Julia Child’s 100th Birthday on Aug. 15
I’ve got to admit, I never watched any of Julia Child’s cooking TV shows. I was too busy playing with Barbie dolls and “secret agent” or making mud pies. Like Julia, I didn’t get into a cooking career until I was in my 30s.
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We had cement work scheduled for our yard, and in the chaos an egg would get splattered if left on the driveway. I chose the hottest place I could think of — my car. I put one outside on the roof of the car, and one inside on the dashboard, with foil underneath each.
It was about that time that I got a call about Julia Child. She was free for an interview within the next half hour. It was unlikely my chance would come again.
I was flustered. Besides the cement work outside and the eggs cooking on my car, I was re-arranging my kitchen cupboards, and cans of food were piled in boxes. There was no time to do research and think up brilliant questions. But, would I rather clean my cupboards, watch an egg cook, or talk to Julia Child? It didn’t take a home ec degree to answer that one.
I dialed the number, and when a deep voice on the other end said, “Hello,” I introduced myself and started to ask for Mrs. Child.
“Oh, yes, they said you’d be calling me,” the voice answered.
I was startled. “Oh, you’re Julia Child? You answer your own telephone?” I blurted out.
“Yes, don’t you answer your own telephone?” she asked.
“Yes, but I’m not Julia Child,” I answered.
Having committed that gaffe, I told her I saw her kitchen at the Smithsonian. (She donated it to the museum last year.)
“Oh, how were they coming with it?” she asked. “They were so persnickety about having to write down every little toothpick and all. I just left everything as it was.”
My mind raced back to her “junk drawer” from the kitchen exhibit, whose contents included a champagne cork, a World War II- issued signaling mirror, a comb and lipstick. I realized this culinary queen fairly down-to-Earth. I asked all the things I’d wondered about — does she use a microwave? (Yes.) Does she like other cuisines besides French? (Yes.) Is she into organic food (No — “I like very fresh, good food, but I don’t go in for the organic stuff.”
If someone uses her recipes, she said, “I would consider it a compliment, if they give me credit. If they don’t, well, that would be one of those things.”
After the interview, I checked both eggs, and they were actually dried more than fried. Perhaps the aluminum foil didn’t let the heat get through. Or maybe, my car just wasn’t hot enough.
What if I’d asked Julia’s advice? Sure, she answers her own phone and had a kitchen junk drawer, but her idea of cooking eggs usually involves whisks, copper bowls and omelet pans.
But now, we’ll never know. Julia’s nearly a year older. The weather’s cooling down, and I’m running out of eggs.
This movie is making me really hungry!” my 18-year-old daughter whispered to me during an advance screening of “Julie & Julia.”
It’s about two women: TV chef Julia Child and blogger Julie Powell, who spent a year cooking and writing about every recipe in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
Although reviews of the film aren’t allowed until the movie opens Friday, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that there’s a lot of good food featured in it. I half-expected the concession stands to sell hors d’oeuvres instead of popcorn.
Now I know how sports fans feel when they watch a movie “based on a true story” about their favorite team. You know just enough behind-the-scenes details to annoy those around you with all your comments.
I’ve interviewed Julia Child, read her memoirs, cooked from her cookbooks and met key players in her career. So if you leave the theater hungry to learn more about Child, who died in 2004, here are some of the “back stories” and books that will tell you more:
The spy: Young Julia McWilliams worked in a spy network during World War II, a forerunner to the CIA. She was posted in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) where she met her future husband, Paul Child.
The Anne Frank connection: Child’s book was rejected by several publishers before Judith Jones, a young editor at Alfred E. Knopf, helped her hone it into a user-friendly tome. Jones had a knack for picking winners. Another book she rescued from the rejection pile was “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
Last year I met Jones, now in her 80s and a senior editor at Knopf. She regaled the Association of Food Journalists with stories from her own memoirs, “The Tenth Muse” (Anchor Books, $14.95, paperback), which would also make a great foodie movie.
Child’s opinion on the blog: Julia Child was nearing 90 when Powell embarked on her project and became aware of it. In a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly, Jones said she and Child read Powell’s blog together, and that Child didn’t consider Powell a “serious cook.” She was also put off by Powell’s language.
“Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn’t attractive, to me or Julia. She didn’t want to endorse it,” Jones said. “What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt.”
