Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [13]
Julia knew she didn’t want to settle in Pasadena, no matter what happened with Paul, but she couldn’t figure out what to do with herself. By now she was sick of filing and secretarial work, yet she hadn’t come home from the war with any more specific career plans than she had when she left. What she really wanted to do was marry Paul, but she could hardly explain that to him, so she wrote to him about her plans in carefully circumspect fashion. Maybe she ought to look for a job in Hollywood? “I don’t know, as I have no contacts yet,” she mused. “I feel that it is not worth it to me to get any kind of a job like ‘Registry,’ nor a job that doesn’t pay at least $4,000 a year. I want something in which I will grow, meet many people and many situations. There is also and always Washington and the gov’t—both of which I like.”
But it was clear, at least to Julia, that the real project for her stay in Pasadena was to work on becoming Mrs. Paul Child, a project somehow distinct from the question of if and when they would marry. Marriage was inconceivable unless Paul found her to be the right person, and she knew she wasn’t, yet. She had no wish to give up her identity; what she was hoping to do was expand it to meet his, and then dissolve the borders. Paul urged her to read Henry Miller, which she did with mixed reactions (magnificent writing, she thought, but too much of a “stiff-prick forest”); she also took up semantics, psychology, and politics, which she followed in the Washington Post and the New York Times. “There is just so much that is fascinating!” she told him, and underlined the phrase eight times. When she turned to cooking, it was in the same frame of mind—here was an exhilarating intellectual adventure that would bring her closer to Paul. Cooking, love, and learning would be conjoined for the rest of her life.
And learning—conscientious, painstaking, step-by-step learning—was at the center of the enterprise from the moment she first propped a cookbook on the counter and went to work. Julia had none of the instincts that make a man or a woman “a born cook.” Much as she enjoyed food, it’s unlikely that her cooking would have acquired much depth or refinement on its own. She simply wasn’t one of those mysteriously gifted creatures who could wander into the kitchen and wander out again bearing a wonderful meal, never having glanced at a recipe or measured an ingredient. Cookbooks were supposed to help, and she studied them with the faith and zeal of a Torah scholar; but the recipes always seemed to fall horribly short. One day she made a broiled chicken according to the directions in a book, checked on it when the book said to, and found a blackened mess. If she was going to cook, and cook well enough to please Paul, she knew she needed lessons.
Two British women, Mary Hill and Irene Radcliffe, ran the Hillcliff School of Cookery in Beverly Hills; and in the spring of 1946, Julia started going three times a week. She was ambitious and diligent, but when she came home with her new knowledge and put it into practice, nothing seemed to happen as it should. A dish of brains turned into mush on the stove, a duck blew up in the oven because she forgot to prick the skin. She mastered béarnaise sauce—“Awfully easy when the tricks are known,” she told Paul airily—but tried it another time using lard instead of butter and watched the whole thing congeal into a vile mass. There were triumphs occasionally: she and a friend gave an elaborate dinner for twelve featuring three kinds of hors d’oeuvres, steak and kidney pie (“The crust was superb”), and peas cooked with lettuce, the French way. But then there was the day she got up at 6:30 in the morning to make the family a big breakfast and ended up in near-hysterics two hours later when she still hadn’t managed to put any food on the table. “The kitchen was a