CHAPTER 9

From Julia Child’s Kitchen

I. MA CHéRIE

IN JUNE 1971, Réalités sent a writer-photographer team to interview me at La Pitchoune, and, bearing in mind Simca’s hurt feelings over the Vogue and McCall’s stories, I insisted that we include her for lunch. It was important to show the two of us working together as a team, I felt.

“Simca will ride in on that interview like one of Patton’s tanks—innocently, to be sure, but with total egocentricity,” Paul warned. “I mean, she hasn’t even tried out your recipes, not even for French bread. It’s incredible!”

“Not entirely true,” I replied. “But it is a fact that she has never considered me a cook worth bothering about.”

I sighed. Simca was my “French sister.” I responded tremendously to her verve and creative flair, and I was grateful for her generosity with La Pitchoune. But there was no doubt that she and I had grown further and further apart. Maybe it was inevitable. I called her La Super-Française in part because she was typical of the old school: her opinions were fixed; she wouldn’t listen; she told you what was what. That left no room to bat around ideas or have any real conversation.

A few months later, I was standing with Judith Jones in my Cambridge kitchen when I opened a letter from Simca. In it she criticized a recipe from Mastering, Volume II, saying something like, “C’est pas français! You Americans can’t possibly understand that we French would never use beef drippings to baste with!”

For years I had brushed off Simca’s slights and insults, but now I was sick of it. This letter was the final straw. I was so angry that I threw the pages to the floor and stomped on them. “No more!” I swore. “I won’t be treated this way any longer.”

Judith raised her eyebrows.

“That’s it,” I declared. “End of collaboration!”

SIMCA AND I never had a frank discussion about our contretemps. There was no need to. After so many years of working together, we knew each other inside and out. Now we were graduating from each other and going our separate ways—me to my television teaching and books, she to her private life and cooking classes. Still, she would always remain my “adorable grande chérie bien aimée.”

Simca was sixty-six years old, and after twenty-two years in professional cooking, she said, she “wanted a rest.” But she wasn’t really the resting type. In a stroke of good fortune, Judith Jones made a contract with her to write a book of her own. Simca’s Cuisine would be a combination of stories about her life with menus and recipes from her favorite regions of France—Normandy (her native terroir), Alsace (where Jean was from), and Provence (where they lived together). Her book, Simca wrote in the Foreword, was for those who were “no longer quite beginners, who adore to cook and partake of la véritable cuisine à la française—the true French cuisine.” It was also a good repository for some of her many recipes we did not have space for in our two Masterings.

Writing an entire book on her own proved to be tough going. Part of the problem was that it was to be written in English, for the American market, and Simca didn’t have as full a grasp of the language as she thought she did. I lent a helping eye and tongue where I could, but did not involve myself in any meaningful way. Eventually Patricia Simon—the American who had written about us for McCall’s—was hired to help midwife Simca’s Cuisine. With a good deal of encouragement from Judith (to whom the book was dedicated), they eventually finished. It was a very French book, with ambitious menus that demanded a lot from the American cook. But it was charming and packed full of Simca’s creativity. I even recognized a few of Jeanne Villa’s earthy touches woven in.

Simca’s Cuisine was published in 1972. Sales were decent, but not as brisk as Simca had hoped for. Publishing is a tricky business, and for better or worse sales are closely tied to an author’s celebrity. I tried to console her by pointing out that even the great Jim Beard’s Beard on Food had not sold all that well.

BY NOW JIM was a regular guest at La Pitchoune. He was bald, stood about six feet two inches tall, and must have weighed at least 260 pounds. He was a kind, funny man with a remarkable palate. Whenever I was stumped on a cooking question, I’d call Jim, who knew most of the answers off the top of his head, or, if not, who to ask.

When Jim Beard arrived at La Pitchoune in January 1971, he looked heavier and more tired than usual. He had been traveling practically non-stop for months, doing cooking demonstrations, teaching classes, and writing food articles all over America. He had come to visit us in France to take a break. The usual pattern was that, after a few days of R & R at La Peetch, his vigor would bounce back. But this time he never felt quite right. Concerned, Paul and I drove him to Grasse, where Dr. Pathé bluntly told him: “Monsieur Beard, you are overweight and overstrained. You must make major changes in your life-style immédiatement, or you will certainly suffer une crise cardiaque!” That put the fear of God in him, and within six months Jim had dieted off some sixty pounds.

That October, we had scheduled a lunch date with him in New York. But at four-thirty in the morning, Jim was awakened by sharp chest pains. He just lay in his bed, breathing heavily, not daring to move. Finally, a friend forced him to call his doctor, and Jim was whisked off to the hospital. There he was hooked up to a machine, which probably saved his life.

