Backstage with Julia Page 9

  Me with Brad and Andrew in Julia's kitchen.

  Brad and Andrew were four and two years old when I began to work with Julia, and books by Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and several other child-rearing experts shared shelf space with Irma Rombauer, Jacques Pépin, and Julia Child. I pretty much had weaning, toilet training, and separation anxiety down, but I was in search of the absolute, definitive, no-fail method of instilling self-confidence in children. Julia abounded with a secure sense of self and a can-do attitude. I wanted the same for my boys. So I asked her how she got like that.

  On a visit to Julia's, three-foot-tall Andrew took an entire roll of film of her that never captured anything above her waist.

  "My mother thought we could do no wrong," she answered immediately, referring to herself and her younger siblings, Dorothy and John, who like Julia grew to be over six feet tall; Mrs. McWilliams liked to say that she raised eighteen feet of children. "She was always telling us we were special. When you hear it all the time, you can't help but feel good about yourself." From that moment on, I never missed an opportunity to tell my boys that they were the best, and today, at twenty-nine and thirty-one, they are!

  Perhaps it was Mrs. McWilliams's enthusiastic cheerleading, maybe it was all genetic, but Julia was special, and her uniqueness came wrapped in all that self-assurance. No wonder she was able to inspire passion in at least three generations of amateur and professional cooks; along with each technique and morsel of French cooking, she served up a generous helping of confidence.

  "Have the courage of your convictions," she told her audiences. "If I can do it, you can do it." And we believed her. We were like Mrs. McWilliams's eighteen feet of children—we could do no wrong. If, perchance, we did make a mistake, it didn't matter. "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen." Long before Nike made it a call to action, Julia gave us the message "Just do it!" In New Haven I would soon realize that she wasn't just talking about flipping potato pancakes, crepes, and omelets; she was talking about dealing with life.

  We arrived at the theater early in the morning on a glorious fall day. A historic old port, this particular section of New Haven had all the weathered charm of a classic New England dockside market, where vendors sold food from burlap bags and wooden boxes. That day there was a farmers' market in front of the theater. For me, the produce of fall outshines that of any other season, including the much-touted summer offerings. Plump purple eggplants, deep green and brilliant red bell peppers, long and narrow pale green frying ones, lush plum tomatoes, and lacy Italian parsley all scream, "Cook me!" The brilliant display was not to be ignored, and Julia, who admitted that some of her fondest memories of France were the outdoor food markets, did not intend to.

  We strolled the stands pinching, sniffing, admiring the wares, and chatting with the vendors. Julia told me that talking with the vendors was her favorite part of visiting an open market. After assuring us that his plump, perfect eggplants had been picked just that morning, one vendor directed our attention to the food shops that lined the wharf.

  "Best meat in the country," he told us, pointing to an Italian market behind him.

  "We should go in," Julia said, already striding toward the store.

  Busy at work, carefully arranging cuts of meat in a display case, were the owners, a middle-aged Italian American couple who were as proud of their store as they were obviously surprised and delighted to see Julia walk into it.

  "Why, that's just beautiful," Julia said, admiring the well-marbled steaks, neatly sectioned chicken parts, long ropes of sausages, and tied roasts.

  "Thank you," the man said. "We cut and prepare all our own meat and make all the sausage, sweet and hot, right here." He invited us into the back room where they hung the meat ready to be cut and then showed us into another room where the sausage was made. Julia was like the proverbial kid in a candy shop, and on the way back to the theater she told me that she could be content being a butcher; the whole business of meat fascinated her. That was probably why she was so visually descriptive of meat cuts on television, pointing to her own body parts and moving her arms about to show how some parts became tough with use and needed long, slow braising while other parts remained relatively unused and would be tender enough for a quick sauté.

