“IT’S REALLY A VERY EASY RECIPE”
INTERVIEW WITH MARTHA DEANE
THE MARTHA DEANE SHOW
OCTOBER 1961
MARTHA DEANE: It’s 10:15 in New York, and this is Martha Deane, and good morning everybody. And again, I’m glad you’re with us because our guests are two interesting women who live in various places and travel in various places and cook in various places, and the kind of cooking they do…we all should be able to cook like that.
And now here are Julia Child and Simone Beck, the two authors of the superb cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I’m delighted to have the both of you on the program. Good morning.
JULIA CHILD: Good morning.
DEANE: Mrs. Child, I thought you might like to tell our listeners about this book in a general way. Some of the things you were telling me were that, really, it’s a book of French cooking, but it’s for the American cook, and it’s for the woman who doesn’t have servants.
CHILD: It’s also for men too. It’s for anyone who really loves to cook and likes to eat and does all their own cooking and serving, and we’ve tried to make it absolutely foolproof so that every recipe is supposed to work. Because I think in some books you feel that you’re dumb if the dish doesn’t come out the way you’d like it to, but our feeling is that in that case, it’s the book that’s bad. And these are all supposed to—well, they all do work because we’ve tried them out ourselves, and all of our pupils have.
DEANE: They’ve been tried out many times on many people.
CHILD: Many times.
DEANE: Madame Beck, tell our listeners that wonderful story about the number of times you try out recipes, and usually on your husband first, and then you try them out on other people, I gather.
SIMONE BECK: Well, my husband has very good taste, see, so sometimes when I am not sure of myself, well, he has to taste. So three times, four times, six times, then I think, Now it’s okay, but still you must work again. So I do it again, and at the end of the week, he says, “Well, never give me another—another dish the same because, you see, now I have had plenty.” [Laughter]
DEANE: Well, one of the fine recipes in the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking is the scalloped potatoes with cream.
CHILD: Yes.
DEANE: And you told me before we started broadcasting that your husband ate scalloped potatoes with cream every day for six days.
BECK: Every day. Every day!
DEANE: And the seventh day, he said it was all right?
BECK: Yes, and now you can do the recipe. So, once it was okay, I sent it to Mrs. Child, and again, she tried it to see if it was okay for her. See? That’s why the book could be, I think, good, because I think the recipe was all taste. I don’t know how many times each recipe was tried and tried again.
DEANE: When I think of poor Mr. Beck over seven days with scalloped potatoes and cream, I’ll bet he has not looked at a potato or a bit of cream since.
CHILD: Probably not. [Laughter]
DEANE: Now, Madame Beck said that she then sent the recipe to you, Julia Child. So maybe then this is a good point to tell us about your collaboration and how you two met and what happened. And then you’ve also mentioned somewhere along the line running schools, plural. So let’s talk first about the collaboration, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and then we can talk about the schools later.
CHILD: Well Madame Beck and I met about…heavens, in 1950, I think it was. We had a mutual friend who knew that we were both very much interested in cooking.
DEANE: Was this in Paris?
CHILD: This was in Paris. We were living there at that point. We lived there for six years.
DEANE: Your husband was in the diplomatic service.
CHILD: Yes, he was. He was at the embassy in Paris. He was running exhibits. And we don’t have any children, and I’ve always liked food, so I went to the Cordon Bleu. And at that time, the GIs had the GI Bill of Rights, so I joined a class at the Cordon Bleu starting at seven in the morning. And I went there for about six months, and after we’d made chaudfroid de poulet and homard à l’américaine about six or eight times, I felt that was enough, and I wanted to do something else. And just then, I met Madame Beck and we really fell into each other’s arms. She was interested in doing a French cookbook for America, and I was beginning to think that might interest me. And then, we had some American friends who came over to Paris, and they wanted to learn cooking, so I think within two days we started our cooking school, L’École de Trois Gourmandes. And it went on all the rest of the time we were in Paris. And then when we moved to Marseille, Madame Beck and Madame Bertholle kept on with the cooking school in Paris. And then finally when my husband and I moved to Washington, I established a branch there. And then my husband was moved to Norway as cultural attaché, and I started a cooking school there, L’École de Trois Gourmandes. And Madam Beck has always had hers in Paris. And now…
DEANE: And she still has it.