It was a close call. We were now at that age where some of our oldest and best friends were “slipping off the raft,” as the saying goes, and heading into the great blue yonder. Paul Mowrer, our beloved friend from the Paris days, had died over the summer.

To forestall the inevitable, Paul and I went in for our annual physical. I was fifty-nine, and the doctor said my health was fine. Paul was sixty-nine, and the doctor said to him: “Your electrocardiogram could be printed in a medical textbook. . . . Everything about your condition is just great.” (Now, that’s my idea of a good doctor!)

IN JUNE 1972, Jim Beard once again flew in for a rest stay at La Peetch. He was coming from Norway this time, where he had traveled about advising the ’Weegians on how to please the American palate. He stayed at Le Mas Vieux, partly because the bedrooms were more Jim-sized than at our house, and partly to keep Simca company.

She had broken her right leg and had been housebound in a wheelchair for forty days; her spirits were in the dumps, and she was desperate for fresh air and visitors.

The evening Jim arrived, the weather was gorgeous and the frogs’ chorus croaked loudly in the background. Jeanne produced a lovely tarragon chicken, and we had a fun conversation around the dinner table, mostly about food. As the night wore on, the sometimes stern and intense Simca suddenly burst forth with a girlish joie-de-vivre.

Every morning, Jim wafted slowly across the field to La Peetch, dressed in a vast, billowing Japanese kimono, for breakfast. We’d sit on the terrace in the shade of the olive tree, drinking Chinese tea and eating fruit, while chatting about cooking, restaurants, and wine. Jim knew what everyone in the food world was doing, and filled us country bumpkins in on all the big-city gossip.

One midmorning, we climbed into our little French rental car—Paul behind the wheel, Jim seated Buddha-like next to him (still in kimono), and me accordioned into the backseat. Then we bumped down our old rutted driveway—the kind of road known as “a jeepable track” during the war—around the corner and up the hill to Plascassier. While Paul emptied our big paper sacks full of trash at the local garbage depository, I bought two rabbits from Boussageon, and Jim chatted with passing Plascassiens, many of whom he recognized from his previous visits. From there we drove on to Grasse.

What a fabulous city! Jim and I bought fruit in the Place aux Aires, while Paul snapped pictures with his trusty Rolleiflex, and then we strolled slowly through the crowded medieval streets, taking in the layers of history and smell and sound. We returned to the car laden with swollen shopping bags, and transferred the perishables to our “traveling fridge,” a large Styrofoam box lined with bags of ice cubes—an excellent system for preserving things like fresh fish or greens in the heat. That afternoon, we Gigis experimented in the kitchen with a beer-and-flour batter for deep-frying the big orange zucchini blossoms we’d bought. They made lovely crisp eating.

II. CHEF

ONCE A YEAR, a fascinating cooking contest was held in Paris: to the victor went the lifelong right to put the initials “MOF” after his name. These magical letters stood for “Meilleur Ouvrier de France”—which roughly translates to “Best Chef in France.” And in the competitive and rigidly hierarchical world of la cuisine française there was absolutely no higher glory. The challenge was to cook a whole meal drawn from the classical repertoire. Everyone cooked the same dishes, and the menu was announced a week ahead of time, so that there were no surprises. The competition took most of a day, and was open to any chef who dared pit his skills against the best in France. The judges were a group of former contest-winners and venerable cooks. They watched every step in the competitors’ preparation of the dishes, and judged them as much on presentation as on taste. The contest was avidly followed by the public and widely reported on. It was said that triumph in the MOF was more prestigious for a chef than earning a Ph.D. was for a graduate student, because in the cooking competition there could be only one winner.

That year, 1972, there were forty-eight contestants, and at the end of the day the winner proved to be none other than Roger Vergé, chef of Le Moulin de Mougins. How lucky for him—and for us! The Moulin was our favorite restaurant in all of the Côte d’Azur, or perhaps in all of France, and it was right down the road.

A culinary star, Chef Vergé, had spent time in the States and knew all about James Beard (he had even seen an episode or two of The French Chef, which hardly anyone else in France had heard of). When he learned that Jim was in town, he asked us to make sure to stop by and say hello. So one day Paul, Jim, and I drove to his restaurant in Mougins, a small hilltop town long favored by artists.

Chef Vergé and his wife, Denise, were a charming couple, the most attractive of the well-regarded chefs we had met. He was in his early forties, with thick hair and a bushy mustache turning prematurely gray, and a melodious voice. Not especially tall or big in stature, Chef Vergé had tremendous charisma. His personality was on display everywhere at the Moulin: in his great skill in the kitchen, his handpicked wine list, his brigade of personally trained young men, his clearly thought-out conception of what a first-class dining room should look like, and his ability to live up to that ideal on a daily basis. (A little-known fact about this “chef to the stars and artists” was that he judged people by their hands: out of some personal superstition, he shied away from those with small hands—something I didn’t have to worry about.)

