RULE No. 6:
TO BE HAPPY, WORK HARD
There is so much that has been written, by people so much more professional than I, that I wonder what in the hell I am presuming to do, anyway.
POSTWAR PARIS WASN’T ALL CRÊPES SUZETTES AND LADIES SWANNING around in nip-waisted dresses. Not surprisingly, we have the movies to blame for this impression. Pretty much every American movie set during the early 1950s in Paris achieves its historic magic by putting the actors in fedoras and parking a few beautiful old Peugeots on the street and calling it authentic, which it was, minus the shell shock and pieces of cardboard people were still lashing to their feet in place of shoes. During the first years Paul and Julia lived there, there were endless shortages; days would pass without enough coal for the stove, so that preparing a simple lamb chop and a pan of peas was an ordeal. There was a fierce drought in the summer of 1949; vegetable crops and vineyards were withered and wasted by September, causing a steep rise in produce prices. Then, just when Paris seemed to be regaining her mojo as a world-class city, the General Strikes of 1951* meant weeks without public transportation. Paul and Julia rose to the occasion, employing the Blue Flash to shuttle their friends and Paul’s colleagues at the embassy wherever they needed to go.
But Julia was always at her best when she had to buck up and make do. Whether she was aware of it or not, a life of ease failed to bring out her best qualities. Difficult circumstances never seemed a reason not to do what you wanted to do, and after a few months at Le Cordon Bleu, with its own shortages of basic equipment and ingredients, cooking became the only thing Julia thought about, aside from Paul. Her days began at 6:30 a.m. and ended at midnight. She cooked in class all morning, returned to her Roo de Loo attic kitchen and cooked between classes, went back to Le Cordon Bleu in the afternoon, where she paid extra for special demonstrations, then came home in the evening to serve dinner and entertain. As we all know from Julie & Julia, most days she and Paul had a nooner.
The making of Julia Child is such an oft-told tale that it bears reminding ourselves that Julia’s enthusiasm and commitment to cooking was a little bizarre. We tend to forget, I think, that she did not have a Julia Child to inspire her to scale the Everest that is Pâté de Canard en Croûte. Few women of her class in Paris did their own cooking. Most bourgeois Parisian households had live-in maids and at least a part-time cook. What Julia was doing in the attic kitchen on the Roo do Loo was to her time and place as a friend’s architect husband who makes charcuterie* is to ours: cool, but a little over the top. That the apartment Kathy and I rented in one of the best zip codes in Paris didn’t have an oven proved that while the French revere haute cuisine, everyday people aren’t really expected to master cooking it.
When Julia wasn’t cooking she attended luncheons and lectures at Le Cercle des Gourmettes, a ladies culinary club that existed primarily because no women were allowed in Le Cercle des Gourmets. In France, not only were men the only humans who truly knew how to cook, but also they were, apparently, the only ones who knew how to eat. Normally, Julia wasn’t a fan of all-female groups—perhaps she’d had enough after her all-girls high school and college—but so eager was she to avail herself of every culinary opportunity in Paris, she thought Why not? Members were invited to show up at 10:00 a.m. on the days of their luncheons, and Julia rarely missed the opportunity.
Around the same time, Julia met Simone Beck. Simca,† whose “family” recipes she’d learned at the knee of the family’s cook in Normandy, had already published one slim book about prunes and prune liquors, and when she and Julia became acquainted, she was working on another book with Louisette Bertholle, translating French recipes for an American audience. The first draft had been rejected by the original American publisher, who felt it was too dry, and lacking in any background or instruction in French attitudes about food and cooking. They needed an American who understood the degree to which American cooks were clueless when it came to La Cuisine, and Julia agreed to see what she could do in order to make the book more accessible, i.e., create the “blah-blah” (Louisette’s term for the friendly background explanations Americans seemed to require).
Meanwhile, the three also hatched a plan to give cooking lessons to Americans. They named themselves L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, Paul designed their stylish badges (the same one Julia faithfully wore on The French Chef), and they corralled three students for their first class. They were in business!