CHILD: And she still has it. Wherever either of us are, we always establish a cooking school.
DEANE: Well, you establish a school just like that?
CHILD: Well, it’s very easy, I’ve found, to do. All you do, you get some prospective customers, and you ask them over for lunch. And I have a lunch that I always give them, which is a little—I give them a little pâte à choux with chopped mushrooms and cream and a little Madeira in it and then a poached egg and a sauce béarnaise and that always slays them. And then we have a lovely cake of Madame Beck’s chocolate almond cake. It’s one of the best cakes I ever ate.
DEANE: I read that recipe in the book.
CHILD: We have that for dessert, and then after that, I have as many pupils as I want.
DEANE: They all say, “We want to learn to make these.”
CHILD: Yes, mm-hmm. That’s all.
DEANE: And where do you start cooking then?
CHILD: Well we’ve—
DEANE: I think of a school as having, you know, a special stove and a special—
CHILD: Well, I have a rather special kitchen. It’s nice and large, and I have a restaurant stove, and if the pupils came and cooked there then they’d say, “Oh, well, I won’t be able to cook at home because she has all this fancy equipment.” So I’ve found it’s better for people to gather in their own group, and then we go from house to house each week. We go to someone else’s house, and they’re cooking on their own stove. And then we always have a delicious lunch with a little wine, and it’s a great deal of fun because they’re cooking with the people they like. It’s much more fun all around.
BECK: And you get to say—
CHILD: Excuse me? What?
BECK: You’re counting their utensils.
CHILD: I always go in and inspect the kitchen first.
BECK: Yes, see how it is.
CHILD: If they don’t have the utensils they need—we need—I bring them along in my big French shopping bag, which is right over there. Usually their knives aren’t sharp, so I always bring a lot of knives along.
DEANE: You make a big point of that in the book. Keep the knives sharp.
CHILD: Well, you can’t do anything with a dull knife.
DEANE: This is very important for the cook, isn’t it?
BECK: Yes, well it’s important for everything. Without a sharp enough knife, you don’t cut properly. You cannot cut properly.
CHILD: And there’s lots of cutting in French cooking, you’ve got to learn how to do it quickly. That’s the dog work. For instance, if you were an apprentice cook in Paris, you usually would start out at fourteen. You’d spend two years learning how to prepare vegetables, cutting, doing all the dog work. But you don’t have to spend two years learning it.
BECK: No.
CHILD: As a person, I mean, I learned it in about two weeks of just hard work. Or how to flute a mushroom. That takes a little while. Finally, you get on to how to do it. But you have to do all these things quickly, or you just spend so much time on it that you’re not getting to the actual cooking.
DEANE: How do you flute a mushroom?
CHILD: Well, you hold the cap of the mushroom in your hands with your thumb on it. And then you have a very sharp knife, which you hold rigidly, then you turn the mushroom against the knife and it takes off just a little flute, or edge.
DEANE: The trick is in turning the mushroom rather than the knife.
CHILD: Yes, you start at the crown and then you rub the mushroom against the rigidly held knife. But the knife has to be sharp.
BECK: Very sharp. The corners. Very sharp.
DEANE: That’s wonderful. I’m so glad I asked.
CHILD: [laughs] Well, it’s not difficult. When you first do it, it doesn’t seem the right way to do it. But you learn that it is the right way. That the mushroom is cutting itself against the knife. And it’s very pretty.
DEANE: That reminds me of something else in the book. The trick there obviously is to move the mushroom and not the knife.
CHILD: Yes, exactly.
DEANE: In a wonderful recipe for a cake, I don’t have it in front of us, so I’ll see if I can remember which one. I think it’s one of the orange cakes. Anyway, chopped almonds are put all around the sides. Am I right? Now, you stop me—I’m just trying to remember. And instead of sprinkling the almonds on the cake, or, you know, dropping them around the edge, you put them in a pan after they’ve been slivered, chopped—what do you say, slivered?
