on what Julia had bought on her last visit and what she planned to make with it.

One night that year, I made Julia’s stewing hen–which was stuffed with bread and herbs and simmered in stock, rather than roasted–and served it to my boyfriend and his best friend. “Do you cook like this every night?” the friend asked incredulously.  Not wanting to seem domestic (though I was) or unstudious (because I wasn’t), I stammered, “Not really.” “Yes,” my boyfriend replied proudly.  He was the only person who truly valued my kitchen prowess, so I quickly changed the subject.

The following year, a Wellesley friend who came over to a party mocked me for cooking all the food myself. “You’re so domestic,” she said acidly. “For roasting a turkey?” I asked. My penchant for making Julia’s Swordfish a la Grand Chartreuse would remain a secret until well after graduation.

During my fall semester in Cambridge, I struggled with my desire to write a fan letter to Julia Child. Though my boyfriend thought she would be flattered, I eventually deemed the the idea creepy and gave it up.  I kept watching “Julia Child and Company” on WGBH but assiduously avoided  going by her house on my way to and from class. (Recently I learned that Julia kept her phone number listed and happily talked to strangers who called with questions about her recipes; perhaps if I’d known this, I would have been bolder.)

It was around this time that my boyfriend and I found ourselves walking behind the Childs in Harvard Square. It was late fall. Julia walked arm-in-arm with Paul, who wore a cap and scarf. Aside from their height difference–she was noticeably taller–the thing I noticed immediately was their closeness; unlike many older couples, they seemed enthralled by each other and kept up a steady stream of conversation. “That’s Julia Child,” I whispered, thrilled.  We lost them in a crowd around Boylston Street; that was as close as I ever came to meeting her.

Twenty years later, while finishing work on my documentary, “Jim Thompson, Silk King,” I learned that Julia Child, who like Jim Thompson had served in the OSS, was posted to Ceylon during the same period as Thompson in World War II. I also knew that she was now widowed and living full-time in Montecito. When my mother called to report that a family friend had invited the French Chef to lunch and was having a nervous fit over it, I asked if I could contact Julia for my documentary.

“She’s awfully old,” my mother said dubiously.

“But she’d remember meeting Jim  Thompson, wouldn’t she?”

“Oh, honey, don’t bother her. Say, how’d you like to have to cook for Julia Child?”

“I’d love to.”

“It wouldn’t make you nervous? I’d be a wreck.”

“No. Why would it?”

Apparently my mother missed Julia Child’s essential message: I learned to cook the classics and so can you. Unlike today’s TV chefs, who fall into two camps–the pros whose cooking says don’t try this at home and the non-pros for whom processed foods and shortcuts trump technique–Julia didn’t see the need for either snobbery or dumbing-down. Her cuisine was classic French as handed down by Escoffier; there was no pretense or trendiness in it. The recipes, though sometimes difficult and time-consuming, were accessible to any home cook in possession of basic techniques and a desire to learn. In every episode of “The French Chef” and “Julia Child and Company,” as well as every cookbook she wrote, her point was that we–the home cooks–could do it too.  

I’m proof of this. And though I’ve learned from Alice Waters, Ken Hom and many other chefs, Julia Child remains my guiding spirit. If I’ve often failed to heed her dictate, “never apologize, never explain,” I’ve certainly upheld her can-do spirit through thousands of meals. Soon I’ll be making yeast for pain levain, something I’ve been wanting to try for years. I’m not sure Julia Child ever made her own yeast; at any rate, it’s not her recipe. (It comes from Steve Sullivan of Acme Bread in Berkeley, one of the world’s greatest bakers.) But it’s a sure bet I’ll be thinking of her when I do it.

This site has been officially moved to a new domain, http://www.myhalalkitchen.com. Please visit there to see what’s cooking!

This winter, I’ve snuggled up to more than my fair share of Julia Child cookbooks and DVDs of her cooking shows, “The French Chef”. So far I’ve seen countless hours of her slapping dough around to make croissants and French bread, demonstrating brutally tedious sauce-making techniques and offering 1960’s style video of her own shopping tours around Paris and the south of France. Nevertheless, I’m addicted to learning from this woman.

As a result, for the first time I’ve made homemade French Onion Soup, following Julia’s recipe verbatim. It turned out perfectly. Even my husband was “warmed” up to the idea of eating enormous amounts of onions and butter and cheese in this hearty dish. He even warmed up to the idea of learning a little something from Julia. I think he’s enjoying himself, ever so slightly, because Julia was a practical woman and a wildly demonstrative teacher who made it easy for us to understand and learn from- something all teachers should be, in my opinion.

One thing I’ve learned from reading other books and blogs about French culture, cooking techniques, style and form is that the French, particularly Parisians, really love to warm themselves up with a hot bowl of soup during the chilly winter months. Check out David Lebovitz’s blog about living in Paris and his article about celery root soup at: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2008/12/celery_root_soup.html

Here’s a quicker version of French Onion Soup than in Julia Child’s book I used (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Fortieth Edition, Vol. 1 by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, p. 43-45). It’s Emerille Lagasse’s recipe found on the Food Network website:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/french-onion-soup-recipe/index.html

Substitute ½ cup red grape juice for the sherry and remember to use only your own homemade chicken and veal stock, made from dhabiha halal animals. If you don’t have that, use a halal canned or carton broth (let me know if you see that in any stores), or a can or carton of kosher stock or broth.

You can also use beef stock instead of chicken or veal stock but the taste will be a bit more “meaty”. And you can also just use one type of stock (i.e. only chicken as opposed to the combination), just make sure the stock is dark. Don’t make this dish if you will only be able to use water- it just isn’t worth sacrifice in taste.

Bon Appetit! Let me know how your soup turns out…

Yvonne

Julia Child was my “Big Bird” of French cooking. Just like her counterpart who lives on Sesame Street, Julia was tall, robust, and cheerful. Big Bird pranced down Sesame Street daily, dispensing wisdom to children. Julia’s route was from sink to stove to oven on the PBS kitchen set of “The French Chef.” 

In her constant apron, she worked magic and turned dull ingredients into a chocolate bombe, or animal entrails into eight different pates encased together in pastry crust. She diced onions at the speed of sound with her lethal chef knives, and whacked a dead chicken in half without flinching. “Now here we have a beautiful young pullet. Look at how lovely the flesh is!” she proclaimed from the TV that barely boxed her in. Then Julia axed that carcass as she sweated under the hot studio lights. She always made a mess and rarely paused to wipe a spill. The wonders of television rendered it all clean by the next scene.

Julia’s no nonsense calm during culinary disasters, and bouts of joy when a soufflé rose, comforted me. She had the temperament of the good and solid farm women in old TV westerns. She was patient with the cooking heathen I was, and I grew up to become one of millions who loved her. Julia Child took my hand through the years, like Big Bird held children’s hands, and led me through a half hour of peace every week. The preparation of a seven page recipe looked easy. She never flaunted her talents. She shared them.

