RULE No. 8:

COOKING MEANS NEVER SAYING YOU’RE SORRY

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The only real stumbling block is fear of failure.

IN JANUARY 1961, JOHN F. KENNEDY WAS INAUGURATED. HE WAS only forty-three, the youngest president in history. He created the Peace Corps, cut diplomatic ties with Cuba, recovered from the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and sent nine hundred political advisors to Saigon, officially kicking off the Vietnam War. His elegant wife, Jackie, had a French maiden name and employed a French chef in the White House kitchen.

“The Twist” was one of the year’s most popular dance tunes, and Bob Dylan made his debut in Greenwich Village. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu. In October, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was in theaters, The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered on TV, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking: The Only Cookbook That Explains How to Create Authentic French Dishes in American Kitchens with American Food* was published to considerable fanfare.

“Probably the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on [French cuisine] was published this week, and it will probably remain as the definitive work for non-professionals … [It is] a masterpiece,” wrote Craig Claiborne in the New York Times. Despite those two qualifying probablys, it is a rave. James Beard, the other titan of fine dining, wrote that he only wished he’d written it.

At the same time, Paul retired from the Foreign Service, and he and Julia moved back to the States for good, moving into a big gray clapboard house on Irving Street in Cambridge, down the street from Harvard, a town they chose for its proximity to Avis.

Alas, so much has changed since then. The average American salary was about $5,000 a year.† Gas cost twenty-five cents a gallon; a loaf of bread set you back twenty-one cents. The IBM Selectric typewriter, brand new that year, is now a relic. What hasn’t changed is the way Julia’s recipes still taste, the way publishing works, and the way the general public supposes it works.

Knopf, a venerable house then as now, went to great lengths to produce a beautiful book, which they then failed to promote. Even though Judith Jones, in the tradition of great editors everywhere and for all time, was passionate about the book, Alfred Knopf himself wasn’t convinced there was an enormous market for it. The house followed the time-honored tradition of tossing it into the world and seeing if anyone would buy it.*

In retrospect it seems like one day women—my mother being one—were reading and chortling over The I Hate to Cook Book,† throwing together the Ham-Lima Supper while mixing up a pitcher of cocktails, and the next the clouds parted and a pair of enormous dishpan hands descended from the heavens bearing a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But there were, in fact, plenty of cookbooks for the housewife-chauffeur or anyone else who was serious about cooking. Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook, by Louis Diat, the chef at New York’s Ritz-Carlton, had just been published, as had Claiborne’s own tome, The New York Times Cookbook.

Then as now, book tours were something that other authors always seemed to go on, and Julia and Simca, who’d come from France, set up their own, just as we all do today. In Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco, they sat for interviews and did cooking demonstrations in department stores. In Pasadena, they made Roquefort quiche, fish mousse baked in a ring mold, and a Queen of Sheba chocolate cake, on a portable stove in a theater.‡ They repeated the same demonstration later in the afternoon. While they were in California, Julia and Paul took Simca to Disneyland. There is no record of what La Super-Française had to say about the Magic Kingdom or its cuisine.

The tour culminated in New York, where Julia and Simca knew exactly no one, aside from their editors at Knopf. Dione Lucas, the reigning U.S. diva of French cooking, the first female graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, who already had a few cookbooks under her belt, offered to host a dinner. Julia, who was naive in the ways of publishing, knew a thing or two about the competitive nature of chefs, and was surprised and touched by this display of generosity. Dione made filet of sole in white wine sauce, Julia and Simca prepared a boned shoulder of lamb with spinach and mushroom stuffing, and James Beard provided the guests.