CHILD: Pulverized. Powdered.
DEANE: And you hold the cake.
CHILD: Yeah.
DEANE: And roll it against the almonds.
CHILD: You hold the cake in the flat of your hand like that, and then you just brush the almonds against it.
DEANE: Rather than just sprinkling them on.
CHILD: Not so…if you did it in a plate, then you’d get almonds all over, and then you’d have to put on a decoration of leaves to hide the mess you’ve made. Well, if you hold it in your hand, you can just slip it on.
DEANE: But I noticed a great many things in there. Maybe that’s what’s been wrong with me. A great many things are just done the opposite of…
CHILD: Well, these are all of the French professional and chef techniques. And they’re much easier, and they have to do things the easiest way.
DEANE: Now, Madame Beck do you teach cooking in Paris the same way Mrs. Child does, going to people’s homes?
BECK: Exactly the same way because we are working together, and of course it would be the same way. We teach, you see? Young girls and sometimes not so young and even older, old women. Doesn’t matter. They even can learn at sixty, even seventy years old. It doesn’t matter if they want to learn something.
DEANE: Women who’ve decided they’re tired of the cooking they’ve been doing and just want to get better?
BECK: Well, sometimes—
CHILD: They want to have fun too.
BECK: Sometimes they have no servants, no cooks, so they say, “Well, one day, I must know how to do something properly,” you see. So even if they’re old, they will do it themselves.
DEANE: Now, Mrs. Child just said something interesting—this is for people who want to have fun. And that’s really the point of the whole thing, isn’t it? Let me do a shopping list I brought along, and then let’s start right there of why you said this is for people who want to have fun.
DEANE: Our guests are Simone Beck and Julia Child, the two authors of a superb cookbook, as I told you, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And just before I interrupted with that shopping list, Mrs. Child, you had said this is for people who want to have fun. And I think I said that’s the point of the whole thing of being a good cook, isn’t it, because if you don’t enjoy it and don’t like it, it’s very difficult to be a good cook. And certainly very difficult to do French cooking, isn’t it?
CHILD: I think, too, that you enjoy it much more if you know what you’re doing. If you’re sort of at sea and don’t really know quite how to do things, you can’t enjoy it. For instance, I sew terribly, and if I ever took some lessons, I might like it, but to me, sewing is just agony. But I think with cooking, you have to have instruction and training so that things are going to turn out properly. Because if you have one failure after another, you become psychotic, don’t you think?
DEANE: Well, I guess so.
CHILD: [laughs] I guess so? Madame Beck seems to agree with you. [Laughter.]
DEANE: The important thing, though, that I ought to bring up is that a great many American women, American cooks, are sort of scared of this French cooking, a little frightened, I suspect, of the title Mastering the Art of French Cooking, because most of us think of this as being very much more difficult than our cooking. And early in the book you warn against shortcuts so it does take more time.
BECK: No, not more time, really. I don’t think so. If you know exactly, if you read the recipe very carefully. I think it’s not more time.
CHILD: I would agree, I don’t think it’s more time.
BECK: I think the end result is so magnificent that you—
DEANE: Well, I guess the reason I bring that up is that a lot of sayings in this country now seem to me geared to time saving. Everything is, as you know, “Do it this way because it saves time.” And then, “Do it that way because it saves time.” Frankly, I don’t know what people will do with all this time they allegedly save, but it does, don’t you agree, it does seem to be kind of a—
CHILD: Depends on what you like to do. If you like to play bridge, you like to spend the time on it; if you like to cook, nothing is too much trouble. Unless you have eight children and laundry and something else to do, then you probably wouldn’t do a very complicated meal. But if it’s your pleasure, if it’s like going out to play golf, you love to do it, and you want to do it well.
DEANE: Now let’s talk about some of the specific things in the book. I think our listeners might like to hear some of the things you’ve written about buffet suppers, for example, because from now on to the holidays, a great many people entertain a great deal, and buffet is a nice way to do it and, sometimes, an easier way to do it. And I like some of the recipes you give for buffet suppers ever so much. I think that sometimes people get so tired of the roast turkey and the baked ham on the buffet table and would like to do something else. And indeed you’ve done some wonderful things, such as the beef stew in red wine, which, you say in the book, would be good for buffet suppers.
