Burgundy / Boeuf Bourguignon
The first time I set out to find it, I missed it. I’d scrawled the address on a scrap of paper and walked along the rue de l’Université with it in my pocket. When I found the number, I crossed the street and knelt on the ground to capture the building’s entire height in my camera lens. But when I got home and looked for the photo, it had vanished. Perhaps I confused the memory with a dream. Eventually I realized I didn’t have the right address at all.
A few weeks later, I made a second attempt, and this time I was more deliberate, plotting my course in advance. That day I did find the apartment building at 81 rue de l’Université, a modest four-story, nineteenth-century limestone structure with tall, slender windows and a pair of solid, dark blue wooden doors. The building’s windows overlooked a little place, a small, cement-paved triangle lined with motor scooters. Next door stood a café with smoke-stained walls and a zinc bar that could have been preserved in amber. There was no plaque to indicate that she had lived there, but I could imagine her all the same, charging back from the market, a wicker basket of vegetables heavy on her arm, eager to dive into the kitchen and start cooking. The apartment was still indisputably chez Julia Child.
I had been thinking about Julia recently because I’d been considering boeuf bourguignon, the dish that helped make her famous. It was early March, and the weather was as blustery and fierce as the proverbial lion. But I had seen the determined buds of forsythia in the planters that ran along the center of my street, and finally I had tangible evidence that spring—and, with it, Calvin’s return from Iraq—was on its way, our year apart almost finished. I anticipated our reunion with uncomplicated happiness. But first we had a few more months to get through.
Several weeks earlier, I had received an assignment from the New York Times—the New York Times! My forehead broke out in beads of nervous sweat every time I even thought about it—for a travel article retracing Thomas Jefferson’s 1787 journey through the vineyards of Burgundy. The focus would be wine, but as I packed my bags for the Côte d’Or, the narrow territory that produces the region’s renowned vintages, my mind kept turning to boeuf bourguignon. The wine-rich beef stew was one of the first dishes Julia Child had ever cooked on television, the one she chose to launch her show The French Chef.
For Julia, boeuf bourguignon offered many teachable French cooking techniques: how to brown and braise meat, how to sauté mushrooms and make a fine sauce. But in recent years the dish had acquired a rare patina, transforming from a humble beef stew into, for many Americans, the symbol of French cuisine. And yet what did we know about its origins? Now I had the opportunity to visit Burgundy and discover the true story of boeuf bourguignon. And though I was traveling alone, I thought I could imagine twin voices on either side of me—Julia’s and Jefferson’s—two Americans separated by centuries but united by their admiration of the region.
* * *
The drive from Paris to Beaune, the wine capital of Burgundy, takes about four hours, a steady southwesterly slog along the A6 national highway. Even if I hadn’t been following the GPS as if it were the Messiah, I would have known I’d arrived in the Côte d’Or by the gentle, vine-covered slopes rising up on either side of the road. Though the region of Burgundy is large, its wine territory is focused mainly on this small strip of terrain, an almost mythical chain of microclimates, mildly pitched hills, and rocky, rust-colored, mineral-rich soil. When the French speak of terroir—a word that literally means “earth”—they’re referring to a special confluence of climate, soil, geography, plant species, and farming techniques. But if I had to pick one place in the world to illustrate the term, it would be here in the Côte d’Or, which packs more than a hundred appellations into a space half the size of New York City, where the same grape varietals have been cultivated into wine for almost a thousand years.
Legend has it that monks established the Burgundy winemaking tradition in the eleventh century, clearing the land, testing grape varietals, and perfecting viticulture techniques. They divided the Côte d’Or into the Côte de Nuits and the Côte de Beaune (côte means “hill”) and traveled between the slopes, mixing the soil with water to taste the differences in terroir. They were the first to realize that neighboring plots of land could produce wines with wildly different flavors, mapping these designations into appellations, many of which are still used today.
The monks came from two very different orders: the permissive Benedictines and the rigid Cistercians. The Benedictines had an abbey farther south, at Cluny. The Cistercians, whose headquarters were at Cîteaux, nearer to the Côte d’Or, were, ironically, ascetics, forbidden to eat meat, eggs, fish, or dairy or to drink anything but water (though they permitted themselves to sample the wine they produced). For the Cistercians wine was purely a commercial endeavor, sold to support their monasteries or offered as gifts in return for political favors.