I must pause here for a side note: How on earth did three wealthy women who grew up in households with at least one live-in cook come to focus on the humble needs of middle-class women like my mother, who was required by the middle-class mores of her day to produce breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week, three-hundred-sixty-five days a year? Simca had the classic French aristocratic upbringing, including the requisite servants and English nannies, while Julia experienced the more rustic Southern California version of same. Even Avis DeVoto, Julia’s pen pal and confidant, herself an avid cook, could pursue her culinary passion because a maid came in three days a week. Mary would come at 10:00 a.m., clean the house, and serve dinner at six-thirty, “a perfectly horrible hour,” Avis once groused. Furthermore, Louisette, the weak link in the collaboration, was unable to share Julia and Simca’s fierce time-consuming obsession, because her impending divorce and financial instability impelled her to think about something other than writing a cookbook. She had the usual messy life, in other words.
Even the now infamous rallying cry from the introduction to Mastering—“This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent–chauffeur–den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat”—presumes that the “occasion” during which a regular housewife and mother can be “unconcerned” with all of those tasks at once is more frequent than the reality, which was close to never.
And yet, they had to address their book to someone, and the American “housewife-chauffeur,” who read women’s magazines and whose highest culinary aspirations consisted of entering the Pillsbury Bake-Off,* must have seemed as good a person as any. What could they possibly have known of the servantless American cook? Other than, like the savages in deepest Africa who were the object of Christian missionary zeal, she was in desperate need of enlightenment.
Julia’s true motives might be that of the natural-born educator that she proved to be, or maybe something more complicated—there but for the grace of Paul Child go I—but in any case she gets a pass, in part because we adore her beyond all reason, and also because she never asked anyone to do anything that she hadn’t done at least a hundred times herself.
For the next eight years, give or take, Julia hurled herself into what she called “cookery-bookery.” There is no other appropriate noun. She and Simca (and sometimes Louisette) cooked and tasted and re-cooked and re-tasted and re-re-cooked and re-re-tasted enough recipes to comprise a first-draft manuscript of more than five hundred pages—and this covered only soups and poultry. They worked with the zeal of law school students determined to graduate at the top of their class, cooking and writing upwards of eighty hours a week.
Simca and Julia grew to love each other like sisters. Theirs was a relationship of deep devotion interrupted by the occasional homicidal fantasy. Simca’s bursts of irrationality combined with her general lack of tact and attention to details tried the endless patience of the organized, methodical Julia.
Their need for each other was like something out of an O. Henry story: Without Simca, Julia would not have access to the hundreds of authentic French recipes that only Simca—or someone like her—could provide; and without Julia, Simca had no access to an American sensibility that could make sense of her classic, complex, never-before-deconstructed dishes.
Julia dubbed Simca La Super-Française, and she was, indeed, one of those energetic, exacting, relentless European women who, after a while, can drive even someone as sunny and diplomatic as Julia Child around the bend. One of the things that irritated Julia beyond measure, aside from Simca’s habit of sputtering “But it’s not French!” when there was some aspect of a recipe of which she disapproved for no reason that she could articulate, was that, like almost all French women of a certain age, she deferred to men.
Over the eight years it took to complete the book, they prepared, adjusted, tasted, and re-tasted hundreds if not thousands of recipes, and yet, if they found themselves at odds over say, a tomato sauce in which Julia experimented by adding green peppers or carrots, Simca would insist upon deferring to some doddering one-star male chef to settle the matter, rather than relying on their own findings. This drove Julia exceptionally mad, since behind every Guide Michelin chef there was a woman, usually a precious, four foot five, cataract-ridden old granny from whom he’d filched his best recipes.
Julia was fortunate in carrying the genes for both Yankee self-reliance and the American West pioneering spirit, and she believed completely in their own “operational proof,” a term she’d picked up from Paul, who learned it from his physicist father. She tried to impose her American character on Simca, encouraging her to stick up for herself and to trust her own experience.
