• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 287 0

swirl of custard to see how warm it was getting as she stirred; sometimes, while she was showing off an array of ingredients, she couldn’t help patting them affectionately. But nothing made her gleam with pleasure like the prospect of getting her hands into the fresh and glistening flesh of an animal—a rump of veal, a goose, a suckling pig, a giant monkfish. When she explained the different cuts of beef on her legendary public television series The French Chef, she used her own body as the butcher’s chart, twisting to display her back or side as if to make clear the intimate relationship between the cook and the meat. “To Ragout a Goose” was first aired on The French Chef in November 1972, long past the time when preparations for dinner in America began with domestic butchering. Most of Julia’s viewers encountered poultry only after it had been cleaned, cut into pieces, and wrapped in cellophane—thoroughly denatured, that is, and ready for recipes. Julia never quarreled with convenience measures that would encourage more people to get into the kitchen, but she thought everyone should be able to take apart an animal easily and correctly. She knew there were squeamish cooks out there, not to mention vegetarians, because she got anguished letters from them all the time; but it was difficult for her to believe that people willingly surrendered their appetites to such trepidations. The idea of a self-imposed barrier between the cook and the food—whether that barrier represented physical, mental, emotional, or moral reluctance—astonished and dismayed her. Besides, if you were going to cook goose, one of Julia’s all-time favorite foods, you had to bring it home whole, since it wasn’t available in America in any other form. And she very much wanted Americans to cook goose. She had planned this lesson in part because it gave her a chance to demonstrate some of the most important tools in her entire batterie de cuisine: good, sharp knives and the courage to begin.

“After your goose is all defrosted, the first thing you do is to take out the fat and the giblets,” she explained to viewers, with the goose splayed out on the counter in front of her. Eagerly, she reached inside. “There’s lots of fat which is all attached to the back end, or the vent as it’s politely called,” she noted, gathering chunks of fat and putting them aside. “You want to save all of this fat, because it’s wonderful to render.” Her voice, a warm and hearty foghorn, swooped through each sentence, landing briefly on this word or that as it caught her fancy. To her evident surprise, after groping for the neck and giblets, she came up empty-handed—“For some reason, it doesn’t have any”—but she did retrieve the liver, which she displayed for comparison purposes next to a life-size photograph of a fresh foie gras. “The large lobe is about seven inches long, from there to there,” she pointed out admiringly. “The geese in France, in the foie gras country, are raised just for their livers, and that’s why you can often buy goose by the piece, which you can’t here.”

Then she picked up a huge cleaver and began to butcher. “Whang!” The end of a wing flew off. With a smaller knife she slit the goose down the backbone and removed a leg and the rest of the wing (“As you notice, I’ve taken off a little bit of the breast along with the wing to make a better serving”), but instead of finishing the job on that goose, she pulled a second goose out in front of the camera. This one was further along in the butchering process; hence she was able to hold up its raw, gaping body to show exactly how the leg and wing had been attached. Then she attacked the second goose with one bare hand and a knife, scraping vigorously through skin and fat and meat, feeling her way around the body as she sought the precise location of various joints. “Here’s what you’re looking for: it’s that ball joint that attaches the wing to the shoulder,” she reported as the camera focused on her fast-moving hands. “There’s the small of your back there, so get that out first, and there’s your knee—and lifting up the