  The format for the Long Wharf demonstration was much the same as it had been in Providence when I met Julia: Liz sitting and organizing, Paul keeping track of time, and Julia, Marian, and me prepping all day for an evening's demonstration. Lunch would be on the set, and I expected that some eager volunteer would arrive with a favorite dish. But at about eleven o'clock, Julia spoke up. "What should we do about lunch?" There was some muttering, and then she decided, "Why doesn't Nancy fix us lunch?"

  I'm sure I must have hyperventilated or at least blanched. If they are honest, most chefs who find themselves having to feed Julia for the first time will admit that the mere thought of it is enough to obliterate everything they ever knew about food and cooking. Over the years, many told me so. I'd known that eventually I would prepare a meal for her, but I always expected that it would be at home, and that I would spend days shopping, cooking, and fashioning frilly paper booties for the bone ends of rack of lamb. To cook spontaneously for Julia Child, let alone Marian, gave me the same feeling I had during those dreams when I walked into a final exam and I hadn't read the text or attended a single class.

  "What would you like to eat?" I asked, hoping my tone conveyed that I would fix whatever she liked and not the feeling of "why me?"

  "Something good. You decide," she responded.

  I looked around at what was available. We had plenty of staples—eggs, flour, butter, a variety of cheeses. My mind began to entertain a frantic jumble of possibilities. Maybe a quiche or a soufflé . . . but would they be as good as Julia's or Marian's? Maybe just a good old egg salad. I had enough eggs to make mayonnaise, and what's better than homemade mayonnaise? Would Julia think that was too simple?

  Then it occurred to me just to fix something I wanted to eat, and I immediately knew what that was.

  "I'll be right back," I told Julia, grabbing my purse and running out the door. I went back to the meat market first to be sure they still had some of the sausages they'd been making that morning. I left with a plump package and then stopped at the outdoor market for peppers, garlic, onions, tomatoes, and parsley. Back on the set, I prepared my nonna's sausage and peppers, a dish I could make with confidence, with my eyes closed, and without stopping my prep work for the evening's demonstration.

  "This is delicious," Julia said, genuinely relishing the standard Italian fare.

  Her delight with it encouraged me to admit my initial total lack of confidence in my ability to cook for her. "You know, I was very nervous when you asked me to make lunch. I almost couldn't do it."

  She looked at me with a warm twinkle in her eye and told me, "I knew you could." At that moment I had a sense of what it had been like to be one of Mrs. McWilliams's children. More than having the ability to do something, having the confidence in that ability, the courage of your convictions, is what makes it happen. Whatever confidence I have in myself today is mine, but Julia set it in motion, and I've never forgotten that. In the acknowledgments for my first cookbook, I wrote, "In her [Julia's] ever practical and endearing way she simply assumed that I would do this—and do it well."

  For Julia, having the courage of your convictions also meant being willing to speak those opinions frankly. That same positive outspokenness, which appealed so to her audiences, was visibly deflating in person. I found that out before our New Haven demonstration, when we visited the meat market. When Julia was admiring the meat in the display case, she commented on the quality of the delicate white veal.

  "It's real veal and not all that small cow people are feeding us," she said.

  "That's right," the owner said. "I buy the animals whole and cut them up myself."

  Sure enough, when we went into the meat rooms, there were the carcasses of several small calve
s hanging on meat hooks. I still don't know why I said, "Poor babies," when I saw the tiny animals, but I immediately regretted it. Julia turned straight toward me and with a stern look and a raised index finger said, "That is unprofessional!" I blushed. "They wouldn't be born if they weren't meant to be eaten," she added firmly.

  "I know," I said, and I did. I had no problem with veal at all. It was a staple in my home growing up. My grandfather owned a meat store and cut up calves just like those. My comment did not express any underlying aversion I had to veal; it was just a foolish muttering, I suppose, to say something. Julia's direct reproach took me by surprise and embarrassed me. But that was the end of it. She spoke her mind, and the next time veal came up, she made no reference to my previous remark or seemed even to recall that I had said it.