MASTERING THE ART OF FINDING YOURSELF THROUGH AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG AND SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE PROJECT OF UNKNOWN VALUE
The general wisdom about following your bliss suggests that most likely you’ll be happy pursuing a field for which you have a natural aptitude, but Julia Child wasn’t a natural cook, nor for a long time was she even a good cook. It’s an imaginative exercise to see past the formidable expert she became, to imagine her in her cold Paris apartment, bent over her typewriter, struggling to write the recipes that would one day comprise Mastering, which for years she called her “scratches.”
One of the reasons she felt the need to devote an entire morning to writing a recipe for cooking lobster, as a way of documenting exactly what needed to be done, step by step, was so that she could follow that particular trail back into the woods the next time she wanted to make it. She needed to have a perfect, highly detailed recipe because she feared she lacked perfect culinary pitch. Had she been a more instinctive, “natural” cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death. The recipes are so infamously long because Julia herself required such details.
Evidence of her obsession, and the ecstasy it produced, would fill an entire book, and did. Page after page of As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto is filled with lengthy passages attesting to Julia’s near-manic joy about food: eating it, cooking it, and everything associated with it: “We also ran into a beautiful Bordeaux 1929, that is just perfectly matured, and is everything one reads about that a wonderful Bordeaux should be but rarely tastes. It is really something to swoon over, the wonderful rich exciting bouquet, that excitement as it fills the mouth … I’m swooning over the typewriter just at the thought of them.”
In 1952, while Julia was still hoping, somehow, to make a career around cooking, she wrote a fan letter to a journalist and historian named Bernard DeVoto in response to a piece he’d written in Harper’s Magazine bemoaning the mediocre stainless-steel knives found in most American kitchens. So grateful was Julia that someone had brought this egregious problem to light, she sent along a “nice little French model” from her batterie de cuisine.
Avis DeVoto, Bernard’s wife, handled all of his correspondence. The thought of the gifted, sage, and canny Avis handling her husband’s fan mail a la Vera Nabokov who, I read once, also escorted her husband around when it rained, to save him having to clutter his mind with learning to open an umbrella, is another rant for another time.* In any case, Avis answered Julia’s letter, and the two became devoted pen pals, then best friends, confidantes, and colleagues. Julia would refer to her, alternately, as her “wet nurse” and her “mentor.”
Their letters are astonishing, a primer both on what it means to be a good friend and why people loved Julia the way they did. When DeVoto, as Avis referred to him, won the National Book Award, Julia leaned hard into her congratulations, raving for a solid sincere paragraph about his achievement. She always inquired about Avis’s work, health, and sons,* and they jointly railed against Republicans, McCarthyism, books they’d read and loved and hated, even the findings in the Kinsey Reports on human sexual behavior.† Their letters were tender and conscientious. Once Julia apologized for failing to send more biographical details about Simca and Louisette and promised them next time, along with “a nice photo of a cold decorated fish.”
Mostly, they rhapsodized about cooking, and about Julia’s big book project. Reading through these long, euphoric letters to Avis, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether Julia was on something other than a beautiful Bordeaux 1929. She enthused over the pure beauty of white beans, the eye-watering bite of some garlic sausages, the heavenly ham hocks, tiny French strawberries, which she called dreamberries. I’m perfectly willing to accept that I don’t possess the foodie gene that inspires me to speak in tongues when in the presence of the year’s first crop of string beans, but neither did Julia. In her rather heavily documented life, there are few foodgasms before she met Paul: She rhapsodized dutifully about her mother’s codfish balls and Welsh rarebit and waxes nostalgic about tootling down to Tijuana with her family to try something called a Caesar salad, but otherwise she seemed to be a born food-as-fuel gal.
What changed?