During the Middle Ages, Burgundy was not part of France but a powerful and independent duchy with borders that stretched to Flanders and the Netherlands, governed by a series of dukes with names that sound like superheroes’: Philippe le Hardi (the Bold), Jean sans Peur (the Fearless), Philippe le Bon (the Good), Charles le Téméraire (the Reckless). The first, Philippe le Hardi, could also have been named Philippe the Wine Lover. A dedicated oenophile, he forever defined Burgundy wine when he commanded the removal of all Gamay grapes (he described them as “disloyal”), ordering instead Pinot Noir to be planted in the region, an edict that remains unchanged since he issued it in 1395. Today only two varietals are grown on the Côte d’Or: Pinot Noir for red wine, Chardonnay for white.
I noticed these very grapevines climbing up the hillsides, attached to wood-and-wire trellises. In the chill damp of early spring, the landscape was bare, the region’s famous reddish soil clearly visible beneath the orderly rows of short, twisting, black stumps. And yet even in their denuded, hibernating state, the vinestock appeared well tended, neatly clipped and trimmed, waiting patiently for the warmer weather to coax out leaves, flowers, and fruit.
The lines of vines stretching up the hill appeared—to my untrained eye—like a single, vast vineyard. In reality, however, my gaze was sweeping across tens, if not hundreds, of different properties, unmarked by walls or fences as tradition dictates. Until the French Revolution, a few wealthy landowners held the majority of Burgundy’s vineyards, the largest being the Catholic Church. That changed in 1790, when the Church’s land was sold as national property and its huge swaths of vineyards were carved into small plots. Today Burgundy remains a region of modest vineyards—some as tiny as a garden patch—with many owned by independent producers instead of large conglomerates.
In Beaune I admired the town’s prosperous shine, the buffed stone hôtels particuliers opening to well-preserved courtyards, the roofs tiled in colorful geometric patterns, the medieval ramparts edging manicured streets lined with gleaming wine shops and fromageries. Foreigners flock here in all seasons, a steady stream of tourists that have left the locals a bit blasé in their welcome. I sat in one café and watched a group of British tourists keen to partake in a glass of local refreshment. The waiter rattled off the wines by the glass—Gevrey-Chambertin, Meursault, Nuits-Saint-Georges—and their jaws dropped. Mine did, too, a little, hearing all those famous names offered so casually. It felt like a celebrity sighting.
Later I had a chance to taste some wine with Thibaut Marian, a young winemaker and owner of Domaine Seguin-Manuel, a winery in Beaune. Thibaut’s family has been making wine since 1750, but he acquired his own establishment more recently, in 2004. We sat in his office separated by a long row of bottles—about half of the twenty appellations that the domaine produces—and Thibaut started pouring. First the whites, golden, crisp, flowery, minerally. He described each one with a father’s tender pride. We swirled, sipped, sucked air into our cheeks, swished, as if cleansing the entire mouth with wine—actually, Thibaut did all these things, and I copied him, always half a beat behind—and then we spit. I had expected the expectoration, but even so it wrenched me to lean over the terra-cotta pitcher. Could one even properly taste wine without swallowing? I considered my car, parked a few blocks away, and tipped the rest of my glass into the crachoir. Thibaut promptly poured from another bottle.
Thibaut’s winery is small and artisanal. He produces about seventy thousand bottles a year, and his production is linked, like that of many independent producers in the region, to organic farming and a lunar bottling cycle, which gives the wine “more purity, more freshness and lightness, and better aging capacity,” he said. We finished tasting the whites and moved on to the reds. Until this point we’d been using the same glass to taste all the wines, but now Thibaut noticed a bit of sediment at the bottom of mine.
“Let me find you a new glass,” he said.
“No, don’t worry, we can just rinse it out with a little water.”
“Water?” A look of horror crossed his patrician features. “Non, non, we will use wine.” He reached for one of the bottles of white and poured a slug, thoroughly rinsed the glass, and drained it into the crachoir.
That was when I knew I was in Burgundy, where wine replaced water.
* * *
In March 1787, Thomas Jefferson set out from Paris on a three-month tour of France. The purpose of the voyage, he claimed, was to heal a broken wrist by taking the mineral waters at Aix-en-Provence. On the way he planned to fulfill his obligations as America’s top envoy, researching French agriculture, architectural, and engineering projects. But when he chose to begin the trip in the vineyards of Burgundy, his daughter Martha became suspicious.
“I am inclined to think this voyage is rather for your pleasure than your health,” she teased him in a letter.
In fact, Jefferson’s five-day visit to Burgundy was not accidental. After spending two years establishing diplomatic relations in the court of Louis XVI, he had tasted his fair share of fine vintages. Now he was keen to explore the Côte d’Or’s cellars and vineyards, to discover the art of viticulture with the hope of transporting it back to Virginia, to taste the wines of a region famous—even in the late eighteenth century—for its terroir.