I was always sad when she took her prepared delights to a fake dining room because that meant the show was over. I wanted to climb into the TV and sit with her then. I didn’t know then that Julia Child was dangerous too. She sautéed, creamed, and sauced her way into my heart without warning that it could be less than healthy.

“Bon appetit!” she chirped, raising a crystal wine glass as cheerful eating music played and the picture faded. 

Julia Child was my “Big Bird” of French cooking. Just like her counterpart who lives on Sesame Street, Julia was tall, robust, and cheerful. Big Bird pranced down Sesame Street daily, dispensing wisdom to children. Julia’s route was from sink to stove to oven on the PBS kitchen set of “The French Chef.”

In her constant apron, she worked magic and turned dull ingredients into a chocolate bombe, or animal entrails into eight different pates encased together in pastry crust. She diced onions at the speed of sound with her lethal chef knives, and whacked a dead chicken in half without flinching. “Now here we have a beautiful young pullet. Look at how lovely the flesh is! I just love it!” she proclaimed as she patted it with gusto. Then Julia axed that carcass as she sweated under the hot studio lights. She always made a mess and rarely paused to wipe a spill. The wonders of television rendered it all clean by the next scene.

Julia’s no nonsense calm during culinary disasters, and bouts of joy when a soufflé rose, comforted me. She had the temperament of the good and solid farm women I saw in old TV westerns. She was patient with me when I was a kid who loved her, and later too when I was an adult, one of many who also loved her. Julia Child took my hand through the years, like Big Bird held children’s hands, and led me through a half hour of optimism every episode. Preparing a seven page recipe looked easy. She never flaunted her talents. She shared them.

I was always sad when she took her finished foods to the fake studio dining room because that meant the end of the show. I wanted to climb into the TV and sit beside her. I didn’t know then that Julia Child was dangerous too. She sautéed, creamed, buttered and sauced her way into my heart without warning that it could be less than healthy.

“Bon appetit!” she chirped, raising a crystal wine glass filled with the proper vintage as she perched proudly beside her culinary delights and the TV screen faded.

How cool is this? The AP reports that newly released records show that Julia Child, public television’s French Chef, was a World War II-era spy.

This week marks both the birthday and deathday, if there is such a word, of Julia Child. The fact that no one in my culinary circle has mentioned either event upsets me. Where are the parades? Is anyone laying a wreath of Bay Laurel on her grave?

Some people old enough to do so talk of where they were when they heard of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I am not that old, so I had to come up with my own where-was-I memories. Karen Carpenter? I was on my way to the newly opened EPCOT Center, the day marred by the endless loop of Superstar running through my brain. Jacqueline Kennedy? Don’t get me started.

The most vivid death for me was Julia Child’s. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was sitting in a traffic jam owing to a fallen tree, crammed into a rental car with five friends near Jemez, New Mexico.

It was a Friday in mid-August, 2004. We were returning from a hike in the mountains and a soak in the local hot springs where, the moment we shucked our clothes and hopped in the steaming water, a hailstorm hit us. And I do mean hit us. It was as though God had opened his comedy closet filled with ping pong balls right onto our heads. Hailstones the size of mothballs screamed down from 10,000 feet, striking us directly or ricocheting off rocks to pelt us in the face. The only safe place was a crag already occupied by a tiny, freakish man– a naked troll with golden dental work– who sat there safe and grinning at his good luck and our misfortune. The couple soaking below us held an oversized umbrella over their heads. Everyone seemed prepared except us. When the attack subsided, we dressed and slumped back to the car, some of us bloodied, all of us bruised.

We were singing stupid songs and fogging up the windows, going nowhere very slowly and laughing about the terrible afternoon we’d just experienced. I had written the word “buffalo” with my index finger on the windshield which, for some reason, was funny only to myself. As I considered explaining to my fellow travelers exactly why it was funny, a radio newscaster announced the death of Julia Child, two days shy of her 92nd birthday.

My first thought was a sad one– Now I’ll never get to meet Julia Child– egocentric, I know. I thought she’d had a good run of it, at least.

My attentioned turned to math, briefly. Two days shy of her 92nd birthday? Since, the day was Friday, August 13th– which would explain the afternoon we were having– that put her birthday at August 15th, my brother’s birthday.

My brother and I had had a competition going about who’s birthday was more significant, his or mine. I touted the fact that I shared my birthday with not only Sally Struthers, but our maternal grandfather and, what I thought was my trump card, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. I liked to throw in the fact that World War One officially started on that date for good measure. He countered with Rose-Marie and the fact that his day was a holy day of obligation in the Catholic church- the Feast of the Assumption (which, as my friend Bill loves to point out, is called Maria Himmelfahrt in German). Since nuns came to pin medals on his pillow the day he was born, he always claimed victory. He never mentioned the fact that he shared the day with Julia Child. I wonder if he ever new. I’d give him the crown for that coincidence alone.

We weren’t a Julia Child-loving family. No one to my knowledge watched The French Chef. I’d watch re-runs of the Galloping Gourmet, but only out of the corner of my eye because I was too busy building mazes for my hamster out of Lincoln Logs. To me, Julia Child was just some tall lady with a funny voice who cooked and everyone from Dan Ackroyd to John Candy made fun of. I’d always thought of her as some grande dame, her nose as far above the jokes and pokes as her 6′ 2″ body would hold it.

I’d bought The Way To Cook when I was in college, as did many of my friends, because I was serious about cooking. It was and is a serious cookbook– step by step and about as how-to as they get. But I only sought pointers, I knew nothing of finesse and had no sense of humor about cooking– I was too intimidated by it. I certainly didn’t think I’d find either in the work of Julia Child. Of course, I’d never seen her television program.

It wasn’t until several years later when I fell into a job working for Jacques Pepin that I heard she had a sense of humor. Pepin, fresh from taping a television show with Child, told us stories of how, when wine-maker sponsers visited the set of their show, she insisted on serving beer. Other stories followed that fairly shattered the previous image I’d formed of her. She wasn’t the droning, Yankee bore obsessed with detail I’d made her out to be from her book and my own imagination. It’s hard to imagine that I never remembered seeing her on television before, but it’s true. The humor and charm that Pepin described surprised me, but it was her puckishness that left me wanting more of her. However unbearable the rest of my experience on Pepin’s show, I came away with that wonderful knowledge.

It wasn’t until last year that I was finally able to see episodes of The French Chef. My friend John recieved a DVD boxed set of the series’ best episodes for his birthday. An ace home cook and successful cookbook author in his own right, he kindly invited me over to his place for dinner and a viewing. We watched her on his kitchen television as we drank martinis and cooked or, rather, he cooked, I drank martinis. Most memorable were the episodes detailing how to roast a chicken and how to make a tarte tatin. Or how not to, I’d say.

Take a moment and watch her talk about chickens (Sorry, I cannot embed this video, so follow the link. I’ll wait. And now for those of you too lazy to follow a link outisde this page…

It was then that I felt I finally got her. Thank you, John.