My theory, extrapolated from years of watching Dr. Huang of Law & Order SVU: Special Victims Unit explain why people (usually deranged criminals) behave in ways the rest of us find inexplicable, is that every time Julia perfected a dish, she was revisiting the rapture of her life’s grandest transitional moment, the Day of the Sole Meunière in Rouen. It was her own private Eucharist, celebrating love, the senses, the joy of sex and intimacy, and the transformation of a lost girl, now found.
Even though she came, eventually, to stand for celebrating the glory of our imperfect, overseared pork chops, and potato pancakes we accidentally dropped on the floor, she knew that occasionally a dish could be perfect, and a life could be perfect, for just that moment. Like every superhero, Julia had that origin story, and in making Mastering she was given an opportunity to relive it. She was both enjoying and documenting in the recipes her own self-discovery, that which, finally, in middle age gave her life its meaning.
During those years in which she labored over Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she lived in a state of more or less permanent jubilation, spending her days in “flow,” that hippie-sounding term that describes a feeling of complete absorption in the task at hand.*
Happiness studies are all the rage now, even though all the ancient philosophers, including Unknown and Anonymous, insist that happiness is a by-product of something else, like being busy (Mark Twain), limiting our desires (John Stuart Mill), or letting go (The Buddha). My idea of happiness is doing something with your life that echoes a time when you were 100 percent sure you were happy.*
A friend of mine had a son who loved playing “office” when he was small, and he has grown up to be the happiest† contracts attorney I know. Likewise, the world is full of people who opted for business school or marketing careers either because they weren’t lucky enough to find something that put them in a swoon, or they needed a career, and one seemed as good as any other. Almost always they find out, too late, that one is not as good as any other.
Julia worked hard and worked happy for a good half century. How did she do it?
Throw yourself into it, even when no one cares but you.
Mayonnaise is relatively easy to make. Julia mastered it early. Often, when the cooking wasn’t going well and she was pulling out her hair, ruining pound after pound of escalope de veau,* she would whip up a pint or two to boost her confidence. Combine an egg yolk with half a cup of oil and add a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. Voilà, mayonnaise.
Then one day the yolk would not accept the oil or the oil would not mingle with the egg, or something was going on. Julia did exactly what she always did, but she wound up with something closer to mucus than mayonnaise. She was flummoxed. Why did her recipe, which had never failed her, suddenly fail her? Learning to cook had awakened Julia’s inner voluptuary, but this was something else. Apparently, it was not enough to be able to make something, document how you got there, and call it a recipe; you also had to know why the food did what it did, so that if something changed (What changed? Hadn’t she made mayonnaise the way she always made mayonnaise?) you could modify your technique.
Thus Julia’s inner scientist was born. Cooking was worthy of being her life’s passion because it was the only thing, aside from her love of Paul, that kept revealing new parts of herself.
How could Julia have known she had an inner, exacting chemist? This now nearly middle-aged woman who had no apparent aptitude for science was now consumed with how cooking worked. She was obsessed with her failed mayonnaise. Was it the temperature of the egg yolk? The temperature of the bowl? The temperature in the kitchen? Would mixing it with a fork guarantee perfection?* Did it make a difference whether you added the oil all at once? Fast or slow? Slow at first, then faster? Drop by drop?
She was now no simple Foreign Service wife dutifully throwing together a meal for her hardworking husband. This was something else, a woman on a mission to find the answer to something meaningful only to her. She spent days making nothing but mayonnaise. She made so much mayonnaise, even Paul, who ate and relished everything she cooked, said No more, and she was forced to dump gallons of it down the commode. Finally, triumphant, she recorded her discovery,† and she mailed it to all her friends and family. Let’s pause to remember the effort this took in 1950: the typing, the procuring of the proper postage stamps, the mailing, the waiting for a response. The result: complete silence.