Then, as now, no one was ever really sure how many copies of a book got sold. Publishers now know how many books are shipped to bookstores and Costco, but at any moment some of them may be sitting in cartons at the back of a UPS Store, on their way back to the warehouse, so the exact number is always somewhere around the number of angels you can fit on the head of a pin. Mastering may have sold 16,000 copies that first year, or maybe 20,000. In 1962, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and snagged 35,000 copies, but BOMC printed their own, cheaper, less stupendous edition, and so once again, who knows how many “real” books sold? The book only became an “instant” bestseller forty-eight years later, after the release of Julie & Julia, when it sold 22,000 copies in a single week. Give or take.

As a writer, I want to say the number of people who bought and used the book matters, but the truth is that without TV Julia Child would have gone the way of, well, Simone Beck. Simca cooked, taught, and wrote books for the rest of her life,* but few people who aren’t committed cooks know her name. Or the aforementioned Dione Lucas, who had not one but two cooking shows, predating Julia by a good ten years. But Lucas, whose technique was flawless, was severe and a little scary. James Beard, “The Dean of American Cookery,”† who was also a good decade ahead of Julia when it came to educating the everyday, can-opening, frozen-thawing, mix-using American-cooking ignoramuses on the deep, simple joys of making and eating good food—and who had studied acting in New York before opening a catering company, which then led to the publication of his first cookbook in 1940, Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés—also couldn’t quite make it on television. Like Julia, Beard was warm and charismatic, and he loved everything associated with food and cooking, but his 1946 show I Love to Eat suffered on several fronts. Whereas Julia would put instruction first, Beard was more interested in entertainment value: Without a moment’s thought, he drew lines with blue ink in the veined Roquefort cheese to make it read better on camera and also had the makeup artist pencil in “hair” on top of his head. Then there was the overacting. But a main part of his problem was simply that the time wasn’t right.

But by the early sixties, the time was right. Julia simply lucked out in the way that James Beard did not. Cultural historians posit that it was because there was a French chef in the White House, or because Upper Bohemians were suddenly going to Europe, but I suspect it was the housewife/chauffeurs, the same ones who’d purchased the I Hate to Cook Book in droves and were sniffing around a new book called The Feminine Mystique,* and starting to think Now that you mention it, I hate that the highlight of my day is ironing the sheets. Then Julia showed up with the grand, life-consuming distraction called French cooking, and the housewife/chauffeurs were, for a time, intrigued, not to say placated.

The show premiered in 1963, and by January 1965 all ninety stations on the public television network were carrying The French Chef. Local stores began stocking and selling out of the utensils Julia used on the show, and the Boston Globe called her “the talk of New England.” Julia was not without her detractors. Someone concerned with hygiene criticized her for tasting with the same spoon with which she stirred, and more than one teetotaler thought there was altogether too much mention of wine, which was actually Gravy Master mixed with water.

THE MIRACLE OF THE FRENCH CHEF

WGBH ordered three pilots of The French Chef in late 1962, in response to Julia’s appearance on a book-chat show called I’ve Been Reading. Public television in the early 1960s was educational television, the redheaded stepchild of what would soon be called the boob tube. WGBH was so little watched that when Julia showed up to discuss Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, with eggs, a big copper bowl, and balloon whisk—strange implements, those—proceeded to whip up an omelet instead, the twenty-seven fan letters that “poured” into the station launched Julia to celebrity status, and the station, anxious to please those twenty-seven viewers, as well as the hundreds of others who had not written in, ordered three pilots of The French Chef.

At the end of her life, Julia would remember that first year of taping as being the hardest she’d every worked in her life (recall, please, the long hours she put in on The Book), taping thirty-four episodes in six months. She was paid $50 per show, which she spent mostly on ingredients.

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“We’re doing making your own onion soup today on The French Chef,” Julia says, rather awkwardly, at the beginning of “Your Own French Onion Soup.”

The first third of the episode is devoted to chopping onions, which can’t be accomplished without the proper type of knife, honed to the proper sharpness. Julia loved her knives. She preferred an eleven-inch chef’s knife of carbon steel. She looks straight into the camera to emphasize an important distinction: “People may try to tell you that the most important thing is for a knife to hold its edge … but really a good knife needs to take an edge.” And for that she recommends basic carbon steel. Then she whips out her butcher’s steel, which she loved almost as much as her knife. Then she shows us how to sharpen the knife on the steel, taking care not to “cut your hand off.”