Thomas Jefferson had first arrived in France three years earlier, a handsome forty-one-year-old widower with two young daughters. He had been sent by Congress to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, succeeding the latter as minister plenipotentiary. For Jefferson, whose wife had died two years prior, the appointment fulfilled a childhood dream of living in Europe. He found housing in a series of grand hôtels particuliers with his daughter Martha and a slave, James Hemings (his younger daughter, Maria, joined him in 1787, accompanied by another slave, Sally Hemings), and he began to circulate among a swirl of artists and intellectuals. Among them he met Maria Cosway, an artist born in Italy to English parents, and her husband, Richard Cosway, a renowned miniaturist and portraitist.
A friendship (or was it a romance?) between Jefferson and Maria blossomed over six weeks, as the two met often on a series of group sightseeing excursions to places like Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Marly-le-Roi. During this period Jefferson dislocated his right wrist while attempting to jump a fence at the Cours-la-Reine park—some have speculated that he was trying to impress Maria—an injury that would trouble him for the rest of his life.
Jefferson’s injured wrist confined him to home for a month, forced him to correspond through his secretary, and—most tragically—cut short his time with Maria. Less than a month after the accident, she departed France with her husband, leaving Jefferson in a gloomy state. “I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings,” he wrote in a letter to her. “Overwhelmed with grief, every fibre of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.”
Titled “Dialogue Between My Head and My Heart,” the letter portrays a lively debate between Jefferson’s tender emotions—“I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief!”—and his cooler sense of logic, which tempered his affection for a beautiful married woman (albeit one whose husband was a notorious philanderer). A facsimile of the document shows his handwriting cramped and crooked—he was forced to use his left hand—but the sentiments rocket off the page. It constitutes the only existing love letter that Jefferson ever wrote.
By March 1787, Jefferson’s wrist had sufficiently healed for him to travel, but his mood remained pensive throughout his solitary journey. Could the three-month trip have been an elaborate distraction from a broken heart? “One travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more,” he wrote in a letter. But when he reached Beaune, he sought guidance, hiring a wine adviser, Étienne Parent. Like many men of the era, Parent dabbled in viticulture and barrel making, but his main income came from acting as a négociant, or wine merchant, blending wines from various producers to create and sell a sufficient commercial quantity. He led Jefferson on a brisk tour of the Côte d’Or, whisking him in and out of cellars from Nuys to Pommard to Meursault, and introducing him to the wines that would become his favorites.
As I toured vineyards and visited vaulted cellars, I tried to see the region through Jefferson’s eyes. The funny thing was, although more than two centuries separated our journeys, it wasn’t that hard to imagine him there. For one thing the landscape still resembled his description, with “the côte in vines. Some forest wood here and there, broom, whins and holly, and a few inclosures of quick hedge.” The famous soil was still “a good red loam and sand, mixed with more or less grit, small stone, and sometimes rock.” The people still appeared “well fed.” Or at least they bloomed with the aura of well-fed confidence that comes from centuries of prosperity.
Also, I had found a wine adviser, Anne Parent, a direct descendant of Étienne who owned Domaine Parent, a winery in Pommard. She led me through her cave, a dimly lit space sharp with the sour tang of vinegar, pausing before various casks and drawing out drafts for us to swill, savor, and spit (directly onto the gravel floor).
Though Jefferson’s diaries offered meticulous travel notes, they revealed no clues to his emotional state. Like him, I traveled alone and, like him, I discovered that the solitude offered lots of opportunity for reflection. Were his thoughts, too, filled with someone who was far away? I imagined him wandering through vineyards with Étienne Parent, quiet as they sipped different vintages, seduced by the magic of the terroir, marveling at the good fortune that allowed him to admire firsthand the beauty and history of Burgundy and the skill of its vignerons. I imagined him feeling all these things and yet all the while being wistful for Maria. When you love someone, you want to share with that person the things you enjoy most in the world.
* * *
I had come to Burgundy with two goals: to taste the region’s wine and sample its food. I had drunk the wine. But when it came to the pleasures of the table, Jefferson was a terrible guide.
Aside from a few potatoes in Dijon—“the best round potatoes here I ever saw”—his diaries don’t mention food at all. Where were the descriptions of beef braised in a wine-dark sauce? The tales of snails roasted in garlicky butter and pried from their burning shells with the help of a special clamp? The stories of jambon persillade—pink Easter ham coated with verdant chopped parsley and slipped into a jellied case? Didn’t he eat any gougères—those cheesy puffs that are so delicious with white wine—or sample the local cheeses, either the soft, creamy fromage de Cîteaux (made by Cistercian monks) or the decadent, sloppy Époisses?