CHILD: Oh, excellent for buffets. One of the good things about it is that you can do it, well, two days ahead of time, and it just is steeping in its wine and sauce. It picks up flavor and is just even better if you do it ahead.
DEANE: Do it two days ahead and put it in the icebox.
CHILD: Perfectly well, and then it just needs a little reheating up until it’s hot through. And the chicken, the coq au vin, same thing.
DEANE: Same thing. Chicken in red wine.
CHILD: What do you think about the veal scallops and cream and mushrooms?
BECK: I think it’s a very fine dish. And so easy to—
DEANE: For a buffet?
BECK: Yes, why not? And it’s very easy to do.
CHILD: Of course, veal is rather expensive. If you wanted to save money, you might want to do something like chicken, which is always inexpensive, such as a cold chicken and lemon jelly. And that’s very easy. There’s no browning or anything like that.
BECK: I think that’s marvelous. Anybody can make this dish.
CHILD: And you can use an old hen if you want.
BECK: An old hen, an old guinea hen, an old pheasant, yes?
CHILD: Or just an old hen–type hen.
BECK: An old hen type, yes. It’s a wonderful, wonderful dish.
DEANE: That’s an old hen–type hen. That’s our Mrs. Child isn’t it? [Laughter.]
CHILD: Well, as for other inexpensive things, lamb stew is very inexpensive too.
DEANE: Now we better sort of do one of these. Let’s see, let’s tell them. Do you want to talk? Do you want to do the chicken and lemon jelly? Do you want to talk about that?
CHILD: Why don’t we talk about the beef stew one because everyone seems to like that?
DEANE: All right, beef stew and red wine.
CHILD: Beef is the most popular meat, isn’t it?
DEANE: Yes, I think so. Now, that one’s on page 315 in case everybody’s looking for its place. I want you to know that each of us has her own cookbook right here this morning. I have paper clips on mine but you all found yours first.
CHILD: This recipe covers a page and a half. This is large print of course, but you find after you’ve done it once, you’ll probably never have to look at the recipe again because it’s very simple. All you do is brown the meat, and you’ll note it’s interesting that very often American recipes, if you’re going to brown the meat, you flour the meat first and brown it, but that’s not French. For the French browning, you’d have to dry the meat, and you brown that first, and that gives a particular flavor to the meat.
DEANE: But you dry the meat first.
CHILD: You always have to dry it because you have to let the fat out, the meat dry, or nothing’s going to brown. It’s just going to stick to the bottom of the pan. So it’s really a very easy recipe, but we’ve given it many details so that you don’t miss something like drying the meat. But once you’ve done it, you really wouldn’t have to look at the recipe again. You might forget about how many cups of things, but for this kind of a recipe, doesn’t make too much difference how many cups of wine or bouillon you have. You always taste the sauce after you’ve done it, and you add whatever else is necessary.
DEANE: Now, I’ve noticed that all through the book, you’ve recommended doing all kinds of stews in the oven rather than on top of the stove. Do you always do that, Madame Beck?
BECK: I always do it.
CHILD: But you don’t have to, do you?
BECK: Of course not. But I think it’s easier for a housewife who is doing something in her house. By putting a covered casserole in the oven, she can do what the kids are doing and come back. She can do it carefully, you see. Her cooking is going very slowly. It won’t burn.
CHILD: That’s what they call the mijoter, or simmering. That’s very French country household cooking.
BECK: It’s very easy.
DEANE: But you do all kinds of stews. All the meat and the chicken and the fowl.
CHILD: But you can do it on top; it just means you have to watch it a little bit more, unless you have an absolutely regulated top. But you have to have a very heavy casserole on the top because in the oven you have enveloping even heat, so it really cooks a little quicker and more evenly in the oven than it does on top, but you can do it either way.
DEANE: So you can do that for twenty or thirty people a couple of days ahead?
CHILD: Oh, sure.
DEANE: And that would really take care of the supper.