“The knife is so sharp so that when you feel it, it feels very sharp,” she tells us. It’s not the first time she will make absolutely no sense. And yet we are reassured. Also, a little turned on by all this knife play. There is no sawing away at the side of an onion with a dull little paring knife for Julia. Even chopping onions can be exciting, especially if you’re a swashbuckler like she is.

“Knives are your life in the kitchen,” she says. “You have to care for them like a baby.” You must never put it in the dishwasher, or throw it into a drawer with other utensils, for fear of dulling the edge. She recommends a magnetic strip hung on the wall. The camera goes in for a close-up as she whacks the blade a little too forcefully onto the strip.

She is a little stern on the matter of onion slicing. You must learn to do it right, if you want to be serious. It may take one or two weeks to master, but you should be able to chop two to three pounds of onions in five minutes. “If you’re serious about cooking, this is the dog work you should practice,” she says, but then reassures us that it will all be worth it, because once you are faced with a daunting recipe for, say, French Onion Soup, that calls for about a pound of onions per person, “you’ll enjoy it because it’s something you enjoy and take pride in.” “You’ll notice I didn’t cry at all,” she says, triumphant. “That’s because I had a great sharp knife … and the juice didn’t splatter up in my eyes.”

Perhaps more exciting than knife sharpening is cooking down the onions, then browning them, which is accomplished with half a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. She tips the saucepan toward the camera so we can see how those pounds of onions have shrunk to perhaps a handful of beautifully browned threads. “Look at this! It’s amazing … That’s because onions have so much water in them,” she explains.

You can also spread the browned onions on steak if you want to forego the soup. “They’re perfectly delicious, just the way they are.”

There is a little bit of confusion over the issue of the stock. She is a firm believer in making your own stock. She suggests beef shanks, chicken necks, and carrots. “It looks awful, but it’s perfectly delicious,” she says as she stirs a huge pot of premade stock. She admits that if you use canned stock, you might as well just eat canned French onion soup, but she’s not going to judge you for it, because then she shows you how to enhance the flavor by adding wine, herbs, and a bay leaf.

Then, you let it simmer, until, yes, it’s perfectly delicious.

After she’s demonstrated making the “croutes” from a loaf of French bread, and shows how to grate some Swiss cheese into the soup to make it extra stringy, the camera suddenly pans up to the ceiling—whoops!—while Julia, now offscreen, goes about her business demonstrating how to make individual bowls, with their own single croute, grated cheese, and if you’re extra hungry (and hoping to have a heart attack that very day), a poached egg. She then moves to the oven and pulls the casserole from the broiler, where the cheese has been browning. “It’s so hot, I better not forget to use pot holders,” she says to herself, and there’s a brief, harrowing moment where it looks as if she might dump the whole thing on her shoes. She places it on the counter, and from our angle, it looks blackened, not browned. “It’s possibly browned too much,” she trills, “but it gives a good effect!”

She then takes the casserole into the dining room next door. It’s important to serve the soup hot, right at the table, with a big ladle. The table is long and narrow, and when Julia sits down, we can really see how tall she is. This soup is hardy enough to serve with only a green salad, and some nice Beaujolais, or “California Mountain Red.” She reassures us that this is a sensational meal, and then comes the moment that seals the deal, that causes us to bond with this strange cooking teacher now and forever: She leans toward the camera and confides, “When you’ve added all those French touches, who’s going to know?”

Do not apologize.