Julia became obsessed over the molecular structure of potatoes and wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if they might offer any insight.‡ She educated herself on the best part of the cow’s stomach to use for tripe, and if anyone cared, which part of an egg yolk is the core. Once, she threw a dinner party and served sea bass with a beurre blanc sauce that wouldn’t “blanc.” Why? She was astounded, believing she had her beurre blanc down cold. The next morning she made six more batches to make sure she got it right. She did all this because it interested her to know, not because it was necessary for writing the cookbook, although it wound up being absolutely necessary because it lent Mastering the authority it enjoys to this day.
I am sobered when I think of how much of Julia’s cooking life was spent satisfying her own curiosity. For me, cooking remains confusing, all wrapped up in housewifery, in being the body attached to the arm attached to the hand that holds the plate of steaming food, in being the woman, in her place, in the kitchen. Home cooks cook because someone is hungry or there is going to be a celebration that demands food. A recent episode of Downton Abbey, the British upstairs/downstairs soap opera, touched on the dilemma when Mrs. Patmore, the head cook of the Abbey, feared and obeyed by all the young kitchen maids beneath her, is courted by a local produce purveyor. This would have been the last chance at romance for Mrs. Patmore, but she turns him down, realizing he only wanted her for her cooking, and that she would rather oversee the tremendous daily work of making the meals for the Crawleys of Downton Abbey than be at the endless beck and call of a husband who demanded his pudding made just so.
But cooking aside, how often do you—do any of us—work that hard at something simply to find the answers to questions no one else is asking but us? Whatever modern strides have been made in feminism, women, it seems to me, are as tied to results, by which I mean pleasing others, as we ever were. The woman I consider to be my most successful friend—lucratively self-employed with a sweet and handsome husband, lovely kids—swears by her To Do List. She loves her To Do List. She has blogged hilariously and with great affection about her To Do List. I asked to see it and was surprised, given her success, that not one thing on it was something she did purely out of her own curiosity. When I asked her about this she laughed and said, “Who has time for curiosity for curiosity’s sake?” But what made her happy? Her family, of course. Her lucrative career, of course. But what else? “Getting to the end of the day,” she said, “and knowing I’ve finished my To Do List.”
Do not cater to the flimsies.
Julia was a stickler for proper cooking technique but was free and easy when it came to language. When she couldn’t find what she considered to be the proper word or phrase, she made up her own. Some of her favorites, in no particular order:
Person Traitoria: A traitor, specifically herself, in relation to her right-of-Joe-McCarthy father.
Dogmatic Meatball: a blowhard, usually French, who believed his way was the only way, and who patronized her because she had two strikes against her, being both female and American.
Upper Middle Brow: Her people (“distressing examples of conspicuous waste of good human material”). Next to being sloppy and taking shortcuts, the biggest insult in Julia’s arsenal.
Upper Bohemians: Her new tribe. Paul and Avis belonged to this class. They read books.
A&P Garboozova: All the god-awful grocery store items passing for food in America: frozen TV dinners, margarine, Cheez Whiz.
Bilious: Any kind of digestive ailment (bloating, nausea, the feeling that the blood in your veins is being replaced by cream) that results from overeating too many test recipes.
Phoo: Short for phooey.
Fluffies: People into “gourmet” cooking. She thought the word gourmet was pretentious, as were the fluffies.
Flimsies: People who didn’t take cooking seriously, who must never be catered to.
“Flimsies” is such a ridiculous word, but Julia was serious. She, who’d never been taken seriously before, was serious on every front on which she could be: serious about not allowing anyone to condescend to her because she was a mere housewife; serious about behaving like a professional, even as she was still learning; serious about refusing to dumb down her recipes to make them seem less daunting to her readership;* and perhaps most important, serious about her procedures, which were the actions that spoke louder than her words.
She tested and retested every recipe in Simca and Louisette’s book and rewrote every one. She had to find out everything for herself, had to see it with her own eyes. If Simca, Louisette, or Avis, or one of the trusted friends back in the States who were trying out her recipes as she was completing them came up with a different result, she would try the recipe again, to see if she could duplicate it.