  Julia spoke just as directly to others who worked with us, whether it was to challenge a comment she thought was unfounded or to interrupt an improper technique. It was just her manner and she usually accented her stern words by raising her index finger, turned out in a stop motion, in front of her chest. In restaurants she was bluntly honest about the food she was served. If it wasn't right, she said so, and I always felt sorry for the waiter or chef who offhandedly asked her how everything was when something was not as it should be. "Well, it's not good at all," she would reply, and then would proceed to explain exactly what was wrong with it—in one way or another as I discovered during that same New Haven trip.

  Our demonstration had ended late and we were all desperate to find someplace where we could sit and quietly eat dinner. We found a nearby family eatery that boasted of large steaks and real baked potatoes.

  "Perfect," said Julia, leading us to a table and immediately ordering the largest steak on the menu and a baked potato. When the meal came, Julia took a large mouthful of potato slathered with butter and made a face.

  "Ugh. It's sweet!" At first I thought she meant that she had been served a sweet potato by mistake, but I leaned over the table to peek in and could see that hers was white like everyone else's.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  Marian, the vegetable expert, explained it to me. "When potatoes stay too long in storage, the starch begins to turn to sugar."

  "It makes them sweet and unappealing," Julia added, just as our very young waitress came to the table to ask how everything was. Julia told her that the sweetness of the potato was unacceptable, and just as I had done, the waitress looked at it, saw it was white, and didn't know what to say, so she left to get the manager. He was only slightly older than our waitress, and in a gesture too grand and serious for his age, he knelt down next to Julia. I think he even laid his hand patronizingly on her arm. "Is there a problem, Mrs. Child?"

  "The potato is sweet," she said, and for the third time someone looked into the vegetable to see what color it was.

  "I don't understand," he said.

  Julia was obviously finished with having to explain. She asked him to open his mouth, and when he did, she shoveled a large forkful of potatoes into it. "Here, taste it," she said. I'm not sure he detected the offending sweetness. It was impossible to know if his shocked expression was a response to the taste of the potato or to being spoon-fed by Julia Child.

  Having the courage of one's convictions does require, of course, that you have a good fallback strategy if your convictions turn out to be wrong. I don't know if Julia uttered those words for the first time on television during the infamous potato pancake show, but I remember them best from that episode. She said them just before she started to shake the pan so the potato pancake would jump up, turn over, and flop back into the pan. But it didn't; it landed on the stove in front of the burner. Julia's fallback strategy was to pick up the pieces, put them back in the pan, and admit, "That didn't go very well." She didn't beg the cameras to stop so she could do it again, she didn't complain that someone had given her the wrong pan or the wrong potatoes, and she never expressed even the remotest sense of agony that she had flubbed up in front of an untold number of viewers.

  Whether it was flipping a potato pancake or something life-altering, Julia had a remarkable ability to put her mistakes behind her and move ahead. She refused to get all twisted up about something that she couldn't change. It was done. Over. Move on. It wasn't that she didn't learn from those mistakes; she did. But once she decided what had gone wrong and why, she dropped it and refused to dwell on the consequences or belabor whose fault it was. "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" were not in her vocabulary. A reporter once asked her, "What is your guilty pleasure, Mrs. Child?"

  "I don't have guilt," she responded, and she did not. Moreover, she did not expect that we should either. And that was a beautiful thing, because I had my share of flubs that made me cringe and it was good to know that Julia would make light of them and not banish me to the dishwashing station. Not even when I single-handedly trashed one of the most beautiful covers for Parade magazine did she blame me.