He did not. Or if he did, he didn’t write about them. Perhaps Jefferson—a semivegetarian—didn’t consider matters of the stomach worthy of his diary. This was one of the many major differences between us. His travel diaries neglect food. Mine talk about nothing else.
No, if I wanted to explore Burgundy’s storied cuisine, I would need another guide. Someone who had sampled the region’s rich and classic dishes and knew how to cook them. Someone who shared my omnivorous approach and American sensibilities. Someone like Julia Child.
In her classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia describes boeuf bourguignon as “one of the most delicious beef dishes concocted by man.” She provides a meticulously detailed three-page recipe but also offers a disclaimer: “As is the case with most famous dishes,” she writes, “there are more ways than one to arrive at a good boeuf bourguignon.”
That, I soon discovered, was a gross understatement. Over plates of wine-braised beef, Burgundy’s professional and home cooks offered me a wealth of contradictory advice, dispensed in hushed voices or with defensive shrugs. You should use only Burgundy wine. You can use any good-quality wine. Add a dash of vinegar to the marinade. Pfff . . . He uses a marinade? Bacon adds a wonderful smoky flavor. The one thing I never use is bacon. My mother makes the best boeuf bourguignon. My grandmother’s is the best. Mine is the best. Julia Child would be happy to know that Burgundy’s debate over boeuf bourguignon is alive and well.
Whatever their particularities, however, most people acknowledged that the dish is a rustic one, a ragout with humble beginnings (or at least as humble as a plate of meat can be considered). Meat was precious back then, more precious even than wine, which in the days before the phylloxera blight was produced in every region of France, with vines growing right up to the gates of Paris. Thrifty cooks endeavoring to use every scrap of an animal soon realized that tough cuts like paleron, or chuck roast, became tender when slow-cooked in wine.
As I left the grape-centric hills of the Côte d’Or and drove south into the wide, flat plains of the Charolais, the origins of boeuf bourguignon became even clearer. There, dotting the green pastures in groups of two or three, I spotted Burgundy’s other famous product: Charolais cattle.
According to local legend, Crusaders brought the snow-white livestock back from their overseas travels and used a rudimentary form of animal husbandry to breed them into powerful, utilitarian farm animals. In 1747 word of their meaty flanks began to spread when an enterprising cattle farmer marched his herd to the market at Poissy, outside Paris, a folkloric journey that took only seventeen days. By 1770 herds of Charolais dotted the route from Burgundy to Paris. “You found them all along the Loire, passing through Nevers, and Orléans,” said Frédéric Bouchot, director of the Maison du Charolais, a museum in the town of Charolles that is devoted to the breed. By the late nineteenth century, Charolais cattle had spread throughout France. Today they’re found around the world—notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia—in either single-race herds or crossed with other breeds.
In 2010, boeuf de Charolles—that is, beef from Charolais cattle, produced in the Charolais region—was awarded the title appellation d’origine contrôlée. According to the cahier des charges, the animals must graze on the region’s rich grass from March to November and move indoors during the winter months. They’re slaughtered at six years instead of the usual five, which allows them more time to grow. The result is generous cuts of beef, prized by connoisseurs for their light marbling and high flavor.
From the roof deck of the Maison du Charolais, Bouchot and I surveyed the lush pastures of the region, divided by hedgerows and dotted with white cows. The animals dominated the landscape in the same way that vines characterized the Côte d’Or.
“Does meat represent Burgundy?” I asked Bouchot as we gazed at the view.
He hesitated. “Wine is more attractive.”
* * *
In her memoir, My Life in France, Julia talks about a trip she and her husband, Paul Child, made to Burgundy in 1949, lingering in “valley towns whose names sounded like a carillon: Montrachet, Pommard, Vougeot, Volnay, Meursault, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Beaune.” She doesn’t mention boeuf bourguignon, but I thought of her as I ate it there, admiring the tender melt of the beef, the tang of its sauce, making a few mental notes to my own recipe as I wiped my plate clean with a piece of bread.
