The foodie nation has hundreds of celebrities, but only one is cooking`s most visible and dedicated teacher, home cook advocate, respected
intellectual-and gastronomic bad girl.
Julia Child, who turns 80 on Saturday, will slip into the octogenarian decade with ”the magic of an icon,” says longtime friend Anne Willan of La Varenne cooking school in France. ”She`s become folklore.”
That has made her public property to anyone who so much as peels potatoes.
Her multi-trademarked style always will be remembered for outrageous statements about food terrorists, the now-infamous propane torch used to caramelize a dish, the roast pig that refused to be carved and defending her mistakes on live TV as good teaching.
It`s possible the media will hound her about turning 80 for years. Already the celebrations have begun.
One took place July 27 in Washington, when the national chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food, which Child co-founded, honored her at a party. Another is timed to her actual birthday, with family gathering in Vermont next week. Yet another will be a bash by WGBH-TV in Boston, which produced her shows since the Emmy award-winning ”The French Chef” took off in 1963.
Putting up a fight
”At first, she wouldn`t have any part of it, not even to admit that she`d be 80,” says Russell Morash, producer and director of 170 of Child`s programs and who continues as her producer today. ”We`re going to get dressed up and go to a fancy hall and hear some speeches. She reluctantly has agreed to come.”
Of course she put up a fight but Child is, in her words, ”a natural ham, which I think always helps,” she says. She`s not going to miss this fete.
”I`ve never resisted anything in my life,” she balked. ”I`m going to be 80 years old and I can`t do anything about it.”
Child`s contributions to the world of food and cooking are as enormous as the field itself. Encompassing seven cookbooks, television as a primary medium for food, the inspiration behind hundreds of food careers, the transformation of cooking into a respected profession in America and a gastronomic scholarship, Child`s impact on cooking surpasses the kitchen range and digs deeply into the core of the food id.
When her manuscript for ”Mastering the Art of French Cooking” crossed the desk of editor Judith Jones at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing firm in 1959, it already had been rejected by a major publishing company. ”It was the book I was looking for all my life,” says Jones, who has remained Child`s only editor.
At the time, Jones says, people treated cooking as drudgery. ”Food was like sex. You didn`t talk about it. Along comes Julia and says cooking is joyous, sensuous and fun.”
Jones sees two aspects to Child`s contributions. ”Teaching was infused with her genuine love of cooking.” Through the pages of ”Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Child introduced Americans to French classicism. She wrote with intelligence, and as Willan says, expressed herself in a way that was rare in food.
”It turned cookbooks around,” Jones says. ”It was because of the little things-browning the meat, bringing out the aromatics, the way you put it together.”
Media savvy
Napa Valley winemaker Robert Mondavi, who has known Child about 30 years, sees her contributions the result of savvy communication. ”She paired relative simplicity with enormous media coverage.”
The story of her first television appearance and how it transformed her into PBS` brightest star is legend-and began, of course, with a cooking lesson. She had managed to get herself on a book show on educational television with the unheard-of literary achievement of a cookbook.
”I had taken a phone call for a colleague from this asthmatic voice that wanted a hotplate,” remembers Morash. ”I said I`d be very happy to pass on the message, madame, but it`s highly unlikely for our book-review host to cook on his show.”
Highly unlikely doesn`t mean no. Child cooked her omelet from what Morash then termed the black art of French cooking. She was such a hit on the book show that he asked her to do the pilot for ”The French Chef.”
When it premiered, Child was 52.
She presented a nurturing persona without being grandmotherly. She was neither frugal nor galloping-no gimmicks, except the gimmicks. With Child, there was no questioning the historic grounding of her recipes. But the delivery-breathless from years of smoking, and biting, from an I-
can`t-help-myself wit-elevated her from one more boring set of hands boning chicken to a woman who transcended the mere putting together of ingredients into excitement, creative activity and entertainment.
Humor is key
”Julia`s style is loaded with humor,” says Mondavi. Almost immediately, she attained the impossible meshing of comic and credible elements. She wielded sabers to carve chicken and donned a pith helmet to feign squab-hunting.
”Her humor makes her even more believable,” says New York Cooking School president Peter Kump, whose background is in theater. ”The essence of a short one-act is that you have a character get into a jam and get out of a jam,” Kump says. ”The plot`s always the same. Julia has in front of her something she`s trying to do, and then there`s a problem and she just blithely solves it in a way people can relate to.”
Child`s genius lies in a comedic management, of knowing when to avoid perfection. ”One of her assistants told me one time Julia shot a scene that had gone just fine,” Kump recalls, ”but she asked to reshoot it-to wait for something to happen, for a human element.”
”That`s the way life is,” Child says, ”and that`s certainly the way cooking is.” If it addles you to make a mistake, she assures that cooking is not an exact science. ”If you don`t know that, then you`re going to have a terrible time and you`re going to be unrealistic.”
