Julia on the Half Shell

By DAVID SHAW, David Shaw is the author of “The Pleasure Police: How Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life” (Doubleday). He is the media critic for The Times

For almost 350 years, give or take a decade or two, the people of the United States and its precursor colonies largely regarded eating as the human equivalent of putting gas in the car: You had to do it at regular intervals to keep the engine running, but that didn’t mean you actually looked forward to it or enjoyed it. Somehow, our Puritan forebears, our Calvinist heritage and our capitalist instincts combined to deprive us of both the sensuous and the social pleasure that the French, the Italians and many other cultures have long found in the simple act of dining.

But that was the United States BC--Before Child.

First with her pioneering 1961 cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” then with her 1962 PBS television series “The French Chef” and, ultimately, with nine other cookbooks, more than 300 TV shows and four decades of Just Being Julia--outspoken, unpretentious, a paragon of both passion and common sense--this unlikely (and somewhat ungainly) revolutionary helped transform the way tens of millions of Americans look on food.

It is no coincidence that Julia Child burst on the American scene in the 1960s, a decade of upheaval and unrest, of challenge and change; while she would be the first to scoff at any suggestion that her achievements warrant attention alongside those of her fellow-1960s revolutionaries, it is clear that, in her own unique way, she has made the kind of lasting impact on our everyday life that Martin Luther King Jr., Betty Friedan and the leaders of the antiwar movement did in the larger sociopolitical arena. No one in his (or her) right mind would compare teaching housewives to make a perfect chocolate souffle with arousing the nation to struggle against racism, sexism and an unjust war. But most of us--those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford it--eat three times a day. Shouldn’t we enjoy doing it? Shouldn’t we try different things? Shouldn’t we eat as well as we can?

Liberation from constricting traditions can be exhilarating in any arena, and for the past 46 years, Julia Child has given a resounding and very public “YES!” to all three questions, and it is difficult to overstate the effect of her answers--and of the populist yet authoritative way in which she has given those answers--on our heretofore food-as-fuel, meat-and-potatoes culture. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, on the eve of Child’s ascent, the American cupboard was dominated by processed, packaged foods. Just pay a quick visit to your neighborhood supermarket today. A onetime wasteland of instant cake mixes and canned vegetables, of iceberg lettuce and--shudder--frozen TV dinners is awash in everything from taro to tofu, not to mention shelves and bins full of exotic mustards and mushrooms, a dizzying assortment of chiles and innumerable fresh herbs and lettuces with names that most of us can’t even pronounce. Fresh produce, fresh fish, fresh bread, ethnic delicacies--a healthier, more balanced and more interesting diet--are all part of the Julia Child legacy.

Child didn’t effect this transformation single-handedly, of course. Not only did she have many helpers in the creation of her books and her television shows, but as the ‘60s became the ‘70s and then the ‘80s, legions of like-minded compeers and admirers began to cook, eat, speak and write as if food really were more than mere sustenance. Most important of all, Child’s timing was perfect. When she stepped into the limelight, the post- World War II economy was still booming, upward mobility was the order of the day and dramatically lower transatlantic air fares were enabling large numbers of Americans to travel to Europe, where they sampled--many of them for the first time--The Dining Experience: the meal as aesthetic, social, even experimental experience.

Now Noel Riley Fitch, who has previously written biographies of Anais Nin and Sylvia Beach, has assembled the first book-length account of the life and times of Julia Child. Unfortunately, I use the word “assembled,” rather than “written,” quite intentionally. Fitch had complete access to Child’s world--seemingly unlimited time with Child herself and interviews with more than 400 other people, as well as the opportunity to read personal letters, diaries, date books, resumes and family genealogies: five file drawers bulging with material, as Fitch herself has written elsewhere. But the resultant biography is curiously bloodless; it is an extraordinary treasury of raw material, wanting only an author with insight and passion to put it in context and bring it to life.

“Appetite for Life” reads less like the story of one of the most remarkable women of our time than like a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings and typed-up interview notes. When Fitch does dare to venture beyond cut-and-paste, record-and-relate, she often embarrasses herself, as when she tries to explain why so many Americans suddenly became interested in cooking at home in the 1980s: “Perhaps,” says Fitch, “because they were tired of the Vietnam War and Watergate.” Right. Julia Child as the love child of a war-weary Jane Fonda. “I am not a cook.” Not to mention: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many poulets de Bresse did you kill today?”

Fitch may also have embarrassed Child, a famously private person, by gratuitously disclosing that Child thought her own breasts were too small, that she wore falsies and that, in the beginning of her relationship with Paul Child, who later became her husband, “Julia was as inexperienced with sexual skills as she was at kitchen skills . . . ‘slightly afraid of sex,’ ” as Fitch quotes Paul Child writing to his brother at the time.