I had known about Julia’s recipe for boeuf bourguignon ever since I was a little girl, when my dad used to cook it for parties. I used to sit on the kitchen counter and watch him wield his Chinese cleaver, shouting “Bang the garlic, Daddy!” when he brought the side of his blade down on an unpeeled clove. Over the years he melded Julia’s recipe with one for Provençal daube from Sunset magazine—adding black olives and orange peel to the wine and beef—but her fleur-de-lis-covered book was still the one he consulted for questions on French technique. It maintained a place of honor on our kitchen bookshelf, an authority on timing and temperature, on the right kind of cooking equipment to buy, on the best way to trim an artichoke or line a charlotte mold with ladyfingers.
I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, but cooking shows were different, educational. My dad and I sometimes watched Julia together, each of us inspired by her confident, clear instructions. One Friday night when I was about thirteen, my parents had some friends over for dinner, and my father and I decided to make a Grand Marnier soufflé for dessert. I prepared the base before everyone arrived, whisking the flour into warmed milk, dropping egg yolks into the liquid and watching it thicken over the heat. I rubbed sugar cubes over a “bright-skinned orange”—as Julia specified—and released a faint mist of citrusy oil that clung to my fingers. Midway through the meal, my dad nudged me and we slipped to the kitchen to whip the egg whites and fold them into the base. The electric beaters whined over the conversation in the dining room, but though I whisked and whisked, the egg whites refused to form stiff peaks. The plastic bowl probably hadn’t been squeaky-clean enough.
“What would Julia do?” my dad asked me.
“Start over?”
“She’s not a perfectionist.”
“She would use them anyway,” I said reluctantly. And so we folded the drooping clouds of white into the warmed bouillie sauce, turned the mixture into our sugared mold, and placed it in the oven. The word souffle means “breath” in French. Did they name the dish soufflé because you hold your breath for the entire twenty minutes that it bakes? When the timer rang, we rushed to the oven. The soufflé’s golden surface had risen just above the rim of the dish, but it was a shaky puff, nervous and unsure. When we removed the dish from the heat, the soufflé started to slump like a sulky teenager. “Serve it!” my dad urged. “Hurry!”
We rushed the dish to the dining table and scooped portions onto every plate. The texture was all wrong—like a spongy flan edged with grainy sugar rather than an airy cloud—but the orange flavor was bright and sweet, almost flowery, darkened by the boozy edge of Grand Marnier. “Mmmm!” exclaimed Mrs. Chang, the ninety-three-year-old mother-in-law of my mom’s friend Janet. Thus far she had picked her way through the Chinese dinner my father had made—when you’re ninety-three, you don’t have much appetite, I suppose—but now she gobbled up her dessert.
“You like it? Ann made it,” my dad told her. She smiled, but I wasn’t sure if she’d understood him. Mrs. Chang was as sharp as a mandoline, but she didn’t speak much English and my dad spoke no Mandarin.
When we had finished eating, I rose to clear the dessert plates, reaching past Mrs. Chang’s unnaturally jet-black head to move the soufflé dish. I felt her hand grasp my arm, stilling me with a surprisingly firm grip. A voice said something in Chinese. “She wants you to leave it,” said my mom. “Leave the dish.”
I placed the dish in front her, and all of us at the table watched as Mrs. Chang took her spoon and scraped out every last morsel of imperfect soufflé. In my head I heard Julia’s high-pitched, slightly madcap, swooping voice: Never apologize.
That was the first time Julia had inspired me—as the careful, methodical teacher who broke down recipes step by step, illustrating that even the most complicated were possible as long as you were thorough. And if something went wrong, as things inevitably did, she simply patched up her mistake and ate the dish anyway without apology or embarrassment.
The second time came a few years later, during a cold, damp winter, my first on the East Coast. I had just graduated from college in California and moved to Boston to work as an assistant at a book-publishing company. I lived in a lightly heated apartment, with roommates I’d met through an ad in the Boston Globe, made $18,500 a year, and subsisted on rice and beans. For entertainment I relied heavily on the public library, which is where I found Noël Riley Fitch’s biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life.
On the book’s original dust jacket, Julia’s face appeared younger and moodier than her television persona. I kept glancing back at the photograph as I read, absorbed by a tale that has by now become the stuff of legend: the awkward girlhood in California, the string of unsuccessful careers, the classified job in the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), the post in China during World War II, her romance with Paul Child, their assignment in Paris, her gastronomic blossoming, her astonishing late-in-life success.
I loved Julia’s story of reinvention and determination. But I was twenty-three and still in the middle of my own invention. It would be years before I felt the resonance of Julia’s tale, before I experienced just how profoundly a change in circumstances could alter a course, or provoke a transformation.
