The Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink; edited by David Remnick; ‘Good Cooking’, by Calvin Tomkins

Next up on the essays shelf:

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick

Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age. There are a couple more collections out there that I do not own, sports writing, humor writing, fiction.

I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great, of course.

Total coincidence: Today is Julia Child’s birthday.

A gorgeous and HUGE profile of Julia Child from 1974, by Calvin Tomkins. It is both a biography of her, an interview with her (and her husband, friends, and colleagues), as well as a breakdown of a series of elaborate cooking demonstrations she gave at the Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco. Julia Child was, of course, a celebrity by this point, one of the most famous and recognizable cooks in the world, due to her runaway best-selling The Art of French Cooking, as well as her cooking show on PBS. The cooking demonstration in San Fran had been organized by some women’s league, who had provided a state-of-the-art kitchen for the stage, and did all the shopping for her various recipes. There had been a snafu in the advertising, I think the day was listed wrong, so ticket sales were slow but started picking up. Eventually, she played (or cooked) to packed houses.

Not only is it a great profile of Julia Child, and where she came from, but it is a great portrait of a marriage. Julia’s husband Paul Child was a huge element in her success (and he felt the same way about her, in terms of his career in the foreign service). But once he retired, he devoted his life to helping Julia, protecting her, and making sure everything ran smoothly. They were a team.

I have not seen Julie and Julia (although I am curious), but we had Child’s cookbook in our house growing up, and sometimes I’d watch her show. She always seemed quite LOOPY to me, as a kid, and it felt live, as though anything could (and did) happen. She would lick her fingers, and drop things, make funny comments, and, in general, rule the roost. But it was a WILD show, especially now in our era of highly orchestrated cooking shows and cooking spots on the Today Show where nothing ever goes wrong. In the profile, Tomkins describes the only time Julia lost her temper during the filming of the show. A potholder caught fire and they stopped filming to put it out. Julia was angry, because of course these things happen in real kitchens and home cooks should know what to do. She liked reality.

She sounds like a wonderful person.

There were times, reading the profile, that I actually felt myself getting emotional. Who knows why. I just feel like I have met a rather extraordinary human being.

The story of how she became the American collaborator on a book about French cooking is fascinating. It was the result of ten years’ research and the book they eventually delivered was almost a thousand pages long. Rejected. So she set to work rewriting. Amazing persistence and resilience. She learned to be a good writer. She knew what she wanted to say, she knew what she felt was lacking in other cookbooks (an assumption of knowledge, usually – which beginning cooks often find frustrating), and she wanted her cookbook to be accessible and yet all-encompassing. It was. There’s a great story of Houghton Mifflin turning the book down. Who wants an 800 page cookbook? Another publisher “took the bait”, and Houghton Mifflin watched, in horror and regret, as the cookbook became the best-selling cookbook of all time.

There are so many excellent and informative sections of this long piece, but I’ll excerpt the part about “how it all began”. Paul and Julia Child met while they were stationed in China during WWII. They started dating. It was the end of the war. They all returned home.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick; ‘Good Cooking’, by Calvin Tomkins

Julia’s detachment was scheduled to go to Shanghai, but, with the war over, the unit’s morale was not what it had been. “I felt we’d lost the purity of our purpose,” Julia said recently. “You can see I’m a Victorian woman at heart. Anyway, I decided to go home. They flew me over the hump to Calcutta and loaded me onto a troopship, from which I disembarked, weeks later, smelling, as somebody said, like a cattle boat.”

A reunion took place several months later in Washington. “We had decided that we should look each other over in civilian clothes, and that we should meet each other’s families,” Julia recalls. That done, they were married in the fall of 1946. Julia was thirty-four, Paul forty-four. For the first year and a half, they lived in Washington. The Office of Strategic Services had been discontinued, but OSS people who had been in Visual Presentation were automatically absorbed into the State Department, and Paul was now doing graphic work for the government. Early in 1948, by a happy official stroke, he was assigned to the United States Information Service office in Paris.

France was not at all the way Julia had imagined it. ” I’d never met any French people before,” she said not long ago, “and I thought they’d be – you know, snippy, the way they always seemed in Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue. I was just amazed to get off the boat at Le Havre and see all these great big beefy people. We drove to Rouen and had lunch there at the Couronne, and I was euphoric. I was practically in hysterics from the time we landed. Of course, I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be for me to learn the language. It was two years, really, before I could get along in it, and four years before I was fluent. But from the beginning I just fell in love with everything I saw. It took me a long time to get over my infatuation – now they can’t fool me so easily.”

The Childs found a comfortable third-floor apartment on the Rue de l’Universite, behind the Chambre des Deputes. Paul could walk across the Pont de la Concorde to his office, on the Farbourg du St.-Honore. At first, Julia spent most of her time at Berlitz, struggling with the language. Both the Childs readily concede that at this point her cooking left a great deal to be desired. Paul knew and appreciated good food, but Julia, like many American woman of her background, had never really learned to cook at home, and until she married Paul she had never been interested in learning. In the fall of 1949, though, she was sufficiently interested to enroll in a special early-morning course at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, where she found herself the only woman student – the twelve others were ex-GIs, learning cooking on the GI Bill of Rights. “I would leave home at seven in the morning, cook all morning with the GIs, and then rush home to make lunch for Paul,” Julia remembers. “I’d give him the bearnaise or the Hollandaise sauce I’d just learned, or something equally rich. In about a week, we both got terribly bilious.”

The Cordon Bleu, founded in the nineteenth century, once served as a cooking school for orphans, to help them make their way in life. By the 1930s, it had become a place where well-to-do housewives (many of them Americans) sent their servants to learn the techniques of classic cuisine. In modern times, it has not been a professional school – to become a professional chef in France one has to serve as an apprentice for years in a restaurant or hotel kitchen, and that training is often supplemented by attendance at a government-sponsored technical institution. But the Cordon Bleu hired professional chefs as teachers, and when Julia enrolled, in 1949, the teaching was excellent. Two of the three chefs whom Julia had as teachers were in their seventies: Max Bugnard, who had owned his own restaurant in Brussels before the war, and Claude Thillmont, for many years the pastry chef at the Cafe de Paris. The third was a younger man – Pierre Mangelatte, who was the chef at an excellent small restaurant in Montmartre, the Restaurant des Artistes.

“Bugnard was a marvelous meat cook, a marvelous sauce maker, wonderful with stocks and vegetables, although not so much with desserts,” Julia recalls. “As a young man, he had known Escoffier. Chef Thillmont had worked in the twenties with Mme. Saint-Ange on her great cookbook, Le Livre de Cuisine de Mme. Saint-Ange, now unfortunately out of print. Those two men knew just about everything there was to know. And in the afternoons we would have demonstration classes by Mangelatte, who was a brilliant technician.” Julia had just enough French by this time to keep up with the instruction. Her interest in the subject, she found, was limitless. “Until I got into cooking,” she once said, “I was never really interested in anything.”