Yet, Child told me in her interview, “I’m always interested in young people who are considering food as a profession, because you’re with people who love what they do.”
Behind every successful woman: Child credited a lot of her success to her husband. He encouraged her, was her chief taster and didn’t shy away from manual labor.
When Child’s first book came out, she launched a do-it-yourself cross country tour to promote it. She would demonstrate a few dishes for ladies’ groups, then sign books. Meanwhile, Paul Child would wash the pots and pans for the next demo, sometimes in a restroom sink or a bucket of water if there were no kitchen facilities.
Backstage with Barr: A few years ago I had lunch with Nancy Verde Barr, a chef and assistant to Julia Child for 24 years. Her fond memories are shared in “Backstage With Julia: My Years With Julia Child” (Wiley, $14.95).
Barr tells how Child got them a table in an exclusive restaurant, not by dropping her own name, but by calling her hairdresser whose brother was a dishwasher there. Among the memorable quotes she shared: “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”
The Smithsonian: During my interview with Child I mentioned that I’d seen her kitchen that she donated to the Smithsonian.
“Oh, how were they coming with it?” she asked. “They were so persnickety about having to write down every little toothpick and all. I just left everything as it was.”
That included the “junk drawer” whose contents included a champagne cork, a World War II- issued signaling mirror, a comb and lipstick.
And her husband had drawn outlines of each pot and pan on a pegboard wall, to make it easier for guests to help put them away.Would Julia Child make it on today’s food TV shows? I wondered this as I viewed a three-disc DVD set called “Julia Child! The French Chef” (WGBH Boston, $39.95).
The first disc is a biography, with clips, photos and commentary by people such as Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine; Boston chef Jasper White; and Judith Jones, the editor who talked publisher Alfred Knopf into publishing Child’s first book, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”
There are some fun anecdotes from Child’s youth, as well as the tale of how she met her future husband, Paul, while working for the Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during World War II.
He remarked in a letter to his twin brother that she was “a sloppy thinker” and that her “gasping and giggling” mannerisms got on his nerves. But gradually, they fell in love. A couple of things stand out in the DVDs: Child was not a natural-born cook. She didn’t know her way around a kitchen until she was well into her 30s, and she had to work at it. And her greatest champion was Paul, a sophisticated gourmet who encouraged her attempts to cook, write her first cookbook and to pioneer the first TV cooking shows.
I was reminded of a telephone interview I had with Child a year before her death in 2004. She told how she and her co-author, Simone Beck, embarked on a do-it-yourself tour when her first book came out. They went from city to city, demonstrating their recipes to interested groups. Then, while they received their audience and signed books, Paul Child washed the dishes.
The other two discs contain 12 episodes of Child’s PBS television series “The French Chef,” some in black and white. There’s not a lot of glitz or glamour. Child is unpretentious, energetically slapping around huge hunks of raw beef, pounding butter with a rolling pin to soften it, and putting her whole body into hand-beating egg whites in a copper bowl.
With her matronly height and warbling voice, how would she fit in with today’s carefully scripted episodes?
She didn’t have the sophisticated air of Martha Stewart, the beauty of Sandra Lee or Giada di Laurentiis, the “Bam!” of Emeril or Rachael Ray’s perkiness.
Some of her attention-getting attempts seem a bit amateurish — clanking two frying-pan lids together like cymbals when she compared coq au vin and chicken fricassee or doing a riff on the Three Bears when showing loaves of brioche.
But the shows are packed with solid, timeless information. You see step by step how to make such classics as quiche Lorraine, pot au feu and petits fours.
Thanks to “Saturday Night Live” and other parodies, the public often assumed Child was a klutz. But watching the shows, you realize she’s actually very nimble on technique — cracking and opening an egg with one hand without ever losing any bits of shell in the bowl, or skillfully using a pastry bag.
I never saw Child’s shows when they originally aired; I was a kid and probably too busy watching “My Three Sons” or “Leave It to Beaver.”
But I recently had an e-mail conversation with Marge Aten of Clinton, a Deseret Morning News reader who regularly watched Child. I asked her how Child’s shows compared to today’s crop of TV chefs.
“Give me Julia Child any day,” Aten said. “She was a great cook and entertaining to watch.”
And she paved the way for everyone who followed.