Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [15]
Twelve years later, Julia wrote again about her first meal in France. In an essay she contributed to a book of Christmas food memories she described the same Buick, the same arrival in Rouen, the same restaurant—but a different menu. “We started with oysters, followed with one of their famous duck dishes,” she wrote. “While husband Paul commandeered a fat ripe Comice pear for dessert and an equally fat wedge of Camembert, I went for the pastries.” No sole meunière? Who knows? Most likely she’d forgotten the earlier version. And even the earlier version may have been conflated with other cherished menus. Paul, who described their first meal in France in a letter written from Paris to his brother that very day, said they had blissfully eaten oysters (“very strong of the sea”) and filet de sole, without specifying the preparation. But sole, especially meunière, came up again and again in his accounts of restaurant meals during those heady first weeks—“Julie had a delicious sole meunière,” “Julie can’t get over how good the sole is,” “Julie wants to spend the rest of her life right here, eating sole.” Julia, too, wrote home about it: “Sole meunière, crisp and bristling from the fire.” Plainly, that simple homage to freshness and butter made an impression on her. As for the “famous duck” of Rouen, it’s not clear how this particular dish made its way into her official past; but Julia loved storytelling, and she loved duck; maybe she had one roasting in the oven while she was typing that day. In 2000, she was asked to describe her “most memorable meal” for Gourmet, and once more she gazed back happily to Le Havre, to the Buick, to the restaurant in Rouen, and to the duck—“fire-roasted and then passed through a duck press.” What emerges from these memories, one folded into another and all of them touched with sepia, is the staying power of the encounter itself, which began when the ship docked and continued for months in a haze of rapture. The rapture was the part she never forgot, and never revised.
Soon after Julia and Paul settled in Paris, an old woman told Julia that France was “just one big family.” As far as Julia was concerned, that family was hers. At their favorite restaurant, Michaud, she couldn’t stop glancing over at a dozen people celebrating around a table spread with “innumerable courses of everything”—champagne, chickens, salads, cheeses, nuts—and everyone relaxed and goodhearted as they talked and ate and drank. “We keep being reminded of the Orient,” she wrote home. “Possibly because both are cultivated old civilizations, who enjoy and have integrated the physical and the cultural things in living.” Julia was at home here. The French struck her as wonderfully natural and earthy, and at the same time immensely civilized. They seemed to believe that the great pleasures of life—food, drink, sex, civility and conversation, pets, children, the splendor of Paris—were simply part of the fabric of being human, and that to enjoy them was as fundamental as breathing. Yet it was also taken for granted that stewardship of these gifts meant relishing them openly, discussing them, arguing about them, and keeping them meaningful through the very power of appreciation. Here was a whole country dedicated to being “worldly.” Right away she started French lessons at Berlitz: nothing was more important to her at this stage than becoming comfortable in the language. She was ecstatically absorbing the city, all her senses wide open and craving more; and