Who’s going to know? That simple, rhetorical aside revolutionized American cooking more surely than did any of the French terms or techniques that Julia was so determined to convey. She was saying, in essence, that this cooking you’re doing? It’s for you. You’re expected to feed the family anyway, so why not take charge of it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like an indentured servant, but more like an artist? Why not enjoy yourself, give yourself a sense of achievement and pride, and feel good about what you’ve made? This is where the cooking moved from something done in the name of service, to something done to satisfy and enrich the cook. Don’t apologize, and if something falls on the floor, pick it up. So important is this having fun, feeling good and proud and accomplished, that you mustn’t fret if things aren’t perfect because Who’s going to know?

The greatest contribution Coco Chanel made to modern style was not the insistence on simple lines, or the invention of the cardigan or the little black dress, but the notion that a woman is most beautiful when she feels comfortable in her clothes. Prior to Chanel, it was all about how good you looked from ten paces. It mattered not whether the fabric was stiff and scratchy, the raw seams poked you, the waist was so tight you lived in a constant state of having stars before your eyes: Beauty was always in the eye of the beholder.

Likewise, Julia turned the drudgery of cooking on its ear.* Her message was a double threat. First, she insisted that things be done properly, with attention to detail. Unlike the magazine and book editors who disparaged the ability of housewives to do, well, pretty much anything, so timid were they, so afraid of challenge or difficulty,* Julia had confidence that if her viewers were “serious,” they could master what she had to teach them. In the same way that a mother bestows confidence on her child by assuming he’s up to the task of say, getting his science project completed and in on time, Julia granted us the confidence to do it because she knew we could.

Second, she knew that mastering anything was a process, and just because you were serious, that didn’t mean you wouldn’t mess up, a lot. Her own show is a real-time lesson on this philosophy: the nonsensical instructions, the occasions when things are overdone or underdone, or something that’s supposed to adhere, doesn’t. This is simply the way of it, or so the unspoken message goes, and there’s no need to apologize, ever.

This was an attitude she adopted after she’d been at the Cordon Bleu for only a few weeks. She made eggs Florentine for a friend, neglecting to measure the flour and substituting chicory for spinach, proclaiming them afterwards to be the most “vile eggs Florentine I have ever imagined could be made outside of England.” You didn’t apologize because it put the guest in the uncomfortable position of having to lie to reassure you, but you also didn’t apologize because this was just part of the rigors and challenge of cooking: Sometimes it just didn’t work out and there was nothing for it.

By the time Julia became The French Chef, she had finally figured out her audience. The “servantless American cook” that she, Simca, and Louisette had arrived on sort of haphazardly as their target audience had morphed first into the mythic loathsome housewife/chauffeur and finally “into a readership that not simply enjoys cooking, but was also excited by the challenge of making something fabulous and difficult, the effort made more seductive still by the fact it was French.” This was the person she was addressing when she looked into the camera.

For all of the equality feminism has wrought, women are still the Apologizing Gender. Not long ago I did an inventory on how often I apologized for something. For a week I wrote down everything I said I was sorry for. I don’t especially consider myself someone who’s eager to please. Around our house, which is now just Jerrod and me, my daughter having gone off to college, I do pretty much exactly what I want. I do laundry when I feel the need to do something that occupies my hands and not my mind, make the bed most, but not all, mornings, cook when I feel like it, order out when I don’t. If I’m really feeling wild, I go outside and prune the roses and tug a weed. As my own boss, I’m never late for meetings, never fail to get the memo, or send one for that matter, and I have no one but myself to answer to when I screw up. I meet friends for drinks or for a walk when the mood strikes; Jerrod and I grab a movie when the spirit moves us, or go for rides on his motorcycle. Sometimes, we borrow his parents’ RV and head out somewhere where we can ride horses. My major day-to-day obligation is feeding the dogs.

You would think someone with this much agency would not have so much for which to apologize. These were the things I was sorry for, that week:

Why all this apologizing? Except for the texting, which admittedly was rude, I had nothing to apologize for. It’s a terrible and silly tic, and it’s not remotely polite. Instead, it creates the mental habit of feeling apologetic.

