Gospel of the Saucepan
Nordlinger, Pia
gospel of the saucepan Julia Child's Conversion of America By Pia Nordlinger Long before pesto came to America—even before penne and sun-dried tomatoes—an odd-looking woman with the body of a...
...In her title, at least, Fitch draws near the answer: Julia Child did indeed have an Appetite for Life...
...It did not prove a promising first step toward greatness: An attempt at Bearnaise sauce congealed into a mass of lard at the table and an unpunctured duck exploded in the oven...
...But then Paul received a diplomatic appointment to France, and of her first French meal—oysters portugaises and sole meuniere—she later declared, "The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit for me...
...But the biographer gets lost in the relentless cataloguing of details and drowns the simple explanation of Child's appeal...
...She was the kind of person who would drop things...
...Fitch hints that Julia would have learned on her own, but that's not quite right: It was Paul, a much more worldly person, who channelled Julia's energetic love of all life into a relish for the good life...
...She wrote in the foreward to a biography of James Beard that during his lifetime "the American people were transformed from dutiful students of 'home economics' to true aficionados of food and wine...
...In November 1962, Life magazine ran an issue wholly dedicated to food...
...Child, however, was hardly unique in decrying frozen dinners...
...The legend of Julia Child was about to begin...
...From her wealthy family's California cooks, her experience of New England food at Smith College, and her haunting of New York's lunch counters after college, she absorbed with gusto the standard American fare of the day: hardy, boiled, and bland...
...Poppy Cannon, editor of House Beautiful and author of The Can Opener Cookbook, once instructed CBS viewers to make vichyssoise from frozen mashed potatoes, one leek, and a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken soup...
...Calls and letters poured into the studio, and in 1963 the Cult of Julia began when The French Chef—the name chosen because it fit local television listings—hit the airwaves...
...Pia Nordlinger is a reporter for The Weekly Standard...
...Enrolling in culinary classes, Child threw herself into cooking—so much so that Paul called himself a Cordon Bleu widower and her devotion made her a favorite student of chef Max Bugnard, himself the pupil of the famed chef Auguste Escoffier...
...Julia Child once said that all she did was "take the la-dee-dah out of sauces...
...Teaching American embassy wives the basics of French cooking, the courses were directed to the "ser-vantless cook" who had to prepare a meal and entertain on the same evening (a concern Child would maintain in all her later work...
...Extolling French cuisine for the common cook, she replaced the perception of eating as nourishment and cooking as punishment with the idea that food exists mainly for enjoyment...
...She graciously failed to mention that the change took place during her lifetime as well—and that she is largely responsible for it...
...The highbrow food writer James Beard declared, "I only wish that I had written it myself...
...But in doing so she changed more than she could have imagined...
...On television, as Fitch tiresomely reminds the reader, Child's six-foot-two frame seemed incommensurate with her subject...
...But then she met Paul Child in China during World War II...
...But Child's imperfections worked in her favor...
...When they attempted a larger work, their publisher suggested that they use an American collaborator...
...Since the show could not be edited, Child said to the camera, "That must be the plumber...
...Laboring with Simone Beck to produce Mastering the Art of French Cooking II, Child stopped filming in 1966, only to return from 1970 to 1973...
...But overwhelmingly the book won lavish praise...
...Dining became more interesting when Clai-borne began his weekly restaurant reviews and wrote The New York Times Cookbook...
...And they were absolutely right to...
...Some people watched for cooking advice, some watched for fun (the mail suggested that small children and non-cooking men were among the viewers...
...The instructions for ceufs brouilles (otherwise known as scrambled eggs) is a perfect example of the attention given to the cooking—and includes one of the most helpful sentences ever to appear in a cookbook: "Nothing will seem to happen for two to three minutes...
...It took eight years for Child to rework for Americans the recipes Beck and Bertholle provided...
...I was hooked, and for life, as it turned out...
...She drew Ivy League wives and Greenwich Village painters—some of whom, Fitch reports, initially thought the show a parody...
...She certainly possessed a zeal for conversion that Americans typically find unappetizing...
...After graduation, she developed a working friendship with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle...
...The odd picture she made seemed even odder when paired with the high-pitched, slightly nasal, almost French lilt of her voice...
...Some reviewers objected to the Americanizing of French classics...
...The truth is that America took to Child first of all because she was messy and made mistakes...
...Something of an artist, an intellectual, and an epicure, Paul introduced his future wife to fine food, wine, and conversation...
...In 1980 she moved to ABC's "Good Morning America" for a wider audience than PBS could provide...
...But the country accepted Child as its teacher because her humor and awkward physical presence seemed somehow to offset her near-religious intensity...
...Armed only with her faith in good food, she set out to save Americans from their culinary sloth and dining depravity...
...Filled with dazzling color pictures and indulging trendier tastes, the books are considerably less significant productions than either volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking...
...Her recipe for cassoulet, for instance, runs six pages while the same dish in Escoffier's traditional French cookbook is only half a page...