Having participated in the production of a number of cooking programs before the onset of their cable television-induced proliferation and, therefore, banality, Child was a trend-setter. I think we can all agree upon that. What impressed me most about her program was its low- budget, public television feel. Child preformed each show– from start to finish– in one take. Along with her many successful dishes prepared on air were many flops, but all were taken in stride and with great sense of humor. Whether blaming her choice of apple for the failure of her tarte tatin or simply explaining, by way of each failure, what went wrong and why, she turned her gaffes into, if not always triumphs, at least into moments of sheer enjoyment. The knowledge that even Julia Child was prone to error on occasion gave courage to her audience, removing much of the fear involved in the making of, say, a Gateau Saint-Honore.

At a time when we, as Americans, generally deferred to the French in all matters gustatory , ignorant of or perhaps in part ashamed of our own culinary heritage, Child not only translated the French way of cooking into a language we could understand and into ingredients we could get our hands on, she served as an entertaining tour guide of French Culture along the way. And she managed all this without dumbing things down– least of all, herself.

In an age where cooking shows are all but shoved down our throats, where any annoying personality is set free to run amok inside our televisions, it can be said that no one can best the original or imitate the inimitable. For better or worse, the Food Network owes its very existence to her. Have they ever said thank you? I wouldn’t know, since I’m not paying attention– I don’t have cable and can’t really stomach cooking shows anymore, with a few exceptions. Nothing would say “we care” like a TV marathon devoted to her original, groundbreaking program. Perhaps WGBH in Boston has already taken the idea and run with it. All I know is someone should.

Granted, Julia Child was practically beatified by the likes of the James Beard Foundation, COPIA and even the Smithsonian Institute while she was alive, but I’m voting for full canonization now that she’s gone. I’d like a new holy day of obligation to supplant the one that no one celebrates anymore. Except Bavarians and my brother, were he still alive. Let’s build a cathedral, a Notre Dame de la Cuisine, say, in her honor– a place of worship where one can go to pray for, if not culinary inspiriation or courage, at least deliverance from evil. Like the fact that Emeril Lagasse has his own band or the mere presence of that squawking Anti-Christ, Rachel Ray.

A nice friend gave me a copy of of Julia Child’s My Life In France a few weeks back, because I asked for it.

Paul Cushing Child, 1948

And now it’s mine! I read it hard, in a matter of days, in subways and at kitchen tables and in other shockingly alternative venues like class. I tend to slow down right before I reach the ends of books I love, so the other weekend I brought My Life In France over to Fred & Thessaly’s with the expectation that we’d drink wine and cook dinner while Julia sat idly in my bag.

Mama, I say, Julia is always writing things like “we began with a half-carafe of Médoc 1929 and then finished a lovely bottle of Pouilly Fumé 1942 with dinner” and I want to know how does she even remember that dinner? My mother laughs not entirely approvingly. She would pour several glasses of wine during the course of one PBS episode, my mother tells me, and I regard her with the awe of one bearing witness to history.

The book did not sit idly in my bag. Thessaly had invited us over because she had a domestic potato surplus; to cope with them, she thought we should make Alice Waters’s garlic mayonnaise.

Alice was going to demand that we emulsify two different kinds of oil and act out other obscure verbs too. I wasn’t sure if that was necessary. I had just read about Julia’s manic efforts to keep her first real culinary victories from prying eyes while still getting them tested by her little sister, Dorothy, back in the U.S.

With the letter I included a number of ‘regular’ recipes, but also a special batch of three recipes that were hidden between pink cover sheets and labeled ‘DOROTHY COUSINS– EYES ALONE– CONFIDENTIAL– to be kept under lock and key and never mentioned.’

These were the Top Secret Confidential Censored pages; our revolutionary recipes for hollandaise, mayonnaise, and buerre blanc. We’d never seen those recipes in print before, and the methods for making the first two were revolutionary.

typed on a Royal Portable, 1952

It was the age of Hoover and McCarthy, and a 6′2″ graduate of Smith College could perhaps not be too careful, nor use the word “revolutionary” too many times.

Thessaly! I said. We can make Julia Child’s mayonnaise legere!

Lily looked skeptical.

What does ‘legere’ mean?

I said I was sure it didn’t mean anything. As it happened, “legere” meant “exceptionally drippy” but we didn’t very much care because it tasted like olive oil and garlic and we’d beat it with the hand mixer ourselves.

L’École des Gourmettes, 1951

My Life In France inspired only a middling amount of cooking in my life–there was the mayonnaise, and a quiche that tasted just like any other quiches I’ve made–but it did reinvigorate a desire to expatriate myself in dapper company.

Julia and her husband, Paul, arrived in France on Wednesday, November 3rd, 1948, after Paul had been posted there as a cultural liaison for the U.S. Information Agency, the USIA.

The Scheelds–as they were called by Francophones and as I have come to call them in my head–were essentially propagandists, but bohemian ones. Paul was a painter and photographer, and the couple entertained figures like Sylvia Beach, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude must have been caught up in an unending sentence that rendered her unable to join her wife at the dinner table.

Alice was a cookbook author, and Julia doesn’t seem to have taken her very much. She describes the mustachioed bottom as an odd little bird in a muslin dress and a big floppy hat.

Toklas (or Stein?) once wrote:

In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.

Young Julia, however, doesn’t seem to have been much interested in climaxing at all. She and Paul never had children, and they slept in separate beds. I am willing to bet that our girl Julie was the one who snored.

Maine, 1955

Rumors of dual gayness followed Julia and Paul throughout their lives; they were like the European version of my favorite sexless union, that of Paul and Jane Bowles. The principle difference between the two pairs other than their respective sides of the Straights of Gibraltar is that John Ashbery wrote an obituary for Jane and William Grimes wrote one for Julia.

In April 1955, Paul was suddenly called back to Washington from France. When he arrived in D.C. and realized that he was not there to be given an anticipated promotion after all he sent a telegram to Julia:

Situation here like Kafka story.

He spent an entire day being interviewed by USIA agents associated with J. Edgar Hoover. Julia writes:

The investigators had a fat dossier on Paul Cushing Child. They attacked him with questions about his patriotism, his liberal friends, the books he read, and his association with Communists. When they asked if he was a homosexual, Paul laughed.

Paul was ten years older than Julia; by 1974, after they had begun living part-time in Cambridge, Paul had moved to a nursing home. His character appears less and less in Julia’s narrative as her celebrity grows; he is occasionally mentioned as kind of a book-tour roadie:

In between shows, we signed books, sat for interviews, and made the right noises to dozens of VIPs. Meanwhile, the esteemed former American cultural attaché…crouched behind some old scenery flats trying to wash out egg- and chocolate-covered bowls in a bucket of cold water.

I started to feel very sorry for Paul Child, especially because I’d completely swooned for an early photograph of him with sunshine on his chest.

Maine, 1946

I showed Christina. Emma, she said, him? You are hard up.

Christina! I gasped at her irreverence. Whatever! She is gay and so was Julia and clearly neither of them would understand. In a last-ditch attempt at cross cultural communication, I chose the verbal over the visual and referred her to a letter Paul had sent to his twin brother soon after arriving in France.