Madame Vergé, a tiny and pretty woman, always made one feel welcome in the dining room, even on days when the chef was away. Ever energetic, she did the restaurant’s flowers, and ran a boutique in Mougins, where she sold antiques, tabletop decor, and Vergé’s gourmet products. Above the shop, Vergé had a second restaurant, L’Amandier, and a cooking school.

The Moulin was a remarkable and thoroughly satisfying experience, and I asked Vergé how he had created such a place.

For over a year, the chef said, he had looked and looked for just the right building in just the right town in just the right region to establish his restaurant. After nearly settling on a place in Aix-en-Provence, and spending several months there checking into the markets, transportation, and the kind of clientele he might expect, he had settled on Le Moulin de Mougins in 1968. For many years the building had been an olive-oil mill, before turning into what was known as un cinq a` sept (a disreputable inn, where men took their girlfriends from five to seven o’clock in the evening). Now, of course, the Vergés had completely renovated the building and furnished it tastefully. It had two large dining rooms inside, an ample bar, and a few rooms upstairs (no longer available by the hour!). The two terraces were wonderful places to eat, with widely spaced white tables covered with pink linen tablecloths and shaded by big umbrellas. Behind the restaurant were several very tall and very ancient olive trees. At the bottom of the hill was a thick dell, with willow trees and a jaunty little brook.

For lunch we ate a lobster dish with a rich red-wine reduction. As we finished our coffee, Chef Vergé emerged from the kitchen and joined us for a glass of champagne. We introduced Jim, and then fell straight into food talk—the challenges of getting stars from Michelin (he had two and was headed for his third), the satisfactions and pitfalls of running a successful restaurant, the budgetary balance one must strike between staff, the kitchen equipment, the dining-room decoration, and so on. At one point I mentioned something that had been bothering me lately: “You know, Chef, over the past five years or so, I feel your famous French chickens, the poulets de Bresse, have not been as good as they used to be.”

“Oui, it’s true,” he replied. “But I have found one little place in L’Allier that still produces good chickens.” As he toured us through the kitchen and introduced us to his smiling staff, Chef Vergé opened a door into a room-sized refrigerator, pulled out a fresh chicken from L’Allier, wrapped it in foil, and presented it to us. In a final act of kindness, he refused to allow us to pay the bill.

With Chef Vergé at his restaurant

Paul and I began to see Chef Vergé frequently, and the better I got to know him, the more I thought of him as a quintessential example of what a true chef should be. He was a living link to the greats of the past, the kind of dedicated cuisinier that had so inspired my love of France and its food. And, like Curnonsky, Vergé could not have come from anywhere but France.

At five-thirty one evening, the chef and his wife joined us for cocktails on the terrace at La Pitchoune. We had brought a big Virginia ham from the States, and hoped they would be interested in that typically American fare. I had used a bit of it to make a jalousie au fromage et jambon de Virginie, a cheese-and-ham tart in puff pastry, which we served with a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1964 that Jim Beard had left for us.

I had long ago decided not to go into the restaurant trade myself, because it required total commitment; furthermore, in a restaurant one is restricted to cooking what’s on the menu, and I preferred to experiment with many different dishes. Still, I always wondered, “What if I had . . . ?” I was curious to know how others had done it.

“How did you become a restaurateur?” I asked Vergé.

“Well, I was raised in the Allier Department with eight brothers and sisters. And for us, food was more important than anything else in our life,” he explained. His village was populated by typical country people—wine-growers, poultry farmers, cheesemakers, orchardists, fishermen, hunters, farmers, marchands de bétail, etc. There were no movies or television, or even any organized sports there, so eating and drinking (and sex, evidently) were their main diversions.

“One of my grandfathers would wake up at four a.m., drink a cup of black coffee, and eat a whole roast chicken. Then he’d drink a second cup of coffee and eat a second chicken. Mind you, this was before breakfast, just to start the day right . . . and every day, too!”

As he said this, I couldn’t help noticing that both Chef Roger and petite Denise had eaten two enormous helpings of jalousie each.

Sundays were the day of real feasting chez Vergé, and all the generations of his family would gather. “My mother and aunt would rise early and spend the whole day cooking,” he said. “We’d start eating and drinking around ten o’clock Sunday morning, and we wouldn’t stop till about five.” At that point, the men would all troop out into the village, where they’d spend an hour or two in a café drinking apéritifs. The women washed up and began cooking dinner. “One of my uncles—he must have been seventy-five at the time—would get so drunk that he’d fall on the floor. When the eating and drinking started up again, my aunt would take a pair of scissors and cut a vein in his ear. By the time he’d bled enough, he’d get up and join right in with the rest of us!” Those epic Sunday dinners would go till midnight.