Fitch fills chapter after chapter with unnecessary details--the titles of songs young Julia learned to sing at the age of 4, the names of her guests at a dinner 25 years ago in Provence--but she omits details that the book’s primary audience, food and wine lovers worldwide, would devour. At times, it seems as if she’s listing every dish Child ever ate or cooked, but when she talks about Child’s favorite foods, she often doesn’t bother to say just how that dish is prepared and why Child likes it so much. Similarly, she often ticks off the wines that Child (or her friends) drank with a given dinner--”a Volnay ‘45,” for example--but she never tells you which vineyard produced that particular Volnay. (There are so many different vineyards for this red Burgundy--ranging from the mediocre to the masterful, each with its own subtly different taste and character--that it takes Matt Kramer, in his book “Making Sense of Burgundy,” 11 pages just to list them all.) Indeed, despite having spent five years burrowing into the world of gastronomy, Fitch herself ultimately seems almost indifferent to the sensual pleasure of food that so impassioned Child.

About the only time Fitch’s book really comes alive is when she’s writing about Paul (who died in 1994). A poet, photographer, artist, violinist and judo expert, Paul introduced Julia to the pleasures of the table and became her life partner in all things. Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time, and Fitch does it--or at least him--justice. In fact, several of the poems and letters that Paul wrote to, for or about Julia constitute the best writing in the book.

Julia and Paul met in what was then called Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when both had essentially clerical jobs during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Julia, born and reared in a well-to-do Pasadena family that retained a professional cook (“Her mother was not a good cook,” Fitch tells us early on), had little interest in food before she met Paul. “She ate only to defeat her hunger,” Fitch says of Julia’s days in New York, where she worked briefly as an advertising copy writer between the time she graduated from Smith College in 1934 and her employment by the OSS in 1942.

Paul was 10 years older than Julia, almost 4 inches shorter--Julia is 6-feet, 1 3/4-inches tall--and infinitely more sophisticated. But Julia had a genuine sense of adventure and a delightful sense of humor, and as they moved about the world and he introduced her to the foods of each country, their relationship blossomed from friendship to love.

Julia later said that she truly “became interested in food” during the six months the two of them spent in China in 1945, but it was in France, in the Norman city of Rouen, that she had what Fitch calls “her epiphany.” It was a simple lunch--oysters on the half shell, sole meuniere, salad and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse--but it was Julia and Paul’s first meal in France, en route to their new home in Paris in 1948, and Julia later described it as “an opening up of the soul and spirit for me.”

It was Paul’s love of food that prompted Julia to take cooking classes when the two lived in Paris, and it was Paul who ultimately became her de facto manager as well as soul mate. His timing, too, was perfect. Julia had gone from taking cooking classes in Paris to teaching them at L’Ecole des Gourmandes, a school she founded with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, two Frenchwomen who became her collaborators on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Ten years in preparation, the book was published in 1961, the year after Paul retired and was thus free to devote himself to her full time; Craig Claiborne, then the restaurant critic of the New York Times, hailed it as “a masterpiece,” and the Child phenomenon was born.

A year later, Julia was starring in her own PBS television show, the first of several in which her thoroughly down-to-earth, slightly klutzy approach both complemented and completed the simplification and demystification of French food that she had begun in her book.

Julia worked hard in preparation for the shows, always determined to direct her efforts toward the home cook, but on camera she was, as Paul said, “a natural clown” as much as she was a teacher and chef. She improvised, she joked, she dropped food and utensils. In one of her best-known television episodes, she flipped a potato pancake in the air and, instead of landing in the skillet, it plopped on the table. Julia simply looked straight into the camera and said, “You just scoop it back into the pan. Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you.”

Ironically, while Julia herself was utterly lacking in pretense, she inadvertently helped lay the groundwork for the foodies of the 1980s, the chef-chasing groupies who suddenly began treating food as a status symbol, at which point Child herself complained, “I’m getting tired of all this foodie one-upmanship.” She has even less patience with the nutrition Nazis who are increasingly in our midst, those alarmists who think the road to heaven is paved with bean curd and the road to hell is paved with fat.

“If we ate the way nutritionists want us to eat,” she says of the broccoli brigades, “our hair would be falling out, our teeth would be falling out and our skin would be drying up.”

Julia is 85 now, but her distinctive voice remains firm, and she has lost neither her sense of humor, her sense of outrage nor her sense of proportion. She doesn’t think people should be afraid of food, and she doesn’t think people should glorify food. She does think people should enjoy food, and she has labored for almost half a century to explain how that can best be done. Fitch provides a wealth of information on those labors and on Julia, Paul and, it sometimes seems, virtually everyone they ever knew. But the definitive Julia Child biography awaits an author whose joie de vivre at least approximates that of her subject.