What follows is my favorite part of the book and also the most translucent prose to be found anywhere in it:

Lipstick on my belly-button and music in the air–thaat’s Paris, son.

What a lovely city! What grenouilles à la provençale. What Chateauneuf-du-Pape, what white poodles and and white chimneys, what charming waiters, and poules de luxe, and maitres d’hôtel what gardens and bridges and streets! How fascinating the crowds before one’s café table, how quaint and charming and hidden the little courtyards with their wells and statues.

Those garlic-filled belches! Those silk-stockinged legs! Those mascara’d eyelashes! Those electric switches and toilet chains that never work! Holà! Dites donc! Bouillbase! Au revoir!

Bonn, Germany, 1956

photo by Paul Child

In light of the release of the new movie, “Julie & Julia,” I wanted to share the following excerpt from my book, “Growing Toward Balance: Achievable Ideas for Bringing Harmony to Your Mind, Body and Spirit.” This particular chapter evolved from a blog post I wrote shortly after the death of one of my heroines, Julia Child:

I asked an American friend of mine who has lived in Paris for the past eighteen years to give me her thoughts on this topic. She says, “The French tend to think that humans are pleasure-driven, and meals tend to reflect that mentality. Eating is not taboo, although excess is definitely frowned upon by my French friends. Basically, eating is an accepted fact of life, and I think it can be said that the French seek to enjoy their meals rather than suffer through them.”

“The organization of their work and playtime are based around the meals instead of the other way around. They take the time to eat breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. They have the same mentality about sex.”

In our society, we tend to think of food as a necessary evil, and we try to control what we eat, calculating carbs, fat grams, etc. Amy Finnerty, journalist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a wonderful ode to Julia Child who passed away three days shy of her 92^nd birthday. I felt a wave of nostalgia as I remembered back to when I was a child and would watch The French Chef with my mother. I loved Julia’s style, finesse, and the way she would sweep scraps from her counter, seemingly onto the floor. I learned how to make bechamel sauce at a very young age by watching her.

She was all about the enjoyment of food. I remember seeing her on a talk show during the 90s during which she created a wonderful-looking dish complete with two sticks of butter and heavy cream. I don’t remember what the dish was, but I do remember that an audience member asked if she had a low-fat version of that recipe. Her response was, “Whatever for?” She was one of my all-time heroes.

Julia Child has been quoted as saying, “What’s dangerous and discouraging about this era is that people really are afraid of their food…Sitting down to dinner is a trap, not something to enjoy. People should take their food more seriously. Learn what you can eat and enjoy it thoroughly.” As Finnerty says, “She did something more important than teach us to cook; she taught us to eat, and some of us in the new Atkins World Order could still use a few lessons. She knew how to indulge, in moderation: food of all kinds (in normal portions); drink (but not drunkenness); smoking (until she did the mature thing and quit); and the company of men (she was a happily married flirt).”

Tonight we’re going to see the much celebrated and hopefully not overrated movie, Julie & Julia. I was not too much of a fan of Julia Child’s TV show, but I was absolutely a fan of her excellent cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and I am a fan of Meryl Streep.

The movie, I’ve read, is a flattering portrayal of Julia Child and her evolution into The French Chef. She was alive when Julie began her blogging adventure and according to one article, Child thought she was being ripped off. According to another article she felt Powell was mocking her, that Julie was not taking cooking seriously. The article ended by saying that Julia didn’t “suffer fools gladly.”

Man, I haven’t heard that expression in quite some time! It brought back memories of the last time I heard that quote. I was in the Grand Canyon and my friend was explaining to me her intolerance of stupid people. “I don’t suffer fools gladly,” she said. Huh. For the rest of the trip I watched this woman do and say everything she said she hated in others.

Read on.

When I was living in Virginia one of my favorite chefs also loved to write. He mailed out a newsletter with stories and recipes. He had a flair for writing and was a culinary artist.

One of my favorite stories was about his once-in-a-lifetime chance in the kitchen with THE Julia Child. He had been invited along with a few other chefs to cook with the living legend. Huge honor! He wrote about it with all the excitement of a little boy on Christmas Eve. He also wrote about it afterwards. I wish I still had the article so I could quote directly from it, because even though it was 20+ years ago, it still makes me laugh.

Sadly, he was reminded that our idols always have clay feet. Apparently, JC was rather a Nazi in the kitchen and not too impressed with these subordinates. She chided them repeatedly for various atrocities and transgressions that annoyed her, especially the disgusting habit so many ‘cooks’ have of testing a dish to see what it needs and then the putting the same spoon back into the pan instead of replacing it with a new one.

She came to his area where he was stirring a sauce. She, the great Julia Child, took the spoon, stirred it, tasted the sauce, complimented him and put the spoon back in the pan!

He ended his newsletter with those horrified italics, but I’m not through.

I’ve seen it too many times. People start out innocently enough, most of the time with good intentions, but then as they grow in popularity, they begin to take themselves too seriously and the ego takes over. Arrogance and intolerance are not signs that you are in the presence of a superior being. On the contrary, you are in the presence of someone who is intolerant and arrogant.

It’s that simple.

Hurrah! ‘Julie and Julia’ opens today and this long-time Julia Child fan may have to actually go to a movie theater to see this one!

Currently I’m working on a post concerning Julia Child’s natal chart (with her death chart included) so check it out if you wish to see The French Chef’s Grand Cross pattern of achievement here with more Astrology details to follow.

Horoscopes display more easily on Blogger so click image to enlarge and read some basic chart info there. I will be updating the post as weekend time permits.

If you missed it this morning, I highly recommend NPR’s interview with the film’s writer-director, the amazing Nora Ephron on the chef, her favorite recipes, and on making Julie and Julia.

I heart Julia Child and in honor of Julie & Julia coming out I wanted to post a clip of Julia.  I’ve been watching back episodes of the French Chef and think she is funny, witty, and a great cook.  Here is her talking about how she used to like McDonald’s french fries before the health nuts got to them…

Silence Dogood here. Julia Child is my hero, so I’ve been thrilled to see all the coverage the movie “Julie and Julia,” which opens nationwide this Friday, has beeen getting. Even our local paper had a big feature on it this morning with a couple of Julia’s recipes.

I confess that the reason Julia is my hero is a bit dubious. Both of us love (er, loved, in her case; she died in 2004, two days shy of her 92nd birthday) cooking for the sheer, sensual pleasure of it. But Julia was a stickler for detail, and my cooking style could be described as “freewheeling at best.”

Instead, I love Julia for her personality, which was every bit as exuberant and oversized as she was. (Julia was 6′2″ tall in the 1930s, a time when the average woman’s height in the U.S. was more like 5′4″.) Our family grew up with Julia, and my brother, sister and I would all sit, enthralled, in front of the TV when her show came on. We thought it was a comedy and found her onscreen antics hilarious, especially as the show progressed and the wine bottle was resorted to with ever more frequency. (I have read in recent years a heated denial that Julia actually drank wine on the set at all, but rather, that she “pretended” to drink wine to encourage Americans to become more at ease with the French custom. Um, right, perhaps she simply became more relaxed as the filming of each episode progressed.)

