CHAPTER 8

The French Chef in France

I. DOCUMENTARIES

IN 1970, we set out to create our most ambitious French Chef series yet. With a bigger budget than ever before (thanks to the happy fact that both Polaroid and Hills Brothers Coffee had signed on to sponsor our show), we were going to shoot thirty-nine new programs, which, for the first time, would all be in color. Since we were doing things differently this time around, I thought it might be fun to record how French food is actually made and sold in France—to show the traditional butchers, olive-oileries, confectioners, triperies, and wine shops that had been my original inspiration. For this, we’d shoot a series of mini-documentaries on thirty-five millimeter film, which we’d later splice into our regular TV programs. So, when I did a show on, say, “How to Bake French Bread,” we could insert a sequence showing how a real French boulanger made real baguettes in a real baker’s oven in Paris.

Although I never mentioned this blatantly, I was convinced that our footage would prove to be an important historical document. Mechanization was taking over the food business, even in France, and it seemed clear to me that many of the artisanal skills we were going to record—the making of glacéed fruits, the hand-cutting of meat, the decorative skills of traditional pâtissiers—would disappear within a generation or two. Of course, film itself can fade or break. But if our little documentaries survived, they might be one of the few records showing how food was once made almost entirely by human hands rather than by machines.

I could hardly wait to get started. But that was easier said than done.

In mid-May 1970, a crew of about ten of us gathered at La Pitchoune to map out our shooting schedule. The plan was to start in Provence, then move to Paris, and finish in Normandy. As we had only a few weeks to get everything done, and no chance of returning to France with such a generous budget, we made detailed schedules for each day—down to the hour, and sometimes the minute—to ensure that everything went as smoothly as possible.

We began our first morning of shooting in the market at the Place aux Aires, in Grasse. Peter, our enthusiastic thirty-two-year-old Dutch cameraman, wanted to film me buying fruit, vegetables, flowers, and crème fraîche. It all went smoothly until our bright lights and dragging electrical cables bothered one of the market women. She began to wave her arms around and make dramatic faces, while bawling: “Oh no! Enough is enough!” A large crowd pressed around us. “How am I supposed to sell my carrots and be a movie star, too?” she scolded us. “Here I am, surrounded by Hollywood, and only two more hours to sell—how are my customers going to buy anything? Tell me that, Hollywood! Now I’ll finish the morning with stacks of stuff on my stand. No! This is too much! Enough!”

It was a legitimate complaint, so we wandered off to shoot elsewhere.

Television production is a lot more tedious than people imagine. Each shot took seconds to watch on TV, and minutes to film, but required hours of preparatory work. When our troops moved into a restaurant, for example, tripods would be erected, light reflectors tilted, spotlights aimed, and rolls of orange electrical cable unspooled. We’d rehearse the scene and begin to shoot, but then my hairdo would have to be rearranged, or we’d have to wait for a cloud to pass. Finally, we’d get the shot we needed, only to break all of our equipment down and move on to the next scene.

It helped that Paul and I were fluent in French and were friendly with many of the local merchants. As Chef Bugnard had tutored me, it was important not to rush, push too hard, or take people’s goodwill for granted.

On the morning we invaded Les Oliviers, a restaurant on a hillside near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alex, the jolly maître d’hôtel, had set up the restaurant’s famous “avalanche” of forty hors d’oeuvres. It was a stunning sight: hot, cold, cooked, raw, mixed, plain, salty, oily, fish, meat, vegetable, and so on. But the food was under big yellow sunshades, and our director, David, grumbled, “This we cannot shoot!”

“But we must,” cried Peter, the cameraman. “The restaurant’s lunch guests will be arriving any minute now, and then it’ll be too late!”

“No! Not with this lemon-colored light!”

“Okay, then, take down the umbrellas and shoot with direct sunlight.”

“Wait, don’t do that—the mayonnaise will melt!” interjected Ruthie Lockwood, our producer.

“Brush those flies away—the table looks like a garbage heap!”