For Julia that change was her husband. Her life blossomed after their marriage, shifting from one of secretarial work and badly cooked meals to passion and glorious food. He was the great love of her life, the reason she came to France, the inspiration behind her cooking. “I would have never have had my career without Paul Child,” she wrote in My Life in France.
Before our move to China, my friend Erin, the wife of one of Calvin’s foreign-service colleagues, warned me about life at post. “Prepare yourself for the 1950s,” she’d said. I nodded even though I had no idea what she was talking about. But once in Beijing, I quickly found out. I found out at the embassy orientation, where my name tag was preprinted with my husband’s last name. I found out at the coffee mornings that gathered accompanying spouses—almost all women, almost all unemployed—for a few hours of light gossip followed by lunch and shopping. I found out every time my hostess introduced me—not as Ann but as Calvin-from-the-political-section’s-wife. I found out when people asked me at parties, “What do you do?” and I could only mumble about a job I used to have.
Even though I loved being married to Calvin, even as I relished our cozy, exclusive domesticity, the weekday hours stretched before me long and purposeless. Oh, I had plenty to do—cooking, cleaning, sightseeing, lunching—but even as I went through the motions, I felt drowned by this new life, one that defined me by my husband’s job, not my own. It was, I knew, hopelessly American to link my identity and self-worth to a career. But I was American, the product of an immigrant mother who went back to her job as a doctor a few weeks after I was born. The idea of spending the rest of my life without a career made me feel as if I’d amputated a limb.
And yet my husband was a diplomat—the very word was synonymous with frequent overseas transfers. And anyone who has ever accompanied a partner on an overseas transfer knows that nothing slows your own career more quickly. For a while I wallowed in Kafkaesque existentialism. At least I wasn’t alone in my predicament. Diplomacy has been called the world’s second-oldest profession, and ever since the sixteenth century—and maybe even before—other wives of diplomats have endured similar existential crises, fading into obscurity while their husbands’ achievements were recorded in history. Perhaps, then, that is why I turned to Julia for inspiration for a third time, not just because she loved food, and had also lived in China, and was also a trailing spouse, just like me—but because I was looking for proof that professional success and marriage to a diplomat were not mutually exclusive.
It was Paul’s work as a diplomat that took the couple to Paris in 1948, an assignment that would surround Julia with some of the best food in the world and launch her on the path to a legendary career. She didn’t know that then, though. As she toiled away in a basement classroom at the Cordon Bleu, perfecting the fundamental mother sauces and pâte brisée, she had no idea that one day she would demonstrate those same techniques on American television to audiences of millions. No, she practiced them because they lay at the root of traditional French cuisine and because she was committed—deeply, seriously committed—to learning to cook it.
Julia fell in love with Paris—“I shall never find anyplace more to my tastes,” she wrote—reveling in its markets and cafés, the way a famous monument like Notre Dame could loom suddenly out of the misty distance. She started teaching cooking classes and collaborating with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, on the book that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a massive project that consumed her for almost a decade. But foreign-service posts last only a few years. In 1953 the Childs moved to Marseille, and then Bonn; Washington, D.C.; Oslo; and Cambridge, Massachusetts—six moves in just thirteen years. And with each move came a new house, new friends, a new community, a new life.
Julia had a project and a path, but reading her letters I thought I could sense her anxiety—“From the point of view of cooking career, [it’s] a real blow”—she wrote to her friend and literary mentor, Avis DeVoto, about the move to Marseille. Or, “We are both just sick about this move,” as she and Paul packed for Bonn. Or, “You can prepare yourself to enter a new culture, but the reality always takes some getting used to,” as they arrived in Oslo.
I recognized her apprehension from my own, the same atomic cloud of unease that mushroomed over me every time Calvin and I discussed our next move, studying the list of open assignments and trying to find the perfect place that offered interesting work for both of us, despite our wildly disparate fields. I felt lucky to have found a path of my own to nurture and climb, one strewn with small triumphs and messy disappointments. I knew I was lucky to have a portable job that I loved, one enlivened by our itinerant lifestyle, one made possible by Calvin’s emotional and breadwinning support. And yet each move was a stark reminder of the things that couldn’t be packed into boxes and sent on a transport ship: contacts, friends, inspiration, the daily routine that was my life.
Sometimes it felt like an opportunity; sometimes it felt like an injunction. Sometimes I felt like chattel, a numbered item on my husband’s official orders; sometimes I felt we were a team, more powerful together than alone. Always I tried to remind myself of Julia, remembering her staccato, self-mocking tone when she became a little maudlin. “Too bad.” “C’est la vie.” “WOE.”
