Julia Child Rules Read online

  By the Same Author

  FICTION

  Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

  The Diamond Lane

  Trespassers Welcome Here

  NONFICTION

  How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

  The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman

  How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great

  The Stuff of Life: A Daughter’s Memoir

  Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club

  Big Girl in the Middle (coauthor, with Gabrielle Reece)

  FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

  Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

  Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

  skirt!® is an attitude … spirited, independent, outspoken, serious, playful and irreverent, sometimes controversial, always passionate.

  Copyright © 2013 by Karen Karbo

  Illustrations by Mark Steele © Morris Book Publishing, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  skirt!® is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  skirt!® is a registered trademark of Morris Publishing Group, LLC, and is used with express permission.

  Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Maggie Peterson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0066-1

  To home cooks everywhere,

  and to the memory of my mother, Joan Karbo

  It is impossible to be a great chef unless you have a very large soul.

  —RUTH REICHL

  Save the liver!

  —DAN AYKROYD

  Contents

  Copyright

  RULE No.1: Live with Abandon

  RULE No.2: Play the Emperor

  RULE No.3: Learn to Be Amused

  RULE No.4: Obey Your Whims

  RULE No.5: All You Need Is a Kitchen and a Bedroom

  RULE No.6: To Be Happy, Work Hard

  RULE No.7: Solve the Problem in Front of You

  RULE No.8: Cooking Means Never Saying You’re Sorry

  RULE No.9: Make the World Your Oyster (Stew)

  RULE No.10: Every Woman Should Have a Blowtorch

  A Reading List

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  RULE No. 1:

  LIVE WITH ABANDON

  Life itself is the proper binge.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1946, JULIA MCWILLIAMS AND PAUL CHILD drove across America. A bottle of vodka and a thermos of mixed martinis rolled around the backseat of Julia’s Buick. It was a time before air-conditioned vehicles and open-container laws. It was a full year before Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady went on the road. It was ten years before the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act prompted the government to build a decent interstate highway system connecting sea to shining sea. It was twenty-five years before my dad, in a rare chatty moment, offered me this piece of excellent advice: Never marry someone until you’ve driven cross-country with him in a car without a radio.

  Paul and Julia apparently held the same belief, for that’s what this trip was all about: getting the full measure of each other without any interruptions. They’d spent two years together working for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II, and now they needed to see if they could stop being coworkers and start being lovers.

  They’d met in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Resort-like Kandy, set amid emerald-green hills and tea plantations on a balmy subtropical plateau, was possibly the most peaceful place in Asia. The environment resembled an ongoing fraternity mixer, if the fraternity was comprised of scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, military strategists, and cartographers, every weekend a flurry of cocktail parties, dinners, cocktail parties, outings, cocktail parties, sightseeing, and cocktail parties. Even though they were both single and the setting was ripe for romance, Julia and Paul just weren’t that into each other. There are opposites, and then there are opposites in a parallel universe.

  Julia was a strapping California “hayseed,” her favorite self-descriptor, a freckle-faced redheaded party girl and prankster whose personal motto at Smith College had been Less Learning, More Moonshine. The only time she felt inspired to improve her mediocre grades was when she learned that seniors who maintained a B average could keep a car on campus.* Her taste in men ran toward “he-men,” tall, broad-shouldered guys who were manly in an obvious, golf-playing, hail-fellow-well-met, Southern California Republican sort of way. Paul Child was not this guy. He was too old (forty-two to her thirty-two), too short (five foot nine to her six foot three), and not much of a golfer.

  Paul was a different kettle of fish: complicated, sophisticated, a painter and photographer, a lover of food and wine, who preferred his women small, dark, brilliant, complicated, and sophisticated.* He found Julia girlish, immature, excitable-verging-on-hysterical. Privately, which is to say in letters to Charlie, his identical twin, he disparaged her awkward virginal quality. Paul was a veteran of numerous love affairs, flings, and dalliances. Before joining the OSS he’d shacked up for years with Edith Kennedy, an erudite woman twenty years his senior. In matters of amour, Paul Child was as French as it was possible for an American man to be.

  Paul and Julia headed north and east: San Francisco; Crescent City; Bend, Oregon; Spokane; Coeur d’Alene; Billings; Flint, Michigan; tucking into Canada for a few days; Rochester, New York; then finally, after nearly a month, Lopaus Point, Maine, where Charlie and his wife, Freddie, had a cabin overlooking the Atlantic.

  They stayed at crummy motor courts with thin mattresses and thinner walls, slurped down phlegmy eggs at roadside cafes, lingered at dive bars, where Julia plopped herself down on the stool and knocked back whiskey with the locals, who gaped. How tall is that woman anyway? No matter. She was used to it. People had been staring at her for her entire life. When Julia wasn’t behind the wheel, she stuck her long legs out the passenger-side window, her toenails painted loose-woman red. She was a thirtysomething spinster at a time when the median age of marriage for women in America was twenty-one.