As a lifelong Julia fan, I was thrilled when a massive biography of her with the marvelous title Appetite for Life came out a few years ago. But despite the title, the book was devoid of life, arid, unspeakably boring. How could a bio of Julia Child possibly be boring?!! And yet. So what a relief to discover My Life in France, Julia’s late-life autobiography, coauthored with her husband’s grandnephew Alex Prud’homme. This book lives up to its subject, and is in part the basis for the movie “Julie and Julia.”

As you probably know, the other part of the movie is based on the book Julie and Julia, which is based on a hugely successful blog created by the Julie of the title, Julie Powell, when she decided to relieve her urban ennui by recreating every dish in Julia Child’s classic work Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’m probably one of the few who was unaware of the blog until the book came out, but once I saw a new book about Julia, I enthusiastically checked it out of the library and settled in for a good read. Zzzzzzz. Julie’s no Julia. Not even close. I couldn’t finish the book, and while I enjoyed the author’s fantasy sequences about Julia’s life as she (Julie) imagined it, I thought they didn’t ring true.

Of course, this may be just me. No matter how much I read about them or how much Julia obviously adored him, I can’t see Paul Child as anything but a cold, pompous little mediocrity who was fortunate enough to gain the love of a great woman. Unlike Julia, Paul does not engage. Neither does Julie.

This is one reason I think the moviemakers displayed a true stroke of brilliance by combining the life of Julia, as described in My Life in France, with the story of Julie as described in Julie and Julia. Julia fans like me will be lining up to see a film we might have skipped had it simply been the Julie story. Kudos for a brilliant idea! I can’t wait to see the movie, and maybe even own it.

Speaking of which, no, despite my love of Julia, I don’t own all her cookbooks. I have a first edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, ca. 1961, courtesy of a local used bookstore, and Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, a latter-day, small, sleek compendium that probably horrified her. And I have a very battered copy of The French Chef Cookbook, ca. 1968, with a shredded, taped-together cover, also from a used bookstore and based on her famous PBS series, the first TV cooking show in the U.S. (I should add that, despite my childhood memory of the TV Julia being ancient and fat, she actually looks surprisingly youthful and even more surprisingly trim in the photos in this book.)

Then there are the DVDs. Julia comes most vividly to life when she’s captured live. Thanks to modern technology, you can buy or rent her famous TV show in two DVD collections, “The French Chef” and “The French Chef 2.” Or, if you’d rather have a fun introduction to Julia before taking the series plunge, there’s “Julia Child! America’s Favorite Chef.” As a Julia fan, I own and enjoy them all.

However, I wouldn’t want to try to cook from TV. Despite the apparent ease with which Queen Latifah was able to recreate Emeril’s recipe while watching his show live in “Last Holiday,” I’d look drunker than Julia at the end of a program if I even began to attempt such a feat.  So thank God for that battered, taped-together copy of The French Chef Cookbook, which presents Julia’s recipes episode by episode.

Today, I’m going to share Julia’s recipe for Beurre Blanc, one of those mysterious French sauces that you hear about but don’t necessarily know about. (White butter? What the hell is that?!!) In France, this sauce is most often served with fish. But I think it would be delicious over pretty much any vegetable and even as a dipping sauce for bread. Voila, and as Julia herself would say, bon appetit!

             Beurre Blanc

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

2 tablespoons each of lemon juice and dry white vermouth

1 tablespoon finely minced shallots or scallions (green onions)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

2 to 3 sticks (1/2 to 3/4 pound) chilled butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

Boil the vinegar, lemon juice, vermouth, shallots or scallions, salt, and pepper in a 6-cup enameled saucepan until the liquid has reduced to 1 1/2 tablespoons. Remove saucepan from heat and immediately beat in 2 pieces of chilled butter with a wire whip. As butter softens and creams in the liquid, beat in another piece. Then set pan over very low heat and, beating constantly, continue adding successive pieces of butter as each previous piece has almost creamed into the sauce. Sauce should become a thick ivory-colored cream, the consistency of a light hollandaise. Immediately remove from heat and season to taste. (If not served immediately, set over barely tepid water to keep butter from congealing; do not reheat, as sauce may thin out and turn oily.) Makes 1 to 1 1/2 cups.

So, are you planning to see “Julie and Julia”? Our friend Ben and I are going to see it next weekend with our friends Chaz and Delilah, both accomplished and enthusiastic cooks, after a French picnic lunch in the spirit of Julia. (Chaz and Delilah are both by-the-book cooks who’d do Julia’s techniques honor, even as I honor Julia’s spirit of exuberance and try to internalize rather than actually following her technique.) Poor OFB is coming along by default, but at least he’ll get a wonderful picnic lunch out of it.

Anyway, if you see the movie or have read any of the books (or blog) or are a way-back Julia fan like me, tell me what you think. Julia Child is an American phenomenon, a child of privilege who found herself in an exacting discipline and went on to become an enduring icon, America’s own “The French Chef,” in a world where chefs were men and chefs were genuinely French. Julia was a true bon vivant, someone who enjoyed life’s pleasures, at a time when our knowledge of health and health foods was about to bury the rest of us under a pile of scientific guilt. (“I can’t eat this piece of hard candy, it’s worse for my teeth than chocolate! I can’t eat this potato chip, it’s full of fat and bad cholesterol! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” How refreshing to find someone who said, “It tastes good, so why not?”) Note that Julia, with all her indulgences, managed to live into her nineties. She’d probably be with us today if she’d been alive to benefit from the latest geriatric advances.

I wish. I miss her!

         ‘Til next time,

                   Silence

Kate & Julia

In his book A History of Cooks and Cooking, author Michael Symons notes that “Mass Foodism” (also known as being a “foodie”) has been on the rise for years — as can be observed in the booming gourmet food/cookware industry as well as soaring sales of cookbooks. Part of this rise, Symons adds, is due to television bringing “foodism to the masses” via charismatic instructors like Julia Child.

Julia Child made what was once intimidating obtainable, and became an international icon after first appearing (in 1963) as “The French Chef” on Public Television. Child’s greatest contribution to the art of cookery, however, is most certainly Volume One of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (published in 1961).

Child (along with her colleagues Simone Beck and Louisette Berholle) spent a decade researching and writing Volume One — the “style and clarity” of which, according to Noel Riley Fitch (author of Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child), makes it “a genuine masterpiece in culinary history.”

In 1950, Child, Beck and Berholle started their work with a goal to create a book novice American cooks could understand, yet would still be “interesting for the practiced cook.” Ten years later, Knopf’s Judith Jones wrote that the soon-to-be-published book “will do for French cooking here in America what Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking did for standard [American] cooking.”

Jones was right: the book has been in print for over 40-years, including a new edition celebrating the release of the film “Julie & Julia” — opening Friday with Oscar-winner Meryl Streep appearing as Ms. Child.