CHILD: Oh, yeah. And if you wanted an easier one than this, the beef bourguignonne is one that’s called a civet. Oh, it’s the daube. You just put everything in the pot and just cook it. It doesn’t have as fine a taste, but it’s an awfully easy and nice one to do. So if you’re in a hurry, all you need to do is cut up all your vegetables, and you roll the meat in the flour, and you put it in layers in the pot, stick it in the oven, and that’s it. The daube is very easy.
BECK: Same way.
CHILD: One thing about the care that you take in making the beef bourguignonne is that it makes it one of the best beef stews there is. The daube, as you find when you make one and then the other, is awfully good, but it doesn’t have the sophistication of the bourguignonne.
BECK: And when you know how to do the beef bourguignonne, you know how to do the coq au vin. It’s exactly the same way. Stick it in red wine.
DEANE: It’s the same recipe.
BECK: Same way, how to do it.
CHILD: In other words, once you’ve learned one, you can do any kind of a stew. Probably not a mackerel stew. [Laughter.]
DEANE: Mackerel stew? This is rather revolting.
BECK: A fish, exactly. A Spanish dish.
CHILD: The idea doesn’t sound very good. [Laughter.]
DEANE: I go along with you on nearly everything, but you bring up these things that I don’t go along with, and I’m just not going to play.
CHILD: All right.
DEANE: You better tell about cold fowl and lemon jelly. Because Madame Beck thinks that is obviously one of her favorite recipes of the book.
BECK: Yes.
CHILD: She developed it. It’s her recipe.
BECK: It’s my recipe because one day, my husband brings some old pheasant—an old partridge—home, and he asks what can I do with it, you see, to make it good. And I think this is a wonderful recipe, you see, because even with an old pheasant, even with an old partridge, or even an old guinea hen, you can have a wonderful cold dish with lemon jelly. Because with some olive oil, you cook, you see, and it goes in the flesh. Lemon slices—
DEANE: You cook the old fowl in olive oil.
BECK: Everything is cooked in a pot, see. And covered with vegetables. Then slices of lemon, oil—olive oil, if you have it. Olive oil is always better. White wine—dry white wine—and pimento, and all kinds of vegetables, and it’s cooked for only two hours; that’s all. And after everything, let it cool, remove the grease, put it in a pot, like a large bowl, and the day after, even on the night after, it is a wonderful cold dish for a buffet.
CHILD: It just Jell-Os by itself. The lemon helps it jelly.
BECK: The lemon, the bones, all the ingredients, you see, are cooking very slowly together.
CHILD: It’s just a fancy thing with very little effort.
BECK: No, nothing. Anybody could make that recipe, anybody; a child could make it. You put everything in a pot and nothing else.
CHILD: Let her go.
BECK: Let her go. Only you need to have the good ingredients, you see, that’s all. There’s no mystery there. There’s no tour de main, we say in French, you see. That’s a trick.
CHILD: As you notice, Madame Beck has recommended a white wine, but we find that because white wine in the States is rather expensive, white vermouth works extremely well.
BECK: Yes, wonderful! Dry vermouth.
CHILD: It’s much better than a sour, bad white wine. You don’t use very much of it. In fact, you use less than you would a white wine.
BECK: Dry vermouth can always replace dry white wine, it’s better.
DEANE: Is that true in any recipe, Madame Beck?
BECK: Yes, of course.
CHILD: We’ve put them all in the book.
DEANE: Use dry vermouth instead of white wine.
BECK: [looking in book] Here, half a cup dry white wine, one third cup dry white vermouth.
DEANE: Well, that’ll take care of that old guinea hen or whatever.
BECK: It’s very important, you see, because everyone can have dry vermouth. Dry white wine has peps.
CHILD: It’s too expensive.
BECK: Expensive, yes, difficult to arrange, yes.
DEANE: Now, let me finish that shopping list that I brought along, and then let’s get to the dessert department because there’s a wonderful dessert department in this fine book of yours, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
DEANE: And now we get back to our guests, Simone Beck and Julia Child, two of the three authors of this fine new cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And I think we agreed to get into the dessert department, and perhaps we could persuade Madame Beck to tell us about her famous chocolate cake, do you think?