I don’t doubt that Julia apologized when she was wrong. Part of her upbringing as an Upper Middle Brow–girl in Pasadena would have dictated that she had good manners, but she was not about to apologize when she’d done nothing wrong. One could argue that failing to measure the flour in that long-ago eggs Florentine was “wrong,” but mastering cooking—or anything—is a process to be both accepted and respected, and the people who benefit from your practice—your friends and family—must also accept and respect it.

There is no need to reinvent yourself.

If you are old enough to have watched The French Chef as a child, it’s nearly impossible to watch it today free of the miasma of nostalgia. The perky vintage 1960s theme music.* The grainy black-and-white film. The often lame introduction. (Who can forget “These are the chicken sisters!”) Front and center, Julia herself, wearing her uniform of cotton-blouse-with-strange-badge,† pearls, and apron tied at the front.

I set my college-age daughter down to watch some Julia, to see if it resonated. She doesn’t watch any of those chef shows—Master, Iron, or Top—or Cake Boss, or Kelsey’s Essentials, or that show with Paula Deen’s son. The entire food-show phenomenon—spawned, of course, by the success of The French Chef—holds no interest for her, at least not yet.

She watched the quiche episode and was surprised. “Julia is so natural and normal,” she said. “I felt like I was in the kitchen with her. I wanted to be in the kitchen with her!”

Julia’s ability to be herself in front of the camera hypnotized us, and still does, apparently. Who was this large, occasionally breathless, excitable woman who had no ability to put on airs? It wasn’t as if she forgot the camera was there—every once in a while, especially in the early episodes, she looks up and into it with a startled smile—but she possessed no ability to alter behavior because it was there. She would sometimes crack herself up and do nothing to disguise her glee. In the episode on how to roast a chicken, when describing the age of an old stewing hen, she said, “This chicken is beyond the age of consent” and practically laughed out loud at her own improvisation. Each show was filmed in one take, and some were rougher than others. The aforementioned “To Roast a Chicken” was particularly rocky. The sentence “This chicken weighs five and a half to nine months” was followed moments later with information on how much you might expect to spend: “It’s twice as much more expensiver than.”

Viewers not only didn’t mind her mistakes, they loved them and found them comforting. They loved watching her taste something. She lowered her eyelids, her gaze softened, then she slurped or licked or bit. She was somewhere else, focused within, feeling the food in her mouth, evaluating it, reflecting upon what needed to change. We were transfixed.

Even though TV was in its toddlerhood, viewers could still smell a phony. It’s what sunk James Beard, who misread the medium and believed that showmanship and being “entertaining” was all that was required. WGBH was besieged with fan mail raving about Julia’s “honesty,” “forthrightness,” “naturalness,” “lack of that TV manner.”

The obvious lesson here is to “be yourself” just like Julia was, but the degree to which that’s easier said than done cannot be underestimated. For one thing Julia, because of her staggering height and unusual voice, had, from a very young age, no choice but to be herself. There was no radar beneath which she could fly, no opportunity for her, ever, to adopt the affectations of a conventional woman and get away with it. Who she was, was who she had to be; when the camera was turned on her at the age of fifty, she had no experience being anyone else.

This isn’t true for most of us. Most of us fit in better than Julia did, and the pernicious urge, from the time we are small, day in day out, week in week out, in order to keep fitting in, is to succumb to the society-pleasing parts of our personalities. Most of the time you think, Where’s the harm in acting more accommodating than I really am? Or feigning an interest in soccer or locally grown produce that I don’t really possess? Or pretending to be superinvolved in my kids’ enrichment activities? Or overpaying for a pair of low-rise jeans that don’t really fit, aren’t comfortable, and prevent me from sitting on a bar stool without my ass hanging out? Or laughing more than is entirely necessary at that hot guy’s joke? And speaking of being hot, as long as you’re able to work your hotness every waking moment, you’re exempt from everything listed above.*

My point is that the average woman’s inclination to obey her culture’s imperatives is a tiny, constant stream that eventually creates a majestic, postcard-worthy canyon of Who the hell am I? And if, perchance, you’ve decided you’re alternative and edgy, with a snarky blog, chipped dark brown nail polish, and a fashion pieced together from the thirteen cents a pound bin at the Goodwill, you’re fighting the same losing battle. Sorry.

