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Julia Child's Lessons_in_Living
She combined a Puritan work ethic with a love of live.
BY AMY FINNERTY
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
If someone with a fake French accent, or $400 haircut, told us that genes,
not butter, would kill us, we might not believe her. But when Julia Child
said it, we were ready to place our lives in her hands--and pass the leg of
lamb.
Call her our Lewis & Clark of the kitchen. Ms. Child took wary Americans by
the hand some 50 years ago and led them through an unexplored landscape of
edible French words. Dressed in the style of a third-grade teacher, a glass
of red sometimes tilting dangerously in her hand, she made calves brains
appetizing and kitchen mishaps forgivable on her PBS program, "The French
Chef."
Technically, Ms. Child, who died last week at age 92, is classified more
often as a "cook" than as a "chef." She was an amateur, who entered marriage
as a culinary virgin. Raised in a wealthy Pasadena, Calif., household in
which the mistress experimented at the stove only on the cook's day off, Ms.
Child had thought that she might become an actress or a "lady novelist"--or
even, briefly, a spy. But she learned to cook as a bride, to please her
worldly gourmand of a husband, an American diplomat 10 years her senior.
Ms. Child used a puritan's industry--classes to improve on her Smith College
French, intensive cooking lessons, a decade of punctilious research for her
magnum opus, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"--to an end that was
anything but puritanical. The aim was the satisfaction of lust--for red
meat, sugar, eggs, good wine and butter. Ms. Child's was not an unbridled
lust, though. Just as she worked carefully toward her life's goals, she
lavished methodical attention on each step of a recipe, building to its
climax--the eating of it.
She addressed one glaring flaw in the American ethic--our aversion to
actually enjoying what we've labored for. In this she shifted the focus of
pride at American tables away from the heartland cliché--that of "plenty,"
the visible fruits of labor--toward an emphasis on quality, and the senses.
A purring palate was more important than a piled-up platter.
She appeared on public television in the 1960s, for $50 a week, in her
serviceable blue blouse, slashing away at fowl carcasses like a madwoman,
reviving terminally fallen soufflés and delivering dry one-liners between
separating and whisking. Audiences devoured her. It was as if they'd been
waiting for an authority figure to tell them it was OK to make a mess in the
kitchen, as long as they were taking on new challenges and enjoying the
results with a decent Burgundy.
Her stewardship of French cuisine, her prodigious gifts as a teacher and
author, have been well documented in many sweeping obits. But even before
she died, the Web site chowhound.com, for example, was posting frequent
messages about her, though her cooking may not have been the stuff of the
foodie e-zine vanguard.
This one is typical: "Hey, chacun à son goût. Beard was a titan, but Julia
is, well, God." When a prominent food critic wrote an essay about Ms. Child
that was mildly unworshipful, fierce attacks on the young journalist ensued
on that Web site. (Don't mess with Julia.)
Many food trends have come and gone since she became famous, and she
remained unmoved, deriding the anti-butterfat lobby and other bores.
Health-food zealots were a baffling irritation to Ms. Child, and she
delivered a consistent message over the decades: Ignore them. No wonder our
feelings about her are still so passionate, several decades after her most
oft-cited accomplishment (bringing coq au vin to Peoria).
Food was the medium, but the message amounted to a philosophy of life. She
did something more important than teach us to cook; she taught us to eat,
and some of us in the new Atkins World Order could still use a few lessons.
She knew how to indulge, in moderation: food of all kinds (in normal
portions); drink (but not drunkenness); smoking (until she did the mature
thing and quit); and the company of men (she was a happily married flirt).
Her husband, Paul Child, was a man invariably described as "a sensualist,"
and like all good husbands he brought out the best in his wife, channeling
her energies in ways that pleased him, of course, but also allowing her
distinct signature to emerge. But even if she'd never met Mr. Child, and
discovered exquisite food in his company, she might have found greatness in
other ways, through her ability to subvert Americans' love of suffering.
She said that her greatest achievement was marrying a nice man and cooking
nice food. Her fans understood that she valued the rewards of her effort
more than the effort itself, and that she had mastered the art of eating.
Her popularity never waned, even in an age in which food is sometimes
treated as a toxic substance. Perhaps because she came across as a
no-nonsense Yankee with a can-do approach, she convinced us that it was not
merely safe, but sensible--and not merely sensible, but imperative--to keep
slathering butter on those potatoes.
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