...Her simultaneously laughing and sincere approach to the world's most highbrow cuisine has made her a permanent American icon...
...Both found Army food unsatisfying—Julia perpetually hungry and Paul perpetually disgusted—and they hunted out the best local cuisines...
...Watching the mad glint invariably in her eye and the smudge of flour usually on her nose, Americans found her utterly captivating...
...Claiborne went on to claim that the "comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work . . . will probably remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals...
...But despite her only minor advances in cooking, she and Paul were married in 1946...
...gospel of the saucepan Julia Child's Conversion of America By Pia Nordlinger Long before pesto came to America—even before penne and sun-dried tomatoes—an odd-looking woman with the body of a valkyrie and the voice of a pixie turned American cooking upside-down...
...The real cause of the unique success of Mastering the Art of French Cooking lies rather in the fact that Julia Child proved an astonishingly good writer—her elegant prose the perfect vehicle for her endlessly complete instructions...
...Closing the program after more than two hundred episodes, Child went on to create over the next twenty years six further television series, most of them accompanied by cookbooks compiling the recipes and techniques demonstrated on air...
...Recognizing that "If I was going to catch him, I would have to learn to cook," she enrolled in a cooking class upon her return home...
...Beginning in 1961 with her evangelical Mastering the Art of French Cooking, her successful crusade to improve the American palate moved to television with The French Chef in 1963 and continues to this day...
...Her eightieth birthday, in 1992, saw lavish celebrations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles...
...Child's viewers and their affection, however, have only expanded as the years have gone by...
...Born in California in 1912, Julia McWilliams had an early interest in food that extended only to the quantities necessary to fuel her unflagging energy and her growth to a towering adult height of six feet, two inches...
...Insisting that it "must be Frenchy French, though practical for the U.S.," Child sent a typed copy of every recipe to three friends in America for local testing...
...In another, a loud bell rang in the studio as someone needed to use the freight elevator...
...It's possible to overstate the universal badness of American food before Julia Child, but there were no doubt some dark deeds done in the name of cookery...
...The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, with its famous Jell-O molds, was the most influential cookbook until 1931, when The Joy of Cooking made a small step forward...
...Child was invited to the Today Show and to Blooming-dale's to give demonstrations...
...Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book gave way to The I Love to Cook Book...
...I needed better directions...
...The recipe for souffles takes a page just to explain how to beat egg whites by hand: "The glory and lightness of French souffles are largely a matter of how voluminously stiff the egg whites have been beaten and how nicely they have been incorporated into the souffle base...
...In one now-famous episode, she flipped a potato pancake out of the pan and told the audience, "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and no one can see you...
...Their first joint project was a school: I'Ecole des Trois Gour-mandes...
...Her misadventures in the kitchen continued: She describes her try at broiled chicken, "I put it in the oven for twenty minutes, went out, came back, and it was burned...
...One cause of the book's success in 1961 is difficult to recover in 1997...
...Well, he knows where to go...
...The French Chef was not the first television cooking show, but it was the first to hold the attention of the general public...
...When Mastering the Art of French Cooking at last appeared in 1961, it was not without critics...
...About time he got here...
...A few months after the book's initial promotion, Child was invited to an interview on a Boston educational-television program...
...Fitch observes, "The Ladies Home Journal advertised: 'Learn to cook in five meals!'—meaning learn to open tins, pudding boxes, and frozen vegetables...
...Julia Child spent her first thirty-six years as a food philistine and every year thereafter as a gastronomic missionary...
...With Beck, she toured the country publicizing their work and holding classes...
...It was my idea to bring on the whisk and the bowl and hot plate," she recalls...
...A year later she helped found the American Institute of Wine and Food...
...Educational television was just talking heads, and I didn't know what we could talk about for that long, so I brought the eggs...
...In her passion to share her new knowledge, Child decided that this book—unlike earlier compendiums—would explain everything to readers who knew nothing about French cooking...
...Craig Claiborne, food critic of the New York Times, lamented the absence of recipes for puff pastry and croissants...
...Americans were traveling abroad and eating out more often...
...She could become excited, almost hysterical, in the process of teaching, but her burning desire to instruct came across as warm encour-agement—the eccentric charm of someone who wanted to make everyone love cooking as much as she did...
...The New Yorker denounced the use of canned bouillon and salmon...
...I was infatuated with her," her husband's niece remembers from their first meeting...
...Harvard University, Child's neighbor of thirty-two years, awarded her an honorary degree in 1993, and she was featured at the Smithsonian's "Gala Celebration" in 1995...
...Both beating and folding are perfectly simple operations when you know the reasons behind the directions...
...One of Child's most devoted admirers, Noel Riley Fitch, has written a new biography that seeks to account for the triumph of the Cult of Julia...
...In 1982, she stopped writing her column for McCalls in order to became the food editor of Parade...
...In 1961, the country watched agog as Jacqueline Kennedy ensconced a French chef in the White House...
...In 1952, Beck and Bertholle published What's Cuisine in France, a small American edition that achieved little notice...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 14
