The first time I really took notice of a stove was when I was staying a block away from the Great Beach in San Francisco. The stove happened to be the only place in the cottage where - by climbing on top of it - you could get a view of the ocean.
The second time I took notice of a stove was in 1969, when the
San Francisco Examiner hired me to be the assistant food editor, which tells you in exactly what esteem food was held, even in San Francisco, in those days. I was 22 years old and single. I could boil a hot dog. I had recently moved to California from Washington, D.C., where I had worked at the
Washington Post. A reporter named Carl Bernstein took up the collection for my farewell gift, a Ronson Slimline cigarette lighter. It was, in many ways, appropriate as a memento mori. I had recently set fire to my oven in Georgetown by putting a lamb chop in the broiler, closing the door, and retiring to the living room to watch the evening news while my dinner cooked itself.
Responding to a noise from the kitchen, I rushed in, and heard my lamb chop being engulfed in flames. I picked up the phone and dialed
O."Do you know how to put out a fire in an oven?"
"I'll call the fire department."
"No, PLEASE!..."
A minute later, I heard the sirens. A huge hook-and-ladder screeched to a halt in front of my row house. The next-door neighbor ran over, pulling up his pants as he dashed in. Four firemen ran into the kitchen, trailing their hose through the living room. The one with the fire hook leaned down and slid open the broiler door. There it was, my lamb chop, dark brown and licked dead-center by a tiny one-inch flame.
He looked at me over his shoulder.
"Hell, lady, it's done just right!"
"Do they know about the lamb chop?" my ex-roommate's boyfriend asked when I called to tell them about the new job. My boss at the
Examiner, blessedly ignorant of my adventure with the DCFD but cognizant of the fact that my favorite meal was french fries and ketchup, promptly enrolled me in Joyce Goldstein's California Street Cooking School. Joyce would go on to open a fabulous restaurant, Square One, at the leading edge of the San Francisco food boom. But for now, she taught French cuisine with a smattering of haimish Brooklyn. We learned to make boeuf bourguignon, and pate laced with cognac and schmaltz. We ate everything we prepared, every week, and I cherished every morsel. I, who had learned to make Jell-O instant pudding at my mother's knee, fell in love with the mousses, the pale-green frozen one with the perky little tinfoil collar, and the unctuous chocolate one that we cooked on the stove.
I decided to throw a dinner party. The evening began so well. I made a salad and mixed up the vinaigrette per Joyce's recipe. The boeuf bourguignon's sauce was the color of borscht, but the dining room was candlelit and nobody noticed. Then came dessert. Unable to choose between mousses, I'd made both. I froze strawberry mousse in crystal goblets. It was so hard that when my date dug his spoon in, the crystal shattered. The chocolate mousse wobbled in its big china bowl. It never managed to set itself up. Henceforth it became known as the mousse that poured.
I was, in short, always better at writing about food than cooking it, and in that regard I am totally different from Nora Ephron, as well as Julia Child.
I have all of Julia's cookbooks and all of the books
about Julia. I love
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I rifle through it a couple of times a year. But unlike the Julie of Ephron's 2009 movie,
Julie and Julia, based on Julie
Powell's book about cooking from that cookbook and then blogging about it, I'll bet I've cooked fewer than 10 of Julia Child's recipes. It's funny how even people who don't cook much or well, like me, have so much invested in Julia Child - her show, her cookbooks, her imitators. Even eminent foodies like Michael Pollan have invoked her to tell us how far we've fallen from cooking at home.
I met Nora Ephron in 1972. We were in Los Angeles for the Pillsbury Bake-Off. Nora arrived late, harried, and famished. She plopped down next to me at the press conference. "Is there anything to eat?" she hissed. I offered her my apple and she took a bite. It was not, as current hagiography would have it, small and tidy. I filed a story about the Bake-Off. Nora, for
Esquire magazine, wrote "Baking Off," a brilliant evisceration of cooking contests and the misguided, undereducated, unemancipated women who were sucked into competing in them.