The umbrellas came down, the camera went up on Peter’s shoulder, the flies were shooed, and we shot the scene. Over and over. “Willie, your feet were sticking out,” Peter cried to the soundman, who was hiding under the table with his microphone while Paul and I ate for the camera.

“Let’s shoot that sequence again,” David sighed.

By three-thirty, we were finished, and our team fell on the “avalanche” like a starving wolfpack.

One day, the crew filmed me driving around Plascassier and visiting our local butcher, Monsieur Boussageon. He ran a nice little shop with his wife and mother-in-law—a trio that, contrary to the usual tradition, worked very well together. We had scheduled to shoot the Boussageons making a pâté pantin together, but early that morning his wife gave birth to a little girl—two weeks earlier than expected. Ha! We had to improvise on the fly. With his wife and mother-in-law at the hospital, Boussageon showed us how to make a pantin: he used six and a half pounds of pork, veal, and foie gras with truffles, done up in a pâté à croûte, decorated with dough “leaves” glazed with a whole beaten egg, and cooked for two hours. It was a fabulous display, but in the midst of a particularly good sequence two locals barged into the shop loudly demanding the right to buy blood sausages. At the end of the day, we gratefully bestowed a bottle of champagne upon the wonderfully accommodating Boussageon.

In Marseille we filmed the making of a bouillabaisse, and then took our cameras into the Criée aux Poissons fish market at 4:00 a.m., which was visually splendid. From there we moved to Paris. It was now June, and in rapid-fire succession, we shot segments on frogs’ legs at Prunier, cheese at Monsieur Androuet’s charming cave, hand-carved meat at the Paridoc supermarché, pastry decoration at Monsieur Deblieux’s pâtisserie, and, of course, cookware at Dehillerin’s Old Curiosity Shop.

We had planned to shoot the making of beurre blanc at Chez la Mère Michel, but when we dropped in for dinner we were badly disappointed, and sadly crossed her off the list. On another evening, Paul and I ate at our old favorite, Le Grand Véfour. We wanted to use the restaurant’s venerable sommelier, Monsieur Hénocq, for a show on “Wine and How to Keep It.” At eighty-seven, Hénocq remained graceful and charming, but he was going deaf and had taken up long-winded philosophizing. As we left, I embraced Hénocq fondly, but it was obvious that he would not translate well to television.

Even with a dear friend, I could not allow sentiment to cloud our professional standards.

So—what to do about our wine footage?

Halfway up an immensely old, steep street called the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève was a wine store owned by one Monsieur Besse. He was a jolly fellow, with a tired old flapjack of a beret, a gray smock, and a gap where his front teeth had once been. The famous caves de Monsieur Besse had been written about many times, but no one had ever tried to record them on film. And for good reason. The caves penetrated deep into the earth, each level danker and moldier than the one before, like a series of dungeons connected by narrow tunnels and rotting ladders. Dust, candle-drippings, cobwebs, and la patine des âges lay thick on everything. It was a horrible yet fascinating place to explore. Thank goodness we didn’t suffer from claustrophobia! There must have been thirty to forty thousand bottles of wine stored in those Stygian depths—although “stored” was not the right word, for there were no shelves, and his bottles were piled haphazardly into mounds on either side of the narrow tunnels up to the top of the stone arches. The jagged edges of broken bottles poked at us in the gloom. Many didn’t have labels. There was hardly room to turn around, and if one were to brush against them, the whole jiggery place might crash down.

Paul and I speculated that Monsieur Besse was a “wine miser,” who neither drank nor sold most of his collection, but kept amassing bottles to satisfy a personal craving. The catacombs seemed to be an external symbol of some twisted aspect of the Besseian brain.

To film inside Besse’s caves would require a small hand-held camera and battery-powered lights. At a specialty shop we rented the camera and lights, and began to load them into our little truck. When our director, David, asked the store owner for a receipt, the man handed him a business card. “No, monsieur, I need a receipt to show how much I paid,” said David.

The owner’s cheeks flamed red and he shouted: “Must I be accused of cheating by every passerby?! If you don’t trust me, then I refuse to do business with you!” He and his wife grabbed the cameras and lights, and rushed them inside.