“My uncle, he was a very robust man who lived to be eighty-four, you know. Everybody in town was big—red faces, strong people, hard workers. No one in my family ever heard of dieting. When I see some of the skinny little people in my restaurant pecking at their food like sparrows, I remember our village, where everyone ate heaps of sausages and pâtés and beef, and fish, and pheasants, and geese, and venison, and chicken. Not too many vegetables, of course. Mostly meat.”

“So you learned to cook by watching your mother and aunt?”

“They put a bench right up next to the stove for me to stand on, so I could see everything they were doing. Sometimes I would stir the pots, or hold a casserole, and of course I was tasting everything and listening to all their talk. So when I turned seventeen it was only natural that I should apprentice myself to a chef, and that’s how it all began.”

III. HEARTBREAK

IN AUGUST 1974, it was ninety-nine degrees and humid at La Pitchoune, and despite a cure of iced champagne poor Jim Beard was not faring well at all. But it was Paul who awoke at 4:00 a.m., coughing and choking with a gusher of a nosebleed. We stanched the flow, cleaned him up, and changed the sheets. The next morning, he was struck again. And just before lunch, he had a third nosebleed attack. This was not normal. We called the local doctor, who suggested putting ice on Paul’s nose, keeping his head elevated, and a few other basic remedies. The gushers stopped.

We had never been to La Peetch in August before, but I was taking a break from telly work and meanwhile working on my latest book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen. That evening, we held a party on our terrace. There were nine guests, including the American cookbook-writer Richard Olney, a friend of Jim’s who had come over from his house in Solli`es-Toucas. The menu included oeufs en gelée, roast leg of lamb, haricots panachés (shell beans and string beans), and cheeses. For dessert, I unveiled a long-worked-on and finally-presented-to-the-public tarte au citron, which was marvelous. Paul served a succession of wonderful wines. His nose behaved.

“Well, sure, you can call it a heart attack if you want to, but that phrase has many meanings,” the doctor said. “Why did it happen? We don’t really know. But we’ll give him every test we can think of.” It was October now, and we were back in Cambridge. Paul had suffered an infarction, a slowly developing heart condition.

It wasn’t a roaring lion of a heart attack, such as you see in the movies, he said. Rather, it was a blockage of the arteries that had sneaked up on him “on tiny padded feet, like a field mouse.”

Starting in about 1967, Paul recalled, he had felt very slight chest pains. They would disappear, and when his heart was tested, the doctor said: “Congratulations, you have the heart of an athlete in his thirties!” But after his nosebleeds at La Pitchoune in 1974, Paul started feeling the pains every day. He told our doctor in Boston about it that fall, and was immediately whisked into the Intensive Care Unit, where they detected two blocked blood vessels. Using veins from his legs, the doctors performed a new kind of operation, a bypass. After the surgery, Paul was trussed up with tubes like un pigeon désossé, and remained miserably bedridden for weeks. Furthermore, something about the operation (perhaps a lack of oxygen to the brain) had left him with a case of mental scrambles. He confused numbers and names, and his beautiful handwriting degenerated into scribbles.

My poor husband, he who took such pride in lifting heavy suitcases and felling massive trees, hated to be so weak and confused. I hated it, too.

I went to visit Paul at the hospital every day, sometimes twice a day. But I had much left to do on From Julia Child’s Kitchen—and thank heavens I did! As always, my work gave my life form, forced me to be productive, and helped me to keep a good balance. I was very lucky indeed. Without a challenging project like a cookbook to work on, I could well have gone cuckoo in those dark months of Paul’s hospitalization.

THIS NEW BOOK had started out as a kind of French Chef Cookbook, Volume II, and was based on our seventy-two color-TV shows. But once I started in on writing it, the book turned into something quite different: a personal meander full of stories, recipe tangents, and summarizing comments about my twenty-five years in the kitchen. It was my most personal book, and the most difficult book I’ve ever written. Perhaps that’s why I’d come to consider it my favorite.

In a way, From Julia Child’s Kitchen represented a great liberation for me. It included the lessons I’d learned from classical French cuisine, while putting my cooking know-how to work in new directions. With Judith Jones’s strong encouragement, I branched into Indian curries, New England chowders, Belgian cookies, and tinkered with new gadgets like the microwave oven. As was my habit, I delved into the proper hard-boiling of eggs and the various ways to soufflé those tricky busters, potatoes.

My hope was that readers would use From Julia Child’s Kitchen as if it were a private cooking school. I tried to structure each recipe as a class. And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing. This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!