Sometime later, I was invited to a San Francisco Press Club dinner for Julia Child. We had cocktails in a little room, just a dozen or so people. I was surprised at the small turnout for the tallest person in the room. "Let's go," someone called, leading us down a hall to a room containing a long table with a curtain in front of it. We trooped in and sat down. I was fairly smashed. Suddenly the curtain flew open and there, below us, were hundreds of people seated at round tables. Later I realized that the rest of the dais could have had a food fight and nobody would have noticed. They were watching Julia Child eat. But that night, sitting up there was totally unnerving. Between bites, Julia told tales of live TV, charming the throng, never more so than when she denied dropping that chicken. Wine flowed freely. Julia was making jokes.
Suddenly I noticed that the little man seated on my left was scowling at me. "You're holding your wine glass wrong!" he snapped.
"What do you mean?"
"You should always hold a glass of white wine by the stem," he said. My fingers were curled around the bowl.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Paul Child," he said. "Julia's husband."
Our conversation grew slightly warmer, but Paul never really looked happy except once, when Julia said something that made me laugh. "You're really enjoying her, aren't you?" he asked me. "Of course," I gushed, full of good cheer.
"I'll make sure you talk with her later," Paul said. And he did.
Julia and I sat in a corner of the empty banquet room after the dinner was over and killed a few more glasses of wine and some cigarettes. I have little memory of our conversation. Some of it was about her book, some of it was about
The French Chef, and some was about how I was thinking about doing something else, somewhere
else. She was my mother's age, but she felt like a contemporary. She understood what I was saying. She understood restlessness. And she gave me wonderful counsel: "Stay in
food!" she trilled, and I can hear it as if it were yesterday. "The food world needs more eager, intelligent, attractive young women like
you!"
A half-dozen years later, I stood, teeth chattering, at Julia Child's side door in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was two below zero and I had just flown up from New York to talk with her for
Newsday.
"You poor
thing!" she said, ushering me into the warmth of her kitchen. "You must be
frozen! You need a nice toddy!" It was almost lunchtime, and the smell of rye bread wafted from the oven. Julia uncorked a Wente Brothers Grey Riesling, and we drank it while she finished fixing our lunch: the crusty, savory bread, for which she and her assistant had been testing the recipe; a big bowl of soup - a clear chicken broth that she cooked on her six-burner Garland range, with beautiful little vegetables, including tiny tomatoes Julia had peeled herself - and a salad that included an incredibly green-and-yellow avocado, hardly commonplace in the Northeast in the 1970s. Paul came in, looking positively cheerful, and the three of us sat down.
Julia acted as if she had nothing at all that she wanted to do more than hang out at the long table in the center of the Cambridge kitchen, eat, drink wine, and answer my questions. She was so busy, and yet she had all the time in the world.
She amazed me then and she amazes me now. She got knocked down by male chefs at the Cordon Bleu, but also by a female gatekeeper. She was a trailblazer on the tube, reinvented herself as her abilities waxed and waned with age, and kept working almost up to her death at 91.
Cooking, as the cliché goes, is very creative. But it's also about learning the truth. It's about calculation. It's about pleasing the people you're feeding and about pleasing yourself. For Julia Child, a woman of independent mind, uncommon warmth and endless curiosity, treating food well was a way of treating people well.
When it was time to go, she and Paul gave me a copy of their new cookbook,
Julia Child and Company, signing it with their names and a little heart, because it was Valentine's Day. It wasn't until I read her biography that I knew about the Valentines with the photo of the two of them in a bubble bath that they sent to their friends for the holiday, and I really knew nothing of their sexual frequency until I saw Ephron's movie. Frankly, I prefer to think of them as I last saw them together, shoulder to shoulder, with Julia reaching down teasingly to pat Paul on the top of his head, and Paul standing on tiptoe to give her a kiss.
Recently, I visited the Smithsonian. When I saw Julia Child's kitchen, a few miles and 40 years from where I set fire to my lamb chop, it made me cry.
About the Author
Freelance writer Janice Berman lives in Palo Alto, California.
Read her blog at
www.janicedance.com.