“No! No!” cried Daniel, our local guide. “We’ve just paid for that. Give it back!” He brought the equipment back outside.

“Take your filthy money!” the owner shouted. “We don’t want it!” His wife stuffed the money back into our crew’s pockets, while he grabbed his equipment, slammed the door shut, and locked it. And that was the end of that. The famous caves de Monsieur Besse remained unfilmed—by us, at least.

By mid-June, the weather in Paris was hot and humid. We kept waiting for a crackling thunderstorm to come along and cool things off, but it just grew hotter and hotter. And now we were delving into what I considered the most important part of the whole expedition: how to make French bread.

The heat was nearly unbearable inside Poilâne’s tiny, medieval-style bakery, where we worked from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. one day. We filmed every step in the bread-baking process, from the development of the levain, to sliding the round loaves into the oven on long wooden paddles, then sliding them out again, and letting the huge golden loaves cool as they gave out wonderful smells. As far as I knew, this step-by-step making of a proper French loaf had never before been filmed.

A few days later, our great bread teacher Raymond Calvel, Professeur de Boulangerie, École Française de Meunerie, gave me a similar step-by-step lesson on making baguettes. We spent all afternoon in his teaching laboratory, while outside the sky roared with thunder and lightning and dripped heavy raindrops. Calvel kneaded, rolled, and slashed the dough. I kneaded, rolled, and slashed. It was an important, triumphant moment, the passing along of one of mankind’s oldest life-sustaining traditions, and I prayed we had captured its essence on film.

From Paris we drove to Rouen, to film another of my favorite rituals, the making of pressed duck at La Couronne, the restaurant that would forever remind me of my first meal in France. We warned the owner, Monsieur Dorin, that once we started to shoot there would be no stopping, no matter what. He shrugged, offered to keep his staff late, and said, “I’ll stay on the job with you until tomorrow noon, if necessary.”

In Poilâne’s bakery

The plan was to eat dinner at the restaurant and begin filming after the last guest had left, around midnight.

That afternoon, Peter, our cameraman, announced that he had an excruciating pain in his left leg. He admitted he’d been suffering throughout the trip, but hadn’t mentioned it. Now he was going into the hospital! We were aghast. Without him, we had no show. What to do?

We decided to say nothing to Dorin and to keep our dinner reservation at La Couronne for nine-thirty, as planned. As we ate our way through the fascinating stages of a pressed-duck dinner, we all had our ears strained to hear the telephone. Finally, it rang. The doctors had discovered that one of Peter’s vertebrae had been displaced (probably from hoisting the heavy camera to his shoulder), which had pinched his sciatic nerve. He was given injections and pills, and was advised to find a new career.

Temporarily free of pain, Peter leapt into action. He set up his lights and camera and moved furniture around like an athlete.

For visual drama, we decided to set a big fire burning in the medieval fireplace, where three special Rouennaise ducks would be spitted and roasted. (Dorin served thirty ducks a day, and the spit took so long to cook them that they were mostly roasted in the kitchen.) As the heat in the fireplace rose, it turned the blades of a fanlike contraption inside the chimney; this was attached by a chain to the spit, which slowly turned the birds before the fire. Beneath the ducks was a metal trough that collected the drippings, which were scooped up and used to baste.

By 12:30 a.m., the ducks were cooked and we began our demonstration. Dorin was wonderfully relaxed and straightforward in his presentation, as if he were a television veteran. I asked him leading questions, and he answered me in accented English as he deftly dismembered a duck. Peter shot us from many angles and distances. Willie recorded every noise, from the crackle and snap of the fire to the sizzle of the roasting duck flesh and the gush of blood and wine as the silver press crunched down on the carcass. As we finished up, the big old horloge chimed 5:00 a.m. outside. The eastern sky was brightening. Cocks began to crow. A light breeze cooled our sweaty, flushed faces. We all felt elated, for we knew we had just shot one of our most successful sequences ever.