  Before the trip, Paul worried in letters to Charlie that Julia would be prudish and alarmed by the demands of desire. But Julia was a big woman of even bigger appetites. As she would admit in a letter to her friend Avis DeVoto several years later, “Before marriage I was wildly interested in sex.” Yes. Julia. Wildly interested in sex.

  To think of the two of them pulling up to some lonesome high-desert motel (cue the tumbleweeds) in the big Buick, Julia hanging on Paul’s shoulder, giggling, barefoot, while Paul secured their room key from the suspicious clerk who scowled as he got a whiff of their martini-infused breath and rocketing hormones, is to get a glimpse of her rebellious spirit, her complete lack of regard for anything resembling conventional behavior or, God forbid, rules. She despised rules, and her lifelong way of dealing with them was, in any given situation, to neglect to know them. A simple, elegant solution.

  Charlie and Freddie’s one-room cabin at Lopaus Point sat at the end of a rutted sandy path, and when Julia and Paul arrived, they had to park the Buick in town and drag their suitcases through the dense woods to get there. Even though it was high summer, the wind was cold enough to give you an ice-cream headache after a short stroll along the r
ocky, forbidding beach. The cabin had no electricity, indoor plumbing, or interior doors. Charlie, his wife, Freddie, and their three teenage children slept in the cabin’s only room, and when Julia and Paul arrived, they joined them.

  Another woman (me) might have objected to the rustic situation in which she found herself. She might have poked her beloved in the ribs and said, “Tell me I did not drive all the way across the country to pee on the freezing beach behind a piece of driftwood?” Even allowing for the fact that Paul and Julia were now drunk on love, sex, and premixed martinis, Julia would have had every reason to do such a thing, having spent idyllic summers at a beach house in Santa Barbara, where the winds were calm and orange blossom–scented, the ocean tranquil and inviting, and the house plumbed.

  But Julia was a devotee of anything that was risky, difficult, and had the potential for catastrophe. All the high-wire cooking she would do on The French Chef decades later, the boiling of live lobsters, the flipping of omelets, was par for the Julia course. She craved adventure and made it a point to find it wherever she could.

  Living in close quarters with the people who meant the most to the man who meant the most to her was Julia’s idea of a terrific time. So much could go wrong! So many nerves could become frayed. So much truth about people’s genuine nature could be revealed. Still, Julia was fearless; her tactic was to unload both barrels of her entertaining, charismatic Julianess upon the unsuspecting Childs. She made up funny songs with the kids, fashioned hats for them out of strands of seaweed and bits of broken shells, cooked alongside Freddie, chopped wood and cleared brush with Paul and Charlie.

  The Childs marveled. It was the summer of 1946, remember. People didn’t drive cross-country, much less fly cross-country. It took a lot of effort for a Californian to wind up in a tiny town on Mount Desert Island, Maine. “Out West” really was out there, and the very East Coast, progressive, intellectual Childs hadn’t spent much time with Julia’s species of westerner—hang loose, raucous, outspoken, with a boundless appetite for novelty. A woman who played each day as if it were a piece of jazz. She whistled while she worked, and she worked as hard as any man. She didn’t care that the cold salt air turned her red curls into frizz, or that she was forced to hand-wash her clothes in a pot heated over an open fire. Not only that, and on a completely different topic, they noticed, or at least Charlie did, that she had the longest, most beautiful legs in the world.

  As the vacation drew to a close, Paul and Julia announced their engagement. Because Julia was practical as well as unconcerned with propriety, and because it was 1946, a time when, celebration-wise, weddings had more in common with Sunday brunch than with a multimillion-dollar Hollywood blockbuster in 3-D, they set the date for As Soon As Possible, September 1.

  The day before the wedding, Paul and Julia were in a head-on collision with a runaway truck. They saw the brakeless truck barreling down on them, and Paul tried to swerve, but it was hopeless. They were both thrown from the Buick. Paul hit the steering wheel, Julia the windshield. On her way out the passenger-side door, her shoes were knocked clean off her feet, and her last memory before passing out was that she needed to hang on to those shoes—she loved them, and pretty shoes in her size were so hard to find.

  The next day, they were married anyway. A picture from the happy day shows Paul leaning on a cane and Julia looking slim and feminine in a short-sleeved suit with a scalloped, ruffled hem and belted waist. The dinner roll–size wad of gauze taped to her temple does nothing to detract from her serenity and happiness.

  The story of the Childs’ courtship is my favorite verse in the epic Song of Julia, the part that occurred a few years before that fateful day in November when the angel Gabriel visited her at the restaurant in Rouen, bearing a plate of light, lemony, delicately sautéed sole meunière, and the message that she would go forth and deliver an entire nation from Jell-O molds jazzed up with pineapple and green beans.

  It’s the “before” Julia, the California hayseed in her natural state, roaming the world as a single giantess, never passing up an opportunity to engage people, get a little smashed, and have a good time. Julia loved life, even before it started going her way. She had no idea when she married Paul Child that she would score a trifecta: a divinely happy marriage, a career that would both fascinate and challenge her for the rest of her days, and the achievement of fame and glory. She was just being Julia, living with her customary abandon. For those of us who have a complicated relationship to food, a somewhat tortured on-again-off-again love affair with cooking, who don’t automatically thrill to the question “What’s for dinner?” every morning upon waking, who sometimes wish we could just hook up an IV for a week and not have to deal with it, the Julia without the apron is the simplest, least complicated Julia to love.