Julia and Paul left France in 1954, a departure that she described in her memoir as “painful” (though, in classic Julia fashion, she enthused over “an honest-to-goodness American steak” in the very next breath). I understood her sorrow, because I felt it myself. I had been dreading leaving my beloved, beautiful France ever since the day I found out we were moving there. When Calvin returned from Baghdad, we would have two years in Paris before we moved somewhere else. And then we’d do it again, and again, and again, every two, or three, or four years until he retired.
“This is Paul’s career, and if he wants to stay in it, we’ve just got to resign ourselves to abrupt changes,” wrote Julia to her friend Avis. “Trouble is, neither of us likes to move around at all. We dig in with our paints and pots, as though it were for a century.” I wondered if Julia ever dreamed of a house, a place that didn’t get packed and unpacked every thirty-six months, a place where she knew every creak of the floorboards, where she could reach for the kettle and make a cup of tea without turning on the kitchen lights, where the children she never had left small, muddy footprints in the hallway, a place drifting with the happy ghosts of countless meals cooked by her own hands. A permanent place. A home.
There was a poem, “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer, that I thought about sometimes when the gnaw for permanence became ferocious. In it the narrator contemplates the life that might have been.
It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives.
I missed them, too. A house I’d never seen, its entry hall papered in mad toile prints. A kitchen hung with copper saucepans. The hairdresser who knew my daughter’s favorite ice-cream flavor. Friends who dropped by and stayed for dinner. Business cards that I could print in batches of ten thousand. Colleagues who surprised me with carrot cupcakes on my birthday. And, probably, a career in an office, and not as a writer. Long weekends in Florida, not Luang Prabang. Perhaps no books published, no second, or third, languages spoken. Quite possibly no Calvin.
Nine years earlier I met Calvin and made a choice to live a peripatetic life instead of a more permanent one. I had made my decision, and knee-deep in the glorious, messy minutiae of our daily existence I didn’t regret it. Still, when things got challenging—when the idea of moving to another foreign country and learning another foreign language exhausted instead of excited me, when the loneliness of being new again clawed at me, when Calvin and I fought about our choices instead of compromising—it was easy to dream about that other, steadfast world, where things rarely changed. It seemed so wide open, so rich with the possibility of deep friendships, with attics that I could fill to overflowing, with career opportunities that could grow out of running into someone every morning at the coffee shop.
But when my perspective shifted back to reality, I knew there couldn’t be a world wider than mine, ringed with adventure yet anchored with love’s safe harbor. It was love for Calvin, and his love for me, that made me choose this vagabond life. It was love that made us support each other, and it was love that made us listen to each other, and it was because of love that we agreed to compromises—like going to Baghdad for a year—that didn’t feel good but maybe, possibly, turned out to be the best decisions after all. Calvin and I didn’t have a permanent address to call our own, but instead we had made the world our home. We’d left pieces of ourselves behind in each place we lived, and perhaps we were stronger together—and stronger individuals—because of it.
Of course, it still sailed next to me, that parallel life—it would always sail next to me—as full of joy and challenge as the one I was living. I thought of it sometimes, pale and chilled—lit by a satellite moon, not the sun of reality—a ghostly ship charting a route to what might have been, while I remained on the course of what was.
* * *
The Château du Clos de Vougeot is the kind of haughty building that couldn’t be anything but a château, an immense stone structure looming over a sea of well-tended Côte de Nuits vines. Founded in the eleventh century by the thin hands of Cistercian monks, the vineyard had produced fifty thousand bottles a year in its heyday, a veritable ocean of wine for the period. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson stopped there on his journey to observe the monks’ prodigious winemaking process with an eye toward importing it to the United States. Over the years he would ask his wine adviser, Étienne Parent, to include Burgundy vine clippings with his shipments of wine, in the hope of cultivating them in Virginia soil.
Today the château houses a museum and a conference center, as well as the headquarters of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a prestigious wine club. But the monks’ industry is still evident in the enormous fifteenth-century grape presses on view in the covered courtyard, the cavernous fermentation vats that stand in the cuverie, and the sweeping ground-floor cellar, built to store two thousand casks.
In 1790, only a few years after Jefferson’s visit, the French Revolution removed the monks from the château and confiscated the property from the Church. Several families owned the estate until 1889, when the 124 acres of vineyards were separated from the buildings, divided, and sold to several producers. The land is currently split among more than eighty owners. The monks have long disappeared. The cuverie and caves where they toiled have been dry for centuries. Two hundred twenty-five years, a vine-ravaging epidemic, and several wars separate us from Jefferson’s visit. And yet the Château du Clos de Vougeot remains a symbol of the Côte d’Or. Today it is a veritable embassy of Burgundy wine, represented by the twelve thousand members of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin.