CHILD: Yes, so good.
DEANE: How she does it, and why it’s so good.
BECK: Well, it’s very easy again, very easy cake to make.
DEANE: But you say that about everything.
BECK: Yes, well, it’s easy. When you know about cooking, everything is easy. Do it once, and you can do it all your life. Even without reading the book. You know it by your heart and by your taste. Well, this is a very good chocolate cake, and the trick I think for this cake is to be overcooked.
DEANE: Overcooked?
BECK: Overcooked!
CHILD: Undercooked.
BECK: Undercooked. That’s not to be overcooked, it has to be undercooked. [Laughter]
DEANE: Here, let me do it for you: the trick in this chocolate cake is to undercook it.
BECK: Undercook it. [Laughter]
DEANE: No, that’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You can imagine how I’d give a recipe for chocolate cake if I were in Paris and you were interviewing me on French radio! Just hold that thought, and you’ll feel better about everything.
CHILD: Well, this is the cake that has the almonds and the butter in it.
BECK: Yes, almond butter chocolate, and the chocolate is melted with a little bit of coffee.
DEANE: Madame Beck, the thing that interested me is that you don’t use baking powder, you use egg whites to make the cake light.
BECK: Never baking powder.
DEANE: No baking powder in cake?
BECK: No, no. Some cakes use it, of course. Some.
DEANE: But not your cakes.
BECK: Not in France, you see. When you make an Alsatian cake like kouglof, you use some special flour.
DEANE: But for your chocolate cake and your orange cake and your almond, you use egg whites—
BECK: Egg whites.
DEANE: Instead of baking powder.
BECK: Never baking powder.
DEANE: You both do an amazing bit in the book on egg whites. I think we ought to talk about egg whites a little.
CHILD: Well, egg whites are awfully important in soufflés and desserts. You have to have them. Now, when you beat an egg white, it has to rise seven times its original volume. It has to be absolutely smooth, and when you hold up a bit of egg white in the beater, it makes a little point that folds over at the top. But it has to be smooth and velvety. And it can’t and it shouldn’t have those granules in it. Once it has the granules, it means that some of its puffing quality has broken down.
DEANE: First, you warn in the book against using a bowl that has ever had grease in it.
CHILD: Mm-hmm. That seems to hold the egg whites—
DEANE: You apparently have a special bowl for beating eggs.
CHILD: Well, in France you have a lovely round-bottom, un-lined, copper bowl. But if you bought that in this country it would cost you twenty-five dollars. We found just by chance that a plastic bowl works almost as well as a copper bowl. It’s something chemical, and I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s that the egg whites sort of cling to the copper, which allows them to rise up more. I don’t know what the chemical reason is.
DEANE: Maybe then you could recommend to my listeners a plastic bowl.
CHILD: A plastic bowl and a great big handheld whip is best, but if you don’t have the muscles in your arms and some people, women, do not, you can use a handheld electric beater. But you have to hold it a certain—
DEANE: It has to be handheld.
CHILD: Yes, because you have to circulate as much air as possible into the egg whites. So you circulate the beater all around and you go rather slowly at first until they begin to foam. And then you turn it on to about medium. But then you keep circulating it and as soon as you stop the beater, hold it up and the egg whites stand in little stiff peaks that just folds over on the top. They’re stiff, and that’s it.
DEANE: And that’s what you use in this cake instead of baking powder?
CHILD: Yes. But some plastic bowls have a slight oiliness on. I got one in Boston the other day, and it was polyethylene or something—or poly-something or other. I don’t know.
DEANE: Poly-something. They’re all poly-something.
CHILD: Well this one worked all right. But if you find a bowl, a plastic bowl, that doesn’t work, you just go and buy another one. They don’t cost much.
DEANE: And save that bowl just for eggs.
CHILD: You don’t want it to get oily because it does absorb oil.
BECK: There’s a stick on the edge, see, because a copper basin sticks on the edge. If you slip down like in Pyrex, it’s no good, you see. It has to be on the edges.