Behind the original mishaps and gaffes was money, or too little of it to reshoot. But keeping the slips in a performance has become a way of puffing up students` self-esteem. ”If everything turned out perfectly all the time, they`d be intimidated and think they were stupid,” she says. Since the beginning, Child`s message has been the same. Its simplicity, combined with sheer continuity and repetition, took hold of cooks as well as people barely on culinary footing.
It boils down to this: ”To teach people to cook, and the pleasures of cooking and eating, which is the main thing,” Child says.
Thoughts on terrorism
Her enjoyment of food and drink are unabashed and only rarely cause for apology. Those who would undermine her right to a good meal that might include cream, butter and maybe some veal have seen what it`s like to be on the wrong side of her barbs against her only enemy. She calls them food terrorists, places them in the category of cultists, then rebukes cultism.
In 1986, she told John DeMers, then of United Press International: ”I hate vegetarians, and I hate health food.”
”I shouldn`t have said that,” she says now, mildly regretting the comment. Why not? ”Because I got quoted! There was some fallout-disappointm ent, resentment.”
Last year she told a Northern California writer that she thought food terrorists were partially insane. She chuckled when she found out no one objected. Her editor, Jones, concedes that sometimes Child can be too frank, but that such statements come from the gut. ”Why shouldn`t she say what she believes?” asks Jones. ”She`s earned the right to speak up.”
While Child has influenced the approach to food by the public, she also has had an effect on food professionals.
”I would not have a career if it were not for Julia Child,” says Mary Risley, proprietor of Tante Marie, one of San Francisco`s most profitable cooking schools. ”How I learned to cook was reading her books and watching her shows. I started teaching with little formal training. I got it all from Julia Child. She paved the way for hundreds of cooking teachers like me.”
Alan Tangren, a 10-year cook at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., feels much the same. He was a meteorologist when he cooked his way through
”Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” He says it gave him the foundation to get hired by Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters without Waters making him unlearn bad habits.
Tangren finally met Child at the Robert Mondavi Winery, where she appeared for a cooking weekend, and he was part of the kitchen support crew.
”I wanted to tell her everything-badly,” says the soft-spoken Tangren.
”She was so busy, all I had a chance to blurt out was that I had always wanted to meet her because I had cooked my way through her cookbooks. It wasn`t very satisfying. But she came to the restaurant about five years ago, and I had my picture taken with her. It sort of completed the circle for me.” She finds it difficult to take all the credit. ”I opened the door for them,” Child says, ”as France, itself, did for me.”
Commitment to scholarship
Those who know her only as an infectious cooking personality may not realize that Child`s commitment to the scholarship of cooking is equal to her insistence that we cook at all. ”People not in food think of people in the field as just cooking,” she says. Her array of time-consuming intellectual pursuits have changed the underpinnings of America`s professional food life. She has donated 2,500 books, papers and manuscripts to the library of gastronomic literature at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University and Radcliffe College, which focuses on women`s issues. It is the largest cookbook collection in the country.
As co-founder in 1981 with Mondavi of the AIWF, she literally sought to advance the quality of life through food and drink. Today the organization has 33 chapters and 7,000 members internationally. ”It was a dream very similar to the dream for her book,” says Chalmers.
She put herself in a leadership position of preserving the James Beard house in New York as a culinary meeting place. Most recently she produced the idea for a master`s culinary program at Boston University, now in its second year.
”She`s always pushing forward the young people, young chefs,” says Jacques Pepin, one of the program`s faculty members. The curriculum has less emphasis on actual cooking to instead bore into advanced nutrition, culinary history, food sociology/anthropology, aesthetics, marketing and
communications.
”I remember when she said she looked forward to the day when people would go into the culinary arts as a profession, and their parents would be just as proud of them as if they`d gone to law school or medical school,”
says Kump. ”She is dedicated to it as a serious discipline, art and profession, not just a craft.”
Turning 80 will not daunt her schedule. Upcoming is yet another PBS series highlighting American chefs she hand-picked-Alice Waters, Dean Fearing, Jim Dodge, Nancy Silverton, Bradley Ogden, Wolfgang Puck, Chicago`s Charlie Trotter and more-with Child as moderator (or as some might say, modulator).
Titled ”Cooking with the Great Chefs” and still in the funding stage, each episode represents a master class. ”They`ll be teaching, not showing off!” Child says. ”And I`ll be what I always wanted to be-Mrs. Alistair Cooke. Ha!”
Accolades, credit and gratitude are expressed to her endlessly in language that is sometimes as syrupy as two-parts-sugar-to-one-part-water. She remains publicly humble, but recognizes her place is from on high. As much fun as she`s had in her gastronomic life, she has no doubts about what she`s left in her wake.
”This wonderful world of food is really a serious art form,” Child says. ”It takes every ounce of intelligence that you have, and creativity as well.
”I think that`s what I was able to translate down to people.”