  My own affection for Julia is more complex than that of the average home cook. For one thing, I’m not the average home cook. I am the below-average home cook. I have a few “signature” dishes (stuff I can make without pulling out a cookbook), but otherwise I am a mere recipe follower, and despite some serious attempts throughout the years, I cannot seem to elevate my game. Every new recipe I try becomes simply another recipe I know, not the gateway to deeper understanding. I’m like a Japanese pop star who can sing an entire show of English songs without speaking the language, or like the algebra student I once was, who can memorize enough equations to pass a class but is still unsure why I’m solving for X. When in doubt, which is about four nights a week, I fall back on roasting a chicken and steaming some broccoli.

  Just so we’re clear.

  HOW DO WE LOVE JULIA? LET US COUNT THE WAYS

  Julia is the one true god of modern American cooking. Before Julia (B.J.) it was all cheap, overcooked pork chops suffocating beneath a glop of tepid Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup; After Julia (A.J.) it was Rôti de Porc Grand-Mère with a zippy little Chardonnay.

  God-fashion, she is everywhere. Every time a cook avoids shortcuts, Julia is there. Every time someone is trundling her cart down the wine aisle and thinks, “I’m going to give this Schloss Gobelsburg Gobelsburger Rosé Cistercien a shot!” Julia is there. Every time you toss in another dollop of butter in lieu of the more heart-healthy alternative, you’re cooking with abandon, the Julia way. Every time you hop on the scale after having cooked with abandon, and cuss at that ever upward-creeping needle, the name you’re really taking in vain is Julia’s.

  When was the last time you heard or said “bon appétit” and didn’t think of Julia Child? Come to think of it, who in America has said “bon appétit” in his or her normal voice since about 1964?*

  Oh, I know. History is full of exceptional chefs who were committed to educating Americans about the glory of good eating long before Julia Child came along. Chefs who were more exceptional than Julia,† and who also had their own cookbooks and TV shows. James Beard comes to mind. Actually, he’s the only one who comes to mind, as every other good, hardworking, dedicated cook has been thrust into the deep shadow cast by the massive klieg light that was The French Chef.

  My theory is that our real attachment to Julia is less about her cooking, or even about what she did for the cause of serious cuisine, and more about our admiration for her immutable aptitude for being herself. Julia’s real genius wasn’t in breaking down the nine million steps in cooking a mind-blowing beef bourguignon, or assembling a thousand-page cookbook,* but in having the confidence to stand in front of a camera, week after week, without trying to change one thing about herself.

  Is there anything more radical or attractive? A woman who’s not particularly pretty, who’s as tall as a man and has a voice like a cartoon character, but who, nevertheless, lives in her own skin with self-assuredness and joy?

  During her time at the head of the culinary pack, she certainly had her detractors. In 1966, the year Julia was christened Our Lady of the Ladle on the cover of Time magazine† and made the leap from best-selling cookbook author and popular star of a cooking show on educational TV to
Most Famous Chef in America, a lesser-known Frenchwoman named Madeleine Kamman, who’d also graduated from Le Cordon Bleu, and who had slaved away in the kitchen in the bowels of a one-star French restaurant and was technically better trained than Julia, sniffed loudly and publicly that Julia was neither French nor a chef. Cantankerous food historian Karen Hess, who made a name for herself by being against celebrity cooks, elite foodies, people who knew nothing about food, and everyone who wasn’t her, told David Kamp, author of The United States of Arugula, that she thought Julia was a dithering idiot.

  I’m sure there were others. Julia may have ushered in the Age of Cuisine in America, but foodie infighting has been around since at least 1765, when a certain Monsieur Boulanger opened the world’s first restaurant in Paris and was promptly sued by a local food guild, claiming his single menu offering of sheep’s feet in white sauce violated their right to be the only group in town licensed to serve cooked food.*

  Every generation imprints on a slightly different Julia. The first knew her as the serious, exacting author of the exhaustive Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One, while its younger sisters grew attached to the slightly goofy cheerleader known as “The French Chef,” first in black and white, then in color. The Julia of the late 1970s was the one immortalized in Dan Aykroyd’s iconic Saturday Night Live impersonation; her resultant vaguely Monty Pythonesque reputation had no hope of being rehabilitated by the short, perky spots she did on Good Morning America and the often awkward cooking shows that never quite lived up to The French Chef. There was a half decade or so near the end of the twentieth century when she fell off the radar. Then, Julie Powell, a girl in a dead-end job looking to give her life meaning, single-handedly engineered a Julia comeback by cooking and blogging her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking*. Her Julie and Julia, which served as the inspiration and template for Nora Ephron’s movie of the same name, reintroduced Julia to a whole new, hip home-cooking crowd.