After a snooze, Paul, Ruthie, and I drove to the town of Thury-Harcourt, near Caen, where we’d film “All About Tripe” at a restaurant that specialized in that interesting dish. From there, we’d continue on to an ancient abbey in Aulnay, where we’d shoot a bit on Camembert cheese, and conclude with a party in Caen. And then our French Chef expedition to France would be complete.

When we arrived in Thury-Harcourt, we were given a message: “Call the Hôtel de la Grande Horloge in Rouen ASAP.” Wondering what we’d left behind, we dialed the number. David, our director, answered: “Peter has had a relapse and he can’t go on. The pills and shots aren’t working on his back. Daniel is driving him to Paris right now. He’ll fly home to Amsterdam and go straight into the hospital.”

Pouf! That was it. No tripe. No Camembert. No party in Caen.

Within minutes, the French Chef team scattered this way and that. Paul and I, meanwhile, felt like a couple of parrots who had just been let out of their cage: “Now what?”

II. CONTRETEMPS

I FOUND IT NEARLY impossible to write the introduction to Volume II amid the TV hubbub, and when McCall’s magazine asked if they could photograph Simca and me cooking together, I had said “No.” I simply didn’t have the time or energy.

Nevertheless, while we’d been off shooting our documentaries, a team from McCall’s gathered at La Pitchoune. The magazine hired a French woman food writer to oversee the making of dishes from Volume II, and had contracted Arnold Newman to photograph them. I met the woman at Simca’s apartment in Paris. She was charming, but I stood firm: “I am finished working on the book. My time and energies are now devoted entirely to television. I will NOT cook anything for McCall’s. Furthermore, my husband has already taken hundreds of perfectly good photographs of Simca and me, and I see no point in taking any more.”

It was not an uncomplicated situation. Knopf wanted to generate publicity to sell our book, naturally, and McCall’s was offering a cover story, which would give us a big push. I felt very loyal to our publisher, and to Simca. But I was tuckered out. And so was Paul, who was annoyed that his excellent work had been passed over for reasons we could only guess at. (For one thing, there had been a massive reshuffle of the McCall’s staff, and the editors who had hired Paul no longer worked there.)

“Why don’t we avoid La Peetch altogether, and spend the next two weeks driving slowly through the Massif Central?” he suggested.

“I am not going to be put out of my own house by a bunch of magazine people!” I snapped.

We drove slowly along back roads toward the coast.

IT WAS SUNDAY at La Pitchoune. Our rental-car keys were missing, and we were supposed to take Simca and Jean to the Cannes train station. I was worried about Simca—she had just visited her doctor for the first time in eight years, only to learn that she had heart-valve trouble and was losing her hearing. The doctor had advised her to change her life-style “completely.” This was hard to imagine. But my usually vigorous friend was noticeably despondent and diminished. Meanwhile, our little house was covered with cables, boxes, reflectors, and other photographic paraphernalia (somewhere in the midst of which, I just knew, were our car keys). Arnold Newman and a gang of McCall’s people were crowded into the living room, thinking they had finally coerced me into posing for yet another cover-photo shoot.

“No!” I said.

Paul eyed Patrick O’Higgins, one of the magazine’s editors, and reminded him: “Julia has been very clear about this from the start.”

With a loud wail, Simca burst into tears. Glancing at me with a hurt expression, she exclaimed: “I had my whole heart set on this picture of you and me together on the cover of the magazine—and now you say no more photos! How can you treat me like that?!”

I was speechless. This was the first time in twenty years of collaboration that she had said anything like that. Perhaps the outburst was an emotional reaction to her heart and hearing troubles. Whatever her reasons, I was caught in an impossible situation. I fumed for several minutes, but finally relented. For the rest of the afternoon, Simca and I stood and sat in various poses while Newman snapped off 175 traditional look-at-the-camera portraits.