  Parade was my initiation to food photography on a grand scale. Each of the articles occupied four center pages of the magazine and contained several recipes and plenty of full-color how-to photographs. The cover was a knock-'em-dead full-page photo of all the recipes that followed. Each production session required a week's worth of work and a large team. I served as executive chef and Marian as co–executive chef when she was on the East Coast, and together we supervised a kitchen staff that consisted of one or two assistant cooks and a dishwasher/cleaner-upper. When Julia wasn't upstairs in her office writing the recipes that we would prepare, she was part of our kitchen team. Liz was there, of course, organizing the schedule and making certain that we had what we needed—from her stool. When a shoot called for a pan that we didn't have but she did at her home across town, she crossed her legs, put on her glasses, and phoned for a taxi to go to her house, collect the pan from her son, and drive it back to Irving Street. When I answered the door, there was a rather confused taxi driver asking if someone was expecting a pan.

  Someone of course had to take the photos, and our East Coast photographer was the delightful, keen-eyed, and oh-so-easy-to-work-with Jim Scherer, who had worked with Julia before on the cookbooks that accompanied her Julia Child & Company and Julia Child & More Company books. Parade's art director, Ira Yoffe, and senior editor David Currier joined us for the week and we all fell madly in love with both men. They were excellent at their jobs, great at fostering and maintaining a team spirit with everyone, and—probably what made us love them most of all—they ate everything we fed them with the appreciative appetites of hungry teenagers after lacrosse practice.

  Rosie Manell in Julia's kitchen in France.

  Because Julia wanted the look of the food in each issue to be consistent, she asked Rosemary Manell to work with both the East and West Coast teams, and so I met the "official food designer" for the first time. Rosie and Julia's friendship began in the 1940s, when Paul Child worked with Rosie's late husband, Abe. About ten years younger than Julia, Rosie was almost as tall but with a much larger physique, and she lumbered with slow, plodding steps around the kitchen. She had a great long mane of white hair that she pulled back into a ponytail with a rubber band. She eschewed makeup, wore sensible shoes, and was not into clothes, as Julia was. Paul called her "earth mother," and I thought of her as an aging hippie.

  Rosie had a fine artist's eye, knew exactly what look she wanted to create for the covers, and was so fastidious and exacting about getting there that we all learned to stay out of her way when she was creating. It was her painting, and we didn't mess with it. Had she not been so open to our good-natured teasing about her fussiness, her rigidity might have spoiled our fun.

  She, Ira, and Jim collaborated to create some astonishingly artful and often award-winning covers—but they took a great deal of time. For each session, they cleared out Julia's large dining room and swept yards of colorful cloth onto the floor, which became the photo's background. Atop that, they constructed a virtual collage of the food we cooked, and then they accented it
with decorative serving pieces from Julia's large collection.

  All that did not happen in a one-two-three motion. Ira often tried several colors of cloth for the background before finding the one that he felt best complemented the food; Rosie chose and rejected a series of dishes; Jim checked and rechecked the lighting, opening and closing blinds and moving his lights around the room. During this setup phase, we used stand-ins, just like movie stars use stand-ins to frame a shot, but ours were look-alike food dishes that resembled the real ones waiting in the kitchen.

  When the stage was set, they called for the food, but it would still be a long time before we were finished. In the days before digital camerawork, taking a magazine photograph was not the simple snap-edit-and-upload it is today. First Jim had to take several Polaroid pictures to check the lighting, positioning, and multitude of other I-haven't-a-clue-what details that food photographers check with such tedious and meticulous care. All food photographers. I've never worked with a food photographer who was speedy, and Jim was no different. That is how food stylists got so popular in the first place: after a lovely, glistening chicken had sat for hours and endured endless moving hither and yon into position, the photographer would remove his frowning eye from the lens and announce, "That chicken looks dull." The stylists then pulled out a trusty basket of tools and sprayed, brushed, oiled, and blowtorched the glow back onto the bird.

  So, to return to my story about trashing the cover, on that day, the subject of the article was a summer wedding lunch, and the design team had transformed the dining room floor into a captivating flurry of pink lace and romance. But Rosie wasn't satisfied.

  "We need something else," she said. "It needs more celebration."

  "How about the Baccarat champagne glasses?" Julia asked, referring to two exquisite crystal glasses she'd received as a gift the day before.