All this said, usually by age fifty—Julia’s age when those first pilots were filmed—if we’re ever going to figure out who we really are, now is the time. We’ve lived a little, have accepted that we’re never going to go to the Olympics in any sport other than dressage or shooting, and that we do, in fact, have a favorite child.

And what does society, by which I mean women’s magazines and the Huffington Post, think we should do just as our real personality is throwing aside its chains? Reinvent ourselves.

Do not reinvent yourself, that’s the lesson behind this section. Reinvention is code word for using all your God-given brute female mojo—your intuition, perception, stamina, resilience, wisdom, and perhaps cash from your IRA—to do something so new, your personality has to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt. Give up your job as head of human resources at that Fortune 500 company and open that dude ranch in Wyoming. Give up teaching cha-cha to seniors and go to law school. Close your law practice and move to Cambodia, where you do something or other with children. What you are doing here is disrespecting all of your hard-won experience and knowledge and turning yourself back into a beginner, a neophyte, someone with “girlish” enthusiasm, but no expertise.

If you’re over, say, forty, you know some things. Citing the accomplishments of Bill Gates and the Beatles, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, posits that it takes practicing for 10,000 hours to become an expert. Why throw away what you’ve become at least good enough at to be a newbie at something else? Even though it sounds all life-affirming and proactive, it feels like just one more case of discouraging women from owning who they are. And if there’s any doubt, consider that reinvention is not something pressed on men.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t make a change; be Julia, and slide into something challenging and novel, but not completely out of your wheelhouse.

Julia, on TV, was the sum of all of the Julias she had been: the popular girl in high school; the crazy college roommate; the emperor on stage, hamming it up; the dizzy newlywed hurling herself into Parisian culture and French cuisine; the cookbook writer; the scientist and educator. When she first saw herself on camera, she was appalled, calling herself Mrs. Steam Engine. She was always trying to improve her ability to move around the set, explain the steps while handling the ingredients, and make eye contact with the camera. Notes from producers said things like “Stop gasping” and “Wipe brow,” but no one ever suggested she do anything that wasn’t in keeping with who she was.

Find yourself a Paul Child.

The French Chef, which aired nationally through 1973, first in black and white and then in color (the ubiquitous mid-gray-toned cotton blouse was revealed to be a nice French blue), only wished it had had a shoestring on which to be produced. The budget pretty much consisted of the money to pay the light bill. Each show took roughly nineteen hours of pre-production, which consisted of Julia and Paul at home in their kitchen, breaking down each recipe into individual movements and points of instruction, which he would then time with his stopwatch. If Julia felt she needed diagrams to better explain herself, Paul would stay up until the wee hours, rendering something that could have hung in a museum. His drawing of the four stomachs of the cow for the Tripes à la Mode episode is particularly nice.

On the day of taping, the Childs arose at 6:00 a.m. It was winter in Boston, so you know how much fun getting out of that warm bed must have been. The Cambridge Electric Company display kitchen, where the episodes were shot, was on the second floor of the building, and Paul shoveled the snow off the fire escape before lugging in the pots and pans they’d brought from their own kitchen. (Easier, apparently, than taking the building’s freight elevator.) There were no production assistants, no gofers, no interns. There was Paul, and whatever grip or gaffer was standing around the Cambridge Electric Company’s display kitchen with nothing to do. After the taping, the crew would eat, while Paul did the dishes.

Reader, I wish I could offer concrete advice on how to find and land your own Paul Child, a guy who will effortlessly switch roles with you if and when your career suddenly takes off, becoming in a matter of a few short months the wife to you that you once were to him, but I fear it’s mostly a matter of luck.