The next day, salty old Jeanne Villa took Patrick O’Higgins to the Marché aux Fleurs in Grasse and bought a car-full of flowers and vegetables. These were to decorate the dining room at Rancurel’s restaurant, across the river. The idea was to create a hearty, country “fête champêtre” as background for dishes from Volume II that Rancurel and Boussageon would cook and Arnold Newman would photograph. For atmosphere, they invited a dozen local people to partake of the meal. Jeanne and Laurent made one “couple,” and they were joined by Cantan the contractor, Lerda the carpenter, Ceranta the electrician, their wives, plus a few others. Everyone got tight, screamed with laughter, told dirty jokes, ate huge amounts of food, and sang loudly. The kids from the kitchen sneaked in and poked their fingers into the whipped cream on top of the cake.

III. MOVIE NIGHT

MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, Volume II, was published on October 22, 1970, nine years after Volume I. Knopf had decided on a first printing of a hundred thousand copies, and Simca and I did a quick publicity tour across the country. About two weeks after the book launch, our colorful new French Chef TV series began broadcasting—featuring the documentary footage we’d shot in France—on PBS stations across the country. The first show was on bouillabaisse, and the reviews were mostly favorable. What a terrific way to launch our book!

The first inkling of trouble arrived one evening in January 1971, when Judith Jones went to a dinner party in Manhattan. She happened to be seated next to a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital, who mentioned that he was part of a team researching the possibility that asbestos was a carcinogen. A little bell went off in the back of Judith’s mind. “Asbestos . . . Hmm . . . Julia recommends using a piece of asbestos cement to create a bread-baking surface in her simulated baker’s oven in Volume II!”

We had indeed. The next day, Judith telephoned the hospital and located the doctor in charge of the asbestos research. Without telling him exactly why she was interested, she asked about their findings. The doctor said something like: “We have reason to believe that there may be a causative relationship between certain types of cancer and asbestos, and we advocate not using it in connection with any form of food preparation. Asbestos cement may be less harmful than plain asbestos, because it is compacted with cement, but we do not wish to theorize about this until our research is complete.”

“About how long will that be?” Judith asked.

“Oh, about five years,” he replied.

“Thank you,” Judith said. She hung up and immediately called us in Cambridge.

Quel désastre! We had already recommended using tile made of asbestos cement in the book, and now we were days away from taping our two bread shows for TV. But we couldn’t recommend using a potentially carcinogenic tile in our simulated baker’s oven! What to do?

We had eight days to find a substitute. Any new tile must be affordable and available to the average American; it must be tough enough to get very hot and not split when cold water was dropped on it; it must adapt to bread loaves and ovens of various sizes; it must not weigh too much; and its glaze must be “high-fired” (baked at over 2,250 degrees), so as to avoid lead poisoning.

At 103 Irving Street, Paul spent hours researching all manner of tiles, in various sizes, thicknesses, and prices: silicon-carbide plaques for $19.00 each, Pyrex slabs for $14.50, and slate for $5.15. The first two were too expensive, and when we tested a piece of slate it split in the oven’s heat.

On Friday night, February 5, I made bread on three different tiles: quarry tile, tortoise-glaze tile, and firebrick splits. All three produced excellent loaves. None broke. Hooray!

Then we had a long talk with Dr. Rothschild, a lead-poisoning expert at Sloan-Kettering Hospital. Not only was he a charming and careful scientist, but he and his wife had already read Volume II, bought a sheet of asbestos cement, and successfully made a loaf of French bread. He said that he didn’t think there was much, if any, danger from asbestos cement, but he would test it anyway.

In taping the first bread show, we decided not to mention asbestos tile on air; we would simply suggest that people use ordinary red floor tiles. Judith reached much the same conclusion about the book. It was selling well, and in subsequent printings of Volume II, she made several corrections, one of them a quiet altering to red floor tile or quarry tile for use in the simulated baker’s oven. We never got any letters on the subject, and I’m not sure anybody even noticed. I began to suspect that French bread was the recipe I worked hardest on that the fewest people bothered to try!

The taping of our bread shows went off quite well, though there was one last scare to get through. Hanging over the set were sixty-five very hot lights that burned like the Saharan sun. Arrayed in front of me were several bowls of rising dough, so I could show how bread dough should look at different stages. But the heat from the lights got the yeast going and, as they say, “Time and rising dough wait for no man!” Then I misplaced my reading glasses, on camera, and couldn’t read the little labels on the bowls. I kept up my patter, but picked up the wrong bowl of dough to demonstrate with. When I began to knead it, the dough didn’t behave the way it was supposed to. But I was already deep into my explanation, and managed to muddle through the scene. À la fin, the loaves rose perfectly just before going into the oven, and everything worked out fine at exactly 28.57 minutes.