“Julie & Julia” is the first of what might well become many motion pictures based on Child’s fascinating life encompassing great loves, world-wide travels, epic feasts — and perhaps even a stint as a WWII spy. Standing over six-feet-tall, Julia Child’s dynamic physical presence and positive personality drove her ever-increasing popularity as a TV performer and delivered her passion for cooking to an international audience.

Writer Christopher Lydon, quoted in Fitch’s biography, states that: “Queen Julia has done more than [Betty] Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Co. to show American women a model of power in public and expressive self-discovery at home.”

Even after her death (in 2004 at the age of 91), the cult of Julia Child is still hungry for more: DVD collections are available for purchase, her home kitchen has been moved into the Smithsonian Museum, new books are inspired by her life,  bumper stickers read “What Would Julia Do?,” and the truly obsessed can buy devotional candles.

If you haven’t yet had your fill of all things related to ‘the original spice girl,’ check out Flickr’s Julia Child group (lovingly administered by the author of this blog… )

Everyone is awaiting the new film “Julie & Julia” which portrays cookbook author and iconic TV teacher (and entrepreneur) known as much for her warbling near-falsetto voice as for her impact on American cooking:  Julie Child.

To a country infatuated with cake mixes, TV dinners and instant foods that would not mess up the kitchen, Child and co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle brought a French sense of tradition, art and quality in food. Then for a decade starting in 1963, Child’s wildly popular television program, “The French Chef,” persuaded home cooks to venture into complicated territory.

These days, Americans have entered a new era of the homemade, and the film could help bring this generation of foodies back to Child. To coincide with the opening, the publishers have released new editions of “My Life in France” and Powell’s book “Julie & Julia” with Streep and Adams on the cover. Even the latest edition of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is being sold in a wrapper promoting the movie.

Photo:  American television chef Julia Child.

More on Julia Child:

Julie Child:  Lessons with Master Chefs

Julie Child:  The French Chef  1972:  Cheese Souflee (PBS Video)

Julie Child:  Biography

Bon Appetit!

Posted by:  Laurel Delaney

With the opening of the new movie Julie & Julia, the nation is savoring the gem that was Julia Child. Julia was one of the original cheflebrities and her first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking changed the way Americans eat forever. Her bigger than life persona inspired a generation of home cooks to attempt classic French dishes like Coq au Vin and Coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Recently a regular customer to the café presented me with the gift of a first edition copy of Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook. The book was published in 1968 as a companion to her long-running TV show, The French Chef. The book had belonged to the customer’s mother who passed away in 2007. I would like to share with you the note she signed inside the book. I am only including first names so as to protect my benefactor’s anonymity.

Dear Stuart,
This book belonged to my mother Mary. When I discovered it I thought of you. The tasty dishes you prepare for Mars Hill Café are wonderful and delightful to the taste buds. It is my hope that this book of treasured recipes enhances your career and aids your dream of becoming a top rated TV chef.

Bon appetite!
Glynis

The book now occupies a prominent place in my living room. It is a treasure I will keep the rest of my life. Or at least until my niece graduates from culinary school. That gives me about 15 years to enjoy it.

Our PBS station is rerunning classic episodes of the great Julia Child, the real ones from her early days – not the ones I was familiar with. I had seen many of the little, er, whaddya want to call ‘em – boutique? Boutique episodes where guest chefs came in and made stuff while the very elderly Julia loomed over them in her hospital green kitchen and enjoyed watching their efforts.

I’m glad she enjoyed it, because I did not. Often the chefs were gurgling nonstop hymns of praise or sort of phoning in their “inside baseball” offhanded cooking. The great Julia graciously pretended not to notice, and in all cases gently steered the chefs back to the food and the techniques as best she could.

I was not born when her original series started, and it was most certainly not something my mother would have turned on while I toddled around feeding dirt and leaves to Mrs. Beasley. By the time we got cable, Julia had finished that show and was on to other things, and I was getting PBS provided cooking lessons from shows like ZOOM (ZOOM! Z Double O M, Box 3-5-0, Boston Mass, 02134!) where I saw an actual child give a breathtaking display of Christmas sugar cookies with cut out stained glass windows made from crushed Lifesavers.

Of course, I have seen snippets of the original show and almost every food writer mentions the revolutionary way the great Julia (TGJ) made fancy cooking approachable for the home cook, as well as providing fodder for Dan Ackroyd, which made her kind of a mythic character with a funny voice. But today I flipped on the television and there she was, making omelets. And I learned more in the first ten minutes of her show than I have in much dedicated reading on the subject, including Martha’s obsession with same. Unlike Martha’s no doubt perfect specimens, TGJ just beat up a couple of eggs, threw them in a skillet, and swirled the skillet around until the eggs rolled up into a cylinder and allowed her to tip them out of the skillet onto a plate. “It’s more fun to do it this way, I think,” she said. “And you can use your hands to neaten it up if you want to.”

Reader, would Martha ever use her hands to neaten up a slightly raggedy omelet? Mais non!

Good heavens, how much more quickly my own efforts to learn how to cook would have come along if I’d known about Julia’s original series, particularly considering that all I know about cooking, I learned from TV. And what a surprise for the Husband when I corner him at the stove next weekend to confess that everything I’ve ever told him about omelets has been a lie. I will show him TGJ’s method and he will, of course, say, “That’s how I always made them until you made me do it your way” and that is a damn lie. (But it makes him happy to say outrageous, self-aggrandizing things, like when he once tried to convince me that Peter the Great had written “It’s A Long Way to Tipperary” when he was touring Europe.)

The Husband has good-naturedly volunteered to go see the forthcoming movie about TGJ because he figures Meryl Streep is usually a good bet, and he secretly has a little thing for Amy Adams, I suspect. I can’t wait to see it.

The movie will no doubt be followed by a trip to Barnes and Noble to buy a Starbucks for himself and a copy of the book for me. No, I don’t have one! No, I have never even borrowed it from the library! I was just too intimidated. But if the book is like the omelet episode I just watched, I don’t think I have anything to worry about. Merci, Julia! Merci beaucoup.

Earlier today, I checked Facebook and saw that Smith College’s Alumnae group linked to a NY Times article written by Michael Pollan entitled “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch.” Someone commented on the link, sarcastically thanking Pollan for blaming the downfall of cooking on working women. I was curious to see if he actually did that, so I clicked. Generally, I don’t consider Facebook a timesuck, but I ended up writing a long piece while reading the article while trying to gather my thoughts. Since it got so long, instead of commenting on Facebook, I’m posting it here.

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What an interesting article. It starts out with reminiscences of watching Julia Child on TV as a kid, but evolves into a very insightful overview of food programming and advertising as we know it today, versus back when Julia was on the air. Pollan talks about how food programming now is largely about eating (and ordering food) rather than making it yourself. He discusses the competition-style shows, now so common on channels like the Food Network. (His remarks on how Erica Gruen shifted that channel’s focus in the 90’s to an audience who liked to eat rather than who liked to cook makes those shows make a lot of sense – the market of “those who liked to eat” includes a far greater number of men, which likely is why these competition shows have commentary to rival ESPN announcers.) He also talks about the advertising that is shown: during the shows for the “likes to eat” crowd, the ads are almost always for take out or other pre-made stuff. Compare that to the ads shown during shows like America’s Test Kitchen, which routinely shows ads for KitchenAid products, and in the show itself, promotes items and ingredients via its testing segments. But the items ATK promotes are to help the viewer make things themselves, not simply know how to order the item in a restaurant.

