Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [42]
Those pilot programs have been lost, but judging from the letters that poured in to the station, the Julia who ventured in front of the camera that summer had already tapped an instinct for television. “I loved the way she projected over the camera directly to me, the watcher,” wrote one of these original fans. “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter; loved her looking for the cover of the casserole. It was fascinating to watch her hand motions, which were so firm and sure with the food.” Years later, when a friend mentioned that she was about to cook on television for the first time and felt nervous, Julia’s advice was simple: “Think about the food.” Whether she was flipping an omelet on a hot plate or holding up an unwieldy length of tripe in a beautifully equipped TV kitchen, food was the spark that ignited her performing personality and set it free.
Taping for the series began in January 1963. For her official debut as the “French Chef,” Julia chose boeuf bourguignon—a hallmark dish, resonant in her own memory and familiar to anyone who had ever been to a French restaurant. Besides, it was just beef stew. Surely even a housewife couldn’t be intimidated by that. And it would illustrate wonderfully well her favorite teaching topic: how French cooking was simply a matter of theme and variations. As soon as home cooks learned to brown beef, deglaze the pan, and set the meat to simmering in wine, they could do the same with lamb, veal, or chicken. Back in the nineteenth century, Julia’s long-ago colleagues in domestic science had been equally entranced by the marvelous logic of culinary structure, and were inspired just as she was to make it the basis of their gospel. Of course, they were teaching variations on white sauce, not variations on French stew; but Julia’s radiant faith in the message was kin to theirs.
Julia practiced hard: she wrote and rewrote the script, cooked and recooked the stew, figured out the timing for each step of the recipe, plotted her way around the TV kitchen, and tried to memorize the first few sentences she would say. Once the cameras started rolling, they wouldn’t stop—the budget didn’t allow for breaks and splices—so the show had to be choreographed as tightly as a high-wire act. On Monday evening, February 11, at 8:00 p.m., a large covered casserole appeared on black-and-white television screens across New England, and a breathy voice exclaimed triumphantly, “Boeuf bourguignon! French beef stew in red wine!” A hand lifted the lid from the casserole. “We’re going to serve it with braised onions, mushrooms, and wine-dark sauce,” the voice went on, lingering fondly over each word in wine-dark sauce, while the hand moved a spoon gently through the stew. “A perfectly delicious dish.” Then the voice dropped to a mumble—“I’m gonna…”—and abruptly stopped. The camera followed the spoon as it emerged from the stew and traveled higher and higher until it reached a mouth. Now a woman’s face appeared on-screen, eyes lowered as she leaned intently over the casserole and tasted. Then she straightened up with a satisfied expression, covered the cassserole and put it in the oven, and set a platter of raw meat on the counter. She looked pleasantly into the wrong camera, looked pleasantly into the right camera, closed her eyes for a second, and said, “Hello. I’m Julia Child.”
Despite the easygoing warmth that came naturally to her, this debut never quite shook off an air of nervous tension. Julia had no gift for artifice: she could perform, but she couldn’t pretend, and not until she turned to the platter of raw beef did she palpably relax. The sight of raw ingredients always restored her equilibrium. “This is called the chuck tender, and it comes from the shoulder blade, up here,” she explained, indicating the location on her own body. Apparently the director hadn’t expected such a graphic show-and-tell, because the camera remained fixed on the beef. “And this is called the undercut of the chuck, and it’s like the continuation