One afternoon I visited the château and met with its director, Richard Fussner, and head chef, Olivier Walch. As we sat in one of the Renaissance-era meeting rooms, a Confrérie delegation milled around in the gravel courtyard, occasionally breaking into loud refrains of the “Ban de Bourgogne,” the semimusical Burgundian battle cry, which is accompanied by choreographed clapping and hand gestures.
“The Confrérie’s mission is to promote Burgundy’s products, protect its viticulture, and, also, to promote a certain art de vivre,” said Fussner as a tuneless chorus drifted in through the window. “Being a member is like being an ambassador for Burgundy’s wine, culture, and cuisine.”
When the Great Depression caused Burgundy’s wine trade to stagnate in the 1930s, two enterprising Côte de Nuits winemakers had the bright idea of starting a wine club inspired by the Bacchic societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They founded the Confrérie in 1934, adopting a motto—“Jamais en vain, toujours en vin” (Never in vain, always in wine)—and shared their finest vintages with friends and strangers, hoping to spread the word about Burgundy and thus encourage international wine sales.
In 1944 the Confrérie established the Château du Clos de Vougeot as their headquarters, restoring it and in fact improving upon its former austerity, creating luxurious banquet rooms where monks had once lived in spartan simplicity. (In the monks’ former dining room, re-created as part of the château’s museum, long wooden tables, benches, and a pulpit hinted at their austere lifestyle; one brother would read passages from the Bible as the others ate gruel in enforced silence.) Today the Confrérie is an international organization, with chapters on five continents. Members gather at the château sixteen times a year for chapitre banquets. Dress is usually black tie, and around their necks members wear a small, shallow silver cup dangling from a wide striped ribbon. This is the tastevin (pronounced “tat-van”), which, as its name implies, was once used to sample wine.
Burgundy wine and diplomacy share a long history, dating at least to the fourteenth century when the duc de Bourgogne (and Pinot Noir fanatic) Philippe le Hardi carried casks of the wine in all his convoys throughout France and Flanders, using it to spread festive cheer at banquets and smooth his path at the negotiating table. Burgundy wine was also used to curry favor (or to bribe), as with Jean de Bussières, the abbot of the Abbaye de Cîteaux, who in 1359 sent thirty barrels of Clos de Vougeot to Pope Gregory XI. Four years later de Bussières was ordained a cardinal.
Thomas Jefferson, too, knew the political significance of wine. Though he had enjoyed the occasional tipple of Madeira or port as a young man, he gave up the two when he renounced British colonial rule, rejecting the Englishman’s culture of fortified wines and long-winded toasts. “The taste of this country [was] artificially created by our long restraint under the English government to the strong wines of Portugal and Spain,” he wrote. For the rest of his life, he sipped and served the lighter wines of France and Italy and hoped his fellow Americans would follow suit.
By now Chef Walch had launched into a discussion of boeuf bourguignon, musing over its global appeal. Perhaps the dish could be considered another ambassador, made with the two products that best illustrate Burgundy: wine and beef.
“I make mine with beef cheeks,” he said, adding with a spark of defiance, as only a classically trained French chef could, “The recipe has to live! It’s a form of globalization on the plate.”
I considered his words later that evening, as I sat down in a lively Beaune bistro, to a menu bourguignon. The dishes sounded classic, but they were modern interpretations, simplified and fresh. Instead of snails nestled into crocks of garlic butter, there was a garlicky green parsley soup garnished with escargots curled like seared shrimp. Instead of mini-gougères on a plate, there was a puffed gougère soufflé, a crisp-shelled marvel that shattered to reveal steamy, cheese-scented layers. Instead of boeuf bourguignon fortified with bacon and mushrooms, there was a fine stew sparked with the tang of ginger and orange peel, its meat shredding under the gentle pressure of my fork, its sauce a marriage of bright wine and deep, beefy redolence.
I used every scrap of bread and mashed potato to sponge up the sauce. I licked my knife to capture every last vestige of that sauce. If I’d been alone, I might have licked my plate. It haunted me, the sauce, with something richer and more profound than its dark depths. If wine is a Burgundian diplomat, I thought, perhaps boeuf bourguignon is like a diplomatic marriage, two successful, independent entities joined together, more powerful united than apart, at its base a simple, rustic recipe—and yet one that is constantly adapting, modernizing, and being reinterpreted.