Pollan quotes Mario Batali about the Food Network:

The contrasting of Julia Child’s show with Rachael Ray’s (and others of that variety) particularly struck me. I am certainly one of those people who gets a thrill out of really cooking (not just microwaving stuff), so I understand Pollan’s comments regarding how Julia viewed cooking: a challenge, taken on to please no one but yourself. There’s a great feeling of triumph in following a recipe and getting an edible result (especially if it turns out half as nice as the recipe’s accompanying picture!). That’s why I write my cooking and gardening blog – it’s not so much because I care how many people read it, but simply that I like having a record of my culinary successes, as well as a way to note an recognize failures, so as to fix them in the future.

And because of this, I take some issue with Erica Gruen’s comment about people not watching TV to learn things. I don’t think that’s an entirely true statement. I think what she probably meant was that the people who DO watch TV to learn things are a relatively small group, and thusly, far less profitable than what any given network would like. If people didn’t want to learn something from TV, we wouldn’t have a lot of the programming on PBS (I’m particularly thinking of Create TV here). And we certainly see plenty of TV shows and DVDs peddled to parents of young children as “educational,” so I can’t believe that no one thinks of TV as a learning tool. (How many “movie days” did you have back in grade school and high school?) I’m not saying TV can (or should) replace classrooms or actually attempting things yourself, but simply that it IS possible to learn from TV, if the show is smart, well-written, and engaging.

But Pollan’s main question here seems to be “Why are we fascinated by watching OTHER people cook?” We don’t get to taste their amazing dishes at the end. We don’t get the satisfaction of having prepared it ourselves.

To point out that television has succeeded in turning cooking into a spectator sport raises the question of why anyone would want to watch other people cook in the first place. There are plenty of things we’ve stopped doing for ourselves that we have no desire to watch other people do on TV: you don’t see shows about changing the oil in your car or ironing shirts or reading newspapers. So what is it about cooking, specifically, that makes it such good television just now?

I think the thing with watching cooking on TV is that it makes cooking seem easy and fun, something that most of us don’t consider cooking to be. Don’t get me wrong: I very much enjoy cooking. But at the end of a long day, when I get home late, cooking is a hassle. My mentality becomes “Need fuel NOW,” instead of thinking about what imaginative thing I can whip up. If I came home and all my ingredients were prepped in pristine little glass bowls, and I had all the pots and pans set up, and all dinner had to it was throwing the stuff together, popping it in the oven, and chilling out for a bit while it cooked, then yeah, I’d probably cook more during the week. But, like most of us with full time jobs and other obligations, I don’t have a team of culinary elves at home setting things up to be ready upon my return home every night. And as Pollan points out, there is something fascinating about watching a project come together, and cooking is just as much a project as building a spice rack or painting a seascape or organizing your closet. Some of those things sound more exciting than others, sure, but there is inherent fascination in seeing the end result, especially if it’s in an area that you yourself are not particularly skilled at.

I also think Pollan’s assessment of our fascination with textures of food is correct. So many of us, as he rightly states, sit in front of keyboards and monitors all day, sending impersonal emails, working on boring spreadsheets, sitting in on endless conference calls. And often, we’re in a position lacking actual power and authority, always having to acquiesce to someone above us in the corporate hierarchy. So watching people play with real things, and tell us about how they feel and how they smell, showing us what those things look like, and then telling us “I will do this, and that will happen,” and then demonstrating that, yes, that actually occurs, is a comforting feeling.

This is, I think, a large part of why I like to bake when I feel I’ve been particularly unproductive. Knowing that if I follow a set of instructions, I will end up with a specific item, and unless I do something pretty stupid, it will invariably come out to essentially the same item. And if I want to try something new (like, say, add coconut to Irish cream brownies), I can do it, and I don’t need anyone else’s approval to do so. There’s a sense of adventure in waiting to see what the result will be. If it works out, then I feel like a rock star. If it doesn’t, I still feel a sense of pride in taking a risk. And as Pollan says, regardless of what happens, there is a definitive outcome. If it works, I make a note on my blog, and tag it as such, so I know that I can do it again. If it doesn’t, I still make a note of it, knowing not to do it again, or, if it wasn’t a total failure, what I might do differently next time. It’s a sense of progress, and learning, and that breeds a feeling of success. I don’t know many people who can feel that certainty of what they do at work each day.

As a “working woman,” I do take slight offense to Pollan’s commentary about working women being part of why Americans no longer cook nearly as much as they did in Julia Child’s day. However, that offense is largely due to my belief that it shouldn’t solely be the woman’s job to cook for her household. But as that was mainly how families operated in the 1950’s, I can’t say that Pollan is wrong in including the working woman as part of the equation that lead to a decline in home cooking in America. The other part of the equation, which I’d never really thought about before, has to do with the food industry and the end of World War II. After the war ended, food companies tried to sell American consumers on the magic of processed food, which had been used to feed the troops. Combine a technology that helped create pre-made cooking “helpers,” as it were, with a generation of women who had spent more time in the factories and working because the men were off fighting a war, and it’s really not surprising that we’ve ended up to what Pollan dubs a more “industrialized” approach to food.

But just because our attitude towards cooking shifted, it’s funny that we didn’t seem to want to get rid of entirely. Pollan illustrates this point by telling us about the just-add-water instant cake mixes that stores used to stock. The food industry figured out if they left something for the person making the cake to do, no matter how small (like cracking an egg), it allowed that feeling of ownership, despite not really doing anything to contribute to the end result. We still craved that feeling of accomplishment, however undeserved, and the companies were smart enough to use that to their advantage. And specifically with regards to women, Pollan says this very interesting fact:

In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

So if ALL American women are eating out or getting take-out, we can’t rightly blame the working woman for the entire collapse of American home cooking, though there are some who still cling to that notion.

And on the topic of working, Pollan also brings up an issue which I’ve been interested in for a long time: the concept of overwork. Something that is reaching epic proportions in America, much to the detriment of our workforce and companies (in my opinion), we now work nearly a full month more than we used to in the 1950’s. And that has a direct effect on our relationship with cooking (among other things). Pollan rightly comments that the cultures that still value food and cooking are ones that still have time for it. (I would imagine much of Europe falls into that category, as they still value vacation time. Americans work nearly 9 weeks longer per year than workers in Western Europe, and we get roughly only two weeks of vacation per year compared to Europe’s five to six weeks.) I would gladly cook more if I had the time, and I know I’m not the the only one. (Yes, there are other things I’d do, too, but lots of people enjoy cooking, just don’t have sufficient time for it.) I’m also of the belief that if we had more reasonable work expectations and schedules, we would eat healthier as a nation and exercise more. It wouldn’t fix everything, of course, but with more time, plenty of people would cook more, have time to go to farmers markets to get more natural, unprocessed ingredients, and have time to look for and try new recipes.