CHILD: On the edges. It’s just as if you’re making a puff pastry, you wet the pastry sheet first to make the puff pastry hold on to it, so it has a footing and can pull up and rise from the footing.
DEANE: Are you good at making puff pastry too?
CHILD: Yes, but we find that American flour is a little different than French. It takes much more time because American flour is hard wheat and is rubbery—you have to rest it, usually about two hours between the rolls.
DEANE: Well, now, I know the name of an American flour that’s not. And when we stop the broadcasting I will give you both some names.
CHILD: We’ve written to some flour companies, but we’d like to know a name.
DEANE: I think I know one.
CHILD: They don’t sell soft wheat flour to the ordinary person, which is too bad because it’s much better for pastry.
BECK: Too dry, you see. In France, the flour is moist.
DEANE: Madame Beck, what other kinds of desserts do you like to make besides cakes?
BECK: Well I always like charlotte. It’s very popular in France, you see. Charlotte aux pommes. It’s very nice and a very easy recipe.
CHILD: That lovely recipe of yours—the charlotte malakoff, which has lady fingers with this buttery almond crème inside.
BECK: And you could put strawberry and raspberry in between, you see. That’s very, very—
CHILD: Not a slimming dessert. You just take a little bit, but—my, it’s good.
BECK: The very popular charlotte aux pommes.
CHILD: With apple, apple charlotte—
BECK: Apple of Bellevue.
CHILD: Yes.
BECK: That’s very, very good.
CHILD: Very good.
BECK: Very good recipe.
DEANE: Easy to do, I have no doubt. She says everything’s easy.
BECK: It is easy.
CHILD: Well, once you know how to do these things, it isn’t difficult because you’re doing the same thing all the time, but you just make different combinations.
BECK: Mixing egg whites and sugar, it’s the base of making the cakes. When you know how it has to go—
DEANE: You mean how to mix sugar with egg yolks—
BECK: The sugar and egg yolk, you must work very often. Very often you begin to make your cake, mixing egg yolks and sugar.
CHILD: Beating.
BECK: Beating until its pale yellow and running like a ribbon.
CHILD: Makes the ribbon as they always say.
BECK: It makes a ribbon when you run it with your spoon, like that, falling like a ribbon, it’s right.
DEANE: Now you keep on beating the egg yolk and sugar until it makes a ribbon when you bring it up out of the bowl on a spoon.
BECK: When it falls back like ribbon, see.
CHILD: That takes maybe a minute.
BECK: A minute, yes.
CHILD: Then you take an electric mixer.
BECK: That’s very easy.
CHILD: Then you have to know how to beat your egg whites, but that’s easy to do. And you have to know how to fold, and that’s easy to do.
BECK: And fold this chocolate cake.
DEANE: Well you have a diagram in the book on folding in the egg whites.
CHILD: Oh, yes, and we have a picture of what the egg whites should look like when they are done.
DEANE: Because you fold the egg whites in with a rubber spatula—
CHILD: Mm-hmm.
DEANE: By cutting while the egg white is poured on, first you put a tiny bit in.
CHILD: To lighten the thing up. What you want is to fold in the egg whites carefully so that you don’t deflate them. You have to keep as much of their volume as possible so that when it gets in the oven, it’s going to act as a puff.
DEANE: After you add in a little to lighten it, you pour on the rest of the egg white—
CHILD: You scrape them on because they don’t pour on that thing, and then you come down, slowly down, with your spatula and out and up, and it brings just a little bit of the egg white down and a little bit of the mixture up over, and that is done very quickly. And that is terribly important because you can beat—
DEANE: For a soufflé.
CHILD: For anything.
BECK: Anything—even for a cake it’s the same way, it’s the same thing.
DEANE: I wish we had more time—
CHILD: Those are easy too, you just have to—
BECK: Know about it, you see.
CHILD: Or be shown or read the book.
BECK: Read the book, and you’ll know everything.
DEANE: I wish we had more time because this has been delightful, and I thank you both ever so much for coming. And I want to tell our listeners that our guests have been this morning Simone Beck and Julia Child, the authors of a fine new cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.