Julia Child_ A Life - Laura Shapiro [44]
“I love your T.V. program! You are the only person I have ever seen who takes a realistic approach to cooking.”
“Bernard Berenson wrote that there are two kinds of people, life-diminishing people and life-enhancing people. Certainly you must be the most life-enhancing person in America!”
Julia once said that nineteen hours of preparation went into every half-hour show. First she broke down each recipe into segments, and then she did each step in her kitchen at home while Paul timed her with a stopwatch. How long did it take to chop a sample of onions for onion soup while describing how to hold and use a knife most efficiently, the way chefs did? How long did it take to start the onions cooking in butter and oil? To demonstrate browning the onions with sugar, salt, and flour? To blend stock into the onions and add wine? They worked on each step again and again, trying out different words and phrases, and different ways of showing a particular technique. Then they prepared a script, in the form of a detailed chart displaying time sequences, food, equipment, procedures, and what Julia would say. (Though she worked hard getting the wording as precise as possible, only the very beginning of the show was memorized; the rest she entrusted to adrenaline.) Every single item to be shown or mentioned—oven temperatures, pots of boiling water, samples of asparagus unpeeled and peeled and too scrawny to use, spice jars, spatulas—was listed on the chart in order of discussion. Julia did all the necessary precooking, including a fully prepared version of the dish as well as various ingredients in different stages of readiness. Paul meanwhile created diagrams showing the TV kitchen from Julia’s perspective as she faced the camera, with the location of every utensil and every morsel of food.
IN OVEN: Casserole of gratinéed soup
Conditions in the TV kitchen were primitive: WGBH had burned to the ground two years before, and the new building wasn’t finished yet. The first sixty-eight shows were staged in a donated display kitchen at the Cambridge Electric Company, where all the equipment had to be hauled in for rehearsals and taping, then hauled out again. On rehearsal day, Julia and Paul got up at 6:00 a.m. and packed their station wagon with precooked and partially cooked food, raw food, equipment and charts. They also tucked in any special items needed for a particular show, such as the thirty-square-inch chart of a beef carcass that Paul worked on one night until 2:00 a.m., drawing the bone structure and including all the classic cuts of beef. They discovered early on that it was easier to use the fire escape at the electric company than to load and unload the freight elevator, so the two of them carried everything up and set it out on long folding tables. Then Julia and the producer, Ruth Lockwood, rehearsed all day and into the evening, using what Julia called “live food” because that was the only way to get the timing and all the details correct. While they worked, Paul washed mountains of dishes. Then the Childs packed the car, went home, unpacked the car, Julia had a shot of bourbon and made dinner, and they went to bed.
On taping days, they did the same packing and hauling, and while Julia and Ruth were rehearsing, crew members began to arrive, lugging cameras and equipment up the fire escape. The studio became a mass of lights, cameras, and cables. The control center was in a trailer parked around the corner, where director Russ Morash sat watching two screens and issuing instructions to the cameramen. The crew worked out the lighting and camera angles, Julia was made up, and a microphone was hooked to the inside of her blouse, with a wire running down her left leg and into an electrical outlet. (By a miracle, she never tripped over this tether.) Finally, the floor manager shouted, “Sixty seconds! Quiet in the studio!” Julia looked into the camera, and taping began. Afterward, the crew devoured all the cooked food and took a break, while Paul washed dishes. Then