Another side effect of overwork is lack of time and energy to spend with family and friends. Cooking is, as Pollan says, an emotional experience. It is a social experience as well. I remember watching my mom cook when I was little, and baking Christmas cookies with her and my brother for years. I remember asking my grandparents about the treats they brought to our house at Christmas. My office has a propensity for potlucks, and there’s always a bit of excitement about what to make and seeing what everyone else will bring. And when I go to see my parents, I admit, I get a little excited when my mom asks what I’m going to cook for them. I certainly get a feeling of accomplishment from cooking at home, but I find it much more gratifying to share my results with other people. I bake cakes when I know I’m going to a larger gathering, because I know there will be people to eat it. I post about my culinary adventures on my blog, often with photos, to share with the few friends who read it, so they can see what I’m up to, and maybe try the recipe themselves.

I’m convinced that having more time to devote to food and cooking would create a much healthier nation on the whole. Aside from the time to try new recipes, cooking more would allow for more social opportunities. I often have daydreams of having fancy dinner parties with friends. While I never go to that extreme, I did try to get a group of friends together to start sort of a monthly cooking club, the idea being that we’d meet at someone’s house once a month, and each person would either cook the whole meal, or we would decide who was bringing what. (Or, if we could, decide on the meal ahead of time, decide who was bringing what ingredients, and then share the task of cooking all together.) The main reason it didn’t work? Time. (The second reason was transportation, since some peope rely on public transportation, and we didn’t all live close enough for this to be convenient.) But there was an interest in the idea. For those with kids, having more time could make cooking a family activity. There are plenty of simple tasks kids could do to help out, and more complicated things older ones could do on their own. (I think it would also give kids much more appreciation for their parents – whichever does the cooking – by helping out, and it could be a valuable way to teach them about nutrition before they get set in too many bad habits.)

This has turned out to be a far longer musing than I’d originally planned, which is why I’m posting it here, instead of simply commenting on Facebook as I’d intended. I realize I’ve summarized the article fairly well, probably because I’ve been noting my thoughts as I’ve gone through it. (It’s a long article, and I was afraid I’d lose the random thoughts I was having while reading, hence the notations.) But if you’ve made it this far, it’s still worth reading the whole NY Times article. Pollan’s points are interesting and valid, and I do appreciate that he bothers to go a little deeper than “Women! Women in the workplace! It’s all their fault we eat frozen meals!” So, nicely done, Pollan, nicely done.

“Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will always remember you. And if you’re in a crowd, you’ll always have some clean air to breathe.”

And the public does remember the humor and the dynamic personality of the six-foot, two-inch woman named Julia Child.

Sadly, the TV chef left us in August 2004, but her influence continues in numerous cookbooks, food videos and soon-to-be released motion picture, Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep.

At the oldest restaurant in the country of France,  Paul Child introduced his new wife to French cuisine with a meal of oysters, sole meuniere and fine wine. Having been raised on hearty New England fare, Julia characterized the dining experience as, “an opening up of the soul and the spirit for me.”

The newly weds both worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when they met.  At first, these two contradictory individuals cared little for each other.

Ten years older than Julia McWilliams, Paul Child, an artist and poet with a black belt in judo, spoke flawless French.  Before the OSS posting, the adventure-starved young woman worked as an advertising copywriter for a New York upscale furniture business, W & J Sloane.

In a letter to twin brother Charlie, Paul, a world traveler, described Julia as “wildly emotional” and  an “extremely sloppy thinker” who couldn’t “sustain ideas for long”.

On the other hand, Julia despaired of Paul’s, “light hair which is not on top, an unbecoming blond mustache and a long, unbecoming nose”.  After a cross-country trip, livened up with 8 bottles of whiskey and 1 bottle each of gin and mixed martinis, the couple wed the following September, 1946.

With Paul’s assignment to France, his new wife’s education in the art of fine food began in earnest.  “I was hooked,” she remarked and soon enrolled in the Cordon Bleu, the esteemed cooking school which has produced Food Network chefs, Giada De Laurentis, Mario Batali and Sandra Lee.

Along with six months of instruction and private lessons with Master Chef, Max Bugnard, the budding gourmet haunted the open-air street markets gleaning food lore from fish mongers, bakers and sellers of fruit.

Not to be left out of the adventure, Paul squired Julia to neighborhood bistros as well as fine restaurants further increasing her knowledge of well-prepared food and its presentation on the plate.

A collaboration with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, over a period of ten years, produced Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume 1. During this time, the Childs were posted throughout Europe and then back to Washington making communication between the three colleagues difficult in those days before e-mail and fax.

Detailed reports of individual recipes, each page typed with six carbon copies, flew back and forth across the continent and the Atlantic throughout the 50s.  Exhausted at one point from the exacting experience of perfecting one-ingredient recipes, Julia exclaimed, “I’ve just poached two more eggs and thrown them down the toilet”.

Clearly, she couldn’t stomach another Salad Layonnaise, a traditional French salad of  curly endive, hot bacon, and a freshly poached egg.

After testing all those recipes, volume 1 was rejected by several publishers for being too much like an encyclopedia.  Weighing in at 734 pages, they weren’t too far from wrong.  But persistence paid off with publicity from The French Chef on WGBH, Boston’s public TV station, the cookbook sold 200,000 copies by 1965.

Imagine those housewives of the early 60s who regularly stocked their pantry shelves with Shake ‘n’ Bake, Redi Whip and Tang reaching for whisks, molds and copper bowls to produce quiche Lorraine, boeuf bourgignon and reine de saba.  Quite a change and all because of a former advertising copywriter.

Recovering from a full radical mastectomy in 1968, Julia dried her tears and threw all her energies into completing volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Rushing from stove to typewriter like a mad hen,” she quipped.

Success from more episodes of The French Chef catapulted Julia from cook to a celebrity.  But Paul’s declining health took away his French and verbal fluency.  From then on, he served as manager, photographer, recipe tester and proofreader leaving the limelight to his adored wife.

Consequently, Julia’s  40-year career devoted to fine food, yielded  an induction into the Culinary Institute of Fame (1993), France’s Legion of Honor (2000) and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom(2003).  In August 2002, The French Chef’s kitchen was welcomed into the Smithsonian National Museum as an exhibit.

Besides being recognized with honorary degrees  from various universities , the distinctive voice and manner of Julia Child have been  parodied on SNL (Saturday Night Live) by Dan Aykroyd,  by Heathcliff Huxtable  on The Bill Cosby Show (1984-1992) and  on Garrison Keillor’s radio series, A Prairie Home Companion, by Tim Russell.

During her 90 plus years, this restless young woman from Pasadena, California, who once cooked up shark repellent for the U.S. Navy during WWII,  grew into an iconic figure  synonymous with fine dining in the kitchens  across  America.