Whew!

But there was no time to rest. We were on to the next show, and the next—“Pizza Variations,” “Chocolate Cake,” “Pressed Duck,” “Working with Chocolate,” etc. It was a hectic spring, fully taken up with rehearsing and shooting two French Chef programs every week, reviewing our French footage, and so on.

IN MAY 1971, Paul and I slipped away from the telemaelstrom to the peace and quiet of La Pitchoune. After landing in Nice, we celebrated with our traditional lunch at the aérogare. The food was perfect, the wine was perfect, and the service was perfect. Ahhh! Where else in the world would you find airport food of such quality? As always, this ritual meal signified an internal shifting of gears: it reminded us not only to slow down, but to open up our senses. “You’re not in the U.S.A. anymore, kids,” it seemed to say. “You are here in la belle France! Faites attention!”

At first we thought we might spend a week or two roaming the Côte d’Azur, but once we settled into our satisfying little house there was no question, we’d stay put. Our zest was worn out. We needed to be incognito, do nothing but sleep late, eat well, and enjoy the sound of the cuckoos and the smells of the countryside. But we were so keyed up that it took at least a week to adjust to our peaceful surroundings.

La Peetch was as cold and dark as a dungeon. It took hours to get the radiators working, sweep out the cobwebs, and replace the burned-out lightbulbs. The carpenter and mason had done their work, but the plumber and electrician had yet to appear—and when they did, they discovered that our new dishwasher had the wrong voltage and was missing certain pieces. What with the holidays of Ascension and Pentecôte upon us, no work could be done for days. We shrugged. The big new parking lot at the top of the driveway looked magnificent, and behind the stone wall a line of pretty rosemary sprigs was sprouting. It had been an unusually cold winter in our corner of Provence, and all of the mimosas and a good many other plants had been killed off or badly stunted; now the survivors were full of bright-green shoots, and there was a profusion of enormous orange and yellow rosebuds.

Before we’d arrived, the International Herald Tribune had published an article by a former Paris embassy colleague of Paul’s, who wrote about knowing us in the old days and how to find La Pitchoune. This was irritating, especially after two sets of American tourists and a Canadian family in a minibus drove right up our driveway asking for us. As instructed, Jeanne and Laurent told them, “The Childs aren’t here.” It seemed to do the trick.

We had two of our TV shows, “Spinach Twins” (shot at La Pitchoune) and “Meat Loaf” (shot chez Boussageon, the butcher), made into sixteen-millimeter sound-and-color films. One evening, we invited a group of the locals over for a movie night. The audience numbered about a dozen, including Jeanne Villa, the Boussageons, the Lerdas, Umberto, Gina, Les Fischbachers, and so on. At nine, just before the lights went down, there was slight nervous tension in the air: our guests were not used to being invited into an American’s home, and they had probably never seen themselves in a movie before. They all smiled stiffly and sat ramrod-straight in their seats. The lights dimmed, and as they watched me, Simca, and themselves in the sequences shot right here, no one budged a muscle.

The lights came up, we served champagne, and suddenly everyone was talking boisterously. It was interesting to note that the women scarcely wet their lips, while the men indulged in at least three or four glasses of champers each.

By eleven-forty-five that night, we were ready for bed, as I’m sure the early-rising locals were, too. Only, they didn’t know what the protocol was for departing politely, so they just sat there waiting for some kind of mysterious signal. We didn’t know what the signal might be, either. Finally, Paul pulled Jean Fischbacher into the kitchen and in a whisper asked him to leave first. Entering the living room, Jean said in a loud voice: “Well, thanks a lot, it’s been a very good evening!” As he ushered Simca toward the door, the entire crowd rose out of their seats as one and rumbled outside in happy confusion.