Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [14]
Julia wrote to Paul about all of it, whether the results were delicious or disastrous. Far more than books or politics, food became a red-hot connective wire between them during these months of separation, a living metaphor for the intimacy that had seemed so elusive at the end of the war. “I feel I am only existing until I see you, and hug you, and eat you,” Julia wrote; and Paul suggested that she move to Washington and become his cook—“We can eat each other.” This was the highly charged context in which Julia threw herself into studying recipes, practicing her Hillcliff lessons, and staging dinner parties: every cup of flour and sprinkle of herbs seemed to radiate her desire for Paul. He, too, was getting hungry. In July, he showed up in Pasadena, and the two of them got into Julia’s Buick and drove back across the country together.
It was the supreme test: long, hot days on the road, nights in cheap motels. Julia had packed eight bottles of whiskey, a bottle of gin, and a bottle of premixed martinis. She was as good a driver as Paul, he noted with approval, and it turned out that they liked stopping to look at all the same things—“wineries, crab-canneries, local architecture and nature.” Julia never complained, ate and slept as comfortably as if she were traveling in luxury, painted her toenails, and washed Paul’s shirts. “Quite a dame,” he told Charlie. By the time they reached Niagara Falls, he was in love and knew it.
Julia’s determination had carried her to a glorious finish line: the raw, emotionally chaotic “old maid” that Paul once dismissed was now his lodestar. Sitting down to analyze his rush of awakened feelings in a letter to his brother, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Did Julia change, or did he? It was Julia, he decided. And Julia had indeed changed, or rather she had opened up areas of her mind and personality that nobody before Paul had demanded to see. Yet when he went on to list what he loved most about her, he didn’t dwell on the intellectual skills that had newly flowered, but rather on the great, stalwart elements of her character that had always made people warm to her—and would have the same effect years later on millions of people she would never meet. “She never puts on an act,” he wrote, pinpointing at the top of the roster the very quality her audiences would relish most. “She frankly likes to eat and use her senses and has an unusually keen nose…. She has a cheerful, gay humor with considerable gusto…. She loves life and all its phenomena…. She has deep-seated charm and human warmth which I have been fascinated to see at work on people of all sorts, from the sophisticates of San Francisco to the mining and cattle folk of the Northwest…She tells the truth.” And he noted appreciatively that she had none at all of the “measly Mrs. Grundyisms concerning sex” that might have been expected in an inexperienced woman nearly thirty-four years old. A month later, they were married.
Chapter 2
Prof. Julia
THE STORY OF Julia Child’s first meal in France has been told and retold, most eloquently by Julia herself. In 1948, she and Paul were living in Washington, not quite sure of where his career was heading, when to their great joy the State Department posted him to Paris to become exhibits officer at the United States Information Service (USIS). They arrived at Le Havre on November 3, and as soon as their Buick emerged from the ship, they drove off toward the capital. Around lunchtime they came to Rouen. The name of the restaurant was La Couronne, and Paul—“in his beautiful French,” Julia recalled—ordered the meal. She described it lovingly in the fish chapter of From Julia Child’s Kitchen: first came oysters and Chablis, and then a splendid sole meunière was set before them. “It was handsomely browned and still sputteringly hot under its coating of chopped parsley,