When the time came to tackle cassoulet, the iconic comfort food casserole from the south of France—pork sausage, goose, and white haricot beans cooked for days in a heavy earthenware pot—Julia rounded up twenty-eight recipes, all from chefs who claimed, in Dogmatic Meatball–style, that their recipe was the correct recipe.
Reader, she made them all.
She was determined to Americanize dishes that most people could go to their grave without knowing how to make. Fish quenelles is one. The first clue is that there is no English translation. A quenelle is a quenelle is a quenelle. The second is the phrase “force the fish through the strainer.” All that comes to mind is a scene from Alien Resurrection, where the massive, gleaming half-human/half-alien is sucked out of a golf ball–size air hole and into deep space, viscera first. Still, Julia thought we should all know about them.*
Most of Mastering was written via mail.† In 1953, not long after Julia began working in earnest, Paul was posted to Marseille, which they loved (still France) and then to Plattsdorf, Germany (not so much). They spent some time back in Washington, D.C, then went on to Oslo, Norway. There was no question that Julia would accompany him. Where Paul went, Julia went. They were Pulia. Julia packed up her batterie de cuisine (totaling seventy-two pots, pans, graters, extractors, squeezers, and whisks) and unpacked it again in some too-small kitchen with too-low counters in another city, so that she could continue working on the book.
Still, it didn’t matter where she was; her work ethic was something not seen often among people in this century. In their little government-issue apartment in Plattsdorf, which Julia more or less despised, she nevertheless set herself the task of learning German. After cooking most of the day, she would finish up writing recipes around 7:00 p.m. and cook dinner to be served at 8:00 p.m. Then she and Paul would “fritter” away an hour (during which she would relax by writing detailed, hilarious ten-page letters to Avis), after which she would study German for a few hours.
Though she often wanted to bash Simca over the head for some La Super-Française outburst, she was rarely unhappy.
It’s not a new observation: Throwing ourselves into hard work can be deeply gratifying, and mastering a skill is a satisfaction in and of itself, but the reality of this has largely fallen out of favor. In our modern times, people generally feel that the key to happiness involves doing the least amount of work for the most glory, believing that happiness is to be found in outward appreciation and approval, not inner dedication. That this never really makes anyone happy—witness the miserable reality stars, the depressed lottery winners—fails to deter us; we somehow remain convinced that the smart money is on figuring out a way to grab the gold ring with the least amount of effort.
Is there something you’re dying to attempt, but you manage to talk yourself out of it because it seems like too much work, or will take too much time and discipline? This is your inner flimsy talking. Pat her on the head, but don’t cater to her. You’ll be happier for it.
Do everything humanly possible to avoid housework.
Part of the immense gastro-cultural divide between a hallowed Michelin star–studded French chef and the Servantless American Cook was that the chef devoted every waking hour to his art, and of course had someone at home to cook for him and care for him, while the SAC, as well as her family, which she was there to serve, considered cooking to be part of her many chores. You know, the ones that are never done, per the old saying.
Over the years, so much snark has been directed at those Franco-American Spaghetti, frozen French cut string bean–serving housewives, who really can’t be blamed for wanting to make their lives a little easier. We are now enlightened, and know about using the best fresh produce, using the caramelized nubs of meat left in the pan to make a sauce, the miracle of cooking something down to intensify the flavor, and all the basics instilled in our grandmothers and mothers by Julia, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and all the other kitchen heroes who rescued America from Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Fish Sticks and Tang. But the end of a long day is still the end of a long day—ask any Busy Stay-at-Home Mom.* And often the impulse to order a pizza is overwhelming, especially since it’s all your kids will eat anyway.
That said, if you want to devote any time to cooking seriously, or doing anything seriously for that matter, something has got to go, and that something is housework. If hiring someone to come in every other week means giving up your daily latte or buying shoes at PayLess, do it. You are giving someone else gainful employment, escaping the admonition of V. I. Lenin, who railed that “petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades” women, and being like Julia, who did as little as possible.